(1) appears to express the idea that there is some minimal but acceptable alternative (and the criticism suggested in the emphatic third clause is that not even that minimal acceptable option was taken, much less the preferable option identified in the first clause using "ought").
Use much less wormwood, preferable petite (to minimize bitterness).
A duel, Schnitzler's narrator concedes, may have been over something trivial, but dying for the "emptiness" of honor was surely preferable to "dying for much less and to no purpose, upon the command or wish of other people".
Many women find that the ring and tablet are preferable, as they are much less messy to deal with.
NHHSMM is concluded as the preferable option as it provides much less volatile predictions and more importantly is characterized by confidence intervals which shorten as more data come into play, an essential trait of a robust prognostic algorithm.
Those who believe the latter is preferable should be asked tough questions: How much less education do we think would be good for our children?
Similarly, if there are two courses of action, one which causes extreme amounts of suffering and ultimate death, and one which causes much less suffering and painless death, then the latter would be morally preferable to the former.
While working with a credit counselor can damage your credit, the damage is likely to be much less than if you default on your bills or declare bankruptcy, so it's almost always preferable to these alternatives.
However, this is completely equivalent to solving the following system (27 with data weight matrix (28 Solving Eq. (27) with Eq. (28) is preferable to solving Eq. (25) with Eq. (26) because W is typically much less dense than W∞.
Much, much, much, much less perfect.
