OSHA workplace inspections

It turns out that federal workplace safety inspectors and Mickey Mouse are locked in a cosmic dance of perfect synchronisation, moving together through the years as though one were secretly controlling the other via an invisible bureaucratic puppet string. We have no idea why. The universe, it seems, has decided that the number of times an OSHA official checks a forklift in Nebraska must correlate almost perfectly with how many people queue for seven hours to hug a person in a mouse costume in Orlando. This is either a profound truth about the hidden order of American life, or evidence that correlation is basically just pattern-seeking with better spreadsheet software.

The likely culprit, and this is where things become almost disappointingly sensible, is probably economic confidence and employment levels moving in tandem between 2015 and 2023. More people working means more workplaces for OSHA to inspect, and more people with disposable income means more families spending $159 per adult on theme park tickets. Add in the post-2020 rebound effect, where both inspections and Disney attendance surged as the economy recovered, and you've got two entirely separate human activities responding to the same underlying economic tide. Think of it as two swimmers in the same current, moving downstream together not because they're coordinating, but because the current is moving them.

We are pattern-recognition machines who will happily mistake a shared river for a secret handshake. The data is real, the correlation is real, and the mystery of why these two disparate datasets move together is real, which somehow makes the whole thing both more and less interesting than it initially appeared. Perhaps that's the real point of Spurious altogether. We're not learning that OSHA causes Disney attendance. We're learning that we'll look for meaning in almost anything, given enough numbers and enough certainty.