Travis Roach

gotta enjoy this brief period between the win and our stupid president saying something stupid

USA? USA? USA?

We beat Canada at their national pasttime (complaining about American politics)

USA men USA women
🤝
Getting dragged around by the Canadians for 58 minutes and still winning gold

I repeat.

Tech professor arrested for fentanyl conspiracy charges, no longer employed by university Editor’s Note: A federal complaint is only an allegation and not evidence. All defendants are innocent until proven guilty

Supply chain management professor breaking bad:

www.dailytoreador.com/article/tech...

I forgot he was on Bluesky! Here is @asjadnaqvi.bsky.social

I woke up to learn just how may Canadians I follow on here 🏒🥅

Now one of you please hire me so I can move there and post a bunch of flag emojis after a goal, too

GitHub - asjadnaqvi/stata-sankey: A Stata package for Sankey diagrams A Stata package for Sankey diagrams. Contribute to asjadnaqvi/stata-sankey development by creating an account on GitHub.

I haven’t used this particular one, but I’ve loved Asjad’s other data vis (Stata)

github.com/asjadnaqvi/s...

Shout out to @josephpolitano.bsky.social who held off on making new charts yesterday just in case

Just paid a zombie tariff 🤦‍♂️

Apparently the bare root pear trees we bought from somewhere else had a big die off and couldn’t ship. Only other place we could buy from this late in the year does their grafting in France. They weren’t willing to take the charge off in case it come back so…

🧟‍♂️tariff🧟

Trump Suffers Setback Unrelated To Child Rape

Trump Suffers Setback Unrelated To Child Rape

Perhaps the real Tariffs were the allies we lost along the way

Wife paid a bill to FedEx the other day that was for import duties on an Etsy item. When I told her about the Supreme Court decision she basically yelled “when tf do I get my $17 back?!”

Which is a long way to say, it’s going to be fascinating to watch the unwind from this ridiculous policy 🍿

Liberation Day: 2/20/2026

E.P.A. Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule

The legal war over the endangerment finding is now underway. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/c...

US EPA plans to loosen mercury rules for coal plants this week, NYT reports The Trump administration plans to loosen restrictions on coal-burning power plants this week, allowing them to emit more hazardous pollutants including mercury, the New York Times reported on Wednesda...

Trump clears the way for power plants to dump more mercury into the atmosphere.

#EconSky: Registration for "The Craft of Publishing in Economics" is now open! March 9, 12-1:30 EDT.

Three fantastic editor will give suggestions for how to navigate the publication process w/ plenty of time for Q&A.

More info & registration form below.

econ4ua.org/the-craft-of...

Again, any explanation of the "vibecession" needs to account for the fact that it was the upper- and middle classes who saw the biggest sentiment drops.

The map below displays county-level estimates of inflation-adjusted annual direct damages from natural disasters across the United States, based on a methodology that was developed by New York Fed economists and applied to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Events Database. Users can filter the data by disaster type and focus on states and counties of interest. Full prior-year data are released in August, with revisions to the dataset posted in February. See the Overview and FAQ tabs for more information.

NY Fed updates map of U.S. for losses from natural disaters, data covers 2024. www.newyorkfed.org/research/pol...

HHS Open Data Access official HHS datasets for research, analysis, and transparency.

New dataset dropped this month: national Medicaid provider spending (2018–2024), aggregated by NPI x HCPCS x month. Includes FFS, managed care, and CHIP encounter data. Public, 3.3GB, provider-level detail. Looks very useful for utilization & spending research
opendata.hhs.gov

She was right, btw 🎉🥳🍾

This is a real thing that is hanging in my house. We got it at an antique store and I love it so much. It’s a terrible drawing of a girl playing with an ugly doll that says, “Mama has given me this doll because I have been industrious”

Also, this is the second second-round R&R I’ve knocked out this month. Time for a tasty beverage 🍻

We sent in a revision the day before Friday the 13th because we don't need this paper to be in peer review for more than the one million years it already has been

Coauthor pointed out that it was really good to get the revision in today instead of tomorrow (Friday the 13th)

I told her she sounded like Michael Scott ("I'm not superstitious, bit I am a little stitious") 😂

Their Water Was Undrinkable. Oklahoma’s Oil Regulators Failed to Help. State regulators discovered strong signs of oil pollution, including high levels of salt and toxic metals, in one family’s drinking water. But for two years, they repeatedly delayed basic tests to fin...

State regulators discovered strong signs of oil pollution, including high levels of salt and toxic metals, in one family’s drinking water. But for two years, they repeatedly delayed basic tests to find the culprit — then closed the case.

Final EIA-860 is out, and 2025 really did it: 54 GW of new U.S. electric capacity, 96% clean. Solar again carries the offense, and we built more storage in 2025 than the cumulative total through 2023. More and more and more additions... but also record low retirements.

Yikes here are the numbers for the past 12 months. Everything is pretty much dead except healthcare/social assistance. Note that healthcare growth is largely not about the business cycle -- it's about the aging of the population and more elderly people needing care.

core part of the ostensible economic justification for mass deportation was that Americans would rush in to take all the jobs immigrants left, but now unemployment rates for native born Americans are rising and the admin is sending people out to do damage control