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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

If that is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), I hope that:

1) She will not be subject to long term repercussions for being honest and doing her job

2) Whoever asked her to cook the numbers, will be sued and arrested and go to jail. Cooking the numbers in this case equates to me as killing people, because decisions related to reopening, etc, will be heavily influenced by these numbers.

3) I hope that someone Rebekah Jones will know that unknown people in the internet, even in this obscure hacker site called Hacker News, are proud of what she stood for. She has nothing to gain and everything to lose, and yet she chose the right path. (again, assuming this is true)

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Are you new to American politics? The demand to cook the books undoubtedly came from the top, whoever investigates can also be fired, and the public are out demanding that reopening happen even if it kills people.

Fortunately, most of the public are not making that demand. It's well worth keeping in mind that those people are vastly outnumbered: https://xkcd.com/2305/

If you dig into the science of polling, what you discover is that the way people answer questions is rather confounding, so management of the largest polls typically do not like to use the modern science of polling.

See David Moore's book The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls.

Big fan of majoritarian rule, will of the people, consent of the governed.

How do we realize that ideal?

Legalizing psychedelics.

Regardless of what happened to this woman, if the public wants the reopening, then by all means it should happen. The opposite, house arrest against the public wishes, is terrifying.

There have been several polls that show the public is happy with the lockdown, even Republicans.

I misunderstood what the gp meant by "the public are out demanding that reopening happens".

The public wanting something does not mean it “should happen.” Moreover the public does not want premature reopening.

Certainly, but the public should have the correct information on which to make that decision. Demanding public servants massage data to lead public opinion is the same misdeed just with the opposite justification.

In most cases we can't even figure out where the top is though like all the doctors that are being encouraged to mark deaths unrelated to covid-19 as related simply because of the time that it happened in.I heard one doctor say oh yeah that patient did die of the virus because we couldn't get supplies here for their condition even though it was completely unrelated they still are calling tons of deaths cause covid-19

"I heard one doctor say"?

like in person? or on TV?

and from this you draw the conclusion that "tons" of deaths are misreported?

A move straight from Erdogan's and Vladimir's books. At least she is not rotting in a cell (as per their literal book). Other countries do the exact same thing but I never place i.e. Iran to the same standards as Turkey and Russia (self proclaim) to be. These are truly dark-grey pages in US history. I sincerely hope next time around the people of USA select better leaders.

Edit: people of Florida were lucky to have such a civil servant.

> Edit: people of Florida were lucky to have such a civil servant.

It doesn't appear to say she was fired. Just taken off this particular task.

When a principal is made a middle-school science teacher, that’s also not a firing.

It still counts as workplace retaliation.

Agreed.

I'm not sure this deserves the downvotes. This behaviour (firing disagreeable public servants, censoring information, blatantly lying) is the exact opposite of what you would expect to see from a strongly democratic nation. It amazes me that the US hasn't fallen further on this chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

It's probably because the countries that are ranked lower have even larger and more systemic issues with democracy. Keep in mind that most people in the west and the English-speaking world experience a large reporting bias towards the US (and Europe, etc.), and this compounded with the size of the US means it's very easy to find a new negative story about the US every day.

I don't say this to excuse the problems. I just want to point out (based on my experience with family in some of these places and local news sources there) that the countries that are not ranked as highly tend to have a lot of problems that people who focus on US news genuinely don't often hear about and know about.

It's a nice sentiment to have, but it's mostly just halo effect. Democracy is nice, but not that nice. In fact, it's completely orthogonal to "firing disagreeable public servants, censoring information, blatantly lying" - these issues happen in democracies as much as everywhere else.

Do you have a source on the claim that democracies have, on average, roughly the same level of these shenanigans as non-democratic nations?

Certainly the United States does some morally dubious things that are comparable to some of the atrocities that e.g. China and Russia do, but I've still had the impression that oversight, transparency and freedom of speech _improve_ things.

I don't have a source on the claim, it's my belief based on observation and reasoning from first principles (e.g. what systems present in a democracy should have prevented this (alleged) situation from ever happening, why they didn't work here, and have anyone ever saw them working anywhere else?).

"Oversight, transparency and freedom of speech" certainly improve things - to the extent they exist in a country - but they don't stop greedy people from lying and scheming. I'd say the same feature that makes democracy a nice system - bloodless change of power - also creates a framework for greedy people to scheme essentially risk-free. You can defraud the state and defraud the voters and retire rich, instead of getting shot by the opposing group for making too many waves. Point being, you shouldn't expect a country to not have these problems by the very virtue of being "a democracy" - and not China/Russia/Turkey/North Korea/whatnot.

Democracy improves things when it is exercised. In the USA and others countries there is a system in place to avoid public dissent. For example, the USA is practically free to do anything they want in terms of foreign policy without opposition from the national media. Except for some faint opinion pieces here and there, the media is very supportive of whatever crazy schemes the government is trying to impose on "enemy" countries, and practically never debates why a country is an "enemy" or not.

What's your proof of this statement?

Here's a paper i found: https://www.e-ir.info/2015/12/20/a-critical-analysis-of-the-...

There seems to be a correlation in some cases.

It's not a paper, it's some student's essay, and the very abstract of it can be shortened to: "some people think democracy helps reduce corruption, others disagree, it sorta seems it really does help except it may introduce its own forms of corruption, and it's extremely hard to measure any of this anyway, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯". I don't think it's very convincing in either direction.

Quoting the "Infinite Monkey Cage" podcast. Democracy is a trial and error political system. You try president/prime minister A political party or coalition A. If they fail, next 4 years people try B, and so on.

People choose well or bad, but People Choose (sorry for the caps). In NK, China, Russia people don't actually choose.

In USA people 'choose less' (check out "Gerrymandering", also check on YT: last week tonight Gerrymandering).

The public servant was not fired.

Moreover, consider the fact that the press is reporting the issue. And that we are freely discussing it.

She was not fired. BUT if someone is counting oranges and reports oranges with a defined scientific method and someone flips the switch and asks the same person to count apples and in a half-baked method, and still report it as "oranges" then you either play along their dirty game OR you have the decency to call them out and quit.

She did the decent thing. They did force her to quit.

She was not fired for the dashboard. But after coming public with this information, I guess there is a big chance she will be fired.

> consider the fact that the press is reporting the issue. And that we are freely discussing it

consider there is a "press like apparatus" working very hard to polarise the issue into dead lock. "teams" were already drawn up before the issue even started.

Worth remembering that all the astroturfing facebook campaigns about reopening came from a single florida ip as well.

Got a source for that?

As a Floridian, I feel defeated. Most people here don’t follow politics, nor would they care enough to make a stand and protest or call for action. Even if they had the drive, a large majority of residents don’t have the luxury of taking days off of work to do this, especially in the current events. Unless mainstream media, especially Fox around here, makes a statement about this, it’s unlikely anything will happen as a result of this.

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