Post ArglufN8HZYGkFKVnM by sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange
(DIR) More posts by sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange
(DIR) Post #ArbpDq5I0VEtXh1BVA by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-01T11:22:20Z
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A few weeks back I was complaining about this meme and we had a good discussion about it on here. I ended up making a lesson plan about taxes and my students really liked it so I will share it. (It is for students with a basic understanding of integration. But, you could probably rework it to skip that bit.)https://drive.google.com/file/d/14xaQ1hMpqy0A68MAbxN49zK4HxK8m2R6/view?usp=sharing(And if you have feedback let me know!)#tax #taxes #math #mathEducation #lessonplans #calculus
(DIR) Post #ArbpcCh5b2gucCJh3o by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-01T11:26:45Z
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I WILL NOT tolerate any of my former students wandering around in the world saying "nobody ever taught me how to do the taxes" NO. You will not be saying that. I'm not putting up with this. It's just percents and recipes. (although, I'm glad I looked at the topic more closely, there is more to it than I thought. Interesting stuff. )
(DIR) Post #Arbqom4fyjSpm5uJ9s by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-01T11:40:14Z
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And I do hope my students find applications for what they learn in my class, that mathematics permeates their world and informs how they solve problems. But if all I could say is that all my students understand the difference between marginal and effective tax and how brackets are applied? If that's *all* they remember? That'd put them ahead of most adults I meet who generally DO NOT get this concept. And this common misunderstanding has many consequences!
(DIR) Post #Arbrg6AK0kLbQxyUwi by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-01T11:49:50Z
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@MonniauxD @fuzztech I think Nick is just making fun of how Americans tend to react to any criticism of how we do things, no matter how logical or valid.
(DIR) Post #ArbtmvEhFEGFTLP1M0 by richpuchalsky@mastodon.social
2025-03-01T12:13:19Z
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@futurebird I am now going to write the most annoying possible thing someone could write about a high school math lesson that seems fine. I wish that someone could de-STEM this kind of thing a little bit by putting some political economy in here. If we're talking about US income taxes the thing that really jumps out at me whenever I do them is the torturous way in which economic reality has to collide with ideology: for example health insurance subsidies.
(DIR) Post #Arc7EYy8vPw7vPAcMq by starluna@mastodon.social
2025-03-01T14:44:07Z
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@futurebird I love that you're doing this. In two of my undergrad sociology courses, I had a section on how taxes work. The goal was to it understand how they are biased in favor of wealthy households. It was frequently the top 3 lessons students remarked on at the end of the semester as what they believe they'll be thinking/ talking about after the semester ends.
(DIR) Post #Arc7iBzOvZSLLGt3rs by jeremiah@tldr.nettime.org
2025-03-01T14:49:25Z
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@futurebird bless you for this work
(DIR) Post #ArcFbIuzZDVuRD3Ef2 by frameadvance@mastodon.social
2025-03-01T16:17:51Z
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@futurebird I read through your lesson plan and absolutely love it! I wish more students were taught this in such a clear way. Since you asked for feedback, I just wish it didn’t include the dig on parallelograms because geometry is my bestie!
(DIR) Post #ArcRXIQAfjx9BhUSMS by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2025-03-01T18:31:35Z
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@futurebird I think the inability to get marginal tax rates is motivated reasoning/propaganda. People purposefully don't get it for ideological reasons, then other people hear the tales and unthinkingly accept them.
(DIR) Post #ArcpFvqLlCrN8nzKU4 by TobyBartels@mathstodon.xyz
2025-03-01T22:57:22Z
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@futurebirdVery nice!One point that I think is good to make, not so much to do with taxes as terminology, is that in much of economics the word ‘marginal’ indicates a derivative. Just as the amount of tax is the integral of the marginal tax (with respect to income), so the marginal tax is the derivative of the tax.(If you do any problems with marginal revenue and marginal profit, the same thing applies there, except now the derivatives are with respect to quantity sold. A lot of economic analysis is done ‘on the margin’ because at heart it's an optimization problem and they're checking whether a derivative is positive or negative.)
(DIR) Post #Are0XHAszvlysL1hx2 by fuzztech@infosec.exchange
2025-03-02T12:38:30Z
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@futurebird @MonniauxD That was it thank you
(DIR) Post #AreCAqMPD7vin9U6SW by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2025-03-02T14:40:29Z
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@futurebird Back in the 2000s when I was active on LiveJournal, I do remember actually educating one of my LJ friends about this, and it was one of my proudest moments there. He was a pretty smart guy who worked in movie CGI in San Francisco. But the circles he moved in were pretty right-libertarian and he was exposed to a lot of their theorizing and would pass it on.At one point we were discussing taxes, and I mentioned in his comments that when you pass a bracket boundary, only your income above the threshold is taxed at the higher marginal rate, so you don't take home less money. The lightbulb actually went on in his head, and he was so stunned that he made a whole other post explaining this at length and credited me with telling him.So not everyone who doesn't get it is in bad faith. But I think they've been exposed to bad-faith discussion.
(DIR) Post #AreCBD94UrvjSSQHMu by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2025-03-02T14:44:53Z
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@futurebird The thing is, I remember people getting this wrong even in the days when most people filled out a paper 1040 by hand. So they had actually gone through the calculation and they still didn't understand it. Now, most of them probably did this crucial step with a table lookup. But you *can* look at that table in the 1040 and see that it's a function that doesn't have gigantic steps in it. And if I recall correctly, if your income is too high for the table there's a bit where they actually explain the formula, which is piecewise linear.
(DIR) Post #AreDXLL8oGqBCMBZLM by sepdroid@androiddev.social
2025-03-02T14:57:24Z
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@mattmcirvin @futurebird You were on LJ back in the day? Explaining taxes. 😍
(DIR) Post #AreDXMdxxlUdF207KC by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-02T15:04:10Z
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@sepdroid @mattmcirvin There are a lot of former #LiveJournal folk on here. I’m one. Although I don’t want to be judged by my early 20s “thoughts” good lord no.
(DIR) Post #AreDd7LXkZsbXH7wfo by llewelly@sauropods.win
2025-03-02T15:02:34Z
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@mattmcirvin @futurebird at every job I've ever had, someone would bring up all the bad-faith right-wing lies about taxes every time taxes were discussed in converastions at work. I encountered this at dishwashing jobs and software development jobs, at postal service jobs and community college computer lab jobs; "every job" is not hyperbolic. (I don't know if it varied regionally, but I encountered it just as often in the Puget Sound area of Washington as I did in Utah.) Everyone gets exposed.
(DIR) Post #AreDvY07O8tNPotTSy by sepdroid@androiddev.social
2025-03-02T15:08:33Z
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@futurebird @mattmcirvin My early twenties thoughts involved posting song lyrics that were ambiguous and saying "This is exactly how I feel." You are excellent at short-form storytelling so I could imagine a story with ants trying to get the details right about that one ant that was an accountant.
(DIR) Post #AreE0BhzhLWFj0d4CW by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-02T15:09:25Z
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@llewelly @mattmcirvin “It’s so stupid, they have it set up to incentivize it so if you do better you end up doing worse! It’s all a racket.”Oh yes please tell me about it, brother! (its not like I can stop you from running your mouth) It’s all such a racket you don’t even know that the real “racket” is how you are repeating this nonsense— all while acting like I’m the one who doesn’t understand math. 🙄🙄🙄I have been there.
(DIR) Post #AreEEO8KIfSmJViWQ4 by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2025-03-02T15:11:56Z
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@futurebird @llewelly I have heard tales of it being used for malicious ends: bosses explaining to their young employees that they actually don't want a raise because it'll put them in that higher bracket and they'll be paupers.
(DIR) Post #AreIxkNmp8oyAOpge0 by bucknam@mastodon.social
2025-03-02T16:04:55Z
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@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin I am glad my postings to USENET are either gone or have been anonymized by time so I don’t have to answer for some of them!
(DIR) Post #AreMF0gdl5n3WCZgcy by llewelly@sauropods.win
2025-03-02T16:41:44Z
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@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin I was an on-again-off-again livejournal reader, but I never kept a regular "journal" there, because honestly I was always kind of terrified of the idea. (I didn't know it would get bought up by a russian crime lord, but I was worried just the same.)
(DIR) Post #AreN0v2e3A77uViCGW by GeoWend@kosmos.social
2025-03-02T16:50:18Z
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@futurebird That was a wonderful digital space. (I still maintain a presence and post on DreamWidth, which is where a number of the best developers for LJ went after it was bought….)
(DIR) Post #AreP2sL5Gjpo13OgfQ by sepdroid@androiddev.social
2025-03-02T16:42:39Z
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@llewelly @futurebird @mattmcirvin It was a kinder internet where we were only worried about getting fired for complaining about our coworkers on the internet.
(DIR) Post #AreP2tNbOrRXF9aDEO by llewelly@sauropods.win
2025-03-02T16:51:31Z
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@sepdroid @futurebird @mattmcirvin I definitely had some tense conversations in that era, with employers about my politics, or, more frequently, their perception of my politics. But not for things I said online; usually for answering honestly when asked why I didn't drive. Did it play a role in me losing jobs? Probably, but so many of those companies were so badly run the company fell apart first.
(DIR) Post #ArePJoPf7TO8lJcAa0 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-02T17:16:13Z
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@llewelly @sepdroid @mattmcirvin “answering honestly when asked why I didn't drive” don’t know what your reasons are but this is … relatable. Although I do sugar it a little, “it’s the whole reason I live in a big city” — seems harsh to just say I think many people who drive are a menace to human life …
(DIR) Post #AreQ3tcu4GYkFimaMy by llewelly@sauropods.win
2025-03-02T17:24:33Z
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@futurebird @sepdroid @mattmcirvin Agreed, but for so much of my life I lived in utah, where big cities are not a thing, at least not on a scale anything like NYC (NYC has something like 2.5 times the population of the entire state of utah), and most utahns would rather believe the cities they live in are much smaller than they actually are, so saying “it’s the whole reason I live in a big city” didn't help.
(DIR) Post #AredyaBeJanXs8OZFI by bgrinter@mastodon.sdf.org
2025-03-02T20:00:09Z
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@futurebird @clive Every time a friend posts a meme on Facebook along these lines, I reply with this. Stops discussion fast 😝
(DIR) Post #Argl2U24E9qHwCdl7A by ThreeSigma@mastodon.online
2025-03-02T15:38:02Z
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@mattmcirvin @futurebird For some reason I always disliked piecewise linear functions. I wanted to implement some kind of power-law function, ideally including a negative income tax. Something like ‘you get to keep sqrt(ax+c)/x of your money’ so that doubling your take-home means quadrupling your income if you make a lot more than a median income. Silly, I know.
(DIR) Post #Argl2VT2tL16OAGonw by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2025-03-03T20:24:04Z
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@ThreeSigma @futurebird That's a very math-knower type of a reaction. I kind of feel the same way but I think it's already beyond the point where many policy people will find it comprehensible, let alone the general public.
(DIR) Post #Argl2WQFLEN7Lly652 by futurebird@sauropods.win
2025-03-03T20:28:53Z
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@mattmcirvin @ThreeSigma Face it piece-wise functions are tacky. Linear functions are basic. Piece-wise linear functions are crimes against all things elegant.
(DIR) Post #ArglufN8HZYGkFKVnM by sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange
2025-03-03T20:38:45Z
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@futurebird @mattmcirvin @ThreeSigma Same, except that I wanted to base it on the exponential function. Your income goes up by a factor of 2.7, you make another 100k more.
(DIR) Post #Argmd34VWrqMzPmUq0 by mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz
2025-03-03T20:46:47Z
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@futurebird @ThreeSigma The fact that their derivatives are discontinuous does enable the "higher tax bracket makes you poorer" lie through the old switcheroo of confusing a function with its derivative (which seems to happen all the time in media discussions of economics and finance).
(DIR) Post #AtYVMjHiMF50ciMVyi by philsplace@mastodon.sdf.org
2025-04-28T16:39:41Z
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@futurebird @gizmomathboy When I was in the sixth grade (the 70’s) I literally had to take a class called “life skills”.It was a year long course but you rotated every six weeks to a new “skill” class.Examples: Home ec, finance, small engine repair, health, etc… And, naturally… since “it was good enough for us”…Well, actually, I think something like that really should be done these days.(In this case it could be covered in the finance section)
(DIR) Post #B2Q8aUSXJdrtFRPBIm by LibreFaso@hostux.social
2026-01-18T20:35:52Z
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@futurebird Thanks !Is it available without selling one's soul ?