A 'Whom Do You Hang With?' Map of America | Hacker News Reader

A 'Whom Do You Hang With?' Map of America

npr.org

73 pointssethbannon38 comments

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.

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/

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

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.

Wheresgeorge tracks members bills though, those would mostly be carried by people going from one state to the other, not through Federal Reserve branches right?

Banks take their cash and bring it to their regional Federal Reserve Bank for counting/cleaning/repair/replacement/etc. So pretty much any time a bill lands in a bank it has a good chance of getting sent back to the Fed.

Since most places you pay cash at take it straight to the bank ASAP for security reasons, most of your cash ends up at a bank. In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of a business other than maybe a hotdog stand that doesn't take 100% of their cash revenues to the bank.

On the other hand, a marked bill is likely to be destroyed at replaced if it makes it to the Fed.

Do they send the cash to the cash's regional reserve, or to the bank's regional reserve?

Businesses take cash to local bank branches, which then take the cash to closest Federal Reserve branch. Most large cities have Federal Reserve branches even if they are not heads of the regions.

But WheresGeorge tracks $1 bills, which probably turn over in a business's cash register and get returned to random people as change more often than they go back to the bank.

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

http://www.frbservices.org/help/coin_and_currency.html#a1

Businesses that collect large numbers of dollar bills bundle them up and give them to their banks, these wind up in the hands of the local federal reserve that checks them and delivers them to businesses that give out large numbers of dollar bills inside of the same district.

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.

Came here to say this. It seems like a lot of the lines are due to the locations of the Federal Reserve Banks. I would also like to note that there are branches of FRBs in Denver, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Miami, as well as many others, but the ones I mentioned are ones that I find geographically separated from their main regional bank. If you look, even these larger branches of the FRB's seem to be centered in these regions as well. I don't think some of the smaller FRB branches (like El Paso, or San Antonio) have cash services departments (I could be wrong here), but the larger ones do.

To expand on julespitt's comment: Each FRB (and whichever branches of each FRB has a cash department) gets money sent in from banks to be exchanged/counted/cleaned/recirculated/stored/whatever in whichever bank is closest. This explains a majority of these lines. This probably also explains why there's some really defined lines around Seattle, Denver, and Salt Lake City. Even though they are branches of FRB's, they still have cash departments.

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.

How do you figure? Whom is a real word (albeit, sadly, one that's dying out). The rule about not ending sentences with prepositions, on the other hand, is and always has been bunk.

> The rule about not ending sentences with prepositions, on the other hand, is and always has been bunk.

Well, it's language, not science or mathematics. It's not as though language has rules that emanate from axioms. It's a matter of convention and consensus. And the consensus changes over time.

This is because people wanted to make English more Latin-like in the 1700s.

So Latin rules were applied to the non-Latin English language: i.e., not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions.

However, applying these rules changes meaning and tone.

English doesn't have special grammatical structures (e.g., Thai) or verb conjugations (e.g., Spanish) to discern levels of formality or tone; so we must encode them in the dynamics of the word choice and standard grammar.

Being able to form sentences in such structures is one of the primary ways in which we do this.

Double negatives are another example. In the 1700s people wanted Formal Logic rules to be in English and decided that a double negative was invalid.

However, the double negative places a meaning in the sentence that is intended by the speaker, and comprehended by the audience.

That meaning is fundamentally different from the single negative form.

Observing such restrictions create artificial barriers to communication and unnecessarily hinders the depth and character of expression.

However, and this is key, those rules are completely and utterly arbitrary, meaning that nobody would come up with them on their own, so knowing them meant you were taught them, and having been taught them meant you were of a high enough social class to be Our Sort. Therefore, speaking English in accordance with those rules is a class marker, something that's always useful whenever people may attempt to get Above Themselves.

Hey, it's this or going back to doing it based on skin color and last names.

> nobody would come up with them on their own

Um. Someone had to.

I think he meant that they came into existence ad hoc, with so many originators that its genesis would be nearly impossible to sort out.

> "With whom do you hang?"

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

'Around whom do you hang?'

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

Or, in Bislama, "hang you who". Approximately.

Or "Who do you hang with"--"who" is the subject form, and "whom" is the object form; "who" is the subject of the quoted sentence as posted.

It's sad and ironic; using "who" in object position is a common mistake, and prescriptivists (grammar nazis) often correct it to "whom". But in this case, "who" would be right, but the poster has seen the correction so often that they've applied that "correction" even where it's wrong.

PS - thanks for posting first and giving me an excuse to talk about it :)

If you're going to talk about it, you might as well get it right. Yes, "who" is the subject form and "whom" the object form, but "you" is clearly the subject in this sentence - "you hang"; subject-verb.

"Who do you hang with?" sounds more correct than "whom do you hang with?", but only because of that trailing preposition. Use "With whom do you hang" (as has been mention elsewhere) and we're all square.

But damn those Grammar Nazis anyway; that's not how people speak."Who do you hang with?" works perfectly well for me, gramatically incorrect or not.

>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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com