2010 US Census thread because we can't move forward until you mail it back

not the best picture of me, but it's the best picture of my 2010 census form yet

Oh hell yes, I better get one of me & my historical enabling of schools + roads before I mail that shit out.

ha you can see my bike in the middle of the living room, where it lives

Did it!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/marshmallowy/4441473078/sizes/m/

wait where's my photo. trying again.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4027/4441473078_238446f0a8.jpg

WDYLL being properly accounted for, as stipulated by the Constitution?

I'm going on chatroulette tonight with just a picture of my census form. And my balls.

you have to bring your balls into every thread don't you

Step aside.

not long ago he was talking about the pubes of others, so his balls are a step in the right direction

I was doing no such thing. Believe it or not, that was one of the rare occasions when I didn't bring up the topic myself.

and yet i believe her

you have to bring your balls into every thread don't you

censused

xp I suppose I have earned a lack of credibility in this area.

you were! maybe not overtly discussing in detail but reacting to the pubes of others!

anyway, can we talk about the special latino question?

i also found the language interesting "how many people live/stay in your apartment/house/mobile home"

the two verbs interest me

"special Latino question"...?

plz say it is not "Are you a special Latino? ___ yes ___ no"

my apartment holds three comfortably, seventeen uncomfortably

are you an "angry Latina judge"

Yes ___

No ___

Fuck you, Scalia ___

i also found the language interesting "how many people live/stay in your apartment/house/mobile home"

Yeah, that is a curious verb choice. Does my dead mother in the attic count?

y

Is she comfortable?

it asked very specifically "are you of latino/hispanic descent and if so what kind" and then listed puerto rican, mexican, nicaraguan, etc. then there was a little box asking "are you of 'other' hispanic descent?" and listed colombian, "spaniard" etc.

THEN it asked for my "race" and i was given a chance to say whether i was white, African America/black/Negro, korean, Chinese, Guamanian, etc.

then there was a box for "OTHER"

so basically what I understood is this:

* they are counting latinos
* they are counting if someone is latino + something else
* they don't give you an option to mark if you are [x] race + (something else not latino)

weird, i thought
* they want to know if you are

whoops
ignore that last * point

U+K Walken sketch

http://www.hulu.com/watch/4165/saturday-night-live-census-taker

If they want to know if I am weird, they're going to have to have to be a little more specific.

anyway, can we talk about the special latino question?

i think this is because the census is worried that if the significant population of americans who are latino/hispanic aren't given an option to list that as their ethnicity, they might get tripped up and choose white. from what i understand latino/hispanic isn't listed under the race category, because it's not technically a race. i assume the only reason there isn't also a separate white-race ethnicity disambiguation question for arab-americans is because that's not considered a "significant" population?

limiting people to specific races/ethnicities gets hairy, for sure. they should just provide a world map on the form and say "shade in every region from which you believe you have ancestors" during some particular time period.

function of time period, of course, would be so that everyone doesn't just shade ethiopia

I believe part of the reason for asking such specific questions is so such a map can be made.

right, but i'm saying at this point the accuracy of the map's data is only going to be as good as the question by which the data is obtained

i understand why they're doing it -- i just want to know what they're going to do with the data. are these contortions the work of squeezing people into a box or expanding the box? because squeezing isn't going to get us anywhere.

ps USians can't read maps, duh -- try harder!

It's all so they can round us up into FEMA death camps more efficiently.

oh, i see. well i don't think they're trying to fit people into these boxes one way or another, only make sure the box itself is accurately defined. i guess the purpose of that is so grad students' sociology theses can be as accurate as possible?

The white/non-hispanic vs. white/hispanic vs. non-white/hispanic-or-whatever-else-there-was distinction is one I'm familiar with primarily through seeing it used on Wikipedia. Thank you internet for keeping me up to date with demographic trends!

i like how the questions on the form are:

1) how many people are in your house?

2) How many people are REALLY in your house?

3) REALLY??

what is the legal difference btwn 'black' and 'negro'?

Are those two seperate options (haven't got mine yet)?

Got mine Monday, returned Tuesday morning. Came home to a vaguely "threatening" postcard Tuesday afternoon about returning it OR ELSE. Really?

yup

13 USC Sec. 221
TITLE 13 - CENSUS

CHAPTER 7 - OFFENSES AND PENALTIES

SUBCHAPTER II - OTHER PERSONS

Sec. 221. Refusal or neglect to answer questions; false answers

(a) Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I, II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title, applying to himself or to the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not more than $100.

(b) Whoever, when answering questions described in subsection (a) of this section, and under the conditions or circumstances described in such subsection, willfully gives any answer that is false, shall be fined not more than $500.

Oh I'm surprised by the "threat" just that the sent me the follow-up postcard literally the day after I got my forms. I know it takes like 3 minutes, but still.

There's an add on the bus stop near my work encouraging people to fill out the census form so that Chicago Transit Authority knows how many more buses to add, which hurts me in my feelings area because the CTA just cut a ton of service, including my favorite bus, and no amount of census data is going to change that because we're broke.

That said, I filled out and returned our census form because I am a sucker for doing my civic duty. Also like I said in the Chicago thread, we straight, white, middle-class, married people need to STAND UP AND BE COUNTED.

xxpost There's one checkbox that says "Black, Afr. Amer., or Negro" iirc; I guess it's not really a separate option but there's still some distinction apparently. The one for white just says "White"

Please check one

[ ] I'm white btw

[ ] No homo

i can hear the arguments in the congressional census committee about the black/AfAm/negro language -- they were just trying to cover their bases i'm sure

just like some people say "where do you live" and others say "where do you stay" -- covering their bases

i just would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in those meetings where they hash it all out, including the Special Latino Question of 2010

got my form today, pretty excited

wouldn't you love to see the first draft of this thing? i would.

http://i40.tinypic.com/24ybreb.jpg

nice! i completed my census while 100% sober, but i will say that i felt a bit of giddiness when i was done.

I just got this today.

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/fluxion23/community-survey.jpg

Which I will happily fill out, of course. But apparently this only goes out to about three million households, which puts me in a pretty small percentile. Smaller still, since my household has one person in it.

My first thought, considering the identical questions on the first page, was that the Census Bureau was attempting to re-brand the Census form, and thought that maybe someone had been talking to Frank Luntz.

308,745,538!

^^exclamation point, not a factorial obv

I didn't counted in this census btw, so it's at least 308,745,539.

538 is my magical number!
add one and it blows my mind

xp iirc they have an algorithm to account for people like you.

just concerned abt my homegirl who works for a ny congressperson. they are losing two districts, hope she gets to keep her job in two years.

any more news about the special latino section?

Mapping America: Every City, Every Block
Browse local data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, based on samples from 2005 to 2009. Because these figures are based on samples, they are subject to a margin of error, particularly in places with a low population, and are best regarded as estimates.

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority.

Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July.

The latest estimates, which gauge changes since the last census, are a reflection of an immigration wave that began four decades ago. The transformation of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup has gathered steam as the white population grows collectively older, especially compared with Hispanics.

The census has forecast that non-Hispanic whites will be outnumbered in the United States by 2042, and social scientists consider that current status among infants a harbinger of the change.

“This is a watershed moment,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in family issues. “It shows us how multicultural we’ve become.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/census-minority-babies-are-now-majority-in-united-states/2012/05/16/gIQA1WY8UU_story.html

Apologies if this is being discussed elsewhere -- I just thought it was demographics-related so I stuck it here.