This could use some explanation and layout of the implications.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
33 points (85.1% liked)
Showerthoughts
37244 readers
945 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
How would that work? Like these ten apples are equal to 2 bags of oranges?
Guessing they mean;
A 5 EUR coffee is 1 EUR more than a 4 EUR coffee.
A 50000 EUR car is 5/4th or 125% times a 40000 EUR car.
125% times
...is the most cursed thing I've seen all day. Especially so when you realize that when you convert it to a decimal of 1.25, the sentence is completely correct. Bravo. 😅👏
In my native language % means "per cent", meaning per hundred.
So it reads as 125 per 100 times 40000.
Is that not the case in English?
I've never seen anyone write it like that in English. It is understandable when you explain it, but it would normally be written simply as 1.25
Hence why I keep one of these in my selling satchel:
If I understand you correctly, I think "people don't easily comprehend the significance of increasing orders of magnitude" is a better way to frame it. To use iii's examples, people perceive a coffee that costs 5 as being 1 unit more than a coffee costing 4. But when comparing two cars costing 40000 and 50000, the human brain tends to just latch on to the most significant digit, and starts to see it the same way: just one unit more.
Tangentially, given our brains' difficulty processing large numbers, I wonder if this effect leads to money management skills being worse on average in economies with smaller base currency units, such as the Japanese Yen, Indian Rupee, South Korean Won, or for an extreme case study, the Iranian Rial, which currently exchanges at 49,313 IRR ≈ 1 EUR. When your haircut costs 1200000, a new phone costs 18700000, and a new car costs 1331400000, it's hard to judge the weight of your decisions. When the slightly nicer car costs 1645200000, it's near impossible to notice that you just spent your coffee money for an entire year (~5 days a week for 50 weeks) on a moonroof and Apple CarPlay. Not sure if that example is applicable to the average Iranian, but eh.
I'd think the opportunity cost is easier to realise with the absolute difference in currency units. The price of any alternatives you might consider is usually specified in currency units.
The only relative that I'd think might be helpful for expensive purchases would be to convert a price orrice difference into number of days/ week / months of your expected disposable income or something like that.
Money is earned linearly, not logarithmically
Orders of magnitude are super important for us (well, most people..)