Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Did I a$k?

One word pair I'm seeing online more and more is "net worth." At first I noticed it in clickbait headlines about the deceased, as in "Robin Williams's net worth when he died left his family stunned." (Guessing that was pretty low down on the list.)

But now if you look up the name of anyone famous you get all these stories about their "net worth." Which raises the question of how these internet tabloid reporters who never travel on assignment would know. And moreover, why would I care? I'm not a divorce lawyer.

Anyway, I'm sure this is all a good sign and not an omen of looming techno-feudalism.

2 comments:

susan said...

Funny you should mention that. One of my pet peeves has been seeing the idiotic questions posted under just about anything you can google search called 'People also ask':

Alpine
- Which country made alpine?

Bell Telephone
- How do I contact Bell by phone?

Cat
- Do cats fart?

Draft horse
- Can draft horses be ridden?

oh, I liked this one:
Egypt
- Is Egypt a real country?

The sheer quantity of such banal inquiries is enough to make one despair of ever encountering intelligence on the interwebs. The questions about how much is a particular celebrity worth are ludicrous.

Hmmm.. I need to look up the answer to that question about cats. See you later.

Ben said...

There's no question so stupid that someone, somewhere hasn't thought to ask it. One consequence of the so-called "Information era" is that it's always somewhere and sometime, so you're going to come in contact with those someones.

Dogs definitely fart. In geologic terms the families only split off from each other a few minutes ago, so if one does I assume the other would too. In fact I would guess it's pretty much common to all mammals.

As for contacting Bell by phone, it would be funny to claim that you're Thomas A. Watson calling Alexander Graham Bell back. Unfortunately he's changed jobs and residence since then, so he's pretty hard to make contact with.