What are those signs?

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.

That... Is a very morbid, yet perfect example.
- No, the poor Americans will be confused by the inversion.
  
  First removing 1/3 (4 rounds) from a 12 round magazine leaving 2/3 (8 rounds) left ... then switching to talking about how a 1/3 full magazine with its 4 rounds has more rounds left than the 1/4 mag with 3 rounds.
  
  They won't be able to catch on, and are likely to respond with something along the lines of "But the one you took 1/3 out of has just 8 rounds left, and the 1/4 one has 9 rounds left, which is more. The 1/4 one is more."
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.
- The cake is a lie.
- To be fair everybody likes cake. Even if pie is better.
How do you take a round... out? Is this like where I shoot in the air for holidays or gender reveal parties?
- No, that's dangerous. You shoot toward the poor end of town, not just anywhere.
No, they can't. They need 3-4 full magazines to hit once.

Troll gave it away by calling them "signs"

Welcome Ken M energy

i know the guy on discord and he was actually put into a book as well

There are 2 individuals in this post
- 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.
- Feels like you've a specific person in mind.
- Honestly, if you're good enough at math, you don't need to be very good at reading. The reverse isn't true.
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.
no wonder people learn to hate math
Sounds a hell of a lot like my Australian school experience.

My high school was great, if you were doing poorly in a class then next year they'd put you in an easier class to bring up your average grade (And if that didn't work, then they'd just ignore you).
Sounds like you were in the "regular" class. I went to the smart kid class, and they did a much better job of explaining stuff.
- Yeah I definitely was. Our regular class of 30 kids in one classroom, one graduation class of 900... The goddamn school was a city of 2,000 kids... Of all those kids, and therefore all those parents paying taxes, we somehow couldn't afford paper one year. Of my class of 900, 400 graduated. That should tell you something about the shithole I come from lol

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.

I know there is a syntactically correct way that everyone knows and accepts, but it does depend on what the expression is.

Do you write it 5 > 3 or 3 < 5?
- I don't understand your question, both of those are correct.

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

Why has no one introduced a 1/8th pounder and charged more for it?
- Wait no, they should do that. The eighth burger would be a success (although to be fair the 1/3 Burger was decades ago so maybe times have changed)
- Because at that point the size difference would be clearly visible.
  
  Also many fast food places have, and they're called sliders.
It's literally what happened...

why the fuck are you greentexting it sarcastically

and

who the hell are the 18 other people that thought you were making sense?
- who the hell are the 18 other people that thought you were making sense?
  
  The same kinda people who would have assumed the 1/4 pounder was bigger 30 years ago

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.

That's ~50g. I wouldn't think of ordering less than 100g of anything at a deli

(At least people in metric countries hardly need fractions)
- Yeah it was a comically tiny amount of meat.
It depends on how much they're paying you
- That was another point of frustration. People would think if they asked for a half pound and the scale reads .6 they get a deal, but in reality it's just printing a label that says my pounds and they gotta pay accordingly. Some customers would accuse you of ripping them off if they asked for a specific amount and got that amount exactly.

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/
- Yeah, I would think so. No other restaurant had problems selling 1/3lb burgers. Braums and Carls Jr sling them by the truckload. Almost all the small family restaurants here sell their burgers by 1/3lb 2/3lb sizes. And I don't exactly live in an area known for it's high intelligence. So I'm calling shenanigans.
- Is A&W a good source on why their huge marketing stunt failed?
Yup, A&W sucked because their food sucks. They were great when I was a kid (I loved their frosted rootbeer mugs and onion rings), but they started cutting costs or something because I never went back after the early 2000s or so.

I blame it on this stunt where they merged KFC and A&W, both of which suck.

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)
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.
HUNGRY ALLIGATOR SIGNS for life!

Lord bless whoever came up with that imagery, 3 generations of kids passed algebra because of this.
- CHOMP CHOMP

The hungry alligator eats the bigger number.

That always confused me as a kid. Big side is bigger number - simple and straightforward.
- It's a little alligator going towards the big number. Simple and straightforward.

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.
- A&W was such a cool thing before McDonald's and the other franchises killed them off.

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.

Even though fractions makes sense for accuracy in a mathematical point of view, I see no benefit in a practical application.
- Fractions are easier to do calculations in your head or on paper than trying to do the same stuff in decimals. E.g. half of 1/2 is 1/4, half of 1/4 is 1/8, half of 1/8 is 1/16, half of 1/16 is 1/32 etc. In decimals this would be 0.5 -> 0.25 -> 0.125 -> 0.0625 -> 0.03125. When building stuff, I find it useful to be able to do that kind of stuff in my head easily.
Interesting.

But we use fractions a ton here in the US. For example, you can buy milk in a half gallon or a gallon. When you measure, you use 1/4 cup or 1/2 cup. In metric, you rarely use fractions and instead just change the unit (e.g. 250ml or 1L).

Since it's so common here, it's honestly nuts to me that anyone here would be confused at whether 1/4 lb or 1/3 lb is bigger, because we use fractions so often here. If you've ever cooked anything in your life (incl. macaroni and cheese from a box), you've dealt with fractions in real life. I probably do more fraction math than decimal math, especially since I buy everything with my credit card, so when I see a decimal, I round it to the nearest convenient fraction (e.g. I bought 4.5lbs of meat recently for a dinner party, and I communicated that as 4 1/2 lbs). If you ask me how many ounces are in a 1/4 cup, I'd have to stop and think. But if you ask me how many 1/4 cups are in a cup, I'd have the answer for you on the spot.

So I could see this happening in areas where fractions aren't common, but in the US, it's something everyone deals with, pretty much daily. Oh, btw, we have one of these at my local dump:

)
heuristics of assuming that larger digits means larger number

That's not heuristics, it's mental laziness or smoothbrain. You shouldn't say you have a good education in math and then say that...
- It's indeed a form of mental laziness because the mind is designed to approach some concepts with a non-perfect optimization. That's heuristics. Yes, I can very easily see which number is the largest if I put my mind at it. But scanning over a fast food chain-sized menu, seeing numbers for 2, 4, 8, 12 piece nuggets, prices on different items and a 1/3 pound burger next to a 1/4 pound burger, I could easily see my mind skip the math and mess up the size comparrison.

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.
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.
- Never really saw it anywhere else at least here in the Midwest.
"lber" is making me irrationally angry.
- That's fair.
- made from pure lberian lbex meat

Would you rather have a 1/2 ounce bag or a 1/8 bag?

Most people in the 70s didn't smoke weed...
Why the fuck would you bring ounces into it? We were having a perfectly fine conversation here and now you've brought imperial unit conversion into the mix.

What's the ounce to pound thing again? 12? 16? 20, or 32 or something? Who am I kidding? I don't give a shit.

If you're not using metric at least have the decency to stick to pounds, kilopounds, millipounds, micropounds, or whatever the fuck you want to name your orders of 1,000. Just don't ever come here fucking about with short tons and long tons or I'll strap you to a board, drop you in a tub, and drown you in a metric ton of sewage.
- Ok guy. My country uses metric so … slow your roll.

Higher number = growth and better!

Infinite burgers = infinite growth!
- (waist) line must go up!

Pay attention to your kids' education folks

Also a single quarter pound patty plus fries is already enough food. Perhaps too much.

Depends on the person and their lifestyle. It's too much food for a 130 pound couch potato. It's not nearly enough food for a 200 pound bodybuilder, or rock climber.
- On average. We all know McDonald's isn't exactly catering to bodybuilders.
- An actual rock climber did this. He averaged about 16 regular McDonald’s burger patties over 3 months
For you maybe... Not everyone is your size.

One of my roommates from college was a 6'4" active rock climber, he ate twice as much as anyone I knew, including ridiculous amounts of fast food, and always stayed in shape.

I have literally watched him eat two pounds of meat, two baked potatoes, a salad and some cheescake for dessert as if he was eating a normal meal and he is still one of the fittest people I know.

1/3 pounder? More like turd pounder :)

Why is he using meme arrows incorrectly? /s

Should have just called it something fancy, like the 'Royale'.

Because of the metric system?
they should have just called it something idiotic like Big Quarter Pounder.

wouldn't surprise me

Math. Its whats for dinar

Your mom and pounder

Honestly it's not real meat so it doesn't matter how much you pile on the bun.

Racoon nipple, squirrel elbow. Yak hooves. Missing children.....etc....etc.

If this is real, then you're poking fun at a mentally deficient American. This may shock you, but we don't all fit that bill.

I'll say the same thing to you that I'd say to Donald Trump: Fuck you.

You all still use imperial, so...

Maybe not all fit the bill, just the majority.

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