How to explain to Americans: If You remove 3 bullets out of an Gen 4 Glock 26 9mm 12-Round magazine, that's 1/4. If you remove 4 bullets, that's 1/3. The police can shoot one more unarmed black man with 1/3 of the magazine than 1/4.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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The cake analogy is better and still appeals to Americans because it is cake.
Yeah but they already failed with the burger analogy. And it's a burger.
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i know the guy on discord and he was actually put into a book as well
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What are those words
"Somehow it's ok for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet if I said, 'I never learned to read,' they'd say I was an illiterate dolt." - Neil deGrasse Tyson
It's been this way for a long time now unfortunately.
Chuckle? Hell I know full grown adults in their fifties who wear their mathematical ignorance as a badge of pride!
It's like they're clinging to their youth so desperately, that they continue on with the high school trope that only nerds who are undeserving of social interaction know math.
Meanwhile, they also tend to continuously moan online how broke they are - inevitably from decades of poor financial decisions that landed them under a mountain of usurious debt with double digit compounding interest.
They also like to get grammatically pedantic on the regular to show off their superior language skills - usually when they've got nothing of value to contribute to the conversation or they know they've been bested, so better point out those autocorrect errors.
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In my eyes, if you don't understand 1/3 > 1/4, then ya might as well be an illiterate dolt. It's one of the first things you learn in school along with reading. Might as well consider your self a primary school dropout.
The American education system (for my old millennial ass)
"Memorize this. No I will not explain how it works or why. Memorize it take the test and leave me alone."
Me who is physically incapable of memorizing seemingly arbitrary stuff and needs to understand for it to stick: I guess fuck me then huh? 1/4 pounder it is!
I learned more about algebra from making games in BASIC than I ever did in any class.
Programming taught me math, problem solving, and how to reassemble a keyboard after it bounces off the wall and shatters into 103 pieces.
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no wonder people learn to hate math
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I once had a mortgage advisor point at a more than sign and go "is that more or less? I never can remember"
Like, why did you get into this job? I ended up not taking his advice.
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Try to compete with McDonald’s marketing on their brand new 1/4 pounder
Get absolutely destroyed when piggy-backing their marketing strategy fails
Blame the customer for not understanding fractions
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I used to work on a deli. Someone ordered an eighth pound of meat (which is like nothing and nobody ever did this). My coworker asked me if that meant .8 on the scale.
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Except it's not true. That was just the excuse A&W made when going bankrupt. No one else had problems selling 1/3lb burgers in the US.
It was literally reported in newspapers at the time, angry people posting in the opinions section about how A&W was 'ripping people off'
And no other existing fast food chain at the time marketed a 1/3 burger.
Source: I am fucking old.
Now can you explain to me why so many people assume your bullshit to be right?
for some reason people love to revisit things like this and find post hoc justifications for dumb fucks to make them look smarter. it happens a lot with elon and TFG too.
but the one timeless example that pisses me off the most is W's "fool me once" flub. every time it's mentioned, so many people come to his defense, adamant that it was on purpose! supposedly he didn't want to have a clip of him saying "shame on me" on camera to be used against him in political ads and whatnot. not like we have tons of evidence that he was a fuckwit before that, and never mind that there's absolutely no evidence for this to be so propagated like it's a fact...
but this is such bs on so many levels that I'm getting angry even right now thinking about it. wow! such marvelous political instincts... he sure didn't end up giving a much worse soudbite that made him look like an absolute buffoon now, did he? what a savant!
no, people can be stupid. but also the american public in general? come on... there's areas in which you can try to save your national pride, math ain't one of them.
Wasn't this proven false long ago? Snopes says it's true. 🤷
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/06/17/third-pound-burger-fractions/
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The hungry alligator eats the bigger number.
That always confused me as a kid. Big side is bigger number - simple and straightforward.
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The way he lays out his math had me a little confused at first but I blame it on my lack of coffee
When I was in grade school I remember a teacher told me that if you think about the greater and less than signs as alligators eating the bigger numbers... To this day, it's still what I see
That's still how I think about them as well
Huh... I was taught they are 2 lines. There's a bigger gap on the side which is bigger, and a smaller gap on the side that's smaller (so small they touch)
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My teacher put a kid with dwarfism and tall kid side by side in front of the black board and drew a line between the tops of their heads, and then another still downwards but in the opposite horizontal direction. Thus the pointy end always faces the smaller thing, while the open end always faces the larger thing. Doesn't work so well in english, though since it kind of implies people with dwarfism are "less than" people without the condition. In the language it was taught the verbs used for < and > are also used when comparing heights.
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Well, the 1/3 also had to compete with the double-quarter (aka, half pound, but two patties), which is bigger and feels significantly more substantial as well.
It doesn't help that any place I saw selling them (let's be real here, this is about McD's) was offering an expensive and fancy 1/3rd burger (deluxe bacon, southwest ranch style, Asian sensation with real gold flake, etc) against the old reliable (cheap) quarter-pounder. Perceived value is everything.
Also, we're bad at math, lol
A&W had a 1/3lb burger that was cheaper than McDonald's quarter pounder. Nothing fancy about it, just people are bad at math.
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It doesn't take a ton of mental capacity, but even though I have a good education in math, I still find myself doing the heuristics of assuming that larger digits means larger number. Using fractions for comparing sizes can flip these heuristics. And I think a lot of people are like me, and also that they won't spend a lot of time reading each item on the menu.
Where I'm from, burger sizes are just given in amount of grams, which makes it a lot easier to compare.
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The third burger failed because it was a stupid amount when it came out, iirc it was more expensive than the quarter lber and like a dollar less than a double quarter lber.
Well yeah, that's how math should work. It's more expensive than the thing it's bigger than, and less expensive than the thing it's smaller than.
My point was almost everyone would rather spend the extra dollar to get more especially because the double quarter lber came with a larger fry iirc.
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It failed at more chains than just McDonald's. Lots of places had 1/3 burger patties only and most have switched to 1/4 and didn't even alter the price... More profit and they get less headache about it.
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Higher number = growth and better!
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