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Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

nytimes.com

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Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#121

Post by Sunset »

Clownshoesms wrote: post #96
r00fus wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could it be the front-and-center red * bolded * text? Or perhaps the logo with the clipped words?

Hehe that might be part of it, I actually feel claustrophobic reading it. A neutron star of text and links.

The font size is "wrong" for everything and completely inconsistent and all over the place. White spacing is all wrong too.

The font color is non-contrasting, because gray on blue is a brilliant idea. I'd literally fire someone if they submitted this as graphics design.

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#123

Post by afsina »

propman wrote: post #23

I am definitely very excited about this. Blanket statements like "government is too inefficient and such a waste" or "we need to raise more taxes to fix this problem" are statements that are irrefutable due to the convoluted nature of government. Now we can have a little more insight into what is efficient and what isn't. Also the opaqueness and division of data makes it difficult to make meaningful and economical de…

Sadly, many people who make those blanket statements (such as myself) also believe governments, especially big-centralized ones cannot be fixed. These kind of data is good, it may be an eye opener for some. But governments will find loop holes to make those spendings look like justified. Most people will be fine with it anyway. Look at the authors response: "Oh there are 10 million public school teachers, those are nice people!"

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#124

Post by Holdont »

leggomylibro wrote: post #91
CalChris wrote: post #34

And in related news, Trump killed open.gov today. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170414/13382037153/trump...

Jeez, nobody tell him about data.gov ...

Seems data.gov is down... though only technically

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#125

Post by afsina »

aryehof wrote: post #8

The article mentions that the data shows a huge allocation of resources to education. Why is education publicly funded in the USA, and not left to market forces? Can't that be considered a "socialist" policy?

Yes it is. But they will tell you that you signed the social contract with your birth blood and need to pay up or go to jail if not. Harsh but that is the truth.

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#126

Post by seoguru »

tanderson92 wrote: post #111
SamReidHughes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really believe this why don't you short-sell a bunch of companies and make a killing?

Because the belief has nothing to do with your arbitrary test. And even if it did, the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

one of my favorite John Maynard Keynes quotes.

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#127

Post by thomastjeffery »

jezclaremurugan wrote: post #71
abritinthebay wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realistically? National security. I know that sounds like a cop-out but if you think about it, it makes sense that the government has to classify some things. The question is where does the line get drawn. I agree it's too far to one side right now but the extreme you suggest is far far on the other extreme.

Why can't military spends be in one classified bucket and the rest be open and 100% transparent? I don't think information on how much is spent on roads, healthcare, police, education will affect security.

Because that's 550 billion dollars. A very significant portion of that does not need to be secret.

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#128

Post by rahimnathwani »

The UK's National Audit Office has this page: https://www.nao.org.uk/highlights/whole-of-government-accoun...

It shows a breakdown, for the year 2014-2015, of "consolidated financial statements for the whole of the UK public sector".

The pie chart and "Breakdown of WGA Balances" can be hard to understand when you first load the page, but if you hover over a column in the column chart (under '2011-2015 Balance Information'), you can click to see a breakdown for one of the sections of the column chart.

It's kind of nice to see the information categorised by type, rather than by which body spent the money.

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#129

Post by ht_th »

dingdongding wrote: post #104
WalterBright wrote: post #24

> “How many people work for government in the United States?” he asked, with the excitement of a child showing off a new toy, before displaying the answer. “Almost 24 million." Directly, sure. Indirectly, a lot more. By indirectly, I mean companies that do government contract work.

If you go by that approach then everyone in the society indirectly works for the govt in some way or the other.

Sure. But I was more thinking about people who directly work indirectly for the government, such as cleaners who work for a company that has them clean (the same) government offices (all the time). There are a lot of similar supporting services that have been privatized and "out-sourced" to external companies but which employees are practically working for the government.

Re: Steve Ballmer serves up a data trove about government spending in the US

#130

Post by woogiewonka »

leggomylibro wrote: post #91
CalChris wrote: post #34

And in related news, Trump killed open.gov today. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170414/13382037153/trump...

Jeez, nobody tell him about data.gov ...

Is this a joke or not, I can't tell because none of the pages on data.gov load for me...
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