Facepalm

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.

Troll gave it away by calling them "signs"

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

"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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

The hungry alligator eats the bigger number.

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

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.

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.

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

Higher number = growth and better!