Tag Archives: zombie

Today’s Dumbest Chart, Presented in Chart Form

by JocelynCamp63 Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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“Someone on the internet is wrong” isn’t a great mission statement for a blog. I get it. Really. But….National Review posted this in their Twitter feed a few minutes ago:

This is so phenomenally stupid that I figured it had to be a joke of some kind. Or maybe some intern put it up, not understanding how dumb it was. But no. When I backtracked to the PowerLine post that it came from, it turns out that author Steven Hayward wasn’t trying to trick anyone. He was making an explicit argument that this is the right way to view climate change:

When I make charts and graphs, I generally make it a practice to scale the vertical axis of a chart from zero (0) to the upper bound of the range. Compressing a chart’s vertical axis can be grossly misleading…..The typical chart of the global average temperature is usually displayed this way normal chart inserted….But what if you display the same data with the axis starting not just from zero, but from the lower bound of the actual experienced temperature range of the earth?….A little hard to get worked up about this, isn’t it? In fact you can barely spot the warming….If this chart were published on the front page of newspapers the climate change crusaders would be out of business instantly.

Hayward missed a bet by not using Kelvin and scaling the chart from absolute zero at the bottom to the temperature of molten lava at the top. Then the warming would really be invisible.

We all post stupid stuff sometimes. But things are really going downhill at NR if they post charts like this even though the author explains exactly why he’s doing something so dopey. In case they still don’t get it, though, maybe the chart below will clear things up.

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Today’s Dumbest Chart, Presented in Chart Form

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Remember That Shot Fired a Few Months Ago in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War? Turns Out It Was a Dud.

by WinfredBSB Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Does immigration depress wages? One of the seminal studies of this was done by David Card in 1990. He studied the Mariel boatlift of 1980, which swamped Miami with new immigrants, and concluded that there was little effect on wages. A few months ago, George Borjas took a fresh look at the data, and concluded there was an effect, but it was restricted to those without a high school diploma. Among high school dropouts, wages dropped 10-30 percent for about six years.

The key chart is on the right. Click here for more detail, but the nickel version is that the blue line shows the wages of Miami’s dropout population compared to other cities. I wrote about this at the time, and noted an oddity: “Before 1980 and after 1990, the wages of high school dropouts in Miami are above zero, which means dropouts earned more than high school grads. That seems very peculiar, and none of the control cities show the same effect. Does this suggest there’s something wrong with the Miami data?”

Yes it does! A pair of researchers at UC Davis tried to recreate Borjas’s conclusions, but they couldn’t do it. “Significant noise exists in many samples,” they say, “but we never find significant negative effects especially right after the Boatlift, when they should have been the strongest.”

So what’s up? Where did Borjas get his huge effect? Well, it turns out that his Miami data was indeed suspect:

We find that the main reason is the use of a small sub-sample within the group of the high school dropouts, obtained by eliminating from the sample women, non-Cuban Hispanics and selecting a short age range (25-59). All three of these restrictions are problematic and, in particular, the last two as they eliminate groups on which the effect of Mariel should have been particularly strong (Hispanic and young workers). We can replicate Borjas’ results when using this small sub-sample and the smaller March CPS, rather than the larger May-ORG CPS used by all other studies of the Boatlift. The drastic sample restrictions described above leave Borjas with only 17 to 25 observations per year to calculate average wage of high school dropouts in Miami.

So Borjas used a small March census sample, and then left out several groups that should have shown a strong response to the wave of immigration. As a result, his sample size is so small as to be useless. Tweaking his data even slightly removes the wage effect entirely.

Borjas does mention sample-size problems in his paper, but never really addresses it or makes it clear just how tiny his sample is. I’ll be curious to hear Borjas’s reaction to this, but given the questions I already had about his paper, this reappraisal of his data puts it pretty firmly in the category of unlikely to be true. For now, it appears that even a massive influx of new immigrants over a period of just a few weeks has almost no effect on wages at all.

Does this mean that immigration in general also has no effect on wages? Nope. But it certainly suggests that the effect is probably pretty small if it exists at all. In any case, the Borjas paper doesn’t seem to prove anything one way or the other.

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Remember That Shot Fired a Few Months Ago in the Great Immigration vs. Wages War? Turns Out It Was a Dud.

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Quote of the Day: Ted Cruz Angling For Some of That Trump Magic

by RosalynAgee Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Ted Cruz, apparently feeling gloomy today over Donald Trump’s ability to get attention with outrageous statements:

The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. The media doesn’t report that.

Huh. Could be, I suppose. Most convicted felons are pretty poor, and poor people tend not to vote for Republicans. Why would they? Of course, they tend The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats. not to vote for Democrats, either. They just don’t vote.

Presumably, Cruz got his data from this study, which estimates that 73 percent of “hypothetical felon voters” would vote for Democrats. However, a more recent study that looks at how many actual felons register as Democrats puts the number at 62 percent for New York, 52 percent for New Mexico, and 55 percent for North Carolina. That’s still not bad, Democrats! You have the felon vote cornered. Except for one thing: only about a third of them registered at all, only about a fifth have active registration records, and only about 10 percent or so actually voted for president recently. Liberals may generally be in favor of allowing released felons to vote, but it sure isn’t because they think it will help them at the polls. Working for felon voting rights is about the most inefficient and futile way imaginable of getting out the vote.

In any case, anyone can play this game. Just find some demographic group that tends to vote for Party X, and then find some bad thing also associated with that group. In this case, poor people tend to vote for Democrats, and felons tend to be poor. Bingo. Most felons are Democrats.

Or this: rich people tend to vote for Republicans, and income-tax cheats tend to be rich. So most income-tax cheats are Republicans.

Or this: Middle-aged men tend to vote for Republicans, and embezzlers tend to be middle-aged men. So most embezzlers are Republicans.

We could do this all day long, but what’s the point? The whole exercise is kind of silly. If Ted Cruz wants some attention, he’s going to have to do better than this.

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Quote of the Day: Ted Cruz Angling For Some of That Trump Magic

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Here’s What It’s Like to Work at Planned Parenthood

by LatoshaGood Posted on November 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last night, Bryn Greenwood, who worked for Planned Parenthood in the late 90s, tweeted about her experience:

I worked at a #PlannedParenthood clinic in Kansas for 3 years. My coworkers & I were subjected to the following acts of terrorism:

Gasoline was poured under our back door & ignited 4 times. Twice while the clinic was occupied, causing patients to be evacuated.
Butyric acid (used as a stink bomb) was poured under our doors & into ventilation system so many times I lost count. Clinic evacuated.
2 cherry bombs were left on our doorstep after hours, causing damage & clinic closure. Imagine what it’s like going to work after that.
We received hundreds of phone calls, threatening to torch our clinic & to kill the “murdering whores” who worked there.
3 times someone drove by at night & shot out our windows. Picketers stood on the sidewalk & harassed employees as we swept up broken glass.

Our clinic didn’t perform abortions. We did well woman exams, pregnancy tests, dispensed birth control, & treated STIs. Our clinic offered free & low cost services in a low income neighborhood, but every day the “pro-life” movement tried to frighten us. The goal was to make us afraid to come to work, to make us quit, to make us close the clinic. That’s terrorism. That’s how terrorism works.

This is what life is like for women’s health providers, even ones who don’t perform abortions. I guess I’d urge caution about calling this terrorism, since I’m not sure it does us any good to expand the scope of crimes that are part of the “war on terror.” Historically speaking, that hasn’t been great for liberal values. Still, it’s hard to argue that the goals and methods aren’t pretty terrifying—and that’s even without Greenwood mentioning the personal threats implicit in photographing license plates and publishing names and addresses of clinic workers, which are common tactics.

After two days of near silence, Republican presidential candidates are finally “praying” for the victims of the Colorado attack. They could hardly avoid it when they were booked on national TV—and anyway, praying is always okay, even for sinners. Especially for sinners, in fact. It’s a turn of phrase that doesn’t risk showing even the slightest desire to protect Planned Parenthood from future attacks. Republicans might not want Planned Parenthood workers killed, but they sure don’t seem to mind if their angry hordes do everything just short of that.

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Here’s What It’s Like to Work at Planned Parenthood

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Medicaid Provides Pretty Good Health Coverage for Children

by TanjaPflaum0174 Posted on November 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Via Harold Pollack, here’s an interesting study of children’s health care. The researchers investigated how good Medicaid coverage was, and the results were surprisingly positive. I have painstakingly modified the chart so that higher numbers are always better, and as you can see, reported satisfaction with Medicaid was equal to or better than private insurance on most measures, and very close on the others.

Now, this is only for children, and the results might be different for adults. Still, a lot of people—including me—generally think of Medicaid as fairly lousy coverage. If this study is correct, we need to rethink this.

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Medicaid Provides Pretty Good Health Coverage for Children

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The Return of the Warblogs

by EverettUHF Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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We’re in a war of civilizations. If you won’t say radical Islam, you aren’t serious. We need to fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here. They hate us for our freedoms.

I really hoped I’d heard the last of this nonsense around 2003, but I guess not. The sensibility of the post-9/11 warblogs is back, along with all the overweening confidence in amateurish geo-religious belligerence that fueled them the first time around. But at least this time, in the midst of the panic, we have a president who says this when he’s asked about committing more ground troops to the fight against ISIS:

We would see a repetition of what we’ve see before: If you do not have local populations that are committed to inclusive governance and who are pushing back against ideological extremists, that they resurface unless you’re prepared to have a permanent occupation of these countries.

The war against ISIS will be won when Iraq gains the political maturity to provide a working army that’s not merely a tool of the endless Sunni-Shia civil war in the Middle East. We could turn Anbar into a glassy plain, and all that would happen is that something worse than ISIS would crop up.

There’s a lot we can do to defeat ISIS, and most of it we’re already doing. Airstrikes? Check. Broad coalition? Check. Working with Arab allies? Check. Engage with Sunni tribal leaders? Check. Embed with the Iraqi military? Check. There’s more we could do, but often it’s contradictory. You want to arm the Kurds and create a partnership with the Iraqi government? Good luck. You want to defeat Assad and ISIS? You better pick one. You want to avoid a large American ground force and you want to win the war fast? Not gonna happen. Everyone needs to face reality: This is going to be a long effort, and there are no magic slogans that are going to win it. Unfortunately, they can make things worse.

The Paris attacks were barbaric and tragic. Let’s try not to turn our response to them into a tragedy as well.

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The Return of the Warblogs

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7 Death-Defying Zombies of the Plant & Animal World

by DaniloPoirier Posted on October 24, 2014

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7 Death-Defying Zombies of the Plant & Animal World

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