CVS is being sued for asking customers to donate to the American Diabetes Association when they check out. Those donations are in fact *not* sent to the ADA, but instead reimburse the CVS for a legally binding obligation of $10M that CVS promised earlier
Ok these comments are way more intense than I think the situation demands so just to clarify:
-CVS donated $10M to ADA
-They asked for donations from customers to the ADA, but did not specify that they would be donating the money regardless of whether customers did
I think it's kind of slimy, and potentially a CFPA violation, but not fraudulent. And it sounds like it's pretty similar to what other money raising campaigns do.
@Josh_Merfeld
seriously. I get all my diabetes meds from CVS, and always used to "round up" to donate to the ADA. Leaves a really bad taste in my mouth
So much of this advice requires YEARS of foresight- undergrad math, 2 years of RAing, a year of taking the GRE every month until you get a 167 quant score.
I don't know how anyone without an academic parent and family money ever gets into grad school.
A thread.
1/N
I wrote a memo on the econ PhD application process based on my experience last year. I think prospective applicants - especially those outside of top schools - will find it useful. I only saw this from the supply side, so feel free to correct me!
deleting my dating apps because I want to meet someone the old fashioned way (by defending both her and my buddy’s honor from a pretentious harvard student at a bar after solving a previously thought unsolvable combinatorial mathematics problem)
I vow to never use "et al" and will type out every authors' name in any paper I write no matter the word count because I stand for justice for all peoples and also have a 'V' last name.
“The store serves only as a collection agent for your gift. Assuming the business is following the law, it will not include your donation as part of its business receipts, or income, nor will it claim the charitable gift as an expense.”
🚨🚨🚨 New working paper! In a field experiment on an online labor market, job applicants who had access to algorithmic writing assistance on their resumes were more likely to get hired. Thread on why this matters.
With
@zanmuny
@johnjhorton
\1
In a way, I believe all science is social science- all science is done by people who can never fully escape their own perspectives. And if our screening process for economists is for people who were raised by economists & had enough money to take the GRE 4 time, we are worse off.
My boyfriend is across the room reading a book about how to store, cut, and prepare various vegetables. I keep hearing him murmuring to himself “that’s fascinating” “wow” “who would have thought!” about strategies for dicing onions
Taking formal logic was the most useful class I ever took as an undergraduate. It has completely changed the way I think, helps me spot fallacies and see holes in people’s lines of thinking and also makes me insufferable during family arguments.
My bf (who has lived in the US less than a year) is looking online for a nintendo switch and just asked “Have you heard of this ‘Best Buy’ and is it a reputable retailer?”
If you’d like to fuel any of this rage into action, please donate to Diabetes Action, the diabetes nonprofit with the best transparency rating + most bang-for-your-buck I can find
I couldn’t be more grateful for the last 5 years at MIT. It’s with a full heart I am leaving this wonderful academic & social environment. Exceptionally grateful for my advisor
@johnjhorton
who is just as fantastic as his papers & tweets suggest, & to the whole IT group at Sloan.
After an RAship, three years in graduate school, and countless mistakes, I finally feel confident using % vs percentage point and for all the kids out there who aren’t here yet, let me tell you it gets so much better
On a car leasing website I just saw an EV for "$2,500 at signing, then $152 per month" after calling the company, found out the actual price was $7,500 up front, $400 per month" We asked the agent "So the offer we saw online, was that just completely made up?" and she said Yes.
My friend was really smart, driven, and passionate. She would have made a fantastic economist and academic. But she had to make practical choices at every step of the way because she couldn't afford to take the GRE multiple times/ apply to 20 phd programs.
I too am passionate about what I do, and am probably also smart/driven. But I had a parent with a PhD who provided advice and money for me every step of the way, so now I'm one of the ones who "made it" and my friend didn't.
Third person just asked "have you been stocking up on non-perishables because of coronavirus?"
Nah mates, I only have 1 week's worth of insulin in my house right now bc i'm at the end of a 3month cycle covered by my insurance company, i'm not worried about having enough lentils
I just wish I could search for stuff like “AKM paper” or “that paper that says F-stat of 10 isn’t good enough for IV” and Google would know what I’m talking about
Tense mood on a family vacation while my siblings and I fight over who gets what bed when there is an obviously worse bed.
I suggested this is contractable and offered $20 to get the good bed, let me tell you folks, this strategy does Not make you popular
🚨🚨🚨 Really excited to share my paper on the minimum wage with
@ekaterinajardim
,
@mlmarklong
, Bob Plotnick,
@JakeVigdor
, and
@hilweth
which came out in the May issue of AEJ: Economic Policy. (Link without paywall below)
I am a long time R user and much less experienced with Python.
One thing I've found useful when getting Python help from chatGPT is to get it to translate code from R into Python. Or to ask it to explain a concept in python in terms of how you would do it in R
I recently said to my boyfriend "You know when you sit down to start working, but first you end up responding to a couple emails and then you check twitter and all of a sudden an hour has passed before you reeeally start work?" AND HE SAID NO
Anyone else gain a new respect for their partner while working from home with them this last year?
Like, I always knew my husband worked hard but holy shit he never stops and is so good at what he does
In case you missed it: This week, I introduced the END CRT Act, which would prohibit federal funding for any agency or recipient of federal funding to teach Critical Race Theory (CRT) in workplace training.
Read more about my bill here ⤵️
I always just lived the life I wanted to live pre-tenure. Figured if I didn't make tenure, I'd just find another job.
It's an underappreciated point that if you write good papers but just don't quite write enough for the place you start, you'll very likely get another good job.
I saw a great talk for mid-stage grad students that started with the quote
“We don’t know what doctoral students do in their third year, but it seems to take a year…”
Possibly controversial:
I feel we don't give enough mid-stage feedback to PhD students in econ/finance. Between 2nd year and job market, they have like 3-4 years of doing their own thing, and a lot of people seem to have not a great clue how they're doing
Can someone please explain what this meme is. I missed it when it came out and now i see it posted all the time with totally random things (mb to do with causation != correlatation or endogeneity or ?) but to me this is just a picture of a plane with red dots and i DONT GET IT
Happy International Women's Day to every female PhD student that's been told it must have been really easy to get into grad school because of how desperate schools are to let in women
Happy International Women's Day to every woman that's been at a BBQ and had to listen to a man explain that the gender wage gap isn't real once you control for occupation
🚨🚨🚨 New NBER WP just dropped with
@ekaterinajardim
,
@mlmarklong
, Bob Plotnick,
@JakeVigdor
, and
@hilweth
. It's on spillover effects of place-based policies and what employer-employee matched data can teach us about them!
1/n
Some personal news: I’m moving to Cambridge! Some professional news: I’m going to
@MITSloan
!
I’ll miss the fantastic people here in NYC, but I’ll be back for bagels and broadway shows :) In the meanwhile, Boston, here I come!
Type2 diabetes is on the CDCs list of covid comorbidities but Type1 is not.
So I went through all the journal articles the CDC cites, expecting to see covid has worse outcomes for T2Ds than T1Ds. The articles either show the opposite, or dont distinguish between T2/T1
A thread
This tweet has a great mix of overconfidence and fun facts! I’ll try-
I will be 29 years old when I start as an Assistant Professor at Stanford, the same age as Richard Thaler once was and 2 years older than Britney Spears was when she shaved her head.
Just picked a photo for my website and now I am exhausted. Finally found one photo out of 1M where I look professional but not intense, friendly but serious, like I have a personality but one which isn’t overwhelming, sensible but not homely, pretty but not hot,
Chatted about machine learning with an undergrad in a common study area of the CS building and he asked me if I am a FRESHMAN which is either a testament to my YOUTHFUL ENERGY or my IGNORANCE ABOUT MACHINE LEARNING
I had a friend in undergrad who was 2 years ahead of me. Her passion was addressing poverty and used to tell me about how she wanted to become an economist so she could do the sort of research she read about in books like "Poor Economics."
Academics start out regular people who are able to communicate with many different types of people and then one day you catch yourself saying "i had a muffin earlier that crowded out lunch"
But she was a senior in college, and majored in Econ/Poli Sci and didn't take any additional math. I was only a sophomore, but because my dad did a PhD in Finance he told me to take as many math courses as I could, so I did. I convinced her to take Calc 1 before she graduated.
One of the worst things about grad school is that there seems to be a very low correlation between “acting like you know what you’re talking about” about and “knowing what you are talking about”
And a much higher ⍴ between the former and “male.”
🚨NEW PAPER🚨
"Anonymity and Identity Online"
We geolocate the majority of EJMR posters and show that posting on EJMR is wide-spread at US universities and also frequent in other organizations employing economists.
Presentation at NBER SI (7/20/2023):
I am extremely partial to UK hiking culture. In Seattle, hikes were taken very seriously & involved enough gear that you could plausibly stay in the mountains indefinitely. In the UK it's big coats, to-go tea/cocoa, biscuits, and you have a little sit whenever you feel like it.
After forgetting to drink water for a week and then diagnosing myself with every possible ailment known to webMD, I drank the recommended number of glasses today and you’ll never guess what happened
I have been ruthlessly mocked in every zoom meeting I've worn my fingerless heated gloves with wires that plug into my computer. But, i don't care!! These bad boys keeps my fingers warm in this arctic office building and they're going to be considered fashionable any minute now!!
I am thrilled to announce that starting summer '24 I'll be an Assistant Professor at Boston University
@BUQuestrom
! I'll be joining their Information Systems group, which is filled with amazing faculty whose work on platform economics I’ve been citing since I started grad school
To all the academics making fun of Kamala for repeating that quote multiple times... you are telling me you've never made a joke teaching and then resaid it in every damn section?? smh
When the landlord owns 2-3 houses/apts & manages repairs themselves, every repair comes directly out of their pocket & they're often emotionally invested in the building
corp landlords w property managers solves the principal agent problem by separating ownership from management
She worked campaign jobs while she applied to a couple masters programs that provided funding. She ended up doing an Applied Econ MA at a small school in France. After, she couldn't get RA jobs & kept working on campaigns until she unsuccessfully applied for a couple PhD programs
@AmandaAskell
A few years ago a guy came up to me at a bar, asked my name/job, when I said “I study the effects of the minimum wage” he responded “that’s all fine and good, but it’s gonna put people out of work. Have you thought about the fact the moneys gotta come from somewhere?” Yes.
I got coauthorship on the project I worked on as an RA. Yes, at the time it took me a week to make a time series plot. But the pub process is so damn long that by the time the paper was in the Xth round of revisions and I was well into a PhD program, I was able to pull my weight.
If the social sciences are heading towards the natural sciences where there are large groups of RAs, post docs, and students working towards their research projects then…we should probably also do what the natural sciences do and include those people as coauthors?
I was listening to music and sort of dancing while waiting for the T, and a woman stopped me with a big smile to say “you look so joyful! What are you listening to?!”
and then I had to say “Justin Bieber’s original christmas songs” and her face visibly fell
This but for newly married people choosing a new last name.
Tired: Woman takes man last name
Wired: Both parties hyphonate
Inspired: Both parties pick new last name, ideally "Wolverine"
New authorship ordering proposal: every paper uses a single team name.
Like "Wolverine (2019) showed the importance of naming convention using a novel RCT."
📝New WP with
@ekaterinajardim
!
We show the Seattle mwage to $13:
- raised the rate of business exit
- shifted the composition of entering businesses towards less labor-intensive businesses
→ s.t. 2/3 of overall employment loss came from extensive margin
Lot of comments about how people are never going to use the check out machines to donate again. If so, make sure that does not mean you donate less overall. Diabetes sucks, but advances in tech&meds make it much more liveable
Join me in donating now!
100%, and want to add plotting every vaguely important variable every which way. Time series, histograms, and by treatment group.
These kinds of gut checks are a slog but it saves so much time in the long run.