Bloomberg Business Week has calculated all the numbers and have figured that Louisiana is the laziest state in the country.
They try to explain the story by saying "We aren't trying to beat up on Louisiana. Goodness knows, between Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Oil Spill, the state has been through some tough times in recent years. But the statistics speak for themselves."
They have a concoction of numbers which measures people by how much money they have, how much TV they watch and their obesity ranking.
Here are the Bloomberg numbers:
Time sleeping: 8 hours, 44 minutes
Time watching TV: 3 hours, 5 minutes
Time relaxing and thinking: 29 minutes
Time socializing: 54 minutes
Time working (averaged over total population ages 15 and older): 2 hours, 41 minutes*
Median age: 35.1
Obesity ranking: No. 5 (31.2 percent)
Maybe because New Orleans is our second home we see things different, but we still fail to understand how a business magazine can define people by calculations.
Honestly we started laughing at this silly bunch of numbers because we don't think Bloomberg Business Week really gets it.
We define who we are by what we get out of life and what we enjoy.
We understand how to withstand and overcome hardships.
We know how to appreciate the culture, the music and yes, the food we eat.
Bloomberg goes on to say:
To be clear, by “lazy” we do not mean lacking work ethic or engagement. Rather, it is a measure of leisure time spent doing sedentary activities compared with activities that require more physical effort, such as exercising and even working.
What was that? They don't measure work ethic, just whether people are working.
They continue to point out that people in Louisiana don’t work or have enough physical effort and, therefore, they must be lazy and obese.
This ranking is based on five years (2004-2008) of state-level data evaluating the average leisure time engaged in sedentary activities: sleeping, watching television, surfing the Internet, playing board games, relaxing, thinking, and socializing.
And then, here it comes, the obese southerner.
After all with the the sedentary lifestyle and all that fabulous Louisiana’s cuisine, there must be a price to pay, right?
They figure, with the lack of physical activity there just has to be higher obesity rates.
It's bad enough that the people in Louisiana are lazy and obese it’s that they too stupid to do anything about it.
Once again, the thoughts of the the elitist are higher than our thoughts.
But what does it matter?
Maybe we're just too lazy to really care.
