2022 LC Thread—New Year, New Thread

https://twitter.com/psychotronica_/status/1569901140350799872

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I’m in Brisbane visiting my sister and it’s just… Like it’s not BAD but “gotta hand it to Brisbane, they do X better than any other Australian city” is not true for any X. Not even racism and they really tried at that. I’ve always thought Houston is the US equivalent of this, but I’ve never been there for exactly that reason.

In a large enough dataset really bizarre random things should be expected to happen all the time. Still a cool story though.

Friend of mine made a pretty good point.

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https://mobile.twitter.com/WCTHistory/status/1569853788722286595

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Bah in comments it’s fake and the real tweet is in quotes and attributed to Shirley Dobson. Wish people wouldnt post fakes, so annoying.

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It seems like basically any time there is intense scrutiny of a murder conviction there are tons of police and prosecutor errors or lies, no matter how guilty the defendant. Withholding exculpatory evidence is something you learn not to do like 2 weeks into law school.

they’re legally required to at most crossings, even if there’s nobody there. if you walk down the railroad you see little signs (I think they vary by railroad, but a lot of them are just a small black “W” on a white sign) as you approach a crossing telling the engineer where they need to start blasting the horn (the “W” is for “whistle”).

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I was on a train into Chicago trying to catch a baseball game when we hit someone, we sat there for about 2.5 hours while they did the cleanup/investigation. Just a high schooler with headphones on, devastating.

There are always going to be prosecutor discovery errors in any case when you are dealing with voluminous discovery. This is especially true at the state level where the prosecutors are frequently under-resourced and overworked. There is, of course, a huge difference between an intentional withholding of exculpatory evidence, and an accidental technical discovery violation. The former is very bad, the latter happens in probably every complex case, and every murder case.

There are no at-grade crossings anywhere in my city, but the trains are always laying on the horn because there are always people on the tracks. It’s one of the more popular spots for encampments, although one property owner just clear cut about 5 acres to drive them out. Dude could have at least left a couple trees here and there, but he went scorched earth. God forbid if people sleep on completely unused wooded property which isn’t even visible from anywhere.

I think I’m going to go as Ash Williams from Evil Dead for my friends Halloween party. What do you call the black straps around his chest?

It’s a shotgun harness.

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Tactical bra

I believe the formal term is “manziere”

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No, those look different.

This seems excruciating. I guess I’m lucky that I don’t know the stigma of being below average height, but it seems hardly worth it.

Fwiw you would get an equivalent result without the pain by instead taking three inches off the femur of anyone shorter than you. Don’t tell Bezos this.

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Feels like this is the perfect business to take advantage of the increase in toxic masculinity that seems to have happened over the last few years, and the clientele they mention in the article (crypto bros, CFOs, dudes trying to pick up more women at the club) seems to confirm that.

“Women don’t like me because I’m short” or maybe it’s because you’re an asshole.

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Bruenig strikes again

The centerpiece of Child Trends report is the claim that child poverty declined dramatically over the past few decades. The chart summarizing this looks like this development looks like this.

When I saw this chart earlier this week, it looked very strange.

The decline in the 1990s made sense as the employment rate and the EITC increased a lot in the 1990s (the EITC’s effect is massively overstated by shoddy data, but that’s not relevant here). The stagnation from 2000 to 2013 made sense. We had two recessions and employment dropped considerably. The slight decline in the mid-2010s also made sense as employment was starting to pick up again.

But the sharp drop in 2018 and 2019 was hard to understand. The labor market improved some but no more than in prior years.

Nothing that happened in the economy in 2018 can explain this data. But something that happened at the Census can. In the mid-2010s, “the Census Bureau introduced redesigned income questions, followed by changes beginning in 2015 to allow spouses and unmarried partners to specifically identify as opposite- or same-sex.” These redesigned questions were studied for a few years, but they did not make it into the data series published by the Census until 2018, which is when these otherwise inexplicable income spikes occurred.

In 2018, the Census income and poverty data had what is called a “series break.” The underlying methods changed, making 2018 and 2019 incomparable with the prior years. We can’t say for sure what impact this series break had because we do not have a 2018 and 2019 data set that uses the old methods. But anyone with a lick of sense can see these graphs above and realize that there is no way they reflect dramatic real-life changes rather than survey methodology changes. Trump was not juicing the incomes of the super-poor. It just wasn’t happening.

A tiny CTC expansion that entirely excludes families with earnings below $2,500 while only increasing CTC benefits by, at most, $75 for any family earning less than $9,167 did not cause the per-capita income of the 2nd percentile child to increase by $977 in a single year. For the smallest family with a kid — a two-person family — that’d be a jump of nearly $2,000. Anyone who thinks this actually happened at the same time that the Census changed its income and family relations methodology needs their head examined.

If you remove this obviously bullshit statistical blip from the report, there is basically no child poverty decline at all after the year 2000.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1570414496950140929

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