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New Website Offers Provably Fair Solutions To Everyday Problems
An anonymous reader writes Carnegie Mellon researchers have just launched Spliddit, a website that offers methods for helping people split rent, divide goods, and share credit. The novelty is that these methods are all "provably fair": there are mathematical proofs showing that each algorithm on the site provides rigorous fairness guarantees. For example, the method for splitting rent is guaranteed to be envy free: the assignment of rooms and division of rent is such that a housemate would never want to swap places with another housemate. All it takes is a pair of siblings to prove that there's no such thing as "provably fair," non-mathematically.
I keep telling my dogs that the way that Spliddit divvies up the expenses is PROVABLY FAIR, but all they do is look at me blankly, cocking their heads to one side. Damn dogs. I never see a dime out of either of them.
Proverbs 21:19
Greece used something similar when trying to get people to honestly report the value of their antiquities. If they listed it for a price the government thought was too low, the agency could buy it for that price. I wish local governments would do something like that with home values. If they want to tax me for a house worth more than what I can get for it on the open market, then I should have the right to sell it to them at that price.
To divide ice cream equally between two kids, have one dish it out and the other choose. My parents did this with my brother and me, and there was never anything to fight about afterwards. You'll never see more precise measurement in your life, though.
it should ALWAYS be that the person sitting is in charge of making sure it is down.
Men sit down to poop, i don't hear them ever argue about who left the seat up, they just check before sitting.
common sense?
The male wants to avoid unnecessary raising and lowering - conservation of energy.
The female wants TWO things - she wants the seat lifted before the gentleman urinates, AND she wants it lowered before she does.
If the gentleman leaves the seat up, the female (provably) got the first thing she wants - the seat was raised before he urinated. Each party ends up doing the same amount of effort - they either raise or lower the seat before using it. That's fair.
The other option, that the seat is left down, means that a) the man is expected to do 100% of the work, both raising and lowering, while the female does none. More importantly from her point of view, if the seat is down, she doesn't know whether or not it was down when he peed. She might be sitting on pee spots.
Fairness, and her own piece of mind, therefore dictate that he leave the seat up.
However, if she's clever, she can't gently force the seat to be lowered afterwards by placing a tray of soaps, potpourri, etc. on top of the toilet. The tray will prevent the seat from being raised all way to vertical and gravity will ensure it ends up down. The clever gentleman can respond to this forcing function by pointing out that it prevents her from knowing whether male guests ever raised the seat at all.
Divorce is the prime example - it's rarely about the 2nd home, the dog, the china, etc.
It's about the cheating, the 'stealing the best years of my life', the drug addiction, etc.
Nine times out of ten, people are not really looking for 'fair', they want 'JUSTICE' (in quotes).
A pity, because in reality, 'JUSTICE" is another word for spending all your time and money on lawyers to punish someone else.
If their algorithms won't let you spend all your time and money on punishing your opponent, it won't actually solve all the problems of sub-dividing property.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In a domestic (i.e., household) setting, the simple compromise is toilet LID down. This way EVERYONE has to lift something to do something. If you're a lady, you lift the lid and the seat is down. If you're man doing #1, then you lift the lid and seat together. for #2, you lift just the lid.
Then when you're done, you put the lid back down. If also keeps the bathroom more hygienic as the act of flushing creates a plume of toilet water. Keeping the lid closed keeps that plume within the toilet and not the entire bathroom.
It has the advantage that stuff doesn't accidentally fall into the toilet too.
Least-effort solution (minimum number of seat position changes) is for the person who uses the toilet to move it into the configuration they need it in, then leave it.
Least-agony solution (minimum number of gross incidents) is to always lower the seat after use. However, the fact that "men won't follow" this solution is merely coincidence - this solution happens to coincide with the configuration women always use so they can never be guilty of transgressing it. When I was living alone I had a dog who liked to drink out of the toilet. Consequently, I always told guests to lower the lid of the toilet after using it. My female guests always left the lid up. About half the men would lower it (probably due to being scolded about it by women all too often).