It's 2,347. There's also 927. And 538, and who can forget 386. 936 is also a classic. 1205 is a favorite, although AI changes the scales these days. As does 303. 1838 is another good one for when CC is "thinking". 1425.
I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.
I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.
Unfortunately, this extends to research studies. My mother enrolled me in the Growing Up Today Study (https://gutsweb.org/). I eventually stopped responding to that, as I couldn't see how any child (or even adult) could answer their questions on estimated food consumption remotely accurately, making the whole thing seeming dubiously ethical.
It's cited constantly in the research on ultra-processed food you see these days.
Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address. The last census was in 2001 and then there was also done a big job registering every residences in multi residence houses. The assumption is that we will never have to do a form based census ever again and just use central registries instead.
That may or may not work depending on where you're at.
If for example you have poor compliance with the law then the law is mostly useless (in the US you do have to update your ID in 30 days, but huge numbers of people dont).
And that doesn't count if your country has a huge undocumented population, like some places in the US do.
Most countries don't extend citizenship to illegals. No driver license, no housing, no benefits. They are irrelevant to the statistics- it would be like counting squirrels.
Undocumented residents are pretty different from squirrels. They participate in the economy pretty similarly to documented residents. Consumption, transportation, jobs, housing, etc, and all the related taxation and resource utilization.
> Over here we just have every person registered in a central database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the registry updated with your current address.
Where is this magical land with no homeless people?
In our country, in case you are homeless the address you are registered to is the town hall of the town you are homeless in. It's a bit ironic, but the bureaucracy needs an address and the thinking is that local social services and the town administration likely know where to find you (but of course nobody can keep you in the town).
Poste restante is an option. Or some friend. Or not just updating it. Still that doesn't significantly affect total population count. And with right policies and social housing you can get it to pretty low point. Where the true nomads will pick for example the poste restante.
I'm not sure how they handle people living precariously without stable housing. There's a few, but not that many and most of them have some sort of connection to social housing and might be registered there or they are registered through the social welfare office.
> we just have every person registered in a central database from birth
"Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence!
A human female can have sex once and pop out a new human 9 months later regardless of her connection to any official social systems or state apparatus. She could disappear into the woods as a hermit and produce a completely uncounted unknown new person.
To the degree that that doesn't happen, it's because a country has spent generations building a giant high trust society with good widely available medical infrastructure and a culture where almost everyone believes it is better to use that than to go it alone. Building that system requires the powerless to organize themselves and counterbalance the powerful elite who otherwise have a tendency towards despotism and corruption. That in turn requires a lot of shared culture so that the powerless feel they are all one tribe and not fractured out-groups (a reality the elites are constantly incentivized to manufacture). You need good education, mobility, safety.
An easy census is the very pinnacle of a successful society and only in a few places in the recent past has any country reached it.
frankly I don't think in any even half modern country you can go at it alone. I struggle to imagine how someone would physically manage to evade public authorities here in Germany where schooling is mandatory and any kid not in the education system would sooner or later be caught. There's barely even a place so remote authorities or other citizens would notice you and report you. You couldn't go to the doctor or anywhere really without identification or insurance.
So I think it's less of a function of trust and more simply of modernity, you're not going to escape attention for too long unless you're a trained spy or something
A recent case in the Netherlands involved six children being off the radar of the government their entire childhoods. Not sure if homeschooling is legal in the Netherlands or not but in this case, it wasn't relevant.
"Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of people register their adress with the government at the house of an unsuspecting widow?
And how long does it take for that central registry to be informed when somebody has emigrated from the country without informing the government? Five years? Ten?
> "Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of people register their adress with the government at the house of an unsuspecting widow?
In e.g. Germany that requires a signed statement from the landlord, and the ability to receive mail at that address. If you can't receive mail at your own address, it'd be noticed and reported within at most 5 years. I actually believe it'd be the national health insurance that'd be the first to notice & report you missing, as having health insurance is mandatory (even if you continue paying them, they'd notice it once they can't send you a replacement card).
The Netherlands stopped with the census in the 1970s when computers became viable. You have to report each birth and death to your domicile. It's fairly foolproof because you can't do anything if you do not legally exist.
The problem is that it's being used for things it shouldn't be used for. Everyone these days knows that you shouldn't use a microwave to cook a steak, but I'm sure when it was first invented there were many chefs who tried.
I wish more people paid attention to air quality. I'm a delivery driver and air quality has a noticeable effect on my energy levels throughout the day and also my mood. Slightly rainy days are probably my favorite days to work because no one is outside digging up roads and kicking up tire dust with leaf blowers and the rain seems to clean the air a bit.
As a motorcycle rider, it's always very noticeable. The stale air from the helmet coupled with the shit shit air from outside makes me very sleepy and you can develop a sore throat in a few hours
uBlock Origin can block these if you check the "Annoyances" filter in the filter list. I think it's disabled by default because it has a higher risk of breaking sites, but I never have a problem. I haven't seen a cookie banner in a long time!
This is what I use and it works great. I mainly use it to download things like 3-hour music playlists ahead of long drives to avoid wasting mobile bandwidth.
The scale of each map is independent, and differs by an order of magnitude from the "lonely" top row to the "not lonely" bottom row.
A charitable view would be that they consider each category independent.
Another charitable view would be that they're focused on showing trends, not "absolute value of loneliness", and that you can view the order of maps Always-Usually-Rarely-Never to be an additional dimension. This would have better fit a linear layout, but as they note in the caption, a fifth map "wouldn't fit"; they are constrained by article layout.
If you think the WP is simply trying to push the premise of the article, that there is a "Loneliness Epidemic", then you may enjoy the book `How to Lie with Maps` by Monmonier:
One thing I rarely see discussed is the possibility of contaminants like machine grease, spray lubricants, and dust getting into food. When the process for making food is automated, it seems much more likely to me that some of the moving parts in the process end up getting coated with small amounts of machine grease or lubricants. Maybe a moving machine part was sticking, so a technician used some spray lubricant on it, some of which found its way to the conveyor belt that was transporting the food to the next stage of the process. Maybe a metal part that is used in the process was coated in some kind of oil to protect it during storage. Someone may install it without cleaning it off with a solvent. Maybe something is being stored in an open-air vat, and work is being done nearby that generates dust. The more processed a food is, the more opportunities there are for contaminants to find their way into the food.
I think of these things because I worked in a kitchen that made dough, and our dough mixer always needed to be lubricated. I once found grease that had dripped from above into the mixing bowl. Luckily I am someone who takes such things seriously, but there are a lot of careless people out there. Even if you wipe off grease, an invisible trace amount will remain on the surface unless you clean it with a solvent. I also worked in a warehouse that stored machine parts used in food packaging equipment. There was drywall work being done at the time and the whole place was coated in gypsum dust. I remember handling "food grade" lubricant and looking up its safety data sheet (SDS) out of curiosity, and my takeaway from reading it was that it's still probably not something you would want to eat.
If you want a fun scifi horror novel to read related to this topic, check out Parasite Eve by Hideaki Sena. It's the novel that inspired the PSX game. The whole plot revolves around mitochondria and was inspired by the author's time as a grad student. I read it a few months ago and really enjoyed it.
