Gold Noise

Saw this chart from ZeroHedge on feedly and thought 'this looks ominous', but the image was too small to see the numbers clearly, so I opened in a new tab. Now I was able to clearly see the numbers in the enlarged image. 

The gold line is the spot price of gold. The other two lines are some obscure market bullshit, I'm not even going to try and figure out what they are.

Now look at the numbers on the gold scale (2nd from the right). It ranges from $5300 an ounce to $5550, a difference of 4%, not a catastrophic collapse. Now look the time scale along the bottom. It starts at 3:30 AM and runs till 7 AM this morning. That's like ancient history. Gold could be a thousand dollars higher or lower by now.

I suspect anytime you use a microscope to look at any kind of financial market you will find what look like apparent huge leaps in prices. I imagine there are people who thrive on this kind of minutiae but I ain't one of 'em.

The ZeroHedge article is paywalled. I suspect that the feedly link will not work for you.

Low Wages

Visual Capitalist posted a chart showing number of working people making less than $20 an hour. It lists the states in order of the number of people. I thought that was not particularly useful, I wanted the list in order of the percentage of the workforce earning those wages, so I asked Google to extract the text from the image and put it in a spreadsheet. Mostly I did this just to get a little mental exercise. Google does a good job of extracting the text, but it puts each item on a separate line, and I want all items pertaining to one state on the same line. I could do this by hand with any text editor, but being who I am, I went with using spreadsheet formulas. Was it any faster? Maybe, maybe not, but it was not tedious and I refreshed my spreadsheet skills.

The US States With The Most Low-Wage Workers

Original Rank	Percentage Rank	State	Thousands of People	Percentage of Workforce
27	1	Mississippi	581	52%
20	2	Louisiana	781	45%
30	3	Arkansas	541	43%
39	4	West Virginia	293	43%
22	5	Oklahoma	735	42%
21	6	Kentucky	739	41%
36	7	New Mexico	352	41%
5	8	North Carolina	1,800	40%
18	9	Alabama	821	39%
1	10	Texas	5,100	38%
3	11	Florida	3,500	38%
48	12	Wyoming	92	38%
7	13	Georgia	1,700	37%
15	14	Missouri	1,000	37%
17	15	South Carolina	824	37%
29	16	lowa	547	37%
11	17	Indiana	1,100	36%
32	18	Nevada	511	36%
37	19	Idaho	311	36%
33	20	Kansas	474	35%
14	21	Tennessee	1,000	34%
10	22	Michigan	1,400	33%
31	23	Utah	511	33%
9	24	Ohio	1,600	32%
38	25	Nebraska	298	32%
40	26	Hawaii	181	32%
44	27	South Dakota	137	32%
16	28	Arizona	963	31%
43	29	Montana	144	31%
6	30	Pennsylvania	1,700	30%
45	31	Delaware	135	30%
8	32	Illinois	1,600	29%
19	33	Wisconsin	808	29%
41	34	Maine	171	29%
47	35	North Dakota	103	28%
13	36	Virginia	1,000	27%
4	37	New York	2,200	26%
12	38	New Jersey	1,100	26%
46	39	Rhode Island	131	26%
23	40	Minnesota	659	25%
2	41	California	4,000	24%
42	42	New Hampshire	161	24%
34	43	Oregon	416	23%
35	44	Connecticut	380	23%
49	45	Vermont	67	23%
25	46	Maryland	630	22%
28	47	Colorado	553	21%
50	48	Alaska	161	20%
24	49	Washington	639	19%
26	50	Massachusetts	605	18%
51	51	D.C.	141	11%

Murder

Homicide rate by state. FBI. 2022 data.

I was glad to hear that Trump sent the National Guard into Washington D. C. might be sending them into Chicago. From the news, it seems like crime is out of control there. Then I mentioned that there had been 238 murders in Chicago this year, and my friend replied that Chicago is a big city. That wasn't the response I was expecting.

So let's see if we can make sense of this. Population of the Chicago metropolitan area is 9.4 million. Call it 10 million. The number of murders last year was almost 600, so the murder rate is 6 per 100,000 (seems to be the number that Wikipedia uses). The rate overall for the USA is like between 3 and 10.

Looking at the map (above), Illinois had a murder rate of 7.8, which is not much different than 6, at least compared to some places, like some Caribbean islands and Mexico.

Countries with the most homicides

I suspect that there are problem areas in Chicago where the murder rate is very high, but that doesn't bother most of the people in Chicago because they don't live in those areas. Which is kind of like me not caring about the murder rate in the Caribbean.

Where do you live?

State Farm commercial Never
A PERFECT LIFE MOMENT

I'm reading a story on Crime & Consequences about crime reporting and this lines appears:

On average, 69% live in suburban areas, 19% live in rural areas, and 12% live in urban areas.

I'm surprised, I thought most of the people lived in cities, but I guess suburban sprawl is where we want to be.

Back to the story, this business of crime reporting seems a little fishy. They're quoting all these numbers that purport to show the percentage of crimes being reported, but how do you know how many crimes are not being reported? I suspect statistical sleight-of-hand.

Death

 

Annual Number of Automobile Accident Deaths

Annual Number of Drug Overdose Deaths

I was surprised to find that that number of deaths from drug overdoses was so high. In the last few years it has exceeded the number of deaths from automobile accidents.

Every year about three million people die in the United States, about one percent of the population. Most of those deaths are old people.

The combined total of the automobile accident deaths and drug overdose deaths is less than 150,000, which is about five percent of the annual total for all causes.

"During 2020, COVID-19 was listed as the underlying or contributing cause of 377,883 deaths (91.5 per 100,000 population)." - Provisional Mortality Data — United States, 2020

That means COVID related deaths were about 10% of the total.

Nobody Lives Here

Parts of Brazil with no people living within one square kilometre (80% of Brazil's total area)

Another coincidence. This one popped up the day after we started watching a The Mechanism, a Brazilian crime show. Curiously, Brazil does not show up in the video about immigrants to the US.

Via daily timewaster

Immigration

Foreign Born Population in the U.S. (1850-2019)
RankingTheWorld
I came across this the day after we watched Black '47 which was set in Ireland in 1847, just three years before this animated graph starts. I think a static graph would do a better job of portraying this information, but maybe that's just me. It's interesting how there seem to be waves of immigrants from one country and then another. Italy, Germany and Ireland are well represented in the early years. Mexico has been the biggest lately.

Via The Unwanted Blog

Where are we?

The Four Scenarios

I continue to suspect that the danger from the COVID-19 virus is overblown, that it's no worse than the seasonal flu that happens every year. But I might be wrong. It's kind of hard to tell. All kinds of numbers appear in various reports, but I suspect (I'm a suspicious kind of guy) that most of those numbers come from outfits with that are promoting a political agenda of some sort, so I don't trust any of those numbers.

The number of deaths is particularly fraught. Roughly one thousand people die every day in the USA in normal circumstances. That's roughly 400,000 people per year. How many of those deaths are caused by the flu in a normal year? Maybe as few as 10,000, perhaps as many as 80,000. Telling me that X number of people died from COVID-19 yesterday, or last week, doesn't really mean anything to me unless you can compare it to some baseline, and what's the baseline for a new disease? There isn't one.

We don't know how infectious this disease is and we don't know deadly it is and we won't really know until it has run it's course and some unbiased people have had a chance to review the statistics. (Unbiased people? Where are you going to find any of those?)

Meanwhile, where are we headed? Mark Weber has posted a power point presentation that looks at four possible scenarios of what the future might bring. The slide at the top of this post is number ten. The presentation is aimed at business leaders, but everyone could benefit by considering these possiblities.

Via Cool Tools

Misinformation

Corona Virus is as deadly as the Spanish Flu

Came across this graph and I thought "that's pretty cool", shows just how deadly the Corona virus is in comparison to other well known diseases, but there was no link to the source, so I went a-Googling, and found this graph:

No, it's not

It is almost identical to the one above, except the Spanish Flu has moved from a 1% percent fatality rate to 10%. And once again, no link to the source, just vague references.

The Spanish Flu is the one that killed a bazillion people a hundred years ago. The top graph shows that the Corona virus has similar fatality rate. The bottom says the fatality rates for these two diseases differ by a factor of ten. Of course, we won't really know how deadly the Corona virus was until it's all over.

The panicked reactions of government officials are doing more damage to our world than this virus could ever hope to inflict.

An enterprising dude (or dudette) could clean up in the restaurant business by putting up glass partitions between dining booths. Meals would be served through slots in the door, just like in prison. It would help get people acclimated to life after the zombie apocalypse.

Death

Number of deaths in America in 2014 (1 pixel represents 1 death). 
At least it does in the original graphic, but this one has been scaled down by a factor of 4, 
which means each pixel represents 16 deaths.

Found this on graphical representation, which is a pro-gun blog. I think it gives a good picture of what's killing us, except it doesn't include automobile accidents or opioid overdoses or soldiers killed in combat, so lets see how big those are:

• opioid deaths:      47,055
• automobile deaths:  32,675
• combat deaths:   maybe 200, hard to tell

If we made a block at the same scale to cover these, that block would be this big:

Scaled block for other deaths.

I should have made a new block for these three categories, but I'm lazy, so I just scaled the other one down.

Smoke, Smoke, Smoke that Cigarette

Correlation does not always imply causation. Source: Tyler Viglen.

PRICEONOMICS has a good story about Ronald Fisher, statistics, how they are generated, how they are applied and how much people like to fight about them.

Wikipedia article about Ronald.

Via Detroit Steve.