Ha, these calculators have had a great past 24 hours. I made one today too: http://taxes.kareemshaya.com You did a very nice job with the receipt vibe.
Thanks, yours looks pretty nice too!
Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
51–60 of 83 posts
Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#52Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#53I made this last night after being inspired by http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1302494... All the calculations are done with Javascript. Let me know what you think!
This is awesome. I passed along that article to some friends, the consensus was "great idea, never gonna happen." Now I get to pass this link along. That makes me :)
Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#54Can you put little voting arrows next to the line items so I can vote up NASA and vote down defense spending? Oh wait, representative democracy. Damn.
Don't forget that 'defense spending' encompasses a huge swath of technology research that may benefit NASA as much as anything else.
Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#55I made this last night after being inspired by http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1302494... All the calculations are done with Javascript. Let me know what you think!
Good idea and good instincts. I hope you have a scalable hosting solution, because the presentation and domain name are so well chosen that I can see you getting millions of page landings by tomorrow. For your own benefit, perhaps some thoughtfully-filtered Adwords or so would help cover those costs and/or make you some ca$h. For the site itself, keep the simple presentation but perhaps add + signs to allow people to…
Put it on App Engine
Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying with a value of 1e20 , 1e21 gives interesting results. More curious is that using konqueror I get one value but with firefox i get another. Seems to be some bit flipping somewhere, since with firefox I get Miscellaneous mandatory programs $16068258000000004096.00 4096, 16384 , etc but with konqueror i get: Miscellaneous mandatory programs $16068258000000005000.00 Maybe some bug with the javascript interpreter…
Why do people always try to break things? This is a serious question pertaining to human nature, not a complaint. I've noticed that anytime I demo something I've built, if the person/people I'm showing have control of the demo they go try to test the outer boundaries of whatever I've built. What makes us want to do that?
It isn't just human nature. If you have a dog or a cat or have watched videos of animals on Youtube you'd see it has to do with most animals on planet earth.
I have a theory: Things have evolved to try and do everything they can do, because nothing is smart enough to act on foresight alone.
Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#57Can you put little voting arrows next to the line items so I can vote up NASA and vote down defense spending? Oh wait, representative democracy. Damn.
I've wanted that level of civic participation for many years too - but when you think about it, it's only in the last decade that this has become even remotely practical.
But someone should indeed implement such a thing - if they can attract enough traffic, the aggregated preferences would start to become extremely useful, though not always in obvious ways. The only ones I've seen so far tend to be sponsored or created by lobbying groups that want a highlight a particular positive or negative policy outcome - you know, the sort of thing that says 'on current trends, everybody in the US will be employed as a member of the general staff by 2073, and safety razors will have 48 blades.'
...although a recent careless razor purchase turned out to have 6 blades - and I didn't even notice we'd passed 5. So what do I know?
Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#58Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#59I need to remember this for the next time someone tells me my desire for lower tax rates means I must not desire roads, police, and fire fighters. It's remarkable how little of the tax burden of a modern state actually goes towards essential services. A modern country could probably be run with single-digit taxes. You would be missing things like a space program, science subsidies, farm subsidies, and socialized reti…
Re: Where My Money Goes: A visual receipt for your taxes.
#60Can you put little voting arrows next to the line items so I can vote up NASA and vote down defense spending? Oh wait, representative democracy. Damn.
If only Congress had an API... POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=expel POST /house-of-representatives/?district=4&action=elect&candidate=329183
There is actually an API available. I'm currently working with it to produce a longer lasting version of this same concept, though the concept is kind of not interesting now that like a dozen different people did this...