Tag Archives: data

How do Supreme Leaders invest?

Okay, I’m talking about U.S. Supreme Court justices here. Not to be confused with the Iranian system where an unelected ideological leader for life has the right to overrule the decisions of elected leaders without explanation or question…oh shoot, it is basically the same thing, except we have nine of them!

Anyway, ProPublica has put together a dashboard of data on their required public disclosures. They take a lot of privately-funded trips, most often to speak to students at law schools. That kind of makes sense. But some accept gifts from wealthy individuals, and how can that be anything but corruption? They also write books, and do book tours while in office. This seems strange to me, and I wonder if this sort of thing goes on in other countries. Maybe I can see them writing technical articles in legal journals or trade publications, because other practicing lawyers are going to be interested in what they have to say. But I can also see an argument that they write plenty on the job, and they should put their energy into explaining why and how they came to the decisions on the cases before them.

Anyway, another fun thing is you can click on any justice and see what their retirement portfolios look like. And their retirement portfolios look something like mine, with index funds from companies like Vanguard. Only with more zeros. And real estate tends to be a big chunk – I guess if you own a nice home or two in the New York or DC metro areas and your net worth is only a few multiple millions of dollars (typically 5-10 is what I saw), that one multi-million dollar condo can be a big chunk. Come on, you guys are old and you clearly have a nice retirement setup all queued up. Go for it!

house sale price premiums by month and city

Zillow has some data on how much above average home prices are by month of the year and by US city. In general, prices are higher by about 1-3% in March-June. I assume this has something to do with the U.S. school year. It may be somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy though. Last time I was in the home buying market, which was almost exactly 10 years ago, I started looking for listings in January, but there really was nothing to look at until March. So people in my city (Philadelphia) don’t start listing until March, and by the time you go through the process it seems like most closings are going to be in the May-June time frame (precisely when mine was). I wonder if refinancings show up as home sales in this data though, or if they have some way of knowing when the properties actually change hands. That could skew the data because people can refinance any time of year, and they are likely to refinance when interest rates are relatively low and prices therefore relatively high.

measuring blood pressure through your @$$

This seems like a good idea actually – a toilet seat that measures your heart rate, blood pressure, and oxygen level. It’s designed for hospitals, but it makes a lot of sense to me. It would happen automatically, built automatically into your daily routine and with no wasted time or extra effort. You could have it sent right to your doctor if you wanted to.