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>Have committed to $22MM of protein I've never understood this convention and it always causes my brain to short-circuit when trying to read it. Is that $22 M
by UI_at_80x24 8y ago
>Have committed to $22MM of protein
I've never understood this convention and it always causes my brain to short-circuit when trying to read it. Is that $22 Million Monies, or $22 MegaMillions
I'm assuming that the shorthand is supposed to be read as: $22 Million
So then I spend the next 5 minutes stuck in a feedback loop of what the hell am I supposed to be thinking.
- ravenstine 8y ago[deleted]
- awad 8y agoThis is common in industry, don't think about it too much.
- vincentmarle 8y agoM is the Roman numeral for 1000, so MM is a thousand thousands, in other words a million.
- coltonv 8y agoBut doesn't MM mean 2000 in roman numerals?
- AznHisoka 8y agoIt is an awkward notation. Nobody says 100M for $100,000, they say 100K. So why should 100 million be 100MM? It forces people to pause, and think unnecessarily.
- bronson 8y agoI'm the opposite. If I see "10M" in financial docs, then I have to pause think about context. If I see "10MM" I'm certain that the author meant "million" and keep on reading.
- ewhanley 8y agoOnly if by Nobody you mean every person in the oil & gas industry. I find it funny that people get so worked up about different units in different industries. I get that common units would be great for a variety of reasons, but look around - the world can’t even unite on standard units for such tangible things as distance/length. People who work with MM as million are familiar with the vernacular, and it seems unreasonable for them to upend a model that works so a lay audience doesn’t have to pause and think.
- overcast 8y agoI've been in the oil & gas industry for 20 years (IT side of things). We never use MM, I'm looking at last years half year results, and it's "m" across the board.
- ewhanley 8y ago@overcast Interesting! US-based? How would you denote 1000 bbl/day? kbbl vs mbbl
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- munk-a 8y agoThat's not how roman numerals work 22 MM is... 44,000 - though it seems like some Oil & Gas execs never got the memo and were using it as thousand thousands this is... sadness. I believe the M (in $100M) also isn't based in roman numerals but is a convenient dual meaning of Mega- (the metric 10^6 prefix) and the first letter of million.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- derpherp 8y agoSorry, MM is two thousand, not a million. http://www.romannumerals.co.uk/roman-numerals/numerals-chart.html http://www.romannumerals.co.uk/roman-numerals/numerals-chart...
- slimsag 8y agoM is a stand-in for the Roman numeral Φ, or 'mille' which is the Latin word for 'thousand'. So MM is thousand thousand's, or million. The reason it was adopted in finance was because M means thousand, except in English where we adopted M to mean million. Of course metric units where M = million makes more sense today, though. It's a legacy thing that stuck around.
- wavefunction 8y agoGreek numeral Phi ? I can't find a Roman use from quick searching, and the Greeks represented 500,000 with it.
- dragonwriter 8y agoIt's not like exact, but the apostrophus form of Roman numerals used something like forward and backward C’s separated by a vertical bar for a thousand, in place of the conventional M, and this sometimes reduced to something that looked similar to a phi. But calling M a placeholder for that seems accurate, as M was the more common form (and there was also I with a horizontal bar over it, though that seems a later innovation.)
- goldcd 8y agoWell no it isn't.. MM would be 2 thousands - as in the representation of the year 2019 as MMXIX (2x1000 + 10 + (10-1)) Anyway, MM is clearly man-month or 2 digit month of the year when you stringify a date... we don't need more.
- vageli 8y ago> Well no it isn't.. > MM would be 2 thousands - as in the representation of the year 2019 as MMXIX (2x1000 + 10 + (10-1)) > Anyway, MM is clearly man-month or 2 digit month of the year when you stringify a date... we don't need more. Tell that to the entire practice of accountancy.
- goldcd 8y ago
- lotsofpulp 8y agoIt's a finance thing, and it doesn't make sense to continue using it, when you can use k = thousands, M = millions, B = billions, T = trillions, Q = quadrillions and remove all the ambiguity.
- saagarjha 8y agoUsing those is far from “removing all the ambiguity”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
- xxpor 8y agoApproximately 0 English speakers use the long scale. Exactly 0 do in the US.
- Rafert 8y agoYou're completely forgetting about non-native English speakers who use the long scale in their native language. They make mistakes or might even not be aware of the difference.
- xxpor 8y agoI wouldn't advocate using these abbreviations in a technical document that has safety implications, but in an S-1 it's fine. If you make a mistaken trade because you can't keep your scales straight I don't really have a lot of sympathy. If they don't know the difference in the first place they're not reading this document.
- fragmede 8y agoMetric is not universally known in the US, either, so the SI unit prefixes are also not universally known.
- rhn_mk1 8y agoI think you meant k = 1000, M = 1000^2, G = 1000^3, T = 1000^4, P = 1000^5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
- troydavis 8y agoI can't claim any first-principles logic for it. I use it because it's standard in finance and accounting, which is usually the audience for SEC filings. It's everywhere in finance. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-use-of-k-for-thousands-and-mm-for-millions https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/181917/mixing-us... has more background.
- ewhanley 8y agoIt’s also used everywhere in oil & gas for both dollars and barrels (another fun unit of measure).
- lwansbrough 8y agoITT: Engineers attempt to armchair-reengineer new standard units for representing millions, billions and so on without understanding the parameters of the problem.
- soared 8y agoAll these replies are from devs and the like who aren't used to how everyone else uses this notation. Everyone in the business world uses MM, it just looks weird because you're not used to it. Different industries use different notations. If you came to my workplace and used a single 'M' everyone would have the same response here but inverted - how using a single M makes no sense and is inaccurate. I work in advertising where "CPM" is a common metric (cost per milli). So using a single M still means thousand, will MM means million.
- UI_at_80x24 8y agohaha, I completely agree with what you said and I know it was industry-specific term. But despite knowing that, and _STILL_ knowing it meant "$22Million" I still argue with my brain when a little voice says "Mega Millions?" I was hoping I wasn't the only one, and happy to see a vigorous conversation start because of it. (I inherit Karma in a MLM feedback-loop right?) >I work in advertising where "CPM" is a common metric (cost per milli). That's just silly, _everybody_ knows it stands for cents-per-mile, and how truck drivers are paid. (jk)
- sctb 8y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19720814 and marked it off-topic.