You can also consult an attorney to seek recourse from the credit reporting company or companies on whose statements the debt appears. This is typically under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which similarly to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act has statutory (aka automatic) damages in the event that a violation is…

Keep going

If things advance to the stage where they seek collection in court, and you’re poor enough that you might fall below the threshold for legal aid in your community: check to see if there are any pro bono programs that might assist you. I volunteer for one of these in my city, and our usual result goes something like…

And who do you think is the real audience for this? Is the appeal going to be decided based on a straw poll of random laypeople?

And you’re literally using the definition of literally that only exists because of people doing English all wrong.

64 here.

I really enjoyed this article, your explanation of your fear, and your writing in general.

Not from a pure numbers point of view. Doing ridiculously rough math with completely arbitrary assumptions and no intention of trying to make them fit the results, if the average player sees 5 pitches per at-bat, and homers every 50 at-bats, and jesus I have no idea say 100 players have their debut at-bat per season,…

Thanks for that little nugget about our eyeballs, can’t wait to use it to be obnoxious to people filming with their phones :)

Can someone remind me where the oscillating backlash/backlash-against-the-backlash on this currently stands so I know who to make fun of? TYIA

In my experience, McDonald’s Coke tastes the same every time, and it’s particularly delicious. On the other side, Taco Bell’s Mountain Dew tastes like some other soda entirely.

It amazes me that we banish a guy from one sport for betting on his own team to win games (I realize what it can do to the team in the other games, but still), while another guy can go onto the field of play and purposefully try to hurt his team in a playoff game and he’ll probably get a max contract next year.

Oh man, what’s that short story about the boy who wanted to lick every part of his body (and somehow kinda succeeded, if I remember correctly)? I feel like it’s DFW, maybe a chapter in The Pale King? I had a tough time trying to Google it.

Yeah, you’re probably right about the noise. Another potentially interesting analysis, though noisy in its own right, would be some kind of standard deviation calculation for free throw percentage. Teams, as you point out, are employing the strategy when they need the FT shooter to have a really bad stretch of free…

What about other ancillary benefits to the strategy? Say, your team is significantly older than the Clips, and running a bit of H-a-J in the second quarter gives your guys much-needed rest. Or maybe the numbers show that the Clips perform poorly on offense for the next couple minutes after H-a-J, standing around and…

Has anyone calculated Jordan’s FT% in “Hack-a-Jordan” situations vs. all other situations? It seems possible that his knowledge that the other team is deploying that strategy could materially affect his concentration and therefore his shooting percentage.

What continues to surprise me about is reporters’ dogged insistence on asking him questions he’s going to shit on. At this point they might as well just ask him whether androids dream of electric sheep or something asinine like that and see what happens. The worst case scenario is exactly what happens at every other…

I enjoyed this quite a bit

Floyd Mayweather is larger than Katie Couric’s entire body, so this isn’t really that surprising.

Usually true, except the article references the headline, so I got nothin.