Chance that a British baby’s first word is a brand name: 1 in 4. –Harper’s Index 2004 I’d like to see some of the details behind this study…

Saturday, May 8, 2010 | 11:55
Filed under: Politics/Society by Dries
Comments Off

The oil slick off the Louisiana cost is still expanding and is now approaching coastal marshes. The Coast Guard is now going to try to set fire to the slick in the hopes of dissipating the oil. Some commentators have (jokingly?) suggested that the US should simply nuke the slick and move on, like the [...]

Thursday, May 6, 2010 | 17:25
Filed under: Current Events, Energy/Environment, Politics/Society by Dries
Comments Off

… and I’ll tell you why. This is only one of a many commercials like this. You may have seen one from Sprint that’s very similar: three people are stuck on a ski lift, and the commercial talks about how these three people have awesome Sprint phones so they can visit an alternate reality (be [...]

Sunday, May 2, 2010 | 19:30
Filed under: Media/Internet/Tech, Politics/Society by Dries
Comments Off

My home state of Texas is famous for its large number of executions. For years, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice maintained an online list of what these inmates requested as their last suppers. TCDJ recently took down the list, but it is now available on a mirror. The list makes for fascinating reading. Be [...]

Friday, April 23, 2010 | 11:55
Filed under: Politics/Society by Dries
1 Comment »

[Previously: parts 1, 2, and 3.] Let’s talk about gasoline taxes. As I pointed out in previous posts, gasoline consumption is lowered only slightly by an increase in prices. While this makes it difficult to reduce consumption (and carbon dioxide emissions), it does give us the opportunity to raise an enormous amount of revenue. And [...]

Tuesday, April 13, 2010 | 23:32
Filed under: Energy/Environment, Politics/Society by Dries
1 Comment »

[See preceding posts for more information.] After writing yesterday’s post, I decided to update my data to include the last quarter of 2009. This definitely changes things, as you can see from this graph:  What makes these record-low consumption rates interesting is that they are not completely explained by high fuel prices. The same [...]

Tuesday, April 6, 2010 | 0:16
Filed under: Energy/Environment, Politics/Society by Dries
Comments Off

Using the equation I estimated yesterday, I decided to calculate the price elasticity of demand for gasoline. Price elasticity of demand is basically the responsiveness in a good’s consumption to a change in price. This number is (nearly) always negative, because the more expensive a good becomes, the less of it people buy. As the [...]

Sunday, April 4, 2010 | 19:04
Filed under: Energy/Environment, Politics/Society by Dries
Comments Off

[Updated: I re-estimated this with daily consumption instead of monthly consumption for the simple reason that some months have more days than others. The F-score took a hit, but the model is more accurate, overall, I think.] I decided to play around with some of the stuff I’ve been learning in my econometrics class to [...]

Saturday, April 3, 2010 | 13:52
Filed under: Energy/Environment, Politics/Society by Dries
Comments Off

… found this great little diatribe on a friend-of-a-friend’s Facebook profile. [...] Last summer, in my first excursion here into politics, I wrote about the experience of hearing reason shouted down at a town hall meeting. I had gone there with my teenage daughter to speak for my hearing-disabled wife, who is unable to work [...]

Saturday, January 23, 2010 | 12:20
Filed under: Politics/Society by Dries
Comments Off

So it’s been five weeks since school started. One midterm and one policy memo later, it feels like I’m really getting into the swing of things. When I compare my experience as an undergrad at UT at the same point, I think I can point to many more things and say, “I didn’t know this [...]

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 | 12:03
Filed under: Politics/Society by Dries
2 Comments »