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Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

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Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#141

Post by robk »

gopher_space wrote: post #42
ddtaylor wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you expound more? How did this work across different fields of sport? I assume a basketball scout can recognize talent early in their domain but how is it crossing sports?

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#142

Post by vhcr »

We have some discontinuities in our tax code in Argentina, if you are an independent worker, and earn up to 11,916,410 pesos ($11,682) per year, you pay 793,332 pesos ($777) in taxes, around 6.6%, but if you earn one more peso, you enter the general regime, and start paying >50% in taxes.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#143

Post by jeffbee »

madcaptenor wrote: post #123
jeffbee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true, but the graph I posted is initial leases only.

I see you said that in your link. Maybe I should read more carefully before making comments.

Reading any part of it launches you into the top percentile already.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#144

Post by toast0 »

munificent wrote: post #129
toast0 wrote: post #46

Earlier 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 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. A friend of mine has a son who is giant for his age. The kid is 7 but he's the size of a late middle-schooler. One of the…

Yeah, we definitely get/got a lot of that. At his current size/age, it's not so bad, but it was definitely a bigger deal when he was a newborn that looked like 2 months old (delivery nurses didn't understand why we were in their ward), and a preschooler who looks older, where there's a lot of development happening in a short amount of time.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#145

Post by autoexec »

hammock wrote: post #113
amanda99 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chart (2012) is from Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare - so take note the commenters who are trying to suggest this is libertarian propaganda. Pennsylvania has a substantial program to pay for child care for many of its residents: https://www.dhs.pa.gov/Services/Children/Pages/Child-Care-Wo...

> The chart (2012) is from Gary Alexander, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Public Welfare - so take note the commenters who are trying to suggest this is libertarian propaganda.

In fairness, the linked image is sourced to a libertarian's blog and Gary Alexander is also a conservative who was appointed to Corbett's administration and was often criticized for extensive cuts to Pennsylvania’s welfare programs which he characterized as fighting fraud and waste until he resigned after a few scandals (https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2380594/ex-penns...) including the fact that he was still living in Rhode Island and was charging tax payers for his travel/commute expenses.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#147

Post by mikepavone »

chubbyFIREthrwy wrote: post #48

>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 ear…

> 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.

This wasn't setup this way because it was thought to be a good design, but as a political compromise. At the time, it was seen as important to keep the headline cost of the bill below some arbitrary threshold and for it to be revenue neutral (the wisdom of this is questionable in hindsight since the moderate Dems that supported the bill mostly got wiped out anyway and it never got any Republican support). Medicaid is cheaper for the government than ACA subsidies (at least for low income people given the way the subsidies are structured), partly because the government has a lot of negotiating power and partly because Medicaid is stingy.

This was made worse when the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government couldn't make receiving existing Medicaid funding conditional on Medicaid expansion (Medicaid is partially funded by the federal government, but the program is administered by individual states) so whether the Medicaid expansion is even available to you largely depends on whether your state is run by Democrats or Republicans (with a few notable exceptions).

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#148

Post by wizerdrobe »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #117
autoexec wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

16k wouldn't cover daycare in much of the US let alone food, clothes, etc.

What are you imagining the typical rate is in much of America. When we lived in the city we had a range of about 225 to 300 per week as of last year. Outside of the city we pay 160 per week.

The real issue was the waiting list…

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#149

Post by noqc »

nominatronic wrote: post #36

A similar fun example is the distribution of Elo ratings on a chess site, e.g. here's the weekly distribution on Lichess for Bullet games (less than 3 minutes): https://lichess.org/stat/rating/distribution/bullet It's easy to understand why this happens: - Player ratings will fluctuate by small amounts as they win and lose individual games. - People are happy to stop playing when their rating is at e.g. 1503, but if…

Haha, guilty. I put my rapid rating above 2k and haven't played in months since then.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#150

Post by autoexec »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #130
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.

How much of that standard of living is based on credit, though? Credit is largely based on income. Housing, payment flexibility for amenities and vacations, big ticket purchases that reduce long-term costs, etc. When 3/4 of those making less than 50k and 2/3 of those making less than 100k are living paycheck to paycheck, that extra flexibility influences quality of life quite a bit. Quote ( https://www.bankrate.com/f…

I'm sure that's part of it. It could help explain how one person has to live in a roach infested apartment while another can get a nice house in the suburbs. Same with having no car or only being able to afford a used one in poor condition vs having nice new cars with very low monthly payments. Those two things alone can mean a lot in terms of standard of living.

I know that they say it's expensive to be poor but it'd be a very broken system if we had a $60k a year social safety net for everyone, but poor people still couldn't afford fresh healthy food, reliable transportation, or adequate housing and were still fighting to keep their heads just above water.

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