Links - December 2024

These are links I saved on my phone last month.

COVID-19 Wastewater Data – National Trends | NWSS | CDC

No startling news in this one. I just think it’s a neat little data visualization. Superannuation in Australia - Wikipedia

I bookmarked this as an example to use in class, as contrast to US Social Security. I Made My Own Acquire Game | BoardGameGeek

My mom bought me Acquire for Christmas, which prompted a “wait a minute” moment. I dug through a closest and sure enough, we actually already had an unplayed copy of Acquire from 2008. (Great game, as it turns out.) The 2008 edition is made of very cheap cardboard tiles, and we decided this plastic upgrade wasn’t worth the cost of keeping the newer edition. Looking online, it’s fairly common for people to create their own deluxe copies nowadays. Is My Blue Your Blue?

Hue 169 for me.

EDGAR Entity Landing Page - Search Results for UNITEDHEALTH GROUP INC

After the murder of Brian Thompson, there was a viral claim on social media about the claims denial rate for UnitedHealthcare skyrocketing during Thompson’s reign as CEO. Skimming through the company’s quarterly reports, the “medical care ratio” (percent of premiums spent on medical costs) hasn’t dipped (and actually rose a tiny bit), so if that claim is true, I wonder if it has something to do with Medicare Advantage using managed care to free up funds for supplemental benefits. Another possibility is that the claim (originally from value penguin dot com original research) just isn’t actually true.

Tanzi effect - Wikipedia

“The Tanzi effect is an economic situation involving a period of high inflation in a country which results in a decline in the volume of tax collection and a deterioration of real tax proceeds being collected by the government of that country. This is due to the time elapsed between the moment the taxable event occurs and the collection of the tax becomes effective.” California’s minimum wage for fast-food workers did not create jobs

The object-level political issue isn’t why I saved this. I saved this because it’s unusual for an opinion piece to do a diff-in-diff replication.

The American Economy in 20 Jobs

Here’s an interesting reddit post. The user clumps together occupation categories (just based on vibes) to get 20 categories which each represent about 5% of the work-force. It’s a cute idea, and I kinda want to take a shot at making my own version… maybe there’s some way to cluster occupations based on something like switches between categories?

Atari 2600 Star Castle : D. Scott Williamson - ia

An old Atari employee goes back to remake a game they didn’t think was possible on the hardware at the time.

Wang Chong (Wang Ch’ung) | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Ancient materialist philosopher. I’ve linked to his arguments for why ghosts cannot be real.

(3) Argument from ghostly efficacy: If a living person is harmed, this person will immediately go to a magistrate and bring a case against the party who harmed them. If it were the case that people become ghosts when they die and can interact with living humans, every ghostly murder victim would be seen going to a magistrate, telling him the name of the killer and the means of murder, leading him to the body, and so forth. This is never witnessed (ever).

Province 8 of the Episcopal Church - Wikipedia

Two reasons I saved this.

Firstly, it’s a US subdivision map where the lines mostly, but not entirely, match up with state borders.

Secondly, the most conspicuous deviation is that pac-man shape corresponding to the Navajo Nation

concertina.net

I stumbled across this while looking for some information about the music museum here in Vermillion. I saved it because I like niche little single-topic forums.

Divisia Inside Money Aggregates - The Center for Financial Stability

Standard monetary aggregates equally weight different kinds of money and exclude things like credit cards. This is a different approach that tries to weight money by its liquidity.

Pawsense

“PawSense helps you catproof your computer, by protecting against cat typing but letting humans use the keyboard freely”

China’s final warning - Wikipedia

“By the end of 1964, more than 900 such “final warnings” had been issued.”

Win–stay, lose–switch - Wikipedia

I knew of a result from game theory experiments that a simple “Tit-for-tat” strategy performed extremely well. Here’s an alternate (still dead simple) strategy that can sometimes outperform tit-for-tat. Just keep doing whatever works.

Reexamining the Vietnam War, four decades after America’s defeat | Penn Today

Peter Leeson on Pirates and the Invisible Hook - Econlib

Pirates were surprisingly organized and profit-oriented.

32 tenured UW-Milwaukee professors to be laid off

(It’s the “College of General Studies” that shut down, which was housed on secondary campuses.)

Greg Mankiw’s Blog

CollegeNPV - [reddit]

Purports to estimate the net present value of college programs. Presents estimates for individual majors at individual colleges.

The Kernel

This short story has some of the clunkiest prose I’ve ever seen and has very little payoff at the end, but I still it enjoyed it for its description of the largest possible object that could exhibit an earth-like surface.

Poem: The One Hoss Shay by Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1858

It’s a poem about a carriage that worked perfectly for exactly 100 years before falling apart. Originally about Calvinism or something, I heard it in the context of architecture, and specifically the lifespans of sports stadiums

Small Business Development Centers - SD specific link

There are semi-governmental programs to offer free consulting to small businesses. I heard about this program in the context of my faculty orientation, because SD has a lot of family businesses and students in a business school in SD might have particular need of this kind of consulting service.

The Great Inflation | Federal Reserve History

Federal Reserve Board - The Federal Reserve after World War II :

Diocletian - 284-305 AD | Armstrong Economics

Roman emperor who oversaw a period of hyperinflation, tried to respond to it with price controls.

Index of Economic Freedom - Heritage Foundation

Highly subjective, but still fun to flip through. They give Finland the only perfect score on “property rights”

Mathematical Treasures: Mesopotamian Accounting Tokens

Likely connected to the origins of cuneiform, which makes accounting and writing twin sisters. The whole list of “mathematical treasures” is fun to poke around with as well.

Rutherford B. Hayes Is More Famous in Paraguay Than in the U.S.

Hayes oversaw some international arbitration which resulted in Paraguay getting the majority of its current land area.

Interview with Ed Averett – The Man Who WAS the Odyssey²

The Magnavox Odyssey 2 was a video game console from the late 70s. The parent company Philips didn’t have much faith in it, but a single developer cranked out about half of the system’s library by himself and was able to keep the thing afloat for a few years.

Another interview with Averett.

Also, here’s a little idea. An AI assistant that does sentiment analysis on you email inbox to figure out which emails will be stressful to read.