Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for February 21, 2020

Can you retire from doing nothing?

Pig you have to work only for our mouths and guts , and retirement will come as soon as possible .

Argh! 0 divided by 0— not easy math, impossible math!

Pig is being realistic – if he retires, he will led to be the bacon he’s been working to become.

That’ll do pig. That’ll do.

Panel 3 is mathematically wrong. Cartoon sensible though.

(what is the number you must multiply zero by in order to get zero? Answer: any number at all)

Not to be a math geek but 0+0÷0 does not equal 0. Division by zero is mathematically undefined. Try it on any calculator. You’ll get an error.

Pig just drew four eggs with little symbols between them. He doesn’t know math, but he does love to draw.

When programming computers if I accidentally had divide by zero bug the usual result was computer crash, clients looked somewhat unfavorably on that

So, Pig doesn’t plan on enjoying retirement? Or retiring?

That’s not income – it’s principal.

Cartoon mathematics.

The formula doesn’t take income tax into account.

Pig first you must work then you may retire ;-) … Croc Power !

Pig draws the number of eggs he stole from the Angry Birdies.

Pigs are supposed to be smart.

When I was in elementary school, they taught us that any number divided by itself equals one, so shouldn’t it be 0+0/0=1, or better yet, (0+0)/0=1?

Your math is wrong! Doing it like that is easy. Try the right way.

Everyone is freaking out about dividing by 0 but nobody has mentioned Pig’s PEMDAS error. Also the formula he’s using assumes that no interest is being generated from the funds, so it’s only relevant if your retirement fund is in your mattress.

Sounds about right for a farmer.

“The math is easy” he says, while dividing by zero.

I retired yesterday. Had a flat.

Actually, it should be written, “(0+0)/0”. Otherwise you’ll do the order of operations wrong.

If only trigonometry was this easy.

Oy! Pig needs guidance….big time!

Oof! Too close to home . . .

Retirement Pension? What’s that?

I hate math. There I said it. I feel much better now.

You were drawing cartoons during math class, huh Stephan?

My calculator just exploded.

This has zero logic.

“Divide by the number of retirement years you plan to enjoy.”

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Never mind the math errors — how are you supposed to know when you are going to die?

Hmmm. When I did that calculation, it came up with an answer of “42”.

Good thing, Pig, is just a fictional comic strip character

Pension? I ain’t no government worker.

You can’t do the math unless you know what your expenses are. Once you do, though, the answer is shockingly simple. (To coin a phrase.) https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/

Yeah, I always enjoyed those retirement fund seminars. I went, perhaps naively expecting them to tell me how to better manage my funds so I could have a retirement. But they always start out, “There are many ways you can handle your disposable income…”

Disposable income? Who are they kidding? If we had disposable income, we wouldn’t need to attend a retirement seminar. How about “How to retire after a lifetime of living paycheck to paycheck.” That’s the seminar I wanted. ;D

Actually, I managed to retire early through a fluke, and it all became clear: financial management is pure random chance circumstance. It all boils down to: spend as little as you can, stop going to movies (because there’s Netflix and movie theaters are absurdly expensive), stop blowing your paycheck on Saturday night booze, find ways to cut costs through sensible spending, and learn the difference between “I need this” and “I want this”. Stop buying trinkets and collectables (because they become useless dust collectors that just take up space), and at the end of the week or month, any cash that you have left over stick in a sensible investment account.

The read all the books on post-apocalyptic survival you can find at the local library and wait for the eventual total collapse of society and the economy along with it. ; )

Hundreds of thousands of years, everything fine. Then the third century B.C. Mesopotamia pops up with the zero, providing mathematicians with a division conundrum actively being studied today, and so far not soluble even with Reverse Polish Notation.

When your retirement results in becoming bacon, you don’t really need any savings.

Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’

You just had to trigger the math geeks, didn’t you?

Any engineer worth his salt knows the answer is “infinity.” Yes, they know what mathematicians say, and on odd-numbered days they’ll respect it, but engineers know practical.

zero divided by zero results in “undefined”

Just tried this on my iPad calculator. 0 plus 0 divided by 0 = Error. Common sense tells me it’s 0 but I guess I’m in ERROR.

Pig is playing Retirement as a Zero Sum Game.

It ain’t a game, Pig!

Umm, 0/0 = infinity.

The answer is actually infinity (and beyond). :-)

I’m lucky I like what I do for a living, because I’ll probably be working until I’m 70 (or so).

Using Irrational Math when you divide by zero the real answer is infinity.

Good thing you’re a pig

0/0 is one. Anything divided by itself is one. Not hard.

For everyone prating of infinity, be careful. Georg Cantor formulated the rules for operations with infinity — and ended dying in a sanitarium. The best answer is that the QUESTION is ill posed.

Let x represent “my whole life…”0+0/x=…Oh no

Err, that would be undefined, I believed.

Your decision to not retire has destroyed the fabric of reality through impossible math.

New conspiracy theory: the dividing by zero rule was made by big companies so that it would be mathematically impossible not to have to work toward retirement.