Category: Numbers & Statistics

Rats Etc.

Gummint, Numbers & Statistics

Here’s a little bit of news:

New York City has imploded, with crime soaring and homeless people everywhere. Every day brings a new tale of an attack against an innocent person on the city’s street or subway.

To make matters worse, New York City is losing its top taxpayers. According to a study by the city’s Independent Budget Office, the city has lost 10% of taxpayers who earn more than $750,000 and 6% of those who make between $150,000 and $750,000.

The New York Post said many taxpayers are fleeing New York’s sky-high taxes.

And the latest study by the Budget Office only included data up to 2020. There’s no telling how many more have left since the COVID lockdowns that crushed the city.

The exodus is costing New York City billions. The Post reported in June that some 300,000 of the city’s wealthiest residents “earned $21 billion in total income in 2019, according to new data released by the Internal Revenue Service.”

That sum, the paper said, “represents the largest flight of capital from the Big Apple ever recorded.”

Now while I’m sure while that my Readers will share my chuckles of schadenfreude, there’s also the worrying caveat that these rich liberal assholes will infest parts of Free America that, quite frankly, shouldn’t have to put up with their baleful influence on our hitherto-happy, Constitution-loving homeland.

Unless, of course, they just increase the Liberal Asshole Quotient in places like Austin TX or Miami FL.  It’s when they start voting in places like Plano or Boca Raton that the barrels of tar need to be warmed up and the pillows emptied of feathers.

I should point out too that these high-dollar asswipes’ incomes are of little actual value to places like Florida and Texas because unike NYFC, we don’t tax income.  No, their only economic effect (and it’s a dubious one at best) is to drive local real estate prices higher — which helps sellers, of course, but also moves housing out of the reach of local middle-income folks.

Still, I guess anything that hastens NYFC’s slide into the abyss is welcome.

Weimar Redux

Disaster, Mocking Furriners, Numbers & Statistics

Annnnnd the Germans are in deep shit:

According to release statistics from the German economic ministry, energy prices in August were more than double the same period last year, up 139%. The monthly increase was more than 20.4% higher than July. Additionally, producer prices for electricity rose 174.9% compared with August 2021 and by 26.4% in a single month.

This jaw-dropping increase in energy cost has resulted in German manufacturing prices for industrial goods jumping 7.9% in August alone, with a year-over-year increase in the cost to manufacture goods at 45.8%. That is the highest rate of price increase since Germany began recording their statistics in 1939.

It’s a pity they didn’t start in 1919, because then we could have compared today (and tomorrow, from the looks of things) to the numbers from the Weimar Republic.  Nonetheless, Germany’s in for a rough ride.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of watermelons.

2D/3D

Deep Thoughts, Numbers & Statistics

From the Comments to yesterday’s post about the two- vs. three dimension concepts came this, from Reader Harry (no relation):

Vertical projects (buildings, towers) do have 3 dimensions. They are described as vertical projects, even though their height does not always exceed their length or width.
Horizontal projects (roads, airfields) also have 3 dimensions. They are described as horizontal projects, even though their length does not always exceed their height or width.

I understand that perfectly, especially when viewed in Platonic terms.  You may call a table a “quadripod eating-surface”, but that does not negate its “table-ness”, which exists outside any definition.

A road, almost by definition, needs no thickness — it is a line that connects a starting point and a destination, and thus requires no third dimension.  (This is not true in Britishland, however, where a road can start in the middle of nowhere, meander all over the countryside and then just expire — probably out of sheer exhaustion — never having reached an actual destination.  And one may still encounter traffic jams on said roads because while they are theoretically bi-directional, their width is usually less than that of a single car — thus proving the statement that a line may have length but not width.)

Because buildings have no ending point (projecting upwards into thin air), they must have a third dimension.  A wall cannot exist without thickness — even when joined to the ceiling.  (Just because you need only two of its dimensions when hanging a picture, for example, doesn’t mean it needn’t have a third, as a moment’s thought will show.)

And now I need to quit, because I’m starting to get a headache.

No Kidding

Business, Modernism, Numbers & Statistics

One of my favorite movie (and life) lines comes from A League of their Own :  “There’s no crying in baseball!”

Here’s something we all know about.

Facts be damned: Rising use of emotional language like ‘feel’ and ‘believe’ has helped displace rational thought in ‘post-truth era’

A new study suggests we are living in the post-truth era where ‘feelings trump facts,’ as language has become less rational and more emotional over the past 40 years.

A team of scientists found words like ‘determine’ and ‘conclusion’ that were popular from 1850 through 1980 have been since been replaced with human experience such as ‘feel’ and ‘believe.’

The team also identified another major shift around 2007 with the birth of social media, when the use of emotion-laden language surged and fact-related words dropped.

Although the drivers behind the shift cannot be determined, the researchers suggest it could be a rapid development in science and technology or tensions that came about from changes in economic polices in the early 1980s.

Reason #2,465 why I could never work in a modern office.

Coming from a business background where every single proposition or proposal had to be justified with fact, research, real-world experience and (lastly) common sense, the very thought of going through the same process where any suggestion of same might “trigger” some kind of emotional response at best makes me want to reach for the gin bottle. (At worst, it makes my trigger finger itch.)

In fact, an emotional response to criticism would have made my time’s audience suspicious:  Why are they getting upset?  What are they hiding?   Why should we take them seriously when they are such weak people that criticism upsets them?

Nowadays, of course, all the above responses would result in Stern Words from HR (or even, gawd help us, from your own Management, so pussywhipped has the business world become).

No wonder Socialism has become so popular:  because while the eventual goal of Socialism is complete societal control, the way it is introduced is through emotional appeal:  “It’s not fair that…”  or “We need to end [whatever supposed evil]”, without any fact-based foundation but with plenty of anecdotal or emotionally-based evidence.

Small wonder too that the entire Green Movement is based not only on emotion, but a pack of easily-disproved lies (“Climate is cooling I mean warming I mean changing, and we’re all gonna diiiieeeee if we don’t do something!!!”)

Facts don’t need to be propped up by emotion;  they stand proudly on their own.  In fact, it’s probably true to say that the greater the hysteria generated by about some supposed catastrophe, the more likely it is to be complete bullshit.

Dr. Fauci, call your office.