The obvious comparison is to the Big Mac Index. It would be interesting to see the strength of correlation, and if the breaks in correlation would correspond to specific regions or characteristics of countries. (Big Mac Index data available via Statista if anybody wants to run something like that.)

WA requires a permit issued to the employee to work in fast food…

That alone…

https://doh.wa.gov/community-and-environment/food/food-worker-and-industry/food-worker-card

fun!

wherever the green line matches or exceeds a record, maybe circle or dot that spot.

When a truck finishes pickup at dairy farms they perform tests to ensure there are no hormones (like BGH) or other drugs in the batch. If they do find something then they start testing the individual samples they collected from each farmer, and then the farmer responsible has to pay for the entire, tainted batch.

As a bike commuter and with all the snow in the news, I had an itch I had to scratch: How cold has this winter been compared to previous years?

Shown are 3 cities for my home state of California: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. All values are daily low temperature reported at the location.

-Green is this winter season (ok, Autumn too).

-Black and shaded gray are fitted quartiles. Like the min/max values, the discrete view is less than helpful.

-Red and blue are observed min/max over the data period.

Nits: I didn't want to end up with a line plot for non-continuous data, but daily data for the year ends up being too dense for something like points, bars, etc. What points of interest deserve labels without being too cluttered?

data source: Iowa State Mesonet

tools: Python, matplotlib in Jupyter Notebook source

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It’s popular amongst college students and it’s in New York.

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Very interesting. There are a few professions there which surprised me by only requiring licenses in a few states (Security Guard? Bartender?) and others that surprised me in that they needed a license at all (Florist lol).

I wonder what classifies as a "license" in the first place. Is a brief course proving you can competently serve (i.e. not over-serve) alcohol a "license" to a bartender? Because we have a brief test in my province in Canada for anyone who will work with alcohol, but I'm not sure I'd classify it as a "license", but at the same time you can't do the job without it.

>or even on a sidewalk

Uh, no. The sidewalk is not a place for people to conduct business, it's a path of travel. Don't push pedestrians into the street, forcing them to risk being struck by cars because you want to cut hair on the sidewalk.

These amounts assume a retirement length of 15 years. Many people will live longer than 15 years if you for example, retire at 65. Not making past 80 years old is not something you want to count on. I personally know someone that did, and is dirt poor now as he burnt through his retirement in his 70s, buying gifts for people, splurging on grand kids etc. Unfortunate all around.

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That's explained in the Methodology section. This is a decent article and it's important financial planning for everyone. Note that he's talking about retiring fairly early, and as a single person - there are financial consequences for both factors.

Thanks for the laughs😁

The world has moved up from $1 McDonald's burgers to $3.50 Starbucks lattes ... Yay consumerism!

I saw a financial planner recently in California and it was considerably more than 800k to retire comfortably here...

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This idea about retiring "comfortably" needs some work. It's very subjective.

If you live as the locals live, it's possible to spend very very little. That may entail eating a lot of local food or locally-crafted spirits each of which can be unbelievably cheap, living in regular local housing maybe without HVAC (or where you bring your own HVAC) instead of a modern apartment, and driving a scooter.

If you can't adapt to that and you also aren't rich enough to live like this and also be a member of a golf club then, honestly, you are probably going to have a worse time than if you'd just stayed put in a place where you're already adapted/acculturated.

Licensing regulations can be especially burdensome for low-income immigrants that might’ve been barbers, etc. their whole life but they don’t have the income to pay $300 for some annual license fee and go through months/years of training/school as some apprentice barber.

A lot of licensing regulations (even for jobs where some sort of licensing/standards should be necessary) are created to be unreasonably burdensome by groups/trade associations that want to restrict the number (and therefore competition) of barbers, manicurists, florists, etc.

It’s very interesting that licensing reform is an issue that both progressives and free-market conservatives/libertarians tend to agree on.

Most Americans retire in a pretty bad position. Almost half of the US middle class will be in poverty at some point during their retirement. Go to your local Walmart and take note of the 70 and 80 year olds working there.

Wyoming is open for business.

What does "comfortable" mean? They say 700k for US, yet the actual median retirement is, what, ~100k? (from what I could find with some quick searching). That's a lot of "uncomfortable" people.

I can’t imagine that Americans could retire without millions of dollars considering that they would be bankrupted by a serious medical crisis. How much does Medicare pay?

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Unfortunately no Venezuela on the map, but I'm guessing the price around 20 million.