[ExI] jobs craved
spike
spike66 at att.net
Wed Nov 25 00:58:51 UTC 2009
Many here are science types, so perhaps you have been as entertained as I
have by the claim by the US government that the 700 billion dollar stimulus
bill created or saved 640329 jobs.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE59T2QP20091030
http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/home.aspx
Several things jump out immediately. Note the six significant digits in
that answer. Not 640330 or 640000, but exactly 640329 jobs. The humor of
that need not be emphasized, so obvious is the silliness.
The thing that I really found puzzling is that there is a unit missing.
When we talk about the amount of power we used this month, it requires two
units, kilowatts and hours. You need both. To discuss how many jobs the
government created/saved (henceforth abbreviated craved), then the
government craved 640329 jobs multiplied by some unstated time unit. Did
the government crave 640329 job-hours? Job-years? Job-eternities? Can
anyone just make up their favorite arbitrary time unit? How much tax money
was spent to crave these 640329 job-milliseconds?
This is just weird. Am I the only one here mystified that these absurdities
are allowed to stand unchallenged on an official US government website?
spike
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20091124/7ecb33ef/attachment.html>
More information about the extropy-chat
mailing list