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Comment by ique | Hacker News Reader

There are three things I find annoying by this game.

I shouldn't be driving a car if I don't have money for it. I should sell the car and always take bus, since later in the game it says I have that option.

I had to choose if I should stay with an hourly paycheck or work by the piece. I choose piece because then I thought I could put in some more work, but then it just said I couldn't work that much. Well if I had known that I would have stuck with an hourly check, that's math you can actually work out in real life before making that decision.

It says I have a college degree but that wont help me, and then it says I'm probably too uneducated to help out my children with math homework.

All in all some interesting facts about the american low-income society, but the choices and different aspects of it are very strange. You could do a lot more to save money as well as make more money than is presented here. Well basically, kind of annoyingly simplified.

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I'm currently teaching a college algebra class in which students learn to solve the kind of problem presented. (It would be very interesting to know where "train problems" got their start, though...)

The vast majority of my students cannot solve that sort of problem by themselves after seeing several examples of similar problems worked out. Yes, this is the last math course some of these students will have to take. No, they are not all liberal arts students.

Given how quickly unused knowledge decays, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to assume that your average student with a bachelor's degree won't remember how to solve a train problem.

Given how quickly unused knowledge decays, I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to assume that your average student with a bachelor's degree won't remember how to solve a train problem.

Well, that just sounds like an indication that we're handing out far too many Bachelor's degrees to people who don't deserve them.

Out of curiosity, are you allowed to fail these students, in this compulsory course?

Many of them do fail. But they don't go away. It's not uncommon for people to take it three or four times until by luck or sheer force of will they finally pass with barely satisfactory grade.

Of course, this might be confirmation bias on my part. I never again see the ones that drop out.

Part of the problem is that students are told how to solve these kinds of problems rather than being taught to reason their way through the problem.

I looked at it and 'reasoned' they will meet when the combined distance of both trains is 300 miles. No math required for that step.

I believe most adults and kids could then figure out 50 MPH + 70 MPH = 120 MPH and 300 Miles/120 MPH = 2.5 Hours or am I giving people to much credit?

Yeah, if you choose hourly (I did) then your boss just cuts your hours in half. But then later I lost a whole day of pay when I called in sick, but I don't really see how I couldn't make up that time seeing as I was only working 20 hours a week.

And what state are we living in in this game? Is there a state where a single parent making $9/hour doesn't get subsidized health insurance? If so maybe this fictive character (in pretty poor health it seems) needs to move. Apparently, all of your friends and family (at least your dead grandpa and friend getting married) lived out of state, so what are doing staying put.

Fun game, great info, but I agree with the over simplification. IRL, I can't pick an apartment without building an elaborate cost-benefit spreadsheet, so the slider bar abstracted away too much for my enjoyment.

He cut your pay in half, not your hours. It's stupid.

Why is it stupid? It happened to my aunt about ~3 years ago. She was making about $12.50/h doing phone ordering (very senior, trained everyone, etc.); the company was sold/acquired and she was offered her old job at $9.25/h during a fairly large layoff. Since she lives in Michigan where the unemployment rate is well over 15%, she decided not to roll her dice at job hunting. She took the 26% pay cut and went to work for the same supervisor the next day. At least her house is mostly paid off, although it's worth half what she bought it for ~15 years ago -- this was her retirement savings.

I think the point of the game is that many people just can't comprehend how easy it is to have bad things happen in a very substantial way... with very little notice and being mostly powerless to do anything about it.

Because no matter what you do, you get screwed. At most, it should inform you of the choices.

It informs you of the choices. It doesn't inform you of the unforeseen consequences. For all the flaws in this propaganda game, that isn't one of them. Neither is the "screwed no matter what" part.

It didn't tell me how much I would be making with either choice. I would at least know how many parts per day I produced, and it would be easy to calculate the daily rate from that. Not to mention that, in real life, you would probably be able to switch after having had your rate cut in half, or the supervisor would tell you "do you want to keep half your hourly rate, or switch to a per-part rate?".

There's nothing unforeseen about that.

Why are "keeping the job I have" and "job hunting" mutually exclusive decisions? Keep your job and apply other places.

If she's getting paid by the hour, every time she takes time off for a job interview costs her over $30. In a state with 15% unemployment, she'd have to roll the dice multiple times, and the likelihood of finding a higher-paying job isn't great; the likelihood of finding a higher-paying job in only a few shots is very low.

The game is also advocating playing on the lottery as investing in your future.

That's not even the right message to send out.

I don't think much encouragement is needed there. I hear the phrase "If / When I win the lottery..." cited too often as a cure-all. That weekly or daily lottery allotment would be better spent elsewhere but unfortunately isn't.

Non-linear utility of money, especially when negative money is involved.

I didn't buy the lottery ticket in the game, but now I'm curious -- I wonder if they bothered to code up a one-in-a-million chance that if the player buys a lottery ticket they'll actually win. That would be pretty cool.

"You won the lottery! You gain forty million dollars! OK, you were lucky this time, but the point about poverty still stands, okay?"

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