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Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

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Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#171

Post by duxup »

thfuran wrote: post #135
duxup wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I changed career paths post age 40 via a coding bootcamp. Despite being a terrible student when I was younger, I found had a great time learning, and I've really enjoyed my job ever since. I found myself in a strange position though, lots of services offered benefits to students, discounts, internships, storage / compute time etc. I was not enrolled in a traditional university (although they were administering it), a…

>One internship I applied to did not seem to clearly indicate they were only really interested in younger, and more traditional students until the second interview. Well, you missed out on a lucrative lawsuit there if you're in the US. An interviewer telling someone they're not going to be hired because they're over 40 (or even just because they're not young enough, when they are over 40) is legally equivalent to tel…

When you're changing your career and trying to get into an industry ... it's hard to know how that plays out. More directly a buddy of mine, also my age, and in the same camp was straight up told by a recruiter they were looking for someone younger. He had her on speakerphone and asked her to repeat it and she did.

Then the question was, do you want to be the guy who calls that out? Trying to get a job...

I don't think the outcome is a sure thing, in that case I wanted to do / say something but I felt like it was the applicant's call. Not an easy decision.

I respected his choice to just move on, still burns me up a little, but his call IMO.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#172

Post by lannisterstark »

gottorf wrote: post #168
lannisterstark wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily, I'm okay with people not working if they didn't want to. Most people would end up getting bored doing nothing after a few months and work with what they like to do anyway.

Devil's advocate: the longer you stay away from gainful employment, the more marketable skills you lose. (This is one of the arguments against a minimum wage; that it keeps low-skill and therefore low-pay labor from establishing a foothold in the labor marketplace that would enable them to up-skill over time.) So UBI would incentivize the creation of a permanently unemployable underclass. I'm OK with people not worki…

> as long as those people are OK with subsistence-level living standards.

I mean, UBI never meant "Extravagant money." It has always meant something akin to "basic standards for survival."

The entire idea from what I understand is that you should be able to survive just fine, not have it pay for your 98" micro OLED :P

> the longer you stay away from gainful employment, the more marketable skills you lose.

I sorta relate to this as someone who's been coasting by at my current job for last year or so. But I'm also working to upskill myself actively. You bring a good point but I don't know what teh solution to that would be.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#173

Post by SmartHypercube »

I don't think this is a problem about "discontinuity". It's about the monotonicity of the function from income before tax (and insurance, etc.) to income after tax. So I don't think "sharp threshold" is a problem, as long as the law is "if you are making more than this amount, the extra part should be taxed at a higher rate."

From other comments I learn that some laws indeed do not work like this. Really?! That's awful.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#174

Post by lannisterstark »

skybrian wrote: post #170
lannisterstark wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily, I'm okay with people not working if they didn't want to. Most people would end up getting bored doing nothing after a few months and work with what they like to do anyway.

I'm early-retired and all I can say is that it didn't work that way for me. I do have more time, but I'm not so bored that I want to tie up my schedule. I'll come up with a project I can do at my own pace. It's sort of like telling yourself that you'll go back to school. Some people do, but most don't.

> I'll come up with a project I can do at my own pace.

Right, but wouldn't that be similar? Obviously there are going to be people who are going to say "screw it, I'm going to live like this" on a basic survival-wage UBI, but I doubt a majority would want to.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#175

Post by baggy_trough »

callalex wrote: post #107
baggy_trough wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's important to deal with reality as it is. Perhaps government is not always the best way to prevent poor people from starving to death.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#176

Post by hackerlight »

orangecat wrote: post #106
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.

Is UBI the same as a negative income tax that Milton Friedman advocated for?

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#177

Post by sircastor »

duxup wrote: post #95
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 changed career paths post age 40 via a coding bootcamp. Despite being a terrible student when I was younger, I found had a great time learning, and I've really enjoyed my job ever since. I found myself in a strange position though, lots of services offered benefits to students, discounts, internships, storage / compute time etc. I was not enrolled in a traditional university (although they were administering it), a…

I finished my bachelors degree after I turned 40. I was a much better student than I’d been in my 20s or teens.

My wife is friendly pursuing her bachelor’s and it is clear to both of us that universities are really just tolerant of non-traditional students. You won’t be treated poorly, but all of the infrastructure, tools, class progression, etc, is constructed around post-Highschool young adults.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a community college, but I suspect they’re slightly better.

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#178

Post by _carbyau_ »

immibis wrote: post #158
thfuran wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were, why would they offer welfare programs at all? Surely an "indolence tax" assessed on anyone with income below a certain threshold would be more cruel.

What do you think poor people would do if there were no welfare programs?

This is what I find perplexing.

Welfare programs are not for the poor.

They are so the poor doesn't "eat the rich".

(For those playing at home this is a slogan tossed around with connotations of society wide rebellion - which would not be a comfortable outcome for rich people.)

Re: Suspicious discontinuities (2020)

#180

Post by gopher_space »

robk wrote: post #141
gopher_space wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

We're talking about people dedicated to the idea of "sport" in general getting excited about kids in local communities who are already talented and driven enough to be twice as good as their peers. Sports scouts follow up on phone calls more than they discover talent hidden away in the cornfield, if you see what I mean.
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