Not a small town, but the Philadelphia Tooth Fairy Project sounds similar: https://www.inquirer.com/philly/blogs/public_health/The-Phil...
I first learned about this from Radiolab: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-pro...
271 karma · joined November 19, 2009
I first learned about this from Radiolab: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/g-pro...
His incredible 52 Assistants show is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jljt5Ml28FU
Which is to say, even a tinier drop in the bucket.
Simply reporting p-values is insufficient; there is a huge difference between statistically significant (high confidence that the value is not zero) and significant (the correlation is large enough that it's relevant for anything useful).
From the plots I suspect the correlations are pretty low...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/nyregion/in-reversal-new-y...
Agreed, though, that cyling in NYC can be incredibly dangerous. Every serious cyclist treats an accident as a "when", as you mention. And in my own experience (6 mile Manhattan commute, mostly on the Hudson), I could be in 3-5 accidents per week if not for extreme paranoia. I would not give up my helmet, irrespective of the legal situation.
As hard as economic value is to quantify, "enduring value" is even harder. So I won't even attempt to make judgments on that front.
Look at it this way. There are plenty of talented engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs out there trying to build the next big thing. Due to the incredible scale and reach of the internet economy, those who succeed will become fabulously wealthy. But most will fail (or at least not reach that scale) due to various circumstances---a misstep in execution, a superior competitor, our simply bad luck. There are certainly many small successes, but success or failure can seem like an incredibly binary event.
Why should engineers shoulder that risk? That’s the raison d’etre of finance and investment. Let those with capital take on the risk, and give the engineers enough security so that a “failure” doesn’t put a talented person out of the game. If every startup that demonstrates that it execute on an idea and can clear some threshold of viability gets a reasonable exit, then the investors will still get enough Facebooks to generate a good return, and the startup teams are much less captive to chance and fortune with respect to whether they can pay the bills or not.
In the long run, I envision an enormous amount of economic activity flowing through micropayments, where everyone is giving/receiving payments based on their production/consumption patterns. In that world, their rates are too high. But for the world as it currently stands, it may be ok.
My idea of a micropayment is about $0.25, so a minimum $0.05 fee is way too steep.
Even further, consider the impact that this tax structure has on people deciding to take on debt for higher education (ok, so that's frequently a bad idea anyway, but there have been other discussions about that). A smart single person might well decide to take on $100k (or perhaps even $250k as the law professor seemed to imply) to raise their lifetime earning potential. But then two smart single people get married. They would like to have kids, but what was originally a reasonable investment is now quite a handicap because of the fixed cost + marginal tax cost related to the second income.
If someone has the skill and ambition to succeed in a demanding professional career,isn't it better that they do so rather than doing their own gardening for fear of being judged? In general, it seems obviously good for society for a married couple to both work and outsource some of their domestic responsibilities that others can perform more cheaply. But our current (and even more, our future) tax code discriminates against this heavily.
That said, I used lilypond a couple of years ago and loved it.