yesterday a friend of mine, Leo, came by unexpected by my house....he was doing some work nearby and wanted to say hi.
We had a few beers and talked about everything......at a certain point he asked me how much I use per month for heating my house with my salamandra, wood oven, as only heating source. I told him the years before I used around 300 kg of quebracho per month, which cost 800 per 100.....so around 2400 pesos/monthly......but to make it more accurate I gave him the usd amount....around 50 usd, (last year by 40-50 peso/usd).
He said to me I can't use that term since there is 8 different usd rates......at the end I give up, and say use whatever rate u want........I cannot be more explicit.....
Was nearly like he was blaming me of the usd mess and numbers. (It's a good friend so no hard feelings).
But this leads me to be thread title:
Wtf is it with argentinean people not knowing how to use numbers and percentages????? I'm amazed every day of the lack of knowledge of numbers and their meaning.
If I say 7......what is 7? A lot? A little?
It's a lot if it's new popes moving into Vatican, because only one there now...
but if it's chinese learning to play banjo, it's a small number.... because China has 1.7 billion people!!!!!
So numbers are always related to other numbers.....just standing alone it does not say anything.
When talking about coronavirus I constantly get presented with this misleading facts.....f.ex. talking about which barrios has most coronavirus cases......no mentioning of that some of them are 10 times bigger than the other ones mentioned. Or when talking about which provinces has most cases.... Buenos Aires and BA province has around a third of whole country population....please keep that in mind!!!!
Seems like to put numbers in perspective and use percentage is not very used in Argentina......just look at how they always are talking about how many infected around world, never mention that still extremely few tests are done....an important factor!
Also always talking about 5-10 bigger countries and comparing them to u is just absolute nonsense!!!!
The blame game always come up when u mention usd...."u r a foreigner blabla".......I don't use dollar term because I'm tourist or foreigner, I use it to be more accurate talking about stuff!
If they have that big problem with using usd as a reference, just make an index of bananas, milk, yen, usd, euros, goats castrated in turkey or whatever, and put the peso in relation to that......will be exactly the same result!!!!!
But please teach more basic mathematics and percentages in school.....it's really 101 to understand the world a bit better!!!!