I wasn't trying to say that valuing the death based on earnings was some sort of fullproof awesome plan. It isn't, and for exactly the reasons Monk brought up (and I'm sure even more reasons when you think about it).
I was just saying, that if our options are -
A) Pay what they would have reasonably made
B) Pay truckloads and truckloads of money because their death made someone really really sad
I'll take A.
Of course, millions of people die and no one gets a boat of cash. This is merely referring to the frivolous lawsuits when someone sues the hospital, or a chemical company, for the death of their loved one etc.
Oh I agree, I think both A and B are terrible. I just don't understand the logical basis for A: why is it the lifetime earnings that would go to the parents? that is money they would never have seen anyways... It just seems to come out of nowhere, as if someone said, "we need a really big number... how about lifetime earnings". What is the argument for using that number, I don't get it?
What about C: the replacement cost of an individual (how much money it takes you to replace that person). If that person is someone's offspring, their replacement cost is pain and suffering + cost to conceive and raise a child, or adopt and raise a child in the event that they are too old. If the dead person is a spouse, employee, etc, the replacement cost is fairly straightforward (the cost of doing the work to find a new one). All of those seem fairly calculable.
How about Sam Walton, who went from a country kid to the founder of what would become Wal-Mart and Sam's Club?
Or Herman Cain, who was born in segregated Tennessee to a cleaning woman and her barber husband who eventually became CEO of Godfather's Pizza and a Republican Presidential primary contender?
Or the former CEO of Best Buy (who recently stepped down over corruption allegations) who began his career as a cashier at Best Buy?
Or any of the current group of first generation millionaires? (A first generation millionaire being a person who made their money as opposed to inheriting it).
those people all got help from somewhere, i guarantee it. here is a list of places they most likely got help from:
1. public school and teachers therein. obama makes SPECIFIC reference to this in his speech: "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life."
2. education loans
3. business loans
4. their freaking parents
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. it's a very true truism. everyone gets help from other people, somehow or other. this is the core of what the president said. The part i think people find objectionable is the last sentence - "Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." But it's true, insofar as you add one crucial word to it - "yourself" (which i think is implied). "Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that [yourself]. Somebody else made that happen." there is no possible way that the president meant to imply that business owners had no role in their business' inceptions.
Just using the projected future income of a person as their worth is rather fallacious, since people are relatively high maintenance. IE if you want to project forward their income, you also need to project forward the resources they would have used (living expenses) during that same time. You would have to use predictive models based on the consumption habits of the person before death, weighted against behavior patterns of people with similar behavioral traits and socioeconomic status throughout different ages through the time of retirement.
Given how many people have a negative net worth, the value could potentially be negative. You would have to pay the cab company for killing your son.
Yeah, that's what I think about the silliness of some of these lawsuits.
totally valid. even if you assume a net positive 'worth', why would the parents be entitled to that money? They were probably going to die before he made the bulk of it anyway...? Can someone explain to me the basis of valuing death based on potential earnings?
Just because you can sue someone for a ton of money doesn't necessarily mean that the life was actually worth that much though.
Take a 30 year old person, say they make 30k a year. Say they work to 70.
40x30k=1.2 million
But then, they get killed by a chemical truck with a drunk driver behind the wheel.
The chemical company pays 10million.
Was he worth 10million?
I'm unsure, part of me thinks we should pay 1.2million.
In these kinds of lawsuits, I'd do the math, and not award money just because someone is sad, or feels personal loss. Pay what they would have earned. As cold as that sounds. So in the case of a baby who dies as a result of bad doctoring during birth...what is that baby really worth?
I'd maybe take the parents combined income / by half x 18 years
So if the parents combined make 60k year, 18x30k=$540,000
I know someone will say "WTH! Thir child is worth more than that!!! ZRGG!!" But c'mon really?
We have no idea what was going to happen with the kid, and the parents still get a half million dollars. They get rich, and their kid could have been a meth head working at 7-11.
As far as the sunk cost think.
What happens when you pay 1million to train a superb pilot to fly spaceships - and that person runs a red a creams someone else, killing everyone involved?
Was the pilot still worth more than those he killed? What was their worth at the time of death?
EDIT: This kind of thread always reminds me of the "First World Problems" meme
As if the starving, malaria infested, dying children of wherever are worth anything, and here we are talking about the millions of dollars a parent might get in America if their perfect angel isn't born according to plan.
That kind of makes sense - but why should the parents get that money? the baby wasn't going to give that to them over its lifetime, why does it's financial earnings translate to worth (to the parents)? the only people that baby would have been monetarily benefiting are the government (through tax revenue). As far as I can tell, pain and suffering are just about the only things you can legitimately claim payment for.
oh, that and replacement cost. how much is it going to cost you to make another baby to replace the one that died. That's pretty easily calculable.
Had a good friend and teammate sitting at a stop light behind his father when a cab rear ended him. He spent 2 weeks in ICU and passed away. The parents took the cab company to court and they instantly because multimillionaires(and part owner in the cab company) Because he was younger, they estimated out an average salary till an average death and then it was multiplied for pain and suffering. So kids can be worth much more then a 30 or 40 year old when calculating actual worth.
that's his perceived worth in terms of net worth (how much the person has), or worth to his parents. this is much different than worth to society. your friend's worth to society so far had actually been negative, since he consumed resources and did not output anything substantial (yet, unless he invented something really grand, etc). The future is very uncertain, so as i said before, the best inference we can draw about his continued and future worth to society would be based off the trends of his parents.
Quote from dcartist »
The price of training a pilot is not the "sunk cost fallacy", because we are not discussing amounts that were haphazardly sunken into a person, but the amount money we are SYSTEMATICALLY putting into training each individual of a group of people that we have deemed as a society to NEED, and are continuing to train on an ongoing basis.
I guess if the training that we pay for is proportional to the output of the trained induvidual, then it's a basis for comparing people's starting points (an intercept). It's where you start off: how much you are contributing to society post - training. But you could just measure that value instead per my previous post: directly measure the individual's impact. There are actually a lot of companies that do this, using a peer - review process (see: valve).
I don't think anyone has really addressed OP's question yet...(except dcartist, but i was writing this while he posted the question was if we can quantify someone's value to society.
person A kills person B for $70,000. That means person B was worth $70K to person A, not to society.
a baby dies during birth due to medical malpractice, and the parents receive a settlement for $500,000. That baby was worth $500K to the hospital, not to society.
I think that worth to society must be calculated by how much you currently contribute, like an instantaneous rate of productivity. This is something I've thought a lot about. an individual's worth to society should be how much good they're doing right now for society. predictions of future worth are too difficult, unless you've got a lot of data to base that forecast on. In the following models, the term "work" means "good to society". This value can certainly be negative, especially in the case of criminals. Money is always a good way to do this - if a criminal caused $500 in property damage, that's negative 500. If a CEO had an idea that caused his company to be $5MIL more profitable, or a firefighter saved a house worth $400K, etc, all of these are ways to quantify a person's impact (+ or -) on society.
Old people (left their parents care for more than 10 years):
model should take into acount past trend and magnitude (slope and intercept) of work accomplished. standard model II (RMA) regression should do it, build a predictive model. Integral of that model is that person's lifetime productivity.
young people (children):
harder to account for. as a society, we can always make more, so they are inherently worth less (i.e. we haven't sunk funds into training them yet - I know how fallacious this is). It's also very difficult to quantify their worth, since we have no past evidence on which to make predictive models (insufficient data). I think the best way to predict future performance is based on their parents' trends, and if there is sufficient data, also the relationship of their grandparents trends to their parents trends (F3 ~ F1:F2).
Value to society, which was the original question, can vary a lot, and may have to do with the training that went into that person.
e.g., US airforce might invest $1,000,000 into training a single pilot.
Special abilities might make somebody way more valuable to society. What is the value of society having a General Patton? Can he be replaced by a lesser man?
How about a Oppenheimer or an Einstein?
I think this is a much better way to go about answering the question.
i LOVE un-sets, I hope this becomes a reality. A card making fun of the "two explores" snafoo would be great, or something like Prodigal HydromancerU
Creature - Human Wizard
t: target player takes a shower
1/1
to poke fun at all of the magic players who smell TERRIBLE (just look at any complain thread in magic general)
If I happened to have a really large bag containing the numbers 1 to infinity and decided to pull one number out of the bag at random, what's the chance that I would pull out the number 41? Is it 0% or is it impossible for the probability to be calculated?
you can express that probability as a limit.
P = probability of pulling 41 from the set
n = size of set
1 = number of draws
P = 1/n
the limit of P as n approaches infinity IS zero. This is not to say that 1/infinity is equal to zero, that's just the limit. For all intents and purposes, zero can be used in real-life applications well enough. I would say that the probability is zero. However: where are you going to find an infinite set in the real world? even the number of hydrogen atoms in the sun is a finite quantity.
math is a tool to examine the real world. people often forget that, and think that reality is based off of math (as in a computer simulation). If your mathematical constructs do not have real-life analogs/equivalents, you're doing math wrong.
she sounds like the kind of girl that can't think things out rationally, that expects you to read her mind, and is very entitled. she flat out told you that everything is ok, so why would she need you to be at the hospital with her? i've had a few girlfriends like that, the "irrational emotional" type. i can't stand it, and my current girlfriend (of 4 years now) is a much better communicator. I think the OP should wait until the end of his road trip to decide what kind of person his girlfriend is, and whether or not she can be trusted to be level headed. if not, move on. if so, good job rectifying the situation.
If you notice her getting upset and being passive aggressive (not kissing or holding hands because she's "upset") then I'd split up. Youth is too short to be hung up over a girl with unrealistic expectations from you. Also, she may be wanting to break things off with you. And just trying to find a decent way to do it. She may feel like she has to have a reason other than wanting to be single. So she'll get super upset over little things. Things neither one of you can control, and blame you. And act like this: Not respond to your calls/texts then say you weren't there for you. Not kiss or hold hands cause she's "upset". (yeah right, it's okay for you to get lunch for her but she is so upset she can't kiss you? bull) General passive aggressive nature etc. etc.
this is very familiar to me. you can't be expected to put up with that kind of crap. don't reward them for trying to control your life, it will only end poorly, trust me. relationships are all about compromise, and if you're the only one being compromised, get out of there.
I learned a whole bunch about what the term "intellectual property" means, and how copyrights and patents were originally put in place to create a large public domain of free stuff, but lobbying has killed that initiative
The answer to your social problems is not anonymous chats. Sure, it's a boost to self-esteem that can help you move on, but you need to put your energy into the real world.
Couldn't agree more. OP, you gotta get out there. It may be hard, but just start talking to people, make some friends. That can sound like a monumental task when you've been living in a basement for 5 years (personal experience), but it's possible. I don't know about you, but in my case, I had to give up on a lot of my opinions to make friends. "Living" on the internet tends to polarize and radicalize a person, and you can't bring that into real life, you have to let it go. Not saying that this is you, but it happens. Finding common ground with people can be tough, but it's bound to happen eventually. Just get yourself out there (to social events i mean, like FNM or yoga or whatever). You can do it, just take it one step at a time. Talking to people over the internet, no matter how fulfilling, is NOT a substitute for real face-to-face human contact.
I can't stand people who play the game competitively. I'm talking about people who only want the prize at the end, and the glory of winning. For me, magic is more about the fun things that happen during the game, the cool interactions between cards, and the interesting gamestates that evolve. but some people have to win all the time, and i really don't understand that mentality.
My friends always try and get me to go to FNM with them, and when I do, it's always the same 10 or 11 people playing their tier-1 standard decks. those kinds of decks are no fun to me, because they're so expensive and are very seldom as synergistic i think they should be. my decks are always "build around" decks, where there's some synergistic strategy between the cards. that doesn't work out so well in a competitive format. All of this isn't really so bad, it's just the nature of the event. but the people there are frequently mean and look down upon me, telling me that my decks are bad or being paternalistic to me, "hey let me look through your deck and tell you how it can be better". The answer is always "buy more expensive cards that work well on their own". That's no fun at all.
I have a Motorola and my phone (Droid Bionic) can copy data features no problem. Apple didn't even flinch when my phone was announced and it was known to able to do such things. What is it about these phones that makes Apple not want them to be released? Apple knows these phones can outdo the IPhone and so they are stalling them them as long as they can.
I think they're just trying to protect their business. Specifically, patent No. 5,946,647 covers iOS' ability to hilight data features, such as emails, phone numbers, etc, in emails, texts, and web pages. Apple patented this, it's a legitimate claim on their part that their software features this capability. if samsung copied apple in this regard, then the injunction would be justified.
is it patent trolling? probably. Is reform necesary (redefining software patents as art instead of engineering)? definitely. under the current definition of the law, is apple in the right? seems like it to me. maybe samsung shouldn't have infringed on apple's patents.
I don't think apple has much to be afraid of, their app store (where the real profit is made) is much more profitable than google's. Part of this is because developers prioritize iOS development. many people seem to think this is because of android market fragmentation, which is really google's fault for not having very specific hardware requirements for android phones. this leads to phones with vastly different hardware configurations running different proprietary versions of android. in manycases, phones are locked out of updating to a newer version of the android operating system, even when hardware requirements are met (why i will never buy a motorola android phone).
people like simple stuff, and apple's walled garden is easier to navigate than google's. I don't think they have anything to fear quite yet.
Oh I agree, I think both A and B are terrible. I just don't understand the logical basis for A: why is it the lifetime earnings that would go to the parents? that is money they would never have seen anyways... It just seems to come out of nowhere, as if someone said, "we need a really big number... how about lifetime earnings". What is the argument for using that number, I don't get it?
What about C: the replacement cost of an individual (how much money it takes you to replace that person). If that person is someone's offspring, their replacement cost is pain and suffering + cost to conceive and raise a child, or adopt and raise a child in the event that they are too old. If the dead person is a spouse, employee, etc, the replacement cost is fairly straightforward (the cost of doing the work to find a new one). All of those seem fairly calculable.
those people all got help from somewhere, i guarantee it. here is a list of places they most likely got help from:
1. public school and teachers therein. obama makes SPECIFIC reference to this in his speech: "If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life."
2. education loans
3. business loans
4. their freaking parents
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND. it's a very true truism. everyone gets help from other people, somehow or other. this is the core of what the president said. The part i think people find objectionable is the last sentence - "Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen." But it's true, insofar as you add one crucial word to it - "yourself" (which i think is implied). "Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that [yourself]. Somebody else made that happen." there is no possible way that the president meant to imply that business owners had no role in their business' inceptions.
totally valid. even if you assume a net positive 'worth', why would the parents be entitled to that money? They were probably going to die before he made the bulk of it anyway...? Can someone explain to me the basis of valuing death based on potential earnings?
That kind of makes sense - but why should the parents get that money? the baby wasn't going to give that to them over its lifetime, why does it's financial earnings translate to worth (to the parents)? the only people that baby would have been monetarily benefiting are the government (through tax revenue). As far as I can tell, pain and suffering are just about the only things you can legitimately claim payment for.
oh, that and replacement cost. how much is it going to cost you to make another baby to replace the one that died. That's pretty easily calculable.
that's his perceived worth in terms of net worth (how much the person has), or worth to his parents. this is much different than worth to society. your friend's worth to society so far had actually been negative, since he consumed resources and did not output anything substantial (yet, unless he invented something really grand, etc). The future is very uncertain, so as i said before, the best inference we can draw about his continued and future worth to society would be based off the trends of his parents.
I guess if the training that we pay for is proportional to the output of the trained induvidual, then it's a basis for comparing people's starting points (an intercept). It's where you start off: how much you are contributing to society post - training. But you could just measure that value instead per my previous post: directly measure the individual's impact. There are actually a lot of companies that do this, using a peer - review process (see: valve).
person A kills person B for $70,000. That means person B was worth $70K to person A, not to society.
a baby dies during birth due to medical malpractice, and the parents receive a settlement for $500,000. That baby was worth $500K to the hospital, not to society.
I think that worth to society must be calculated by how much you currently contribute, like an instantaneous rate of productivity. This is something I've thought a lot about. an individual's worth to society should be how much good they're doing right now for society. predictions of future worth are too difficult, unless you've got a lot of data to base that forecast on. In the following models, the term "work" means "good to society". This value can certainly be negative, especially in the case of criminals. Money is always a good way to do this - if a criminal caused $500 in property damage, that's negative 500. If a CEO had an idea that caused his company to be $5MIL more profitable, or a firefighter saved a house worth $400K, etc, all of these are ways to quantify a person's impact (+ or -) on society.
Old people (left their parents care for more than 10 years):
model should take into acount past trend and magnitude (slope and intercept) of work accomplished. standard model II (RMA) regression should do it, build a predictive model. Integral of that model is that person's lifetime productivity.
young people (children):
harder to account for. as a society, we can always make more, so they are inherently worth less (i.e. we haven't sunk funds into training them yet - I know how fallacious this is). It's also very difficult to quantify their worth, since we have no past evidence on which to make predictive models (insufficient data). I think the best way to predict future performance is based on their parents' trends, and if there is sufficient data, also the relationship of their grandparents trends to their parents trends (F3 ~ F1:F2).
EDIT:
see: sunk cost fallacy (as i mentioned above).
I think this is a much better way to go about answering the question.
Prodigal Hydromancer U
Creature - Human Wizard
t: target player takes a shower
1/1
to poke fun at all of the magic players who smell TERRIBLE (just look at any complain thread in magic general)
you can express that probability as a limit.
P = probability of pulling 41 from the set
n = size of set
1 = number of draws
P = 1/n
the limit of P as n approaches infinity IS zero. This is not to say that 1/infinity is equal to zero, that's just the limit. For all intents and purposes, zero can be used in real-life applications well enough. I would say that the probability is zero. However: where are you going to find an infinite set in the real world? even the number of hydrogen atoms in the sun is a finite quantity.
math is a tool to examine the real world. people often forget that, and think that reality is based off of math (as in a computer simulation). If your mathematical constructs do not have real-life analogs/equivalents, you're doing math wrong.
this is very familiar to me. you can't be expected to put up with that kind of crap. don't reward them for trying to control your life, it will only end poorly, trust me. relationships are all about compromise, and if you're the only one being compromised, get out of there.
http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
Couldn't agree more. OP, you gotta get out there. It may be hard, but just start talking to people, make some friends. That can sound like a monumental task when you've been living in a basement for 5 years (personal experience), but it's possible. I don't know about you, but in my case, I had to give up on a lot of my opinions to make friends. "Living" on the internet tends to polarize and radicalize a person, and you can't bring that into real life, you have to let it go. Not saying that this is you, but it happens. Finding common ground with people can be tough, but it's bound to happen eventually. Just get yourself out there (to social events i mean, like FNM or yoga or whatever). You can do it, just take it one step at a time. Talking to people over the internet, no matter how fulfilling, is NOT a substitute for real face-to-face human contact.
My friends always try and get me to go to FNM with them, and when I do, it's always the same 10 or 11 people playing their tier-1 standard decks. those kinds of decks are no fun to me, because they're so expensive and are very seldom as synergistic i think they should be. my decks are always "build around" decks, where there's some synergistic strategy between the cards. that doesn't work out so well in a competitive format. All of this isn't really so bad, it's just the nature of the event. but the people there are frequently mean and look down upon me, telling me that my decks are bad or being paternalistic to me, "hey let me look through your deck and tell you how it can be better". The answer is always "buy more expensive cards that work well on their own". That's no fun at all.
it's the algorythm apple has a pattent on, not the actual feature. go read the pattent:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,946,647.PN.&OS=PN/5,946,647&RS=PN/5,946,647
also, what do you mean by "Apple knows these phones can outdo the IPhone"?
is it patent trolling? probably. Is reform necesary (redefining software patents as art instead of engineering)? definitely. under the current definition of the law, is apple in the right? seems like it to me. maybe samsung shouldn't have infringed on apple's patents.
I don't think apple has much to be afraid of, their app store (where the real profit is made) is much more profitable than google's. Part of this is because developers prioritize iOS development. many people seem to think this is because of android market fragmentation, which is really google's fault for not having very specific hardware requirements for android phones. this leads to phones with vastly different hardware configurations running different proprietary versions of android. in manycases, phones are locked out of updating to a newer version of the android operating system, even when hardware requirements are met (why i will never buy a motorola android phone).
people like simple stuff, and apple's walled garden is easier to navigate than google's. I don't think they have anything to fear quite yet.