Tag: #Statistics

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The Avocado Toast War

When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each.
–THIS GUY*, Australian Real Estate Mogul

We are on the precipice of a full-scale war. The skirmishes are already under way at blogs, tweets, instagrammies, and facebook posts around the globe. While the world may be going to hell in a handbasket for other reasons, humanity is in high dudgeon over avocado toast. I might as well as join the party.

The instigator was THIS GUY (*who I refuse to name; you can google it if you want to give him the publicity) with his comment targeting the group we all love to bash, the Millennials. This 35 year old real estate mogul from Melbourne targeted Millennials on the Australian 60 Minutes by focusing on their passion for the luxuries of Avocado Toast, lamenting how it prevents them from properly purchasing a white picket fence house in the suburbs and having the 2.3 children that has been mythically dictated to be required for a good life.

Such comments raise so many questions. What is the price of avocados and, moreover, of avocado toast? What is the price of a house, and how does it compare to toast? Are millennials buying houses and, if not, why not? Who is THIS GUY? And, anyway, who asked him?

20170517 avocadotoast Continue reading “The Avocado Toast War”

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Tax the Peasants with this One Weird Trick!

Taxes are universally despised by everyone who pays them; shared resources are universally used by everyone who pays taxes. These are common unpleasant truths like waste disposal and knowing where hamburgers come from. No one is pleased when April 15th approaches.

While the income tax in the US is a phenomenon that started in the middle of our young history, taxation in general goes back to the dawn of civilization. The notion of paying resources into the central governing body is at least as old as the development of writing. Many of the earliest forms of writing – cuneiform on clay tablets from Lagash, Sumeria ( now modern Iraq) – reflected accounting for taxes paid by the farmers and peasants.  Some of these predated coinage, so many taxes were paid in kind. Farmers paid with chicken, livestock, or grains and if they didn’t have the goods, they paid in labor.

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SeverusTare, Deviant Art

Continue reading “Tax the Peasants with this One Weird Trick!”

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Moving to Healthy

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Combined map of Healthiest cities, Kaj courtesy of Easy Map Maker

I want to be healthier. I should probably move to Gunbarrel, Colorado. Or Portland Oregon; Rochester, Minnesota; or Highlands Ranch, Colorado. These are all the healthiest places in America, according to multiple ranking studies published within the last year. Being healthier is good, but whenever you look at these Healthy Places studies, you come to some quick conclusions. The studies seem to have issues with their methodology of places or factors, come to very different conclusions, or intermix causal reasons with results. Beyond a slightly interesting headline, most of the rankings as individual places to live aren’t interesting except as a curiosity. But there are conclusions to draw, if you look past the rankings themselves.

I almost feel nervous doing data analysis in this column TWO WEEKS IN A ROW, after the analysis of the Best Actresses last week. But a ValuePenguin study came out over the weekend, and I couldn’t help it. I had to peek at it and got irritated, went digging at the data, and voila! Fodder for an argument!  When I started looking at other similar studies, the need to quarrel with the information got even bigger, and the need to vent even greater. Let’s consider it a public service. Continue reading “Moving to Healthy”