Algorithm can find a neighborhood’s political leanings by its cars

Not that statistical analysis like this isn't interesting, but when you have two choices - Red team or Blue team - which are also highly clustered and a ton of variables to use to correlate - pickup, sedan, hybrid, minivan - of course its going to be pretty easy to build a model that will pick the correct team with high accuracy.

And that’s, girls and boys, how a few PhDs back in the 10’s, either by stupidity or lack of ethics, laid the foundation for the big brother state we have today.

Blah blah blah, cars are a sign of material wealth. You could do the same thing looking at the house themselves.

I&#x27;m skeptical of this.<p>How do they ascertain that the cars <i>belong</i> to the suburb? Would a suburb be ranked differently if for a month there were civil works that meant a lot of contractor vehicles etc were parked up? What about if the local Ferrari club decides to go for a cruise and all meet at a coffee shop in the neighbouring suburb every week? What if the suburb was located in a cold region, where it&#x27;s more practical for most people to drive a SUV in winter?<p>What about the republicans who drive Civics, and the republicans who drive Audis? What about the democrats that drive Toyota Tacomas, or the democrats who drive Volts?<p>I mean, what would it make of me? I have a toyota hilux for work, a mx5 (miata) for track days, and a subaru wrx sti for driving to the shops. I wonder what my political leaning would be considered to be?

<i>From the understated opulence of a Bentley</i><p>I&#x27;m sorry, what? A Bentley is &quot;understated&quot;?

Reading bumper stickers would be even more valuable.

So what should my next car be in order to be useless to this algorithm. I don&#x27;t like being categorized and sifted. Once that information is available, it is always abused. Humans never don&#x27;t abuse the power they get, and I hate it. I hate being on the receiving side. It may be small abuses, but within a civilization those add up, and we are on the edge of dying a death of a thousand cuts.

I wonder if they&#x27;ve got access to historical streetview images, to test how stable the claimed relationship is over time.<p>After all, when oil prices rise you&#x27;d expect people to choose more efficient cars - not necessarily to change their voting patterns. I can&#x27;t see any mention in the original paper of how they calibrated for that.

Full article for those who are interested:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;27&#x2F;1700035114.full?sid=2d5af382-1da4-4ffe-a9fd-16033af26746" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;27&#x2F;1700035114.full...</a>

I&#x27;d like to see it take into account parking habits. In my experience, it seems to be much less common to find a vehicle backed into a parking spot in more liberal areas. I wonder if this observation is correct.

Hopefully, it won&#x27;t be used to improve gerrymandering algorithms.

This is not surprising at all. Another interesting problem that you can solve is using your social media friends&#x27; cars to predict an individual &#x27;s political leanings.

Am I the only one who is a little offended that just because you own a pickup truck then you must be conservative, and if you own a Tesla you must be liberal? Seems to me that is more stereotyping than lot&#x27;s of things that social justice warriors get outraged over.