From the BBC:
The government has incurred a loss of £2.1bn after selling another tranche of shares in Royal Bank of Scotland. The shares were sold at 271p each, almost half* the 502p a share paid in the government's bailout of RBS a decade ago when it rescued the bank at the height of the financial crisis.
Clearly, the government did lose money, but that money was lost/wasted ten years ago when the government bailed out RBS. The government did not lose a penny on the sale itself, it merely converted shares worth £2.71 into cash of £2.71.
* The phrase "almost half" is totally misleading as the government sold the shares for more than half of what it paid for them. It would, however, be correct to say "The shares fell in value by almost half".
This leads me on to something else which annoys me. Let's say Object A weighs/has mass 1 kg and Object B weighs/has mass 2 kg. It is fine to say that B is twice as heavy as A, or that A is half as heavy as B. It is also OK to say that A is lighter than B. But for some reason, a lot of people say that A is "twice as light as B", which is nonsense. You can't use a comparative with an adjective meaning light, small, short, near etc, only with adjectives meaning heavy, large, long, far away etc.
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