May I see your papers, citizen?

OOHH!! OOHH!! I WANNA YOTTA CASH!

I knew you would come up with such a lame reply as that.

It's not even worth the kilobytes or the megabytes, let alone the gigabytes you use for your bandwidth.

Every second in the news you can see comments similar to this:

US Population Hits 308M

Francis has now discovered that people can do things RONG!





David

It's only that I'm amazed with the frequency you do so..

I made a joke based on the link that Francis provided . . . particularly since Francis speculated that David would not read the link . . . and it was voted down. Really!

In defense of OmSIGdavid:

Don't be hard on David. He's just old. Still stuck in the world which actually used Roman numerals. Wow. Oh. Wow.
His question, when did we start using Metric? shows this.
Um. How do I put this?

ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO, POPS!!

Look around.
Except for wonderful countries like Myanmar and Liberia, parts of the United Kingdom (required by law to use both English and Metric) only the US of A remains as stuck in the past as OmSigDavid,
but not as stuck.
All American science and medicine is done in Metric. All American manufacturing for use overseas is done in Metric. (When I worked in the oilfield equipment making field, the engineers went out into the shop and confiscated every English tape-rule they could find. All the blueprints were done in Metric. That was 30 years ago.) Most, if not all, American cars have the option of showing speed and distances in Metric.

We, as a people, will get to the promised land. We are crawling there.

100 percent of Americans know how big a 2 liter bottle of Diet Coke is, what they can't figure out is how big a 2 liter can of gasoline is. (But all American gas cans show how many liters they hold.)

That bottle of wine from Sonoma says 750ml . No ounces in view.

A glance in your cabinet will show that the cans of soup, the box of trash bags and the roll of toallas de papel show their weights and lengths in Metric, sometimes the English measure is in parentheses, sometimes not.

Yep, America is finally catching up to the rest of the world, finally catching up to Beau, a really nice pot farmer I knew back in 1967, who told me "No, man, no ounces, everything I got I sell in grams or kilos."

David is also wrong about foreign aid, but I need some breakfast.

Joe(Pass that half a kilo box of Wheaties)Nation

That is funny.

I actually think that David is of the generation when one could be accepted to law school without an undergraduate degree.

M is only the sign for 1000 since the High Medieval Ages.
It wasn't known in the original Numeri Romani.




And in medieval times, people had written CCCM for 300,000 or three C's with a vinculum ...

actually there was a time when one was required to have an education (generally liberal arts) before attending graduate/professional schools such as law or medicine. that was when having an education actually meant having an education. The conversion of our university system after the G.I. Bill ended all that by converting our universities into an industry only seeking the dollars made abundantly available for the mass marketing of "college degrees".

The only thing that bothers me is the metric system was invented by the french. This worries me as much as they screw up. Almost as much as we do.

My ex-husband's father was an attorney but he did not attend college but went directly from high school to law school.

The early labor union movement sponsored study groups in many subjects. The idea was to make the laborer an educated person.

When I was part of the left-wing student body at WSU, we all wanted to bring back the seven liberal arts to raise the standards of education. Today, parents of college and graduate students call professors asking why their kids received Cs. Duh!

In business, or at least in the financial industry of which I'm a part, the proper abbreviation for million is the "mm" the equivalent of one-thousand thousands.

1m = 1,000
1mm = 1,000,000

"k" is rarely used.

I don't know Ma. Everyone knows what I mean if I say I am made $210K last year (which I didn't).

I know what you mean to. I was mentioning that in the financial services industry, it's rare to see a number expressed with a "k" after it. In presentations I give, I have been 'instructed' to not use the abbreviation k; that it is out of standards for our industry. We use numbers like:

300M (thousands)
300MM (millions)
300MMM (trillions)

I'm not saying that any one way is right or wrong; but both are rather common. I wouldn't have called POM out for using 300M like David did; it's not like there is some universal standard (like POM claimed). There is a hodgepodge of methods and abbreviations out there, mostly used in specific contexts.

POM referred to popular usage in the post I was just looking at. The example eBrown used is likely the most common usage of a short-form for thousands - people talking about their incomes. 50k, 120k, 200k. That's common usage - and has been the popular "standard" for at least 40 or 50 years.

What specific industries use seems to be much more variable than what is used commonly in North America.

I find that to be true as well.

Thanks. THis forum is pretty much conversational and what I said is that it is popular usage . . . conversation.

At least in the US, natural gas is measured in mcf. If your well is a really good one, the production is in mmcfm, which is a million (thousand thousand) cubic feet per minute.

Elsewhere anyone uses measurements according to the SI (Système international d'unités - International System of Units), e.g. metric tons.