It would be cool if on the bar chart the two bars for each agency could be combined; make the furloughed employees in blue and show the rest of the agency in grey-blue or something like that, so it more visually shows how the agencies are diminished.
Show HN: govuptime.com
61–70 of 181 posts
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#62Ah, that chart on the bottom is on a log scale. I wasn't expecting that... and if I didn't look closer I would have completely misinterpreted it (for example, it appears that the DoD is mostly shut down).
It's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.
I personally think the author did this because otherwise the DoD would so heavily dwarf everything else that you wouldn't be able to see whats going on. But I agree, intended or not, this has the effect of heavily exaggerating the proportion of people on furlough. Its like using a log scale on a pie chart. It really makes no sense.
The author really should consider this and think hard about what point he is trying to make with that chart on the bottom.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#63Non-linear bar graph scales should be a last resort.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#64Ah, that chart on the bottom is on a log scale. I wasn't expecting that... and if I didn't look closer I would have completely misinterpreted it (for example, it appears that the DoD is mostly shut down).
It's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.
It's not attempting to be deceitful. The problem is the DOD has 8x as many employees as the next largest agency. If spaced without a logarithmic scale, the rest of the agencies are so insignificant it doesn't have any effect at all.
To try to avoid the confusion, I'm working on another graph of percentages working for each agency, and a disclaimer about the scaling.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It took me a sec too. It's a confusing application, since the intent is to compare to adjacent rows.. the first one for example is "half furloughed" but only a slightly smaller red line. Visually confusing.
I like it. You need only look at a few log charts to get the hang of it, and if it wasn't a log chart, it would be hard to see the difference between organizations with less than 20,000 employees, because the bars would all be very short. Edit: took another look, and it is quite a bit more confusing than I thought, because of furloughed vs total employees. I can't quickly tell if the furloughed for an agency is linea…
It's also logarithmic.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#66Very nice, good job!
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#67Metrics are cool and all, but this glosses over the really important story here, which unfortunately seems to elude much of the general public: that a small minority of republicans are subverting the budget process because they don't like a law. They cannot be allowed to do this. I can only assume the rest of the RNC is going along with it because they are stupid or cowards.
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#68The funnier version: http://www.thedailyshow.com/
Or as a download: http://thepiratebay.sx/search/daily%20show/0/7/0
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#69Ah, that chart on the bottom is on a log scale. I wasn't expecting that... and if I didn't look closer I would have completely misinterpreted it (for example, it appears that the DoD is mostly shut down).
It's downright deceitful, in my opinion. The entire page is trying to exaggerate the significance of the shutdown.
It seems like you're loading it with the Sean Hannity inane view that its basically no big deal though, right?
Re: Show HN: govuptime.com
#70It would be cool if on the bar chart the two bars for each agency could be combined; make the furloughed employees in blue and show the rest of the agency in grey-blue or something like that, so it more visually shows how the agencies are diminished.
If the author chooses to do this, absolutely get rid of the log scale. The chart makes it look like 95% of the DoD civilians are on furlough. Its 50%. The author is simply trying to show too much on that chart, and s/he is inadvertently making it look way worse to the average person (who doesn't know what a log scale is) than is intended.
I may lose my salary because of this shutdown (this thing affects way more than direct govt employees), so I am probably biased towards making this seem as bad as possible. But I can't stand charts that are misleading.