Non sequitur of the month: "either-or" means "fifty-fifty"

Very frequently I experience an urge to write a post with no other purpose than to just mock some piece of extraordinary stupidity that I've encountered in the media. I try to fight that urge, as writing posts that do nothing but attack an easy target is kind of cheap. However, sometimes the temptation is just too strong. For one thing, shooting fish in the barrel can occasionally be fun. For another, psychologists tell me that it's unhealthy to suppress anger, and non sequiturs make me extremely angry. I take them very personally.

Therefore, in order to channel that anger, I decided to start a periodical feature called "Non Sequitur of the Month." In it, I'll try to present truly spectacular errors in reasoning. Fireworks of stupidity, if you will. And since pretty much any fallacy can in principle be stated as a non sequitur, I don't anticipate having trouble keeping things going.

First up is one Anna Cieślak, a journalist working for the second-largest Polish daily newspaper, Rzeczpospolita (title means "The Republic"). She has a blog, and on that blog, there's a post on unemployment. The very first two sentences of that post, in translation, read

From the micro point of view, i.e. from the point of view of an individual, it makes no practical difference whether the unemployment rate will climb to 12.5 or to 13.5 percent. You'll either get fired or you won't, and therefore your risk of becoming unemployed is 50 percent anyway.

Yes, you read that right. Apparently, the author believes that whenever the outcome variable is binary, it necessarily means that each alternative occurs with probability one-half. I should immediately start playing lottery; since I can either win the jackpot or not, it must mean that I have a fifty percent chance of winning.

This is truly a remarkable, monumental piece of stupidity. I believe the first entry in the Non Sequitur of the Month category may well turn into a non sequitur of the year.