Leaderboard

IMO, when there is silence it means it was a robocall and they don't have any available salespeople to take your call so it's silence. You may eventually get a salesperson on the line. The computers are constantly dialing even if nobody is currently ready, in anticipation that when you pick up someone will actually be available.

Great story, @JohnH! A friend spent a couple of years working out in the Marshall Islands. Depending on which direction the trip was, it either took two full days or less than one. Those flights cross the International Date Line. (Did you know that Magellan and his crew, when they got back from the first-ever circumnavigation of the world, were close to getting accused of being witches? Because their calendar was off by a full day! I forget how they got out from that one, but they did.)

I got $13 and change from a class action suit some years ago. Yeah, they sound great - but the only ones who profit, it seems, are the lawyers. Maybe the bad guy gets spanked.

Roberts, I'm thinking there would be a W-2 (if indeed any of this is legitimate, and it's not). My last exposure to this was with a number of USCitizens living on Kwajalein Island (Marshall Islands). They were exempt from income tax but not from Social Security or Medicare. At the time, they could earn up to $75,000 with no income tax withheld, but SS and Med were withheld at the normal rate.

This time travel discussion reminds me of a story by Lewis Grizzard (southern humorist for any of y'all who didn't know him). Atlanta Georgia is on Eastern Standard Time, while Birmingham Alabama is on Central Standard Time. It takes less than an hour to fly between the two cities. A local in Atlanta went to the airport to inquire about traveling to Birmingham on his first ever airplane flight. The ticket agent said he would depart Atlanta at 11:02 am and arrive in Birmingham at 10:54 am. As the customer stood there contemplating what he had just heard, the agent asked "Do you want to buy a ticket?" The customer replied "Nope, don't think I do. But where does it leave from? I'd sure like to see that sucker take off!"

What E = MC^2 means, @BLACK BART is that energy and mass are equivalent, subject to a large correction (the speed of light, times itself). So how much energy resides in a tiny bit of matter? Astounding amounts (hence the amazing destructive abilities of nuclear bombs). How much matter could one form out of energy? Teeny tiny little insignificant amounts (it does go both ways, after all, and explains the electric bills of particle accelerators). The limerick, however, addresses a fact learned from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which tells us that time is a PHYSICAL property. It moves more slowly with increased gravitation and with increased speed. Two cesium clocks, at different altitudes, run slightly differently (not so as we'd notice; the difference is less than a second per million years). Which one is right - BOTH are! Because time itself is different at different gravities - and higher up there is less gravity. Likewise, time slows down with increasing speed (you have to get to more than 40% of the speed of light to notice). Your link goes to the Time Dilation equation where you can calculate the effect for yourself. So if twin brothers split up, and one goes on a space journey to Alpha Centauri and comes back in - let's say fifteen years - he is a couple of years YOUNGER than his twin upon arrival home, because time slowed down for him. The speed of light is a theoretical limit (I am not going to go there, don't worry) but the limerick implies that if the barrier is broken, the girl in question can come home before she left. Great trick, as she can remind herself to bring whatever it was she forgot... no, wait, that gets us into time paradoxes. Let's not go there, either, at least right now. Relativity, Special Relativity, and Quantum Physics get weird and surreal *very* quickly - and anyone who is lacksadaisical about the implications of these principles really does not understand them at all. In fact, they are SO bizarre and ridiculous that the *only* thing they have going for them is that they are undeniably factual.

OK. Here it is...

I would ask the client a simple question,... and wait.... Long pause... and deep thought would follow..... Quite the young actress...Yeah..?