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Nope. Try again.
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If Bloomberg gave the entire $60 billion to 330 million people it would be about $180 per person
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A: “Oh, my mistake. I guess that’s why Bloomberg is the billionaire and I’m just a millionaire.”
B: “Actually your net worth is $172.”
A: “NUTS!”
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Grr, I came here to use these very words!! Knfound you knappa.
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Assuming Bloomberg is worth $60 billion and there are 327 million people in the United States:
$60e9/327e6 people = $60e3/327 people, or about $180 per person.*
*actually $183.49 per person when I calculated it.
Engineering notation is your friend.
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sigh
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…which is not to say that it wouldn’t still be a worthwhile thing.
Add the hoards of another billionaire or two, and it could make a significant difference.
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What’s worse is being bad at sanity checking; since that’s more broadly useful and much harder to compensate for with either reference materials, pencil and paper, or calculator.
Getting the correct answer for the 500/357 part is a math issue; knowing that when you are dividing a few hundred million of something across a few hundred million people the answer couldn’t possibly be in the millions is just basic magnitude; and that, plus some pretty rudimentary math(or a calculator) is all you need to get a usefully close answer.
We know that 357 is less than 500; but 2*357 would be more than 600; so 500/357 is somewhere between 1 and 2; and the millions cancel out. That’s far too shoddy for anything where error accumulates; but gets you an answer that is close enough to sum up the situation with math that wouldn’t have passed muster in elementary school.
It’s especially unnerving when the only reason this got reported is that it sounds astounding; and “sounds astounding” is more or less the #1 trigger condition for “I should do a sanity check”.
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Completely agree with you. What is very surprising to me is that there were probably a dozen people involved; showrunner, research staff, interns, even the graphic designer that superimposed the tweet to a background image…
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(British joke deleted after I saw your later post)
Also wrong (you’re off by a factor of a thousand; you mean $327 quadrillion), but not as wrong as saying “a milllllllion dollars!” when you meant a buck and a half.
EDIT: no @anon50609448 that was right, as they rightly point out. I was wrong. math is hard.
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A million is 10^6.
327 x 10^6 (people) * 10^6 (dollars) = 327 x 10^12 dollars to give a million dollars to each person.
10^12 is trillion.
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She had to go dark after that and add a bit to her description to stop the flood. I admit I laughed at that one and felt bad for her.
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The power of Euclid compels you!
(Get it? Power. I’m here all week, folks. Tip your servers.)
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Ten to the power of a multiple of three, to be exact.
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I like the 1018 trillion, when do we get to vote on it?
I can’t imagine real mathematicians prefer trillion = million × some stuff
to the simple and intuitive trillion = million3
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Except in the UK, where this is trillian:
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On UK TV you mean. According to the book:
“She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes. With her red head scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress, she looked vaguely Arabic.” Sigh.
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