2y ago

Introducing a new SI unit to quantify national tragedy

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.

21 comments

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.
- 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.
  
  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
I prefer the more granular competing unit named Tower. 2 Towers = 1 Bush
In the Vatican City example, one death would be 62 Towers. Much more functional in everyday use.
Okay, and 1 Rona is defined as 1 Bush/day
- We can think of these units in similar ways to voltage and amperes (amps). Whereas Bushes are a measure of the dead like a volt measures energy, and Ronas are the rate or "flow" of Bushes, much as amps measure voltage current. The multiplication of these two values calculate the "economic externality", of which the electronic equivalent is known as wattage.
  We got Israel putting out a lot of economic externalities rn.
  
  Bushes and Ronas are more like joules and watts, amps aren't a rate of volts they're a rate of coulombs.
I approve of this
Unironically this should be adopted as a standard Hexbear unit of measurement
Okay, the February 28 incident was in the ballpark of 250-400 Bushes, while Tiananmen Square was between ~20milliBushes (official figures) and ~85milliBushes (high end of Amnesty International's estimate).
So apparently Feb 28 was the equivalent national tragedy to massacring ~3-4.7 million people in China in 1989, whereas Tiananmen was equivalent to killing 1.5-6.5 people in 1947 Taiwan.
Incredible moral framework, no notes.
A second Bush has just hit the towers.
man in Vatican City choking to death on a hotdog
fake gay
I hope the name is changed to the Dubya.
- No because then the ghouls with refer to them as "dubs" implying they earned a "W" when murdering people.
  
  Oh, good point.

21 comments