prior probability

The world’s wealthiest family are the third-generation heirs of Sam Walton. Collectively, they own a 50% stake in Walmart. More mind-boggling are these numbers from this recent Bloomberg report: the members of the Walton clan are so wealthy they amass $100 million per day or $4 million per hour or $70,000 per minute! At this astronomical rate, their family fortune will have grown over $20,000 since you began reading this blog post. (A new Walmart employee in the U.S., by contrast, will have made about 6 cents in that time, based on an $11 per hour wage.) We blogged about the significant social benefits of Walmart a week ago, and we also noted that Walmart is the largest US company by revenue and by number of employees, so the great wealth of the “House of Walton” should not be surprising to us. Our only question is: who owns the other 50% of Walmart? Update (8/23): here are some of the projects that some of the third-generation Waltons are investing in.

Image credit: Bloomberg

This interactive and zoomable graphic is available here. Hat tip: @kottke.

Check out this survey and interactive report by Sahil Chinoy, a graphics editor for The New York Times. According to Mr Chinoy, how you answer a handful of questions is very likely to determine your political affiliation. Putting aside the unreliability of “self-reports” and social-science surveys generally (people lie!), can you guess what these “handful of questions” are? The visualization of Mr Chinoy’s survey results below should provide some clues:

Image credit: N.Y. Times

Lots of people like to complain about partisan gerrymandering. One problem with all these complaints, however, is this–what would a non-gerrymandered voting district look like? Given this problem, here’s our tentative solution: instead of relying on State legislatures to draw up the voting districts in their respective States, why not create such districts based on the area code zones already in use in each State? Consider the State of Texas, by way of example. Currently, there are 27 Congressional districts and 21 area codes in Texas. So, why can’t we just overlay 21 of these districts on the pre-existing area code zones, with the remaining six members of Texas’s House delegation chosen at-large (State-wide)?

Toni Morrison, our national treasure; may she rest in peace. Here is her obituary, and here is a transcript of her 1993 Nobel lecture, or better yet, listen to the audio of her plaintive and poignant narrative via the YouTube clip posted above.

With the first batch of college football games just around the corner, we want to bring star quarterback McKenzie Milton to your attention. Milton used to start for the University of Central Florida (UCF) before he was seriously injured at the end of the 2018 season, but according to this recent Associated Press report dated 5 August 2019, Milton might be joining the coaching staff at UCF. We’re familiar with the term “student-athlete”; this is the first time, however, we’ve heard of a “student coach”! Here is an extended excerpt from the AP report (edited by us for clarity): Continue reading →

Continue reading →

Yes, according to Zack Kanter, for the following reasons:

Walmart is one of the wonders of the modern world, built from scratch in a hyper-competitive environment, scaled from nothing to the largest company in the US by revenue and by headcount, all resulting from a singular vision of saving everyday people money with everyday low prices. It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime.