Need to add this one here
https://twitter.com/martinmbauer/status/1769672126905090386
Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
71–80 of 294 posts
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#72The worst one of these that affected me was money helping people in the 2008 housing crisis. qualifying was based on what percentage of your income your mortgage payment was. So I would have got it if I had made a little less money, or if i had bought a house I knew I couldn’t afford. It felt like being punished for making the right decisions.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#73The discontinuities at the used care sale prices graph seems like an arbitrage opportunity on depreciation. Buy right after a round number, sell right before another, pay less on dep.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#74A friend of mine from a farming family in Europe once told me a story that his family would wait until the year one of his siblings was due to go to college and then invest in new farm machinery. Their reported net income for the year would reduce or go negative and the sibling would get to college effectively for free on a hardship tuition grant.
Huh? Wouldn't they have to depreciate it over several years so only a fraction of it would be a deduction in the current? Or is the idea that they'd buy so much capital equipment that even the fraction they could depreciate that year would wipe out all the other income? AIUI, the concept of depreciation exists in tax law precisely to prevent indefinitely deferring taxes via reinvestment (though it can't do anything a…
Many countries allow accelerated deprecation of designated equipment.
Here's the IRS's - https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/additional-first-year-depreciat...
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think you could bucket by age but have the ability to move kids around. The problem is that these youth sports can get very competitive, and then people will be tempted to move the bigger kids down to get an advantage.
At least in USA Hockey, it's not too hard to get approval for kids to 'play up', our 12U team this year had 3 kids that were under age by one year. Getting approval to 'play down' is a lot harder. Our competitive league rules say (sorry for caps) "HAVING 10U PLAYERS PLAYING UP AT 12U IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED, BUT OCCASIONALLY THERE ARE COMPELLING REASONS TO DO SO. EACH ASSOCIATION AT THEIR DISCRETION MAY ALLOW UP TO TWO 10U PLAYERS PER SEASON TO PLAY UP AT THE 12U DIVISION." And further players are on a case by case basis, determined by a league coordinator from the opposite side of the state.
USA Hockey rules don't permit playing down unless a doctor says it's medically necessary, but then they're not allowed to play on competitive teams. Simply being small or unskilled is specifically not an acceptable reason. [1]
IMHO: playing up is pretty easy to administer, but playing down would be very hard to administer fairly for competitive teams, so it's just flat out prohibited.
Edit for further thought: If you have enough participants, it might make sense to try running Jan 1 leagues and Jul 1 leagues and see if it makes sense to go to quarterly leagues too. Or maybe agitate to change the cutoff for Spring Hockey and see how that looks?
[1] https://www.sedistrict.org/page/show/834907-playing-up-down
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#76Similar to car prices, we see the same mental rounding effect in rents. People will rent a home for $2100 or $2200, sometimes even $2150 for those truly dedicated to price finding, but hardly anyone rents an apartment for $2137. Source: my data for the city of Berkeley https://observablehq.com/@jwb/berkeley-rent-board-data#cell-...
The car pricing seems to be that some amount of people round 79,999 down to 70,000 when determining mileage and so cars with 79,999km on the odometer are penalised much less than cars with 80,000km. I think the rent one is much more driven by "some landlords like round numbers for posting ads/doing their finances".
The "round prices" is definitely a factor, the math may say to rent for $2134 but the landlord will either round that down to $2100 or up to $2200.
And unless increases are limited by some law, they will usually only raise it by even amounts.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#77I was all excited when I saw on Zillow a decent new apartment complex in town with rents that were actually reasonable... until, after hours of studying photos and floorplans and neighborhood, I noticed a statement on Zillow, near the bottom of the scroll, in one of the tabs in right column, that the building is subsidized, and there's a permissible income range.
While some of us could qualify while on early startup salaries, I don't know how I'd feel about subsidies as a techbro, and I know I wouldn't feel good about having to move from a nice building (big time investment, moving monetary cost, and quite possibly moving to a crappier building) because the startup was doing OK.
I was disappointed, but not surprised. As a middle-class techbro, this is a very lite version of a much bigger problem that has affected many low-income people. News has long had stories about low-income people who are trapped with subsidies they need (housing, food, support for children, etc.). They make a lousy wage, and can't afford to get much of a better wage, because the societal safety net on which they depend would be ripped out from under them before they could afford it to.
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#78It's too bad income "cut-offs" even exist. Shouldn't it always be a smooth function?
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#79At least in the government, there should be a law that any hypothetical scenario where someone making more money before government taxes/incentives would cause them to earn less after, must be quickly resolved by replacing hard cutoffs with gradients. No benefits should apply 100% for anyone making under a certain amount and 0% for anyone making over. Instead there should be a range they slowly decrease, so that if y…
This is why people don't want to pay taxes at all
Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)
#80At least in the government, there should be a law that any hypothetical scenario where someone making more money before government taxes/incentives would cause them to earn less after, must be quickly resolved by replacing hard cutoffs with gradients. No benefits should apply 100% for anyone making under a certain amount and 0% for anyone making over. Instead there should be a range they slowly decrease, so that if y…
It all comes back to the fact that government is a low accountability sector, despite what many people seem to think.