Suspicious Discontinuities

The perverse incentives around these discontinuities is one of the worst misfeatures of programs intended to help people. Here is a real example. My niece wound up with 3 kids, divorced, with inconsistent child support payments. So she went on food stamps. She was looking for a better job. She found one, interviewed, and they wanted to hire her. But the salary that they offered was $0.50/hour too much for her to stay on food stamps, and was less than…

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 a few hundred dollars over…

Unfortunately I can't find the reference any more, but there was this great presentation by someone explaining how in computer systems developers will "optimise for the requirement", and ignore anything outside of it. The example was latency. If the programmers were told to achieve less than 1 ms for 99% of the requests -- then sure enough -- the 1% of requests would have sky-high latencies of multiple seconds. If told they needed to achieve 1 ms for 99% and…