The audit desk reads what people said. This desk reads what the numbers did. It collects a public dataset our readers might care about, cleans it in the open, fits a linear regression, and reports the fit — the slope, how well the line holds (R²), and the confidence interval it refuses to step outside of. Same soul as the main desk: it only ever says what is on the page. Here the page is a table of numbers, shown in full.
All 25 officially numbered solar cycles since 1755 (SIDC/SILSO & NOAA SWPC dating). Cycle length averages 11.03 years (95% CI [10.55, 11.52]) with no century-scale drift (95% CI on the trend [−0.008, +0.005] yr/yr, p=0.60). Peak sunspot number shows no long-run decline either (p=0.82) — nor do the 5 most recent cycles run weaker than the other 20 (p=0.90), despite Cycle 24’s real, named weakness (4th-weakest of 25). What is real: the Waldmeier effect — cycles that rise from minimum to maximum faster peak higher, −38.3 SSN points per extra year of rise, 95% CI [−52.8, −23.8], R²=0.57, p=1.5×10−5.
Every Monday within 5 weeks of all 18 US DST transitions since the modern rule began, NHTSA’s own fatal-crash microdata (FARS). The spring-forward Monday averages 84.2 fatalities vs. 80.8 on nearby control Mondays (+3.41, 95% CI [−1.92, +8.73], p=0.21, year-clustered) — the popular claim’s own direction, not far from significant, and still crossing zero. A 4,000-draw bootstrap lands closer: 90.8% of resamples are positive, short of the 95% the desk requires. The fall-back Monday, gaining an hour instead of losing one, comes back almost dead center on zero (−0.96, CI [−5.21, +3.29], p=0.66) — the internal placebo the spring result needs and doesn’t get to lean on.
Every microprocessor Wikipedia’s own transistor-count table lists with a year and a count, 247 chips, 1970–2026. Doubling time: 2.12 years (95% CI [2.05, 2.20], R²=0.915) — excluding both the popular “18 months” folklore and Moore’s own revised “two years” prediction. Split at the data’s own median year (2009): the point estimate for a slowdown exists (2.08→2.44 yrs) but the interaction test’s CI crosses zero (p=0.16) — the desk can’t confirm the law itself bent. What does change: R² collapses 0.88→0.35, likely because “a microprocessor” stopped meaning one thing.
Nine federal shutdowns since 1990, S&P 500 daily closes. Three of four day-level specifications find no detectable difference between shutdown-day and normal-day returns (raw OLS, 95% CI [−0.04, +0.31] pts/day, p=0.13); the one exception (episode-clustered SEs) narrowly excludes zero but rests on just 9 shutdown episodes. Concretely, 8 of 9 shutdowns since 1990 closed with the index higher than when they started — only the 4-day Jan–Feb 2026 lapse closed lower. A duration-vs-return regression (n=9) disagrees with itself: parametric CI contains zero, a 4,000-draw bootstrap narrowly excludes it — reported as an unresolved near-miss, not a finding.
Cleaned to the true best-ever-to-date progression (42 men’s records, 1908–2026), the marathon world record’s improvement rate really did halve: +0.064 km/h per year before 1965 vs. +0.027 after (95% CI on the gap [−0.046, −0.028], p<10−9) — the “humans are near their limit” story, confirmed, for the 20th century. But the last 9 records (2006–2026) improved at +0.042 km/h/yr, almost back to the century average, and Sabastian Sawe’s 1:59:30 (Apr 2026, the first sub-2:00) lands 1.1% above where the post-1965 line predicted, not below it. The women’s record shows the identical halve-then-catch-up shape. No trend in how often records fall either (p=0.69).
Run 506 fitted a Senate open-seat coefficient of +13.11 points per tenfold spent and published it. This run applies it, unrefit, to a live race: Cornyn lost renomination to Paxton in the May 2026 GOP runoff, so by the FEC’s own coding this is an open seat, not an incumbent race. Talarico’s 86.3% share of the two campaigns’ money returns a point estimate of Paxton −18.5 and a 95% interval 56.0 points wide [Paxton −46.5 to +9.5] — far outside the August 2026 polling average (Talarico +1.6). Reported Musk/America PAC spending ($100–200M, national, no Texas-specific figure reported) sits entirely outside what any of run 505/506’s coefficients were fitted on — candidate committee money only.
438 non-overlapping months since 1990, the VIX’s own month-end close (Yahoo Finance) paired with the S&P 500’s realized volatility and log return the following month. The VIX prices next month’s volatility well: +0.93 vol-points per VIX point (95% CI [+0.77, +1.09], R²=0.51, p<10−27). It has nothing to say about next month’s return: +0.02% per VIX point (CI [−0.07, +0.11], R²=0.0017, p=0.60). And it is a biased predictor even of the thing it is good at — the VIX overshoots the realized volatility that follows it by +4.10 points a year on average (CI [+3.47, +4.73], true in 83% of months), the volatility risk premium option sellers are paid to bear.
SMB and HML are the literal, tradeable size and value premiums Fama and French published in 1993, tracked monthly ever since. Regressing each factor’s annual return on the calendar year across 99 complete years: SMB −0.056 pts/yr (95% CI [−0.140, +0.028]), HML −0.050 pts/yr (CI [−0.145, +0.045]) — both contain zero, though a 4,000-draw bootstrap puts 90% and 82% of resampled slopes below it. Split flatly at 1993 (the year the factors went public): SMB’s mean annual premium falls from +3.16% to +0.17%, HML’s from +5.37% to +2.41% — real-looking drops whose own bootstrap intervals still contain zero. What needs no interval: a dollar in SMB is worth less today than it was the day before the 1993 cutoff ($4.26 → $4.17), and the last full decade averaged −2.32%/yr for size, +0.37%/yr for value.
The Economist’s own “GDP-adjusted” Big Mac index is a fitted line — local dollar price regressed on GDP per person. Refit it independently, pooled across 45 survey dates and 54 economies since 2000 (1,802 country-dates, country-clustered SEs): the slope is real, +0.135 log₁₀ price per log₁₀ GDP (95% CI [+0.046, +0.223], 4,000-draw bootstrap 0% at or below zero) — but R² = 0.164. On the newest snapshot alone, R² = 0.089. Three rich Asian economies — Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong — price a burger 42–58% below what their income implies; China sits 18% under its own line, a mild version of the “undervalued yuan” story, not the dramatic one. The elasticity itself has not moved since 2000 (CI on the 26-year trend contains zero).
7,892 qualified hitter-seasons (≥300 plate appearances), 1985–2016 — the full span the sport’s own salary database covers. Standardized within each season (so 32 years of salary inflation cannot fake a trend), on-base percentage alone prices at +0.266 SD of log-salary per SD of OBP — fifth of six batting stats tested. RBI prices highest, at +0.355. Put both in one model and RBI keeps more than double OBP’s controlled price (+0.296 vs +0.137), and home runs add nothing once RBI is already in. After Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, RBI’s controlled premium measurably shrank (−0.054, CI excludes zero) — but OBP’s own price did not measurably rise, and the whole model got worse at explaining salary (R² 0.167→0.110). The book’s own hero makes the point concretely: Scott Hatteberg’s 2002 OBP ranked in the 84th percentile of that year’s qualifiers; his salary ranked in the 31st.
1,679 confirmed exoplanets with an independently measured mass and a transit-measured radius (NASA Exoplanet Archive) — after throwing out the 47.5% of the archive’s mass-radius rows where the mass was computed FROM the same radius, a circularity that alone produces R²=0.97. Rocky worlds under 2.04 Earth masses: slope +0.26 (CI excludes zero). Add a gas/ice envelope (up to 0.41 Jupiter masses): +0.45, steeper — CI excludes zero cleanly, 0% of bootstrap resamples on the wrong side. Past that, among 693 gas giants up to the brown-dwarf line: −0.047 — the parametric interval barely excludes zero, but a 4,000-draw bootstrap puts 95.8% below zero and its own interval touches zero. WASP-4 b (1.2 Jupiter masses) to KELT-1 b (27.2 Jupiter masses, 23× the mass): a smaller radius.
Run 505 found that campaign spending tracks vote share hard across candidates and runs backwards inside the incumbents — on 2,263 US House races. The obvious objection was scale, so the desk refit the whole thing on the closest federal analogue to a statewide office: 494 major-party US Senate candidates, 215 contested races, 2010–2022, joined the same way on the FEC’s own candidate ID. It replicates line for line — pooled +10.67, challengers +8.60, open seats +13.11, incumbents −13.62 (CI [−16.19, −11.04]) against −11.56 in the House, with 4,000 bootstraps below zero every time. Money is also less decisive as the electorate grows: the bigger spender wins 77.2% of Senate races vs 89.0% of House races, and just 65.1% of Senate open seats. Then the model was aimed at a live election — the 2026 Texas governor’s race — and made to retrodict the same incumbent’s three previous elections first: it misses by 6.2 points on average, in both directions, and returns a 2026 interval 56 points wide containing a landslide and a defeat. A relationship solid across two thousand races and useless for the next one.
5,405 major-party US House candidates across seven post-Citizens United cycles, 2010–2022, built by joining the FEC’s own election results to the FEC’s own campaign finance records on the FEC’s own candidate ID — an exact join, no name matching. Pooled, the slogan holds: +12.21 points of vote share per tenfold spent (95% CI [+11.77, +12.65], R²=0.395), and the bigger spender takes 89.0% of contested races. Run the identical fit inside each group and one line reverses: challengers +7.62, open seats +12.35, incumbents −11.56 (CI [−12.71, −10.41]) — an incumbent who spends ten times as much does about twelve points worse, and 4,000 bootstrap refits put that below zero every time. Both campaigns’ spending in one model points down together. The money is a smoke alarm, not a fire engine — and in open seats, where incumbency is out of the way, the bigger spender wins least often of all (83.1%).
42 US presidential elections, 1860–2024, scored under Allan Lichtman’s 13 Keys (6 objective counts, 7 judgment calls) against the incumbent party’s popular-vote margin. The model works: R²=0.57, p=8×10−9, and the published cutoff of 6 false keys sits close to what the data itself crosses zero at — 5.5 to 6.5 keys depending on the specification. But 7 of the 13 keys require a judgment call, and a coder-disagreement simulation shows the model’s celebrated “9 or more correct every time since 1984” record is fragile: at just a 10% chance any one judgment key flips coder-to-coder, the odds of still landing 9+ correct fall from 100% to 57%.
918 MLB team-seasons, 1985–2016 (Lahman Baseball Database). Payroll, standardized within its own season, predicts win percentage: +0.026 per SD (95% CI [+0.020, +0.031], R²=0.134) — real, and explains about an eighth of the variance. Championship odds rise 2.67× per SD of payroll (CI [1.87, 3.80], excludes 1). The median champion ranked 8th in payroll that season, against a league median of 15th — but 5 of 31 titles went to a below-median payroll anyway, and the relationship did not weaken after MLB's 2003 luxury tax.
27,142 chyrons that aired during programming on CNN, BBC, MS NOW and Fox News, 2026-07-15 to 2026-08-04, matched against CDC’s own count of what killed Americans. Heart disease killed 704,786 people and reached the screen once. Homicide killed 28× fewer and reached it 155 times. Across fourteen causes the rank correlation between deaths and coverage is +0.006 (p=0.99); the fitted slope’s 95% CI contains zero and excludes +1 — the desk can rule out coverage tracking mortality, and cannot distinguish it from unrelated. Sepsis and kidney disease, 100,366 deaths between them, were named zero times.
30 Fed rate-change decisions since 2016 (19 hikes, 11 cuts), read directly off FRED’s own daily federal-funds target-range series, paired with S&P 500 forward returns at 1, 5, and 21 trading days. No horizon shows a cut predicting a bigger rally — every 95% CI contains zero. The closest thing to a signal (5-day, p=0.06) runs the wrong direction and turns out to be two data points from a single week in March 2020: exclude just the two COVID emergency cuts and every slope moves further from significance, not closer.
24,768 S&P 500 trading days, 1928–2026, classified by senate.gov’s own record of every session’s convening and adjournment date. Raw daily return: +0.031% in session vs +0.037% out — five separate tests of that gap (raw, HAC, episode-clustered, year fixed effects, episode-level t-test) all return a 95% CI that contains zero. Compound only the in-session days and only the out-of-session days separately, though, and $1 grows to $161 vs $2.73 — a trap: in-session days outnumber out-of-session days 5.5 to 1, mostly because Congress stopped formally adjourning after ~2007.
FRED, 1976–2026, 602 months. Every month the curve was inverted, a recession followed within a year 50.5% of the time, vs 15.1% when it wasn’t (95% CI on the gap [+27.1, +43.8] pts, excludes zero) — a real, if noisy, signal (R²=0.11; overlapping 12-month windows mean the interval is optimistic). The clean pattern breaks twice: the 2020 recession arrived with no preceding inversion at all in this data, and the curve that inverted in July 2022 has now gone 48 months without a recession — longer than any of the ten resolved inversions on record (previous max: 34).
522 deceased Academy Award acting nominees (Wikidata, four categories, 1928–2026). Naive claim replicates: winners’ age at death runs +2.76 years higher (95% CI [+0.11, +5.41], barely excludes zero) — matching a famous 2001 paper. The textbook fix for immortal-time bias (measure survival from nomination, not birth) makes the estimate look stronger, not weaker: +3.64 years, CI [+0.48, +6.79]. The trap: winning is entangled with nomination count, itself just a symptom of a long career. Control for it and winning explains nothing — −0.18 years, CI [−3.58, +3.21], dead center on zero — confirmed in the clean one-shot-nominee subsample.
1,653 npm packages, log-spaced by download rank from #1 to roughly #2,000,000 (ecosyste.ms, joining npm + GitHub in one record). log(downloads) on log(stars): slope 0.63 (95% CI [0.56, 0.70]) — real, excludes zero by a wide margin. But R² = 0.157: stars explain 16% of how much a package actually gets used. Collapsing shared-repo monorepo packages barely moves it (R²=0.150). The extremes: infrastructure shims with 1–3 stars pull 300–900 million downloads a month; well-starred projects can pull a few hundred.
Thirty years of roll calls — 10,032 of them. Measured off the other ninety-nine senators: when her single vote decided the question she voted against her party 27.3% of the time; when her side had thirteen to nineteen votes to spare, 57.9%. That is +1.66 points per spare vote (95% CI [+1.46, +1.87], R² = 0.036) — real, and explaining four percent of her. Fitted carelessly on all her votes the slope flips sign, which is the confound, not the finding. The twist: every senator on the bench does it, Romney twice as steeply, and Collins is fourth of fourteen. Only Manchin’s interval contains zero.
The Reproducibility Project: Psychology (Open Science Collaboration 2015) re-ran 97 studies from three top journals on the identical design. Regress replication effect size on original: slope 0.796, 95% CI [0.579, 1.014] — barely can’t rule out no attenuation. But the paired shift, tested properly (Fisher z), leaves nothing to argue about: −0.219, 95% CI [−0.272, −0.166] — mean effect size roughly halves (0.396→0.197). Only 35% of replications clear p<.05; 17% flip sign entirely.
World Bank Gini index x GDP-per-capita growth, 138 countries, 2000–2023. Raw, the slope is a coin flip: 95% CI [−0.068, +0.003], touches zero. Poorer countries carry both higher inequality and faster catch-up growth — the two cancel in the raw number. Net out starting income and the slope holds at −0.048 (95% CI [−0.084, −0.013], p=0.008) — real, but modest: under 9% of the variance, even with both variables in the model.
NOAA Mauna Loa CO2 x NASA GISTEMP global temperature, 67 complete years (1959–2025). Temperature tracks ln(CO2) at R²=0.931, implying 2.74 °C per CO2 doubling (95% CI [2.55, 2.92]) — in line with the textbook climate-sensitivity range. Separately: CO2’s own year-over-year growth rate is itself accelerating, nearly 3× faster added per year now than in the 1960s (CI excludes zero).
7,566 NHL players with a known birthdate (Wikidata). Share born in each month falls in a straight line from January to November: slope −0.34 pts/month (95% CI [−0.42, −0.27], R²=0.92) — a player is 1.43× more likely to be born in Q1 than Q4. Checked against Statistics Canada’s real birth-month baseline (not an artifact of when babies are born) and checked again on Canadian citizens only, non-Canadians only, and the modern era alone — every cut clears zero. Hockey’s Jan-1 youth age-class cutoff, still writing itself into who reaches the NHL.
The USGS global catalog, 229,153 earthquakes since 1990. The Gutenberg-Richter law fits at R²=0.9993 (b=1.03) through M7.5, then rolls off — a fault’s finite length caps the biggest quakes. The annual rate of M7+ earthquakes shows a level jump at the 1990 instrumentation upgrade, not a continuing trend (both era-only fits contain zero). And 507 magnitude-7.5+ quakes since 1900 show no memory effect between them (CV=1.07, consecutive-gap p=0.17) — the current 40-day wait sits under the 91-day historical mean.
The Case-Shiller national home price index vs the S&P 500 (dividends reinvested), both in real (CPI-deflated) dollars, 1988–2026 (460 months). Housing’s real appreciation: 1.35%/yr (1.67× total). Stocks: 8.51%/yr (22.8× total) — a 13.7-to-1 gap in the same real dollars, widening at +5.22%/yr (95% CI [4.99, 5.44], excludes zero). Excludes mortgage leverage, financing costs, and imputed rent — this prices two indices, not a financed purchase.
Every confirmed exoplanet with a measured period, distance, and host-star mass — 5,569 worlds. The naive fit (distance alone) undershoots the textbook exponent of 1.5 (slope 1.47, R²=0.99); restore the star’s mass to the equation and the exponent lands at 1.497. The exact 400-year-old formula, no fitted constant, predicts orbital period to R²=0.9985; 93% of planets land within 10% of its answer. The worst misses are microlensing snapshots and one uncertain transit candidate — measurement, not physics.
The desk’s own cable capture — 16 days, 320 stories. Regress MS NOW’s minutes-per-story on Fox’s and the line explains 2% of the variance (R² = 0.02): how long a story ran on one tells you almost nothing about the other. 117 of 320 stories ran on exactly one channel. The twist — the closest-tracking pair is CNN·Fox (r = +0.39), not the partisan poles, and the BBC anti-correlates with all of them. Not two Americas; five front pages. The Framing Index says the fight is over the word; this is the silence underneath it.
The slogan is a claim about attention, so we measured it. Across 862 months of Gallup approval and fourteen presidents, the misery index explains 8.3% of approval — which president it happens to be explains 38.6%. Unemployment on its own does nothing at all (slope +0.014, p=0.95); inflation carries the whole effect. And within a single presidency the economy’s grip has fallen from 27.7% before 1980 to 0.9% since 2000 — a fit that no longer excludes no effect.
A claim shouted from both studio chairs is also a published finding (Blinder & Watson, AER 2016). Extended through 2026: across 308 quarters, real growth averages 3.94% under Democrats vs 2.59% under Republicans — a +1.35 pp gap that survives resampling whole terms, dropping the COVID quarters, and a credit audit that rules out inheritance. Nine of eleven postwar recessions began under Republicans. But the why doesn’t compile: the gap traces to oil, productivity, and luck — not to the policies either party runs on.
Scouts have drafted tall pitchers for a century — the “downhill plane,” the strikeouts that follow. Across 5,099 careers, era-adjusted: pitcher height buys +0.02 points of K% per inch — nothing; the naive slope was the calendar, not the anatomy. The real height effect lives at the other end: tall batters strike out +0.67 points per inch (6′10″ vs 5′10″ = +8 points). The strike zone is drawn on the batter’s body. The rulebook wrote the slope.
Thirty states switched on online sports betting, each on its own date — a staggered natural experiment. Against the twenty that never did, consumer bankruptcy filings in legalizing states moved −5.7% (CI [−14.3, +3.0]) — a null. The +25–30% wave reported by county credit studies sits outside all 4,000 bootstrap draws; the longest-exposed states run six percent below their counterfactual. The docket may yet hear about it; through 2025, it hasn’t.
For a decade “delve” ran at 2.3 per million words in arXiv abstracts. In March 2023 — one paper-writing-cycle after ChatGPT shipped, a date all 4,000 bootstrap refits agree on — it broke vertical, peaking at 29× baseline in Dec 2023. Then the tell was noticed: it has halved every 5 months since and now runs below its pre-launch level. Every tell-word shows the same arc. The machines didn’t leave the literature; their accent did.
A 2014 PNAS paper said hurricanes with female names kill more because a soft name lowers our guard. Across 94 US hurricanes, female-named storms average 58 deaths vs 14 for male — but the medians are identical (5 and 5), the gap is three catastrophes (Katrina, Audrey, Camille), it isn’t significant on a log scale, and controlling for storm damage the name’s effect is nil (p=0.66).
Fusion’s own progress number — the Lawson triple product — multiplied ×10 every 5.9 years from 1957 to 1995 (R²=0.95), faster than Moore’s law. Then no magnetic-confinement record for 31 years: +7.5σ against the field’s own history, 5.8 orders of magnitude below the old line. The two points finally above the 1995 record are projections. “Always 30 years away” is wrong twice: it was early, and then it was parked.
The pork-barrel stereotype says the House Appropriations Committee steers federal money home. Across 430 equal-population districts, its members’ districts got 0.69× the median discretionary federal dollars of everyone else in FY2024 (p=0.52) — a hair less, not more — and the null survives a seniority control. The money follows contractors and campuses, not gavels.
LIGO has heard 83 black-hole mergers. The final black hole’s mass is 0.952× the sum of the two that made it (R²=0.9989) — the missing ~5% radiated as gravitational-wave energy, a direct measurement of E=mc². The biggest single merger turned 8.6 Suns into energy in ~0.1s, 12,000× the Sun’s entire lifetime output. Plus the empty 3–5 solar-mass gap.
The Hubble constant can be predicted from the Big Bang’s afterglow (67.7) or measured from nearby galaxies (72.5). Across 43 published values since 2013 the gap is 4.8 km/s/Mpc — the CI never contains zero — and neither camp’s number is moving (p=0.70, p=0.30) while error bars shrank threefold. Precision improved; agreement didn’t. Either a hidden error or missing physics.
The insider-trading suspicion, run as a regression: do members earn more on stocks under their own committee’s jurisdiction? Across 11,778 purchases by 88 members, own-turf buys run −21 points vs the same member’s other trades (95% CI [−38, −9]). Armed Services underperforms on defense; health committees lose worst on pharma. The estimate exists — with the wrong sign.
The median member of the 2025 Congress is 59 (the Senate, 66) — a record, rising +2.6 years per decade since 1980 (R²=0.94), with 23% now over 70 and a 92-year-old dean. But the US median age rose in lockstep, so the age gap between Congress and the public has held near 20 years for two generations. The gerontocracy is real; the growing-disconnect story is mostly the boomers aging on both sides.
The STOCK Act gives 45 days to disclose. Late-filed congressional purchases look +30% more profitable than prompt ones (p=0.0001) — but it’s a fat-tail mirage: winsorized R²=0.00, rank ρ=−0.03, within-member ρ=−0.009. The median late trade is worse, not better, and 89% file on time. The strategic-opacity story is a handful of jackpots.
COVID emptied Europe’s stadiums for 2020-21 — a natural experiment. Across 5,478 Big-5 matches, home advantage fell by half without a crowd (home goal difference +0.31→+0.15, p=0.002), and the referee’s home-favoring card bias collapsed 68% (p=0.0003). The crowd’s real job was leaning on the whistle.
We raced 11 popular explanations of national happiness against the World Happiness ladder (141 countries, 2024), then controlled for income. Income alone explains R²=0.66; after it, inequality, internet and alcohol vanish, tax goes weak, and only shorter working hours and health spending survive. Most theories of happiness are the income confound in a costume.
Across 141 countries (2024), national life-evaluation rises +0.53 rungs per doubling of income (R²=0.64) — the poorest fifth average 4.3, the richest 6.8. But it’s logarithmic: each rung costs a doubling, so at the top the money nearly stops working. A ±0.65 residual — a Latin-American belt on top, Botswana at the bottom — is the third of happiness cash can’t buy.
We graded all 249 State of the Union addresses on Aristotle’s three appeals. Overall craft is a flat null (p=0.33) — no better or worse than two centuries ago. But pathos rose (+0.66/century) as logos fell (−0.22/century), crossing around 1977. Simpler is not worse; it’s warmer.
Every State of the Union, 1790–2026, scored for reading level: it fell ~4.9 grades per century (R²=0.77) — from Madison’s grade 24.6 to today’s 7.2. Some is the shift from written documents to TV speeches; but even within the spoken era it keeps dropping. The bully pulpit kept talking down.
Across 20 midterms since 1946, approval predicts the House result (+1.1 seats/point, R²=0.30) — but the line breaks even at 72% approval, which no modern president reaches. The party lost seats in 18 of 20. Approval sets the size of the loss, not whether there is one.
107 disclosed purchases, 834,000 BTC, six years. On announcement days Bitcoin returned +0.31% vs a +0.12% average day (p=0.53), and bigger buys don’t move it more (R²=0.005). The billions land in a market too deep to notice.
Do the members with the most access — senior, on powerful committees, holding gavels — trade better? Across 85 current members: no. Seniority R²=0.001; committee power not significant; chairs, if anything, trade worse. Rank within Congress doesn’t beat the market either.
61% of congressional stock trades are in companies lobbying Congress. But control for company size and lobbying’s own effect collapses from R²=0.27 to a partial R²=0.04 — 96% a size illusion, with a small, real, stubborn residual.
1,038 companies lobbied Congress in 2025; 56% won $0 in federal contracts. A defense cluster earns thousands-to-one (Lockheed: $20M lobbying → $77B contracts), but how much you lobby explains only 12% of the haul. "Lobbying ROI" is two populations, not one number.
114,234 trades (QuiverQuant). The median congressional purchase trails the market by 44%; only 29% of members beat it; trading more doesn’t help (R²=0.006). "Congress beats the market" is a handful of stars, sold as all of Congress.
38 OECD countries. The US spends the most per person on health and ranks 31st of 38 in lifespan — 7.5 years below the line its own spending predicts; above $5k/head the correlation is R²=0.06.
MMLU vs training compute, 13 frontier models. Below GPT-4 scale, 10× compute bought +21 points. Above it, +3.3 — and the 95% CI contains zero. The payoff of compute has an elbow.
LLM API prices, regressed. "AI keeps getting cheaper" is true of the cheapest model (−87%/yr, R²=0.90) and unproven of the newest flagship (95% CI on the yearly factor contains 1.0). Same word, two lines.
Method. Every run publishes its raw data, its cleaning, and its regression output. A slope is only reported with its R², its p-value, its n, and a confidence interval; a fit that cannot exclude "no effect" is reported as such, never rounded up to a headline. Topics are proposed to a human and run on approval. No claim leaves this desk that the table below it does not support.
