5 ms·

percentages used as click-bait... -How's the business? -Great! We've had a 100% increase in visitors in a single day! -Amazing, how many visitors today? -tw

• harperlee 11y ago
  This is a knee-jerk response and doesn't really apply to the parent. The gas price raise was certainly not an artifact of having few data points or low resolution as in your example.
  • mikeash 11y ago
    I read it as pointing out that if you take an extremely small number and increase it by a large percentage, the result is still pretty small. Here, the price of gas has gone up by 6,000%. That's a lot! Except that in absolute terms, the price has gone from $0.02/gallon to $0.11/gallon. I can see larger fluctuations than that just by crossing the street in many places.
    • harperlee 11y ago
      Yes but then again if I purchase a hundred gallons, I go from paying $2 to $110. So it is indeed such a big growth in price. They are fundamentally different dimensions, because a transaction value goes from negative infinite to positive infinite (from a specific point of view), and in it, zero is just a specific point in the scale (that could be moved by fees or other debts to be netted against); whereas number of visitors can't go negative, and in such a scale zero is absolute (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_scale). This makes the comparison dangerous. But it seems that pointing that deserves downvotes...
      • rawTruthHurts 11y ago
        Deserved downvotes not for missing the math, but missing the click-baity-ness, I presume.
    • flubert 11y ago
      >Here, the price of gas has gone up by 6,000%. That's a lot! Except that in absolute terms, the price has gone from $0.02/gallon to $0.11/gallon ...It looks like you are missing a factor of 10. 6000% is 60x, so as near as I can tell gas was $0.002 per gallon, and now is rising to $0.11 per gallon. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-17/venezuela-raises-gasoline-prices-for-first-time-since-1996-ikrf0ppn http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-17/venezuela-...
      • mikeash 11y ago
        You're right, temporary brain failure. Looks like it's too late to edit the original, but let the record show that it was really $0.002/gallon.