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Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

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Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#41

Post by lupire »

richrichie wrote: post #3

> The following histograms of Russian elections across polling stations shows curious spikes in turnout and results at nice, round, numbers (e.g., 95%) starting around 2004. This appears to indicate that there's election fraud via fabricated results Two observations: 1. Why from 2004? Things were much worse in Russia before 2004. 2. The numbers of this election seem to agree with approval rating polls conducted by we…

2004 was the first election after the dictator took office and decided he would never leave. (He pretended to leave once, installing a puppet for 1 term, due to Constitutional limits. When he officially returned, he amended the Constitution to make himself dictator for life.) He's still dictator 20 years later.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#42

Post by gopher_space »

ddtaylor wrote: post #28
lesuorac wrote: post #25

> It's generally believed that this is caused by a discontinuity in youth sports: > 2. Within a given year, older kids are stronger, faster, etc., and perform better I've seen a few youth ice hockey games and by god it's just unfair; there's a kid like a foot taller than the rest. I'm kind of surprised there isn't some system that buckets kids by size , it can't be fun for the small kids to get elbowed in the neck ev…

I remember playing basketball as a kid and being very entertained beating kids that were much taller than I was. Sure, they had the height, but they lacked so many fundamental skills and sometimes it was clear they didn't think they had to work very hard or do practice drills because they were tall. Fun fact, the ball and hoop don't care about any of that. It lets me steal it from you and it lets me put it into the h…

> Fun fact, the ball and hoop don't care about any of that.

Tangent: I grew up around a high school basketball coach and saw that all of the adults knew exactly who was going to college in which sport, and usually by late jr. high. We'd go to games just because he said some kid on the visiting team was going pro and that's exactly what happened.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#45

Post by AceJohnny2 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #18

I went to school at a relatively late age and started in community college. The school/state had a policy where any independent income earners making less than 35,000/year would not pay tuition. A single dollar over that would require paying full tuition of ~$60/unit or about $750 a semester. One year I worked a little more overtime during the holidays than usual and realized with a week to go in the year that I'd go…

> I have never understood why things like this don't use some sort of sliding scale, rather than absolute dividing line.

Because it's easier to pass a law that sets up such welfare when it has a simple threshold, or at least it was.

Last time this article came up, someone referenced a group of lawmakers in the US who were working at smoothing out these awful discontinuities, but I can't quickly rustle up the link.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#46

Post by toast0 »

lesuorac wrote: post #25

> It's generally believed that this is caused by a discontinuity in youth sports: > 2. Within a given year, older kids are stronger, faster, etc., and perform better I've seen a few youth ice hockey games and by god it's just unfair; there's a kid like a foot taller than the rest. I'm kind of surprised there isn't some system that buckets kids by size , it can't be fun for the small kids to get elbowed in the neck ev…

If you've ever played Nintendo's Ice Hockey (1988), it's super realistic, and the tradeoffs of big vs little are clear: little guys bounce off of big guys and big guys move slow.

My kid is in 12U youth hockey and is a big guy, and yeah, smaller kids can often usually skate around him, but if they bump into him, they fall over, and often he'll get a "big kid penalty" which means he gets a break in the penalty box for the crime of being tall and physically near a smaller player who fell over. We had to do a bit of coaching on how to make (allowed) physical contact so it reasonable contact doesn't look like prohibited contact (mostly be sure to have hands off when kids are falling, it's real easy to look like cross checking when it was actually just incidental contact).

Some of the littler kids seem to have a lot of fun getting away with a lot more physical play than he can. Although he says he enjoys it when a small kid gets mad at him and tries to knock him over, too. So at least so far, seems like everyone is having fun.

I don't think you can really just bucket kids by size and ignore age though... there's a lot of mental development between 10U hockey and 12U hockey, and putting a big 10 year old on the 12U team is often not right because the level of play is so much different, most 10 year olds won't keep up. At the same time, a small 12 year old on the 10U team is going to have a big advantage from age.

Around here we do have two different leagues, one for 'recreational' teams and one for 'reputation' teams, and you more or less have to demonstrate a decent amount of skill to get on the rep team, and then you're playing with much better teams. All the teams are composed of a mix of big and small kids though.

Edit to add: All that said, I think bucketing kids by age makes sense and I agree that there can be advantage to being at the extremes of the cohort. Since the US school system usually has a different cutoff date (september-ish) than US youth hockey (jan 1), you might see different results where there's grade level based high school hockey and age based youth hockey... but not in Canada where the cutoff is Jan 1 for both.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#47

Post by danaris »

JohnMakin wrote: post #18

I went to school at a relatively late age and started in community college. The school/state had a policy where any independent income earners making less than 35,000/year would not pay tuition. A single dollar over that would require paying full tuition of ~$60/unit or about $750 a semester. One year I worked a little more overtime during the holidays than usual and realized with a week to go in the year that I'd go…

Frankly, because many people think that any kind of welfare or assistance is, at best, a necessary evil—and more often just evil—and they want to make it painful, complicated, and hard to access.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#48

Post by chubbyFIREthrwy »

>One reason people were looking for ways to lose money was that, in the U.S., there's a hard income cutoff for a health insurance subsidy at $48,560 for individuals (higher for larger households; $100,400 for a family of four). ... That means if an individual buying ACA insurance was going to earn $55k, they'd be better off reducing their income by $6440 and getting under the $48,560 subsidy ceiling than they are earning $55k.

I had the opposite problem for the 2022 tax year: I turned out that, with investment losses and no earned income, my adjusted income was below the poverty line, which ... means your ACA healthcare subsidy is cut off entirely!

https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/individuals-and-fami...

The "logic" there (from reading discussions of the cutoff) is that, "well, if you're below the poverty line, you should be on Medicaid and not on the ACA exchanges at all, silly!" Okay, but if you have wildly varying income, and a high income from previous years, you don't know that you'll be "in poverty" this year, and won't qualify because of the past year.

I was tempted to update my taxes to claim phantom income from my imaginary cash-based business, which would then get me the subsidy, but that feels ick.

(Which, I know, being retired on crypto, I also feel ick about taking the subsidies to begin with, but that's a different issue.)

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#49

Post by andrewflnr »

layer8 wrote: post #30
andrewflnr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, though, even if the players don't want it to be. The bug is in the rules.

There are unspoken rules, and neither spoken nor unspoken rules are perfectly enforced. It’s only a game if you treat it as such.

> There are unspoken rules, and neither spoken nor unspoken rules are perfectly enforced.

Yeah, it's a pretty bad game.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#50

Post by autoexec »

amanda99 wrote: post #40
autoexec wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something seems very off with that image. I've known a lot of different people who were on welfare over the years, and not one of them had a standard of living anywhere close to what someone who nets $60,000 a year does. That said, there is absolutely a cliff where you could risk a loss just by taking in more money.

The main feature of that image is "childcare" which seems to be a fixed subsidy of $16k (and "CHIP", ~$4k related to child health care). I don't know what the former means and how these are calculated, but if you don't have children, this graph would look a lot less exciting.

The ones I've known with kids all seem to have it far worse. If they were getting a $16k tax credit or whatever it must not have been making up for the other costs involved with raising children.
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