2013: Net Gain or Net Loss? A Quantitative Review

These days, everything seems to have some sort of measurement system. We have heights and weights, salaries and rankings, Klout scores, GPAs, BACs — it seems like everything must be put into numeric terms. Accordingly, we’ve put together a comprehensive review of 2013, scored with our proprietary scoring system. Every significant event of 2013 will be judged on a scale of -5 to +5. A score of -5 means the event made the world a much worse place, and a score of +5 means the event made the world a much better place. Let’s take a look back at 2013 and see where our world lies after the year’s events.

4 Places That Are Worse Than Detroit

The Iconic “Spirit of Detroit” monument. In its left and right hands are Detroit mascots Ulrich the Urchin and “The Naked Nicklesons”, respectively.

Unless you owe somebody $18 billion, you have more money than the city of Detroit.

Detroit recently announced that it is declaring Chapter 9 bankruptcy, because, in Detroit, the best and most proven way to solve a problem is to give up.  The tragicomedy of the situation, of course, is that it couldn’t even succeed in declaring itself a failure; in essence, even having no money is too much money for Detroit to be able to handle.  While there are multiple reasons (a shrinking population, too many public sector employees, this guy named Kwame Kilpatrick, etc.) why Detroit is in the situation it’s in now, those are too hard to understand; and if college has taught me anything, it’s that the best way to declare yourself an expert on a subject is to be really loud, vocal, and domineering about that subject while doing as little research as possible, because, as everyone age 16-28 knows, intelligence is directly proportional to the amount of Facebook posts you have about Egypt.