A Scientific Lesson for the Geographical Journalism Party

Posted on 22 October 2011 by Terry Chay

Scientific thinking requires that the more outlandish the claim, the more compelling the evidence must be. It is this thinking that rejects the libertarian’s love children: Freakonomics, The Bell Curve, or nearly any book by Malcolm Gladwell.

During lunch, I exhausted my daily newsfeed and started to troll the top hits on digg when I ran across this linked article in which a journalist and amateur geographer explains the Tea Party movement.

Here is the central claim that forms the basis for the author’s entire argument:

We’ve never been a nation-state in the European sense; we’re a federation of nations, more akin to the European Union than the Republic of France, and this confounds both collective efforts to find common ground and radical campaigns to force one component nation’s values on the others.

What a load of crap! Continue reading about regionalism after the jump→

Credit Reporting

Posted on 19 July 2011 by Terry Chay

Just spent an hour trying to get a fraudulent site (creditreport.com, freecreditreport.com, consumerinfo.com, and thousands of others) to stop charging my credit card. They have been billing me since September of last year and despite disputing the charges before, they keep doing a recurring charge. They wanted the following in order for me to “cancel” my account:

my name
the credit card number charged
my birth date
the last four digits of my social security number
e-mail address
my full name
my mother’s maiden name

Notice how all of this information is just what they need to do a complete identity theft? Continue reading about dealing with credit reports after the jump.→

Voting yourself to oblivion

Posted on 9 November 2010 by Terry Chay

“My mom said she voted for anything that is going to lower her taxes.”

Great so your mom voted for Prop 19 which failed. But the other stuff? You realize that your dad is the only breadwinner in the family and he’s a government employee. When California is forced to submit a budget, and all alternate taxation and alternate funding resources have been closed, the first thing they’re going to do is lay off your dad (again).

It’s sad, but it’s the cold hard reality of those votes. I’m sure they’re going to enjoy the no new taxes when they’ve got no income to go along with it.

Yet another year where I voted with the losers on all but a couple propositions. Ironically, I’m one of the lucky few who doesn’t get touched by this voting stupdity. Heck, I never even had a joint.

Enjoy the consequences of your actions.

Editorial wall my ass

Posted on 6 October 2010 by Terry Chay

The person next to me on the airplane was reading the Wall Street Journal. I glanced over and it took me about 15 seconds to realize that it was the editorial page. The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has definitely got to be the largest: “I’m an ignorat douche” tags I’ve ever seen a person display.

A lot of people rationalize reading the Journal because of the claim of an chinese wall that separates their editorial board from the news board. The claim is their editorial board is right wing whackos (and that content is given for free online); their journalsm is impartial enough to make business decisions (and that content is behind a pay wall online).

Bullshit.

Take this recent example: McDonald’s May Drop Health Plan.

And then read the takedown by a conservative or the this New York Times article. There is really no excuse for sloppiness in this reporting other than a political agenda—after all the rationalization McDonald’s is giving for dropping the plan in the article is that they’re keeping too much money for themselves!

This is common sense: Murdoch bought the paper and changed its direction radically. If you are reading the Journal now to make business decisions, you are making really poor ones.

Are democrats more educated?

Posted on 21 July 2010 by Terry Chay

Balloon Juice links to a Brookings study that measures educational attainment by metropolitan area and notes that 24 out of 25 areas are in states that went for Obama in 2008.

This made me immediately wonder which the outlier was. A quick scan said that the post is incorrect and that there are two outliers according to that metric. The first is Austin-Round Rock at #14 and the second is Tucson, AZ at #25. Doug was probably referring to Austin. But why talk about states, when we have the county breakdown? The county Austin resides in (Travis, TX) actually went for Obama by almost 2 to 1 (64-35%)—seems a shame to pick on Austin simply because it happens to be in a red state.

Continue reading about education and voting patterns after the jump. →

No man is an island

Posted on 9 June 2009 by Terry Chay

…except “Coach”

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Moment of Zen – Craig T. Nelson on Glenn Beck

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Craig T. Nelson explains the Killer Ape hypothesis. The part anthropologists missed is that, while nobody helped our Third Chimpanzee forbears, they did have access to welfare and food stamps.

(Here is the full segment just in case you think I’m taking this out of context.)