Ugh, these are the worst 'info packets' to receive.

Wage levels in general are highly correlated to age/experience/years with a company.

If a company is going to cut people, the point is to cut costs.

If your goal is to cut costs, replaceable people with higher salaries are the right place to do it (for the company).

I don't know how to reconcile those two fairly. Maybe it is the requiring for severance based on tenor to counteract cost savings bias? But then you run the risk of pushing less experienced people into being cut, without the chance to build their resume.

I know someone who was able to sue successfully - in Canada though. He was quite Senior and laid off from his job. They hired someone for the exact same job at lower pay.

In MA you are no longer allowed to ask job applicants about their salary history - only their expectations for a future salary. It's supposed to promote pay equity. Hopefully, it will.

It's so bizarre that "over 40" is a protected class, but no other age brackets are.

It's hard to have even basic sympathy for people over 50 and will be for about three years.

Sucks being an older worker, though. My wife has been out of the workforce for a while and is not getting callbacks. There is a sense the kind of jobs she wants have been designed with younger people in mind.

It can't be that easy for most people over 40 to snap a guard's neck so quickly and silently no alarm is raised.

6: Ageist!

I HAVE A VERY PARTICULAR SET OF SKILLS. I DON'T HAVE MONEY. THIS IS WHY.

||
Football you drunken whore, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.
|>

My head is quietly exploding that you didn't calculate the ages of the 290. At least a random sample?

I am a little ashamed.

If they're in a column, you can probably find a way to paste them into excel pretty easily. Or I can tell you the answer (36.8).

6 oh, hey. some of us have just turned 41 you know.

12: they're on a physical piece of paper.

Oh. Try to highlight stuff on it with a mouse anyway.

Done. I used a physical mouse. Now what?

Hanta virus.

That was me.

CAREFUL THERE BUD.

16: now talk into it. Try 'hello computer'. If that doesn't work, just give them the formula for transparent aluminum.

I'll call him Squeakers.

Squeakers is the correct password. Good job Heebie. You have saved the whales and the federation.

I think, if the mouse wriggles too much, or pees on your fingers, it might be easier to do it with MS office lens, which scans things very intelligently.

Impressive how painful getting data from one format to another still is. I hope Squeakers doesn't bite. He might even chew up your source material.

A recent thread on gerrymandering inspired me to look up the algorithm for allocating House seats. I thought it would be fun to code it up in Python and run it on all the past census data, then do some "what-ifs," like "Puerto Rico is a state," or "DC is a state," etc. The coding it up part was actually fun, but getting the censuses in csv or Excel format or even copy/paste from a webpage was just not fun at all and I gave up after getting 2010 and 2000. It was actually surprisingly difficult to even find straight-up census data by state on government sites in a format that didn't require all sorts of mangling to use.

Have you tried SAS?

Nice that they cover exceptions: "An Ohio strip club law prohibits patrons from touching a nude or seminude dancer unless the patron is a member of the dancer's immediate family."

So if you run into the place and say "Harriet! I told you to stop working here! You come home right now!" and carry her off you're covered.

26: It was so ridiculous. We were just shaking hands.

||

Soviet interest in Chinese politics increased markedly. The reason, historian Aleksandr Lukin has shown, is that the Sino-­Soviet split "gave China experts and the public at large a unique chance to legitimately criticize a socialist country."4

25. My problem was in finding the input data in some vaguely useful, vaguely standard format. I wanted to do very minimal Squeakers-work before feeding it to my apportionment module.

Confession: I've never used SAS. SPSS, yes. TROLL, yes. Matlab, yes. Various SQLs, yes. SAS is available as a free download in a VBox? How odd. What's that about?

That is remarkably similar to the project we're doing with undergraduates this summer, except their coding is painfully slow. And we're looking at towns instead of countries.

I feel like there *must* be some nice scan -> OCR -> convert to CSV or other format pipeline someone's written and put on Github for that kind of thing.

There's some useful stuff here: https://github.com/gerrymandr

Which I have not whatsoever combed through for relevance, before posting that.

Heebie must be everyone's favorite prof. "You can find the proofs in Chapter 3. Maybe."

Moral question: If you have your face in the chest of a stripper in a Columbus, Ohio, club and the police raid, do you shout "Mommy" or do you wait for her to shout "Daddy"?

35: There's some truth to that.

I assume there will be A WTF Friday, because after today I am utterly full of WTFs. Am also currently in Twitter timeout either for telling Brit Hume that he was so full of shit that his eyes are brown or Tim Alberta that he was a useless piece of shit.

I require rage outlets.

I know. I can read body language pretty well because I've been to the dentist.

Speaking of WTF, how garbage is Yale Law? I guess Berkeley still has Yoo.

Everybody should go to Creighton.

Oh, 38 is the comment I couldn't find for today's post! Hiya Stormy.

Crow not Daniels obv.

38: Just as Stormy D was being arrested, Stormy C was being banned from Twitter???

Coincidence!? I think not!

40 - As an alum, I was all ready to be forgiving for their official press release congratulating Judge Kavanaugh because sure, that's what you do, you get to issue a nice press release if you're a law school and one of your graduates goes to the Supreme Court, seems silly to deny them that, and then I read Professor Amy Chua's "Judge Kavanaugh is great for women because my daughter was his clerk" and I just fucking lost it. Burn it down and salt the earth where it stood.

There's a weird relationship between anti-elitism and Ivy-League worship in the U.S. Somebody at Iowa State should write a thesis on it.

45: I don't think that's what's happening. It's a segment of the elites that are so enthralled by elite credentials that their supposedly elite brains cease to function, and the other side takes advantage of this weakness.

44: Seems like a bit of a self-own for Amy Chua to announce that all that Tiger Mothering led to her daughter going to the same school where she teaches and then getting a prestigious job from her friend Brett who hires lots of her students. A true testament to grit and determination!

There's a weird relationship between anti-elitism and Ivy-League worship in the U.S. Somebody at Iowa State should write a thesis on it.

Similar to the Clinton family's problem? More attacks => more insularity?

I only know people who went to University of Iowa.

47:

many of the new landlords had risen to wealth and eminence through state service. Their newfound family traditions of study and conspicuous morality gave them every hope of maintaining access to office. Entry to the imperial academy or other avenues to office came through periodic recommendations solicited from eminent local families known to the central court or local officials, so powerful landlord families assured themselves of continued access to office through their control of these recommendations.
[...]
throughout the history of imperial China the actual characteristics of the political system defined by the First Emperor were condemned as criminal. In their place was erected a moralizing façade, which some have described as the "hypocritization" of Chinese political culture.