Glad to see Brad Pitt doing better

So apparently Angelina Jolie is felling better and stronger now enews, metro with a couple of movies coming out.

well isn't that nice. personally, I'm glad to see Brad Pitt doing better after being cleared in FBI abuse investigation.

the whole thing with Brad was dubious from the start. a lie. now he is cleared and it's good. good for him. good in a way for all formerly married men who find themselves facing these sudden abuse allegations after their marriages end.

I got thinking about why Brad was able to win. I came up with these reasons in order of importance

1. resources Brad has vast wealth and was able to hire top notch lawyers, private investigators, PR flacks, etc. he was always able to properly defend himself against false allegations.

2. access to mass media and fair coverage Brad has powerful friends in Hollywood and the mass media. Notice there was no piling on effect on Brad when the allegations came out. Brad was able to ensure the coverage was at least reasonably fair of the allegations. If it came to it, Brad could probably have enabled his own side to get out via a 60 minutes segment, Vanity Fair cover, etc. turns out the correct media strategy (nice to be a be able to afford great publicists per #1 above) was to lay low, let the investigation run its course, be cleared, emerge on top.

3. muscle Brad wasn't going to be intimidated or bullied by FBI or local police goons with their broad shoulders and guns. per #1, Brad can afford his own bodyguards. they have big muscles too, and guns. also with the resources for top legal help, you wouldn't see Brad interrogated for hours with no lawyer present, or his house ransacked with no warrant; at the orders of some maliciously-motivated allegations.

4. willing to fight regular suburban dads in Brad's situation of false allegations often give up. perhaps agree to an extremely unfair and unfavourable divorce settlement, and the abuse allegations disappear as suddenly as they appeared. who can blame them, facing financial ruin, permanent separation from the kids, and even jail. Brad from #1 above had the resources to properly defend himself. with that it may have motivated him to stand and fight and ultimately be vindicated

5. was actually innocent yeah that. the allegations were false and Brad was cleared. I put this at the end intentionally. unfortunately it is a known thing when these allegations come up apropos of divorce, that the guys all too often are unable to properly defend themselves and miscarriage of justice occurs. this time the good guys won.

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Has there been an investigation into the original false accusation against Brad? where did that start? also if there was some issue why didn't Angelina say anything all those years they were together.

perhaps someone in law enforcement should listen and believe reports that Brad Pitt was falsely accused of abuse. follow up and find the original source of the false allegations. uttering false abuse allegations is itself a crime.

what's sad is that Angelina is the bad parent. she took her kids into a hot war zone to advance her UN career. recklessly endangered their safety, threw her own kids under the bus, for her own personal benefit and aggrandizement. who again was the bad parent in that marriage? yet it was Brad under FBI investigation. funny about that

Price's law and the 80/20 rule

Recently I got thinking about Price's Law and Pareto Principle and if they are compatible or saying the same thing.

I've known about 80/20 for some years, back as far as university. The 50 per cent and square root I'd head of more recently, in the last few months. I was wondering how to reconcile them.

under Price's Law it states

50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.

Now under the 80/20 Rule, also known as the Pareto Principle it can be stated as

80% of the work is done by 20% of the total number of people who participate in the work.

I will use these definitions as cited. Though I've found things a bit strange because on some sites I've heard the term Pareto used with square root and half.

So there is overlap between them. The 80% of work under Pareto 80/20 is included in the 50% of work under Price. The Price contributors are a subset of the Pareto contributors.

I got a bit confused thinking about it. I was thinking about cutoff points and in terms of small worker sets. At small sizes it can seem a bit confusing and even contradictory between Pareto and Price.

They overlap twice. Let X be the number of workers. solving for  

sqrt(X) = X/5

0 = X² - 25X

with solutions of X = 0 and X = 25

so X = 0 makes sense. no workers do no work. It was X = 25 that I got stuck on a bit.

At X = 25 under Price, the top 5 people do 50% of the work. However under Pareto 80/20 the top 5 do 80% of the work. So it seems at low sample numbers Price and Pareto don't work quite so well.

The trick is to use larger samples. At larger sizes X/5 dominates sqrt(X), the numbers stabilize and it becomes clearer.

Let's say that the number of units of work done is equal to the number of people. This would match up to say an outsourcing contract where each worker generates 8 billable hours each day. So to the client with 100 contractors from the outsourcing firm they purchase total 100 units of work a day. Now who within the 100 people gets what actual useful work completed is somewhat opaque to the client.

So if X = 100; then under Pareto the top 20 people do 80 units of work, and under Price the top 10 people do 50 units of work. So the 10 Price people average 5 units of work each, and the (20 - 10 = 10) Pareto people do (80 - 50 = 30) units of work, or 3 units of work each. The remaining 80 people do 20 units of work or 0.25 units each.

Now if X=10,000; then under Pareto the top 2,000 people do 8,000 units of work, and under Price the top 100 people do 5,000 units of work. At this 10,000 number (about the size of a company on the NYSE, a phone company, or power utility) the ratio of Pareto to Price people is 1,900:100, or 19:1. The Price people now accomplish 50 units of work each and the Pareto people are still solid contributors at about 1.6 units of work each. The remaining 8,000 are alas invariant at 0.25 units of work each.

So as the population scales, if we accept Price as invariant that sqrt(X) will do 50%, the exceptionals really soar. Still the "solid contributors", the non-Price Pareto people will do 30% of the work, while being essentially 20% of the population, as X/5 - sqrt(X) approaches to X/5 for larger X. So the non-Price Pareto people will approach 1.5 units of work each.

Which is pretty good for the solid contributors. The "remaining 80%", the fungibles will get laid off first. At a ratio of 1.5 units per person to 0.25, the average solid contributor gets 6 times as much done than the average remaining 80 person. So you want to know who the solids are and keep them around.