The Urban Institute has an interactive map that shows how many Americans are in debt county-by-county. But not just "in debt," because that would be almost all of us. This shows the percentage of people whose debts have gone to collections.
Debt in collections includes past-due credit lines that have been closed and charged-off on their books as well as unpaid bills reported to the credit bureaus that the creditor is attempting to collect. For example, credit card accounts enter collections status once they are 180 days past due.
At the site, you can click on counties to get a breakdown of the percentage of people in collections, how much they owe, and what percentage owes medical debt. My county shows 52% of households have debt in collections, and 33% have medical debt in collections. If only we could all be like Minnesota. -via Digg
Comments (2)
Also, Minnesota has a nice thing going.
- Godard
Everyone has influences. You just can't do anything that doesn't have elements of something else. Some may be direct influence, or and artist or authors come up with similar ideas independently.
Even in the case of the obvious similarities between C3PO and the lady robot in "Metropolis"... It is not a stretch for any Sci-Fi author to imagine a metal humanoid robot. Just try to come up with something that doesn't look influenced by "Metropolis".
There is still room to be creative, despite similarities to other works. The same people that designed the characters in Star Wars also did the ships and those were certainly quit different from what had been seen before.