There's a kernel of truth here that's relevant -- through about 2023, the fortunes of the 35-45 year old cohort did improve relative to the mid-2010s -- but it remains the case that for this group, 1) homeownership is *way* lower than it was 40 years ago and 2) householder status is less common

Your wife/girlfriend/husband/boyfriend/partner/random person you know probably wants a pumpkin donut and a dirty chai latte and if you get them one they will like you more

A big problem with basically everything is that the median person is a confident dumbass

Verbal debate, like upper body strength for men, is largely a vestige of previous eras, so it's a sort of historical playacting. Some guys like to reenact civil war battles, some guys like to debate like a pre-literate Sumerian, everyone needs a hobby

I feel like this is not adjusting for population properly, so it would be better to choose only the best single item/dish from each. My controversial list A = French fries B = cacio e pepe (going to say rome is B) C = pizza D =falafel E = shiro on injera F = maafe G = burritos

Today is 3/4/05 squared

An underrated quantification of a society in distress is how much scam and scam adjacent economic activity is tolerated

A fun fact is that the Norwegian statistical office is 5x as large as the US statistical system (on a per capita basis)

A very niche event that is relevant to millennials who grew up in Southeast Michigan: 89X is back, playing alternative rock like it's 1997

I guess for no reason at all, I'm reposting a piece I wrote two years ago, entitled "it's the fucking guns, you fucking fucks."

Guns are actually bad People who own guns actually are bad people They get mad when you say this But they have the option of not owning guns and being not-bad people

Do we still do sirens for new working papers? If so then 🚨Working Paper Alert🚨-- "Housing Capital and Intergenerational Mobility in the United States", joint with Ari Binder and Max Risch Read it here: www.census.gov/library/work...

If I exfiltrated a copy of the numident to a random server I would be in jail right now

There's a sort of cargo cult understanding of EJ issues that grinds my gears -- going from the fact that there's a *correlation* between demographics/disadvantage and environmental exposure to some idea that *every* disadvantaged community is necessarily disproportionately exposed.

Every summer I grow tomatoes and basil and make one really good pasta sauce and convince myself I have what it takes to be a self sufficient gentleman farmer

Its probably not great that the linear progression of time is woke apparently

I knew an ex-Olympic athlete who was part of a state-sponsored Eastern Bloc doping program and he was shocked by the dosages of testosterone his cop buddies were taking. All these guys are loaded up on strip-mall TRT, resentment, and white Monsters.

We should of course learn from non-experts and experts alike, but if anything we are not elitist enough -- non-elite claims, of true, should be subject to the same standards of evidence we treat elite claims. Gatekeeping is just another way of asking for rigorous proof

The K-12 treatment of slavery really suffers from an unwillingness and inability to speak openly about rape.

I've been reading a lot about the French Revolution lately, and its definitely instructive that these crazy idiots, just guillotining around the country, starting random wars, etc are like "yea no slavery real bad"

Computer boys and LLMs are really just analogs of each other -- in the same way LLMs sound like an expert to normies, computer boys sound "smart"

The GFS model is absolutely sure that the current tropical wave developing behind Erin is going to be a thing -- predicting a Hurricane Sandy situation in the 18z run (This far out the global models are dogshit is my understanding, this is mostly just a curiosity)

I have significant Chinese and French ancestry, I have never checked the Chinese box or the white box, only the Asian and Vietnamese boxes. I do not plan to start writing in French with this change. It's not a DNA question! Really don't get white Americans' confusion, welcome to my world lol

The problem, of course, with undermining faith in the integrity of data collection is that stuff like this -- normal stuff like updating forms to be in line with new statistical standards (the new SPD-15 race and ethnicity question format, finalized last year) gets treated like a big conspiracy

It is worth thinking about the fact that there has to be, by definition, a lowest ranked economics PhD program

type of guy who's position on whether a 17 year old is capable of making decisions as an adult fluctuates wildly based on whether that kid is trans or has committed an unarmed burglary

In northern Michigan, taking advantage of southerly winds to send some smoke back Canada's way

7. Title 13 also says the commerce secretary can conduct a mid-decade census in 2025 (with April 1 as the reference "census date"). But the results can't be used for reapportioning House seats. And the question topics for such a 2025 census would have needed to be reported to Congress years ago

C'mon man

There are 34 EPA AirNow monitors which have measured an PM2.5 AQI above 100 for more than 50% of the hourly readings in the last week. The monitor in Potawatomi, WI has not had a single 24 hour period with AQI below 100.

Either RCP8.5 represents an acceptable future (so we should burn coal like its 1950 to own the libs) or RCP8.5 represents an impossible future (because we aren't going to burn any more coal), you need to choose one.

Investigating whether AI/ML methods can improve the births-deaths model's ability to capture turning points is exactly the sort of thing that the smart computer boys are supposed to be good at, maybe they should try that?

Knowing true facts about the world seems like a pre-requisite for being a member of a polity

Welp

Have been working on some rapid response stuff related to the last couple days of poor air quality -- here's an animated gif that shows how the smoke plume spread over the Midwest Wednesday through yesterday

Happy new Burial music day to all who celebrate

Good morning to everyone except out of control Canadian wildfires, who can eat a dick

Feel like I need to dust off my "Lawyers, physicians and (software) engineers are members of skilled trades -- important for a functioning society, but ultimately downstream from and reliant (if not parasitic) on the actual growth-producing activities of a modern economy" takes

Lead addled boomers trying to use the self checkouts at Meijer: a tragedy in 5 parts

For anyone who's interested, updated versions of the Gridded EIF data product for 2024 are now available: www.census.gov/data/experim... For this release, we're experimenting with housing unit level data: we produce noisy counts of occupied housing units by age, income and housing value.

The other memes in the series include "which singers have the same name as your mother's maiden name?", "what freeways have the same numbers as you SSN?" and "send 2 Bitcoin to this address if you ever want your personal data again"

The thing about Bullshit Jobs is that if Graeber had had an annoying middle manager instead of being a free wheeling academic he would have written more papers and gotten tenure

People who preboard with a definitely fake service animal make me want to go 25% reactionary

I'm travelling to Boston today for NBER (I'll be at the CRIW meeting + the preconference for the 2026 CRIW housing deal, presenting in progress work on flood risk). Got the airport a little early, waltzed through security (zero line!) and then looked at my phone to see my flights delayed an hour.

Every rich gen X tech guy turns out to have lucked into doing one replacement level programming task at the right time to get sweet monopoly rents; as long as people pretended they were geniuses everything was fine, but as soon as they had to confront their mediocrity it's a rocketship to fascism

If you like me made this mistake this year, the solution (sans pickles) is to make a cucumber salad with a rice vinegar, soy sauce, ginger, sesame and sriracha dressing

A reminder that as far as we can tell, literally everyone who was born in, e.g. 1971 (really anytime in the 1970s) was lead poisoned as a child (via the great McFarland, Hauer and Reuben PNAS paper)

Canadian wildfire smoke is smoking again, looks like

Exposing children to avoidable environmental risks is bad actually