USAFacts_Official

USAFacts_Official OP t1_ivptrhk wrote

Reply to comment by CausticNox in Frequency of billion-dollar natural disasters in the US (2021 dollars), 1980 – 2022 [OC] by USAFacts_Official

This doesn't 100% answer your question, but since damage to homes, businesses, and government buildings goes into these estimates, then it's likely a safe assumption that places with more population will have more of these structures and higher costs. This is from the article:

>The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is responsible for calculating the costs of individual natural disasters. There are three main categories of direct or indirect costs that go into these estimates. These include physical damage to homes, businesses and government buildings, damage to property inside these buildings, and the costs associated with businesses being shut down or people losing their homes.
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>The cost estimates don’t include environmental damages, any physical or mental healthcare costs, or larger supply chain impacts. The government also doesn’t attempt to put a price tag on the lives lost during a disaster.
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>Because of the way disaster costs are calculated, the estimated totals are considered conservative evaluations. The true costs associated with natural disasters are difficult to capture due to the lack of immediate data and the hard-to-measure long-term costs.

And to answer the inflation question, the data here is adjusted for 2021 dollars.

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USAFacts_Official OP t1_iux5h1v wrote

Reply to What factors contribute to gas prices? [OC] by USAFacts_Official

Crude oil prices are just one factor influencing the price of gasoline. While the release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve primarily affects the price of crude oil, other factors such as taxes, marketing, transportation, and more also contribute to the price of a gallon of gas. Crude oil historically accounts for 40% to 70% of the cost of gasoline.

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USAFacts_Official OP t1_it32ui8 wrote

Reply to [OC] US counties required to provide non-English ballots under the Voting Rights Act, by number of languages by USAFacts_Official

Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act covers localities that meet two criteria:

  • More than 10,000 or over 5% of voting-age citizens in state, county or municipality must be “members of a single language minority group,” and have limited English proficiency. For example, Hispanics with limited English proficiency are 5.8% of California’s population. That means all elections in the state must include ballots and election information in Spanish, even if an individual county or city doesn’t meet that population threshold.
  • The language minority must have depressed literacy rates. Depressed literacy rates are based on whether the share of the language minority’s voting age citizens with a fifth-grade education is less than the national share.

These determinations are made with Census data for Hispanic/Latino, American Indian/Alaskan Native, and Asian race and ethnicity groups.

But this process excludes some communities with limited English skills. For example, immigrants from North Africa who primarily speak Arabic (and are marked white on the Census) or immigrants from Haiti who primarily speak Creole (marked African American on the Census) would not be covered under Section 203. The Census Bureau is actively researching the inclusion of “Middle Eastern or North African” as a separate racial response category, but the official Standards of Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity have not been revised since 1997.

Spanish is the most covered language under section 203. Three states and 194 other counties in the US require ballots to be provided in Spanish. The next most common languages provided throughout the US are Chinese, Vietnamese, Navajo, Choctaw, and Filipino. Twenty states and Washington, DC do not have any localities that are required to provide non-English voting materials.

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