Friday, October 31, 2014

It is interesting math that does not factor in the cumulative effect of trash

Every now and again, council member Emily Evans defies logic and lays a head scratcher on us that introduces new mathematics equations I am not familiar with. For instance, last June, while advocating shrinking Metro Council representation, she claimed merely popping out kids already shrinks a community's influence in government. Hence, have a nuclear family, give up power to influence. Subtraction by addition.

Also in June, in defense of the Tennessean littering our neighborhoods with unsolicited trash every Wednesday, she said this:

It's no more an inconvenience [to pick up rolls of the Tennessean littering yards, sidewalks, and streets] than taking the junk mail out of your mailbox and putting it in the trash.

Actually, if you stack the amount of Tennessean paper you have to throw away every week on top of the junk mail you discard every week it equals more garbage, more drag on your own time than if the Tennessean never darkened your door again. The extra burden is on someone else to clean the mess if the Tennessean will not do it themselves.

We now hear that the "newsroom of the future" is a more "metrics-based" project of meeting customer demand rather than reporting facts that might shed light on events readers might not otherwise discover. In other words the Tennessean is flipping itself to be an advertising circular rather than a news vehicle. So, we are more inconvenienced now by more junk mail, the main difference being that Tennessean junk mail is in plain sight, not hidden in our mailboxes.

I fail to understand how adding to the pile of unwanted junk somehow equals "no more" in Emily Evans' new math.

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