At 12:38 PM -0400 10/25/00, David Honig wrote:
At 09:45 AM 10/25/00 -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
I didn't answer even that question. I did not return the form.
My result was the same as yours: No visits or inquiries.
That's a shame. If I get fined $100, I can write a column about my experience and sell it for much more.
-Declan
Some folks who didn't send theirs in did get visits by (otherwise unemployable) censusworkers. They went away when told to do so, I'm told.
My favorite census story was the (true) one where the (nice old lady working for the Fedz) census worker got literally eaten by the dozen or so dogs some nonresponding dude kept in his yard.
I had a "pre-visit" by a pair of women--perhaps Census workers, perhaps not--about a year before the actual Census. They told me they were listing structures on properties so that Census workers could then make accurate tallies of the outbuildings, structures, etc. While one of the women engaged me in conversation about how many rooms my house had--I didn't tell her anything--the other woman started to enter my side yard, through an archway. I yelled over to her, "Please don't trespass on my property." She retreated, and the first woman mumbled something about "not liking a threatening tone." She said they were required by the rules to check properties for evidence of numbers of residential units, out-buildings, "granny flats," etc. Angry by this time, as I am wont to get, I told the both of them that the U.S. Census exists for one and only one purpose: counting the population for the sole purpose of the apportionment of Congress. It doesn't exist to track races (Japs, for example), to make pretty maps of income, marital status, computer usage, sexual preferences, numbers of pets, numbers of televisions and computers, and so on. It just doesn't. They retreated down my driveway (they had walked in...I assume they were walking to all houses on the street). I half-way expected Yet Another Stern Call from the Sheriff, but it never came (either that or my phone line was busy, as is usually the case during the day). When the Census form eventually arrived I got the short one. I answered only the question about the number of adults living at the address. I wrote "Aryan" for my race...I figured if the "favored minorities" got to have dozens of sub-classes ("Asian American, Pacific Islander, but not Chamorro Islands," or somesuch), then I could certainly write down "Aryan." [For those not in the U.S., the Census is a slave to political correctness. We have the spectacle of those of Spanish descent, as in "from Spain," writing down some variant of Hispanic for their "race," even though a Spaniard is of course of European, aka white, stock, while most Mexicans are much different. Amerindian, or whatever. And the Asians are divided into a dozen or so groups which lobbied for inclusion in the Census. Meanwhile, Finns, Irish, Poles, Israelis, Russians, Arabs, BUT NOT SPANIARDS, are all lumped in as "white." Bizarre.] In the Censuses of 1980 and 1990 I think I wrote down "Human Race" or something like that. Now I try to be as politically incorrect as possible. Fucking statists. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.