IQ and Political Leanings (1 comment)
After the 2000 election, I saw a table ordering states by IQ and showing how they voted. It's still out there, but I'm too lazy to find it, mostly because there's a very similar page for 2004. I was looking at that and found it curious, though unsubstantiated. I thought it might be telling to look at more history and try to link the data with a more verifiable source, so I did. My version of the page goes back through 1960 (data courtesy of Wikipedia) and uses IQ estimates from the 2000 ACT. So while it's still plenty flawed, I think this version is much closer to reality and shows that the page that we've all been sent links to is massaged data at best. Once again, the Republicans are smarter than the internet would have us believe, but there are some neat patterns there, like no state outside the bottom 12 has been won by an independant candidate since 1960 (maybe earlier, but I think the table's big enough).
While I was writing to George Lucas and worrying about the election, I also had a run-in with PayPal. It seems that it's against their terms of service to use a large number of one-time-use credit card numbers (as are happily issued to me by MBNA). When I tried to add one to pay for my laserdisc player, PayPal declared that I'd hit the limit and closed my account. I called customer service, and the woman lied to me about how credit cards work. Dhe also told me that one-time-use numbers were useless because PayPal is the only system that will see my number. I've been on the internet long enough to know not to trust PayPal.
I called back later that day and talked to a much more useful gentleman who had run into the same problem with his PayPal account and knew who to forward my request on to. A few hours later, I got an email from the account review department informing me that I'd need to fax a copy of my drivers license and credit card statement for the account to be unlocked.
I found that unreasonable.
I called back again and found myself talking to a nice girl who was thoroughly unable to help me or explain why such documentation was needed. She bounced me up the chain to her team leader and after a minute on hold, he came back and told me he'd restored my account and I'll be able to use as many credit card numbers as I want in the future. It's nice that he fixed it so quickly, but I wish I wouldn't have been lied to and been told I needed to not only supply, but fax unreasonably personal documents first.