Zach Weinersmith

You must have a bigger humiliation fetish than me!

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It’s the red button under the comic.

Confusingly, many of them grow up to dislike Batman.

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A lot of it is the rhythm. In some cases an Irish tune and an Appalachian tune are *the same tune* by syncopated differently (as a reel versus as a hornpipe, for example). The ornamentation is also going to be different. I think it’s largely an island-speciation sort of thing…

booooooooo

Going for some hatemail here

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I would never, nor would any statistician, use GDP as the only indicator of the economy.

One funny version I've seen of this lately is something like "Gas prices were high under Biden because Biden was bad, whereas gas prices are now high under Trump because of contingent reasons."

This is interesting

That's an interesting angle I hadn't thought about! And I assume it's gotten worse over time?

But like, just to be clear, if I say "unemployment is happily down to 2%" that doesn't mean I'm saying "fuck those 2%" and I don't understand why people think it does.

For me to do otherwise would feel like trying to know if a symphony was good by hearing one note! I don't know how people swim in this world without it. During the early years of covid I was surprised how few people were checking mortality/morbidity/vitality numbers vs. going off of stories.

For me it is very natural to understand the world through statistical charts. It doesn't affect, e.g. what stories I read my kid, or how I talk to a friend, but when I want to know how the world is, what I want is big stacks of information that's been cleaned an analyzed.

I think the disconnect for me on macro stats is that, if I say "inflation is down" then I think some people who see high local inflation (or just high prices generally) think I'm saying "your problems aren't real." And on some deep level I just don't understand this.

The source of this data is just one more set of gov't macroeconomic statistics though.

The Most They Ever Had In the spring of 2001, a community of people in the Appalachian foothills of northern Alabama had come to the edge of all they had ever known. Across the Sou...

Right. If you want a more poetic rendition of this sort of choice, this is a great book: www.uapress.ua.edu/978081735683...

This is a complaint about pundits and spokespeople though, not the kind of people who work at BLS or BEA.

I mean, genuinely, I wonder what people think macroeconomic statisticians do all day if they're NOT trying to figure out whether people can get jobs and what their wages are and what groceries cost?

Incidentally, no, these agencies aren't reporting what the stock market is doing. Why would you even bother when it's reported on literally every millisecond on thousands of media outlets?

Like this stuff goes deep. Behold a wonderland of graphs: fred.stlouisfed.org This is what economists do. If you hear someone looking at topline GDP saying "Economy good, stop complaining" you are listening to a pundit, not a statistician.

Addendum: we *do* measure how poor people are doing, whether people can find jobs, and average wages, and median wages, and a bunch of other stuff. And it's adjusted for inflation. Economists aren't mathematical villains in tophats and monocles trying to make sure they dollars stack really high.

There's also, for lack of a better word... too much cleanness on the notes, if that makes sense?

That is kind of my impression, yeah! The words that pop into my mind is Irish tends to be less twangy and less harsh, but I don't know what that reallllly means in terms of music.

But we *do* measure that! This is why e.g. we care about median real wages vs average real wages.

Duelling Banjos YouTube video by David Garrett - Topic

As an example of something subtle, here's David Garrett playing an Appalachian tune, and you can just hear that he's classically trained, in a way that's hard for me to describe: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIxr... The violin sounds inappropriately fancy even if the notes are correct.

Hey music dorks: I was listening to some oldish Irish reels, and it's clear that Appalachian music has that shared lineage, but feel like I can instantly tell if it's Irish or American. Am I right about that, and if so why? Is it a rhythm thing or an instrument thing, or something more subtle?

The other thing is every corporate exec in the country would be furious and the stock market would tank. At least for now these things seem to matter to the administration.

The other thing is it's a very serious thing to accuse these people of being government puppets. Evidence needs to be good.

It could be, I just mean there's no evidence. In addition, the kind of people who work at BLS are people who could be making way more money doing something else. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but I believe if they were being pressured to fudge numbers we would find out.