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Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

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Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#331

Post by Dylan16807 »

coldtea wrote: post #314
Arodex wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them.

The problem is not that MAGA "ate them, chew them and spit them", but that the traditional neoliberal shit GOP circles "ate, chew and spit" the MAGA movement and what people voted Trump for. Instead Trump was fully assimilated to the Borg/Swamp, with a big fuck you to the MAGA promises (except the show he put on about immigration).

Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

And I wouldn't say he served existing entrenched interests very well either. To the extent he touched the swamp it was to put in worse people only he liked.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#332

Post by ck2 »

layer8 wrote: post #132
ck2 wrote: post #101

if you want to keep your sanity, I suggest silently adding the phrase "...for the next 950 days" every time you read some politically spiteful news like this because the next two years are going to become insanely miserable

It’s highly uncertain what will happen in 950 days.

I think it's easy to predict some things that will happen in 950 days

in 950 days there will be several hundred warehouses concentrating over a million people in this country including many thousands of children costing a quarter trillion dollars (already funded)

and the Iran War will still be happening despite over a hundred declared "deals"

and the US will be running Cuba (forcing millions to return there)

statistical noise or the lack of it will be the least of our problems

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#333

Post by energy123 »

monitorlizard wrote: post #173
gambiting wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, which is why the government shouldn't have this data at all in the first place.

Say you get your way, and, for fear of Mark Carney rolling the tanks in and taking over North America, the US stops collecting any data on its citizens. How is the IRS supposed to know how much tax to expect from you? How is SNAP supposed to determine your eligibility? How is unemployment supposed to know if you're ripping them off or not? Data privacy is a real concern, but you need PII to run government services ef…

> for fear of Mark Carney rolling the tanks in and taking over North America

You're saying it's farfetched, yet census data was already used as a tool to assist an extermination campaign:

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/rearvision/the-dark-s...

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#334

Post by pjc50 »

bee_rider wrote: post #137
arjie wrote: post #74

Pretty sad, in my opinion. In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure. I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted…

I’d be more interested in giving my state detailed info, letting them run programs. The country can have aggregate data.

The history of the VRA suggests that several states simply cannot be trusted to do that for all their residents.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#335

Post by fragmede »

estearum wrote: post #285
prepend wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud? Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that? It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected.

Can you describe specifically how someone finds enough complaint-free absentee ballots and sick friends to vote at any meaningful scale? Doing this even 10 times seems unbelievably hard.

It seems less hard if you datamine the shit out of everything, exfiltrate the social security database, and feed it into a computer. Get the historical voting records. SELECT address FROM voters that haven't voted in 10 years. Send someone to follow the mailman and steal ballots from that address. Or simply don't mail them out in the first place. They're not likely to notice to complain in the first place.

Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#336

Post by Dylan16807 »

nerdsniper wrote: post #249
rectang wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates. RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate. It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help. ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is ha…

Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”. https://www.rangevoting.org/CompChart.html#votsysts

We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority.

And that's electoral votes. Counting actual people has the most voted candidate lose all the time.

Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence the choice between candidates I like less. If I do check my third choice I risk helping them beat my top two. If I don't check my third choice then I risk them losing to even worse options.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#337

Post by TehCorwiz »

pjc50 wrote: post #334
bee_rider wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d be more interested in giving my state detailed info, letting them run programs. The country can have aggregate data.

The history of the VRA suggests that several states simply cannot be trusted to do that for all their residents.

This federal administration also cannot be trusted. Perhaps the solution is that both the states and the feds run separate censuses so that any broad stroke manipulation or blind spots can be noticed and reconciled.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#338

Post by fragmede »

testing22321 wrote: post #321
kajman wrote: post #124

I "enumerated" for the last census. Trust in my community was already not high* and I had lots of interesting encounters. I really believed the rather invasive data I was collecting with a friendly face would be used and handled responsibly. I feel for the poor souls that'll sign up to go door to door for 2030 now that the firewalls against weaponizing and monetizing all of our sensitive government data has been torn…

> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me Countries conduct censuses so they can understand, in great detail, what is going on with the people who make up the country. With this accurate information, improvement plans can be made, and life can be improved for everyone. The comments about just making it a head count give a very interesting wind…

Or worse, they actively don't want to make life better for the "wrong" kind of people.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#339

Post by AnthonyMouse »

SadErn wrote: post #286
JoshTriplett wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy . A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is…

> you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California. The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully desig…

The fun part about this is that it depends on facts that nobody actually knows.

If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative.

The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.

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