71–80 of 166 posts
lobbyist spent a long time [...] educating members of Congress This is exactly, EXACTLY why lobbyists must be banned. It's not education, it's propaganda. The country is run by people whose knowledge is solely based on propaganda?
I sat and stared at that screenshot of Internet Quorum for about five minutes with a mixture of shock and despair. I'm a user experience designer. I started my career in the mid '90s, trying to turn green-screen DOS applications into GUIs without letting things like Internet Quorum be the result. I've been fighting the good fight for fifteen years. With that one screenshot, I felt like the whole thing had been for na…
Could you with your skills fit more information and ability to change it that fast in that amount of space? I doubt it.
American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice: Force your legislature to start using version control. * No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. * Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses d…
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on PlainSite. http://www.plainsite.org We don't have bills yet, but we allow diffs on the text of laws and proposals to improve them. If you're interested in helping add features (we have a long list), e-mail info at plainsite dot org.
I sat and stared at that screenshot of Internet Quorum for about five minutes with a mixture of shock and despair. I'm a user experience designer. I started my career in the mid '90s, trying to turn green-screen DOS applications into GUIs without letting things like Internet Quorum be the result. I've been fighting the good fight for fifteen years. With that one screenshot, I felt like the whole thing had been for na…
Am I really alone in thinking that the Internet Quorum UI isn't really that bad? Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad. In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system…
Bravo - this is going in my quotefile.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"? Do you want to bring Democracy back to the system (or your choice of roughly equivalent question), or are you just trying to put your own political ideals on a privileged pedestal? I think one of the key reasons we have been unable to successfully ref…
>And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"? Maybe they'd be forced to do so in order to compete with the new cohort of younger, technology-embracing politicians which will sweep to power on the crest of a wave of louis ck-style "OMG finally someone who understands" sentiment from the reddit ge…
Let's hope not. The Teaparty congress started going to work on things that didn't serve the tea party, but rather, corporate benefactors.
Another example of the big problem being that money == speech.
I sat and stared at that screenshot of Internet Quorum for about five minutes with a mixture of shock and despair. I'm a user experience designer. I started my career in the mid '90s, trying to turn green-screen DOS applications into GUIs without letting things like Internet Quorum be the result. I've been fighting the good fight for fifteen years. With that one screenshot, I felt like the whole thing had been for na…
Am I really alone in thinking that the Internet Quorum UI isn't really that bad? Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad. In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system…
No, not at all.
My first thought when I saw it was that it's actually pretty clear and straightforward as far as interfaces go, the only real difference between that and the type of Web 2.0 interface that people use today is probably a 100 line style sheet to make it look less 1995 and a conversion to use AJAX requests instead of full page reloads.
Then again, "just" probably means quite a bit of work in the case of converting to AJAX requests, if the code that generates these pages looks anything like I imagine it does...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"? Do you want to bring Democracy back to the system (or your choice of roughly equivalent question), or are you just trying to put your own political ideals on a privileged pedestal? I think one of the key reasons we have been unable to successfully ref…
>And how do you plan on getting Congress to agree to use a system in which vast swathes of them will "look like an unelectable crypto-fascist in the eyes of the public"? Maybe they'd be forced to do so in order to compete with the new cohort of younger, technology-embracing politicians which will sweep to power on the crest of a wave of louis ck-style "OMG finally someone who understands" sentiment from the reddit ge…
[1] http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/publications/p...
This is an invitation to play the lobby game. To me it reads like "we should bribe Congress too". But can we do that? Large corporations will have disproportionally much more economic power to bribe Congress. They can throw money at the problem repeatedly until they have exactly the law they want. If Congress cannot work, then Congress should write the laws but not vote them. Citizens should vote the laws, like in Ca…
Have you looked at how that's worked out for California? Thanks to ballot measures, the people of California voted to never raise their own property taxes, and then later voted to require massive spending initiatives in education and other places, which of course went unfunded, because they'd voted not to pay for anything. Now California has regular budget crises that are essentially unsolvable, thanks to citizens vo…
American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice: Force your legislature to start using version control. * No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. * Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses d…
I started work on a "somewhat" similar project* around the beginning of the year. This was for the state level, not the federal level. There were quite a number of issues. The most annoying being that the state archives only went back so far. Checking it now, it goes back to the mid-70s (very encouraging, 9 months ago, it only went back to the mid-90s). If you need a reference on why this is important go back and rea…
American geeks: if you want to fix your congress using your preexisting l33t hacker skillz rather than getting directly involved in politics (and who could blame you,) then here is my best advice: Force your legislature to start using version control. * No more sneaking revisions through in the middle of the night without anyone noticing. * Being able to do `git blame` style operations to resolve individual clauses d…