3 ms·

This seems to show generally higher incomes around metropolitan areas, which I would have expected. But there are some areas in the 75k+ bracket that surprise m

This seems to show generally higher incomes around metropolitan areas, which I would have expected. But there are some areas in the 75k+ bracket that surprise me, such as: 1) Western and northeastern Wyoming 2) Western North Dakota 3) Northern Alaska Does anyone know why that might be the case, and where the money could be coming from? (National parks? Military bases? Oil fields?)

fetus8 8y ago
Oil Fields. Western Wyoming has some crazy huge oil fields and refineries. I would assume similar cases for North Dakota and Alaska as well, but I don't know for sure.
- iooi 8y ago
  ND: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom Alaska: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_North_Slope#Petroleum_resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_North_Slope#Petroleum_r...
- dx87 8y ago
  Yep. My father works at an oil refinery in Northern Alaska and everyone there is making well over 100k, around 200k for middle management, plus benefits like a pension. Downside is that it's a frozen tundra where you can't go outside without protective goggles to keep your eyes from freezing shut, but they also work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off, so it's basically 6 months of vacation every year, in addition to normal vacation days. He said some people chose to live in warmer places like Puerto Rico and just fly back and forth every 2 weeks.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    >work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off I haven't been in the oil business for a very long time but that was a very common pattern for offshore drilling rigs and the like. The interval of weeks varied from 1 to 4 as I recall generally based on how remote the location was.
amyjess 8y ago
If you're interested, my census tool includes median income and housing price data from the ACS: http://zaidan-x.org:8192/ http://zaidan-x.org:8192/ Caveats: I'm still using an older dataset (the 2011-2015 one, IIRC), but I'm hoping I can migrate to the new one soon. And because of some boneheaded design decisions I made, the income and housing data is only available at the county level and below, not at the state and statistical area levels. I also had to wrangle the data in certain ways to get the data in the format i want (median income, median housing cost, and median housing cost as a percentage of income; the source data is segregated by renters, homeowners with mortgages, and homeowners with no mortgages). I've written about this before, and you can find my calculations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196287 (and yes I'm comfortable linking it now because I've since set up a robots.txt so Google doesn't crawl every endpoint that algorithmically generates graphics) And, yes, at some point I'm going to get off my lazy ass and implement Let's Encrypt.

fetus8 8y ago

Oil Fields. Western Wyoming has some crazy huge oil fields and refineries. I would assume similar cases for North Dakota and Alaska as well, but I don't know for sure.

iooi 8y ago
ND: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dakota_oil_boom Alaska: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_North_Slope#Petroleum_resources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_North_Slope#Petroleum_r...
dx87 8y ago
Yep. My father works at an oil refinery in Northern Alaska and everyone there is making well over 100k, around 200k for middle management, plus benefits like a pension. Downside is that it's a frozen tundra where you can't go outside without protective goggles to keep your eyes from freezing shut, but they also work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off, so it's basically 6 months of vacation every year, in addition to normal vacation days. He said some people chose to live in warmer places like Puerto Rico and just fly back and forth every 2 weeks.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >work 2 weeks on / 2 weeks off I haven't been in the oil business for a very long time but that was a very common pattern for offshore drilling rigs and the like. The interval of weeks varied from 1 to 4 as I recall generally based on how remote the location was.

amyjess 8y ago

If you're interested, my census tool includes median income and housing price data from the ACS: http://zaidan-x.org:8192/ http://zaidan-x.org:8192/ Caveats: I'm still using an older dataset (the 2011-2015 one, IIRC), but I'm hoping I can migrate to the new one soon. And because of some boneheaded design decisions I made, the income and housing data is only available at the county level and below, not at the state and statistical area levels. I also had to wrangle the data in certain ways to get the data in the format i want (median income, median housing cost, and median housing cost as a percentage of income; the source data is segregated by renters, homeowners with mortgages, and homeowners with no mortgages). I've written about this before, and you can find my calculations at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196287 (and yes I'm comfortable linking it now because I've since set up a robots.txt so Google doesn't crawl every endpoint that algorithmically generates graphics) And, yes, at some point I'm going to get off my lazy ass and implement Let's Encrypt.