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Christopher Greaves

One In A Million

Thursday, September 25, 2008

This afternoon’s Toronto Star ( http://www.thestar.com/News/GlobalVoices/article/503435 ) contains a story about plastic bags. “U.K. village at forefront in fight to ban plastic bags”.

And here I quote: “Of an estimated 500 billion bags used each year worldwide, millions will turn into litter.”.

What is meant by “millions”? Whatever you want. Could be two million, could be three, could be five.

Bill Bailey made a good point with his ‘” Three Men Go Into A Pub ” joke.

Could be 499 thousand million.

Whatever you want.

Let’s try “Two Million will turn into litter”. (We can’t try One Million, because they did use the plural form).

If 2,000,000 out of 500,000,000,000 turn into litter, that’s not a big problem at all. Certainly a few seals/seagulls/tortoises will die, and I regret that, but it’s not a BIG problem. It’s an annoyance, or an aggravation.

If 2 out of 500,000 are a problem, then 498,000 out of 500,000 are not a problem.

Seems to me a 99.9996% success rate is pretty good. It’s better than anything that happens in my life. Ever.

What about Twenty Million? That’s a 99.996% success rate. Still pretty good.

How far do you have to go to consider it a problem?

I consider unsolicited tele-marketing calls a problem. I probably get one such call in every hundred incoming calls.

That’s one per centum.

We would need five thousand million plastic bags to reach one percent. That’s millions, it’s true, but more reasonably it could be written “billions”. Yet the writer didn’t write billions, but chose millions.

From which I infer that the problem is nowhere near as bad as unsolicited telemarketing calls.

And I am sorry for the wildlife, I really am. I am a gentle man who refuses to squash cockroaches. I respect their ability to survive.

Like them, don’t let yourself be fooled by numbers.

P.S. I too would like to see plastic bags banned. It won’t happen, but a deposit of, say five dollars per bag would start to make a difference.

709-218-7927 CPRGreaves@gmail.com

Bonavista, Friday, December 20, 2024 5:04 PM

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