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  • THIS IS WHY PENNIES SHOULD NOT BE IN EXISTENCE

  • @maichips NO pennies are bad, Unicorns are good

  • @vmqta94 Not so in the eyes of John. He has deep-seated hatred for unicorns.

  • He called Nerdfighter Daniel Biss before this I bet

  • In the title, out of "Big OIL RIPS YOU OFF", Big is the only word not in all caps. Kind of ironic.

    Best wishes!

  • im wearing a turtle neck right now

  • Wait Abraham Lincoln? I thought that was Bob Marley...

  • @wolverineblue18 i assume marley was quoting him...

  • But what about 0?

  • @wrheade when he's talking about rounding he is talking about saying 4.2 --> 4 and 5.7 --> 6.

    5.0 is already 5, so there is no need to round it

  • is it sad that i have a major fangirl crush on John? Oh, wait, no it's not. DFTBA<3

  • Yeah. Actually this reminds me of the virus from the movie office space

    or, at least how it was supposed to work (The movie revolves around a bunch

    of characters getting laid off so the bank-software company can make more

    money, so they write a virus that takes the pennies that are rounded off of

    each money transaction and puts them into a seperate account, which over time

    amounts to a lot of money (Except that it was a little mis-coded so it stole a

    lot more money than expected.

  • Have YOU ever tried to milk a purple alligator?!? It's flipping hard!

  • I'm so happy I've been stealing rides my entire life. I'm saving the world money.

  • u do realize that gasoline in the US is tremendously cheaper than gasoline ANYWHERE else in the world...

  • This was totally one of those things I didn't understand when I was learning the rounding rules. I was all for .5 being rounded down.

  • <3 John Green

  • Big oil is using pennies to screw us! It's just like when Voldemort used unicorns to kill people! >:(

  • Can I be you when I grow up?

  • @aciijess listen 2 ur parents u can be what ever u want ill be a purple aligater when i grow up 8D xD

  • the laugh was great.

  • "Big Oil"? Is that what people are calling OPEC these days?

  • Actualy gas stations are ripping you off more that you think. It might say you get gas for $3.29 however if you look at the pricing on the tank itself it always says $3.299. So it's really $3.30 based off of every rounding system possible. Every time you buy a gallon of gas, you are spending about 1 penny more than you think you are.

  • Did you get your eight cents back?

  • Gasoline is also (ounce-by-ounce) cheaper than bottled water.

  • @volkswagenminibus strangely enough... Very true. ><

  • It's almost like a vague interpritation of an economists version of Cave Johnson's "Lemons" Rant.

  • Also, externalities such as pollution and climate change are not paid for by the consumer at the pump, but forced upon the taxpayer.

  • Dutch rounding always rounds X.5 to the nearest even number, so 0.5 becomes 0, 1.5 becomes 2, 2.5 becomes 2, etc. In this way X.5 is rounded up half the time and down half the time instead of always rounding up.

    Note: Dutch rounding has nothing to do with X.51; that will always round up. Oil prices always end in 9/10 of a cent though, so we don't need to worry about hundredths.

  • 2:29 xD

  • A math video John didn't consult Daniel Biss for?!

  • If we eliminate regulations for oil companies here in the U.S., prices will go down at the pump. Allow companies to dump toxic oil waste into open pits (or) shoot it into the water table and the cost of disposal will be dramatically reduced.

  • Cracks been good to him

  • Um...you say that more often we round up rather than down (5-9 up, 1-4 down), but technically, you round down on zero (basically not at all), so that 50% of the time you end up with the lower digit, and 50% of the time you end up with the upper.

    This seems unintuitive since the cent wouldn't change with a zero, but if you don't account for this, you end up making unfair accusations that rounding isn't fair.

  • @mcdrums8706 He's saying you round down on four numbers [1 2 3 4] and up on five [5 6 7 8 9]. That's one more than four. Thus, not fair! (:

  • @xokayla3194xo But he's missing the case for zero (0). Base-10 system has 10 digits, so even though rounding doesn't change 3.000, it still counts, making the rounding system fair. Without accounting for zero, you're missing 10% of all cases, at mathematicians don't like that very much.

  • @mcdrums8706 Rounding is moving the chosen decimal to the nearest zero. Therefore, zero is never rounded at all and cannot count as being rounded down, because to round down the value of the number must be decreased. Changing 3.00 to 3.0 isn't rounding, because the value of the number hasn't changed, It's getting rid of zeros that don't have any function. Mathematicians may not like missing 10% of all cases, but I doubt they'd like pretending there are 10% more cases than really exist, as well.

  • Why does this come up when I search "israel" out of all vlogbrothers videos? BECAUSE ITS ABOUT MONEY!? conspiracyconspiracyconspiracy­conspiracyconspiracyconspiracy­conspiracy

  • Wikipedia = bad :(

  • The summer of 1998 saw a time of unreal low fuel prices. I recall paying 0.74 per gallon at the low, walking into a grocery store and seeing a gallon of distilled water selling for 0.79. Gas was cheaper than water! So wtf happened? Today the sation near my house in Indiana displays $3.99/gal and the expectation is that it's going up. I guess I don't know why these things occur, but I have a response. I'm getting a hybrid. One day I hope I'll have a 100% electric car.

  • think of it this way,John, you need to pay the person who milks alligatoers ALOT OF MONEY for the job that they do.

    beacuse,they,well,milk nonexisten creatures who have ALOT of preasure on it's jaws

  • ugh! call radar,he needs to fix the Wikipedia page

  • @skyskelton97 Radar fixes Omnictionary, not wikipedia (incidentally, omnictionary now actually exists, google it =D)

  • But 0 rounds down.

    So 0-4 are down, and 5-9 are up.

  • @Ebonyl93 0 isn't a fraction of anything.

  • @TacticusPrime That depends on what numbers follow the 0

  • @Ebonyl93 So you mean we count the positions between say 1.0 - 1.1 then 1.1 - 1.2. Then it makes sense to round 1.49 down and 1.51 up, but that still leaves the 1.5 position (the precise middle) as defaulting up. That gives an edge to rounding up.

  • @TacticusPrime Yes, but as 1.00 stays at 1.00, 1.50 can round up, and it would still be "fair"

  • @Ebonyl93 You aren't rounding 1 to 1 or 5 to 5. That's nonsensical. That's what I said in the beginning, 0 isn't a fraction of anything. 1.5 is the precise midpoint between 1 and 2. It is not closer to either one of them. It would be equally correct to round it down or up. Rounding it up every time gives an advantage to rounding up.

  • @TacticusPrime Oh ok, I think I finally understand what you're trying to say.

    But, 1.00001 sill rounds down to 1, and.... I don't really know how to explain this properly. I think it's now a matter of probability, as 1 isn't "rounded" but rather becomes 1, 1.5 must therefore become 2, otherwise, if every single value was obtained, probabilty would mean that you paid less money than you should.

    I'm sorry, I know this doesn't make sense, I don't know how to phrase it. I normally talk with my hands

  • @Ebonyl93 You could just as easily phrase the argument the other way. 1.5 is the precise midpoint between 1 and 2. One could say, because 1.999 is rounded to 2, you need to round 1.5 down to 1. It's just confusing you because of the number in front of the decimal. Don't think that way, think in terms of a number line.

  • @TacticusPrime No, it's still a question of probability. It is "fair" that half the time we pay the lower dollar amount and half the time we pay the higher dollar amount. Which means that because we pay 1.0 as 1, we should pay 1.5 as 2. This means that overall, we are paying a "fair" amount. I don't see how we could accpet this fact in third grade but are arguing it now.

  • @Ebonyl93 Dude. Ask a mathematics professor, he'll tell you the same. Including 1.0 and 2.0, there are a necessarily odd number of intervening decimals. 1.49999 is rounded down and 1.50001 is rounded up correctly. 1.5 is exactly in the middle of 1 and 2, thus it can be correctly rounded up or down. We round up every time, so there is an imbalance.

    You are wrong; it's ok. John doesn't just talk out of his ass.

  • @TacticusPrime Thank you for using a semicolon correctly, it's so rare =)

    John says that you're rounding up 5/9 of the time. You are saying that 1.500001 is rounded up, so you guys are saying different things. Or I'm understanding one of you wrong.

    If you are saying that in the tiny tiny chance that the number you arrive at is EXACTLY 1.5 and not even 1.50000000001 then I agree that is could possibly be rounded down. But John says it rips you off 1/20 of the time and I don't agree with that.

  • round 5-9 up and 0-4 down. It's just that the "0" does nothing as rounding down just lops it off.

  • Actually the way oil companies are taking money from us in a way that allows bigger profits is that they increase the price of oil they have already bought and is ready for consumption at gas stations because of a oil scare, but after the oil scare they either never reset the price or they take weeks to reset the price after nothing happens.

  • Greatest Asian women **busizz4me.info**

  • Spend a 50 cent stamp to try and get 8 cents back? Who's math class did you go to?

  • you need to read something inaccurate from wikipedia EVERY VIDEO!

  • John... This is pointless, I know. Many people before me have probably said this, not that I'm bothering to check. This video was posted over a year ago.

    Too bad.

    Our rounding is fair. You forgot about "x.0."

    .0-.4 rounds down, and .5-.9 rounds up.If you use Dutch rounding (excluding 5) and make x=y-1, then x.0 to x.4 rounds to x, and x.6 to x.9 rounds to y. There's a 0.5 range for which it rounds to x, and a 0.4 range for which it rounds to y. THAT's unfair.

    Debating Nerdfighters!

  • "...unless it's a question of math. Then you can in fact fool all of the people all of the time."

    LMFAO

  • big oil companies arent raping us they are just loving us roughly at this point we simply havent realized we dont like the crude sex yet

  • actually, that abraham lincoln quote was actually a pt barnum quote, sorry

  • The Oil companies are trying their best to stop free energy ideas from spreading to common people.

    We need to put an end to this corruption ,start generating your own electricity now.

    Visit LT-MAGNET-MOTORdotCOM and get the blueprints . Join the Revolution!!

  • I don't like paying for gas, but it is kinda important to pay the true value of gas... cause gas hurts the planet a lot, and if it's expensive, people might turn to better modes of transportation...

  • i'm gonna learn from you just cuz my name is hank so you must be talking to me

  • I must admit though, the unfail mathematics that oil companies use to rip us off also helps my grades in school so...yeah...

  • Lol at the gatorade part...

  • Halarious.

    Genious.

  • "Abraham Lincloln said this."

    You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time

    Actually, no, he didn't (although it is incorrectly widely attributed to him).

    It is originally from the boss of a circus named Barum,who is Lincoln's friend.

    Actually, I think you mean P. T. Barnum of the world famous Ringling Bros. Barnum and Bailey Circus.

    It was spoken by Abe Lincoln but it was actually written by Mark Twain

  • i want to kick your fucking teeth out

  • the large oil are the fucking filth in society.

  • Sorry I am not sure if i made a my point clear ... it would be very interesting if you can share the sites that you have built a reasonable amount of trust over the years, clearly We know where you start with the old media, but in this Internet media where do you usually go to as your " TRUSTED source "....I know its a year old video but i hope you come and read the comments

  • Hey - John what are your resources ( and i mean Your Top 7 Internet and old media sources ), These are the sites / Channel / Newspaper that you go to to read... when you are "trying" to form an informed opinion about a subject. The Reason i say trying in Quote .. with so much information and misinformation..We can only try.The site you mention should be the one you dont Google, but the one you remember the URL and goto.which means a certain amount of confidence

  • WHO MAKES MORE OFF OF A GALLON OF GAS? government (VOTE UP) or oil companies(VOTE DOWN) ?

  • 2:30

    And this is why I love John :)

  • I love how excited John gets. 2:30 made my day.

  • did you know that water is more expensive than oil?

  • who cares

  • you can't round seven and a half cents by richard Bissell third grade style. pwned oil companies!!

    seven and a half cents in your pants

  • i may be wrong on this logic, but if it was a paper snail mail letter that you sent, you would have paid 44 cents to the us postal service, five and a half times the amount of pennies you have requested.

  • 56500 view

  • This doesn't actually make sense. You round down on 0-4, and up on 5-9. That's 5 *tenths* each way.

  • You actually don't need to round on zero, because, um... 7.0 is actually 7.

  • You don't round zero, therefore John is correct.

  • @WhyHelloShelby

    Its true you don't round from 0, however you do round down from the numbers between 0 and 1. .0000...1 to .499999... is rounded down and .5 to .999999... goes up, a range of .4999999... in both cases. So John is wrong.

  • @pyroqwerty Right, I would be wrong if the device measuring the oil output from the pump measured infinitely, but it does not. So to the oil pump there IS a limit to the number of decimals calculated, so they still rip you off.

    (The mathematics behind this are more complicated than I said in the video, but it turns out that I am right anyway, although in the end I was kind of accidentally right.)

  • @vlogbrothers Ah, ok then. I was just thinking of the rounding method itself and not how it's actually appied in real life (perhaps due to not having a car).

  • @elgrand1. You don't round 0.  There's no need to round at zero. It's a whole number. I pity you.

  • Heh, we learned "Dutch rounding" as part of the significant figure system in Physics. Yay for College Physics Land, where 3 times 5, 4 times 5, and 5 times 5 all equal 20!

  • I'm drafting my "8 cents" letter right now!

    Gatorade DOES come from gators.

    I KNEW IT!!

  • 1) how did the getting the eight cents back go?

    2) your happy-bouncing of laughter at the very end made me lol for a steady seven minutes.

  • Did you ever get the eight cents??

  • Hows this for a shocker its cheaper to make oil than it is to drill for it.

  • the only thing worse than a pencil pushing IRS agent is a big oil lobbyist. i want my money back.

  • win!

  • Concern over oil companies rounding up pennies could be portrayed by some as complaining about the cold while taking an evening stroll on the deck of the Titanic.

  • all math is demon math mathics

  • The Dutch golden age started because loads of Belgian people moved to Holland! True story.

  • I was very confused when this year in physical science (or Experimental Methods as they call it here (for some reason)) we learned the new method of rounding. Like, why bother teaching that dumb one in third grade? The 'new' one makes much more sense.

  • classic...good stuff

  • Did you really write to Exxon? I'd like to know what they say.

  • well it has been 102 days since you posted this if my math is correct and as far as i know you haven't let us know about the eight cents. You need to let us know. Im dying here. lol =D

  • LOL. My 8th grade science teacher's name was Mr. Fink

  • I like this guy!

  • @GSpotter63 Welcome to the Nerdfighters! *stamps*

  • @GSpotter63 Welcome to nerdfiteria.

  • @GSpotter63 I think we ALL like this guy. :D

  • @radness13 I don't, I love this guy, also I'd like John to review the diamond cartel

  • 1 to 4 down down to 5 up

    i am confused

  • Speaking of BIG OIL

    What Obama Told Abdullah as He Bowed to BIG OIL

    /watch?v=vCwWya99eRQ

  • I was having a debate about this with my science teacher, she said normal rounding was fair because it uses the numbers: 0,1,2,3,4 to round down and 5,6,7,8,9 to round up. she says that there are five numbers for each side, so that would mean its fair. So when John was talking he left out the zero when he talked about the lower numbers, did I just forget some rule of rounding specific to zero, or is my teacher correct? (sorry if this is confussing to anyone)

  • Well, if you round a number ending with zero, it's not really rounding because the number doesn't change.

  • I have had the same discussion. Rounding from zero is valid, because you aren't necessarily rounding just one digit away. Suppose you wish to round 4.505 to the nearest tenth. 0-4 rounds down, so the result is 4.5.

    By ignoring zero, the Dutch rounding system actually rounds downward 55% of the time, while the traditional method is even.

  • I didn't think of that, but I suppose that's true.

  • Comment removed

  • My chemistry teacher never called it Dutch rounding, but that's what we did. That teacher was the sig fig nazi.

  • Eeeeew... sigfig... I've never gotten 100% because I always have at least 1/2 a point marked off for sigfigs...

  • "Even at the very height of the 2008 oil bubble, a gallon of gasoline was still less expensive than a gallon of Fierce Grape Gatorade. Which strikes me as just a little bit odd since oil must be mined from the depths of the earth, shipped across the world, then refined, then trucked to a gas station, then sunk into a gigantic underground container. Whereas to produce Fierce Grape Gatorade I believe all you have to do is milk purple aligators."

    GENIOUS!

  • I laughed all through this..... Stupid third grade math!!

  • what if u were dutch rounding 555.55??

  • they rule is that anything higher than .50 gets rounded up, and anything less, .498 gets rounded down. If it's .50 exactly as far as you can tell, then it is split up/down half the time based on the number that came before, as a general rule, round to even numbers. 4.50=4 5.50 = 6

  • The world would implode and everything inside it would be destroyed.

  • To be fair a lot of companies round up as long as there is a decimal of a penny. So if something costs $4.011 they'll charge you an extra 9/10 of a penny. Be happy the oil company isn't doing that.

  • thats actually true.

  • hey! I've heard that Lincoln didn't actually say that!

  • I have a little game I play whenever I watch his videos. I like to count how many times he blinks

    throughout the 2:37 seconds of the video, he blinks 3 times

  • maybe a couple times when he blinked you blinked at the same time....

    theres something to think about...

  • Good luck with Exxon... they recently refused (after a fierce decades-long legal battle) to pay damages to the commercial fishermen whose livelihoods were severely impinged upon by the 1989 oil spill in Prince William Sound. So get a lawyer if you want that 8 cents.

    <3 B.

  • you screwed my head up

  • lol @ all the books behind ya. :P

    x

  • Gatorade is really expensive when you look at it like that.

  • //Thank you!//

    I am taking my first college physics class where I have just learned the even/odd rule for rounding.

    I was livid.

    I called all my friends and explained to them how we've all been lied to our whole lives by teachers and parents.

    Strangely, none of them found this as infuriating as I did.

    I feel validated knowing you care too.

  • you really sure cal your mathematician and verify this... i know your history with math... lol

  • Wikipedia= an infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards.

  • Oil vs. Gatorade...

    even greedy oil execs drink gatorade...

  • Wow, this is a Big Nerd fallacy: "if you round 1 to 4 down, & 5 to 9 up, you are rounding up 5/9ths of the time." WRONG: Let's say the pump-meter is accurate to three decimal places. You pump exactly 1.001 cents of gas, you pay 1 cent. You pump 1.099: you pay 1 cent. So the range of '1.0' to '1.099 is getting rounded down. That means that we are really rounding down 'zero to four' or FIVE/TENTHS of the time. If you pump 1.499 cents worth, you got virtually all of a half cent for nothing!

  • 2) So, if you are trying to hit a round number as you fill up, say $30, the point you hit is a somewhat random number between $30.00000 and $30.00499. I contend that most of the time, the number people actually hit when trying to do this is below $30.00249, or a 1/4-cent above the target. Therefore, people may be cheating THEMSELVES out of a penny per four visits to the pump, on average... depending on their motor skills and reaction times.

  • 3) Instead, If I'm in a hurry, I try to see how many micro-squirts I can get out of each penny, and then finish by getting this number without advancing the dollar-readout. So, if the pump reads $30.10, and I can get 3 micro-squirts without it going to $30.11, then I know I must be close to the $30.10499 mark, right? I've maximized the amount of gas I can get for a penny. This also means that I am consistently taking almost a full EXTRA half-penny of gas from the pump without paying for it.

  • 4) If I wasn't in a hurry, I could just calculate the exact pump reading to three places that would equal $30.00499, but that's totally Monk. ;)

    BTW, if you just fill up and stop at a random number, you are being honest and fair with the gas-station. Half the time you take up to a half-cent free, and half the time you pay up to a half cent extra, over the long haul. If you are trying to hit an even number, you are probably averaging about a quarter-cent free gas per visit. You're the rip.

  • 1.0 can't be rounded down anymore than 2.0 can be rounded up.

    Technically it's not five tenths of the time, though. The range of 0.000~1 through 4.9999~ is smaller than the range of 5.000~ through 9.999~~

  • who is hank?

  • lol purple alligators

  • Big oil is going to look like amateur night after BIG GOVERNMENT. Big Government is going to take us all to the cleaners.

  • Hahaha, love this vid.

  • Some of the people are stupid all of the time, and all of the people are stupid some of the time.

  • Milk purple alligators xD

  • office space anyone?

  • Hahaha totally!

  • You just contradicted yourself! You weren't fooled, and you said that everyone can always be fooled by it.

  • Perhaps John Green is not as human as he claims to be.

  • love it this stuff is amazing

  • John, I did some research and the starting pay-rate for purple-alligator milkers is $100/hour, so the high price of Fierce Grape Gatorade is completely justified.

    ~Trav

  • Hmmm, I always thought that they rounded up. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 and 0.9 all equal 1.0

    That's how most businesses do it.

  • wait, wait so..

    whats a nerdfighter?

    BAHAjk.

  • That's my state tax return that has to be rounded, fyi.

  • And there's that little 9 after the cent on all of the signs...

    Though some of this extra cent (or 1/10th of a cent) is put there because of my local government. I think I should report the extra 8 cents on my tax return this year... except they make us round to the nearest whole dollar anyways... :P

  • Yes, you are so right.

  • milk purple alligators....that's funny....

  • that was funny.

  • Who is hank?

  • Ah, never mind, im mildly retarded.

  • Where I grew up, we were taught to use the Dutch Rounding system, unless there were no numbers following the .5, and then we had to alternate rounding up and rounding down.

    Also, side note on Wikipedia: I notice some relevant and true information gets dropped there a lot. (Such as how the article on Gelatin no longer states it is made from pigs, even though it is). And yet, there remains intact things that almost no one finds offensive (See Flying Spaghetti Monster). Odd how that works.

  • You seem to think Pastafarianism is a joke or something.

  • No. I simple stated nearly no one finds it offensive. There is usually always someone who finds a joke offensive. Therefore, I was not claiming it was a joke. (What kind of logic are you using, that you think non-offensive things are jokes?)

  • Sorry, I misunderstood. I was trying to be a smart ass, and ended up sounding like a dumb ass. No harm intended, I promise!

  • Milk purple alligators, that's class.

  • *chuckle* at related video: NOTORIOUS BIG MOVIE