Comment on 👴☝️I did that

• pyre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  2x cheaper is a crazy way of saying half as expensive.

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  • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s fewer syllables, what’s the problem? And yes, milk is cheaper here than the same quality in the US.

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    • pyre@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      because expensiveness is a scale that starts from 0 so you always know how expensive everything is. cheapness works the other way, so there’s no starting point. that means there’s no way to quantify how cheap the first thing is, in order to double that. in your example gasoline would have to be the least cheap thing possible, which means nothing can be more expensive.

      it’s like saying someone’s twice as short as someone else. half as tall makes sense, twice as short is a weird way to say it because how short is the first person?

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      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        “Cheaper” means “less expensive”. 2x cheaper means 2x less expensive, or less expensive by a factor of 2, or 0.5x as expensive. I can say 2x shorter, 2x slower etc. and I don’t see a problem. Everyone I know would understand that it’s the reciprocal of the original price, although I get that in a country whose president can say he slashed proces by 500 % without instantly having to resign, fractions and percentages might have to be specified but that’s longer to say for the same number of significant figures.

        Yes, I can find people debating “two times cheaper” (English) but not “zweimal billiger” (German) or “dvakrát levnější” (Czech), in fact the phrase is often used in promotional material. The only results suggesting it’s wrong are English Reddit discussions’ automatic translations to German or Czech, and Google’s AI summary that cotes them.

        I won’t stop using it just because people with inferior education sometimes don’t get it. Similarly, I provided the metric value and conversion rate, it’s Americans who need to practice mental math.

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    • Stez827@sh.itjust.works ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      You don’t have much better gasoline there it’s just that you use a different unit for measuring the octane. They aren’t actually much different

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      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        TIL, thanks

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  • Tetragrade@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Yet more prof of the insanity of our capitalist system. Fuck this gay earth.

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