Sure, and they could charge tolls to fix the potholes in the streets, too.

In the case of the Lac Megantic accident, the cars were labelled to be less volatile than they really were. If they had been correctly labelled, maybe someone would have objected to leaving the train unmanned at the top of a hill on the main line overnight.

That's an interesting twist on it. I would have said it was budget cutters who decimated the urban forestry budget. The trees on private land were in much better shape than the ones on public land.

Sure, you can sell copies to other people, too. You've already sold a copy to them.

North Dakota runs from about 46 to 49 degrees north. England is 99.9% north of 50 degrees. It would be more accurate to say it's "James Bay type latitude".
You should be more careful when you're criticizing people for their ignorance.

If you have an infinite budget, it makes sense to do that. The NSA comes pretty close.

That's because "data management practitioners" spend their time practicing data management. I bet if you asked the "data analysts" about it, they'd say most of the important work dealing with data is in the analysis, but they still need to waste 20% of their time on data preparation and integration.

And the error (or is it intellectual dishonesty? I can't tell) comes when you attribute those things you read to someone who didn't say them.

Anonymous cowards are nobodies. I'd expect you to be saying it!

I don't see how Arctic air temperature is at all relevant to a story about a ship stuck in Antarctic ice.

But you also seem to be reading things that just aren't there. The post *did not* say "Ha!". It was a statement of a fact. That's all.

The GP posted a statement of fact, relevant to the story. Doesn't sound like a denialist to me.

More likely the GP was replying to the post he replied to.

I don't think you understand Simpson's paradox.

It is Simpson's paradox that makes it appear that poor people vote Republican and rich people vote Democrat, when the reverse is true. That comes from ignoring the other variables that are implicitly included when you subset by state.

Your final paragraph agrees with my claim: richer people tend to vote Republican, poorer people tend to vote Democrat. That's what I said originally.

The interesting fact is at the state level: Republicans living in blue states tend to be richer than Republicans living in red states (just as everyone else in blue states tends to be richer than in red states). If you were a Democrat, you'd attribute this to the success of Democrat policies. If you're a Republican, you say that they are rich in blue states because of the Republicans, despite all those Democrat voters.

They don't. In each state, the poorer people are more likely to vote Democrat, the richer people are more likely to vote Republican.

However, richer states are more likely to vote Democrat, and poorer states are more likely to vote Republican.

So perhaps the question should be posed the other way: if your state votes Republican, why is it poorer?

Those maps are reasonably accurate from a geographic point of view, but they hugely distort the actual distribution of wealth in the population, because the population isn't distributed evenly. They would be less misleading if they had used cartograms, e.g. this one of 2012 election results. Those would show that there is a big concentration of wealth on the west coast and near Chigago as well as the one on the east coast.