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Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

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Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#101

Post by chatmasta »

nominatronic wrote: post #90
chatmasta wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At any given time, most accounts are not playing, so the distribution shows a bias towards values just over a 100 Elo threshold FYI, that graph only includes players who were active (played a game) this week.

Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that out of all the accounts included, most of them won't be actively playing games right now.

In fact none of them will be, because it's computed by analyzing the rolling last 7 days, and each accounts "ranking" is whatever their ranking was at the end of that period (i.e. "now," more or less).

Basically I'm not sure why you're saying that leads to a bias toward "slightly above 100."

Ohh... unless you meant slightly above a multiple of 100. I see now. Because people stop playing when they hit a milestone, right.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#102

Post by rhelz »

If you are upset about somebody not wanting to take that $50k a year job because it would cost them a subsidy, just wait until you hear about trust funds and inheritance!!

If you think losing a $20k subsidy is demotivating, imagine inheriting $25 million.

So instead of knuckling down and working hard to contribute their fair share, they are incentivized to just loaf. No telling the costs to society from these freeloaders.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#103

Post by [deleted] »

Karellen wrote: post #99
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #72

The 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.

So... people who'd been misled into making bad decisions and were being given help because they really needed it, made you feel like you were being punished by not getting similar help you didn't really need because you were making OK money and had avoided making the same kind of mistake? IMO, that's a really glass-half-empty way of looking at the situation. You did good! Try to give yourself a break. People like you…

[deleted]

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#104

Post by 2devnull »

The problem is labels, and beyond that political parties. Politicians like labels because the parties depend on labels for branding. They want to use rhetoric to group people, like “poor” or “rich” and the second you do that you create the discontinuity.

Avoiding benefit cliffs requires more than understanding the issue of discontinuities, it requires the reduction of identity politics which neither party is on board with. Parties themselves are labels. They cater to the human desire to simplify and form tribes around those labels.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#105

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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…

Not to condone the school's policy, but could you have donated the excess income to charity to get your taxable income back under the limit?

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#106

Post by orangecat »

armchairhacker wrote: post #52

At 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…

Right, and this is one of the reasons why I support a UBI that replaces most existing welfare programs. Amazingly some people criticize UBI on the grounds that it removes the incentive to work, when it's almost exactly the opposite.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#107

Post by callalex »

baggy_trough wrote: post #80
armchairhacker wrote: post #52

At 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.

What is the point of saying something like this? Would you prefer that people just not bother to do anything and let poor people starve to death instead?

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#108

Post by nerdponx »

jancsika wrote: post #85

> 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). There are a number of factors that can cause the details to vary (age, location, household size, type of plan), but across all circumstances, it wouldn't have been uncommon for an individual…

These aren't financial hobbyists.

At $48,560, these are mostly people who don't have a lot of money relative to their living expenses, and are doing what they need to do in order to not feel totally broke. < $50k in a lot of places was already getting hard to raise a family on, even before Covid, all the moreso if you're paying full price for ACA exchange insurance, which was then and remains now disgustingly expensive.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#109

Post by [deleted] »

dragonwriter wrote: post #61
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. They often do use sliding scales, but that’s more complex (and expensive) to administer, and (because of multiple interacting programs) ends up not actually solving much of anything. Also, because of the way things (including available funds) work, but even ignoring budgeting for the increased admi…

[deleted]

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#110

Post by nerdponx »

mrandish wrote: post #89

Coding hard cut-offs like this into legislation, regulation or policies seems crazy almost to the point of negligence, incompetence or malice. Especially when it's so obvious such cliffs will incentivize behavior certain to cause negative or perverse outcomes. It's even more incomprehensible when implementing graduated thresholds is so well understood. A related common failure mode is baking in fixed, absolute thresh…

It's often said that the cruelty is the point.
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