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Introducing a new SI unit to quantify national tragedy (hexbear.net)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Since we've recently learned that the value of a lost life is inversely proportional to the population of the country, we need a way to concisely and conveniently discuss tragedies and their relative values. Using 9/11 as the defining constant, we define one (1) Bush as the death of 3000/285,000,000 ≈ 0.00105% of a nation's population. Perhaps easier to remember, 1 kB (kiloBush) is approximately equal to the death of 1% of the population.

Some examples for reference:

9/11 is 1 Bush (of course)
total annihilation of a countries population is 100 kiloBushes (the largest value possible under relativistic models)
1 man in Vatican City choking to death on a hotdog is approx. 124 Bushes.

These changes will be voted on in the 2024 General Conference on Weights and Measures and are expected to pass unanimously.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I know this is a bit but honestly I genuinely like this idea. Yes at the moment Israel is using proportional deaths as a cudgel, but generally in is very useful to look and rhetorically powerful to look at this metric and gives the savagery of US invasions of Korea, Vietnam etc a unique potency.

It's not the only useful lens for comparing tragedy, but to say that The Korean War inflicted 20 kBu is an extremely damning statistic.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's not the only useful lens for comparing tragedy, but to say that The Korean War inflicted 20 kBu is an extremely damning statistic.

Whenever I tell a lib about this, I like to put it into perspective by comparing it to the Nazis, who killed 25% of Russia's population in WW2. The US did 4/5 of a Generalplan Ost to Korea.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Whoah I genuinely didn't know Russian deaths from the Nazis were so large. I mean, I knew it was around 25 million but I didn't realize how many kBu that was.

This metric is already demonstrating its utility

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, Russia's total population at the start of Barbarossa was around 100 million.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wikipedia puts the population of the USSR in 1941 at 190-200 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the_Soviet_Union. Are you talking about Russia specifically? Doesn’t the 25 million number include people from other SR as well?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Yes, although dispropoprtionately from Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs.