361–370 of 662 posts
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Data mining companies? Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.
You’d be surprised how bad/incomplete the data usually is and how much work it takes to make those datasets really useful or reliable. That’s one reason Xoom Info was able to sell for a billion dollars and even their data has a lot of junk Having well curated detailed census data would be a major boon for the data brokers
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It actually does. Religious affinity can absolutely be useful for longer trend studies, and census data is usually of much, much higher quality than other random sample studies.
With that perspective, how do you prevent scope creep when preparing a census exercise? You would collect everything and the shape of each house's kitchen sink, because "it can be useful".
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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…
> 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 people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment. > Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence t…
I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.
> Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite.
That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".
> Both of them are still better than RCV.
I don't see how.
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I don't know who the > The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.
Your model doesn’t eliminate politics, it just entrenches the particular politics of the kind of people who go to T10 schools then get jobs as division heads at federal agencies.[1] There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood tha…
Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden. They file paperwork and schedule appointments for the diplomat. Their role is operational. Logistics stuff. Coordinating what goes where. Setup a meeting between three very important busy people and juggle their calendars. Does that position really need to be someone we vote for? They do operations, not make policy.
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One example is HIAS who runs a fully staffed Darién Gap facility. As soon as there is a friendly administration to mass migration - they just flip a switch and we will have 10 millions of migrants. I don't want to come across as MAGA, because I am a non voter - the Republicans fuel the fire with forever wars. Its really two sides of the same coin. Companies benefit, because when there is no social cohesion workers ar…
"Tens of millions"? Really? Even if we take 20 million, that's 75% of the total population of Venezuela or half of the population of Colombia. There simply are not enough people in South America for these kinds of numbers.
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…
This does nothing to make government less powerful. It just makes government stupider so even if they decide they want to do the right thing, now they can’t because they don’t have the information needed to make effective decisions.
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Chuck Schumer: >“We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants – the Dreamers and all of them, because our ultimate goal is to help the Dreamers but [also] to get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,” Chuck Schumer, who is ma…
That 11M represents decades of migration. It's not getting tripled with the flip of a switch.
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…
That ideal became tantamount to enabling genocide when the US government breached the confidentiality of the census in order to prison camp the japanese on the basis of their race.
> I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity
It's not even just a question of "all". The state should have the absolute minimum capacity to carry out its necessary tasks. Collecting race (just to give one example of many) of any form is not absolutely necessary and so it should not be done.
> they feel that governments are populated by their opponents who will use state capacity against them
Because they may be in the future. -- but even that is too strong, the greatest harm perpetrated by state actors has consistently come from trying to "help" rather than intentionally malicious acts.
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…
I did similar and you summarized the feelings well. It's really sad and hard to rebuild that trust And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.
The same party that promotes distrust in the government (that is justified by the abuse the same party does when in power).
Amazing, innit.
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The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level. Knowing the racial, ethnic a…
Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way. The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than us…
For example census data was and probably is available on the block level but in order to avoid exposing the data of people living in these blocks that might be a few families, the publicized data aggregated and smoothed the data over blocks so you had cases where a block with a few single family residences reported over 100 people living in them. Obviously certain actors shouted voter fraud over the top of their lungs.
So now the law says no fudging of publicized data to preserver privacy, the government always had the actual accurate data.
The obvious solution to this problem is to just hide the sensitive data instead of fudging them.
In the above example the block would now report 10 people living there, but not their racial, religious, ethnic, or socioeconomic conditions.