I gave it a while to avoid being first, but...
I did pretty well.
Looks like history to me more than news, and the line drawing makes into a narrative history. We are writing stories. I no longer read much news, except such as is used in the commentary and opinion I do read, partly because news seemed to rely more and more on personalized anecdote and emotional hooks. The Ferguson riots grabbing an interview with a distraught mother, whatever.
Facts and numbers are about management and control, or providing the illusions and comforts of such, grabbing different parts of the body, ego brain, than descriptive narratives and anecdotes. "95% of sexual intercourse lasts for 13.26 minutes." is not pornography.
More facts:
"95% of jobs created during the Obama administration are part-time, temp or contract" (google it)
DOW: from 6600-20,000 during the O admin
(problems with measuring from a trough, and has been played with)
Without looking, I could add something about urban real estate prices, and of course concentration of wealth in the top 1%
Which as is tells one story, but a different story if it is noted that all four items are very global, happening in Singapore and Sao Paulo as much as Chicago.
Oh, and one fact that has been floating around this week
America dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016 (Guardian headline)
Brown people on the ground not impressed with troop drawdown.
The only ones I got badly wrong were national debt, which I thought was camel-shaped* (but was a steady rise), and deportations, which I thought was a steady rise (but was camel-shaped). A couple I pretty much nailed.
*I think I was thinking of the deficit rather than debt
national debt, which I thought was camel-shaped*
I made the same mistake. I was also off on health care spending (not badly, because I knew that it hadn't changed much, but I underestimated it noticeably).
4: I came really close on that one.
As it happens, in light of 2, I overestimated on troops abroad. I didn't think the drawdown began immediately, nor that the current number was so low (about 10k IIRC).
Camels come in lots of shapes, especially if you rotate them.
Nailed them except for deportation camels.
Same as 5.2. I didn't realize we'd been drawing down in Afghanistan so heavily.
It seems like a very good way to get facts to stick in someone's head. I'm totally going to remember how many troops we have over there now.
I was quite chuffed with myself. I got the debt wrong in the same way as everyone else, the rest I got the shape of the curve right. Especially on the troops. Turns out it matters what news you pay attention to. Who knew?
coin-operated video games and casinos have both managed to find ways to subtly make failure memorable and unpleasant. Possibly the overeducated slacker demographic is not the best approach to profit.
I would add an air horn sound and lurid orange flashing screen, maybe lime green, if the deviation from truth was too large.
Oooh, or a brief video snipet of DJT himself saying "I thought you'd do better. Sad!" before his image receded back into a gold-plated private space guarded by Halford's amazons.
The NYT thing is clever but also massively irritating. Why didn't they label the vertical axess, FFS? And subtly misleading too: healthcare spending "continued to rise, as more people signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare". Which fails to mention just how little it rose: from 16.3% to 18.1%. And that's all it cost to insure what, an extra 30 million people? IOW spending up roughly 1/8 to cover an extra 1/10 of the population.
And I lied, I got the curve wrong on deportations, though I got the overall total about right. The NYT doesn't even mention that the deportation rate changed wildly over time, never mind explain why.
Mossy didn't do his homework on these. I hoped for more...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn2XpuxDBgY
re: violent crime
continued to decline, contrary to President-elect Donald J. Trump's statement that decades of progress are now being reversed. A number of cities saw recent upticks, but over all, crime is still lower than in the 1990s.
God this propaganda is going to end badly. We're looking at a nationwide two year increase of the murder rate of 23 percent. "A number of cities"? Murder is up in like 90 percent of the 30 largest cities in the country.
The idiots in this state started a decarceration push that if anything is more aggressive than California's. The "reform" coalition is bragging about how they've brought down the prison population. The capitol's year end numbers for 2016 in the violent crime categories compared to the prior five year average?
Murder: +67%
Robbery - Business: +25%
Robbery - All other: +24%
Non family agg assaults: +32%
The police stopped policing. Get back to work, commenter.
16 If decarceration is the driver here what kind of offenses have the decarcerated convicts been convicted of?
17: The school resource spot just opened up at the middle school my wife's at and I'm thinking of putting in for it and taking a step back from interdiction work. The risk to reward ratio on the street is fucked right now. We've seen a noticeable uptick in suspects in stolen cars trying to run us over or ram their way out of the containment. One of our last chronic offenders tried to run over one of our patrol guys in a stolen car when patrol arrived in the middle of him leaving the check cashing place where he was committing a forgery. He pled guilty to all of it. Three felonies, including a violent one (agg assault). Total time served was 150 days.
We also can't get guys into jail on anything below a felony (exceptions for DV and DUI). Class A misdemeanors out here include things like hard drug possession, burg of a vehicle, and assault on a police officer. Chase a guy breaking into your car and he takes a swing at the cops? Wag a finger at him and cut him loose and maybe a warrant will come out for him in a couple months and who the fuck cares because the jail will still refuse him. Even felonies are often getting released pending trial within hours with no ankle monitoring or anything. The jail is "full", with little or no mention in public that the county is not staffing several hundred beds in that facility.
You could try Omaha. They've got a huge drop in the murder rate according to a glance I had at the paper. All the murder went to Iowa.
In Pittsburgh, the murder rate had a worrisome jump in 2014 but then declined in 2015. I haven't seen the 2016 figures, but I assume if it was any kind of a big increase, it would have been in the papers.
19: Liberals and libertarians have whole heartedly embraced the myth that the prisons are full of non violent offenders. Prosecutions can be really difficult on the violent crime categories because of non cooperation from victims and witnesses. So what we often get these guys in on are charges like possession of a firearm by a restricted person, possession of a stolen car, possession of a stolen gun, drug distribution, fleeing in a vehicle, etc. On paper those are all "nonviolent" crimes.
You could try Omaha
Let's not go Defcon quite yet. I'll more likely first try a few years hanging out with a bunch of cheerful hispanic and Tongan middle schoolers.
I'm really surprised that assaulting a cop is only a misdemeanor.
It's a felony to assault a health care working performing their duties in Nebraska. You're supposed to wait until after their shift, I guess. Anyway, there's a sign on the hospital doors.
26: Out here a Class A misdemeanor can be up to a year in jail. In theory anyways. A lot of places it's a felony. Here it goes up to a felony for use of a weapon, causing serious injury, etc.
24: OTOH simply warehousing people for a while before releasing them with no better resources than they had before, no attempt at turning them around, and no hope of anything better on their release is a recipe for producing career crooks. Everyone I've talked to who's done time agrees that prison is a crash course in how to be a crook. Our whole approach to punishment needs a ground-up rethink. All we are achieving in practice is creating career criminals out of people whose first encounter with the law could have been their last if any of the structural shit had been addressed. Not that crime would go away if these issues were addressed, but there would at least be fewer career criminals. Simply not charging for violent crimes is an obvious non-solution, but our system sucks balls nonetheless. It's basically about hurting people as badly as you can while maintaining a facade of decency. It's no wonder people come out of the can bitter and violent and go right back to crime. We aren't even trying to reform them.
29: There's been a lot of movement towards more rehab, classes, job placement, etc in the prisons in the last decade or two. It could be better but at some point we're going to have to confront the fact that there's a lot of people who are broken in some fashion who need to be locked up for their high risk years and/or forcibly committed and put on tranquilizers and the real work in reducing incarceration is preventative measures with the upcoming generation.
But, AFAICT, none of that shit is going to happen in the foreseeable future and the options are high incarceration or high crime.
Here we had a big spike in murders in 2016 (the most in at least 20 years), though part of it was that series of weird ones that turned out to be a serial killer who ended up getting killed by the cops. Hard to say if there's a real trend when you have that going on.
Sourcing on 16?
Because "The murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate nationwide, at 4.5 in 2014, was at its lowest point since at least the early 1960s, when the rate dipped as low as 4.6. " From Factcheck.org, but drawing on FBI uniform crime reports.
http://www.factcheck.org/2016/07/dueling-claims-on-crime-trend/
From the FBI in 2014:
" In 2014, the estimated number of murders in the nation was 14,249. This was a 0.5 percent decrease from the 2013 estimate, a 3.2 percent decrease from the 2010 figure, and a 14.9 percent drop from the number in 2005.
" There were 4.5 murders per 100,000 people. The murder rate fell 1.2 percent in 2014 compared with the 2013 rate. The murder rate was down from the rates in 2010 (6.1 percent) and 2005 (20.8 percent). (See Table 1/1A)"
I don't know what gswift's source is, but I took him to be talking about changes more recent than 2014.
Some months ago Swift linked to FBI stats showing murder up IIRC 14% in 2015-16. It's a recent upswing.
Up 12%, 2014-15. GSwift's comment.
I've stopped killing people until I see if things have calmed down in 2016.
Good idea. There's no mileage in being a serial killer if everybody's doing it.
16: "The capitol" - do you mean Sacramento? DC?
If we're just cherrypicking cities that support our story, the homicide rate here in Oklnd is down 11% as a rate per population from the 5-year average; homicides plus injury shootings -22%; all violent crime -14%; non-violent crime (burglaries + motor vehicle theft + larceny) -9%.
16, 30 and similar:
God this is such crap. Is American society so exceptional that, in order to tame it, we must imprison ourselves at a rate greater than not only any other nation in the world but, with the possible exception of the Stalinist Soviet Union at its peak, any other in human history?
There broken people exist just in the United States. Other developed countries seem to miss out on this phenomenon,and get by just fine imprisoning a tenth of amount we do, proportionally.
38: Gah, capital, SLC.
40: I'll outsource the overall homicide numbers to Peter Moskos.
http://www.copinthehood.com/2016/12/no-its-not-just-chicago.html?m=1
Apparently yes, you are so exceptional. Swift is right that there's no prospect of sane social policy anytime soon.
Baltimore homicides were actually down by about 13% in 2016 compared with 2015. Of course, 2015 was a ~60% increase over 2014.
At least we haven't quite recovered our peak of the early 90s.
Homicide numbers don't usually go up or down spectacularly without some cause. What's driving this? A new demographic trying to break into traditional gang turf, or what?
46: In Baltimore, the police went on a sort of work to rule strike because they were pissed a couple of cops were getting prosecuted for the Freddie Gray murder, but a milder trend was national.
Addendum to 41: The Khmer Rouge is almost certainly above us too. I'll post if I have data.
Following links from 42, we seem to have the murder rate down from 2015 in 5 of the 30 biggest cities, up in 21 of them, data unavailable in 4. Overall rate increase of 14%. Violent crime rate overall +3.3%. That's something meaningful; but SLC still seems like an outlier, and given the longer historical comparisons, I'm not going AOOGA at it. (Also because I have no confidence a policy reversal would do anything appropriately targeted. And 41.2.)
It does look like we have a uniform increase between 2014 and 2016 in the 4 biggest CA cities' murder rates, if we're zooming in on recent sentencing reforms in particular. Violent crime is down, though, so not sure where that gets us. (These being LA, SD, SJ, SF.)