Why is a million not a legitimate unit? I don’t really get that as I see pretty much every financial statement using millions (or in some cases billions) as the unit of reporting amounts (with specific and clearly identified exceptions like per share data). As you say, units mean something and million means 6 zeros after whatever numbers are stated. Additional units can also be present, dollars, people or sheep.
The problem (and one I glossed over myself initially) was in the treatment of the units when dividing. They should have cancelled but they were not. If the numbers were presented as units of 1, so all the trailing zeros were considered I don’t think the mistaken claim would have been made. So I do think the issue is about how we keep track of the units and how we need to treat them in different contexts.
I think Matt Parker could have illustrated the problem better by including people as a unit in his breakdown. That would have made it very clear that the end result was the 1.5x $/person and not the > 1 million $/person as claimed.
Why is a million not a legitimate unit? I don’t really get that as I see pretty much every financial statement using millions (or in some cases billions) as the unit of reporting amounts (with specific and clearly identified exceptions like per share data). As you say, units mean something and million means 6 zeros after whatever numbers are stated. Additional units can also be present, dollars, people or sheep.
The problem (and one I glossed over myself initially) was in the treatment of the units when dividing. They should have cancelled but they were not. If the numbers were presented as units of 1, so all the trailing zeros were considered I don’t think the mistaken claim would have been made. So I do think the issue is about how we keep track of the units and how we need to treat them in different contexts.
I think Matt Parker could have illustrated the problem better by including people as a unit in his breakdown. That would have made it very clear that the end result was the 1.5x $/person and not the > 1 million $/person as claimed.