Oh, That's Rather Funny

It's been a very busy day and I have tons of stuff to do but, oh, well.

You know how people are just berserk/whack-job-crazy.   TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP FOAMS-AT-MOUTH TRUMP TRUMP MAKES-SELF-LOOK-REALLY-STUPID crazy.  It's annoying but it's probably a good thing because it's just wearing people out and making the ignorance of the rabid anti-Trumpers really, really public.  Good recent example:  Ocasio-Cortez in New York blathers that unemployment numbers are better because everybody is working more than one job to survive and Liz Warren thinks that it sounds so good that she repeats it amongst her own blather shortly after.  Well, that's not how unemployment numbers are derived, but let that go.  A quick visit to the web site of the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page where they provide government data and lo and behold you find that only 4.9% of the labor force is working more than one job.  Which means that 95.1% of the work force is NOT working more than one job.

Today, people were freaking out over some junk food recalls, including Kraft's Taco Bell cheese dip.  And, in all caps, someone over at a facebook site was TRUMP TRUMP TRUMP LACK OF REGULATIONS WE ALL GONNA DIE!  So I got curious.  The FDA website  has recall info, and I started poking around.  They combine info for human and animal food as well as medicines in their lists and my spot checks for before 2006 didn't find any archived data.  Nor did I find data for 2009 or 2011.  Also, we are more than half way through the year, with only 49 recalls, so I simply used 100 for that.   I'm going to try to remember to go back and revise the figure when the 2018 numbers come out.  But I find a rather funny pattern in the recall numbers vs the year.  I haven't figured out how to lay administration info over this but you probably see what I mean.

Now I have to figure out how to normalize by number of inspections performed. Trouble is, some of the archived data starts at 10/1/2008, the inspection summaries start FY 2006, and I haven't even looked at the USDA site yet.  Maybe I'll just back out of the rabbit hole.  Or stick in the plot of the number of FDA food violation summaries...