2 comments

  • usernomdeguerre 26 minutes ago
    >"We need to check more carefully who is credited and who is accountable for statistical agency releases. We need to watch carefully, when the 2025 American Community Survey eventually comes out, whether the ban on noise infusion leads to less data being published and which tables are suppressed. We also need to question seemingly technical methodological changes and scrutinize them for political motivation more closely."

    I didn't realize they were delaying the 2025 ACS again and it seems things are just going to get worse if things don't fit the narrative of the administration.

  • rayiner 1 hour ago
    Errors by the Census Bureau in the 2020 census resulted in significant over counts in blue states: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/coverage-...; https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3504546-census-blunder-... (“However, it is difficult to understand how the Census Bureau missed more than 5 percent of the populations of Arkansas, Delaware and Hawaii.”).

    How can you fuck up so monumentally, but then when Trump fires you somehow he’s the problem?

    • samstokes 38 minutes ago
      Is that "difficult" quote from a separate source? I can't find it in the text of the linked report.

      Also, the report says that both red and blue states had both overcounts and undercounts, which is a different picture than "over counts in blue states". It is accurate that more blue states had overcounts and more red states had undercounts.

      I realise your question is rhetorical, but the report does offer a possible answer: "The 2020 Census faced many challenges such as conducting fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other challenges to the 2020 Census included con- troversy around a proposed citizenship question and changes in the duration of the Nonresponse Followup operation." It's plausible that those "challenges" could have been experienced unevenly by state, particularly with how politicised the pandemic and its mitigations were in the US.

    • estearum 7 minutes ago
      > We estimated undercounts of people living in census tracts that had the lowest self-response rates. Specifically, we estimated a statistically significant net undercount among people living in the 20 percent of tracts with the lowest self-response rates.

      News hot off the press: people bred from day one to be militantly antagonistic of the federal government end up undercounted when federal government comes to do counting.

      Reminds me of the domestic terrorists who were threatening FEMA workers during Helene and then acting surprised when FEMA workers weren't scrambling to walk up to Trump-flagged homes.

    • Frost1x 50 minutes ago
      > How can you fuck up so monumentally, but then when Trump fires you somehow he’s the problem?

      They can both be a problem, it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. I’m sure in all the turnover Trump removed some incompetent people. He also probably removed quite a few competent people. The ratio is what matters.

      • rayiner 45 minutes ago
        This isn’t a minor fuckup. It skewed House apportionment for a decade. Think of what would happen in the private sector: your team screws up something that blows up a major customer relationship. Do you think the firings are going to be surgical?
        • grim_io 22 minutes ago
          Yes? This is neither Cesar's legion, nor The Apprentice.

          Although, the guy at the top sure runs his place like a TV show, where all the stuntmen really do die for real.

        • aetch 11 minutes ago
          Yes, the government shouldn’t be run on emotions or like a for profit company
        • ElProlactin 15 minutes ago
          > Think of what would happen in the private sector: your team screws up something that blows up a major customer relationship. Do you think the firings are going to be surgical?

          Except that you can look at all of the firings the current administration has been behind and the pattern does not suggest that they are intended to remove people who were incompetent.

          To the contrary, the large number of reductions (and forced retirements) suggests that the administration is trying to remove political opponents and people who are "disloyal" to it, and to generally weaken institutions that the administration doesn't like or feels threatened by.

          This is especially visible in the military:

          https://www.cbsnews.com/news/military-leaders-fired-forced-o...

    • tmpz22 40 minutes ago
      The quote isn't corroborated by the report.

      Ohio and Utah were overcounted, Illinois was undercounted, and the remaining 37 states plus DC had no statistically significant error either way. Some of the significant results are also marginal: Delaware's estimate of 5.45% has a standard error of 2.82, so the 90% confidence interval barely clears zero.

    • lemmetellya 50 minutes ago
      [dead]
    • lisper 44 minutes ago
      > Errors by the Census Bureau in the 2020 census resulted in significant over counts in blue states

      And the 2020 election was stolen too.