There's no time to lose...
Aug. 13th, 2012 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI saw a public service announcement the other day, featuring Emily Deschanel (who stars in the television series Bones). In this announcement, if memory serves, she tells us that if only we'd all pay our credit card bills electronically, we could save $2 billion annually, and goes on to state that such an amount could pay off the credit card bills of some impressive number of people.
There's "could" and there's "would," and the claim made underscores the difference.
That aside, the PSA got me to thinking a couple of things: First, that kind of move would not be particularly good news for the Postal Service, since virtually all such payments are made using first-class mail, which is what subsidizes much of the other crap that's delivered to our mailboxes. Second, the type of thinking that went into that "that money could pay off the bills" line is almost identical (but in a reverse way) to the punch line of the joke that goes:
Cheers...
There's "could" and there's "would," and the claim made underscores the difference.
That aside, the PSA got me to thinking a couple of things: First, that kind of move would not be particularly good news for the Postal Service, since virtually all such payments are made using first-class mail, which is what subsidizes much of the other crap that's delivered to our mailboxes. Second, the type of thinking that went into that "that money could pay off the bills" line is almost identical (but in a reverse way) to the punch line of the joke that goes:
Jo: "In the world today, a woman gives birth to a child every 45 seconds!"
Mo: "There's no time to lose. We must find that woman and stop her!"
Cheers...
