![]() |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
Since I don't think the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation's goal was to destroy more value than they've created, I think they've erred, even as they write a $1 000 cheque to a good cause. The point is to highlight an opportunity for better fundraising practices, not to castigate individual coin-depositors (who may not consider their actions a waste of time). (And by the way: if we're talking in economic terms, leisure hours are more valuable than working ones, because you would demand a very high wage to convert that leisure into labour.) Quote:
This is just another version of the same sort of problem, except that we're talking labour instead of scrap metal (and in this case, the payout is certain, but in all likelihood smaller than the expenditure). Quote:
|
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
|
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Congrats Wave!!!!! I'm happy that everyone came together to help you!
|
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
Sure, maybe if only a few people had spent all that time depositing coins in the piggy bank you can say that those persons couldve been more productive with their time. However, the beauty of the process was that it only required a few minutes from each person in a large group of people to accomplish the same task. Trying to roll all of that time up into collective man hours is in my eyes, apples and oranges. Many people are more than willing to spend 10 minutes or so doing a task like that to help someone out. That doesn't mean you can take 48 people's collective 10 minutes each, add them together and get an 8 hour day of coin dropping. 1 person simply would not do that for an 8 hour day, which is why I cannot follow your argument. -Brando |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
I would like to shore Tyler's thanks to the CD community. Overall, I thought this was a fun and engaging (albeit repetitive) way of awarding a grant. I spent a lot of nights "feeding the pig" while on travel testing robots for my other (not FIRST) job. I chain emailed at least 50 people outside of CD and our team and they in turn passed the word on. At the very least, we cast our FIRST net further than we did before.
To address Tristan's comments: I am with Akash and Brandon so far as being confused by your logic and derisiveness toward this effort. Every year I personally put over $800 cash and easily 500-600 hours of my "leisure time" into Wave Robotics. All of our team members and sponsors donate their cash and energy to different degrees. Almost every fundraiser we have ever done would cost more than we would gain if we were to pay our volunteers even minimum wage. I know from talking to many other teams in the past, this is similar in their estimation. The coin donation effort was no different in this regard than every other effort every team has put into making their team more than just a collection of people. So why do we do this year after year? Why did CD step up to the plate and help our singular team to get this grant? IMHO, we are all givers to the core. We take solace in the fact that what we are doing provides something, that if it didn't exist, would make our community a worse place. This reply was not generated to continue an argument. It was generated to exemplify to the CD community how proud I am to be part of FIRST and CD. This entire organization was partially founded on creating something out of nothing and enabling people and eventually the greater society to be more responsible toward their fellow humans. Again thanks to the CD community for helping in this effort. I encourage every team to go to their local Chamber of Commerce or community involvement center and see what is out there. I would love to see another one of these grant games on CD soon. |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
It's simply about recognizing that first, what's most advantageous for the team may not be equivalent to what's most advantageous to society, and second, that if team members could raise more money by working longer at their ordinary jobs (hypothetically at minimum wage, because that's a conservative estimate) and just donating the extra wages to the team1 (rather than staging fundraisers), that might be a more productive use of time, if they're so inclined. (Maybe there are difficult-to-quantify benefits like camaraderie and publicity that are built by fundraising in your chosen manner—but if you fundraise more efficiently, you'll have time left over that you can dedicate to other forms of team-building.) Quote:
By contrast, if you give your leisure to the piggybank, and let it dictate the donation to the team, nobody is any better off than in the previous scenario. Not you, not your employer, and certainly not the team. That's why—compared to the alternatives—this is a bad choice when you consider society as a whole. So, however you give away that time, you've made the choice to forego something of value (free time), in exchange for something else (money or the team's well-being). The crucial difference is the rate of return. If you take the money you earn for working an extra hour, and donate it to the team, the rate of return is wage:leisure. If you take the time off, and use it to volunteer for the team, the rate return is proportional to your value in that capacity (for that duration). If you take the piggybank, the rate of return is low in absolute terms, and actually diminishes as the number of coins deposited increases. In gross terms, if many people take their excess wages for a total of 400 h and donate them, the team could stand to make a lot of money (based on whatever the wages are for those people). If the team receives 400 h of mentorship, that might also be very useful (but mentorship often requires physical presence, which isn't so easy to subdivide). If the team wins the piggybank contest, their return is $1 000, no matter if 0.001 h or 400 h were needed to reach a winning total—and given equal publicity-seeking abilities, the team's expected return is only $500. Surely for 400 h of labour—even other peoples' labour—they could do better than $500? (Or $1 000, if they're assured of the win.) When both prospective recipients are trying hard to win, this also means the marginal value of each deposit in the piggybank is infinitesimal—every time you contribute, you're giving the team ≈ $0—and the marginal cost is high—you're foregoing > $0 in wages. Quote:
But let's be clear: I'm not arguing that someone should spend 8 h dropping coins. I think that would be a bad idea for the same reasons it's a bad idea to have hundreds of people divide the work amongst themselves—and maybe it's even worse, because a person's tolerance for menial tasks probably diminishes with repetitiveness. (And yes, I am recognizing the irony of spending an inordinate amount of time discussing this topic, when perhaps I could be doing something more productive.) 1 Assuming for the purposes of this example that their employers will let them work on that basis. If salary is fixed no matter how much work you do, then this becomes more complicated—but the minimum wage should be a reasonable lower bound for the purposes of illustrating the point. |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Let me lay out a straightforward comparison, in the hope of divorcing this somewhat from the rates of return and other complexities.
Pretend you're a worker in Wisconsin, making the minimum wage of $7.25/h. You're employed for 40 h/wk, and have the option of working up to 5 h/wk overtime at your normal wage. (Overtime beyond that requires supervisor's consent, and is paid at 1.5 times the normal wage.) You're paid weekly, and your work is tracked by a timeclock. Consider two scenarios, A & B, for one particular week:
So in A, Wave needs to mobilize enough supporter-deposits to win the contest. In B, Wave needs to attract enough donor-hours to match the expected value from A (69, if the odds are even that they will win or lose, so the expectation is $500), or enough donors to match the benefit to society (138, for $1 000). At 50 coins/min, or 3 000 coins/h, the tipping point between a net benefit and a net loss to society is at 138 h × 3 000 coins/h = 414 000 coins. If you can win with fewer coins in play than that, it's a net plus to society, and you should play the game. If you can't, then an alternative was a better solution. In terms of statistical equivalence, you only need to make more than the expected value for the team to come out ahead. So it's best for the team to put the tipping point at 69 h × 3 000 coins/h = 207 000 coins. That's why the right choice for the team isn't necessarily the right choice for society. So, as it actually played out, you used something like 1.5 million coins to win (plus your opponent had a million and change, and those have to be accounted for too). At those wage rates, it would have been a net loss to society. Hopefully, that's a clear statement of what I'm trying to get across. Now, to add in one more complexity: in case B, the benefit to society is variable. That means, if Wave fails to attract enough donors, they could actually ruin their entire effort and make society worse off than in A (where the payout is guaranteed). So I guess you could call case A a form of insurance against insufficient donors—you accept a lower (fixed) return in exchange for certainty. But that's where the perversity of A comes in: since society always makes $1 000 from the grant, all you have to do is make sure your own actions don't harm society. Unfortunately, while every coin that you deposit helps Wave—at 414 000 total coins (the sum for Wave and the opponent), you start harming society. (That's why it's not crazy to say that "cheating" and getting kicked out could actually be better for society than playing the game.) |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Now, lets assumed you're a salaried worker, and make the same amount regardless of working 40 hours or 41 hours or even 80 hours a week. Suddenly your whole argument collapses because that extra hour of leisure time spent wouldn't have made you anything if you spent it at work. In fact, you could argue that it detracts from your hourly wages, as you're putting in more time for the same amount.
Now, lets assume an employer's view of hourly workers. Likely they'll want to cap people at 40 hours/week, otherwise they have to pay them overtime (it's law in most, if not all, states). I know - back in the day (high school/college) when I was hourly, I wasn't allowed to work more than 40... and my boss would literally be standing there at the end of the week if I was pushing the limit to ensure I clocked out on time. Now, the difference between working 40 hours and 41 hours is.... not computable, as you aren't allowed to work 41 hours! Now, what about students sitting in class? doing a mindless task like this during class for many people is perfectly acceptable, as they can still pay attention to the material being presented. This is a period of the day they physically can't be working, as they are obligated to be in class. So in many cases, working that extra hour and donating those wages really isn't possible. How does that figure into your calculations? |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
|
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
I understand Tristan's point. Way back in HS I gave up some work time so I could participate in a car wash fundraiser for choir. We were thrilled with the total amount we made. Then my mom asked how much that would be per person to offset travel costs - and it turns out I only earned 1/2 or 1/3 of what I could have made if I went to work.
Now in the productivity and cost equations, suppose the piggy-bank-stuffer was doing it while at work ... :rolleyes: |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
|
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Can a moderator please close this thread and open up a new one pertaining to fundraising and methods involved?? I would appreciate this discussion being held with no specific teams involved.
To others who did this because it was fun or out of the generosity of their heart, thank you once again for making the decision to help out a fellow team. P.S. If anybody would like to donate $$$ instead of participating in a fundraiser like this because it is not worth the time / money ratio, please feel free to contact me anytime. Wave Robotics is 501c3 exempt through our local community foundation (which provided this contest) and would be more than willing to help you reduce your tax liability. |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
In the next two cases (C & D), assume that there's no value to working more than normal...so you don't. You can think of the hourly case as a simplified version of the salaried case. They're basically the same, except that for the salaried case, your wage is also a variable (which depends on the work you had to accomplish during that particular week, and your productivity). That just makes everything very complex, but you'll see that the same trends hold.
⁂ I think that a lot of the problem I have with this system is that the payout is not proportional to the effort. The harder you try, the less you get for each quantum of effort. While slogging through diminishing returns is probably necessary to win the FRC championship, that's something for which there's no practical alternative—who would pay you so that you don't need to compete? Equally, if it were a case of "this or nothing", it would make sense to persevere despite diminishing returns. But given that there are alternatives, why not explore those instead? And as for the "cheating" angle, if the payoff was proportional to the effort, then yes, scripting coin deposits would cause an actual financial loss to the donor, beyond what they may have reasonably expected from humans alone. I think that's the point where the question of right and wrong really becomes meaningful. But as it stands, there's no loss to society, other than the time you expend trying to win the game. Quote:
Quote:
|
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
You feel as though time is a commodity. It's not. Time (measured in hours of human labor) has value differentiation. Massive levels of value differentiation. A worker in Wisconsin will be paid $7.25 for a single unit of time (measured in hours of human labor). Meanwhile, a poker pro could be paid $64,000 for his unit of time. People who partook in this exercise of... lets call it "coinbanking"... were reimbursed for their time equal to the exchange rate of $1000.00/(hours of time spent by the winning team). You come into this thread and post up massive arguments essentially saying that the exchange rate was much too low (2.8x lower than it should be) and that people who partook in this exercise should of simply done something else for equivalent time, received a higher exchange rate for their product (hours of human labor), and then traded the exchanged good (currency backed by the United States government) to the team. And only if they done this would "society" be prosperous and much better off!
Now, the flaw in that argument is that you guarantee that a person would be able to very simply, find something/somebody to exchange their resource (hours of human labor) into currency at a rate higher than this website, using equivalent units of time. If that was the case, everyone on this planet would be trillionaires. Nobody would be jobless, everyone would be rich, and this planet would massively prosperous selling a non-tangible commodity. I'm really quite unsure why you can so readily accept the fact that time can be exchanged at a rate higher than the minimum hourly wage of a Wisconsin worker, but cannot in turn be exchanged at a rate lower than that (and still see benefits to "society") Unfortunately, the world doesn't work in a way where I can just walk down to the Time Exchange Office and turn in some hours for American Dollars. Society(a term you so readily throw around, and I still don't know what you mean by it) does not work this way. Disclaimer: I'm not an economist, i'm not taking classes in economics, this post is opinionated, even in cases where I present things as fact. (trustatus: The factyness of these facts could quite easily be debated, and if your recent posts are to be used as examples, i'm sure they will be) |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
(By the way, I'm no economist either, though I have taken a few classes in it. I'm not intending to say that mine is the final word on the subject.) Quote:
The fact that time has different value to different people is relevant to the extent that each person's donation is going to be determined by how they value their time. For simplicity and for conservativeness I was using the minimum wage, because I think it's a fairly good lower bound for the average wage a person will receive. But of course, if you're soliciting donations from rich poker players, and they're willing to contribute an equal number of hours' work, then you'll make a lot more money per person. (Though of course, they're not really hourly or salaried, so we're talking average wages here.) Similarly, if you solicit donations from the unemployed, you're unlikely to get much money. If we wanted to be more precise (and had the means to do an experiment), instead of assuming a single (low) wage and running with it, we could ask each donor how many hours of depositing they'd be willing to do, versus how much they value their time. I'm estimating that when you aggregate their responses, and divide by the number of donors, you're going to get something that isn't lower than the minimum wage. (As to why that's right, consider a thought experiment of several case Bs, each with a different wage. Given that it's unlikely that people will be making less than the minimum wage, and basically impossible for them to be making less than zero, but entirely possible for them to be making several times the minimum wage, the distribution of wages is not going to be symmetrical. Imagine a histogram: it will probably be almost empty from $0.00 right up to $7.25, then will have a lot of people for a while, and then will taper down as the wages get higher. The mean of that distribution is going to be larger than $7.25.) Quote:
However, it does not follow that just because the average is above the minimum wage (or positive, or whatever), that everyone will therefore have virtually-unlimited prosperity. I'm not sure how you're reaching that conclusion. Quote:
Quote:
I've also been trying to work in examples of why it's absolutely vital to consider the effects on society, rather than just the effects on the team. The economic concept of a negative externality—a cost that is borne by someone outside of the model—applies here. If you only care about your team (or your family, or your town, or your political donors, etc.), those negative externalities can build up, and make what looks at first glance to be a positive thing (within a team-centric model, it's a free chance at $1 000), into something that's actually worse for society (what is given up to achieve that $1 000?). |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
I respect the folks involved in this debate, but I don't want to invest the time into participating in the economics debate itself.
If I had the choice between:
I would choose to help the team with 10 minutes of my time. In this case, I would feed the piggybank for 10 minutes. Then, I would get back to work. Andy B. |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Let's not forget the money you could've been making while you were planning and typing out immense tl;dr posts on Chief Delphi...
Tristian, you've got a point, but I think one post expressing your concerns would suffice. |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
I just thought I'd do a shameless plug for python:
Quote:
EDIT: After reading through this thread I ran it again for the other side so as to not influence the outcome. Seriously though, you guys SIGNIFICANTLY underestimate the power and overestimate challenge of scripts. If two of me were fighting this out, the number would be in the tens to hundreds of millions (or, more likely, the site would crash). |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
|
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
I probably shouldn't have led off with a numerical example that begat more examples, as people objected to the simplifications in it. Gary actually made one of the underlying points quite effectively with his brief anecdote—which wasn't open to the same kind of argumentation, given that he was describing a real event. In my defence though, all too often people don't want to run the numbers, because conventional wisdom can be so much more convenient. I'm glad I did, because it allowed me the chance to verify that my initial instinct was justifiable (at least to me). I'm absolutely not going to say that it's always worth it to spend time calculating things out or formally describing things like that, but when the consequences of making a faulty economic decision are significant, it's a useful technique to be aware of. (Legislators should try it more often....) Quote:
Quote:
I still think this was at least significantly scripted, perhaps using a less-efficient technique, or perhaps running for less time. 1 My preceding posts in this thread run about 5 400 words, which is worth somewhere between 10 and 20 pages of text. ::rtm:: |
Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!
Tristan has spent a few hours of his time helping create more aware individuals, (myself included). So in my mind he's doing just fine with using his time productively.
|
| All times are GMT -5. The time now is 07:26. |
Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2017, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright © Chief Delphi