Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by trilogy2826

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.

It's not about the team paying anybody minimum wage—so I think you're misunderstanding.

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.)

Originally Posted by Thermal

Except in the case where people donated their leisure hours into some pseudo form of labor for this team.

That's not actually an exception. If you give your leisure to your employer, and then donate the wage you earned to the team, the team is better off. And so is the rest of society, because you've underwritten your personal loss (difference between the value of labour and your wage) as part of the donation, so nobody but you suffers for it.

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.

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

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.

That's a fair point, and that's part of the reason I mentioned that a better crowdsourced fundraising solution would involve making it simple to transfer small amounts of money (equivalent to the relatively low value people place on 10 min of their time).

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.

[Tristan Lall]

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:

1. You work 40 h in total. Every day, you spend a few minutes with the pig, totalling 1 h.
   • You are paid $7.25/h × 40 h = $290.00
   • Your employer gets 40 h of productivity from you ($productivity/h × 40 h).
   • You give up 1 h of leisure as a donation (so no loss to society).
   • Wave Robotics makes $1 000.00 if they win, $0.00 if they lose. (Expected value to Wave is $500.00.)
   • Society gets $1 000.00 + $productivity/h × 40 h either way.
2. You work 41 h in total. You donate 1 h worth of wages ($7.25) to Wave.
   • You are paid $7.25/h × 41 h = $297.25
   • Your employer gets 41 h of productivity from you. (They are better off.)
   • You give up one hour of leisure (of your own accord, so no loss to society).
   • Wave gets some amount, based on the number of donors.
   • The benefit to society is variable, and can be represented as $donated + $productivity/h × 41 h.

Let's assume for simplicity that the extra productivity in B is small, and can be neglected.

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.)

[Jon Stratis]

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?

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

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.

If most of the people involved in this pig-feeding game were hourly employees with the option of donating an extra hour's worth of pay, I'd be inclined to take your very detailed and very clear analysis at face value. However, I suspect that the vast majority of coinpiggage was done either by students who don't fit that category at all, or by salaried folk who don't make any more if they work more. Your argument seems to hinge on the opportunity cost of spending a few minutes of time playing the game, and I don't think you're considering that the "cost" for most of the players is vanishingly small.

[GaryVoshol]

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 ...

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

Sorry Don...I wanted to wait until after the fundraising drive had run its course, to avoid the (wholly erroneous) perception that I might be trying to sabotage their efforts. I may have been just a little too forceful in a thread that was expected to soon reach the end of its natural lifespan.

No worries Tristan. Your point is well-stated and has generated civil discourse so far. Unless it gets out of hand - my fears have decreased - carry on. And I agree, it was gracious of you to make your point after it was over.

[Tyler Olds]

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.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by eagle33199

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?

You'll note the footnote a couple posts up where I referred to those assumptions. I'm not ignoring them—but describing them does make things quite a bit more complex. To help make the point, let me introduce the economic concept of utility: basically, think of it as a currency that indicates how useful something is (to you, to someone else, or to the world). The trouble is, the exchange rate with dollars fluctuates with the circumstances—sometimes you need an Allen wrench, so the utility of a Phillips screwdriver is nearly zero at that instant. (But obviously that screwdriver could be useful under different conditions.) Figuring out the exact exchange rate is complicated—in fact, it's basically impossible. But that doesn't mean we can't make good estimates based on the conditions at hand. (It's perfectly reasonable to call the accuracy of a particular estimate into question, but that's an argument over details rather than the validity of the model.) Previously, we'd been assuming that since you were donating an hour of leisure, its exact value wasn't important. Here, we'll have to compare that value with an amount of money, and calculate losses, so it needs to be converted using the utility exchange rate.

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.

1. You work 40 h in total. Every day, you spend a few minutes with the pig, totalling 1 h.
2. You work 41 h in total. You donate 1 h worth of wages ($7.25) to the team.
3. You work exactly 40 h as an hourly worker. You donate $7.25 to the team.

   If your employer allows you to work exactly 40 hours per week, no more and no less, and won't listen when you explain that it's for a good cause, then option B isn't available to you. So instead, you might substitute option C where you donate $7.25 from your own pocket (so now, the employer gets exactly 40 h of labour, but you keep 39 h worth of wages). Now you're worse off than before; let's say you'd be happy to give up utility equivalent to what you would have donated in B, but that the additional loss of utility makes you unhappy. That means that there is a loss to you, and therefore an incremental loss to society. Depending on the utility exchange rate (i.e. how strongly you value that loss—is that money you can't save for retirement, or does it mean your family will not eat tomorrow?), it shifts the tipping point higher. But unless that hour's wage is of extreme importance to you (or to society), the results are similar: the cash donation is still a better option than clicking the pig for an hour.
   
   The benefit to society is $donated + $productivity/h × 40 h − $loss. So numerically, given equal productivity in cases A and C, the donation is good value when $donated − $loss > $1 000.00. Expressed another way, that means that the tipping point is based on whether or not you accumulate enough donor-hours to overcome $1 000 + $loss. Unless the loss is huge (i.e. unless you really need that money, and thus probably shouldn't be donating it in the first place), it doesn't shift the tipping point by much.
   
   So basically, unless you really need that money you're donating, case C is very similar to case B (and hence it doesn't really matter that you can't work 41 h).

4. You work as much as necessary as a salaried worker. You donate $7.25 to the team.

   Your rate of pay diminishes with the number of hours you work (you're expected to get the job done, using whatever reasonable number of hours it takes). You can think of this in two ways: one is basically the same as C above, one is ridiculously difficult to deal with at a practical level.
   
   In the first sub-case (D₁), let's just pick a number for your average rate of pay—you might be making roughly $29.00/h instead of $7.25/h, because on balance, the salaried workers around here tend to be compensated at several times the minimum wage. This is likely to imply that what you lose by giving money to the team (e.g. $7.25, or 15 min worth of wages) will not result in a major loss of utility to you. So again, the benefit to society is $donated + $productivity/h × 40 h − $loss, where loss is probably relatively small.
   
   In the second sub-case (D₂), which I would consider to be impractical to compute under virtually all circumstances, you now treat productivity and wage as variables, and actually identify what you're earning and how efficiently you're working at the exact moment in question. Assuming you want to be a good employee, you always have a choice between being thorough, or being slightly less thorough and taking more time as leisure. Your concept of that work-life balance is going to depend on a number of factors, including how badly you want to demonstrate that you're worthy of future advancement (thoroughness is likely correlated with being selected for promotion, and with higher future salary), and how much you value various other things in your life (including doing work in support of charity). Similarly, unless you work for the Mafia or something, thoroughness in your job is likely correlated with societal benefit—though the exact rate is very difficult to nail down, because your own productivity fluctuates. (It's probably safe to say that for all reasonable cases, you're a net benefit to your employer, and furthermore a net benefit to society.) In case B, we ignored the extra productivity you give to your employer, because it was small and difficult to quantify. Here, we need to think about it, and it comes down to this question: with respect to the productivity variable, would society be better off with you being a bit more thorough at work (and therefore improving your future prospects, and therefore having more lifetime income to donate to good causes), or instead with you just doing a sufficient job (and reducing your lifetime income, but having more leisure time to spend filling a pig). If you donate directly, the benefit to society is still $donated + $productivity/h × 40 h − $loss. That's obviously not easy to answer when everything's in flux, but I think that instead following the D₁ method and taking a best guess at what your hourly wage is this week will yield a very good estimate, without the computational nastiness.

5. You're a student in class. You feed the pig when you're not otherwise busy, eventually depositing as many coins over the week as a person could do in an hour.

   It's possible that the class you're taking is slow enough that you can operate the piggybank during class without diminishing your comprehension of the lesson. Furthermore, hopefully the teacher is easygoing enough that they won't be offended by you feeding the pig. And maybe you can even do so without distracting other students. And let's say you're in the United States, where gambling online for money is frowned upon (much more so in class)—so basically you are not able to convert that class time into cash that could be donated instead. If there really is no practical alternative, then sure, I guess you should play the Flash game. But do you actually envision this being the case? (And if so, isn't that some sort of damning indictment of the school?)

⁂

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.

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

Now in the productivity and cost equations, suppose the piggy-bank-stuffer was doing it while at work ...

Productivity decreases, so they'd have to work harder to reach the tipping point...in other words, when dealing with the benefit to society, there's no free lunch. (But note that there is a potential free lunch when only considering the benefit to the team.)

Originally Posted by Tyler Olds

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.

How about we just stop referring to Wave by name in the examples?

[Thermal]

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)

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Thermal

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)

Sure, why not....

(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.)

Originally Posted by Thermal

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!

Not "only". (I'm describing an alternative, not every alternative.) But otherwise, yes, that's essentially what I'm saying. There existed a reasonable alternative use of that time, for which the team and society would have been better off.

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.)

Originally Posted by Thermal

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")

I'm not guaranteeing anything, but I do assume (as described above) that the average person could reasonably easily find a way to exchange their marginal unit of labour for what amounts to the minimum wage. (When I say "marginal", I'm talking about the relevant quantum of labour—that which is being used to allow them to make a donation—for which the minimum wage is a fair estimate. We're not talking about the 1^st hour or the 81^st hour of labour, which could be said to have very different instantaneous valuations.) It's undeniably true that this is not the case for some people, and it is equally true that many people can do much better.

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.

Originally Posted by Thermal

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.

That's actually a good approximation of a job. As I demonstrated previously, it doesn't matter a whole lot if you can ask for an extra hour of work, or if you just take the proceeds of an existing hour and donate them. By being employed, you are turning in hours, and receiving money.

Originally Posted by Thermal

Society(a term you so readily throw around, and I still don't know what you mean by it) does not work this way.

"Society" is exactly what it sounds like: everybody, or to narrow it down a little as a practical matter, everybody who has a conceivable interaction with you. By saying society is better off, I'm saying that holding all other factors equal, the benefits to everyone outweigh the detriments to everyone.

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?).

[Andy Baker]

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:

• spending 10 minutes of my time between making a direct impact on helping a team - or -
• spending 10 minutes of my time considering if it was worth it or not

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.

[AlecMataloni]

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.

[lemiant]

I just thought I'd do a shameless plug for python:

import urllib
import urllib2
import time

url = 'http://www.oshkoshareacf.org/gameend.cfm';

values = {'GameID': '15',
'Player2Score': '0',
'PlayerID2': '32',
'Player1Score' : '5',
'PlayerID1' : '31'}

headers = {'Host': 'www.oshkoshareacf.org',
'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1 FirePHP/0.5',
'Accept': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1 FirePHP/0.5',
'Accept-Language': 'en-us,en;q=0.5',
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate',
'Accept-Charset': 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7',
'Keep-Alive': '115',
'Connection': 'keep-alive',
'Cookie': 'CFID=6467245; CFTOKEN=19355325; __utma=68525711.2050307234.1305435022.1305435022.1 307141491.2; __utmz=68525711.1307141491.2.2.utmcsr=chiefdelphi. com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/forums/showthread.php; __utmb=68525711.9.10.1307141491; __utmc=68525711',
'x-insight': 'activate'}

data = urllib.urlencode(values)


for i in range (0, 1200):
req = urllib2.Request(url, data, headers)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
print i
print "done"

It is for the current set (I only just found this thread), and it can handle about 3000 coins per minute. With only a rudimentary knowledge of python you could pull this off. You probably don't even need the headers, I just put them in so that if they store each request and all its information (which is very unlikely), they won't be able to detect the subterfuge.

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).

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

Actually, the real problem-solver's solution is this: figure out a way to overcome the frictional effects of small financial transactions (e.g. impulse control, authentication, etc.), and account for the (minimal) recreational benefits of playing this game, with the overall objective of making donations as attractive as spending time dropping coins in a pig. That way everyone actually wins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Andy Baker

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.

Originally Posted by AlecMataloni

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.

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

(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.)

Yeah, I know.¹

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....)

Originally Posted by lemiant

It is for the current set (I only just found this thread), and it can handle about 3000 coins per minute. With only a rudimentary knowledge of python you could pull this off. You probably don't even need the headers, I just put them in so that if they store each request and all its information (which is very unlikely), they won't be able to detect the subterfuge.

If you were actually doing it for real, I don't think you'd want to leave consistent referrer metadata pointing to ChiefDelphi...that's like asking to get blacklisted (if they do indeed disapprove of scripted input).

Originally Posted by lemiant

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).

Interesting that the rate at which you were able to submit was so high; I figured that because it was done through Flash, it actually had to completely execute all the animations before registering the next coin. I guess that was a shoddy assumption on my part. (Actually, from playing a lot of Flash games in the early 2000s, I should really know better.)

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.