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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2298 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 6, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Fun and mysteries with maps and money.

This map on Wikipedia is almost not surprising. Metropolises and mountain retreats for billionaires are in dark green (as is oil-rich Midland County, TX), everything else literally pales in comparison. But there's this dark green square in Nebraska that is completely out of place.

It's Wheeler County, and it has less than a thousand residents. And for some reason its per capita personal income shot up in mid-2010's but is now similar to the nearby Garfield County. What's going on? It's small enough that a big sale should effect the per capita ranking (an increase of 61k times 800 residents means someone earned 50 million dollars), but it's not a peak, it's a hump. Who has spent several hundred million buying up land in the middle of nowhere in 2011-2016? Bill Gates? Ted Turner?

And there's Union County, the coccyx of South Dakota. There's no hump, it's just rich and growing richer. If there was a major booming company there, the whole Sioux City metro area would've been darker, but only Union County is an outlier. It's not that small (16k people) that a single rich family would skew the per capita income either. It it because every person of affluence from Sioux City has moved to Dakota Dunes? Just how many people earning hundreds of thousands can the meat packing industry support?

Does wheeler county have a jackpot winner? Like it’s 1000 people, can skew it pretty easily.

It's not a spike, it's a hump. Multiple years of increased income followed by a return to normalcy.

Lotteries do that lump sum vs. payment plan thing. I wouldn’t rule them out.

Or some other sort of windfall. Promising mineral assay? Intellectual property? Messy divorce? I dunno.

Couldn't it be slightly more senior oil/gas workers that for some reason have their families there?

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