7 ms·
Centimillionaires: Elites with Investable Assets of More Than $100M
- serevi 3y agoThe person who wrote this thought they'd be clever by using the SI prefix "centi", not realizing that it means one one-hundredth (as in "centimeter"). They should have used the prefix "hecto", which means one hundred.
- Detrytus 3y agoI always admired how simple, yet clever the SI prefix scheme is: use Roman numerals for sub-units (centi-, mili-), and Greek numerals for multiplies (deka-, hecto-, kilo-). Although I guess a century ago average well educated person was much more familiar with Latin and Greek languages.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoAnd in the same breath, century is not 1/100th of a year.
- Detrytus 3y agoBut century is not an SI unit :)
- WrongAssumption 3y agoYes, century, not centiury.
- Someone 3y agoIf only. Deci- is from Latin, too, and both mega- and micro- derive from Greek.
- pradn 3y agoHuh, I had no idea about this distinction - quite clever.
- zzzeek 3y agothen explain centipedes
- alpark3 3y ago1/100th of a pede
- iancmceachern 3y agoPedes must be crazy, a million legs like that
- mdp2021 3y agoIt is because you are confusing an etymology (in 'centenary', 'centennial', 'centigrade'...) with a prefixing (in 'centimeter', 'centigram', 'centiliter'...).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mensetmanusman 3y agoPhew, you helped me realize I have won at life and am also a centi-millionaire.
- varelse 3y ago[dead]
- karmakaze 3y agoAlso confusingly juxtaposed with milli* like it's 1/100th of 1/1000th.
- montalbano 3y agoIt can be used either way, e.g. the word "century" means 100 years. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centi- https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centi- Update: looked into this more and the "centi" part of the SI system comes from the Latin word "centum" which means 100, not 1/100. Definitely seems either usage is acceptable. https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/centimeter https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/centimeter
- Scoundreller 3y agoMaybe, but in Europe, you'll finish off your 33 or 50 centilitre beer in a sitting and possibly a few more.
- Someone 3y agoYes, Latin centum means 100; hence century, and the prefix centi was invented during the French Revolution, meaning 1/100 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centi- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centi-). For hecto-, they took inspiration from the free ἑκατόν (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hecto- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hecto-) (They did the same for 1000 and 1/1000, deriving milli from Latin millum and kilo from Greek χίλιοι, but used Latin for both deca- and deci-, and used Greek for both giga- and micro. So far for consistency) I don’t see how it follows that either usage is acceptable.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WrongAssumption 3y agoThat’s like saying risky and riskless can be used interchangeably because the both come from the word risk. Edit: I don’t know why I even reached for an analogy, it’s exactly like saying hundred and hundredth are interchangeable.
- montalbano 3y agoNo it's like saying biannual can mean twice a year or once every two years. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Language evolves.
- jjeaff 3y agointeresting. I always thought a centenarian was someone 100 years or older. now I know it's someone one-one-hundreth of a year old or older.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoNot every word in the english language uses SI prefixes.
- pavlov 3y ago“Centi” is just Latin for hundred, as in centigrade or centipede, or centurion and century. It’s a convention of the SI system that Latin prefixes are the fractional units, but that’s not a feature of the Latin words themselves.
- wombatpm 3y agoI would have gone with decibillionaire
- jasode 3y ago>The person who wrote this thought they'd be clever by using the SI prefix "centi", not realizing that it means one one-hundredth (as in "centimeter"). The "centimillionaire" to describe wealth of $100+ million has been used for many years before this thread's article. Here's an old newspaper article about Enron from 2003: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/business/company-man-to-the-end-after-all.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/09/business/company-man-to-t... >In one year, Mr. Lay has been transformed from a centimillionaire with huge stock holdings to a multimillionaire whose wealth is mostly tied up in hard-to-sell assets. And some extra trivia... your "correction" and the followup replies is replaying Groundhog Day... e.g. 9 years ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8319279
- DoreenMichele 3y agoOn the upside, HN was smaller back then, so debate about the word was briefer.
- cbsmith 3y agoI would say the rest of the content follows the quality trend the headline established.
- ryanar 3y agois millionaire also incorrect?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- layer8 3y agoI was about to counter with “centinarian” (is that a newborn?), but that’s actually spelled “centenarian”.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mikewarot 3y agoNO My mapper mindset[1] can't let this pass. Corruption of the language like that creeps me out. I've enjoyed the times I was a milli-millionaire in life, and I was a Centi-millionaire once when we paid for the house, but these days being a micro-millionaire is a treat. [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers
- rowbin 3y agoYour house was $10,000-$99,999 and now having $1-$9 is a treat??
- mikewarot 3y agoYes to both. A decade ago, we bought the cheapest house in a town with an awesome school district. Since then, prices have inflated. We were lucky. In that decade our health declined, Long Covid took me out of the workforce. It's a luxury now to have even a few dollars that I don't have to spend on groceries. We're fortunate that we bought the cheapest house, instead of a nice house, or we'd be homeless.
- gigatexal 3y agoAs HN articles go this one being here is puzzling. What value does this article provide to the HN audience?
- seanp2k2 3y agoGood place for 1%ers to argue with 10%ers while 0.1%ers look on and laugh /s
- angrydev 3y agoBravo honestly
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI'm the person who submitted it. I thought it was interesting in part because it talks about some of the cities with a significant number of such people. I'm a demographic outlier with zero social connections via HN. No one on HN routinely emails me, chats with me on the social platform formerly known as Twitter, meets me for coffee in person, etc. So the only feedback I have is upvotes, downvotes, flags and comments and that's frequently difficult to decifer. I submit things I think are interesting and accept that most of what I submit will be roundly ignored. But then this seems true for most submissions, so it's not a strong signal (shrug). I have no idea why this got upvoted enough to briefly make the front page. Which of my submissions does well and which doesn't frequently baffles me. I no longer waste a lot of time trying to figure it out.
- gigatexal 3y agoFair enough. The wisdom of the crowd has spoken and the article was relevant to enough that it got to the front page for a blip.
- lakomen 3y ago... yet another site which displays ads if you hit "reject all" There should be a browser extension to automatically submit gdpr reports for such sites
- CodeSgt 3y agoDisplaying ads has nothing to do with GDPR. They can still display ads that aren’t targeted, they just can’t save your information for more targeted advertising.
- mrlonglong 3y agoFrankly, it's an obscenity that these people can hold so much wealth when there are millions of people who have to live hand to mouth on a daily basis out there. People working for these multimillionaires made all the profit for them. They must pay more in taxes to spread the wealth. Trickledown economics simply doesn't work and increases inequality.
- shyn3 3y agoThe poor are only poor because the education system makes them dumb. If you read the law in America, you would never have to worry about money but unfortunately people only know what the oxford fictionary teaches