bengebre

Yeah that's definitely a day-of-week/reporting dump effect making that spike. The 7 day rolling data for deaths shows CA is only 6% below the most recent peak:

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/covid19/california/#deaths

nb: that's my site

15 days ago was a different universe of testing capacity. Oregon had done less than 500 tests then and was still using the initial (semi-flawed) CDC tests. We've done almost 13,000 tests since then (I live in Oregon). Not to say we're doing enough yet, but it is a totally different situation today in Oregon and elsewhere:

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/covid19/oregon/

edit: that link is to a site I built to track testing capacity and new case growth.

Kudos to NYT, but I think the COVID Tracking Project data is probably better because it attempts to measures total testing as well (positives and negatives). I've been using it to report state-level testing statistics and new case/death curves:

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/covid19/

From the data I've learned that Washington state appears to be getting their arms around this thing:

https://www.deptofnumbers.com/covid19/washington/

Detecting moving objects (asteroids, TNOs) in TESS data:

https://www.benengebreth.org/dynamic-sky/TESS/sedna/

As someone with an High Deductible Healthcare Plan, I pay most medical costs out of pocket up to an annual limit. It's crazy that for such expensive services I NEVER know what my bill is going to be until months after the procedure has happened. I always try to guesstimate costs beforehand, but I've been off by an order of magnitude on more than one occasion. Having transparent pricing in the healthcare world, even if it was just an estimate, would help people with HDHPs immensely.

First I've seen on completion stats for the Stanford online courses:

"Besides the Artificial Intelligence course, Stanford offered two other MOOCs last semester — Machine Learning (104,000 registered, and 13,000 completed the course), and Introduction to Databases (92,000 registered, 7,000 completed)."

I see the title "Delete profile and Google+ features" but no link to an actual action when I visit here:

https://www.google.com/settings/general

My guess is it's going away for everyone, but I guess that's speculation.

The "Delete profile and Google+ features" link in the Google "Account Overview" has also been removed, so it looks like you can no longer get rid of your Google+ account after the fact as outlined here:

http://www.troublefixers.com/how-to-delete-google-plus-or-go...

Have any of you signed up for the service yet? It looks quite slick. I've tipped a couple of people as well as verified my own website so that I can claim tips that people leave for me. The really neat thing (as the ERE post mentions) is that you don't have to sign up for people to start tipping you. All the tips for a site are logged until you claim them as the site owner (via meta tags or file upload). It's a great way to overcome the initial adopter problem WRT getting people to accept your payment method. So website owners don't need to install anything in order to accept tips. I'm interested to see if this catches on. It's really great from both a concept and implementation perspective.

Having just listened to the "When Patents Attack!" podcast today (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/26/138576167/when-pat...), I question how this addresses what I saw as the fundamental challenge with patent trolls -- shell corporations. These companies are spawned as needed to sue the alleged patent infringers. Since the shell companies are just a bunch of lawyers and the ownership of a patent, there's little in the way of assets to counter sue for (i.e. there's not much for the suing entity to lose). I don't think these guys will be swayed by a moral or ethical argument either. And since these shell companies don't employ coders, well, I don't expect it will impact who coders decide to work for.

The BLS doesn't report the data monthly, but it does occasionally break out the unemployment rate for higher levels of education.

http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

In short, yes, the trend continues.

Here's the unemployment rate data by education level in chart form:

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/demographics/

It's interesting to observe the structural nature of these series. At no time (in the visible history of the chart) does the unemployment rate of a higher education level exceed the unemployment rate of a lower education level. Through recession, recovery and expansion, education looks to be a verifiably sound strategy for increasing your employment prospects.

Also worth noting (from the original link) is that the labor participation rate (employed + active job seekers as a fraction of the population) is higher as education levels increase. You're more likely to be working or looking for work the more education you have. Lower education levels have greater rates of people not working and not looking for work.

This stood out to me:

"a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it."

I don't know the backstory here, so I won't jump to conclusions. Is there a reason besides lack of funds for shutting this place down?

Boy, there are certainly much easier ways around it than this. The thing is, I'd really like to not have to use them. I'd love to give the Times $5 a month for access to something more than 20 articles but less than infinity. Sadly that's not an option.

A lot of us New Yorkers use the Freelancers Union for health insurance. It solved this exact problem for me. They're more of a service platform for independent workers than a union. They've got health, dental and 401k plans.

http://www.freelancersunion.org/

I'm always amazed by how many people claim to have learned so little in college. It's not that I don't believe them; I just had the complete opposite experience. Perhaps I'm just slower than most here, but I studied science and engineering in school and it was HARD. It took so much effort, but I learned a ton. I'm a programmer these days, but most of my analysis skills come from the education I got in college and grad school. I've learned a lot since then of course (especially about how to design code), but I attribute most of my (modest) successes to my education.

It kinda makes you long for the days where the exit was a speculative IPO. At least some of the resources went to founders that way and they often retained a sizable chunk of equity (i.e. control of the product).

Related (Why Ten Million Dollar IPOs Matter): http://www.urgentspeed.com/applied_disruption/2010/04/why-te...

The benefits of finding these folks are many:

http://kottke.org/11/01/controlling-healthcare-costs-by-focu...

I noticed they are using "listing prices" instead of sale prices or any kind of constant quality index to calculate their ratios. That's probably not ideal, but since price series are hard to find for homes it's at least understandable (that and it's their business model to collect listings).

I do a lot of work in this domain and the price-to-rent and price-to-income ratios for California look higher by my calculations. Using median sales prices for the broader metro area and income and rent data from the Census, I'm finding California is still quite expensive.

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/affordability/metros

Click on the table heading columns to sort and you see some pretty unaffordable stuff in California. For San Jose the rent ratio is ~35.

Note: In case it wasn't obvious, I'm linking to a site I maintain above.

I think the tendencies you're pointing out are anecdotally accurate occasionally, but they are in no way "by definition" from immigrate or immigrants.

The argument is that stock market returns are not a random process but exhibit mean reversion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_reversion_%28finance%29

In short, large deviations one way are more often followed by large deviations the other. If mean reversion is true, the coin flipping analogy is not an accurate one.

Living like a student for 5 (or more) years is a great strategy, but I just wanted to correct the doubling time math you presented. To double every 5 years you need a 15% annual return (1.15^5 = 2.011). A 10% annual return doubles every 7.2 years, thus the rule of 72:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_72

It's really fascinating (horrifying?) that some of these ETFs went to zero for a moment. I can't understand how they cancel all these trades though. Seems like the biggest accounting nightmare ever.

Looks like mashable broke the story:

http://mashable.com/2010/04/23/blippy-credit-card-numbers

Texas really did behave entirely differently during the recession (employment-wise) than the rest of the country. Not only did the state start adding jobs in the middle of last year, there are now more jobs today than before the recession:

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/unemployment/texas/#employment

(Note: link is to a site I maintain)

Which is similar to saying an increase in labor productivity with the spoils going to businesses that deploy labor saving technology more so than wage earning employees. (if I interpret you correctly)

In short: Do we need a modified definition of recession if our current definition doesn't address the nature of recent recessions?

Hmm. I think a lot of people are aware that GDP has its shortcomings. I think many would embrace a metric that fully captured well-being in an economic manner, but I didn't see the author suggesting any new metric that we should be following instead. I think we use GDP because it's the easiest thing we can use that isn't subject to [much] interpretation. And yes, that sometimes leads to problems.

I think it's hard to criticize the man on those grounds since he has pledged to give the "bulk of his fortune" to the Gates Foundation. That's arguably more productive than donating money to the government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06...

As a thought experiment, isn't it possible that the pie (wealth) could grow larger but that the distribution of that wealth could be narrower due to technology and outsourcing of jobs? That may not be zero-sum, but it could certainly be problematic for wage earners.