Fixing My Own Stupidity – And that of instruction writers

I had a chance to reminisce a little bit about a much older brush with stupidity recently. I was doing some alterations on the swing set and playhouse unit in our back yard, one that I did build myself seven and a half years ago.

What I remembered about it was that some of the instructions, as well as some of the pieces of the unit, had some stupidity issues. However, I have to also bear some of the blame because, had I not been stupid (or maybe I was being rash?) things would have turned out a little bit better. Not that having the unit still standing after 8 seasons of play is a bad outcome, but I could have saved myself a lot of effort.

At the time I built it, my sons were 9, 8 and 1. My older ones were kind of young to help me, and because we had a 1 year old, my wife was otherwise occupied. We had just moved into the neighborhood and I didn’t feel comfortable with disturbing the neighbors, so, I built it with no assistance. And it was a pretty hefty thing to build.

My stupidity comes in not reading all the way through the instructions first. Because as soon as I finished building it, I immediately went into a period of alterations and analyzing what could have been done better.

First thing was the piece of wood that anchored the monkey bars that held up the swings. This piece of wood was a one by four. A one by four. Plus, according to the instructions, after I put up the play house, I was to hammer in some threaded lock nuts into this board while it was attached to the play set. Any guess about what happened? Well, the wood developed small cracks near the lock nuts. Big surprise.

So within days of completing the unit, I was at our neighborhood big box chain home center (I’ll name them if they sponsor me, haha) picking up a 16 foot long pressure treated 2 by 6, which I had them cut into 3 pieces that I measured ahead of time.

First 2 by 6 went to anchoring the monkey bars. But THIS TIME I was smart. I hammered the lock nuts into the board while it was laying flat on my garage floor. No cracking! Well, almost none. The other two pieces of the 2 by 6 went to replacing 1 by 4s that held up the floor of the play house.

After using the garage floor for that lock nut thing, I realized, darn it, I should have assembled the sides of the playhouse on my garage floor. As it turns out, because I built it myself, it does lean to one side by a couple of inches. I actually did do a major renovation of it two years later and partially took down the playhouse and reassembled it using my garage floor, but I had to wait for a week when my kids were away with my wife visiting her mom.

The problem that I had to fix this summer was that kids using the swings caused the play house to sway, and part of this was due to the stupidity of the design of the play house – or perhaps the major modification I did in 2007.

The roof used to cover half the play house with two big 2 by fours across the middle, and I turned it 90 degrees to have it cover the whole play house and not have the 2 by 4 for my kids to bump their heads on. I suppose an argument could be made that I weakened it when I did that. I also did take out part of the railing that would have blocked kids from using the monkey bars.

Earlier in the summer, neighbors of ours redid their deck, throwing out a lot of their old deck railing. I grabbed three rather good sized pieces of the railing and brought them home intending to strengthen the integrity of the play house. It kept getting back-burnered until it became a priority for my wife and her day care kids and their parents.

The railings that I replaced did not have a lot to them. They simply went from support beam to support beam, and these were also 1 by 4s. I allowed the deck railing pieces to overlap and connected them together using wood screws. The railing pieces simply do not allow much movement of the play house at all. I found myself wishing I had gotten to the job earlier.

Fixing Database Stupidity at work

First, an update on the previous post about math stupidity. After much cajoling, the director agreed to a more accurate, but still not perfect, way of showing how much our services saved our clients. Hooray for me.

Any of you who have trouble understanding database, you may as well stop reading right now, because what I’m about to post will make little sense to you. That is not to say I’m trying to insult your intelligence or anything, but if somebody were to blog about comparing operas or ballets, I wouldn’t understand that either.

This is still concerning that meeting I was in last week, and we were reviewing that same report. The whole concept of the report, in case you’ve forgotten, is to be able to say, okay, we’ll charge you $10,000 for our services, but we’ll save you $25,000 a year, and then provide tables to back up those figures.

Anyway, one of the database tables that is used to create these figures was shown to us during the meeting, and I immediately said “That’s poor database design, it violates the first rule of database normalization.” The reason I said this is that the table has 2 numerical columns, one that is 33% of a certain number, and one that is 40% of the same number. So, basically, column A can always be derived by taking column B and multiplying it by 33/40, or 0.825.

To put this in perspective, if your database table had 1 million rows, that would be 1 million extra pieces of data being stored needlessly when they can be easily derived using a simple calculation. (Okay, for a computer it’s simple.)

So, after I was done tearing apart the math I mentioned in the previous post, I took to creating a better database design for this report. The first thing I did was to create a view which would take that single bit of numerical information and create one column that is 33% of it, another column that is 40% of it. But I then took it a step further.

Most of the people I work with are database developers, and as such, they have very little understanding of making their programs modular and reusable. With my experience programming in the .NET languages, I’m ALWAYS on the look out for opportunities to improve their SQL procedures in such a manner.

So, I created a small table that had two columns: LowPercentage, with a value of .33, and HighPercentage, with a value of .4. I then used it in my SQL view (which is basically a query that is compiled) and got the same results. You might be wondering why this is so important. Good question.

If our business users come back to us one day and say, you know, I think the percentages of conversions we can attribute to our services is 35-45%, not 33-40%, all that it will take is to change the two values in that table and everything will update.

Under the current database design, everything is pretty much hard-coded, and changing it will be a significant amount of work.

I shared my findings with the database developer, and, like nearly every other attempt I make to change the way the other database developers do their job, it was meant with silence.

Fixing Math Stupidity at work

Let me preface this by saying that I’m a math and statistics geek.

Any of you who have trouble with math, you may as well stop reading right now, because what I’m about to post will make little sense to you. That is not to say I’m trying to insult your intelligence or anything, but if somebody were to blog about comparing operas or ballets, I wouldn’t understand that either.

I was in a meeting earlier in the week, and we were reviewing a report that is used to try to drum up sales for our company. The whole concept of the report is to be able to say, okay, we’ll charge you $10,000 for our services, but we’ll save you $25,000 a year, and then provide tables to back up those figures.

The major table that backs up the figures shows the number of people who we can reach out to, the percentage of people whose behavior we can expect to change, the number of people whose behavior we can expect to change, and the amount of money that will be saved by changing those people’s behaviors.

So here’s the problem, the number of people whose behavior we can expect to change is rounded down to the nearest integer, and then that is multiplied by the savings per person to get the total savings.

So, if we reach out to 100 people, and can expect to change 1.9% of those people’s behavior, the savings shown is based upon 1 person changing their behavior and not 1.9 people (which, in statistics, is a concept known as the “expected value”). I ran the numbers for an entire report, and we’re basically underreporting how much money we can save them by 10%.

I created a nice little Excel workbook showing exactly how the underreporting was happening and how it would hurt our ability to sell our services.

Since then, I’ve been in a pretty long e-mail discussion with a guy who has a PhD in economics, and he just doesn’t seem to get this concept! But, unfortunately, he is a director and I am not, so if I can’t convince him with my last ditch attempt e-mail, I’m going to have to move on.

Jeopardy! contestant search

Okay, I’m going to take a break (you’re all thinking – haven’t you already taken one – I apologize) from fixing stupidity to celebrate intelligence.  I went to a Jeopardy! contestant search yesterday after passing the online test in January.  So, here’s what happened.

The day of my Jeopardy! audition finally arrived.  Knowing how the DC traffic is, I decided to leave early and bring something to read to keep myself busy.  I left my house at 6:15.  Around 7:00 I was on Rt. 29 passing my office and decided to swing by and grab a cup of tea and use a restroom that I knew to be clean before getting onto Metro.  I also heard on the radio that the shuttle was going to fly over DC, and I was wishing I had the 11:30 appointment instead.  So I continued down towards Metro and crossed over 95 and the beltway and saw tons of stopped traffic.  Thank goodness for my GPS!  I found a parking space and started walking towards the station.  I realized I hadn’t been on Metro in about 15 years, so I had no idea how much I would have to pay.  I asked a young woman about the fare and she told me it was $4.25 and complained about how high it was.  I thought, it’s only $1 more than it was 15 years ago, so it wasn’t that bad.  I rode in and got to the Capitol Hilton at 8:40.  I thought I’d get there early, not by just 20 minutes!

I found the desk and was hit with a sense of deja vu.  When I saw Robert & Maggie, I thought I had done this before.  My a-ha moment would come about an hour later.

Robert approached me and took my picture and handed me my paperwork.  He said the picture might not have been good and I might need a retake.  After I filled out my paperwork, I asked him if he thought the picture was okay.  He replied “I’m not a miracle worker” and I said, “yeah, I guess I don’t give you much to work with.”

Maggie then gave the group some general instructions.  She specifically gave instructions about unavailable dates, like if we were giving birth, getting married, etc.  I raised my hand and asked “What could be more important than Jeopardy!”

We split into 2 groups and went into separate rooms and were given a 50 question test.  Robert gave us instructions and said make a guess if you don’t know, don’t leave questions blank.  They also mentioned that if you answered questions a bit out of order, they would be able to figure it out.  After question 10, I thought, “hey maybe I can put down the answers in random order to mess with their heads”, but I thought better of it.

They then graded the tests while we talked among ourselves.  The guy next to me came from a Minneapolis suburb, and, being the person who came the greatest distance, won the Wii version of Jeopardy!  Beyond him was a soft-spoken woman attorney from DC.  I can’t see her on there because she was so quiet.  I talked a bit of baseball with the  guys in front of me.  Then, because I was wearing a crossword puzzle tie, I was approached by a chemistry teacher from Charlottesville.  He told me he submitted crossword puzzles to Wil Shortz and finally had one accepted.  His name is Mike F., and he is my bet for most likely member of our group to be on the show.  He projected well, had fun and was personable.

Robert & his group returned to the room and had us return to our seats.  It then struck me why it all seemed so familiar.  I had seen both Robert & Maggie at a previous contestant search in Towson about 6 years ago.  He remembered being there and asked how I did and I told him I didn’t get past the 50 question test (this was in the days of the 10 question qualifying tests).

They called up people 3 at a time to play the game.  I was in the 2nd group.  I was a bit nervous and my knees were shaking.  The guy to my left, an attorney from Salisbury, was a nervous swayer (there were a ton of them).  I can’t picture them taking any of the swayers, it would tend to make viewers seasick.  He bumped my left arm at least 3 times.

Then came the interviews.  I brought along my 5 “fun facts” we were told to bring, and I thought they’d be awesome.  All the questions to each of us were very general, though, as though they didn’t read the facts.  They asked about our jobs, families and hobbies and what we would do with the money.  I dug up an old idea from the 90’s and said I would use the money for an “interplanetary bike ride” that would start in Saturn, IN, go through Neptune, OH, Mars, PA, etc.  It seemed to me that with a couple of exceptions, the same questions were asked.  One guy had a wife on Jeopardy! and a lady had a brother on the show, and they were asked about that.  I wish it could have gone on longer, it was fun.

When it was over, I went to the mens room.  Then, I called my old high school friend, Kim, to set up our lunch appointment.  That will be another story.

The Mother Lode of all Stupidity – The U.S. Tax Code

Hello, and welcome to the first installment of my blog, Fixing Stupidity.  In this blog, I’ll touch upon:

Why the Earned Income Credit is an evil plot to create generations of government dependent voting zombies, and can actually encourage people cheating on their taxes

Why the tax code encourages one of the most parasitic practices of all time – Refund Anticipation Loans

Why getting a huge tax refund isn’t some great financial windfall, but a huge rip off

The inherent unfairness of a lower tax rate on capital gains

Why do corporations get a break when individuals don’t

Okay, let’s start with the Earned Income Credit. Here’s what it is in a nutshell, people who make very little money get huge refunds because the government wipes out their tax liability and puts them into negative tax territory.  People see this in a big chunk, sometimes up to $5,750, and think, isn’t it great that the government is helping me.  Don’t get me wrong, here, I have nothing against helping low income people.  What I dislike here is how it’s being done, and I think it’s pretty dishonest.  Because, every single paycheck, the government is actually TAKING money away everybody including the poorest Americans and keeping it as an interest free loan until tax time.  They do this through mandatory FICA deductions, which are usually 7.65% of the paycheck.  Why is it done this way?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to let the poor people keep 100% of their paycheck and pay no FICA, but not get the Earned Income Credit?  What is going on here is nothing short of buying votes.

It also encourages tax cheating.  If you are self employed and poor, there’s actually a range of incomes where you might want to understate your expenses and overstate your income, because the extra amount you receive in Earned Income Credit is more than enough to offset the extra income tax and FICA you would have to spend.

Under the FixingStupidity tax code, you take the number of people the wage earner is supporting, multiply it by $10,000.  Every dollar up to that threshold would not be subject to either federal income tax or to FICA.  From $10,000 – $20,000 times the number of dependents, FICA would be capped at 5%, after that, it’s as high as it needs to be to cover the payments.  The 10% tax bracket would likely be a casualty of this system, but the higher exemptions would make it so that most people who currently pay taxes would pay less.  The folks with negative tax liability would be slightly worse off.

Now for Refund Anticipation Loans.  As I stated above, they are among the most parasitic practices around today.  Tax preparation firms contract banks to make loans on people’s anticipated refunds, and in the process the bank charges exorbitant interest rates just so people can get their “windfall” a week or so earlier.  I worked for Liberty Tax last year, and I always tried to steer people clear of this.  First of all, there was a $30 application fee.  Then the bank would charge interest.  It might appear to be a small amount, but only because it was a short term loan.  If they charge 5% of the refund on a loan that’s only for a month, it’s basically the equivalent of over 60% annual interest!  Using my tax plan above would virtually kill this practice.

Which brings me to my next point.  Getting a huge tax refund is NOT a good thing.  I’ll repeat so it sinks in: getting a huge tax refund is NOT a good thing.  If you earn $50,000 a year as a single taxpayer, the amount you’ll have to pay to the government just for federal taxes is $6,750.  If you happen to get a $1,000 refund, that means that during the year, you gave the government $7,750.  The $1,000 you got was an interest free loan to the government.  With better planning, you could have gotten nearly an extra $20 every week during the year instead of waiting until the next spring to get it in one lump sum.

What’s my solution here?  An option on the W-4 to simply withhold your taxes based upon last year’s tax liability.  Wouldn’t it be great to simply check a box, write in 14% and have the government take $7,000 throughout the year and give you a $250 refund?  Unemployment already does this – if you choose to have money withheld, it withholds a flat percentage.

Since I attacked a program designed for the poor at the beginning, it’s time to attack one designed for the rich.  The reduced rates on capital gains.  Income is income, so why not just tax it all the same way?  It would be nice if it were that simple, but it’s unfortunately not.  Much of the income reported by the elderly is capital gains on the sale of their homes and other assets, so they must be protected to some degree from raising capital gains tax rates to the same as normal tax rates.

I’m sure you’ve all read about how General Electric paid no federal tax for a recent year.  I’ve got a solution for that as well: A Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax.  Individuals have loopholes disappear at higher income levels, so why not corporations?  My idea would come with a twist.  The CAMT rate would be a sliding scale, and it would decrease for companies who increased their domestic payroll and increase for companies who decreased their domestic payroll.  In other words, it would incentivize hiring and decentivize downsizing.

Thank you for reading my somewhat ranting first blog, I’d appreciate any thoughts you might have.