Somewhat off topic rant, but am I the only one who find mathematical notation unnecessarily obtuse?
The bit that gets me is defining degree as n-1. For someone without a mathematical background, it takes a bit of pondering to figure out that you have to define n as one more than the actual degree, the opposite of what seems natrual. My mind at least just wants to think about n as the degree, and use n+1 as the last index. To me it seems aggressively unintuitive.
I guess you want to align the coefficient numbers but would it be a sin to define another index c = n-1 for that purpose?
But I'm a mathematical lightweight and maybe mathematical thinking is all about this. Perhaps some greater talent can correct my thinking.
Fence post and rail is "off by one", two fence posts are joined by one rail, N fence posts are joined by N-1 rails, and this polynomial order and defining coefficients discussion has that in common.
Two points define a line, a polynomial of degree 1. A polynomial with 2 coefficients, ax + b.
Three points give us a quadratic, a polynomial of degree 2 with three coefficients, ax^2 + bx + c.
N points gives us a polynomial of degree N-1 with N coefficients.
Indexing coefficients by their associated power of X seems natural to some.
By giving it a quick read I saw that the have n data points where a polynomial of n-1 degrees provides a useful fit in the sense of this blog post.
Every field has its own language to speak. And shouting into the field from "outside" that they should change is not polite.
E.g
* if you redefine c = n-1 the connection between number of points and dimension is lost.
* c ist very often used as a constant Skalar. E.g as the speed of light. Using it as a dimension of a problem is quite unintuitive.
A cleaner, faster way to implement this sort of thing is to use the "labels as values" extension if using GCC or Clang []. It avoids the switch statement and associated comparisons. Particularly useful if you're yielding inside nested loops (which IMHO is one of the most useful applications of coroutines) or switch statements.
This is nonsense. Not mentioned is that Greece has borrowed excessively and had defaulted on its loans. A bailout was organized by the EU and IMF with terms that Greece had every opportunity to reject. No one forced anything on Greece. The referendum was not binding and political theater for the government of the time.
That Greece accepted the terms reflected the reality that the alternative was much worse and would have caused great suffering for Greeks.
What choice did Greece have? Germany was not extending favorable terms, they were punitive, so what choice did they have but take the least awful choice? Syriza tried but Germany had the upper hand and of course didn't give an inch --though Syriza tried very hard.
Varoufakis would argue the severe terms imposed by the creditors/negotiators exacerbated the fiscal issue. Yes Greece had issues but the creditors's terms exacerbated the problem, made things worse.
It's kind of like borrowing from a loan shark to pay off debts --on average, you're better off not. But hey, once you take it, you either pay up, or you lose something dear to you.
Greece underreported its debt until 2009: i.e. it borrowed too much while lying about how much it's already borrowed. That's the main difference between Greece on the one hand and Italy, Portugal on the other, in my eyes. Italy and Portugal too suffered a public debt crises, but they weren't so blatant about it. I sympathize with the common Greek man, and I wish their crises had been managed with more success, but I also don't feel especially interested in bankrolling Greek policies that led to this crises.
I dunno. Pretty sure creditors aren't innocent little old ladies. They're financial killers and knew the situation but also knew they had Germany and the Troika behind them to save them if things went south (as they did). It was win-win for them. The economy miraculously grows: win! the economy sours: win!
Sovereign debtors also knew that them being part of the Eurozone gave them better borrowing rates because creditors perceived Eurozone as low risk. Both the creditors and the debtors believed that they won't chaotically default because of the Eurozone, because that would endanger the Eurozone. If that were all, the creditor and the debtor would be equally at fault. But, when you add the underreporting by the debtor, that's different. Now, I don't see how you can make a case for equal responsibility, and the creditor being more at fault doesn't make any sense to me.
This is the sort of bureaucratic nonsense people actually rail against.
You're assuming you'd get something truthful or informative out of that process, when in reality you'll get the opposite due to the inherit (dis)incentives.
Right, I guess we should throw up our hands and let the dictator of the week run things as he sees, with no oversight.
If it meaningfully impacts the public, the public should have input. The input doesn't need to be binding, but it needs to be taken into consideration. Representative government is not a once-every-four-years exercise, nor is it something that should only be accessible to the mega-rich.
There's an entire process for this among many rule-making agencies in every level of government, across the world. It serves as, at minimum, a public record of objections and concerns, and at times that public feedback identifies a problem that the rule-drafters failed to address.
It doesn't, and can't prevent outright malice by a capricious autocrat, who only works to make his backroom friends happy. But it does make a public record of that malice.
If you keep no records, require no process, then how do you even identify if corruption is taking place?
The entire reason with we have say, double-entry book-keeping, is because it makes it substantially more difficult to engage in corrupt activities without producing a record which can be used to hold people to account for their actions.
People declare "I think it's corruption" on the internet all the time with absolutely no evidence, which itself is indistinguishable to corruption in the first place (since the favorite tool of dictators and autocrats is to "discover" corruption in their political opponents when it is convenient to do so).
>No, many airlines operate in imperfect markets and reap excessive profits compared to other airlines.
Which ones? Practically all airlines are public companies with easily accessible financial data.
All of the one's I've looked at are barely scraping by with single digit profit margins. Delta is around 6% and Emirates is among the if not the best at around 9%.
The airline industry is famously unprofitable; it is commonly said that on net, the sum total of airlines have made $0 over the course of their history. It is true that there are periods where they do make a profit, but these periods are offset by times when they make massive losses (such as during COVID, after the Great Recession, and after 9/11).
I think there are lots of airlines that are propped up by governments that lose money leading to the meme you're quoting. Many industries were affected by the events you quoted, those sorts of things aren't specific to airlines.
Its not even the same product. When one consider the crowd level at airports, the lines at security, the size of airline seats, or size of food tray which matters specially on international routes.
Though I blame no one, if people want comfort they can pay more or travel less (if possible)
Average airfare isn't a useful stat in this respect. What would be useful is comparing fares for individual routes over the years, which would tell a different story.
Average fares are skewed by low cost carriers entering the market.
The large carriers, created through mergers that should never have been allowed, have the most popular routes locked up through ownership of landing/takeoff slots and similar. On those routes, fares have substantially increased due to a lack of competition.
The low cost carriers business model is to fly new routes (to secondary airports if required) at low prices, often creating new demand (Breeze is a classic example of this).
The math is very straight forward if you consider what each group is doing in the market.
Plane tickets in the US are, inflation adjusted, historically low. Further, the airlines themselves seem to be on perpetual life support and have variously gone into bankruptcy and resuscitated.
You see an oligopoly, but the barrier to entry is as much defined by the thin margins and high capital cost as anything else.
The factoid that they make all their profit off of loyalty programmes is just a repackaging of the fact that they make pretty much no money overall. So you can pick any one part of the airline operation, account for it in a way that makes it profitable in isolation, and go "oh ho airlines really make all their profit from fuel price arbitrage between different countries" or what have you, and it's sort of true but not really reflective of reality.
OTOH, from TFA: "By 2017, US airlines were among the most profitable in the world, and some Senators pointed to things like Basic Economy as evidence that consumer interests were being undermined for the sake of extra profit."
Both statements could be true simultaneously, of course.
