431–440 of 662 posts
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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.
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How hard have you thought about this? The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions. A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home. If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe fo…
This seems’s like an issue created by congress. the constitution only requires a headcount by state. Maybe they should use another mechanism to collect demographic data. Since the concern is not about representation, but allocation, tax returns seem like an obvious alternative and they are already private and collected at a much more granular level.
Plenty of people don’t file tax returns (legally even, there’s a minimum income threshold).
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What, religious data? Are you serious? That's one of the most critical things they can track about their citizens. Let's say your town has a lot of pig farmers. The pig farmers are afraid their business is diminishing. So they lobby the local government to put a tax on chicken and beef, to encourage more pork consumption. Which local officials might be inclined to do for economic reasons. But then you collect religio…
Laws aren’t made that way and laws made that way usually aren’t good. Like a farmer writing rules for people in the city or vice versa purely based on what they think the other side wants. It’s much better if the farmers directly tell you what they want and the city folk tell you what they want and together they figure it out. Census details is great for understanding long term trends. It’s not to be used directly fo…
That's basically exactly how they get made. You don't know anything about the agriculture checkoff in the US, do you?
Every single pound of pork sold or produced in the US sent a tiny amount of it's sale price to the "Pork. The Other White Meat" campaign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork._The_Other_White_Meat
> laws made that way usually aren’t good.
I don't think anyone said they were good laws.
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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…
You’re describing an attack that entails both hacking the SSN database, 1 to 50 of the state voter databases, then physically following mailmen around and stealing ballots…
Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise. I don't know what the political undertones are here, but at some level you need to have actual ground truth, including "this person/household declined". Publishing raw data though? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot from a national security perspective, not to mention all the other reasons not to do it.
Not sure exactly what you're proposing, but if the noise is added independently to different people, you can just buy multiple copies to reduce it.
There are a lot of ways to do this wrong, which is why so much analysis has gone into differential privacy.
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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
In the US there are already people who complain that any election they lose must been “rigged”, including the current occupant of the White House. Choosing Approval Voting over RCV is not going to bring such people around; it’s rhetorical advantages are inconsequential.
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Canada also did this to its Japanese
Interesting to see this downvoted. The mechanism was different - not a tax scheme, but rather the Canadian government directly liquidated their property and put them into camps.
While the mechanism was different that was what _effectively_ happened to US Japanese people, too. The taxes part is more like a separate mechanism of discrimination against anyone "new" which "happened" to overlap with this (and tbh. I have no idea to which degree this overlap was intentional or just "tolerated").
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But if I have to guess why someone down voted the comment (not me) ti might be because it feels a bit like trying to downplaying how bad and against the values the US claimed it stood for, this was. And doing so by pointing at some random other country and saying "they also did bad things so we aren't that bad" which is a really bad argument.
Just because others also have done bad things doesn't mean anything is less bad, or more reasonable or more excusable.
I mean a lot of countries did some pretty bad things in the past, especially the past 200 years.
When I post about stuff like that it's isn't about saying "hey they are bad". It's more because I think people from countries should be aware about all the bad stuff their country did/was done in their country. So that they can learn from this.
But sadly most countries try to bury most mistake, atrocities, large scale crimes etc. in history or at least exclude them from anything thought proactively, e.g. in school. And the only way to know about them is to go looking for them by yourself in your free time. Which doesn't work well even if you care as it's hard to learn what you don't know you don't know.
Like as a random example the tulsa race massacre should be required teaching in middle school with focus on the dynamics which lead to a mob of people including people in governing positions to thinking it is okay to try to lynch a whole district (more or less, simplified).
Or e.g. in Canada there is the genocide of indigenous people (which by now might be through about in school, not sure).
Or in Germany the genocide against Jews (which is thought a lot in middle school as required teaching material).
Or the crimes Japan committed against China in WW2 and before (which they still bury very deeply AFIK).
Or a pretty long list of atrocities in China science 1900.
The important part here isn't teaching "that" it happened, but "why/how" it happened, so that if stuff goes in the same bad direction again people realize it and (hopefully) stop it.
If we don't learn from the past I really don't know how humans as a species expect to not accidentally collectively press Alt+F4, given the increasingly higher stacks/larger powers involved.
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…
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> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me. The data collected was such an important baseline of common understanding, and this will not be a good thing for its future quality. Even without considering the Census data products alone, Census demographic data underlies virtually all extrapolation from other survey research. Everything from nation…
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