621–630 of 662 posts
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What would you do about the birth rate? How will you support the boomers retirement?
Do what Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China are doing: just let it fall, it will eventually bounce back. Boomers will be fine. Replacing your entire culture and people doesn’t really fix the problem, it just permanently changes your country to be more like Africa, Mexico, India, etc.
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Reading is fundamental. I made no such claim. I said many were using it to target people (which they are), and some are even using it to murder people using that data. Which they are. Or do you think that is actually not happening right now?
>Many countries use census data to target (or even round up and murder) specific groups of people by religion, ethnicity, etc. You were asked to back up this claim but haven't cited an example of any country currently "using census data" to "round up and murder" people. Is China currently using census data to do horrible things? Are other countries? Maybe. I have no idea. I wouldn't be all that surprised TBH. You may…
What’s the point?
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The bizarre part is that someone like you seems to think making a nice convenient list isn’t helping them in a material way.
I can't think of any such event where the issue came down to having a list or not. We can see a similar thing happening with ICE raids: do they have clean and tidy lists? No, they're supposed to know what they're doing, but in practice they're just going after anything they want, anyone that crosses their path, and they don't stop at any specific criteria. We had testimony of arrest quotas, and random people shoved i…
The reason ICE is flailing around is because the information we are talking about doesn’t exist. They’re changing data gathering to collect it.
That is literally the point.
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I can't think of any such event where the issue came down to having a list or not. We can see a similar thing happening with ICE raids: do they have clean and tidy lists? No, they're supposed to know what they're doing, but in practice they're just going after anything they want, anyone that crosses their path, and they don't stop at any specific criteria. We had testimony of arrest quotas, and random people shoved i…
Do you really think handing the loaded gun to the chimpanzee is ethically ok, and the same as if you didn’t? The reason ICE is flailing around is because the information we are talking about doesn’t exist. They’re changing data gathering to collect it. That is literally the point.
I'd argue that raiding the data center is theatrical more than anything, and they're not flailing by lack of data, hundreds of arrest have been made at each major raids.
I'd look at this piece with both aspects: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/23/maine-immigr...
On the surface there is this talk about immigration status..We try to draw a somewhat reasonable narrative that makes sense, and I get the sentiment.
The witness comments consistently tell another story though:
> “The book and the movie do not line up,” Joyce told reporters on Thursday. “We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring.”
> “It is clear the overall operation is anything but targeted,” said Sue Roche, ILAP’s executive director. “People are being racially profiled on the streets and in their cars. As is their playbook, ICE is doing everything they can to inflict maximum cruelty and chaos.”
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…
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You do know the former head of the DNC was forced to retire after the leaked emails outed her, and basically all of the top of the DNC, extensively conspiring against Sanders in favor of Clinton? [1] You're right the cabal isn't secret - it's literally the DNC, and who they want to win is who will win, one way or the other. Just reading over that source - it's insane how blatant these people can be: "In May 2016, MSN…
I mean, why wouldn't they? Bernie is not a Democrat, he's independent. Winning elections for their own party is the whole reason DNC exists.
So for instance Sanders would almost certainly have beaten Trump in 2016 - the polls showed him ahead by double digit margins, whereas they had Clinton in for a very close election. Had the DNC listened to their own voters, the country would likely look very different today, and in a way far more favorable to DNC interests, at least if they even believe in their own platform.
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‘Gov’t consistently threatens to do x which is bad, does x which is bad. collecting data which makes it easier to do x is… good?’ Do you even listen to yourself? How would collecting that data in this environment actually improve the country, instead of clearly being used to do bad things - which will make the situation worse? Notably, this is the gun registry problem, and exactly why gun registries are also bad.
Sigh. There is only one OECD country where this conversation has any merit. Your gun registry example is great proof.
Everything I said can just as easily be said about Brazil.
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So you seem to have at least a surface level of understanding of incentives. Check this then: If the census is responsible for allocating federal funds and congressional apportionment, what are the incentives for making census data private and encouraging people that would otherwise hide their identity?
And you seem to not realize that a census has a much wider impact than allocation of federal funds. It’s a nationwide survey done once every 10 years. No other survey compares in scale. Now think about the data you could collect and the decisions you could make based on this data to ensure a better future for all in this country; in fact, this is a stated goal of the survey that you either didn’t know about or are wi…
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>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.
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> If this scenario isn't super weirdly convoluted, more of those votes shift to B than X, so X is eliminated next. It doesn't have to be that convoluted, all it takes is for the eliminated candidate to be a moderate so their votes go in two different directions. But you're right that I messed up that example; the percentages are wrong. The problem case is when your second most favored candidate would otherwise be eli…
> A B X Y It's very unlikely that the two candidates I hate are on opposite extremes and both popular. > Score voting is a Condorcet method. That gains it a point but there are much better methods. Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike. Then the guarantee of the pairwise winner coming out on top is actually using accurate information on what everyone wants.…
It's easy to hate the candidate on the opposite extreme from the way you lean, so all this really requires is for the extremist on your side to be a corrupt populist who gets support by telling people the lies they want to hear or is paying off the right people to get favorable media coverage or valuable endorsements. Or is just more extreme than you can accept but you're in a district with some people who want that.
Notice also that neither of these candidates are the first choice of the majority. They just have enough support in a >2 candidate race to not be the first knocked out.
> Ones where I don't feel the need to balance risk versus reward for candidates I moderately dislike.
This is Arrow's Impossibility Theorem again. All of them do that, because in the rock-paper-scissors triangle where no candidate can beat both of the others, you then need something equivalent to a score to choose the winner. At which point degrading your second choice hurts them against both your first and third choice and whether or not you should do that is influenced by how likely you regard it that other voters will favor your first choice over your third but not your second.
It's also a dangerous game because the error bars on polls are huge and it's more often than not that the final results are very different than anybody's wild guess from the day before they started counting the votes.
> If I'm moderately confident then I'm likely to do it despite the risk.
Suppose your true ratings would be 10 for your most preferred candidate, 7 for the second best and 1 for the inhuman monster the opposing tribe somehow supports for no explicable reason. Polls say your first choice is expected to score ~5, your second choice ~6 and your vile enemy ~4, but all of these are plus or minus 2 points or more because polls are practically random number generators. What are you going to do?
You have the option to try to tank your second choice to give your first choice a better chance, but it's still a very real possibility that your first choice ends up at 4 and the hated enemy at 5.
> The whole framing of the problem was that one of the candidates in the minority party wins. If there are four unrelated candidates that problem goes away. The more popular moderate won, not a big deal.
It's still the same, and the minority party candidate isn't necessarily that much of a moderate, they're just not a far extremist.
Suppose it's California and a Republican, a Democrat and a member of the Green Party are in the race. The district is 40% Republican and under the old system correspondingly 60% Democrat, but in a system with more than two viable parties, it's 40% Republican, 29.9% Democrat and 30.1% Green.
If you hold that election with RCV and the Democrat gets knocked out first, the moderate Democrats (which, with the Green candidate in the race, was all of them) have to choose between a California Republican and a Green Party candidate who proudly wants to raise the gas tax to $8/gallon and pull out of NATO. More than a third of the moderate Democrats choose the Republican over that and under RCV that becomes a Republican seat.
The same race with score voting only does that if people vote the way you seem to think they would, which is exactly their incentive not to.