2026-02-03 03:55:22
Under the supposed premise of saving money, the administration proposes that US postal workers assume the role of Census workers to count people at home. Hansi Lo Wang reports for NPR:
“I think that looking to the Postal Service as a replacement for the Census Bureau and census takers is an effort to find a silver bullet that just doesn’t exist,” Lowenthal says. “The cost savings that Secretary Lutnick believes might be there for the taking simply are based on wildly inaccurate numbers and assumptions.”
For example, the 2020 census cost $13.7 billion, about a third of the $40 billion Lutnick cited in the interview as the cost he claimed the federal government could save.
In 2011, the GAO concluded that using mail carriers to interview households for the census “would not be cost-effective.” The watchdog agency’s report pointed to higher average wage rates for mail carriers compared to those for temporary census workers, as well as the large number of hours needed to follow up with households that don’t respond to the census on their own.
Hey, if the USPS thing doesn’t work out, we could just make all the food delivery services count how many chicken wings people are ordering and extrapolate for the whole country. We’ll call it the chicken wing index. If you include your household in the decennial, you get a coupon for one free chicken wing family meal. Done.
Tags: Census Bureau, collection, counting, NPR, USPS
2026-02-02 19:15:09
In January, the scale for U.S. healthcare subsidies changed, which reintroduced a cliff. If your household makes even a dollar more past the cutoff, you get zero subsidies. For NYT’s the Upshot, Irena Hwang, Josh Katz, and Margot Sanger-Katz take you through an area chart of the changes and how we got to where we are now.
This is geometrically a simple stacked area chart with two categories for government and individual share. Income is on the x-axis and the amount of government subsides is on the y-axis.
But the financial cliff metaphor and the changes as you scroll highlight what happened in January when subsidies were cut. This seems like it would’ve been a useful chart during the government shutdown a few months ago.
Tags: government, healthcare, insurance, Upshot
2026-02-02 16:45:01
Speaking of SimCity, Isometric NYC by Andy Coenen is part curiosity and part AI exercise.
Growing up, I played a lot of video games, and my favorites were world building games like SimCity 2000 and Rollercoaster Tycoon. As a core millennial rapidly approaching middle age, I’m a sucker for the nostalgic vibes of those late 90s / early 2000s games. As I stared out at the city, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like in the style of those childhood memories.
So here’s the idea: I’m going to make a giant isometric pixel-art map of New York City. And I’m going to use it as an excuse to push hard on the limits of the latest and greatest generative models and coding agents.
Tags: Andy Coenen, city, isometric
2026-01-30 18:11:07
In 2000, measles in the United States was declared eliminated by the World Health Organization, because vaccination coverage was high enough. This year, vaccination rates are down and cases are up. There was outbreak in Texas last year, and now there’s another in South Carolina. CNN shows the difference compared to 2023 and 2024, when more children were vaccinated.
As a reminder, vaccines help to stop the spread of infectious diseases. Vaccine good. Measles bad.
Tags: CNN, measles, South Carolina, vaccination
2026-01-30 03:43:15
To show shifts in net support for the president, the New York Times used a U-turn metaphor. The x-axis represents net support. The arrows start in 2020, move higher in 2024, and then turn back in 2026.
The alternative, more standard chart choices, such as a dot plot or bar chart, would have worked fine, but this approach gets to the point better.
Tags: New York Times, voting
2026-01-29 22:07:45
Most states gained population, but a few saw more people move out than move in, based on the newest estimates from the Census Bureau.
