I had never thought about it, but The Beatles toured almost constantly from January 1961 until late January 1965. Then they played a few concerts in summer and early December, before their last tours of Germany, Japan and the Philippines and the US in 1966. At the same time they released 7 full length albums. Crazy!
The work rate was quite something, as was the natural talent backing it up. If you somehow have nine hours to spare it's well worth watching the "Get Back" documentary, which is very fly-on-the-wall.
That being said, it seems like this is being phased out. No new "statsstipendiat" has been awarded since 2019. Before that it was mostly 1-3 persons awarded each year.
That's silly, I think more should be handed out, to encourage art and culture and let it grow organically. But I guess with the Norske Krone doing so weak and the economy and all...
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).
Many old people do valuable work even though they are not in the workforce. They are the backbone of many voluntary organizations, they are often the backbone of their apartment complex taking on janitorial work and administrative work, they are baby sitters, home work assistants, they taken on small jobs no one else want to like election clerks and exam monitors. Some start up a small business so the community can get access to their expertise. One guy I know closed his musical instruments repair shop a few years ago, but started up again in smaller scale because there were no one else local to do the work.
Recently I've noticed that the subtitles on TV shows have become garbage. Often the translations makes no sense in the context of what is happening, but are literal translations of what is being said on screen. I assume it's some kind of AI translation, but who knows. Maybe the translator is just stupid.
To be clear, we had bad subtitles before as well, but that was due to the translators lack of cultural understanding. Most of it made sense at least. Now it's just straight up bad and often makes no sense. Sad!
Can't you just buy an AppleTV, download the EE/BT TV app and ditch the box? My ISP also sends me these boxes that I never connect to my TV since their app on AppleTV works better than using the god awful TV box.
Europe is just lagging behind. There's not that much difference between the US and Europe. Europe just has more history and culture which makes the changes less extreme.
Ships over a certain size are obligated to report their position (and some other information) over AIS (similar to ADSB on airplanes. It's meant for other nearby ships and ports for navigational purposes. These are tracked from shore based scanners, scanners on ships and satellites. You can see partly real-time data on marinetraffic.com and vesselfinder.com
It's not completely real-time unless you pay to get satellite tracking included. The free version only has data from shore based AIS scanners plus a few scanners placed on ships. So close to shore it's pretty accurate, but in the middle of the ocean you only get position and vessel type (unless there's a ship with an AIS scanner nearby).
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