Reports about the large march in New York contain the same quaint estimates of crowd numbers that they did in the 1960's.  The marchers estimate there were four hundred thousand, the police estimate two hundred fifty thousand, and the New York Times estimates one hundred thousand.  The biggest change is that the police usually way undercount these marches.

What boggles the mind is why we have these wild estimates.  Technology should have rendered all of this obsolete.  With satellite images and high speed computers, it should be fairly easy to count fairly accurately.  I have seen news shows do this for nonpolitical events, so why do we retreat back to wild guesstimates when the event is political?

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