

A 'Whom Do You Hang With?' Map of America - sethbannon
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2013/04/16/177512687/a-whom-do-you-hang-with-map-of-america

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a_p
The author of this article should be ashamed of himself. He failed to do
_basic_ research about how money is actually distributed. If he did, he would
have found out about the Federal Reserve distribution system, _the structure
of which is based upon population distribution_. Then he links this map to
cell phone data, and then ignores the fact that cell phone towers _are placed
where people live_ — it should not be a surprise that people place local calls
far more often then they do long distance calls. Then at the end of the
article, he has the nerve to say "These are the first maps that are trying to
paint us the way we actually are." This ignores the fact that there have been
several proposals for alternative states for many years. See ‭[1] [2][3][4]
(in 3, someone asks the author of one such proposal about the similarity of
his plan to Federal Reserve system.)

If he wanted to do some interesting research, he would have asked to man who
tracked dollar bills to ignore bills that were spent locally and instead track
bills that traveled a considerable distance outside of their Federal Reserve
District, because long distance cash transactions have become increasingly
rare in the age of credit cards. Furthermore, that are the most likely to use
cash are usually the poor, who are the least likely (except for the very rich,
who don't carry cash on them at all) to use a computer and spend their time
tracking where their cash has been.

[1] <http://www.tjc.com/38states/>

[2] <http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/bibliography.html#16-state>

[3] <http://www.rev.net/~aloe/region/question.html>

[4] <http://www.rev.net/~aloe/boundary/>

EDIT: Added information about alternative state suggestions.

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dbarlett
You may know the author, Robert Krulwich [1], as co-host of the insufferable
Radiolab [2]. He's made a career out of "explaining" science like this.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Krulwich>

[2] <http://www.radiolab.org/>

~~~
cafard
Upvoted. Didn't they this year bring up the old canard about the ancient
Greeks being colorblind?

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julespitt
Ahem... <http://www.federalreserve.gov/otherfrb.htm>

Cash is managed through the regional branches of the Federal Reserve, and
while there are some boundaries on that map that don't line up, it mostly
seems to be governed by these particular administrative regions.

As a New Yorker from Connecticut, the gigantic barrier between New York and
New England would have to be nearly completely explained by the Fed.

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hollerith
I don't understand. How do the 12 Federal Reserve Banks determine the flow of
dollar bills?

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Iterated
Banks return their bills to their regional Fed bank for
counting/cleaning/exchange/destruction/etc. So if you're from Dallas and you
spend a dollar in Northern Louisiana that dollar is probably going to end up
back in Dallas because Northern Louisiana is in the Dallas Fed's district.

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djoes
While everyone else discusses the uselessness of the map: shouldn't it be,
"With whom do you hang?" I mean, if you're gonna use "whom," might as well not
end with a preposition.

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lutusp
> "With whom do you hang?"

Or the canonical form: "Around with whom do you hang?" :)

~~~
sc00ter
'Around whom do you hang?'

~~~
saraid216
At this point, you guys should be questioning the word choice of "hang", too.

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jere
>New York City, by the same logic, sits on top of a mega-region that runs all
the way to Georgia (though there are soft borders around Washington, D.C.);

It's not quite there, but this reminds me of the Sprawl:

>In William Gibson's fiction, the Sprawl is a colloquial name for the Boston-
Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA), an urban sprawl environment on a massive
scale, and a fictional extension of the real Northeast Megalopolis.... The
Sprawl is a visualization of a future where virtually the entire East Coast of
the United States, from Boston to Atlanta, has melded into a single mass of
urban sprawl.[1] It has been enclosed in several geodesic domes and merged
into one megacity.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sprawl>

~~~
fivre
I've driven from central VA to NYC. Aside from the domes, I'm pretty sure this
has already happened.

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trusche
Previous discussion of the same map:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5457329>

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outside1234
I wonder if this is biased by the way banks redistribute dollars. You have to
think that many dollars end up at a bank, which then shifts them around to
their branches and ATMs. Is it possible that this is just measuring that with
some small leakage of money carried?

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brd
The dollar borders don't seem quite right. The Connected States of American
seems pretty spot on to me though.

Having lived in North Jersey, Vermont, and Mississippi I can attest to
cohesion of "New England", the LA/MS link, the blur of North NJ/NY and their
sharp divide with South NJ/Philly.

The visualizations were interesting to look at if nothing else. I wish they
had done something with the borders (maybe blurred colors) to make it a bit
easier to grok the data.

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buildnship
I feel that with this map, yes it does show what parts of our country "hang
with each other" and it is evident that these parts cross state lines. But
isn't that the point of the state lines? So that you dont have any 1 certain
group of people (whether they be similar related in religion, political
affiliation, or ideology) living in the same place. This is why counties get
redrawn now so that certain political people do not consistently hold a
majority in the white house. It good that these state lines are drawn, so they
we have a diversity of people representing individual states.

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dllthomas
I wonder how much directionality the data shows. Can we get a vector field?

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loteck
What's up with that sharp dividing line between Colorado and Utah? Everyone
else has at least some bleed over with their neighbors. Are CO and UT
economically feuding?

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gyardley
The population along that border is spread real thin. I'm guessing there's
just not a whole lot of people on the Utah side within driving range of Grand
Junction.

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dllthomas
I wonder how much of the cash is movement is drug trafficking.

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styts
I wonder if we could see a map like this for the whole world.

