https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=L...
There’s no actual combination of outsiders going around to every household in every village for even a dozen days of the year to plausibly provide a third party confirmation of claimed residence for each individual.
It’s effectively villagers certifying each other that they really live there as a primary residence.
The math, roughly:
1 billion people (there are more now, but we’ll call it an even billion) / 60 seconds ≈ 16,666,666 minutes
16,666,666 / 60 minutes in an hour ≈ 277,777 hours
277,777 hours / 24 hours in a day ≈ 11,574 days
11,574 / 365 days in a year ≈ 31 years.
That’s just China. The global population would take around 220 years, with not so much time as to say hello. A bureaucracy can of course delegate census reporting such that the groups become manageable, but it puts a lot of things into perspective when you understand the sheer scale of the human population.
In US, for the 2020 decennial census, the U.S. Census Bureau hired approximately 500,000 temporary workers across the country to assist with the count.
Thus..it's difficult and expensive.
On the contrary, that is a small percentage of the taxes I pay from a single paycheck.
this. some smart asses would be calling all their relatives, distant-relatives, friends, etc AND claim that they all lived there. then, share the loot(?) like 50%, 30%, 20% etc
the more better approach would be compensating by property, though does have its own downsides
They don't do the opposite: we build here, now let's see how many people we need to relocate.