151–160 of 161 posts
If you're interested in informing the public on legislation, have experience on the hill or UI/UX experience hit me up. I'm just some dude with an idea who lives in a terminal. Money is secondary.
Making public data open by default can arguable be an imporant step towards fostering societal equity. However, it needs to be not only "open", which typically means stashed away in some corner as a spreadsheet or database file, but accessible and useful to people. The UK has been pushing open data for years now and more and more institutions are now realizing this. Shameless plug for a research project that is aimin…
It would be extremely helpful if the government data used the same Solid protocol (Linked Data Platform) which will likely be getting widespread use starting next year. (See Tim Berner Lee's Inrupt.com Solid startup)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought there would be a flood of projects analysing the data when it came out, but it seems like the idea everyone applauded but not much came out of it. Steve Ballmer's http://usafacts.org seems like the first real attempt though.
Is there a HN thread discussing these reports? I'd love to hear folks' opinions about them... Interesting facts to me in the latest report [1]: - Page 44: "Our economy has grown at a steady rate despite changes in economic policy". I expected to see a lot more fluctuation on this data. - Page 30: "There have been more suicide gun deaths than homicide gun deaths every year since 1981". This is crazy to me given how mu…
Barring some calamity, this is pretty much as expected. Tariffs impact a very small percentage of the economy with large size, and the rest of it with a small overhead, much like a fed interest rate hike. Even with this hawkish fed, there hasn't been anything overly harmful to the economy from a policy perspective.
> This is crazy to me given how much we hear about gun homicide being a problem in this country.
Anything that's politicized gets this special treatment. Kid kills brother with car, blurb in local newspaper. Kid kills brother with gun, national news and Tweets from Presidential candidates.
Texting and driving is as bad as drinking and driving when it comes to number of deaths (dwarfing gun deaths as well), yet people do it like it's no big deal. Most cities still only levy small fines (in comparisons to DUIs) for doing it. Not all accidental death is created equal.
>Page 29: Crime rate has declined but "The number of incarcerated persons has increased by 330% since 1980"
Welcome to the US where the war on drugs gives us authoritarian level incarceration rates.
All I want for this Christmass is an authoritative list of all US federal agencies. I kid you not, there is no such list and the number of federal agencies is uncertain. From Wikipedia: >Legislative definitions of a federal agency are varied, and even contradictory, and the official United States Government Manual offers no definition. While the Administrative Procedure Act definition of "agency" applies to most exec…
Shameless plug: does anybody know where I could get detailed spending and receipts data for US federal budget? Including all federal agencies? There is very limited data at https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/supplemental-materials/ but I am looking for more detailed data.
Let me know what you can't find or request via https://www.data.gov/data-request/
Cool! And they should also adopt UK-like government web design principles.
All I want for Christmas: accountability for the DoD budget, which for 2019 will be $717 Billion, the majority of the USG's discretionary spending.
In 2015, an audit of the budget revealed $125 Billion in wasteful spending, and this was covered up. In 2016, the Office of Inspector General for DoD said that the Army made 6.5 Trillion in wrongful adjustments to its 2015 accounting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_De...
We still do not know how many contractors the DOD employs, or how much money they are paid, because the numbers are just not recorded. We do know, though, that the numbers and budgets we do have are often inaccurately reported, according to the DOD OIG.
People whine a lot about paying taxes, but the politicians that always complain about taxes are extracting record amounts of tax money for a military that is mismanaged, doesn't do its accounting properly, can't build modern fighting vehicles, and doesn't record basic information like how many people they employ.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a HN thread discussing these reports? I'd love to hear folks' opinions about them... Interesting facts to me in the latest report [1]: - Page 44: "Our economy has grown at a steady rate despite changes in economic policy". I expected to see a lot more fluctuation on this data. - Page 30: "There have been more suicide gun deaths than homicide gun deaths every year since 1981". This is crazy to me given how mu…
>Page 44: "Our economy has grown at a steady rate despite changes in economic policy". I expected to see a lot more fluctuation on this data. Barring some calamity, this is pretty much as expected. Tariffs impact a very small percentage of the economy with large size, and the rest of it with a small overhead, much like a fed interest rate hike. Even with this hawkish fed, there hasn't been anything overly harmful to…
Every election cycle, I continue to be disppointed. Even if they were crazy in every other regard, I would probably still vote for them. It’s like, Step 1 towards doing anything meaningful in regards to poverty, education, criminal justice reform, et cetera.
Open data is the first step. I wish I could do more business with my gov't (State and Local) through the internet. "Copies of documents cannot be ordered through this website, by email or over the telephone." Only fax and snail mail... https://www.dos.ny.gov/corps/faq_copies.page.asp
As a next step I would love to see an exploration of a legal system where a change of a law or regulation is backed by both data (data and methodology directly referenced by the law) and a description of the expected impact. Something such as: > By changing law A related to B, we expect the increase of C to be at least D in the next E months. If not achieved, the change is reversed/reduced. Hopefully that would allow…