Paint* peels off. Person picks up the peel. This proves that the person is a vandal who actively destroyed the pool.
*I originally mis-types ‘Paint’ with a ‘T’ instead of a ‘P’. Somehow, it seemed fitting.
Stupid squablling continues between two idiots
Maybe Trump can now threaten to invade Italy!
I’m sure that they’ll appreciate the $300 billion.
For $300 billion you are welcome to invade me. Twice, if need be.
Let me write this out with all the zeroes to visualize what we are talking about:
$300,000,000,000.00
granted: the .00 at the end is a bit cheeky, but technically correct.
Knowing his nibs it would be
$299,999,999,999.99
Not .95, mind you. He is, after all, the one who cashed a 13-cent check.
And those are the wimpy English billions, if they were strong Spanish billones it would be $3,000,000,000,000.00
Let me nitpick on that, you know I can’t avoid it: 300 billones de los cojones would be no less than 16 zeroes of which two would be after the comma. You only managed three lousy billones like some paltry Leon Musk. It goes like this:
$300.000.000.000.000,00
Please note that in Spanish notation “,” and “.” play the opposite role they do in English. That is how you know at a glance that those are real Spanish billones.
You are correct, thanks for the nitpick, in the finest traditions of the SDMB
I didn’t know that the decimal marker in Spanish is also a comma instead of a point, just like in German. As a former German programmer who wrote code for the German and international market, this annoyed me to no end, always having to separate between the two. But it got worse, don’t ask me about date/time formats…
date/time formats are the work of the Devil.
When my benign dictatorship begins the first decree will be that everyone uses YYYY/MM/DD under penalty of death.
Ah, a practitioner of ISO8601
You are right, those could be German Billionen or Spanish billones. As an interesting side note German has the word Milliarde for the English billion (nine zeroes or 109), but Spanish did not. In Spanish, the word millardo is an adapted loanword that does not form part of the system of numeral adjectives; it has been included in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy since 1995 at the request of the Venezuelan Academy of Language [wikicite in Spanish]. It is very seldom used in Spain, probably more so in Venezuela. I ignore whether this usage has anything to do with Venezuela’s rampant inflation, it would not surprise me, but this is speculation.
So what is the Spanish word for 10^9?
Millardo. But it is not Spanish from Spain, it is Spanish from Venezuela. By the looks of it they coined that word based on the German Milliarde, not from the English Billion, as the billón (1012) was already taken. So Venezuelans (who? I don’t know. The press? The banks? A prankster?) invented that term for a concept they knew from other languages but that did not exist in Spanish, and then they presented a request to the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language that this word be included in the official dictionary (a concept, the official dictionary, that is in turn alien to Germans and anglophones). They said please, and the Academy obliged in 1995. Since then millardo is officially Spanish and thus correct usage, but at least in Spain it is a strange word, feels like a pebble in your shoe. Spanish bureaucrats use it, for instance in EU budget negotiations. It is useful for that. But I have almost never heard it in an everyday situation.
ETA: The Academy claims it was derived from the French milliard, not from the German Milliarde. And the example of use they give is Un millardo de pesos. Pesos, not pesetas, or Euros. A subtle way of expressing that it is not Spanish from Spain without snubbing the Venezuelans too openly.
Yes, this is a very subjective take on that snubbing. But it is what my language feeling tells me. I may be wrong, of course.
So what was the millardo called in Spain before that “Venezuelan” usage came up?
Mil millones, of course. Which is what it is!
It requires some mental arithmetic when you interpret something like “nine point 25 billion” into Spanish (solution: nuevemildoscientoscincuenta millones, sounds cumbersome, but it is not difficult), thus the Spanish bureaucrats in Brussels sometimes use the millardos. But a pebble in the shoe it remains, at least for someone that went to school without that word.
Nitpick: wimpy American billions. The British used to use the same billion that you Spanish speakers do (10^12) and called 10^9 thousand million. Under the baleful influence of Americans, they changed to calling 10^9 billion, but then didn’t have a word for 10^12. Maybe now that there’s an American trillionaire, they’ll adopt the American trillion too.
Ugh, my condolences.
It’s so fucking logical, I don’t understand how Americans could not see it.
One
One hundred
A hundred hundreds => A thousand
A hundred thousands
A thousand thousands => A Million.
A hundred million
A thousand millions (here’s were the Americans get confused)
A million millions => A Billion.
You change the name when it repeats.
A hundred hundreds: A thousand.
A thousand thousands: A million
A million millions : A billion.
But noooooo.
ten hundreds = thousand.