Paying for Population

Late last week, an innovative scheme to attract new residents hit the wires. The city of Cumberland, Maryland, is offering a $10,000 payment if you will just move to their fine city and either buy or build a house there, and up to a further $10,000 in matching grants...

Atlantic Hurricane Season

Last week, the second named storm of the 2024 season – Beryl – made landfall with category 5 force, visiting Jamaica and Cancun, and eventually the south Texas coast before losing steam as it makes its way through the middle of the United States. The chaos in a...

ICSC 2024

By mid-morning on the Tuesday of the annual pilgrimage to ICSC Vegas, my body harshly reminds me that humans were not designed to walk for hours on concrete floors. And by mid-afternoon, driving south on I-15 towards the California state line as if the local sheriff...

The Evolution of the Site Report

1985 was a milestone year for me. I wrote my first site reporting system for the new Intel 386 based computers which sported a massive 640k of memory and a 10mb hard drive. The design requirements were twofold: first, that we could execute a radius report within 30...

Transitioning to the 2020 Census

Starting a few years before the 2020 census, the bureau began discussing methodologies for improving ‘disclosure avoidance’. To be honest, we were highly skeptical of how this would play out, especially since the published methodology discussions were obtuse, reading...