“Can you imagine any retailer of any other product getting away with that?” Ex-UCI president Brian Cookson uses baked beans analogy to hit out at “outrageous and incompetent” Warner Bros. Discovery for “trying to kill cycling for British customers”

Spangly Shiny wrote:

Sorry, I just could not finish the article. As soon as I saw figures quoted in excess of 100% I had to look away. There is nothing greater than 100%, because 100% is everything, all of it, the whole shooting match.

That's simply wrong I'm afraid, if you take a base number as a reference point then an increase above it can be expressed in terms of more than 100%. If you earn £100 a day and your salary is increased to £300 a day, your salary has increased by 200%. This is not something that's arguable or a matter of opinion, it's a simple fact accepted by all mathematicians.

While we're on the topic I've always been suspicious of these negative numbers.  Where are your -3 apples, may I ask?

And as for so called "imaginary", "irrational" or "surreal" ones - I think the clue's in the name!

'Transcendental' ones too - we don't need any of that woowoo stuff.

The Pi is a lie!

You know its just maths right? Percent represents a fraction

% = a/b * 100

So if a is greater than b then the fraction is greater than 100%

Look I'll put it this way arguing that nothing can be over 100% is like saying numbers greater than one don't exist!

So yes if something is doubled it's "gone up by 100%" if it's tripped then it's "gone up by 200%".

Because we calculate

"gone up by %" = 100* (a-b)/b

In Britain we are let down by our education system in terms of numerical skills,

https://www.nationalnumeracy.org.uk/news/new-survey-uk-numeracy

The last governments intention to keep numerical skills education going across years 12 and 13 was something I agreed with.

Come on, this cannot be the first time you've seen percentages used like this? Percentages are just a way of expressing fractions/decimals on a scale of 0-100 (hence the name, literally "per cent", ie per 100), and while it's true that you cannot have more than 100% of a limited resource like a pie and cannot give more than 100% of your maximum effort, you absolutely can have 300% more pie than you had before, for example.

343% only? Phew, for a minute there I thought we were being ripped off

If you're going to be ripped off, you should at least know how much you're being ripped off to the tune of.

[And once people have pointed out (more than once) that you've got something wrong, you might try getting it right.]

mdavidford wrote:

road.cc repeatedly wrote:

That £371.88-a-year package is a whopping 443 343 per cent more expensive than Discovery’s previous £6.99-a-month basic subscription

Just to clarify, with my ultra-pedantic mathematician & economist hat on, everything here simply reinforces the widespread suspicion that *very* few people understand percentages.

First, the comment about 100% being a limit. Well, that's right *if* you're talking about a limited resource. So, if a football manager says the team gave 150%, that's nonsense. The team can't suddenly find more skill, strength & energy than they've got. If the team gave 100% it means they gave everything they have - which would require every team member ending the match literally (not figuratively but *actually*) dead from exhaustion. This doesn't happen.

Second, the formula for working out precentage. The formula given is for the total resource, not a change. If we talk about the cost of the NHS, say, as a proportion of the total national wealth (& economists talk about such things all the time), that's the right form - in this case, the formula would be:

([total NHS budget]/[UK GDP])*100

Again, that can't be more than 100% coz we can't spend money we don't have (loans sort of count as part of GDP, & repayments are correspondingly negative GDP components - but please take my advice, don't get me started on the inadequacies of GDP as a measure of anything; however, none of this is rocket science).

Finally, the formula when we're talking about a *change* in something is (obviously):

([amount of change]/[original amount])*100

To be more precise, the percentage change in some value is:

(([new value] - [old value])/[old value])*100

which can clearly be anything at all, including far greater than 100%. Or negative if the new value is less than the old value.

In this case that's ((30.99 - 6.99)/6.99)*100 = 343%

Incidentally imaginary numbers exist & are used all the time in everyday life, although the vast majority of people wouldn't be aware of it. Press a switch, on comes a light - wouldn't work unless someone somewhere is using imaginary numbers, tho possibly without knowing it. Also, irrational numbers are definitely real. They teach you that in A-level maths. Now, that *is* rocket science!

Feel free to quote me...

oceandweller wrote:

mdavidford wrote:

road.cc repeatedly wrote:

That £371.88-a-year package is a whopping 443 343 per cent more expensive than Discovery’s previous £6.99-a-month basic subscription

everything here simply reinforces the widespread suspicion that *very* few people understand percentages.

And that's before you get on to the confusing business of taking the new monthly cost and converting it to an annual one, and then comparing it with the monthly figure for the old subscription. Just, why? (OK - I know why - it's to make one look BIG, while the other one looks tiny, but as well as being misleading, the difference is already significant enough that it doesn't need exaggerating.)

"It was less than 23p a day, and it's gone up to £3,718.80 a decade!"

Not only are irrational numbers real, the vast majority of real numbers are irrational. Also, almost every integer contains the digit '3'.

hawkinspeter wrote:

almost every integer contains the digit '3'.

Not if you count the binary ones.

mdavidford wrote:

hawkinspeter wrote:

almost every integer contains the digit '3'.

Not if you count the binary ones.

That's just cheating