[asolove]

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way.

It’s a census: it just asks questions.

If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

[ShinyLeftPad]

You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

[comex]

It happened a year ago in this country, with IRS sharing data with ICE (breaking a longstanding policy of keeping taxpayer data private within the government).

[kajman]

If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.

[bagels]

The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more.

The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.

[dnautics]

There is a significant movement in conservative circles that "the census should literally only be a count". this could be a wedge to prevent detailed demographic data collection by the government

[Alive-in-2025]

If you don’t count people of different races, nationalities, origin, then you can pretend there are only white people. You don’t know if there are any marginalized people gathered in say an extremely poor neighborhood, because they are all people.

I see it as a way to pretend there’s just white people.

[DaSHacka]

Why would a conservative want to pretend that? When was the last time you actually talked to one?

[nullc]

Do you think the only, or even primary, thing that determines if a person is marginalized is the color of their skin? -- even taking that you're talking about a POOR neighborhood as a prior?

[mvdtnz]

What an utterly ludicrous thing to say.

[Arodex]

Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them.

[inigyou]

MAGA is conservatism. Political factions evolve over time.

[MajorTakeaway]

It's not the entirety of conservatism, however the Tea Party evolved into MAGA and got what they wanted. Generalisations lead to fallacies, have a nice day.

[coldtea]

The problem is not that MAGA "ate them, chew them and spit them", but that the traditional neoliberal shit GOP circles "ate, chew and spit" the MAGA movement and what people voted Trump for. Instead Trump was fully assimilated to the Borg/Swamp, with a big fuck you to the MAGA promises (except the show he put on about immigration).

[Dylan16807]

Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

And I wouldn't say he served existing entrenched interests very well either. To the extent he touched the swamp it was to put in worse people only he liked.

[kube-system]

Oh he is, but the “swamp” he was talking about the entire time is impartial civil service.

What they’re doing to people at the front lines of our government is very sinister and intentional. They’re using a whole host of (legally dubious or plainly illegal) methods to remove lifelong experienced workers with expertise in their field and replacing them with political appointees.

It is the purest form of anti-intellectualism as policy. They don’t want civil service to have the correct answer - they want it to have the answer that matches the ideology they want.

[coldtea]

>Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

Doesn't matter for the point of the argument, he was elected on that promise, and others, that he eventually broke.

[xnx]

But a count of what?

[oh_my_goodness]

A count of people.

[xnx]

All people or citizen people?

[oh_my_goodness]

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S2-C3-1/...

[radiator]

Population in a city?

[boppo1]

Wouldnt that hurt the conservative cause though?

[fragmede]

Count of people - brown people removed = success

[DaSHacka]

More like `people - brown people = success` among the crowd

[dathinab]

yeah,

and implicitly force them to sell the land they own for less then it's worth, which in combination with setting up very messed up tax related laws in some states (1) which highly benefit you if you bought land longer in the past effectively "killed" a budding, wealthy, land owning Asian community and made sure it can't really regrow in that form.

(1): I think it was mainly California, but don't remember full

[wahnfrieden]

Canada also did this to its Japanese

[wahnfrieden]

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.

[dathinab]

> 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").

--

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.

[wahnfrieden]

No, I don’t mean to downplay - it was horrific and exploitative terror in both countries with terrible lasting effects. I just mentioned it because it’s less well known than what America did and because even Canadians might know what their country did to indigenous populations but not to its own citizens in this case (over 90% of Japanese in the country were sent to camps and most of them were Canadian citizens). Canadians sometimes forget the demonstrated capacity for their own country to do violence on its own people (not to downplay indigenous issues either of course, which are better understood), with a smugness about how much worse American government behaves.

[conception]

Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now.

First they came for…

[whattheheckheck]

What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?

[estearum]

Voting and getting everyone you know to vote

[JumpCrisscross]

And civically engaging. Less than a fifth of voters regularly contact their electeds.

[p-e-w]

Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.

[estearum]

Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same.

Voting for the worse people makes things worse.

[intended]

I highly recommend the research done by Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Yochai Benkler.

In a nutshell, you have an issue where part of the information economy/market is captured. To the point that agenda can get set by theories or podcasts that have little truck with reality. Any checks or reviews of the claims, simply do not get surfaced within that ecosystem. This creates a more efficient system for political messaging.

You cannot have an effective democratic system when your consensus building mechanisms have been (intentionally) compromised and weakened.

[dgellow]

Protesting one weekend day every 6 months will obviously do nothing. The pressure needs to be non stop

[SmirkingRevenge]

The trend has been going that direction, where low turnout elections favor Ds and high turnout favors Rs. But only kind of... that holds when Trump is on the ballot. Trump seems to activate a segment of low-info, low-propensity voters who stay home when their guy isn't on the ballot. Things will probably get scrambled again once Trump is gone though.

And don't discount protests. It's crucially important to have big public and forceful displays of united opposition. The regime is unlikely to be toppled by protests, but they will weaken it.

That really matters.

In an authoritarian take-over institutions are the front-lines, not the masses. Think colleges, media, industry, courts, legal firms, local governments, etc. The dilemma those institutions will face is to follow rule-of-law or submit to authoritarian corruption. Authoritarians win when those institutions decide it's safer to submit than it is to follow the law. And when institutions (and the people within them) feel like they are twisting in the wind alone and nobody cares, they are more likely to buckle. Protest movements help reinforce the rule-of-law side of that calculation.

(The rise and fall of Orban is a great lesson on all of this)

Also see: https://essayx.substack.com/p/the-35-percent-rule-just-made-...

[deaux]

> Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high.

In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. Yet instead they were rewarded for it, so you'll see Newsom get the candidacy and presidency in 2028 (if 2028 even happens at this point), and then in 2032 you'll get something like Hegseth or Thiel winning and it's all over.

There is an answer: relentlessly vote, but only for candidates who are actually slightly decent - including third-party - and otherwise stay at home. "Relentlessly" means "at every level", including locally from the very bottom, all the way up.

The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. It shows the others that there's a voter there who can be convinced if catered to, if they select a better candidate. The powers that be have done a fantastic job of brainwashing the entire population of the myth that anyone who _doesn't_ go out and vote for either major candidate is a morally bankrupt person, because it directly benefits them.

The reply to this will be "well it's too late for that now!". It's wrong because the alternative doesn't help you one bit. You're just wishing for a miracle, that in 4 years something happens, kicking the can down the road making things worse long term. And that's actually what's got you here.

It's a symptom of the terminal disease which has infected all layers of American society and has gotten it to where it's at: short-termism. Everyone just looks at the next quarter, the next election. China's ascendency is 1:1 tied to doing the exact opposite. Some smartypants will now point "but zero Covid", great you found a potential exception, now look at the other 90% of policy.

Every time I've explained this I've gotten instantly downvoted without a single reply making an argument against it, because it's too painful for people to admit that they've been part of the road to where the US is at. And again, short-termism: rather feel the short-term tiny dopamine hit by slamming that downvote button than thinking about it. Let's see if this happens again.

[rayiner]

Yes more people should vote: https://data.blueroseresearch.org/hubfs/2024%20Blue%20Rose%2... (“Projecting onto the full voter file, if every registered voter voted, it’s likely that Trump would have won by even more.”).

[estearum]

Yes, more people should vote.

Always funny when Trumpers try to this out as a gotcha lmao.

As a believer in democracy, I think it's better that our government is more responsive rather than less responsive to the public.

[YeahThisIsMe]

The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.

[patrick451]

No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.

[sosomoxie]

Definitely not, you may, at best, shift the problems to someone else. Both of "our" political parties are beyond redemption and cannot be reformed (if they were very not terrible in the first place). The only thing that will change outcomes is direct action and I'm including limitless scaling of that including the armed defense of your ideals.

[vjulian]

Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”.

Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.

[robotresearcher]

Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.

[specialist]

Not voting is much more insulting, by far.

Edit: "civic religion" aha. Sorry, I should have guessed you were trolling. Can't wait to see what kind of revolution you cook up.

[vjulian]

Civics is a kind of religion, and it is difficult for people caught up in it to approach discussion from a logical and external perspective. This kind of civics is dangerous to society.

[esikich]

Violence. But people are still pretty comfortable so here we sit.

[otikik]

Making the wealthy scared

[dmboyd]

The actual effective strategy is “tit for tat”

[jrflowers]

The other party needs to run better candidates. It’s their job to drive voter turnout in their favor (not internet argument warriors) and they’ve lost two out of the last three elections by sabotaging their own primaries and doing “Our candidate isn’t good but at least they’re not a got dang cheeto!!” campaigns.

“Less bad doesn’t have to mean good” is a mantra with a current 67% loss rate, soon to be 75%, and then 80% four years after that if they keep trying it. And they’ll keep blaming the voters that they failed every time.

[bobthepanda]

There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity.

The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party.

Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution.

[Sabinus]

Ranked choice voting and the implementation of independent impartial redistricting are very urgently needed reforms.

[bilbo0s]

I'm pretty sure they didn't think this through in a comprehensive fashion.

Because making it esy to find all the rich people just seems like a very bad idea given the direction things are going.

When it was broad, the only thing you could do was locate, say, large minority groups. Blacks and latinos for instance. And even that led to problems. I can't imagine what will happen when we can drill down and tease out immigrants from citizens. Gay from straight. Rich from well to do. And so on.

[giancarlostoro]

Do you really need the census to find people of specific demographics in 2026? Pretty sure I can go up to anyone in any state and ask where all the Puerto Ricans live and get an answer (in many cases I'm sure I'll get stared at like I'm crazy, but that's still an answer). I know because my parents moved to predominantly Hispanic parts of Florida before fully settling down where we landed, I REALLY doubt they stopped to pull up census data to decide where to find Hispanics / Puerto Ricans in Florida. You can talk to any local of any area and figure out which areas are a specific nationality without census data.

[newZWhoDis]

Does anyone actually believe this crap?

You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?

You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people?

Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right?

"The census" has absolutely no bearing on any of that which you're worried about.

It's just shocking the level of ignorance that gets upvoted in the comments here now.

[falsemyrmidon]

You think they wouldn't use every tool available to then, including the census data?

[asdff]

The census data is probably too stale in most cases to really act on in the way people expect. They used it in the 1940s because that was all they really had. But today it would be stupid to use when you already have backdoors into cell and internet service.

[awesomeMilou]

Yeah okay fair, I was about to post a knee jerk reaction, but it's well known that the US government can obtain higher quality data by just simply buying it from the public market.

[esseph]

> Does anyone actually believe this crap?

> You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)?

I think, and history shows, they would use the tools at their disposal.

Example: https://stateline.org/2026/01/20/ice-is-using-medicaid-data-...

[asdff]

That isn't the census. Census data is stale. These data are not stale. If you no longer qualify for medicaid you need to update medicaid office within 10 days for example.

[esseph]

You act like anybody is actually following that.

[asdff]

Why would you keep your medicaid if you already have employee sponsored healthcare that comes out of your would be earnings?

[kgwxd]

They haven't done a single thing without malicious intent. Go back and find whatever else you've defended in the past, and look at the results instead of the stated reason/goal for doing them. They won't match. They'll be opposites. You'll rationalize or shift blame, of course. But maybe this time, something decent will get through.

[ShinyLeftPad]

> Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google.

Not everybody uses it and not everybody who uses it uses it naively enough to give access to useful identity info.

What's shocking is how people keep finding excuses. "what about Meta" is not one

[asdff]

Forget meta. Your cell service providor also gives data to three letter agencies. Your bank does too. Your utility companies. Every thing or concept you might engage with will probably hand over data to three letter agencies. You post on HN after all, I'm sure they do it here too.

[ShinyLeftPad]

my bank and cell provider and utility company don't ask for my race

anyway let's stop whatabouting:) we are talking about census

[willmadden]

I'm not sure why your comment is grayed out.

Cell tower data, credit bureau integration, social media scraping, palantir, smart home device surveillance, DNA database exploitation, facial recognition networks, tax, payroll, passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases and many more...

The census is a historical relic used to jerrymander congressional seats, and that's about it.

[everforward]

Census data provides a reliable source to build off of, which makes joining between data sets more reliable. A lot of what you're talking about would be partial prints of an identity that have to be joined up with others to give reliable data.

Eg

> Cell tower data

That's just going to get you a subscriber and device ID, unless you're talking about going deep packet inspection and parsing the contents of the packets. You could, but that's a lot of effort to get something the census can hand you for free.

> credit bureau integration

Notoriously unreliable and identities for the purpose of credit get stolen constantly. The easiest way to clean that is against known-good info, like the census.

> social media scraping

Half the profiles are fake, also not reliable data unless you clean it up. Again, census data makes it very easy to cut out profiles that don't match a real person.

> tax, payroll

These are probably fairly reliable, although they usually won't tell you about a person's demographics.

> passport, visa, medicare/medicaid, immigrations and customs databases

There's an enormous part of the population that won't appear in these at all. The huge part of the country that's "working poor" but not poor enough for Medicaid probably aren't traveling internationally. I wouldn't be surprised if half the country doesn't appear in any of these.

The census has value in that it contains a huge depth of information, is tied with your identity, citizens are compelled by law to answer so even the privacy folks have to respond and lying on it is a crime (enforcement is probably non-existent, though).

I'm sure that can all be reconstructed to some level of accuracy given sufficient effort, but that's a lot harder and requires a ton more coordination than "SELECT * FROM census_data WHERE ..."

[bagels]

It's gray because people downvoted it.

[bagels]

You think they wouldn't use it? They're using all the things they can get their hands on. The census also has side effects on the franchise.

[FrustratedMonky]

I have to agree. I'd like Census data to be private, but the cat is out of the bag.

I'm all for keeping all of this data private. But to think it isn't already available is a bit 'head in sand'. Maybe put laws in place for 'general' privacy across all data, before getting too inflamed about Census in particular.

[smrtinsert]

Even at a quick glance this doesn't make any sense. The census is literally how they get the data. Where else would it come from? Drones? Every computer being hacked Michael Bay style?

[cj]

Data mining companies?

Don’t forget there’s an entire industry that exists solely for this purpose.

[kajman]

I don't work in this industry so I don't know their secret sauce, but I would be surprised if census data is not used as a baseline for what they're selling. It doesn't make sense to not want to use it if your next best sources are relying on everyone in the household having an app that sells their location to your network constantly. I see outdated data about me on the public versions of these sites all the time, so I know they don't have omniscience.

[esseph]

It is probably not a baseline for what they're selling.

https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/agency-h...

> Title 13 provides the following protections to individuals and businesses:

> Private information is never published. It is against the law to disclose or publish any private information that identifies an individual or business such, including names, addresses (including GPS coordinates), Social Security Numbers, and telephone numbers.

> The Census Bureau collects information to produce statistics. Personal information cannot be used against respondents by any government agency or court.

> Census Bureau employees are sworn to protect confidentiality. People sworn to uphold Title 13 are legally required to maintain the confidentiality of your data. Every person with access to your data is sworn for life to protect your information and understands that the penalties for violating this law are applicable for a lifetime. Violating the law is a serious federal crime. Anyone who violates this law will face severe penalties, including a federal prison sentence of up to five years, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.

[SmirkingRevenge]

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

[SmirkingRevenge]

* ZoomInfo

[Dylan16807]

> The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data.

Pointing at an example from so long ago to find "the" misuser is turning a blind eye to lots of active misuse.

[throwawayffffas]

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 and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.

[elictronic]

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 use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.

[throwawayffffas]

The whole thing is over noise introduced to publicized documents to disguise the specifics of people in specific addresses, and malicious actors misrepresenting that as fraud.

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.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items.

What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood.

Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?

[fragmede]

How do you show that financial institutions aren't using demographic data unless you have it and run statistical analysis that shows they aren't? Banks aren't the government and can use methods that are illegal for the government to do in order to collect data. Let's say a bank manager is racist in giving out loans, how do you prove it unless you have the data to show it?

[AnthonyMouse]

How do you know if they are even if you have statistical data? Race correlates with all too many things (e.g. education, income) that affect the default rate, so a statistical disparity is expected as a result of the things that correlate with race and affect defaults even if the loan officer isn't penalizing race at all.

Statistics are doubly useless in that context because a given loan officer might process something like 20 loans a year, which is too small a sample size for statistics to show anything with high confidence anyway.

The way people like that get caught is when they incriminate themselves. And the real way you solve that problem is by ensuring a competitive market for loans, so that the economic inefficiency of not giving loans to people who would pay them back actually negatively impacts the institutions that do it, and the borrowers can find numerous other institutions willing to do business with them, instead of the racist loan officer both being the borrower's only option and their bank not suffering consequences from it because the lack of competition allows them to stay in business by also overcharging the customers they accept.

[jmalicki]

There are plenty of other uses - knowing where to build stores to serve your target market, predicting possible pandemic vulnerabilities, etc.

[ilyagr]

This might be the point. As long as they think the people who end up under-counted are not people this government would like to have voting power for the House of Representatives.

[HumblyTossed]

This administration does ... not ... care ... about ... facts.

[sidewndr46]

The real question is why anyone answers these questions in the first place? I just wait until a census worker shows up and tell them how many people live at my domicile. It's needed for proper electoral representation and absolutely nothing else.

[tbrownaw]

Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.

[glenstein]

I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective.

Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.

[dathinab]

Yes.

Extremists or in general any fraction willing to engage in systematic discrimination, harassment, terrorizing or similar love highly detailed non anonymized census data.

Why?

Because it gives them the perfect layout for which areas to harass (areas likely to yield), which to brutalize (areas unlikely to yield or from especially "hated" people), which to best not touch which (areas with too much influence/money or likely to contain hidden sympathizers), which to systematically take apart through other means like building a highway through them (e.g. "hated" communities to strong/connected to brutalize). etc. etc.

All of this has a lot of history weather it's from right extremists like fascists or left extremists(1).

At which point the question is, if the data you collect is that abuseable. Should you even collect it? Is it even really needed?

(1): Like actual left extremists, the a lot of US sources have the habit to label people as left extremists which by EU standards sometimes aren't even left (but centrist) and very far away from extremism...

[themafia]

It's a census: it's only function is to determine the number of representatives your state should have.

Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion.

Thanks.

[cyanydeez]

have you not been paying attention for 10 years? At the top of the rotting snakehead they know all this, they arn't arguing in good faith.

[michelb]

Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.

[vkou]

> they’ll just lie or not answer

The Harper government actively worked on destroying the efficacy of the Canadian census, to make it more difficult for subsequent governments to make data-driven decisions.

In addition to the obvious goal of making it easier to identify and target homosexuals, trans people, minorities, immigrants, it's quite possible that destroying future governments' ability to make good decisions is one of the objectives of the Republican party. Stop voting for the face-eating leopard party, already. They don't use the litterbox, shit everywhere, and actively try to eat your face.

For all the very clever people pointing out that this is nothing new, I have two responses.

1. Your cell company may track your location, and your credit rating agencies know how many nose hairs you have, but they doesn't always (or even usually) have the deeply personal information you're supposed to put down in a census.

2. Enough of a change in degree is a change in kind. If you disagree, remember that Imperial Russia had the Okhrana and sent over a million Sybiraks - prisoners and exiles - to Siberia, and then the fucking CHEKA and the NKVD and then the (kinder, softer, slightly less outright murderous) KGB went ahead to send 18 million people into the GULAG system, and outright murdered half a million to a million. This was all the same, right? No difference?

[mc32]

You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.

[cwmoore]

The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000

[tokai]

>It’s a census: it just asks questions.

Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.

[appreciatorBus]

Then maybe the data shouldn’t be collected in the first place?

[webnrrd2k]

There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.

[derektank]

The entity most capable of weaponizing demographic data is the government itself. If people weren’t previously providing false information to the census, I’m skeptical that this change is what will push people over the edge.

[notfromhere]

Congress passed laws that blocked the federal government from fusing data across departments for this specific reason. the admin decided to ignore those, and a friendly congress is deciding to not act on that.

You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.

[r14c]

Isn't the issue here the lack of accountability? Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt. Ours certainly is and we have a very weak constitution which makes it worse, but that's the US. I think better constitutions are possible, but we have to stop treating it like a sacred document and be practical.

[Supermancho]

> I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt

There's a question of what you mean. Is it, can they be corrupt? have they been corrupt? are they currently corrupt (because of the previous, or incidentally)?

Plato thought Democracy was corrupt and it's the least inherently corrupt system I know of. I would say they are fundamentally corrupt. The best you can do is try to limit it with a document (like the US Constitution) and setting up a multi-branch power structure capable of adversarial action. As you point out, the US does not have that and it's showing.