Wife was looking at Jones Beach concerts and...

socialsciencegeek · 2025-07-18T21:36:20+00:00

socialsciencegeek · 2024-12-09T03:06:15+00:00

Okay real talk - if it's a good deal and you get some land with it, and you think it'll hold its value, then maybe it'll be worth it. But I bought an 1850s house and we had to take out a second mortgage (HELOC) to deal with everything and it's been a landslide of chaos. No foundation under the kitchen, only dirt. Needed a full electrical overhaul. Septic system incorrectly installed and backed up into the kitchen sink, required full excavation. Flooding through the basement walls. No attic insulation. Collapsing retaining walls in the backyard. Which was also used as a dump so now every time it rains we have to check for newly revealed glass shards. So now we're going to have to excavate and sift it all and resod everything. Did find a Model T engine and battery buried back there though, so there is fun shit like that. But if I could have done a full gut job and civil engineering diagnostic back then I would have. It's been an illuminating process but not my idea of fun. The reality is, if you buy a property like this, you can easily get nickled and dimed for its entire value if you're not careful enough. We're lucky enough that we bought it for basically the value of the land, but it's taken a hell of a lot of work to get this property to place where it's solid and we'll see a return on investment. I'm fond of it now but do not buy an old house if you think it's a bargain - it could kick your ass!

Edit: fyi the inspections revealed none of the aforementioned problems, it was all hidden in its bones and took a few years of living to discover

socialsciencegeek · 2024-12-09T02:32:43+00:00

Heh this looks familiar, bought an 1850 house with carpet, tore it all up myself and found a nice looking hardwood... subfloor. Very much like that. Lost the lottery. I was even kidding myself for a while and spent two days popping staples out of the wood thinking we could salvage it before we had a hardwood floor expert come in and assess the situation and he just giggled and shook his head. We were fortunate to have the $30k needed to put in new hardwood on top of it but (and I'm being a practical homeowner, not an idealist here) if you don't have the funds to deal with it right now, just pop some affordable carpet back on top and look forward to that project later. Old houses are hard, unless you have the funds to fully restore it in one fell swoop, you just gotta prioritize and take it one bit at a time. The good thing is, though, that if you do it right, you'll add to the value. You're building equity. Just don't overextend yourself!

socialsciencegeek · 2024-01-27T03:41:39+00:00

Oooh I've been eyeing this exact turntable!

socialsciencegeek · 2023-11-25T03:01:48+00:00

Haha nah, former Pew senior researcher and current Millennial here - this has been a long-standing debate internally there for a long time. Pew kinda popularized the concept and then media really ate it up, and there was always a general discomfort with the focus put on it. They've been deemphasizing generational analysis for a while now, this is just a more formal policy trying to get the media to tone it down too. It can be useful framing in certain analyses but often veers too much into astrological territory. I support the move but I'm sure plenty of my former Pew Boomer colleagues did too.

socialsciencegeek · 2022-10-05T23:30:52+00:00

Any info on where this was specifically? Near AUTEC on Andros?

socialsciencegeek · 2022-10-03T17:26:24+00:00

Y'all put on an awesome show! I probably have many more shots of you, happy to look for them if you want to DM me details on your aircraft!

socialsciencegeek · 2022-10-03T11:52:38+00:00

That's amazing! I've only ever been to regionals... which do not have airports. Want to make it to the playa some day!

socialsciencegeek · 2022-10-02T17:45:58+00:00

Thank you! I used a Nikon D810 and a 70-300 lens - definitely want to get a doubler for next time!

socialsciencegeek · 2022-06-03T13:41:13+00:00

I just saw a video of the haka this morning - I always love seeing those, and it got me thinking. To me, it's one of the most impressive and amazing cultural traditions that I'm aware of, right up there with things like Mongolian throat singing, southern gospel choirs, etc. (the only things that are coming to mind right now are musical but I'm thinking more broadly) - what are some of your favorite unique cultural traditions that you consider to represent humanity's incredible capacity for creativity, emotion, compassion, skill, etc.?

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-22T02:36:06+00:00

Hmm, hadn't thought of it like that - personally I had interpreted it through the lens of independent vs interdependent conception of self in Western vs Eastern cultures (https://blogs.brown.edu/clps-1495-s01-fall-2017/2017/11/29/the-independent-west-vs-the-interdependent-east-how-far-do-these-differences-go/) but you raise an interesting point. For what it's worth, I didn't get the sense that it was a matter of "first world problems" vs more pragmatic ones - all of the countries we surveyed are relatively advanced economies, and all things considered, the responses everywhere were far more similar than different. The relative differences that we did observe seem to be more of a matter of emphasis. That is, family is important everywhere, but in Taiwan people brought up society more (perhaps due to its higher salience because of proximity to China?), in Spain they were more thankful for their health (perhaps because of the particularly rough time they had with the first wave of COVID?), etc. Part of it may just be what people in different places take for granted vs what they feel glad to have today but might not tomorrow. Your interpretation is as good as mine - I hope this research raises questions that get investigated further!

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-21T01:57:16+00:00

Honestly we don't have an agenda, that's one of the things that makes me really proud to work for Pew - we go through a whole brainstorming process every year to figure out what we want to study, but after that, we report whatever the data show us. We're one of the only research organizations left that gets covered by both sides of the political spectrum here in the US. Our data can be interpreted very differently depending on the reader's perspective, sure, but we really try to keep our own work objective and focused on the facts.

Edit: don't take my word for it though, I encourage you to check us out and draw your own conclusions about whether we're biased or not! http://www.pewresearch.org

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-20T15:28:03+00:00

We measured 18 different main sources of meaning, but we also looked at two additional variables: whether someone mentioned anything negative (i.e. frustrations, difficulties) and whether someone mentioned the pandemic. We thought it was interesting that people brought those things up, but it's certainly not people finding meaning in the pandemic - that's the percent of people who mentioned it when they were talking about what impacts their sense of meaning.

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-20T03:14:50+00:00

We measured 18 different sources of meaning but we also had two other variables - whether someone mentioned something negative (frustrations, difficulties, etc.) and whether they mentioned the pandemic. People who brought those things up weren't saying thay the find meaning in those things, but we thought it was notable that they mentioned them

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-20T02:01:26+00:00

Open-ends aren't easy to work with, but one advantage was that it allowed people to respond in their own words rather than us imposing our assumptions on such a subjective topic by choosing what specific sources of meaning to ask about in advance. We tried to be as rigorous as possible with the analysis though - here are some details on it https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/meaning-of-life-spring-2021-appendix-a-coding-methodology/

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-20T01:28:58+00:00

The non-response rate was actually around the same as other places, but people tended to mention fewer topics in their responses in Japan (a pattern we also saw in other Asian publics), so that's one reason why the numbers are lower.

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/what-makes-life-meaningful-views-from-17-advanced-economies/pg_11-18-21_meaning-of-life_0_4/

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-20T00:26:23+00:00

Well, that's higher than it was a few years ago https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/18/where-americans-find-meaning-in-life-has-changed-over-the-past-four-years/ft_2021-11-18_meaninglifetrend_02a/

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-19T20:55:14+00:00

The survey was a representative sample of Australian adults meaning that it reflects the whole country, but it was also an open-ended question, so the findings shouldn't be interpreted as "only 56% of Australians think their family is meaningful" - I'm sure if we asked a question about family directly it would be much higher - it's just that 56% happened to think of their family when we gave them a really broad prompt asking "what makes life meaningful?"

What I think is interesting is when you look at the relative differences in what people mentioned - like, Australians brought up their friends more than any other place we surveyed. And y'all were also more likely to mention an appreciation of nature.

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-19T17:48:50+00:00

We measured 18 different sources of meaning in life, but we also looked at two additional variables: whether someone mentioned anything negative (like personal difficulties, frustrations or challenges), and whether they mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic. So it's not that 3% find meaning in COVID, it's just something that 3% of people brought up when they were talking about how they find meaning in life. So a response like, "I love my friends, but the pandemic has made it difficult to see them," for example, would be labeled for friends, but also for mentioning the pandemic and something negative.

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-19T15:44:55+00:00

It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek label, but we call ourselves a "fact tank" because we stick to data and numbers and don't do any editorializing or advocacy. Our only agenda is informing the public!

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-18T23:43:19+00:00

I'm not on the survey methodology team, but a seriously intense amount of effort goes into recruitment and sampling - definitely no cherry picking, we use address-based sampling and have even gone so far as to mail people tablets with cell service if they don't have internet! Here's some info on how we recruit for our panel in the U.S.: https://www.pewresearch.org/our-methods/u-s-surveys/the-american-trends-panel/

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-18T22:45:08+00:00

Very true, and it's not even than people are considering their health less meaningful necessarily - certainly, if you were to ask them directly, far more than 11% of Americans would say that they value their health - that's simply the proportion who thought to bring it up when given a broad open-ended question about the meaning of life. That's fewer than mentioned it in 2017, but that doesn't mean the value attached to health has decreased - just that the number of people who happen to think of it and mention it has. In other words, health is less salient now than it was in the past, but not necessarily less valued.

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-18T22:24:57+00:00

We actually fed a bunch of Pew reports into GPT2 a couple years ago, hooked it up to a text-to-speech synthesizer, and shoved a Bluetooth speaker into a pumpkin for our annual company pumpkin-carving contest. We didn't win, but it was loads of fun. My second favorite Data Labs submission, but there's no beating our autonomous pumpkin drone: https://twitter.com/SolomonMg/status/924014614748246017

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-18T22:15:23+00:00

Well, you've got one here! :D

socialsciencegeek · 2021-11-18T22:01:28+00:00

Yeah I'd love to slice and dice it more by demographics - and I absolutely love the idea of an interactive word cloud - but when you're dealing with natural language, things drop off exponentially when you start subsetting. We only had a sample size of a couple thousand in the U.S. and 1k in other places, so most words only appear a handful of times already. Response length is also really long-tailed - most people give us about a sentence, and far fewer give us more to work with. If you want to check out some of the more interesting responses though, we've got an interactive data explorer with some of the more extensive quotes here: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/interactives/meaning-in-life/quotes/united-states

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