Results tagged “context”

foreignpolicy.com reports:

The Soviet [… union …] actually built a doomsday machine that would guarantee retaliation — launching all the nuclear missiles — if the leader’s hand went limp.

Compare and contrast Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Same deal, about 20 years earlier.

I love that movie. To me it still remains a excellent contemporary commentary 45 years after it was made.

In the continuing series of “compare and contrast”. Aka, perspective, or as Merriam puts it:

to view things in their true relations or relative importance

news.bbc reports that UK road deaths reach record low.

There were 2,538 people killed on Britain’s roads in 2008, which is the lowest annual total since records began in 1926.

a plane holds, what? 300 people …

So that is 8.5 jumbo jet plane crashes EVERY year, where every single person died. In fact, that is 8.5 jumbo jets carrying only British people.

2,974 victims and the 19 hijackers died in the 9/11 attacks.

In 2003, 42,643 people where killed in road related accidents in America.

That is 14 events similar to 9/11, every year.

And while we are here, consider this:

• 2538 UK people, in a population of 60.9 million is 0.0041%
• 42,643 USA people, in a population of 303 million is 0.014%

You are more than 3 times as likely to be killed by a car in America as you are in the UK. (per head of population, on average, etc).

What this doesn’t account for is that Americans travel more miles by car than people in the UK. Whether that is right or wrong is another matter, but given Americans drive more it’s perhaps not suprising that there are more road related accidents.

Can anyone find any data/stats on average miles driven per capita in the UK and USA because the best I’ve found so far is Per capita car mileage in Britain in 1977 was slightly lower than in the United States in 1950. Which sadly doesn’t help much.

I always enjoy a good “compare and contrast”. Perspective etc..

Virgin Atlantic 2008/2009

• “Annual pre-tax profits reached £68.4m” (2009)
• “nearly double the £34.8m seen in the year earlier.” (2008)
• “The carrier spent close to £1bn on fuel for the year.”

British Airways 2008/2009

• “BA reported a loss before tax of £401m” (2009)
• “The airline made a revised profit of £922m in the previous year.” (2008)
• “BA faced a near-£3bn fuel bill. “

So … based on fuel usage, BA flies about three times more than Virgin Atlantic. Perhaps Virgin Atlantic have vastly more fuel efficient planes? Or maybe BA just overpaid by judging the fuel market wrong?

Still, 922 - 401 still means that BA made more than £500 million (pre tax) over the last two years.

In those same two years, Virgin made a touch over £100 million (pre tax).

So waving hands all over the place, one might infer that BA is somewhere like three to five times the size of Virgin Atlantic.

Then again, Wikipedia says British Airways have 231 planes, with 57 on order but Virgin Atlantic have only 38 with 21 on order. Not sure what (if anything) I might conclude from that tho ….

ps. more funny numbers: A child is bitten by a dog every 0.07 seconds…