221–230 of 273 posts
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One thing that gets wrong is calling Gates the genius. Ballmer is the smarter of the two.
Then why did Microsoft stagnate under his leadership, once Gates left?
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Because intelligence by itself does not assure success. I'm not a Balmer/Microsoft fan, but 'stagnated' isn't the word I'd use to describe Microsoft in Balmer's era: they missed mobile and got into search late, but they did extremely well in other areas.
He stepped in in 2000, with microsoft being the top dog of the tech world, and left in 2014 with them not even being one of the "big four". Right now Apple, Amazon, Google & HP are all bigger (in terms of revenue) than Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_informatio...
It seems we are in agreement - being overtaken =/= stagnation. A more convincing argument would have been if their revenues had plateued under Ballmer (they didn't - revenue grew by 280% from $25B to $70B in 2014).
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www.data.gov works for me
Quite a few links, including the "Contact" page for every topic, are just showing an error message "Data.gov encountered an unexpected error. We apologize for this inconvenience and assure you that work is underway to correct this problem. Please check back in 15 minutes and thank you for using Data.gov." (which appears to be the same text they show as their generic 404 message.) For example https://www.data.gov/cont…
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> It should be possible to see exactly where the money was spent all the way down to an invoice With that level of visibility ("down to an invoice"), it's easy for people to take up pitch forks and begin lambasting teachers, for example, for their spending on computer software, materials for class, and so on. Perhaps a doctor's medical decisions would start being questioned left, right, and centre, yet the people doi…
I disagree. Let me give you an example. Some years ago,the irish police had a grievance, they were paid less pay for holidays than normal working days. This was because when on holiday they were just receiving their normal salary and weren't getting certain other expenses. In other words, these expenses weren't real expenses but a form of tax-free pay. They had been introduced as an under the table pay increase durin…
Steve Ballmer gives mainly to Republicans and gave money to oppose income tax in Washington state specifically for high earners. I doubt he can be totally nonpartisan on this subject.
Today I filed my tax return showing all the money that came in and every minute expense required to make that money. Why can't we hold the government to the same standard? There should be one (huge) annual spreadsheet published showing how much money came in (federal, state, and local levels), with a detailed accounting of where every penny went, just like I am required to do for my business to claim deductions.
>With an unlimited budget, he went about hiring a team of researchers in Seattle and made a grant to the University of Pennsylvania to help his staff put the information together. Altogether, he has spent more than $10 million between direct funding and grants. $10 million spent so far just trying to figure out what the collective governments in the US is spending money on. Is this an argument for privatization or a…
I don't see that it's either. If it were privatized, it would suffer from economic pressure to suppress data that conflicts with its economic incentives. And we don't pay government (i.e., tax ourselves to provide funds) to do this. No money, no results. That's not a failure of government, it's taxpayers deciding not to have the government provide this service.
This isn't a democracy, it's a representative republic. We vote for our representatives, and trust them to make decisions we'd agree with (or at least agree to go along with.) In turn, they appoint and hire people to make the more detailed decisions needed for day-to-day operations.
A failure to keep track of the government's books is absolutely a failure of the government, and not a result of taxpayers "deciding" that the government shouldn't do it. The representatives and their appointees/hires should have performed that task without being micro-managed to do so, because it's the responsible thing to do. (Not to mention that they require all of us to do it for our own finances.) They've failed to do it, and will probably avoid responsibility for it by using the complex structure of the government to point blame away from themselves.
Yes, we can make a big deal out of this and eventually vote to replace our representatives, who can then replace appointees/hires, and change the rules to make sure the accounting is done. My point is that we, the citizens, should not have to micromanage the government this way. That's the whole point of a representative republic; pure democracies don't scale.
Steve Ballmer gives mainly to Republicans and gave money to oppose income tax in Washington state specifically for high earners. I doubt he can be totally nonpartisan on this subject.
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The optics are good but it's effectively useless in determining whether money is being spent wisely or not. It only gives a very high level picture. It would need to allow one to go a whole lot deeper for people to be able to work out what is value and what isn't. How does the office of taoiseach spend €182 million per annum, for example? It should be possible to see exactly where the money was spent all the way down…
> It should be possible to see exactly where the money was spent all the way down to an invoice With that level of visibility ("down to an invoice"), it's easy for people to take up pitch forks and begin lambasting teachers, for example, for their spending on computer software, materials for class, and so on. Perhaps a doctor's medical decisions would start being questioned left, right, and centre, yet the people doi…
I find this reasoning downright despicable. "Not publishing the data because someone might complain"? Seriously? That is the very reason it should be published, to enable constructive criticism.
I agree people might start nitpicking on minor stuff. But it seems the positive outcomes of being 100% transparent would far outweighs the negative ones.