2. OMB is giving federal agencies six-month extensions on the deadline to submit public action plans on getting in line with Statistical Policy Directive No. 15 (now March 28, 2026) and the deadline to start implementing (now Sept. 28, 2029). My earlier reporting on what changes could look like:

Want to win the 2025 Table Contest? Get inspired by @bamattre.bsky.social's interactive table, which turns the Board Game Geek database into a practical tool ✨ His entry: bamattre.github.io/boardgames/ Submit your table using any #RStats or #Python package! Details: github.com/rich-iannone...

Something is clearly wrong with the U.S. on a couple of fronts

@startribune.com Thoughts on having public service articles like election how-tos outside the paywall?

Boy, this is really dark stuff. “Don’t go to college, don’t get a job—marry young and crank out babies.” And the women are cheering, while every single speaker is either a man or a woman who went to college and has a powerful job.

Have ICE protests made Los Angeles too dangerous to live in? We asked three scowling retirees at a Shoney's in Branson.

No words. "…U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students…"

Universities operate on timescales that are incompatible with the whims of specific administrations. Research takes years or decades and agencies cannot make entire fields pivot on short timescales, which is a reason previous administrations have had the wisdom not to try to micromanage the process

Looking to upgrade the DSLR digital camera I bought 20 years ago and God things have changed

Oh darn, another cool online bookmarking tool bites the dust. RIP Pocket support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fut...

Pro tip: don't Google the camera you bought in college for a thousand bucks

Americans favor labor unions over big business now more than ever, analysis of new data @epi.org from me & Adam Reich of Columbia Labor Lab. In data back 60 years, Americans' sentiments are both warmer toward unions & cooler towards big business than ever before. www.epi.org/blog/america...

Move over Microsoft 365, Jesus is my Copilot

I feel asleep, and when I woke up ydata-profiling (formerly pandas-profiling) is now a paid tool? ydata.ai/products/pac... #pandas #python #databs

I made a streetview roadtrip simulator where we all vote on a direction every 10 seconds Also we have to vote to change the radio station. Enjoy! > neal.fun/internet-roa...

A lot of messed up stuff happened this year, but the shining light of hope is that the Pope is a guy from the Midwest named Bob

Do roses make a difference in your tea or is it just aesthetics? I'm about to find out

Trying to get rid of a beta fish tank on Facebook Marketplace, it's been the highest ratio of flaky people. I don't trust any of these guys with a fish

Crap why don't I have any Catholic friends to call for their hot takes

Does the type of data visualization impact readers' stereotypes and victim blaming? According to this, apparently it does to some extent. Showing distributions instead of just means slightly increases readers' agreement that external factors rather than personal ones may explain differences.

Even the Atlantic can slip into the trap of adopting Trump's rhetoric. It says "Trump is delivering" on his commitment "to...cut government waste." Trump is cutting government operations, not government waste. He's not evaluating what is wasteful; he's slashing important programs—which has a cost.

"The analysts were given no time to pass on knowledge of how the annual updates to the HHS guidelines — last completed in January — are done. By law, HHS must update the guidelines annually."

NEW ESTIMATES: The policy reported here—adding a state cost-share for #SNAP that ramps up to 22.5%—would impose $23.65 billion in new costs on states just in the first year it's fully phased in. This would likely lead to deep cuts to food assistance. State numbers in link below⤵️

It's really important that I held onto this certificate of Excel 2010 mastery signed by Steve Ballmer

Yeah, the sole reason why I still have a Facebook account www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

This is the policy process in a Trump White House. Rival factions jockey for access to the Oval, race to get POTUS to run their thing up the flagpole publicly before another faction can shoot it down. This is not a healthy policy process...

Minnesota Management & Budget makes it transparent how federal changes have affected the state's budget, so far $282M cut permanently. mn.gov/mmb/budget/f...

This is the sort of messaging that every R1 university president should have been offering in loud, joint public press conferences at the US Capitol the entire last month. Instead, 🦗🦗

23andMe declared bankruptcy and the company is gonna be sold off for parts. That includes your DNA information and the only amount of control you have is to delete your info immediately. It’s very simple to do. Gift link: wapo.st/4kUsBEF

The pure power of emailing an online document to someone, and then seeing them in it mere minutes later

I've got multiple wrong emails from apps, banks and then retractions this week. Is there something going on?

Finally getting around to Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk (from 2018) for the first time, and good lord if this isn't the most darkly prescient paragraph I've read in a long while

Thinking about why public services should not be designed in the same way as private-sector ones. I've 5 points so far: (1) CHOICE: with v few exceptions, we get to choose the private-sector digital services we use but most public services need to be universal at the point of access (1/n)

Foreign students subsidize the cost of tuition for US students. They nearly always pay full freight, allowing universities to subsidize US students. Up is not down.

Got some raw denim jeans and need to cuff them, I'm not sure anyone on Reddit has an opinion about this

Many people online “seem to have completely lost the ability to tell what is real and what is fake, or simply do not care anymore”- @jasonkoebler.bsky.social www.404media.co/ai-slop-is-a... Generative AI content isn’t just OG spam or slop. It has the potential to cause people to doubt reality.

okay I think I've got it

What are some good recipes that have a lot of moderate down time so I can just be in the kitchen on my phone? Like "stir every four minutes"

Imagine disliking someone so much that you egg their house

One columnist, a professional pundit, is living in a paranoid delusion. The other, a sociologist, is living in America.

"I don't know how to say this in a politically correct way" is the work equivalent of "I'm not racist but ..."

TIL robots can’t do crochet.

File under sad irony www.bbc.com/news/article...

From Children's Defense Fund Minnesota, an explainer on the Minnesota Child Tax Credit, which now features advanced payments. Helpful to anyone who might qualify. minnesotareformer.com/2025/03/04/t...

Wow, end of an era. FiveThirtyEight peaked when my interest in using data science on a variety of problems matured. I know since then it was acquired, Nate Silver is doing his own thing, but still will be missed thehill.com/business/517...

PA's Gov. Shapiro just signed an executive order directing agencies to prioritize the recruitment of federal employees, notably presenting all state positions in federal terms. Saying that an IT position is the equivalent of a GS-13 Supervisory IT Specialist is really helpful! pa.gov/content/dam/...

What do Greece and Argentina have in common? Both have prosecuted national statisticians for publishing accurate statistics in defiance of political leaders.