tag : Programming

Notes (rough) on updating weighting targets. It’s finnicky and boring, with nothing quite adding up without some hacks. One difference this time is that I’m trying to gross to the household populations (excluding students in student residences and those in care homes). Though this produces problems of its own.

This is just a reminder to me. There are so many steps to keeping a model like this up-to-date. And no real way of automating the process, sadly.

Dunno if this is quite right, but …

I’ve built two new interfaces for the model. One is a simple budget sim and the other a specialised Basic Income model.

It’s like painting the Forth Bridge, this. I’ve got to get back to the day-job stuff that pays the bills. Here’s a rough list of what I think currently needs to be done. It’s a lot. There are lots of TODOS and FIXMES dotted through the code - I count 256 of them. Often these are notes about duplicate code, bad naming practices, or things that I’ve hard-coded which should be parameterised. Often things that need checked again.

Here are the main things, I think:

This thing isn’t going to be of much general use if people can’t interact with it.

So I’ve started getting some output out of the model. I’ll do some posts on the full aggregate results presently (pretty encouraging so far), but one odd one stands out: my version of Scotland is a disturbingly equal society compared to what everyone else thinks.

.. 3 months later.

The Covid test I mentioned last time was negative. But 4 weeks ago I had another test, just on a vague feeling, and that one was positive. So it’s been a tricky few weeks. I’ll maybe write an entire entry on this.

On the model: I’ve been fitting it in amongst paid work, so progress is slower than I’d like.

I’m writing a Scottish Tax Benefit model, and I thought I would blog my progress. I’m writing this mainly just for me, as a kind of journal; I really would be rather disturbed if anyone read much of it (but, if you do, welcome..). As much as anything I’d like some practice writing a few hundred words every day.