But if you want to be scientific about it, there are lots of statistics that show that black people are more likely to be stopped by the cops
Yeah, and if you want to be scientific about that, and be honest, you'll see that cops stop a lot more people in high crime areas, and that poor urban areas tend to have lots of crime. And that some of those poor areas have a larger black population. If those areas weren't marinated in serious crime, there wouldn't be so many warrants out, stolen cars, cars full of contraband, and the rest.
In Baltimore, New York, and most other urban areas, the cops and DA are under a lot of pressure to get "results," i.e., mess up somebody's life.
What? The people whose lives are messed up are those who have to live in areas like west Baltimore where local thugs make daily life miserable for everyone else who lives there or tries to run a business there. So yes, the cops are asked to "get results," because the absence of any results would make those areas completely lost to civilization, rather than just sucking generally. Would you rather that the cops were told NOT to arrest known violent gang members, serial assault and battery specialists, and the like? What would you have them do?
how much do they pay you to write this shit for them?
That's a very insightful way to address the substance of the matter. Obviously you're not willing to say the actual numbers or description of the situation is incorrect... you're just mad at someone for pointing it out? I get that. But you're not really making any sort of lucid point.
What? Each year, people's wages are taxed into those programs, and funds are transferred, that year, to the people who receive it. There is no "savings account." There is no "I paid into Social Security, so I'll get X when I retire." The amount that retired/disabled people get from that entitlement program is determined legislatively each year, and if you bother to read the fine print in your SS statement, you'll see that they explicitly remind you that there is no guarantee you'll get any future benefits.
Each year, funds are transferred from the people who pay to the people who collect.
Nonsense. It's not a distraction, it's different topic than the ebb and flow of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which are transfer welfare taxes). Income taxes are what pay for all discretionary spending (the military, federal agencies like the EPA, the FAA, the FCC and a jillion other activities). There's a good reason we look at all of those differently than we do the entitlement programs.
And... capital gains? You do realize that a whole lot of middle class people also earn capital gains, right? Directly or indirectly, through things like mutual funds. Warren Buffet's secretary can put a pizza's worth of cash every month into some investments when she's young, and can and should be looking forward to earning some money from that. You know, just like him: taking money on which she's already paid taxes, and putting it entirely at risk in an investment that stimulates the economy and if and when it happens to pay off, paying more taxes on that activity.
If Warren Buffet loses money in an investment? He doesn't get to write that off against his income taxes - he just loses it, plain and simple. But he's smart, and usually makes good investments. If he's making money, the money he risked is being put to very good use in an active economy. That's the entire reason why we reward that risk taking with a lower tax rate - because we want more of that risk taking to happen.
All of which has nothing to do with transfer entitlement taxes.
Nonsense. Well-off people pay the vast majority of the income taxes in this country. Nearly half the people in the country pay no income taxes at all (though they still get to vote on what happens to the money collected from the other people who do).
The top 5% of earners pay almost 60% of the taxes. The top 25% of earners pay over 86% of the taxes. The bottom HALF of the country pays under 3% of those taxes. So how do you come up with "never actually do pay" - ? These numbers come from the IRS. The people who cash the checks you say aren't being written.
Gore LOST in every carefully examined recount conducted in exhaustive after-the-fact tests run by a panel of journalism outlets (including some that actively opposed Bush and worked to get Gore in office). Most importantly, Gore lost in studied recounts that followed the capricious guidelines he tried to get the Florida supreme court to enforce.
The supreme court made a corrupt ruling and appointed Bush the winner.
No, the Supreme Court stopped a corrupt recount process, aided by a partisan state court, from continuing under unreasonable and unfair conditions. They didn't "appoint" Bush the winner, they called out Gore's cherry-picking, standards-shifting strategy for being the craven election-grab it was trying to be.
So, the corruption you're worried about is something that you think will be fixed by trashing a liquor store? By looting and burning the local CVS? By burning down an almost completely senior center being built specifically to improve the local quality of life in that crappy neighborhood?
Yes, the democrats that have been running that city for decades have plenty to answer for in the way of imperfect services being rendered. But unless you think it's the city government's role to step in between two people and prevent pregnancy from occurring, or to follow thousands of kids around to make sure they actually bother to go to school, then what exactly is it you're proposing? Who is it that starts and populates violent local gangs? Who is it that kills the vast majority of those who die in that area, and scares those who aren't involved out of doing anything about it? Why is it that businesses don't see any point in risking their money to launch a venture in such a neighborhood - perhaps because they can't find employable local people to actually work there, and can't find a market for their goods and services in an area that's filled with abandoned buildings and fatherless kids running drug markets?
The problem isn't government corruption, the problem is in thinking that what amounts to a poisonous local culture is the government's area of responsibility. Those neighborhoods are crap because the people that live there can't keep their own kids under control long enough to turn them into viable members of human civilization. And those that do have the wherewithal to do so leave (along with whatever economic activity they might have represented) because the local culture is completely toxic to their kids' success.
There is a much more credible, obvious, proximate threat to life and property than there would be with some shadowy nonspecific radical-jihadist plot. Things were literally on fire, people.
A few thousand reduced-to-ashes New Yorkers might, if they were alive, argue with your dismissal of their deaths at the hands of radical jihaddis as being non-proximate, and shadowy. They are indeed quite literally dead. Multiple very non-shadowy attempts (some very successful) by the same and related groups to kill other people, in large numbers, have also happened since then.
Which, of course, is BS and not at all how it actually happened. Which you know.
They guy who observed the mold's properties was terrible at communicating his thoughts about it, and had trouble getting help from chemists to stabilize the important stuff. TEN YEARS go buy, and other researchers get the work done. Then THEY travel to the US to find drug manufacturers that might be interested in taking on the complex task of mass production.
You know, pretty much the opposite of your troll list.
Let me put it very simply: because I have no power to vote for or against American politicians, they should have NO power to influence my life.
So, should China have had any power to influence the lives of people in Japan when Japan started its whole Pacific Rim debacle some decades ago? Should the people of Eastern Europe have considered it just too rude to think about modifying the capabilities or behavior of their friendly neighbors, the Ottomans, as those neighbors gathered up a head of steam and sought to spread their friendly culture westward?
Do you live in a country that begins its legislative sessions with group chants about the destruction of other countries? Does your country aggressively support groups that state their objective of slaughtering others specifically because of their religion and/or heritage, and then indeed actually go and help them do it? Do you really think that the world isn't connected, and that people bent on an apocalyptic world view aren't a good fit for having the leverage of nuclear weapons as they seek to control, among other things, major global shipping lanes?
Do you think that just because you don't think someone else should be able to impact your life, that that will actually stop someone who thinks you should be killed for allowing your daughter to read, or for trimming your beard, etc., from not exactly seeing the world in a way reciprocal with you? Being an isolationist doesn't work when someone trapped in a brutal, medieval, theocratic mindset thinks you're suitable only for death, and thinks that isolationism by others is for the weak, and is to be exploited.
Except they aren't losing weight, they're just gaining weight at a slightly reduced rate.
But... the administration says that slightly reducing the rate at which we add on trillions more in debt is a proud accomplishment. So, this has to be similar.
I get it. It's just too much trouble for you to choose between multiple ways of saying something in order to be succinct instead of vague. People who don't value clarity never realize that they people they're talking to - every time that happens - value that communication (and the person attempting it) less and less over time.
What's so hard to understand? This forum is full of people correcting others' poor use of communication when talking about everything from natural selection to global warming to employment demographics. Someone makes a sloppy choice of phrase, and the simple thing they're trying to convey turns into a four-step back and forth during which everyone from trolls to the merely dim decide to screw up the thread or just rant because the OP couldn't trouble themselves to just speak clearly in the first place.
This particular lapse in clarity, which comes up regularly in lazy science and technology reporting, isn't the point. The larger point is the grinding erosion in careful communication, and the erosion in clear and critical thinking of which that is an indicator. You think this is about ego? It's about understanding the power and value of properly nuanced communication, especially in the shortened format that venues like this tend to encourage.
I need to learn English? What you're really saying is, I need to forget English, because it's just too much trouble to quickly sort through the differences found in several ways to say the same thing, each of which contributes to a more quickly digested communication of different ideas. You're cranky because I'm not a fan of lazy thinking, and the fact that you think "learning English" means forgetting how to distinguish between different words is exactly the larger problem I'm pointing out.
There is nothing in there constraining SizeA or SizeB relative to anything else, just the size relative to each other.
No, no constraints in that sense. Just the larger constraints introduced by the fact that the purpose of saying anything at all, in that context, is to communicate something meaningful about A's size. And by choosing the "ten times more" construction, part of what you're communicating is the fact that B, the thing to which you're comparing A, is by implication already considered small. That format (rather than saying, "A is a tenth B's size") is a choice of words that communicates the understand that B is small, and A is even more small. The phrase "ten times smaller" is using the word "smaller" in the sense of "more small."
The words "ten times" is a multiplier. It's used, in a comparison, to say that one value is LARGER than another. In this usage, the smallness of A is ten times larger than the smallness of B. Trotting out that multiplier is a deliberate choice made to focus on smallness in both A and B, with A having ten times more of it. That doesn't describe the size of B, but it communicates that notion that B is already - in the scheme of things - considered small, and A more so.
It's a shame that your own literacy is so limited, and that your own ability to parse the differences between words is disabled by a lack of vocabulary breadth. That's got to be frustrating. Or maybe not, since perhaps ignorance is bliss in some way, right?
Saying that something is "ten times smaller" is like saying "ten times more small." The phrase "ten times" is a multiplier. It means that you're describing an aspect of something, and saying that there is ten times as much of that aspect. In that usage, the aspect you're describing and comparing is the smallness.
By choosing that construction ("A is ten times smaller than B"), you're deliberately focusing on B's size, and implying that the smallness of B is the thing that's being multiplied... that B's smallness is important in what you're communicating, and that it's of note because A's size is even more so (small, that is). If we're not trying to convey B's smallness as part of the concept being communicated (perhaps B isn't really thought of as small at all, in the scheme of things), a different construction makes more sense. Makes for better communication: "A is tenth of B's size." We're still describing the relationship, but doing so without including words that suggest B's size is already considered small.
That you don't have the cognitive and communication skills to understand the difference, or that you DO, and prefer to have communication dumbed down and muddied, and require more back and forth to clarify what you mean, says a lot about you. Which is unfortunate. That you think you have to insult someone else in order to feel better about it is just kind of pathetic, really.
That has nothing to do with the wording people are arguing over
No, that's EXACTLY what people are arguing about. You say "A is ten times smaller than B" when B is already understood to be small compared to something else. The implication in that sentence is that B is already known for its smallness, and A is even smaller. Except, people use that same construction even when B isn't considered small. They use that incorrect connotation when what they're really trying to say is, "B is big, but A is only a tenth as big."
Just like every time someone says, "Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B," I have to guess that, "Product B is $2 more than Product A." Maybe we shouldn't have slept through math class.
Math doesn't help in the absence of context. If Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B, but Product B costs $10,000... does it really matter? That's a little different than Product B costing $3, right? Right. In real life, context actually matters, or you're just wasting people's time.
There is no confusion that it might mean something else.
Yes, there IS confusion. Are we supposed to infer that the thing that the new 10-times-smaller version is being compared to was already considered small? That's what implied, but nobody knows for sure because the person saying it is lazily using a common, and poorly thought out, construction that doesn't actually tell us that.
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds," without implying it is smaller than a breadbox or even small in general.
OK. But let's say you don't know how big the Small Magellanic Cloud is, relative to, say, the Milky Way, or Andromeda, or anything else. And then someone says, "We've just found a new galaxy, hiding behind a dust cloud, and it's three times smaller than the Magellanic Cloud." What are you supposed to gather from that use?
Fine, you don't like the wording
No, I don't like people conveying information in a way that forces you to go research something they mentioned without providing any useful context. When somebody cites a comparative size, but doesn't explain why (or if) that comparison is meaningful, then it's a waste of time. Especially when the communication is theoretically about science and/or technology.
even though everybody knows what it means right away
You're missing the point.
When someone says, "The new battery is ten times smaller than the old battery," yes... we can guess that part of what's meant is, "The new battery is a tenth the size of the old battery."
But there's a reason those are TWO DIFFERENT SENTENCES.
When you use the word smallER in that context, you're communicating that the old battery is small, and the new battery is even smaller. Why? Because you're saying that the new battery has time times the smallness of the old one. That has a completely different connotation than a sentence that suggests that the old battery was what it was (or was large), and the new battery is comparatively small.
The reason we have lots of vocabulary words, adjectives, and constructions is so that we can be nuanced and more precise in simple communication. When you use a sentence that essentially forces the audience to go find out what you actually meant by "ten times smaller" (was the old one small, or huge?) then you've done the opposite of providing useful information. All of that in order to avoid using slightly different words that we also all know?
This is pure laziness, that's all. It's mimicking a sound or phrase without thinking about what's actually being communicated. It's no different than people who say, "I could care less," when they mean exactly the opposite. They are uttering sounds without thinking about the actual words they're using. One small, lazy spoken step for man, part of one cumulative giant leap towards dumbing everybody down.
Billions of people go top some kind of church or another. So...
And at least a few of them genuinely believe in the magical thinking, while most are just there from social peer pressure. But it's still a dire problem.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you want to be scientific about it, there are lots of statistics that show that black people are more likely to be stopped by the cops
Yeah, and if you want to be scientific about that, and be honest, you'll see that cops stop a lot more people in high crime areas, and that poor urban areas tend to have lots of crime. And that some of those poor areas have a larger black population. If those areas weren't marinated in serious crime, there wouldn't be so many warrants out, stolen cars, cars full of contraband, and the rest.
In Baltimore, New York, and most other urban areas, the cops and DA are under a lot of pressure to get "results," i.e., mess up somebody's life.
What? The people whose lives are messed up are those who have to live in areas like west Baltimore where local thugs make daily life miserable for everyone else who lives there or tries to run a business there. So yes, the cops are asked to "get results," because the absence of any results would make those areas completely lost to civilization, rather than just sucking generally. Would you rather that the cops were told NOT to arrest known violent gang members, serial assault and battery specialists, and the like? What would you have them do?
how much do they pay you to write this shit for them?
That's a very insightful way to address the substance of the matter. Obviously you're not willing to say the actual numbers or description of the situation is incorrect ... you're just mad at someone for pointing it out? I get that. But you're not really making any sort of lucid point.
SS and Medicare do not transfer wealth.
What? Each year, people's wages are taxed into those programs, and funds are transferred, that year, to the people who receive it. There is no "savings account." There is no "I paid into Social Security, so I'll get X when I retire." The amount that retired/disabled people get from that entitlement program is determined legislatively each year, and if you bother to read the fine print in your SS statement, you'll see that they explicitly remind you that there is no guarantee you'll get any future benefits.
Each year, funds are transferred from the people who pay to the people who collect.
it's a distraction by statistic
Nonsense. It's not a distraction, it's different topic than the ebb and flow of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare (which are transfer welfare taxes). Income taxes are what pay for all discretionary spending (the military, federal agencies like the EPA, the FAA, the FCC and a jillion other activities). There's a good reason we look at all of those differently than we do the entitlement programs.
... capital gains? You do realize that a whole lot of middle class people also earn capital gains, right? Directly or indirectly, through things like mutual funds. Warren Buffet's secretary can put a pizza's worth of cash every month into some investments when she's young, and can and should be looking forward to earning some money from that. You know, just like him: taking money on which she's already paid taxes, and putting it entirely at risk in an investment that stimulates the economy and if and when it happens to pay off, paying more taxes on that activity.
And
If Warren Buffet loses money in an investment? He doesn't get to write that off against his income taxes - he just loses it, plain and simple. But he's smart, and usually makes good investments. If he's making money, the money he risked is being put to very good use in an active economy. That's the entire reason why we reward that risk taking with a lower tax rate - because we want more of that risk taking to happen.
All of which has nothing to do with transfer entitlement taxes.
they never actually do pay the taxes they claim
Nonsense. Well-off people pay the vast majority of the income taxes in this country. Nearly half the people in the country pay no income taxes at all (though they still get to vote on what happens to the money collected from the other people who do).
The top 5% of earners pay almost 60% of the taxes. The top 25% of earners pay over 86% of the taxes. The bottom HALF of the country pays under 3% of those taxes. So how do you come up with "never actually do pay" - ? These numbers come from the IRS. The people who cash the checks you say aren't being written.
Gore won by the most conservative count
Gore LOST in every carefully examined recount conducted in exhaustive after-the-fact tests run by a panel of journalism outlets (including some that actively opposed Bush and worked to get Gore in office). Most importantly, Gore lost in studied recounts that followed the capricious guidelines he tried to get the Florida supreme court to enforce.
The supreme court made a corrupt ruling and appointed Bush the winner.
No, the Supreme Court stopped a corrupt recount process, aided by a partisan state court, from continuing under unreasonable and unfair conditions. They didn't "appoint" Bush the winner, they called out Gore's cherry-picking, standards-shifting strategy for being the craven election-grab it was trying to be.
For a REASON
So, the corruption you're worried about is something that you think will be fixed by trashing a liquor store? By looting and burning the local CVS? By burning down an almost completely senior center being built specifically to improve the local quality of life in that crappy neighborhood?
Yes, the democrats that have been running that city for decades have plenty to answer for in the way of imperfect services being rendered. But unless you think it's the city government's role to step in between two people and prevent pregnancy from occurring, or to follow thousands of kids around to make sure they actually bother to go to school, then what exactly is it you're proposing? Who is it that starts and populates violent local gangs? Who is it that kills the vast majority of those who die in that area, and scares those who aren't involved out of doing anything about it? Why is it that businesses don't see any point in risking their money to launch a venture in such a neighborhood - perhaps because they can't find employable local people to actually work there, and can't find a market for their goods and services in an area that's filled with abandoned buildings and fatherless kids running drug markets?
The problem isn't government corruption, the problem is in thinking that what amounts to a poisonous local culture is the government's area of responsibility. Those neighborhoods are crap because the people that live there can't keep their own kids under control long enough to turn them into viable members of human civilization. And those that do have the wherewithal to do so leave (along with whatever economic activity they might have represented) because the local culture is completely toxic to their kids' success.
There is a much more credible, obvious, proximate threat to life and property than there would be with some shadowy nonspecific radical-jihadist plot. Things were literally on fire, people.
A few thousand reduced-to-ashes New Yorkers might, if they were alive, argue with your dismissal of their deaths at the hands of radical jihaddis as being non-proximate, and shadowy. They are indeed quite literally dead. Multiple very non-shadowy attempts (some very successful) by the same and related groups to kill other people, in large numbers, have also happened since then.
Conglomerate steals credit & patents it
Which, of course, is BS and not at all how it actually happened. Which you know.
They guy who observed the mold's properties was terrible at communicating his thoughts about it, and had trouble getting help from chemists to stabilize the important stuff. TEN YEARS go buy, and other researchers get the work done. Then THEY travel to the US to find drug manufacturers that might be interested in taking on the complex task of mass production.
You know, pretty much the opposite of your troll list.
If nobody knows how it works, how did the guy invent it?
Just like penicillin.
How many countries has Iran invaded since the revolution in '79?
Iran, or their armed and funded proxies?
Just out of curiousity... why exactly should Iran NOT have a nuclear weapon ?
Because of their frequently asserted world view and actions.
It's rich since the government in the region of Iran hasn't attacked another country since the 1820
Right. It's too much trouble. That's why they send material and support to others to do it for them.
Let me put it very simply: because I have no power to vote for or against American politicians, they should have NO power to influence my life.
So, should China have had any power to influence the lives of people in Japan when Japan started its whole Pacific Rim debacle some decades ago? Should the people of Eastern Europe have considered it just too rude to think about modifying the capabilities or behavior of their friendly neighbors, the Ottomans, as those neighbors gathered up a head of steam and sought to spread their friendly culture westward?
Do you live in a country that begins its legislative sessions with group chants about the destruction of other countries? Does your country aggressively support groups that state their objective of slaughtering others specifically because of their religion and/or heritage, and then indeed actually go and help them do it? Do you really think that the world isn't connected, and that people bent on an apocalyptic world view aren't a good fit for having the leverage of nuclear weapons as they seek to control, among other things, major global shipping lanes?
Do you think that just because you don't think someone else should be able to impact your life, that that will actually stop someone who thinks you should be killed for allowing your daughter to read, or for trimming your beard, etc., from not exactly seeing the world in a way reciprocal with you? Being an isolationist doesn't work when someone trapped in a brutal, medieval, theocratic mindset thinks you're suitable only for death, and thinks that isolationism by others is for the weak, and is to be exploited.
Except they aren't losing weight, they're just gaining weight at a slightly reduced rate.
But ... the administration says that slightly reducing the rate at which we add on trillions more in debt is a proud accomplishment. So, this has to be similar.
I get it. It's just too much trouble for you to choose between multiple ways of saying something in order to be succinct instead of vague. People who don't value clarity never realize that they people they're talking to - every time that happens - value that communication (and the person attempting it) less and less over time.
What's so hard to understand? This forum is full of people correcting others' poor use of communication when talking about everything from natural selection to global warming to employment demographics. Someone makes a sloppy choice of phrase, and the simple thing they're trying to convey turns into a four-step back and forth during which everyone from trolls to the merely dim decide to screw up the thread or just rant because the OP couldn't trouble themselves to just speak clearly in the first place.
This particular lapse in clarity, which comes up regularly in lazy science and technology reporting, isn't the point. The larger point is the grinding erosion in careful communication, and the erosion in clear and critical thinking of which that is an indicator. You think this is about ego? It's about understanding the power and value of properly nuanced communication, especially in the shortened format that venues like this tend to encourage.
I need to learn English? What you're really saying is, I need to forget English, because it's just too much trouble to quickly sort through the differences found in several ways to say the same thing, each of which contributes to a more quickly digested communication of different ideas. You're cranky because I'm not a fan of lazy thinking, and the fact that you think "learning English" means forgetting how to distinguish between different words is exactly the larger problem I'm pointing out.
There is nothing in there constraining SizeA or SizeB relative to anything else, just the size relative to each other.
No, no constraints in that sense. Just the larger constraints introduced by the fact that the purpose of saying anything at all, in that context, is to communicate something meaningful about A's size. And by choosing the "ten times more" construction, part of what you're communicating is the fact that B, the thing to which you're comparing A, is by implication already considered small. That format (rather than saying, "A is a tenth B's size") is a choice of words that communicates the understand that B is small, and A is even more small. The phrase "ten times smaller" is using the word "smaller" in the sense of "more small."
The words "ten times" is a multiplier. It's used, in a comparison, to say that one value is LARGER than another. In this usage, the smallness of A is ten times larger than the smallness of B. Trotting out that multiplier is a deliberate choice made to focus on smallness in both A and B, with A having ten times more of it. That doesn't describe the size of B, but it communicates that notion that B is already - in the scheme of things - considered small, and A more so.
It's a shame that your own literacy is so limited, and that your own ability to parse the differences between words is disabled by a lack of vocabulary breadth. That's got to be frustrating. Or maybe not, since perhaps ignorance is bliss in some way, right?
... that B's smallness is important in what you're communicating, and that it's of note because A's size is even more so (small, that is). If we're not trying to convey B's smallness as part of the concept being communicated (perhaps B isn't really thought of as small at all, in the scheme of things), a different construction makes more sense. Makes for better communication: "A is tenth of B's size." We're still describing the relationship, but doing so without including words that suggest B's size is already considered small.
Saying that something is "ten times smaller" is like saying "ten times more small." The phrase "ten times" is a multiplier. It means that you're describing an aspect of something, and saying that there is ten times as much of that aspect. In that usage, the aspect you're describing and comparing is the smallness.
By choosing that construction ("A is ten times smaller than B"), you're deliberately focusing on B's size, and implying that the smallness of B is the thing that's being multiplied
That you don't have the cognitive and communication skills to understand the difference, or that you DO, and prefer to have communication dumbed down and muddied, and require more back and forth to clarify what you mean, says a lot about you. Which is unfortunate. That you think you have to insult someone else in order to feel better about it is just kind of pathetic, really.
Why would any sane person want to associate themselves with him?
For the same reason that people walk around wearing Che Guevara t-shirts while buying $5 cups of coffee.
That has nothing to do with the wording people are arguing over
No, that's EXACTLY what people are arguing about. You say "A is ten times smaller than B" when B is already understood to be small compared to something else. The implication in that sentence is that B is already known for its smallness, and A is even smaller. Except, people use that same construction even when B isn't considered small. They use that incorrect connotation when what they're really trying to say is, "B is big, but A is only a tenth as big."
A is ten times smaller than B
So what you're saying is, "B is already small, and A is even smaller."
Right?
Are you presuming that someone already understands B to be considered small? What is B small compared to?
Just like every time someone says, "Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B," I have to guess that, "Product B is $2 more than Product A." Maybe we shouldn't have slept through math class.
Math doesn't help in the absence of context. If Product A is $2 cheaper than Product B, but Product B costs $10,000 ... does it really matter? That's a little different than Product B costing $3, right? Right. In real life, context actually matters, or you're just wasting people's time.
There is no confusion that it might mean something else.
Yes, there IS confusion. Are we supposed to infer that the thing that the new 10-times-smaller version is being compared to was already considered small? That's what implied, but nobody knows for sure because the person saying it is lazily using a common, and poorly thought out, construction that doesn't actually tell us that.
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds," without implying it is smaller than a breadbox or even small in general.
OK. But let's say you don't know how big the Small Magellanic Cloud is, relative to, say, the Milky Way, or Andromeda, or anything else. And then someone says, "We've just found a new galaxy, hiding behind a dust cloud, and it's three times smaller than the Magellanic Cloud." What are you supposed to gather from that use?
Fine, you don't like the wording
No, I don't like people conveying information in a way that forces you to go research something they mentioned without providing any useful context. When somebody cites a comparative size, but doesn't explain why (or if) that comparison is meaningful, then it's a waste of time. Especially when the communication is theoretically about science and/or technology.
even though everybody knows what it means right away
You're missing the point.
... we can guess that part of what's meant is, "The new battery is a tenth the size of the old battery."
When someone says, "The new battery is ten times smaller than the old battery," yes
But there's a reason those are TWO DIFFERENT SENTENCES.
When you use the word smallER in that context, you're communicating that the old battery is small, and the new battery is even smaller. Why? Because you're saying that the new battery has time times the smallness of the old one. That has a completely different connotation than a sentence that suggests that the old battery was what it was (or was large), and the new battery is comparatively small.
The reason we have lots of vocabulary words, adjectives, and constructions is so that we can be nuanced and more precise in simple communication. When you use a sentence that essentially forces the audience to go find out what you actually meant by "ten times smaller" (was the old one small, or huge?) then you've done the opposite of providing useful information. All of that in order to avoid using slightly different words that we also all know?
This is pure laziness, that's all. It's mimicking a sound or phrase without thinking about what's actually being communicated. It's no different than people who say, "I could care less," when they mean exactly the opposite. They are uttering sounds without thinking about the actual words they're using. One small, lazy spoken step for man, part of one cumulative giant leap towards dumbing everybody down.
Billions of people go top some kind of church or another. So ...
And at least a few of them genuinely believe in the magical thinking, while most are just there from social peer pressure. But it's still a dire problem.