On January 1, 2020 at 17:09, Ernie Gilman said...
Oh, you've done it now.
Sigh. Those people, in fact by far most of us, would be stating an impossibility in saying that. Bet you never thought about it.
Here we go. I'll try to make this short.
One quantity of real things (i.e. not just numbers, but things) cannot be more than one time less than another quantity of real things. Three times less is impossible.
If you have a hundred of something, that is one times what you have. That's so obvious as to sound silly, but it has implications that we ignore every day.
If you then give away what you have, you have given away one times what you had. You then have zero and you can't give away any more because our universe does not have any negative physical things.
Going back to the initial statement: "The first number is three times less than the other."
No, that's not possible. You're not referring just to mental concepts, numbers, you're referring to billions of dollars. A quantity of dollars can only be three times less than another quantity if negative dollars -- actual bills you can touch -- are possible. Even if this were possible, it's not what you mean to say.
You mean to say "The first number is one third the other."
But hey, just about everybody talks that way.
Next time I'll explain what's wrong with YMMV.
If I mentioned it in the way I did, how/why would you infer that I had never thought about it? It's a stupid way to say "this is 1/x of the other" but since Americans are more concerned with getting more, it sounds better to the morons who don't understand why it's incorrect. They're marketing to stupid people. The same people think that something priced at $299.99 is less than $300. Technically, it's virtually the same (close enough for Rock N Roll).
Why do you think this is what I say? I clearly wrote "There are those who would say....".
