I take a drug called Ocrevus to slow the progression of multiple sclerosis. It's an immunosuppressive drug, the upshot of which is that I cannot receive live vaccines; the risk is that I would actually contract the disease I was getting vaccinated for. It turns out that the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine is live, which means … Continue reading Mickey Measles

[Apologies for the resend - the table didn't show up in the email. You have to click on the title in the email (or the Continue Reading button) to view the correctly-formatted post in the browser] How do we spend our time? For twenty years the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has tried to … Continue reading Time Isn’t After Us (take two)

[Apologies for the resend - the table didn't show up in the email. You have to follow the link in the email to get the correctly-formatted post] How do we spend our time? For twenty years the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics has tried to answer that, with a study called the American Time … Continue reading Time Isn’t After Us

This post continues looking at the migration data from the IRS. This data is based on tax returns submitted by individuals, which means that financial information is available. At each geographic level (nation, state, and county) the IRS includes not only the number of tax returns submitted, but the total Adjust Gross Income (AGI) of … Continue reading The Income of Movers

I've created a tool for visualizing cumulative state-to-state migration for the years from 2008-2022. Pick a state, and migration flow of interest (inbound, outbound, or net), and you'll get a graphical representation of the migration to/from that state. Here's an example - outbound migration from California (the darker the blue, the more migration there was … Continue reading Visualizing State-to-State Migration

I'll continue my look at the IRS migration data; specifically, state-to-state migration. I've got data for the past 14 years, so let's get digging. Here are the largest state-to-state migration totals for that period: FromToMigration, 2008-2022Reverse MigrationCaliforniaTexas989,744564,287New YorkNew Jersey859,094496,497New YorkFlorida851,938414,838CaliforniaArizona635,432402,452FloridaGeorgia609,691564,034CaliforniaNevada604,838356,971TexasCalifornia564,287989,744GeorgiaFlorida564,034609,691FloridaTexas560,271477,570CaliforniaWashington553,507384,579 Over this 14 year period, nearly a million Californians moved to Texas (and a half … Continue reading Moving on…

The IRS does a clever thing with the tax returns it receives. Each tax return has a tax payer ID and an address; the IRS uses this to figure out year-to-year migration patterns. The assumption being, when a tax payer reports a different address from one year to the next, this indicates that they moved. … Continue reading State Migration

I was perusing the voting results for Santa Cruz County and I stumbled across something weird. It has to do with a strange feature of this year's ballot: the U.S. Senate election for California. After Diane Feinstein died in September 2023, Governor Gavin Newsome appointed Laphonza Butler to fill her seat temporarily. By law, after … Continue reading Undervoters

The NFIRS data lists several time stamps for each incident. One is when the alarm was received at the fire station. A second is when the fire company arrived on the scene. The difference between these two is the response time: how quickly the fire company responded to the alarm. To make sure we're doing … Continue reading Fire Response Time

When researching the fire data, I stumbled across a few miscellaneous items. None are worth a full column, so what follows is a grab bag of fire factoids. North Dakota: Farm Equipment Fire Capital of the US I talked about vehicle fires previously. One of the more obscure subcategories of vehicle fires is "Off-road vehicle … Continue reading Fire Odds & Ends