saying they are the same is like saying "on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone falls to zero" or that "a circle normalizes to a line", it's an a = a expression

that's precisely my point... it fits a progression that has a base to it and it's somewhere around 2, for sure... it may diverge from that now but we have a long history and the divergence is not likely to be more than a standard deviation based on the correct baseline