Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
theglobeandmail.com
Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#2Why would a lottery be used at all for picking “winners” for immigration? On multiple levels that seems unfair and wrong.
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#3Why would a lottery be used at all for picking “winners” for immigration? On multiple levels that seems unfair and wrong.
Why is that wrong? How do you propose to select to pick who gets in and who doesn’t?
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#4Why would a lottery be used at all for picking “winners” for immigration? On multiple levels that seems unfair and wrong.
"The Liberals introduced a lottery in 2017 in an effort to make the system fairer – previously, applications were accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. The program receives roughly 100,000 applications each year and selects 10,000"
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#5Why would a lottery be used at all for picking “winners” for immigration? On multiple levels that seems unfair and wrong.
Its still better than using the place of birth as a determining factor.
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#6Why would a lottery be used at all for picking “winners” for immigration? On multiple levels that seems unfair and wrong.
I would imagine it's because there are a limited number of people that Canadians will allow to immigrate into their county?
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#7Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#8Man, people are picky today. This isn't a public webapp, this is a spreadsheet that is controlled by a trusted party. Yeah, it isn't the state-of-the-art RNG, but given that it is only picking 10000 numbers, I would say it doesn't need to be all that good.
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#9All the other points about the unfairness makes sense, but the complaint about the poor random number generator does not make sense.
This isn't a multistep process that the "adversary" has access to. It doesn't matter how bad the random number generator is or even if it is predictable. Sure you could bribe the person putting it into excel I suppose, but you could do that anyway and just have them switch numbers around.
This is a silly complaint. Yes it is a bad random number generator, but predicability of the sequence isn't an attack surface in this use case.
Re: Canada using Excel function for immigration lottery
#10Why would a lottery be used at all for picking “winners” for immigration? On multiple levels that seems unfair and wrong.
Unfair to whom? That is going to be relative.