

You are refuting an argument that I did not make.
I enjoy this type of debate, but this one doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I’m moving on. Thank you, sincerely.
science and music. and beer. and dogs.
You are refuting an argument that I did not make.
I enjoy this type of debate, but this one doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I’m moving on. Thank you, sincerely.
Sorry for the multiple replies btw. My app is acting weird.
“Billionaires are literally cancer” is false specifically because “literally” does not mean “figuratively”.
Correct. But that is not what OP said. Read it again and I think you will see that OP is saying that “Billionaires are cancer” is not a figurative statement at all, but a literal one. You can disagree with them (I do, btw), but they have not misused the word “literally.”
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“Billionaires are literally cancer” is simply a false statement, unless “literally” was used, incorrectly, as hyperbole.
That is my point. Literally can be used correctly in a statement that is not correct, and my reading of the original post is that was OP’s intention. They did not misuse the word “literally.”
I’m not debating the meaning of the word cancer.
You are refuting an argument that I did not make.
Edit to add: OP says cancer can be used literally to refer to billionaires, you say it cannot. One of you must be wrong, but neither is misusing the word “literally.”
Then you do not understand what the word “literally” literally means.
Oooo, sick burn!! I don’t know if I’ll recover from that!
My point is that I believe OP was using the word “literally” to mean what it literally means, and not just using it for emphasis as it is so often used these days. They may still be wrong, but they did not misuse the word.
I think OP used literally correctly here. They are saying that one possible definition of the word cancer can include billionaires as an instance. That’s not the definition you’ll find in any dictionary, but those lag behind the true language as it evolves.
People think they understand numbers like billion because they understand thousand and billion is just thousand times thousand (million) times thousand. Multiplication is fairly intuitive, but exponentiation is not. Without explicitly thinking it through people feel like 1000^3 is not very different from 1000 * 3.
It looks like the dart took out about a half dozen lights and a dozen people in about two seconds, so let’s say 10 strikes per second. At that rate it would take 10^11 seconds to pop a trillion balloons. That’s more than 3000 years!
Of course I did say “make a tiny dent,” but even to eliminate 0.1% of the balloons would take the dart 3 years. One trillion is a number that we use a lot, for example talking about the US national debt, but it is not an ordinary number that lends itself to intuitive understanding. Even a billion is hard to grasp intuitively.
All the fighter jets in the world couldn’t make a tiny dent in one trillion balloons.
take the L and walk away.
I’m here having reasoned conversations with thoughtful people. I left the karma farming behind on reddit, and I don’t miss it. I can’t lose.
The word “see” predates the concepts of neurons, chemicals, and photons by thousands of years. We see objects, not light.
The word “see” predates any concept of rods or cones or photons by thousands of years. It has nothing to do with those things.
That’s not what the word “see” means. You’re trying to to swap it for another word like “sense.” You see objects, not light.
The light that enters your eye carries enormous amounts of information with it. Your eye and a small portion of your brain comprise a highly specific tool for extracting a small subset of that information and processing it. The information you use is only related to the last object the light interacted with, not the light itself (with the small exception being the “brightness” - that has nothing to do with the object).
No one claims to hear the air in their ears rather than the violin that is being played nearby. That’s just not what the word “hear” means.
That’s not what the word “see” means.
McDonalds gets millions of applications? wtf?
ETA: Yeah, I guess they do.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/05/13/mcdonalds-hiring-surge/83595827007/