That has nothing to do with the wording people are arguing over
No, that's EXACTLY what people are arguing about. You say "A is ten times smaller than B" when B is already understood to be small compared to something else. The implication in that sentence is that B is already known for its smallness, and A is even smaller. Except, people use that same construction even when B isn't considered small. They use that incorrect connotation when what they're really trying to say is, "B is big, but A is only a tenth as big."
A is ten times smaller than B
So what you're saying is, "B is already small, and A is even smaller."
Right?
Are you presuming that someone already understands B to be considered small? What is B small compared to?
You just dated yourself. It is mostly just people that are 30+ that still use email on any sort of a regular basis. It would be sort of like letting everyone know you are safe via telegraph.
No, texting would be like letting everyone know you are safe via telegraph. Facebook would be like letting everyone know via a billboard that people may not drive by or pay attention to.
Just like every time someone says, "Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B," I have to guess that, "Product B is $2 more than Product A." Maybe we shouldn't have slept through math class.
Math doesn't help in the absence of context. If Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B, but Product B costs $10,000
There is no confusion that it might mean something else.
Yes, there IS confusion. Are we supposed to infer that the thing that the new 10-times-smaller version is being compared to was already considered small? That's what implied, but nobody knows for sure because the person saying it is lazily using a common, and poorly thought out, construction that doesn't actually tell us that.
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds," without implying it is smaller than a breadbox or even small in general.
OK. But let's say you don't know how big the Small Magellanic Cloud is, relative to, say, the Milky Way, or Andromeda, or anything else. And then someone says, "We've just found a new galaxy, hiding behind a dust cloud, and it's three times smaller than the Magellanic Cloud." What are you supposed to gather from that use?
Fine, you don't like the wording
No, I don't like people conveying information in a way that forces you to go research something they mentioned without providing any useful context. When somebody cites a comparative size, but doesn't explain why (or if) that comparison is meaningful, then it's a waste of time. Especially when the communication is theoretically about science and/or technology.
It's my impression that pro players often get amateur players through bet sizing, if your call/fold response doesn't match the equity of your hand they'll pretty easily see that they can milk you for value or push you into folding. Or that the amateurs are bad at getting the maximum value out of their good hands because they give the pros easy call/fold odds. Of course there's a lot more to bet sizing than your own two cards, but you can't bluff properly without having a pretty good clue about what you represent having and making credible bets as if you had those cards. Pros are pretty good at smelling stories that don't make sense where you're betting on the turn/river like you have cards that you'd never play that way preflop/on the flop because they're usually a bluff. Or a very well disguised hand, but they'll sure test if you're capable of that.
even though everybody knows what it means right away
You're missing the point.
When someone says, "The new battery is ten times smaller than the old battery," yes
But there's a reason those are TWO DIFFERENT SENTENCES.
When you use the word smallER in that context, you're communicating that the old battery is small, and the new battery is even smaller. Why? Because you're saying that the new battery has time times the smallness of the old one. That has a completely different connotation than a sentence that suggests that the old battery was what it was (or was large), and the new battery is comparatively small.
The reason we have lots of vocabulary words, adjectives, and constructions is so that we can be nuanced and more precise in simple communication. When you use a sentence that essentially forces the audience to go find out what you actually meant by "ten times smaller" (was the old one small, or huge?) then you've done the opposite of providing useful information. All of that in order to avoid using slightly different words that we also all know?
This is pure laziness, that's all. It's mimicking a sound or phrase without thinking about what's actually being communicated. It's no different than people who say, "I could care less," when they mean exactly the opposite. They are uttering sounds without thinking about the actual words they're using. One small, lazy spoken step for man, part of one cumulative giant leap towards dumbing everybody down.
Let's be frank, you're evil.
You're not asked to justify abortion, you're asked to keep your fucking nose out of other peoples' business. And how many abortions in the US are late term abortions? Yes, I'm not a fucking retard and saw the clever little rhetorical trick you played there.
Genetically there are something like five or six human races; several in sub-Saharan African, and one just about everywhere else.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
