Fair Warning: British divisions, Thanksgiving, and bad Budget charts
Hello!
This week I went to the Postal Museum and rode on the Mail Rail (highly recommend!). I spotted this map which I thought was interesting, not only because of what it shows, but because… It looks…wrong?
I also hit 500 subscribers last week (thank you!), and I promised I’d do another look at stats so far, so I did.
On the home front
The Budget was this week, so a lot of UK news outlets have focused on that. The BBC hosted a Budget calculator so you can figure out if you stand to gain or lose.
Leavers and Remainers are divided over more than just Brexit — Leavers are more likely to: want steaks well done; think homosexuality is a choice; and leave the Paris climate agreement AND Eurovision.
YouGov wrote about what people thought of the Budget — most people were pleased with the National Living Wage increase and promises for more money for the NHS.
Over the pond
I know it’s old now but I still love this piece about rush hour from US cities:
Given that it’s been Thanksgiving, I thought this holiday eating piece (which is 3 years old!) from WaPo was relevant. Over Thanksgiving everyone — even those virtuous souls who eat well the rest of the year — like splurging on snacks and extra treats during the holiday season.
The Economist has created a Pumpkin Index showing how far people will travel for Thanksgiving: “The average American who celebrated Thanksgiving outside their home county left home at 3:40pm on Wednesday, travelled for 300 miles, arrived six hours later at their destination and then stayed for nearly three days.”
Elsewhere
This NYT piece on the uncounted civilian Iraqi casualties of drone strikes was jaw-dropping. Airwars estimates that there have been 3,000 civilian deaths, where official numbers are about six times less.
Germany’s coalition talks have broken down, says The Economist, “let’s call the whole thing off”:
Since productivity has been talked about a lot lately, I thought this cartesian graph of productivity vs worker hours was interesting. One thing I think is a bit weird, though — comparing Luxembourg feels slightly unfair since it is such a tiny country and its economy is so focused on banking. Is it really productive?
Scientists think they may have found 11 ‘lost’ cities of the ancient world using maths and algorithms (and common sense). Pretty cool, huh?
Bad chart of the week
Do you see it? That bottom left corner has a suspiciously short y-axis. It’s just appalling — it shouldn’t even BE a chart because the movement is so small compared to the whole.
That’s all for this week, thank you for reading! If you like this newsletter, please forward it to people, encourage friends to subscribe to it, or buy me a coffee to show your appreciation. I’m on Twitter @SophieWarnes.
