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On the other hand, given the state of the economy it's not so bad. This is a pretty mediocre jobs report-although that depends on how you look at things. The headline unemployment rate edged back down to 3.5%. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 173,000 jobs. The American economy gained 263,000 jobs last month. You can decide for yourself which presentation is best, but I've chosen to use #3 routinely when I have to deal with enormous data outliers from the start of the pandemic. I would never bother with this unless it were really important. #Depeche mode message board paper monsters softwareAlso, my charting software doesn't do this automatically and it's a pain in the ass to do it manually. That wouldn't work here because there are too many outlier values at different levels. In some cases you could use little slashes to show, say, a jump from 1000 to 5000. A log chart would work except for two things: (a) most people don't understand log charts, and (b) log charts don't work if you have negative data-which we do. It's same as #2 except that the pandemic bars are removed: However, since those bars don't provide any information, why even bother to show them? This is better, especially since we don't really care that much about the pandemic data that spills off the top and bottom of the chart. We'll reset the y-axis so that it does a better job of presenting all the normal data: You can barely tell if the numbers are up or down in recent months. If you set the y-axis to fit those outliers, the rest of the data is useless. The problem is obvious: we had a huge surge of job losses and gains at the beginning of the pandemic. Just set the y-axis to fit all the data and go: Here is Chart #1, which is what you'd think of as the default presentation. Why, a reader wonders, did my Friday chart about job gains have a big chunk of it blanked out? That's easy to explain with a quick comparison of three different ways of presenting the data. If you look at local stats, be very, very careful that you know what you're looking at. ![]() For one thing, it only applies to a single place, but it's also the case that different cities report crime categories differently. ¹There's local crime data from cities like New York and Los Angeles that's fairly up to date, but you still have to be careful with it. Just remember: the object is to come up with things that people might search for if they're afraid of local crime, not just crime reports on cable news. If you want to suggest other search terms or companies, let me know in comments. I had trouble coming up with generic search terms and I might have missed some large home security companies. Now, this obviously has limited applicability. If the home security business is booming, you sure can't tell it from the performance of large public companies that specialize in it. This shows up in the value of home security companies too: There's no sign at all that people are increasingly interested in security equipment. However, once I've smoothed out the lines a bit and added trendlines, the conclusion is pretty obvious: on a national level, fear of crime is either flat or going down. #Depeche mode message board paper monsters how toThis is presumably caused by people who either buy or receive this stuff as gifts and are googling to find out how to use it. As you can see, they all have peaks around the holiday season and around Google Prime Days. This is Google Trends data for three different search topics that people might search for if they're afraid of local crime. So how has that gone over the past few years? Answer: they think about buying some kind of security equipment. What about fear of crime? There are polls that ask about this, but it occurred to me to wonder what people actually do when they get concerned about rising crime in their neighborhoods. There's no way to guarantee any kind of accurate comparison between years and it will probably be 2024 or 2025 before things settle down and we once again have numbers we can rely on.¹īut that got me curious. What this means, basically, is that I wouldn't take most recent crime data seriously. And then, to make things worse still, crime went up and down during the pandemic in ways that are very hard to account for. To make things worse, the FBI recently changed its crime-reporting process and lots of police departments have just decided not to bother with it. On a national level, crime statistics take a year to compile so they're always way out of date. You would be surprised how hard this question is to answer. ![]() Is crime up these days? Or is it down? What kind of crime, anyway? ![]()
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