Live data from Hacker News

Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

desfontain.es

501–510 of 662 posts

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

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

The worse things get, the better they do. It's an insidious, vicious cycle.

No, this isn't a natural law of the universe. Sometimes thing get worse and then stay bad for a long, long time. We happen to exist in a relatively stable, prosperous period. We have used that prosperity to build a system that is more complex and brittle than any time in the history of the species. It won't be pretty when we reach the inevitable crisis.

The people in charge have never seen suffering and don't understand the essential role they have in preventing it. Instead they're disassembling the plane for parts while we hurtle toward the ground.

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands they found it extremely convenient that the Netherlands had a nice centralised paper filing system telling them exactly where all the Jews lived. The Holocaust proceeded more efficiently in the Netherlands than it had in Germany.

Maybe an example that isn’t almost 100 years old ?

[flagged]

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

#503
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 real decline started after Edward Snowden and all the information that came out about the NSA. It really sparked distrust in the government. Trying to get people to respond to surveys was already hard, why would those general people believe the Census Bureau is actually keeping their data safe? Doesn’t matter when it comes to laws and the constitution, if you work for an Agency. You are the government. Response r…

I buy the argument that a functioning democracy requires the populace to believe that the government is honest, competent, and working in their interests. Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Vietnam war (respectively) undermined those notions. As of ~2016, half of the US voting population had come of age after those events.

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

#504
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you alive in 2024? Trump won by 10%. It's absolutely not that people like Trump, it's just that democrats are inept. Literally all democrats had to do was run somebody that didn't have a record of losing primaries.

They're not legislatively inept, it's simply that viscerally, the electorate knows both mobs are guilty of the same representational transgressions. The GOP was always the party of big biz, while the dems were fronting as the hoi poloi's party, and everyone kinda figured that out as Trump played that irony and the anger behind it, masterfully. How do you get out from behind that, is what renders them inept.

I think the big difference between the Republicans and Democrats is that the R-electorate votes for R-candidates because they want what the R-candidates are promising, while the D-electorare votes for D-candidates because they don't want what the R-candidates candidates are promising.

It's one of the reasons why "both sides" arguments are so frustrating. You can find R-voters who will defend Trump all day, in equal numbers to D-voters who will criticize Biden/Harris. You can see it in the number of R-voters you encounter online who think it's a "pwn" to bring up Clinton going to Epstein's Island, while D-voters respond, "yeah, and? Lock him up, too." We don't want these people who lie to us and glad hand for corporations, but it's marginally better than the alternative.

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

#505
post #455
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of the Republican party for half a century now has been: "The government can't do anything right, and if you elect us we'll prove it!"

And it's something of a coin flip whether people prefer that philosophy to the other mob. Trump has made it to a seconds term and is talking about a third because of the stunning policy failures of the US government over the last 50 years.

Trump came to power because too many people have forgotten what kind of man it takes to tear it all down. No more, no less. It's like a clock.

One generation bleeds and dies on a battlefield somewhere so that eventually a few generations later their ancestors can make the same conditions arise again.

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

#506
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you alive in 2024? Trump won by 10%. It's absolutely not that people like Trump, it's just that democrats are inept. Literally all democrats had to do was run somebody that didn't have a record of losing primaries.

They're not legislatively inept, it's simply that viscerally, the electorate knows both mobs are guilty of the same representational transgressions. The GOP was always the party of big biz, while the dems were fronting as the hoi poloi's party, and everyone kinda figured that out as Trump played that irony and the anger behind it, masterfully. How do you get out from behind that, is what renders them inept.

The mob has been convinced of these things. If nothing else, Trump is a master of convincing gullible, desperate people that when he lights the town on fire, only the people they don't like will get burned.

The Democrats did fail, but it's not a both sides situation. They failed to vigorously engage in a simple and honest way with the fact that their opponent is a conman and a crook.

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

#507
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. 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…

[dead]

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

#508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

[flagged]

You should never trust a politician, especially one that claims to be on/in the left.

These two statements are equally as vacuous.

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

#509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are 45 million Spanish speakers in the United States - in 1950 there were effectively zero. This is either a bald faced lie or demonstrates an extreme ignorance of history. There have been tons of Spanish speakers in the United States for a loooong time. Before Texas joined the United States, Spanish was an official language, as in 1837 a law was passed to ensure all laws were translated into Castilian. > Be…

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#510
post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone says the holocaust happened, do you demand evidence of the claim? Because that’s exactly what you’ve done here

Can you give an example of an extermination program which was thwarted by a lack of accurate census data? "The Nazis used a data source to implement an extermination program" is not a statement which proves that your problem was the existence of a data source.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN