Numbers
In which Rat learns human art of statistics
Good time of day, humans!
Transcript:
Human: — Rats, how is this possible?
Human: — It says right here you gnawed minus two feet of baseboard last month.
Rat: — Well, seasonal adjustments alone wouldn’t cut it, so we had to make some revisions to past data as well.
From ZeroHedge:
[M]ost of the job gains in the past few years, and especially 2024, were a mirage, and following the dramatic August 2024 preliminary data revision which vaporized 818K jobs (which had never existed in the first place)
and
[T]he jobs market has become one giant Potemkin village on the verge of collapse.
Full text, with charts and tables
U.S. labor statistics might be one of the most egregious examples but numbers not making sense anymore is a global problem these days.
My college once hired someone who had a Ph.D. in "Assessment," which involved him constantly throwing out data and studies and creating meaningless "assessment" tools. This pedagogical approach assumed that one could quantify knowledge, not only how it should be taught but how it should be received. Watching this pointless experiment play out, I came to believe that the professors in the "Department of Assessment" had been proctologists in a previous career.
Is he reading from Politico?