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Messages - GavJ

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2236
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 11:02:57 pm »
The real nail in the coffin though is that you can even have graphs that turn back on themselves or have areas swept out and not just lines, or all manner of other shenanigans, in special circumstances.

For example, actual effective taxi fares amongst people who are in too much of a hurry to wait for change will have weird, non-line area shapes on such a graph, because they will depend on randomly varying factors like "what types of bills customers happened to have in their pockets at the time." And these would even be lawfully predictable, based on bill carrying statistics, despite making absolutely no sense as an ordered function.

Yet makes absolutely perfect sense when you treat it like what it is: a correlation plot of pairs of observed or predictable values. Not a function.

2237
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:56:45 pm »
Quote
And this is why I think perfectly elastic demand plots are ill-defined.  It doesn't allow any change in price even though someone could clearly sell the good at a different rpice.
Oh no no no no no.
I agreed that you can SET your price at any level you want. I absolutely do not agree that you can SELL a good at any price you want. That's clearly not true. A sale requires an agreeing buyer and seller.

Imagine three merchants right next to each other in a bazaar, selling fungible, nonperishable goods (e.g. dry rice that all comes from the same farmer). They are all forced to sell at exactly the lowest possible price that nets them a quantum unit (e.g. a penny in a cash market) of profit, given their identical costs and overhead. They will not ever sell lower, if rational. They will not ever sell higher, because people will buy exclusively from their neighbors.

Thus, horizontally constrained line.

2238
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:45:47 pm »
Quote
And secondly, a straight vertical line would be a perfectly legal function if demand were a function of price.
*Shrug*

You can have perfectly horizontal lines too.  It's called perfectly elastic demand...

2239
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:44:46 pm »
http://www.amosweb.com/cgi-bin/awb_nav.pl?s=wpd&c=dsp&k=perfectly+inelastic

A fun quote from this economics encyclopedia:

Quote
PERFECTLY INELASTIC:
An elasticity alternative in which changes in one variable (usually price) do NOT cause any changes in another variable (usually quantity). Quantity is totally, completely unresponsive to price. Quantity just does not change, regardless of changes in price.

I think their opinion on whether demand is dependent upon price is made abundantly clear in the language above...

2240
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:40:39 pm »
Quote from: Matt_S on May 19, 2014, 10:39:04 pm
Quote from: GavJ on May 19, 2014, 10:36:09 pm
Jim has diabetes.
Jim demands exactly 20ccs of insulin a day, period.
Jim's price-demand curve is a straight vertical line, which clearly demonstrates price-demand curves are not normal ordered function graphs, since such a curve is non-monotonic.

They are correlative plots. They just plot how the two variables correlate together at different values. Neither really has a privileged position.
Once again, that's not what demand means in economics.  It's okay to use different definitions for your own terms, but that's not what "demand" is on the demand curves that other people produce.
Orly?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

Note in particular "perfectly inelastic demand" which is precisely what I'm talking about, such as demand for insulin, and which is depicted as a straight vertical line that would be illegal as a graph of a normal ordered function.

2241
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:36:09 pm »
Jim has diabetes.
Jim demands exactly 20ccs of insulin a day, period.
Jim's price-demand curve is a straight vertical line, which clearly demonstrates price-demand curves are not normal ordered function graphs, since such a curve is non-monotonic.

They are correlative plots. They just plot how the two variables correlate together at different values. Neither really has any sort of privileged position.

It's just like the graphs you see at the doctor that plot height and weight. They are merely depicting their correlation. There is no function (they might fit one, but there isn't an actual underlying one), and neither is dependent nor independent.

2242
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:21:18 pm »
Quote
And yet demand curves are the demand at any given asking price, regardless of what you think they should be.
Yup. They are also the price at any given demand, regardless of what you think they should be. So?

2243
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:12:15 pm »
Sigh. Okay, if you insist:

* Yes, you physically CAN ask any price.
* You also physically CAN stab the customer and take everything in their wallet.
* You also physically CAN wait until a clerk goes to the bathroom, stand behind the till, and pretend everything is your merchandise and offer 50% off impromptu sales
* You also physically CAN blackmail everybody who competes with you in town and then charge twice as much as them but still make them suggest you for referrals.
* You also physically CAN find a new religion and suddenly give everything for free to the first person with blonde hair you see.

Economic graphs are not graphs of any of these things. They are graphs of what people actually do in actual normal market situations where people are acting lawfully and rationally. And in such situations, prices are in fact predictably constrained and depdendent upon tons of things. So is demand. So is quantity supplied. All of these things also influence other things in predictable ways. They are both dependent and independent (and not just in niche cases. They are both constantly). Markets are non-linear dynamic systems.

2244
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 10:01:12 pm »
And that's not how price works either. I'm glad we've established how uninformative this tangent is from all angles.

Again, moving on, please. Thread has clearly run its course.

2245
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 09:51:38 pm »
Quote from: Matt_S on May 19, 2014, 09:47:57 pm
Quote from: GavJ on May 19, 2014, 09:12:00 pm
Price is neither dependent nor independent. It is part of a cyclical dynamic system. Sometimes it reacts (celebrity starts wearing new brand, price spikes overnight), sometimes it causes (like enticing more producers into an inflated price industry). So either way would be equally reasonable. Economists just picked one.
Price is most certainly independent.  I could open up a store and charge whatever I wanted for my goods.
And I can walk into your store and DEMAND whatever I want for your goods.
So by simply applying your logic here, I guess there must not be any dependent variable, right, since they would both be independent. Thus it does not violate my convention I mentioned earlier. Great, moving on, please...

2246
DF General Discussion / Re: DF has a SHALLOW learning curve
« on: May 19, 2014, 09:12:00 pm »
Quote from: catpaw on May 19, 2014, 03:57:47 am
Quote from: GavJ on May 18, 2014, 05:47:28 pm
Dependent variables never go on the X axis, in any field, or colloquially.

This is wrong. You should study economics to get some.

The classic price-demand curve is classically printed with price on Y-axis and demand on X-axis. Yes we know it against mathematical custom, but this curves are so much in custom that way around any efforts to change it (there has been one if I recall correctly) failed.

Anyway, then there are curves where both variables are cross dependent anyway like the IS-LM model.
Price is neither dependent nor independent. It is part of a cyclical dynamic system. Sometimes it reacts (celebrity starts wearing new brand, price spikes overnight), sometimes it causes (like enticing more producers into an inflated price industry). So either way would be equally reasonable. Economists just picked one.

2247
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: So like, hypothetically...
« on: May 19, 2014, 08:52:15 pm »
Quote from: WoobMonkey on May 19, 2014, 08:25:36 pm
Still less stupid than what Humans do.
It's burning off a fuel of some sort, which would not harm your clothes or body when put out in a reasonable time. My high school chemistry teacher did this with our first class tests, too - lit them on fire pretending to be outraged, then passed them back to us unharmed.

2248
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Fort locations
« on: May 18, 2014, 08:27:09 pm »
After messing around a bit, this worked really well:

One floodgate letting magma into a 1x1, 3 tall stairwell.
Dwarves have access to the stairs the next z level up
There's a 1x1 retracting magma safe bridge partway down the cart sits on.
At the bottom is a grate with a small evaporation chamber.

place cart, open gate, let fill. close floodgate.
Open bridge, cart falls down, so does magma, magma keeps falling into evap chamber though.
Dwarves simply walk down from the top and grab the cart.
Close the bridge and wait for evaporation, start again.

Could probably just have used the magma sea again to absorb the mgma instead of evaporation to make it faster, just didn't think of that.





Requires magma safe rock, but I've never been on an embark anywhere that didn't have magma safe rock. Also 3 iron for the cart.

2249
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Fort locations
« on: May 18, 2014, 07:51:04 pm »
edit - mixed up threads.

Thanks for the design ideas. Floor grates sound pretty easy. Maybe not for a magma machine gun, but simpler for just filling up furnace fuel cells.

2250
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Fort locations
« on: May 18, 2014, 06:53:15 pm »
I never could figure out how to fill minecarts with liquid in a way that consistently worked, though. Am I just out of the loop?

Don't remember the exact numbers, but when I tried it with like, 3 initial ramps, it would just stop in the liquid and not have enough energy to come back out. And yet with just one more ramp for 4 total, wuddenly it skipped straight across without filling up. Annoying as hell.  How do you get it to actually go in, fill up and still also come back up again?

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