Thursday, March 23, 2006

Big numbers

Big numbers are hard to comprehend. So much is concealed from people by sheer magnitude of things around them. Two things i've been thinking about come to mind.

The first is how many assets (money) is out there vs how little most poeple own. Just looking accross the valley and seeing all the buildings brings this to mind. There is just SO MUCH wealth out there for all to enjoy. For example, the assessors office states that for clark county o6/07 year, the taxable value of property is 258.1 BILLION! Holy smokes, that means if you split up JUST the realestate in clark county evenly among our 1.7M people every man, woman and child would have $152,000. That means that every family of 6 should be worth a million. This doesnt even count all the other things of value that reside in our county.

The second is poeple protesting the war because there have been 2,300 deaths(1,800 due to hostiles). Sounds like a big number but the bigger number that goes unsaid is how many US people we have; about 300M. So in a 3 year period the US has suffered a loss of 0.0007% of its population. Compare this to the Korean war at 5,720,000 deaths over a 3 year period and a US population of 150M. That puts the Korean war at 3.8% loss of population. So in comparison the Korean war was 5,500 times more deadly than the Iraq war! Thats literally a drop in a bucket, not a valid reason to protest a war. Infact when I hear only 1,800 hostile casualties from the war I am left in admiration of our military.

-Brad

2 comments:

Shannon said...

What about us ignorant liberals who protested the ideas which caused the war?

I personally think it's stupid to pull out of a war because soldiers are dying. What makes me angry is thinking about the reasons they died...

Have you read "Freakonomics?" I'm just curious. You might find it interesting.

Bradley said...

yeah, you could argue against the war for many reasons. Only valid one I can see for going into that land of savages is to take their oil. I can only hope that somehow we are piping it back to our oil tankers behind the scenes somehow.

Freakonomics is on my reading list. I have heard much about it.