Talk:Odd–even rationing

Moved from User talk:Melchoir
Zero is even is established clearly in the evenness of zero article. There is no need to repeat the arguments in odd-even rationing. That is why we have wikilinks. &mdash; RHaworth (Talk | contribs) 21:07, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
 * My point is that, if you wanted to design a rationing system, it is not enough to understand that zero is even. This fact must be applied through the theorem that given a even-sized list of consecutive integers, half are even and the other half are odd. Since there are an even number of digits, 10, we may group zero according to its parity alone.
 * By contast, if the rationing is tied to the parity of the date, then typically in months with 29 or 31 days, the last day is open to everyone. In other words, odd-even rationing treats the number 31 differently from 1, 3, 5, and 7. If you were to say "the fact that 31 is odd is established clearly, end of story" then you would be committing a non sequitur, and it would lead you to design the wrong system.
 * Of course this article should avoid repeating the content of Evenness of zero. There is no need to explain why zero is even here. It is, however, desirable and necessary to state how the evenness of zero is applied to odd-even rationing. Melchoir (talk) 23:24, 19 August 2009 (UTC)


 * ...Without objection, then, I'd like to revert this revert. Melchoir (talk) 19:27, 20 August 2009 (UTC)


 * ...done. Melchoir (talk) 04:11, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Does this have any effect?
How does this help anything?

Before rationing:
 * Day 1: 0 1 2 3 4 are in line
 * Day 2: 5 6 7 8 9 are in line

After rationing:
 * Day 1: 0 2 4 6 8 are in line
 * Day 2: 1 3 5 7 9 are in line

There's no reduction in the amount of people using the resource on a given day. They are just arranged differently from one day to the next. I don't get how this helps. Justanothervisitor (talk) 14:45, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

It doesn't, it's just the government pretending that doing something is better than nothing: http://debateunlimited.com/Debate/viewtopic.php?p=372452#372452 108.71.14.120 (talk) 02:47, 16 November 2012 (UTC)


 * I think the idea is more that there's only enough for five, so without rationing we have 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 in line, but only 0-4 get anything and 5-9 waste their time and go home empty-handed. The numerical rationing is a way of telling half the population not to bother queueing today because there isn't enough to go around, and then making that instruction specific and enforceable. My understanding, anyway. Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 13:46, 12 November 2014 (UTC)