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USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

usafacts.org

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Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#51

Post by caseysoftware »

neap24 wrote: post #41
lloydde wrote: post #30

"USAFacts was inspired by a conversation Steve Ballmer had with his wife. She wanted him to get more involved in philanthropic work. He thought it made sense to first find out what government does with the money it raises." Had anyone made the comic strip version? Wife: it breaks my heart to hear about the many suffering Americans. We can't take our money with us when we die, let's help our fellow Americans? Steve: t…

I get the joke, but in all seriousness we probably need both types of people in the world. Some who take immediate action and others who prepare the way for more informed action.

It's all in the marketing.

Frame it as "data-driven decision making" and we'll get 100s of think pieces from various tech luminaries and wannabe luminaries.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#52

Post by velodrome »

lloydde wrote: post #30

"USAFacts was inspired by a conversation Steve Ballmer had with his wife. She wanted him to get more involved in philanthropic work. He thought it made sense to first find out what government does with the money it raises." Had anyone made the comic strip version? Wife: it breaks my heart to hear about the many suffering Americans. We can't take our money with us when we die, let's help our fellow Americans? Steve: t…

I find PerotCharts more useful (with commentary), than this particular site. Too bad it has not been updated in a while.

http://perotcharts.website/

Yes, its that Perot: Ross Perot.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#53

Post by notheguyouthink »

ebbv wrote: post #27

I'm actually more suspicious of anything claiming to be "non-partisan" than something that wears its foundational beliefs on its sleeves. At least if something says "We are a Libertarian non-profit" or "We are a Socialist non-profit" or something like that, I know better what specific grain of salt to use when reading its materials. Anything that claims to be non-profit is merely hiding the slant that its people have…

Fair point! I should hope raw numbers are truly unbiased, though they could still include more graphs that paint the picture they're wanting to paint.

Note that i've not yet seen the site, even with http it's under a nearly dead load haha.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#54

Post by droopyEyelids »

jdc0589 wrote: post #50
avar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drill down to any individual metric, e.g. http://usafacts.org/metrics/12892 it says "Sources for this data are coming soon" & "Download coming soon". Give them some time, they just launched.

thats pretty important... The entire point of this thing is to be transparent.

Thats the creator's presentation of the purpose of it.

Snarky? yes, but an important distinction. A truly objective point of view doesn't exist as far as we know.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#55

Post by true_religion »

jdc0589 wrote: post #50
avar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drill down to any individual metric, e.g. http://usafacts.org/metrics/12892 it says "Sources for this data are coming soon" & "Download coming soon". Give them some time, they just launched.

thats pretty important... The entire point of this thing is to be transparent.

Well it is, but I wasn't planning on taking their numbers and running with them today, so I think its okay if their MVP is "here's some numbers, we'll tell you how we got them next week".

All that level of detail is necessary to make things actionable, but if they're gathering data no one cares about---that's pretty important, and you can't know that before launch.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#56

Post by austenallred »

neap24 wrote: post #41
lloydde wrote: post #30

"USAFacts was inspired by a conversation Steve Ballmer had with his wife. She wanted him to get more involved in philanthropic work. He thought it made sense to first find out what government does with the money it raises." Had anyone made the comic strip version? Wife: it breaks my heart to hear about the many suffering Americans. We can't take our money with us when we die, let's help our fellow Americans? Steve: t…

I get the joke, but in all seriousness we probably need both types of people in the world. Some who take immediate action and others who prepare the way for more informed action.

It's entirely likely that USAFacts does more for the underprivileged than Steve Ballmer Philanthropist ever could

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#58

Post by tommynicholas »

lloydde wrote: post #30

"USAFacts was inspired by a conversation Steve Ballmer had with his wife. She wanted him to get more involved in philanthropic work. He thought it made sense to first find out what government does with the money it raises." Had anyone made the comic strip version? Wife: it breaks my heart to hear about the many suffering Americans. We can't take our money with us when we die, let's help our fellow Americans? Steve: t…

I also like this joke in a way except it implies Steve didn't also increase his funding and participation in his wife's philanthropic work, which he has said in multiple interviews where he's shared this anecdote that he has.

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#59

Post by tpetricek »

panarky wrote: post #17

This would be really powerful if it provided access to the original data sources. Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions. The US has 3,000 counties and 20,000 towns and cities, each one a petri dish of experiments in governance. Imagine what we could learn! From the NYT [1]: Want to know how many pol…

This is exactly the kind of frustration I feel almost all the time when I see some nice data visualizations on the internet! And that's why I began working on https://thegamma.net. Now I just need to convince Mr. Ballmer to use it...

Re: USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources

#60

Post by 27182818284 »

drewbailey wrote: post #9
neilsimp1 wrote: post #2

503: Service Unavailable

Yeah I got a Cloudflare DDOS check then a 503. Non HTTPS seems to be working, http://usafacts.org/

Cloudflare lately has become an immediate tab-closing prompt the way paywalls usually are
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