DrQuickbeam

Now make one with an elephant in the middle to put next to this one. It will be equally trite.

Exactly. In most countries, you reason that you never need to count floors unless you are going up or down. If you are walking up stairs, each floor you go past, you count it: F1, F2, F3, etc. If you are walking down stairs, you count each floor you go past: B1, B2, B3, etc.

Americans think about it more like a cake. Each “story” or “floor” is a ~3m or 4m, floor-to-ceiling, architectural layer. You don’t look at a 3-layer cake and say “that cake has a ground layer, then a first layer and a second layer” you say “that cake has three layers”.

This was my first thought. VC’s always expect 4 out of 5 projects they invest in to fail and always have. But it still makes them money because the successes pay off big. Is the money and resources wasted? Welcome to modern capitalism.