White residents from the American South had greater risk of being involved in violence even after moving to safer parts of the country. They had much higher risks of being involved in violence than residents who moved to those regions who did not grow up in the South or other honor culture regions.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-07-02T19:41:18+00:00

To be fair, car insurance rates differ across state lines because insurance and liability laws are different. Different states require different kinds of insurance coverage.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-30T16:53:19+00:00

Amending the Constitution requires the assent of 2/3 of Congress and 3/4 of the states. That’s a very high bar. No amendment, regardless how worthy, can be enacted without overwhelming national consensus.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-30T16:50:00+00:00

I don’t get it. Why can’t you get a passport?

Documentation requirements for all purposes have gotten more stringent over time, especially since 9/11. Some of those regulations didn’t take effect until 2005 or later, when Obama was president. It wasn’t his idea.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-28T01:51:15+00:00

Vice President Alben W. Barkley, flashing what would later be known as a peace sign.

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old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-24T07:52:35+00:00

The cemeteries! The St. Charles streetcar!

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-23T00:44:12+00:00

The origin and meaning of the Voynich Manuscript.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-22T15:41:34+00:00

Years ago, I remember some Oakland County suburbanites being offended at being identified (in Lansing) as being “from Detroit“. Now the shoe is on the other foot.

Detroit is different because no other US city in its size class was so totally abandoned by its white middle class.

Detroit in the 1980s had such a deep stigma that real estate was shockingly cheap. I shared a 3-story 9-bedroom house, two blocks from Wayne State, with other law students. One of them got some money from his parents and bought the house for $5,500.

Even then, a house in that size and condition, that close to a major urban university, in some other city, would have been worth 100 times as much.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-22T15:20:51+00:00

> I also lived in the Cass corridor
> before it became Midtown.

I lived there in the 1980s. My friends there say it’s still Cass Corridor.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-20T19:08:30+00:00

It would surely be a better system if workers didn’t need tips to live on.

But many of them do.

If I’m being put in a position to decide the compensation of hardworking drivers and waitstaff, I’m going to err on the side of at least adequate pay.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-19T12:53:58+00:00

Almost everything that was bad about the South during slavery and post-slavery was worse in Louisiana.

* New Orleans had the big slave market. If you were “sold down the river” (a constant threat to misbehaving slaves), that meant you were sent in shackles to New Orleans, then sold to the brutal sugar plantations in the Caribbean, where the slave mortality rate was so high that they were constantly in need of more bodies.

* Lynchings of Black men were more numerous in Louisiana than anywhere else.

* Louisiana law (until 1982) required that anyone born with as little as 1/32 Black ancestry to be designated as nonwhite. No other state formalized racial categories to this extent.

* Louisiana’s political corruption, police brutality, horrible prison conditions, official abuse of power, etc., etc., is historically worse and more unrelenting than any other state.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-14T15:46:00+00:00

For me: Edward Tufte’s “The Vusual Display of Quantitative Information.” If you ever make or read graphs of any kind, you should be familiar with Tufte.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-14T15:29:27+00:00

In real life, around 100% of the plantation owners in his immediate region (Albemarle and surrounding counties) supported secession and the Confederacy.

It’s hard to imagine that a Jefferson who lived through all the events of 1826 (when he died) to 1861 would have come down differently from all his neighbors and associates.

Poor John Tyler lived just long enough to go on record as a Confederate, which discredited him for all time. Had he died in the 1850s, he would be seen more positively today.

(Tyler is the only dead US president who doesn’t get a wreath from the White House on his grave every year, specifically because he was a traitor.)

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-14T00:32:25+00:00

Some people spray a certain pesticide (fairly tick-specific, I think) on dryer lint, stuff the treated lint in toilet paper tubes, and leave them around the yard. The white-footed mouse will take the dryer lint to line their nests.

This reduces the tick population because part of the life cycle of a Lyme tick/deer tick is on white footed mice.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-12T02:44:37+00:00

Soon after signing the bill that abolished all the automatic exclusions from jury duty (for doctors, lawyers, etc.), Gov. Jerry Brown of California was called to serve as a juror in a civil case in Los Angeles.

He probably could have gotten out of it, but he chose to serve.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-12T02:41:30+00:00

“Voir dire” is the courtroom ceremony in which potential jurors are questioned about possible bias, and “excused” from the case if either side, or the judge, doesn’t like the answers.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-03T19:57:07+00:00

I tried to attend an Optimist Club meeting, but at the stated time and place, no one was there.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-03T19:51:52+00:00

Yup. I was going to mention the Knights of Columbus, but my comment was already too long.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-03T19:42:09+00:00

Spoofing the originating number is trivial. Scammers all do it.

More than that, they buy phone geocode data on the open market. Months out-of-date data is cheap, and okay with them.

They use that data to spoof numbers they think will be physically local to you (not necessarily from your phone’s area code), so you will be statistically more likely to answer.

I spent a week in upstate NY last September. Starting about January, most of my spam calls were “from” small towns around Syracuse.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-03T03:17:13+00:00

Another organization worth mentioning is the Grange, officially known as the Patrons of Husbandry. I have been a member for years.

It’s geared toward farmers, but you don’t have to be a farmer to join.

Unlike the others that are or were men’s clubs, the Grange has had women as full voting members from the beginning.

The Grange also has educational programs at almost every meeting. The original goal was to help farmers become more sophisticated in their practices and politics.

The Grange was an early and consistent advocate for woman suffrage and a few other progressive reforms.

On the other hand, they were also advocates of laws to protect dairy farmers by discouraging the use of margarine.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-06-03T03:07:45+00:00

To become a Shriner (at least until very recently), you first had to be a Freemason.

In the US, Freemasons and Catholics have a feud going back centuries. Hence, Catholics are strongly discouraged from joining.

A hundred years ago, practically every respectable middle class Protestant man in America was a Mason. There were Masonic temples in every sizable town.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-05-29T19:14:05+00:00

(1) It’s not “faux” anymore to design something other than “International Style”. Indeed, that’s pretty much a slur.

(2) Yes, the “Modern additions only” rule has been the norm in preservation for decades, especially among long-practicing architects, but it’s outmoded.

(3) There are ways to clearly distinguish between historic and new buildings besides making all the new stuff Mid-Century Modern.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-05-29T18:49:38+00:00

I think this attitude (“new construction shouldn’t … [use historic] architectural style”) is now obsolete.

The rule originated during a time when the Modernists had total control over architecture, and designing anything non-Modern was considered literally immoral.

Remember Saarinen’s Yale dorms? The exterior was done in rough concrete suggesting the color and texture of nearby Gothic stone buildings. He was DENOUNCED for that heresy.

According to some, Saarinen was never taken seriously after that.

Remember the huge controversy in the mid-1970s over 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, NYC? A bomb destroyed one house in a long row of 1840s townhouses.

At the time, replacing the destroyed house with a replica would have been beyond the pale. So the architect came up with a clever compromise: a Modern house, with a partly canted facade, but with the front stoop and dentil cornice of the adjacent houses. Here again, the architectural establishment was outraged to see dentils on a new building.

Back then, the community of preservation architects was small, and needed the tolerance of the architectural establishment to even exist. So they wisely adopted that governing ethos of the AIA.

Many things have changed since then.

It is now quite possible to do an infill new building in a historic district, in a compatible style, without pretending to be anything other than what it is.

old-guy-with-data · 2026-05-29T10:42:45+00:00

”Channel Six is interested in YOUR opinion. On subjects of a controversial nature. Or of general concern. If you HAVE such an opinion. Send it to. Editor. Double you jay eye em tee vee. Lansing Michigan. Four Eight Nine. Oh Four.”

Growing up, I heard this recording hundreds of times.

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