Why do they say 179,000 million instead of 179 billion? Is that common in their industry?
Removes any confusion for european and american collaboration.
Got old roots dating back to cockney trading slang: "The Old Lady just bought half a yard of cable"
Anyone aged around 60 or older would have been learning these numbers before 1974, and that's a significant overlap with FT's audience. You are dismissing this as if it's Middle English. It's an entirely reasonable explanation, at least one that shouldn't be dismissed.
From the writing of the era, it's clear this new definition for million was not popular, and many chose to continue using the "British meaning." So it was probably in colloquial use for quite a while, and the transitional term "1 thousand million" became the proper style.
The FT has a big international audience. As a German reader where a "Billion" is still 10^12 it does sometimes trip me up a little. So I at least find it useful.
Not trying to argue any point (I mean honestly...), just trying to understand the German POV here, which is interesting.
So the German reader will read the English article (in English, not auto-translated), see the word billion, think “oh that looks familiar” and might assume it means the same as the German word Billion.
Machine translation makes quite a few mistakes, so I think if you have some decent knowledge of a language, you might be better off reading the original rather than a machine translation. At least my point of view from a couple of years ago. But it's also possible that machine translation has gotten WAY better in the last couple of years, I'm not sure.
So there was confusion, even in the English-speaking world. Was. If I understand correctly, England has adopted 10^9, and so now there is no ambiguity.
And instead of (metric) tons, I want megagrams. No kilotons; gigagrams.
I remember the first time I got those units out of gnu units on the command line scratching my head wondering why I'd never used them before and why it was using them at the same time.
Hecto = 100
Hectoliter = 100 litres
Hectogram = 100 grams
Kilo = 1000
Kiloliter = 1000 litres
Kilogram = 1000 grams
atto-lightyear = 1e-18 lightyear
lightyear = 3.156e+7 lightsecond
Hence, atto-lightyear = 3.156e-11 lightsecond = 31.56 pico-lightsecond
The only 'commonly' used unit of measure larger than a kilometer is a light year, at least that I can think of. Maybe a Astronomical Unit, but not 'common' I suppose.
But it shouldn't be common.
If the data consists of electrical potentials between 0.0000001 and 0.0002 V, it’s way easier to think about it as microvolts, especially if any other is in a complementary scale.
I've had people get angry when I tried to use Mm (mega metre) or ask why using some currencies symbols before the number when all symbols for all other units are used after.