The value of numbers is that they have a fixed meaning, unlike vague phrases like “very likely,” “serious possibility” that can mean very different things to different people. But you can rarely interpret numbers in isolation. You need other data for context. 

So go the lyrics of a popular song by LMFAO. But who knew Peloton customers would take the lyrics to heart? According to the graph below, the average number of monthly workouts per subscription rose from about 9 to 18 between Q4 of 2018 and Q3 of 2020! As if that were not enough, the para below points that in Q4, the number has risen to nearly 25! Of course, all of this means that their definition of a workout is a bit suspect, but no one on Wall Street will ever work it out, right? 

Life is short. If you are 40, for instance, you have just about 2,000 weeks left. If you read a book a week, you will read 2,000 more books before you are dead. All this means that you cannot be well-read (in absolute terms). (See here).

The cost of carbon is $50 per 1000 k.g.

Per person carbon emissions from one-way travel across the US are about 1 ton (see below).

Recycling. “The GHG emissions associated with producing 1,000 12 ounce beverage cans are approximately 129.1 kilograms, which is equal to the emissions of .025 cars per year.” (see here.) Put another way, you will need to recycle 10,000 12 ounce cans for each cross-US trip you make on the airplane.

AI. “[T]raining BERT on GPU is roughly equivalent to a trans-American flight.” (see here and the table below. ) If companies that train large models were to do carbon offsets, the compute costs would tower over the carbon costs (the max is about $15k).