Suspicious Discontinuities
danluu.com
danluu.com
Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay on food stamps, and was less than her current job. Thanks to union regulations, the person who wanted to hire her couldn't pay her less than the standard salary. The result is that she did not take the job.
A common result when Congress takes note of perverse incentives like this is that they introduce a more complex program with specific terms that address specific problems that emerged. The problem is that by creating more brackets and more complex rules you usually create MORE cliffs with perverse incentives (though the perverse incentive at each cliff tends to be less).
Another solution is to introduce rules that attempt to identify people who are "abusing the system" and punish them. So, for example, you can only be on welfare for a limited time because people got outraged that single mothers wound up on welfare for a long time. However those single mothers were acting that was in part because they were better off on welfare looking after their own kids than they were in a low end job and paying for daycare.
Stereotypically the first type of solution is characteristic of Democrats and the second of Republicans. But the truth is that both parties do a lot of both solutions.
This is a key motivation for replacing many of those programs with UBI funded by progressive taxes.
People in the US who live in a comfortable six-figure-middle-class bubble really have no idea how precarious their position is.
All it takes is one expensive long-lasting serious illness and they'll be out on the street with the other people who "made poor choices."
You declare bankruptcy, your assets are divided up among your creditors and you start over again. That's why bankruptcy exists. Several (most?) states even let one keep one's home. Maybe we need a law to prevent landlords from refusing to let based on prior bankruptcy — would have to think that through. Bankruptcy is not (or at least should not be) the end of the world.
Children also get to suffer for policymakers poor choices of what the stamps should be spent on, and taxpayers get to suffer the cost of every benefit program duplicating income verification functions and other eligibility functions rather than having universal programs where the tax system takes care of the better off not getting unfair share of benefit.
It's not government paternalism that's terrifying, but cultural demonisation and paternalistic contempt for the poor, combined with unthinking adulation of the extremely rich.
So bad to be treated like a child for their entire life. They're really suffering not having a mortgage to pay every month. Instead they're saving up for their kids college.
1. They tend to be more resilient to budget cuts since everyone is bought in.
2. They don't have the discontinuities mentioned in the article.
Regarding UBI, studies I've seen show that people tend to spend their money on "responsible" things (as opposed to drugs and lotto tickets): https://www.businessinsider.com/stockton-basic-income-trial-...
As for housing, I think that this would be standard econ, really. More money means more demand, which in the absence of more supply, means higher prices. Things like housing are harder to increase the supply of than say, TVs, so yeah, they'd probably go up more than the rest. But I suspect that everyone would still be better off.
I don't think rent-controls are a good idea. On the other hand, I do think that in the long run rich people gobbling up finite land is a problem;
What people want to purchase is not simply housing - it's housing in their preferred location.
I think a big part of what makes housing desirable, for the bulk of the population, is ability to earn enough of an income nearby. If that's the case, UBI might actually directly create desirable housing (out of almost desirable housing) and increase supply.
I don't expect this effect would be large enough that UBI would put downward pressure on housing prices overall, but I don't really know.
A UBI makes the pay matter a little less, and so makes places like that more attractive.
It doesn't, first order, cause more units to be built. But that is not the only way to increase supply.
Longer term, that kind of calculation about potential units, in places where it's easy to build, might lead to more units built. But that gets more complicated.
The wonderful thing about cash (UBI, NIT, EITC) is that it's easy to divide up and low-cost to distribute.
Apart from whether linear actually makes sense or not in the real world.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41487126
>Under the old system many faced a "cliff edge", where people on a low income would lose a big chunk of their benefits in one go as soon as they started working more than 16 hours.
>In the new system, benefit payments are reduced at a consistent rate as income and earnings increase - for every extra £1 you earn after tax, you will lose 63p in benefits.
In other words, after fixing the cliffs of the system, you would "only" face a 63% effective tax rate for working more. So whatever system they have no is even more discouraging. (That understates it because it's phrased post-tax; including a positive income tax, the total effective tax is even more!)
The world makes a lot more sense when you realise that laws and regulations are primarily conceived and constructed to keep incumbents in power. Maybe we should vote in our representatives for life then they'd actually have to focus on making things better.
Should "the system" really push capable people into valueless jobs at the cost of meaningful jobs that have no monetary value?
But I don't think the UK's or US's systems are like that; they just got hobbled together by being pushed in different directions by various groups with conflicting desiderata that combined to produce ridiculous incentives, and those incentives should be corrected.
Moreover, to the extent that valueless jobs and valuable non-monetary jobs exist and can be identified, the proper response is to explicitly target them (either with penalties or subsidies), not just allow anti-market-labor incentives to exist because "hey, not every job is worth doing, you know?"
It's both.
The idea of Universal Credit is a good one - it rationalised dozens of benefits into one programme.
Unfortunately the implementation is - because Tories - a terrible system that causes more problems than it solves.
Under the old system, it was possible to take a job, and then have less actual income than you did before.
Under the new system, _every_ extra hour of work you do causes you to have more money in your pocket, and you are always incentivized to do more work, or start a job that pays less now but might pay more as your experience grows.
I'm not sure how else you'd want this to be designed.
This prevents situations where it's better to stay under a cutoff of X in income until you can jump straight to an income of X income + Y in benefits, while staying on benefits until then.
So, concrete proposal on how you'd structure this?
Edit: Why are people downvoting this?
I don't understand what's so confusing about SilasX's argument.
Removing cliffs and changing it to a smooth dropoff is good.
But that dropoff doesn't have to be £.63 in benefits per £1 earned. That's a pretty big effective marginal tax rate! Why not £.50 or £.30?
It should be extremely easy to understand how this proposal works, right?
It would technically bring more people into the system, but they'd be at the top end, and therefore only be receiving a small fraction of the current levels of benefits. It's totally doable.
If it's less than 63%, you "unilaterally extend benefits to a whole bunch of people who don't currently get them".
Let's say benefits for the unemployed are £1,000 a month (chosen to be an easy number to work with). You lose 63p of benefits per extra pound you earn. The government gives you (some) benefits up to the first £1,587 you earn. If you go to 50%, the government gives people earning up to £2,000 a month benefits, and so on, which probably includes a bunch of people who don't currently get any.
You can't change 63% without either paying much more in the way of benefits overall, or without reducing the benefits of those who can't do any work.
> It would technically bring more people into the system, but they'd be at the top end, and therefore only be receiving a small fraction of the current levels of benefits
That's not how the maths works. Assuming an even distribution of people at each wage level, changing this to 30% effectively doubles overall spend.
So your solution is "spend a lot of extra money on social security", which is fine, but it doesn't satisfy the constraints.
But even so, smoothing out the curve some might be better overall even if the max amount drops.
Also you could extend the curve so that 'benefits' go negative at the high end. Now your budget is fine...
> Also you could extend the curve so that 'benefits' go negative at the high end
You've just invented tax, congratulations.
You have a very different definition of 'massively' than I do.
> You've just invented tax, congratulations.
Positive taxes can balance out negative taxes, ~tada~.
The original constraint was not a $0 increase. I did not violate the original constraint.
And even if you did take it to be $0, it said you can't "just afford to" increase. Proposing a tax to make up the difference meets that critera.
But even inside a hard "no more spending" constraint, it's not nearly as unsolvable as you make it out to be. It's quite possible that giving less money to people mildly below the old cliff edge, while giving more money to people mildly above it, is a net positive. That doesn't screw over people at the bottom, and it doesn't increase total cost.
Going from a hard cliff to a 90% marginal rate was obviously better, right? And going from 90% marginal rate to 85% was obviously better, right? They decided to stop at 63%. It doesn't mean that going further is a priori wrong.
And on top of all of that, smoothing out the curve to 50% very likely motivates more people in the range to work, reducing the amount of benefits they use.
I surveyed opinions on tax brackets a while back, and it seemed like there was a big psychological barrier at the 50% rate.
Most high earners would be willing to pay a 50% marginal tax rate (albeit some very grudgingly) but almost nobody was willing to go over 50%.
What’s good enough for the rich should do for the poor as well. The benefit drop off rate (effectively a marginal tax rate) should be 50% at the very most.
“For each dollar earned, I get to keep more than I give away in tax/benefits” is a cliff edge, but I think a reasonably justifiable one.
Edit to clarify: if your salary is £100K and you get a £10K raise, you see almost none of it in your payslip. But if you’re on £120K and get the same raise you get to take a good chunk of it home. That’s what seems silly to me.
Some people want higher taxes and some want lower; what I’m saying is, 50% stood out as an arbitrary threshold that many people seemed possibly willing to agree on.
Some complained that rich people shouldn’t be expected to prop up the rest of society, but conceded that progressive tax bands might be okay as long as the top rate was no more than 50%. Others felt that highly progressive taxes were essential; they wanted at least 50% as the top rate.
What are you replying to?
Fiscal policy comprises both borrowing and taxing; the two are fungible as far as spending is concerned.
To be clear, I easily understand how a high marginal rate is demoralizing and unfair at the low end. I'm not convinced it's a problem if tax brackets at the high end go to some number above 50%.
This 63% thing is the replacement for "working tax credits" -- it's a top-up of wages for people on low paid work. People get their wages, and then on top of that they get extra money.
In the past this would have been working tax credits.
The advantages are that claimants do not need to ask for permission before starting work. They can just do the work and then declare it. The disadvantages are that the system can't cope well with zero-hour contracts or self-employment, and this is leaving people in severe financial hardship.
As an example, you can reword this just as accurately to say that for every dollar less the person makes, they actually only make $0.27 less because benefits kick in for $0.63 of it. You can reduce that 63%, but when phrased that way, do you want to?
> You need $30,000 / year to live at a minimum in our society. We will make sure everyone that makes less than that gets enough in benefits to make up the difference.
That's not a 100% tax rate for any money earned under $30,000 / year. It's reduced benefits because the definitions of the system (the minimum amount needed to survive) indicate the system only needs to make sure everyone is at a specific minimum level.
You can argue that working costs money (transportation, child care, clothing, etc), and that's a valid argument against working if the amount you make would mean you wind up with less money available for other things.
However, it's still not a tax. It's a limitation in the analysis of cost of living requirements. Calling it a tax is disingenuous.
In the same way that any benefit program being cancelled (eg. movies for kids for free every Friday on the town green, etc) are stealing.
It's a benefit that had some or all of it taken away.
(I mean, if you don’t like the framing, fine, but you specifically said you have a “hard time following” the argument.)
My problem is that I don't see it as capturing less of the wage, I see it as being granted less of the benefit / social safety net.
When you don't make enough money to support yourself, society kicks and and gives you enough so that you're ok (you meet some defined minimum). As you earn more, you need less support from society to be meet that minimum, so you're given less.
Eventually, you get to the point where you meet the minimum without assistance from society. At that point, the benefit is no longer needed (by the definition of the program).
At no point are the benefits your earnings, and at no point are your earnings being taken away by the less of the benefit. Rather, you're just not being assisted by society anymore because you don't need that assistance.
If the recipient of those benefits can't see that and, instead, sees them as "this is mine and you're taking it away", then I argue that's a problem with recipient. They are wrong. They should be happy the benefit was there for them when they did need it... and that it will be there some someone else when they need it. That is the point of social safety nets.
Now, I get that there's some "emotional attachment" to getting the money and then not getting because (as the recipient sees it) they're working (which is wrong; as noted, they're getting less because they need less, period). As such, reducing the benefits amount by a percentage less than 100% of earned ways helps mitigate those feelings. But at some point, the benefit must go away; it's not UBI. The rate at which it goes away is not going to make everyone happy, no matter what is done (that's the nature of compromise).
This is fascinating.
There is an entirely separate debate about tax rates and incentives for high income tax payers wherein it is suggested that marginal income tax rates almost identical to the 63% you are speaking of are fair, equitable, common-sensible and could not possibly deter earners from pursuing extra marginal dollars.
I have no comment to make about either debate.
I simply find it fascinating that an exactly opposite conclusion is made depending on the subject involved ...
And beyond that you're letting perfect be the enemy of good here. Eliminating the cliffs and capping the marginal tax rate of the poor at 63% is valuable progress. If you want things to get better you should celebrate the small victories, not treat them as an opportunity to complain more.
Universal credit replaces a wide range of legacy benefits. One of the legacy benefits it replaces is "working tax credits". These were payments made to people who were working and on a low income.
This part of Universal Credit "tops up" your earnings from work. They are in addition to your earnings. is.
When someone on UC starts working they get their pay from work, and on top of that they get their their universal credit minus 63 pence per pound that they earn from work.
In the past if you did more than 16 hours of work in a week all your benefit would stop, but under UC you can work over 16 hours in a week and keep the money.
Universal Credit work allowances: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/universal-credit-...
What the earnings taper is and how this affects Universal Credit: https://www.entitledto.co.uk/help/Earnings-taper-Universal-C...
How your earnings affect payments: https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit/how-your-earnings-affect...
To lay it out in numbers:
BEFORE £1 pay increase: £X earnings, £Y benefits
AFTER £1 pay increase: £X + 1 earnings, £Y - 0.63 benefits
DIFFERENCE: £0.37
So a pay increase of £1 leaves you with an actual total increase of £0.37. This corresponds to an effective tax rate of £0.63.
Yes, it's 'valuable progress'.
That doesn't mean complaints are invalid, or "letting perfect be the enemy of good". What a rubbish accusation. You're only letting perfect be the enemy of good when you use a problem as a reason to impede the weaker solution. This is a comment hoping for better. Don't shame that!
If your response to the weak solution is to talk about how bad it is, you're setting the wrong incentives.
The intent was to cut the funding to benefits disguised as a new system.
The salary was lower but would somehow remove her eligibility for food stamps?
I ran for the Federal Parliament for a libertarian party in 2007 largely because I supported their policy plan to reform taxation and welfare jointly. The concept was called "30/30": a 30% flat income tax, with negative income tax at 30% below $30,000 income. Capital gains and company tax would also be set at a flat 30%. The gist was to remove all distortions from different tax and welfare settings, so that any taxpayer was always facing the same deal: each additional dollar earned is taxed at 30%.
There were a lot of policies I didn't agree with, and naturally, those were the ones I got the most questions about. Running for a microparty that grabs anyone who puts their hand up is an ... interesting ... experience.
(I came second last with a whopping 0.7% of the primary vote, for those who were wondering)
I don't understand. How was she eligible for food stamps, if she already had a job that paid more?
This was a single mom with three children. She needs to arrange for child care while she's working and it's a good idea to set aside money for medical emergencies. I'm going to guess this job probably pays a few dollars above minimum wage.
Someone in this situation is absolutely eligible for food stamps. But if we get another four years of MAGA, then who knows, maybe not.
The equation was worse job + food stamps > better job without food stamps. The better job in the long run might have lead to better still. But she couldn't afford it in the short run.
A for tax brackets, why do they exist. I think our mathematics is advanced enough that things like tax brackets could be replaced by continuous functions. So its either by design or by lack of imagination that these discontinuities exist.
I've a friend from Finland who is vehemently opposed to any sort of means testing for any social program or aid. I see his point. Means testing creates all of the problems mentioned above ... and encourages those not eligible for them to view them as some burden that other people get but they pay for--fostering resentment.
Progressive tax brackets do not have discontinuities such that your income net of income tax becomes lower as a result of moving up a bracket.
it’s other benefits, tax credits, social programs, etc. that sometimes end up being designed with perverse incentives.
Social security, fire departments, medicare, primary education etc are all available broadly, and are broadly liked by people. People using these government handouts aren't considered lesser for it.
I'm not sure if you're speaking approving or not (or neither). It seems like a reasonable thing to do though. Amazon is bigger than any library, it avoids the use of physical space in city centres and the need to manage loan systems/handle stolen books.
I think the difference between then and now is that IT happened, so it's much easier to do things like calculate complex per-item tax rates than it would once have been.
It’s “not”
Your idea of a possible better world is so bad that you should feel bad! /s
It's really hard to defend libraries though. They're not just an inefficient use of space. They're bad for the environment too, as people have to travel back and forth all the time to swap books, discover the book they want isn't returned yet, etc. They're often badly maintained. Their books get damaged, lost or stolen. Their selection is really, really limited.
Buying a book online is a great replacement except for the buying part. For most people books aren't a big part of their expenditure. For people for whom it is it'd be reasonable to effectively give them the money back instead. Especially now the marginal cost of the "book" is near zero, like with software. If the admin systems were good enough you'd never have to think about it: it could be integrated with the booksellers checkout system so the cost is literally zero. Of course that's not how tax credits really work today, but it could be done that way.
I work remotely, sometimes from a library. I can request a space to work with others, and even hold large seminars if I wanted. There are dozens of free programs for kids to meet and learn, and there are opportunities for for working adults and the elderly, as well. My local library will even do interview prep for those who want it, which includes mock interviews from people in industry who donate their time. There's also 3D printers there, too.
Librarians are more than just people who can find books on shelves. They can help you research, and have access to a multitude of databases that you might not know about. As an example, I wanted to contact the owners of a business and had trouble finding that information. That info existed in a database I didn't know about, and a librarian helped me retrieve it.
I think your local libraries are very different to the sorts of libraries I used to use as a child. What you're describing there sounds more like a community centre of some sort.
Libraries are traditionally silent for example. You don't collaborate in them or else you get shushed. You definitely don't run 3D printers in them!
But I can see that if that's what you associate with modern libraries then replacing them with book purchase credits would seem a poor trade.
My local library has a 3D printer.
In general, I see libraries promoting their services via web sites and Facebook online, and physical bulletin boards in-house and around town.
My childhood, ~45 years ago rural Georgia (USA), had a great selection of proto-nerd books, even production facilities for the local-access cable TV channel.
Not strictly related to public library, but we also had a great time with after-school and summer maker programs sponsored by the County Extension office. In agriculture, everyone has to be a "maker".
(I don't know what urban regions were like. And as this was only about ten years after state-mandated apartheid, no doubt lots of kids were living in medieval conditions.)
2. Why do we call our smartphones phones at all? I mean, sure, they can make phone calls. But most people use them mostly for things that are not phone calls or phone-related at all.
That's how language works. Look at the etymology of any word you like. More likely than not, the literal meaning refers to something historical that may or may not apply or exist anymore. For example, software developers are called engineers. Does that mean they are experts when it comes to engines? And not just software. Civil engineers don't know much about engines either. Yet for hundreds of years, they have been called engineers and for thousands to come, they will be. This is not a bug. This is the natural life of words in human languages.
I've got this funny feeling that Congress likes legalistic solutions to problems because they are mostly lawyers. (All lawyers when it comes to Democrats) The pain of filling out paperwork for means testing seems less painful to them than it does to the general population.
The 'swiss cheese' approach to social services is one of the major reasons why U.S. health care is so FUBAR and so hard to fix. Old people have Medicare and they vote -- they don't see there is a problem. Many people get insurance from their employer and might have no idea what their employer pays or how stressful it is for employers to negotiate benefits every year. Veterans have a program, there is Medicaid for really poor people, Medicaid expansion for somewhat poor people, Obamacare exchanges for people who are almost poor, etc.
When you add it all up there is a small pool of people "left behind" and most of those people are transiently uninsured because they'll wind up in some covered category. Balance that against a larger population afraid of losing what they have, and you have gridlock.
[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/negative-incom...
The variety and complexity of "enough to feed their families" is crazy.
[0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...
The technical insights were far more informative in terms of dating trends.
> Apparently, an online dater’s imagination is the best performing mutual fund of the last 10 years.
If few older people sign up to OKCupid, that would be a sample bias and the average height would be noticeable higher.
Edit: “Adjusting for age, adults ages 18-74 years with an annual income of $15,000 and over were observed to be 1.2 inches taller than those with an annual income under $4,000”, amongst other serious biases (whiteness, education) that affect average height the would be expected to be in OKCupid sample. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_11/sr11_224.pdf
Over 60's are about 1" shorter. Hispanics are a lot shorter.
I am pointing out that the sampling biases are important when looking for cause and effect when comparing against a population average.
Look at "A woman's age vs. the age of the men sho look best to her" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617...
and then compare that with "A man's age vs. the age of the women who look best to him" https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/1439100617...
One of the founders of Okcupid (a data scientist) wrote a book, Dataclysm [1], using data from Okcupid's platform; I highly recommend it (this is where the above comment's [2] graphs are sourced from). You get other "interesting" observations, such that most people don't describe themselves as racist, but a surprisingly high number of people are [3].
[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offl...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379741
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/380086/the-uncomfort... (In Online Dating, Everyone's a Little Bit Racist)
Why/how would people come to think that way? As the parent comment says, this is fundamentally a biological thing.
[1] https://www.insider.com/leonardo-dicaprio-girlfriends-reddit...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/azjti7/leo...
That story is an advertisement for Leonardo, not a fundamental truth about human sex lives.
Disagree. Wikipedia quote "in the old indigenous religions, women married between 12 and 15 years of age". The most generous read of this (and the one I'm inclined to agree with) is that men genuinely factor emotional maturity and morality and so on into their sexual selection and preferences, where the least generous read is that men hide their ephebophilia when answering surveys.
What definition of merit are you using that it's not?
> most people don't describe themselves as racist, but a surprisingly high number of people are
Calling people racist for preferring to date a particular race is just silly, you might as well call people sexist for preferring to date a particular gender.
A: If it's aesthetic, sure (though one might ponder to what extent euro-centric beauty standards are indicative of inherent attractiveness vs a desire to fit into the current dominant culture: fair skin is now very popular world-wide, skin lightening is a big thing in Asia, the most popular plastic surgery tends to try to replicate european features, etc)
B: if it's because you think someone else's genes are inferior to yours... that might be the actual definition of racism. In his final book Where Do We Go From Here, MLK calls this out:
> Often white liberals are unaware of their latent prejudices. A while ago I ran into a white woman who was anxious to discuss the race problem with me. She said: “I am very liberal. I have no prejudices toward Negroes. I believe Negroes should have the right to vote, the right to a good job, the right to a decent home and the right to have access to public accommodations. Of course, I must confess that I would not want my daughter to marry a Negro.” This lady could not see that her failure to accept intermarriage negated her claim to genuine liberalism. She failed to see that implicit in her rejection was the feeling that her daughter had some pure, superior nature that should not be contaminated by the impure, inferior nature of the Negro. It is the Teutonic Origins theory warmed over. The question of intermarriage is never raised in a society cured of the disease of racism.
No true Scotsman. Also, maybe she didn't want her daughter to suffer the cost of how society treated mixed race couples at the time. That's society's racism on display, not hers. I think we should all just be a little more charitable.
In defense of humankinds' innate fairness, though, I feel I should point out that all the reasoning about genetics and demographics and 'those people' in the world will not overrule someone's intrinsic assessment of a potential partner's attractiveness. The young lads and lasses will go out and shack up with whoever tickles their fancy. The older generation will tut-tut and justify their disapproval, but who ever listens to them?
Just give it a few years. I know that Slate (a mainstream publication) a few years ago published an article which mentioned in an aside that it is bigotry for a heterosexual man to refuse to date a male who identifies as a woman. I will be completely unsurprised if in a decade or two the same argument is applied to gender preference, period.
And with your line of reasoning can an intersex person (such as someone with XXY chromosomes) never be considered a man nor a woman?
Your understanding of reality is flawed. XY chromosomes provide the instructions for the human organism to construct a male body -- they do nothing to prevent the altering of it later on.
Also, is this not 'hacker' news? Chromosomes are just the source code -- eventually we we will hack the souce or the binary all we want.
How are you going to take a grown man, whose physical traits are obviously different from a woman (broader shoulders, taller, more muscle mass, deep voice, not to mention his reproductive system, and other documented differences in other organs), and turn him into a woman? This is physically impossible and is akin to changing a banana into a fly.
> if someone is indiscernible from a women without inspecting their molecular structure they are for all practical purposes a woman
And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.
Well, the spectrum of bone sizes / muscle mass do have crossovers between the sexes. Obviously you're not going to turn a 6'5'' 300lb man into a believable woman but if that same man starts to transition at 16? Who knows. And there are plenty of people who are well within the size parameters of the opposing sex even in adulthood.
> And physics and biology would still disagree with you. This warping of reality to fit some unscientific narrative is getting out of hand.
Disagree with what? I said for all practical purposes. Sure, you could in theory make a biological and physical distinction -- it just won't be relevant to 99% of people if the difference is not available to them. Does a multi-platform software user care if he's running the ARM or x86 binary? They are two vastly different beasts but if the compilers work the user has no distinction.
> They're two very different things. Flight is obviously possible because the inherent laws of physics allow it, and we observed other creatures do it.
You are missing the big picture. What we view as physically possible now will change, as it always has throughout history. Space travel used to be 'physically impossible', heck so did circumnavigating the world. We will eventually reverse engineer our brain structure -- downloading our consciousness might be feasible one day. Do you think people will care about XY chromosomes when they can swap bodies? Or in a world that heavily uses VR?
So now there's a notion of "believable" and "unbelievable" changing of men into women? That kind of completely brings down this entire house of cards now doesn't it?
Think of it from another way. If there's an earthquake and a man pretending to be a woman dies in the rubble, and they discover his remains 50 years from now, do you honestly think that they'll classify him as female? His skeletal structure is masculine, and no amount of pretending or hormones or surgery is going to change it.
How so?
> Think of it from another way. If there's an earthquake and a man pretending to be a woman dies in the rubble, and they discover his remains 50 years from now, do you honestly think that they'll classify him as female? His skeletal structure is masculine, and no amount of pretending or hormones or surgery is going to change it.
You're too hung up on the 'essence' of someone. It's not relevant in any practical way. If someone told you your spouse had a different set of chromosomes would you suddenly stop loving them?
You seem to be completely ignoring the generally agreed-upon scientific consensus that gender and sex are not equivalent; sex is biology, and gender is mostly performance. A transwoman is a woman (gender) even though they're biologically male (sex).
There can be studies into why some people have this condition, perhaps it could be due to environmental or upbringing reasons, but the solution is not to expect others to dissociate from reality and pretend that that person is the sex he "wants to identify with". It's no different from asking others to treat that person like a dog if he feels like it.
I'm also unclear as to what the question was which prompted the answers from men and women, or what the motivations were. There is much more to a relationship than sex for procreation, and almost everyone seems to realize this fact. So the conclusion is that men simply find young women attractive (and the "reproductive age" evo-psych just-so story cannot justify it), or men no matter how old they are continue to want children, at the expense of a relationship with a fully developed adult.
Just not as much as older mothers.
And rate of infant mortality vs mother's age: https://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/hua_hsu/cohen_i...
Both have a minimum in the early 30s, a decade off from these numbers. Granted, there's likely some confounding due to poverty rates vs age of pregnancy, but the data simply does not support the conclusion that 20 is the best, healthiest age for a woman to bear a child. There's still some development and biological maturation going on into the 20s.
https://books.google.com/books?id=8dKKCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT232&lpg=...
Rounding up to 6' definitely would've been stretching the truth too much though.
Nevertheless, I always use real height (5’3”) in dating profiles, thankfully my current wife didn’t care (we met on OkCupid). Given that me and her only put exactly 1 or 2 profile pictures and zero description and we still able to meet, should be considered anomaly.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170307114207/https://theblog.o...
Always found their blog posts an interesting look at the underlying data and user behavior. But now they're scrubbing them?
There's nothing remotely partisan about these being a bad thing. _Everyone_ should agree that these make no sense and mis-incentivize behavior. Yet these flaws remain for decades despite being known and discussed for approximately the entirety of their existence.
This issue is eerily similar to the 'border crisis' we've been facing. The issues surrounding the treatment of immigrants that have been decried as inhumane and unethical were fully in force long before 2016. Of course, it wasn't an issue for the Democratic party until we got closer to the census and the other team was at the helm.
I don't think there's any real evidence that either party has the best interests of the people at heart, or that they have any genuine intent to fix the issues at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae#Politics_and_the_...
These issues are not very complicated: give people free stuff and they support you, let the next consuls/emperor worry about the revolts in Sicily (or whatever) that the Dole causes.
We keep saying that these problems will come back to haunt us, but that's all history has ever been.
Many dark matter detection experiments rely on detecting an annual modulation, i.e. an excess of detection events later in the year, when the Earth would be going into the 'dark matter wind'. This helps one distinguish the desired signal from backgrounds that don't change throughout the year, like cosmic rays or ambient radioactivity.
One particular experiment has been claiming a positive detection for two decades, leading to a lot of confusion in the field. It was recently argued [0] that this is due to a discontinuity in their data analysis. The team might be analyzing their annual modulation by subtracting out the average rate in each year, leading to a discontinuity at each year boundary. So if their detection rate is slowly going up, e.g. due to detector aging, it would look like an annual modulation, where the rate is lower in the beginning of the year and higher at the end!
Still, it would have been nice to do something more productive than spend six months at Intel for ~5k after taxes.
This is an incredibly dumb way to structure things.
1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut...
Congress seems to focus on ensuring wealthy citizens and corporations gain more wealth, and not making things fair for everyone else.
Which has the effect of transferring their wealth to someone else (the vendor of the financial product) who just sold something that was effectively worth nothing, for a great deal of money.
It's the most bizarre sort of wealth redistribution I've ever heard of.
On the other hand, if you can deduct traditional IRA contributions, you can make prior-year contributions up until the tax filing deadline, and keep your money. If you're eligible for an HSA or solo 401k, you can also use those to similar effect.
For example, regarding health insurance subsidies (mentioned in the article), deductible IRA contributions must be added back when calculating your income. As are other sources of income. E.g. tax-exempt municipal bond income doesn't count for Federal taxes but it does count for income limits for the health care subsidy.
Offhand, I'm not familiar with income limits for an HSA. It's quite likely that allowed income sources and deductions vary for these various programs.
Not true. IRA/401k/HSA reduce MAGI for healthcare purposes. Do not confuse MAGI for the healthcare marketplace with MAGI on your tax return; those are two different figures.
https://www.healthcare.gov/income-and-household-information/...
But I knew that I saw IRA being added back somewhere! It turns out I was thinking of FAFSA. IRA deductions are added back for computing income for financial aid purposes.
Tax exempt interest is added back for both healthcare and FAFSA.
That's why tax programs and tax accountants are essential. It's difficult for people who don't do this for a living to remember all of this.
The function looks like "y = x <= 48560 ? x : x - 7200" and means that, at the other end, someone who makes $55760 would end up with the same as someone who makes $48560.
It's not necessarily worth nothing.
It has a very high chance of going to $0, but it could also have a very small chance of going to $1 million so that the other party in this trade is not necessarily raking in a lot of profit (or any) by making this trade many times over.
There were only two insurers available through the ACA exchange in my county in 2019. They were Kaiser and Premera. The cheapest plans from Kaiser were a pair of bronze level plans (one with an HSA, one without) for about $770/month. The cheapest Premera were bronze plans at something like $1000/month.
An individual in their late 50s just under the subsidy cutoff would get a subsidy of around $660/month, so if they went with a Kaiser bronze plan would be paying around $110/month. Not too bad at all.
For 2020, the same Kaiser and Premera plans are available at about the same cost (actually, they may even have come down a few percent). But there are also two new providers. One of those has a couple plans slightly cheaper than Kaiser, but comparing side by side the Kaiser bronze plans are better in most ways, and Kaiser also has more locations.
That other company's plans, though, are silver plans, not bronze.
The subsidies are keyed to the cost of the second cheapest available silver plan and so these "no better than bronze but for some reason silver" plans greatly lowered the subsidies. What would have been a $660/month subsidy in 2019 is now only about $400/month in 2020, meaning you'd pay this year around $370/month for the cheapest plans in my county.
Going from $110/month to $370/month in a year when the cost of plans went down slightly and the number of insurers on the exchange doubled is pretty damned annoying.
(edit: deleted parent quotation)
So, if $0 at $20000 income, and $5000 at $40000 income.
A person with $21000 income will need to pay $0 + ($21000 - $20000) / ($40000 - $20000) * $5000, a.k.a $250
I was born on the cut-off date for Little League, so I was the youngest player on the team my first year (and the youngest for my grade the other years.) Do to ambiguity in how the cut-off date wording was written, I ended up (legally) playing a fourth year when I was 13. I was never a big kid but at this point I was certainly bigger than all the 10 year-olds and more importantly had gained coordination and experience. It was my favorite year playing baseball.
(As an aside, I paid karma for it the next year ... I spent eighth grade in a city Teener League where I was once again the smallest, least experienced kid. And the city league was way more cut-throat than what I'd experienced in the suburban setting my previous four years.)
I wonder if we shouldn't group kids by size for sporting activities instead of by age.
There's a famous statistic in Canada that NHL players are much more likely to be born in January and February than September-December. The reason being is they were nearly a year older than other kids they were paired with, so they did better at the sport and thus kept it up as they grew.
Seems silly.
Depending on how small your buckets are, you may end up with a scarcity problem (players and admins/coaches). Also, age matters a lot in regards to coordination. A 13 year old who is roughly the size as a ten year old will, on average, have a large advantage.
Some people just aren't cut out for athletics genetically. Some grow later on and may or may not be interested. Age seems like a fair sorting criteria and general enough to not introduce too much complexity.
This is an interesting claim. How much is a large advantage? Do you mean in hockey specifically? Or in athletics? Or any given task?
Age isn't particularly fair but it isn't the worst either. As a kid, being around kids younger than you can be really displeasing. When you're a kid, the only thing you want is to be treated like you're older/better than you are. If you keep getting put on teams for people who are small - it's likely you're being put on teams for people who are smaller than you.
I had to play baseball with 7-yr olds for about 3 years. It wore me down as a kid. I gave up on baseball at that point and said I wasn't doing it anymore. The reason I had to play with them is because no coach wanted me on their team because they saw me as too small. (Small town, they didn't group by age as much as they did by size) I'd see kids go up to bigger-kid teams and get bigger but I stayed the same size.
As a kid - it was super disheartening to be stuck with the same 7 to 8 year olds for all that time and seeing people you used to play with in the bigger kid league. It sucked.
That said - baseball is probably the ONLY sport I can imagine being where you could move kids up by age and not by size as much. Football, soccer, basketball, etc. all involve a serious size component to them whereas baseball is less so - in my mind.
For reference - I grew up to be a normal sized adult. I was just super late on the curve compared to my peers.
Football was the only sport that segregated by size in my school system's leagues, in middle school. Well, besides wrestling, of course. They're contact sports.
I’m amused that the kids who did worse are absolutely necessary for the kids who do better. They end up getting wasted by the process, demotivated, but they are a necessary brick to step upon.
It’s the same consideration when talking about male suicide. Are they necessary for others to feel good? We could solve a good part of it as a society, but at the expense of providing an environment where males fail less, have a better social net, receive more love, and are less pushed to succeed in their career to be recognized. So we could solve it, but it may cost our economic growth. Is that why male suicide isn’t getting solved? It’s getting less funding than even dog shelters, and less attention than much smaller problems.
No.
There's no evidence at all to support this view. In fact there is evidence to support the view that people who feel good when others feel bad are more likely to have suicidal tendencies.
This is how it's done in rugby in New Zealand and maybe a few other countries, but not most. It's much more important in rugby than in baseball!
I think the most interesting graph is the final one, for marathon finishing times. The idea that people will fudge numbers to meet (or avoid) official definitions is commonly believed (and shown repeatedly here). It's more interesting to observe that it's not just people using motivated reasoning, but also that people will alter their performance to hit highly visible targets.
In Sweden, the principle is that everyone pay into the system, and everyone gets benefits from it.
So everyone, rich or poor, gets a $130/month payment per child under 18. There are many other examples.
The price is that while the US has a very progressive tax system, where high income earners pay a lot of tax, while the low & middle pay very little, in Sweden everyone pays a lot of tax. It (kinda) works because everyone also get a lot back from the system.
So Sweden has very high taxes, but most people get similar value back. You can think of it as a forced savings system in some ways.
There are a few jokes about the Matural Distribution (Matura is the name of this exam) or the Polish Gaussian.
It is the Polish language, which is the most discontinuous. However:
- There are quite a few scores for the essay which are subjective (e.g. on the style).
- It is an official procedure that in the case of results on the edge, the person marking should mark an ambiguous score in the favour of the student.
Given that it's subjective, I find that a really generous and positive take on marking protocol. It takes some perspective to note that while you can't see the value in someone's work, there may still be value in it.
edit: After reading through the article in full, I understand perhaps that's not what's going on exactly. Just teachers trying their hardest to find ways not to fail the exam as it is such an important life step for that person. Still a virtuous thing to do!
By pushing more to pass:
- either the next year the problems will be more difficult,
- or it devaluates the worth of passing an exam.
Also, 30% is very low (especially as such cut-off are for the basic level exams, not advanced level exams). You get the high school diploma, but it is not something that is enough to get to any univ. that makes any sense (some will take such students, but only as they are being funded on the level of enrolment OR they are private and are essientially "a bribe-in rates for a diploma" style).
I think you begin to be right as people move into academia though, certainly you want people who are actually good at the subject to be the ones passing university and going into the work force.
The funny thing about the "almost there" argument is that what it means is the actual line is more fuzzy, but a bit lower. That is, if the "official" cut-of is 30, and teachers are willing to "find an extra point" for people with scores of 28 and 29 but not 27, then the actual cut-off is 27.
I had a prof at uni who for programming projects would say: "The deadline is 6pm on Friday. But there's a 6-hour grace period where you're allowed to be late." Inevitably someone in the class would say, "Doesn't that mean that the actual deadline is at midnight?" To which he would respond, "Yes, of course. But if someone submits a project at 12:01 and it's rejected, when they say 'But I was only 1 minute late!', I can say, 'No, you were 6 hours late.'"
It is interesting when there are a few deadlines (e.g. early bird, regular, last call).
The grace period I set for the hardest homework assignment was 1:05--probably cut off a few people who were hoping to extend a two-week assignment by 3 or 4 hours.
IOW, my professor's insight that there had to be a hard deadline somewhere was correct. But he missed the fact that not all hard deadlines are equal: a hard deadline that is 10 minutes past a natural "anchor" is much easier for anchor-prone humans to meet than a hard deadline right on a natural "anchor".
Which is a bit strange, because the official university policy with regard to scheduling actually already took into account this natural anchoring: It was official policy that if a schedule said 10:00-11:00, the class was actually 10:10-11:00. The idea being that it's much easer for the "hard end" of a class to be at 11:00 than 10:50.
The "suspicious discontinuities" shown in this fantastic post are evidence for it.
It seems to be an Iron Law of Human Nature.
There's a tradition of displaying a color for your username based on your ELO rating (for example people would brag about being Red or Yellow on topcoder).
So people tend to stop competing forever after hitting the next level just to preserve their color!
Graph distribution of ratings: https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/52470
Then I realized/recalled that is what histograms do. They flip the plot between the two axis. The original, non-histogram, plot is really turnout (y-axis) vs registered-voters. But that would look very different (generally such plots are very noisy, with a running-average that mimics a horizontal line). Then, if you wish to know what's the distribution of registered-voters with respect to turnout, you take a histogram.
edit: on second thought, the plot still doesn't make sense. The y-axis should be # of polling stations, not # of registered-voters.
edit 2: This article [0] has a plot that confirms my suspicion (y-axis is supposed to be number/frequency of polling stations, not number of registered voters).
I'm sure this happens. Parents can also get divorced, the kid then becomes a dependent of a poor parent.
But it goes both ways. E.g. in a case I'm familiar with, a friend of my daughter:
1) her father died when she was young, IIRC a junior in high school
2) now she's poor, mother doesn't have or make much money. Fortunately there are things like life insurance and social security survivors benefits to help.
3) colleges like to give good financial aid packages to poor people.
4) mother remarries, but this is a 2nd marriage and so people are older, with existing children
5) now mother is part of a household with a lot higher income; sucks for the daughter because now she isn't getting jack-shit in terms of college financial aid
I certainly wouldn't expect her new stepfather to want to pay $20,000 or more per year tuition for an 18 year old girl whose mother he just married. Especially when he has his own kids to think of for college.
Unfortunately for the kid, community college became the only option.
E.g. if you want to lose $5,000 just buy a bunch of options that are way out of the money, that have a perhaps 1% chance of paying off.
99% of the time you lose $5,000, which is what you wanted.
1% of the time you win $500,000, which is a nice problem to have. That payoff will probably dwarf the financial penalty of whatever discontinuity you were trying to work around.
It's even more appalling that people hardly acknowledge such bias.
> prosecutors can charge people for amounts that are not the same as the amount seized and then notes
If someone is caught with 500g you can simply charge 280g and make your life easier. If you charge 500g the defendant will argue it was just 450g, which even if irrelevant makes the case seem weaker to the jury--death by a thousand cuts. But if you charge 280g and present evidence of 500g, it makes the case seem more like a slam-dunk to the jury.
If you had to work to parse it like I did, the TL;DR is that a minority (30%) of prosecutors are responsible for the "bunching" and it seems they intentionally are choosing to prosecute more cases at this level.
So, there may be police falsifying evidence, but the paper couldn't detect that and it seems more driven by prosecutors choosing to do "bunching" to get the amount of crack to hit the minimum.
IANAL so not sure what bunching means. Maybe instead of charges from separate arrests, they group them together as one large case?
I see your point - do they just say #2 to sound impressive, however, they seem to know the structure of AQI pretty well and folks get promoted into that role when a death occurs, so I’m going with “likely true”.