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biasedstats.bsky.social
Biased Statistics
@biasedstats.bsky.social
530 followers 430 following 1K posts
Reluctant economist, statistician by trade. Cheese-eating surrender monkey. Géologue de la politique. Tweets in 🇫🇷/🇬🇧.
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biasedstats.bsky.social
Un résumé de l’affaire Libye-Sarkozy que vous ne verrez jamais sur CNews, par la fille d’une des victimes de l’attentat du DC-10.

www.lemonde.fr/societe/arti...
« Ce n’est pas que nous qui sommes moqués, c’est le peuple français, énonce d’une traite Yohanna Brette. L’histoire est celle d’un ministre qui a voulu chercher de l’argent auprès d’un Etat terroriste en faisant des promesses, dont celle de réétudier la situation pénale d’un homme à l’origine du plus gros attentat contre la France. » Active au sein de l’Association française des victimes du terrorisme, Yohanna Brette s’attache, avec d’autres, à « transmettre la vérité des faits ». Le procès Sarkozy lui a coûté une dent à force de serrer les mâchoires d’anxiété, mais, depuis, elle affirme sereinement : « Nous sommes là où il faut être. »
November 28, 2025 at 1:33 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Critics-say-ism
Here’s the pitch: Mr. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there—readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus—is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities. Critics say the growth of these programs, which aim to teach about historical events from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, has turned colleges into feckless workshops for leftist political orthodoxy. “Critics say” is the tell, and does it ever go on telling. In contexts not concerning the elite private colleges of New England and their decades-old conflicts and syllabi and on-campus squabbles, this mode of prestige media procedure matters absolutely and enormously, at scales difficult to tabulate. It’s not hard to call them all to mind: “Climate change is increasingly lethal, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Israel is murdering journalists in Gaza at historically unprecedented rates, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Trans people claim to be real, though critics say…” Every bit of this is disheartening on its face. But it’s actually worse than any first-blush irritation, that familiar annoyance that comes from encountering still another textbook exercise in witless triangulation. Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage. For no matter how unhinged the position you’ve taken, or paid someone marginally credentialed to sketch out on your behalf—“Can Woman Think?: We Investigate,” “Is the Negro a Man: A Reconsideration”—that opinion will, by virtue of such provenance, possess all needed evidentiary gravity for the Times. And then some. (Only yesterday the Times ran this actual story, which is not parody.)
November 8, 2025 at 10:19 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Isn’t it aitah?
November 8, 2025 at 1:15 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Les noms de listes pour le test grandeur nature du nouveau portail de vote en ligne des français de l’étranger: une analyse politico-fabulatoire…

1/17
Le Moineau le Masque de Velour Le Chat, le Chien, le Renard et le Coq Le Grillon qui dansa seul quand la fourmi fermait ses volets d’hiver Le Singe et le Manteau du Ministre Le Renard, la Chatte, le Hibou et la Souris
November 7, 2025 at 7:01 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
When “flexible” turns into “employer-discretion” work schedules.
A 2017 paper by two economists, Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais, showed that working mothers with children under 4 would be willing to give up barely any pay for a flexible schedule, and would give up an average of just 15 percent of their pay to work from home. But they would forgo almost 40 percent of their income to avoid an “employer discretion” job in which their boss sets their hours at will. The problem may be more pronounced among mothers, but it isn’t unique to them: All workers in the study — men, women, parents and nonparents alike — disliked employer discretion jobs and were willing to take hefty pay cuts to avoid them. Yet these jobs are a significant part of our economy. At the high end of the income range, a shift toward interactive, team-based work has created something economists call convex returns to hours. Companies earn more when one worker works 80 hours a week than when two work 40 hours each because that one worker’s knowledge and relationships are crucial. Two relatively junior employees might be interchangeable, but two law partners or consulting managers are not — creating incentives for firms to eek out more hours from each employee. It’s a pattern the economist Claudia Goldin calls “greedy work.” In lower-income jobs, it manifests as on-demand scheduling which allows companies to set workers’ hours at will, sending them home from scheduled shifts, calling them in abruptly or shifting schedules at short notice.
November 2, 2025 at 2:35 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
The AI bubble has reached its ‘fried chicken’ phase

www.ft.com/content/b003...
October 31, 2025 at 11:48 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Trump’s new ballroom looks great
Hall of Mirror, Palace of Versailles
October 23, 2025 at 7:43 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
D’après la fédération, via Reporterre, surtout la concurrence à la SNCF et l’usage des routes.

reporterre.net/Les-cars-Mac...
October 12, 2025 at 1:10 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Also in Nashville.

(Fasc-ville?)
Self deportation sign at Nashville Airport
October 5, 2025 at 1:26 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
F/ Europeans and Americans ✅
Netanyahu hold up a sign: “Who has murdered Americans and Europeans in cold blood?” A/ Al Qaeeda B/ Hamas C/ Hezbollah D/ Iran E/ All of the above
September 27, 2025 at 2:09 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
I stand by this
Horse drawing meme, with detailed drawing labelled “cuisine from X” and childish drawing labelled “cuisine from X in the U.S.”
September 17, 2025 at 12:19 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
La part d’opinions négatives semble corrélée à la taille de l’industrie de défense nationale. Logique.
September 9, 2025 at 11:49 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Trump is building its own paramilitary force

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/o...
One of the other things they did was they immediately purged all of the generals who they thought were insufficiently loyal — people who still clung to ideas like separation of the military from domestic law enforcement. Those people were rousted. They got rid of all the JAG Corps, the senior ranking legal lawyers in the military who do things like write use of force policy. These are the people whom the president consults when wanting to do policies like this, and they’re usually the ones who tell him no. They’re gone. Instead, you have this policy written by not the least qualified person I think to ever have been nominated to head up a major federal agency — but by that guy’s brother. That is the person who is writing up the policy about when Trump is going to start sending active duty military into cities around the country. It’s so grim.
September 7, 2025 at 9:21 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Les économistes sont des géologues de la politique (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Livre IV)
Ils élevaient les questions matérielles, les questions d’agriculture, d’industrie, de commerce, presque à la dignité d’une religion. Dans la civilisation telle qu’elle se fait, un peu par Dieu, beaucoup par l’homme, les intérêts se combinent, s’agrègent et s’amalgament de manière à former une véritable roche dure, selon une loi dynamique patiemment étudiée par les économistes, ces géologues de la politique.
September 4, 2025 at 9:06 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Joyeux 4 septembre
Pour les vieux partis qui se rattachent à l’hérédité par la grâce de Dieu, les révolutions étant sorties du droit de révolte, on a droit de révolte contre elles. Erreur. Car dans les révolutions, le révolté, ce n’est pas le peuple, c’est le roi. Révolution est précisément le contraire de révolte. Toute révolution, étant un accomplissement normal, contient en elle sa légitimité, que de faux révolutionnaires déshonorent quelquefois, mais qui persiste, même souillée, qui survit, même ensanglantée. Les révolutions sortent, non d’un accident, mais de la nécessité. Une révolution est un retour du factice au réel. Elle est parce qu’il faut qu’elle soit. Entre l’attaque du passé et l’attaque de l’avenir, l’établissement de juillet se débattait. Il représentait la minute, aux prises d’une part avec les siècles monarchiques, d’autre part avec le droit éternel.
September 4, 2025 at 8:58 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
The share of youth neither in education/training nor employment is very similar in both countries.

I think a better explanation for why marginally more of them live with their parents in France (44 vs 33) is geography and social norms.
September 2, 2025 at 9:53 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Une chaise n’est pas une caste
1830 est une révolution arrêtée à mi-côte. Moitié de progrès ; quasi-droit. Or la logique ignore l’à peu près ; absolument comme le soleil ignore la chandelle. Qui arrête les révolutions à mi-côte ? La bourgeoisie. Pourquoi ? Parce que la bourgeoisie est l’intérêt arrivé à satisfaction. Hier c’était l’appétit, aujourd’hui c’est la plénitude, demain ce sera la satiété. Le phénomène de 1814 après Napoléon se reproduisit en 1830 après Charles X. On a voulu, à tort, faire de la bourgeoisie une classe. La bourgeoisie est tout simplement la portion contentée du peuple. Le bourgeois, c’est l’homme qui a maintenant le temps de s’asseoir. Une chaise n’est pas une caste. Mais, pour vouloir s’asseoir trop tôt, on peut arrêter la marche même du genre humain. Cela a été souvent la faute de la bourgeoisie. On n’est pas une classe parce qu’on fait une faute. L’égoïsme n’est pas une des divisions de l’ordre social.
September 2, 2025 at 11:27 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Quelqu’un sait pourquoi Le Monde écrit socialistes, communistes, écologistes, mais « insoumis » ?
A dix jours du vote de confiance, auquel le locataire de Matignon se soumettra à l’Assemblée nationale, socialistes, écologistes, « insoumis » et communistes réfléchissent à la suite.
August 28, 2025 at 3:18 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
“Zero Tolerance Five years after George Floyd, many liberals blame “wokeness” for stifling open debate. So why can’t they handle being disagreed with?”

By Andrea Long Chu

archive.is/QH517
How did things get so bad? Williams gives the same answer as Buckley: Things are bad because things are pretty good, actually. “Discontent has exploded even as life in the United States in real terms has never been better — or fairer — for black people and other historically disadvantaged minority communities,” claims Williams, citing the “seismic, indisputable victories” of the civil-rights movement. Racism is no longer the governing force in the lives of Black Americans, he argues; what remains are disorganized and isolated incidents, like lost Confederate soldiers who missed the news of Lee’s surrender. Yet certain vocal Black people continue, regrettably, to turn every Black man killed by the police into a symbol for a kind of white supremacy that, thanks to Dr. King, no longer exists. Here Williams quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that the closer a social group comes to achieving equality, the more zealously it tries to close the gap. “It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution,” wrote Tocqueville in 1856. “It happens most often that a people, which has supported without complaint, as if they were not felt, the most oppressive laws, violently throws them off as soon as their weight is lightened.” (This is sometimes called the Tocqueville effect.) Thus Williams would have us believe that white supremacy today is a mirage cast across the moral desert by the Tocqueville effect; all it reflects is the jockeying of an increasingly multiracial elite. But Tocqueville, it turns out, had his own thoughts about racism. In his travels across antebellum America, he observed that racial prejudice was “stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists.” In Tocqueville’s estimation, this was because the Southern plantation owner had no need for bigotry: He had the lash and the legislature. In the North, by contrast, whites lacked a well-defined “barrier” between themselves and free Blacks. Hence, Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “the prejudice that repels Negroes seems to grow as Negroes cease to be slaves, and inequality is engraved in mores in the same measure as it is effaced in the laws.” This is a very different story! Williams claims that a decrease in economic inequality has made Black people more resentful of those fewer privileges still denied them. But Tocqueville’s shrewder observation is that rising legal and economic equality indirectly produces social inequality as the dominant class is forced to confront the prospect of forfeiting its dominance. This is why prejudice seemed to increase in the Northern states. Both Blacks and whites, being formally equal, now perceived informal equality as a concrete possibility.
August 18, 2025 at 9:17 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Bonjour
August 12, 2025 at 9:18 AM
biasedstats.bsky.social
I was referring to proposals to let DC residents vote in MD. Agree that it’s a stopgap, but better to have (some) representation now than no representation, no? And it does not prevent statehood later.
Alternative proposal An alternative proposal to retrocession was the District of Columbia Voting Rights Restoration Act of 2004 (H.R. 3709), which would have treated the residents of the district as residents of Maryland for the purposes of congressional representation. Maryland's congressional delegation would then have been apportioned accordingly to include the population of the district.[73] Those in favor of such a plan argued that the Congress already has the necessary authority to pass such legislation without the constitutional concerns of other proposed remedies. From the foundation of the district in 1790 until the passage of the Organic Act of 1801, citizens living in D.C. continued to vote for members of Congress in Maryland or Virginia; legal scholars therefore propose that the Congress has the power to restore those voting rights while maintaining the integrity of the federal district.[74] The proposed legislation, however, never made it out of committee.[73]
August 11, 2025 at 2:16 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Without going to full retrocession, the question is whether letting DC residents vote in Maryland as a stopgap would delay or prevent DC statehood, by reducing the political cost of keeping 500k voters disenfranchised.

But if statehood never happens, better to have (some) representation now, no?
Alternative proposal An alternative proposal to retrocession was the District of Columbia Voting Rights Restoration Act of 2004 (H.R. 3709), which would have treated the residents of the district as residents of Maryland for the purposes of congressional representation. Maryland's congressional delegation would then have been apportioned accordingly to include the population of the district.[73] Those in favor of such a plan argued that the Congress already has the necessary authority to pass such legislation without the constitutional concerns of other proposed remedies. From the foundation of the district in 1790 until the passage of the Organic Act of 1801, citizens living in D.C. continued to vote for members of Congress in Maryland or Virginia; legal scholars therefore propose that the Congress has the power to restore those voting rights while maintaining the integrity of the federal district.[74] The proposed legislation, however, never made it out of committee.[73]
August 11, 2025 at 2:13 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Selon certains, Venceslas de Luxembourg (1361-1419), roi de Bohème et roi des Romains jusqu’à sa destitution, serait même mort des conséquences de son ivrognerie.
Such a thing, however, is not said to occur as a rule after a heart attack, for the moment of a violent attack is usually followed by rapid unconsciousness and death. This would contradict Thomayer's hypothesis. Dr. Ivan Lesny therefore advanced a different theory. According to this theory, the cause of Wenceslaus IV's death was an epileptic seizure as a result of progressive alcoholic dementia, which happens in notorious alcoholics. "In other words, the king drank himself to death. In any case, the cause of the king's death remains unclear, and there are several possibilities as to what caused him to fall into his grave," Liška notes.
August 4, 2025 at 12:01 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Morceaux choisis:
Last year, Mr. Cooper posted on X two images side by side. The first was a historical image of Nazi leaders in Paris. The second was a photograph of the controversial “Last Supper”-themed tableau at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, which featured drag queens. Mr. Cooper wrote that the former image was “infinitely preferable in virtually every way.” He later deleted the post for being in “bad taste,” but defended the sentiment behind it in the email interview: “It is hard to imagine that any historical catastrophe could have led to a worse present result than a country like France, for a thousand years a jewel of Christendom, concluding that the best use of their limited time in front of a global audience was a blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper.” (Mr. Cooper is Christian and sometimes writes about theology, although he did not confirm via email to which denomination he belonged, if any.) This is a pattern of Mr. Cooper’s: to say something shocking and then to backtrack slightly. It’s a strategy, his critics say, to slowly shift the boundaries of mainstream discourse. “From my perspective, he is very clearly laundering ideas and talking points that have been very common among the white nationalist far right for decades,” Mr. Wyman said. “He understands the rules of the game and what you can and can’t say.”
August 3, 2025 at 12:07 PM
biasedstats.bsky.social
Les ultraroyalistes de la Restauration
Être ultra ; ce mot, quoique ce qu’il représente n’ait peut-être pas disparu, ce mot n’a plus de sens aujourd’hui. Expliquons-le. Être ultra, c’est aller au delà. C’est attaquer le sceptre au nom du trône et la mitre au nom de l’autel ; c’est malmener la chose qu’on traîne ; c’est ruer dans l’attelage ; c’est chicaner le bûcher sur le degré de cuisson des hérétiques ; c’est reprocher à l’idole son peu d’idolâtrie ; c’est insulter par excès de respect ; c’est trouver dans le pape pas assez de papisme, dans le roi pas assez de royauté, et trop de lumière à la nuit ; c’est être mécontent de l’albâtre, de la neige, du cygne et du lys au nom de la blancheur ; c’est être partisan des choses au point d’en devenir l’ennemi ; c’est être si fort pour, qu’on est contre.
August 3, 2025 at 9:54 AM