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Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

whoaremyrepresentatives.org

91–100 of 167 posts

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#91
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is one of very few countries who collect income tax from their overseas citizens.

There are only two; the US and Eritrea.

yep (with few minor exemptions related to income from tax heavens)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_taxation#Individ...

As a side note, the biggest difference seems to be how countries treat foreign income.

Almost every country that has Income Taxes will tax any local income.

But there's a lot of variance on what they do for foreign income.

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking, what are you doing for the ACA individual mandate? I moved abroad in the middle of this year and cancelled my US health insurance when I became eligible for NHS care. I'm realising now that there isn't a way to get a 1095-B from a government-run healthcare system that isn't in the US. Should I just pay the penalty for not having health insurance in the UK?

Forgive my ignorance but why is there a penalty and who is it due to?

there is a penalty because the system is supposed to reduce costs by enrolling everybody (even the healthiest who may feel like they don't need it) WHILE the health insurance sector still is a for-profit competitive market (so there's no "auto-enrolment").

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#93

I got my list and was pleased to see things like Auditor and Coroner, but why no state senator or state representative? There's also no judicial branch to be found, which may not matter much for the Federal Supreme Court, because they're appointed, but just about every jurisdiction I fall under, State Supreme, State Appeals, Local Criminal, Local family, has an elected judge. Judges tend to be a major source of ballo…

Yeah, also does have all the other elected officials for districts (school, fire, etc.)

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#94

I got my list and was pleased to see things like Auditor and Coroner, but why no state senator or state representative? There's also no judicial branch to be found, which may not matter much for the Federal Supreme Court, because they're appointed, but just about every jurisdiction I fall under, State Supreme, State Appeals, Local Criminal, Local family, has an elected judge. Judges tend to be a major source of ballo…

[deleted]

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#95
post #2

Why does it ask for your address? Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list. Are they harvesting the address data for some reason?

"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list." This is not even, sadly, close to true. In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes. While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of represe…

Are there really districts that split apartment buildings by floor? How is that described by the text that sets the boundaries?

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#96
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it yields detail clear down to local offices It has city councils, but it doesn't have any local districts. In Sunnyvale, you are also being represented on at least the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District[1], the El Camino Health Care District[2], and the Santa Clara Valley Water District[3]. If you are curious how I figured this out, I went to the Santa Clara County Local Agency Formation website, which has…

Why do so much work and post on HN instead of sending them a quick mail?

To be fair, chances are the website makers are going to go through every single Hacker news comment anyway.

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#97
To everyone posting here:

I am a creator of this service. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email secure@politiwatch.org!

We're extremely encouraged by all the positive feedback here, and we're glad to provide a service that you all found helpful.

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#98

Looks like this API does a lot of the heavy lifting for this: https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/

Yes, that's one of our primary data sources. We're working on leaving it, however, because we're also Google-phobes.

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#99
post #39

Really useful, love the idea. There may be some data troubles though, I looked up myself and found that the Twitter link for Senator Maria Cantwell goes to a porn account, not her actual profile. Yikes!

Whoops.....

We'll get on fixing that.

Re: Enter your address and find out everyone who represents you in U.S. government

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sysadmin of Politiwatch here (non-profit that made the site). We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious. Regardless, we ask for the address as well as zip because in many areas, a ZIP is not sufficient to gather detailed data, as an official may represent one part of a ZIP code and not another. Politiwatch, the non-profit that made WhoAreMyRe…

> We're not harvesting your data. In fact, we nuke it right after we serve the request. We're super privacy conscious. That's not the whole truth. While you may be deleting the submitted form values, your site uses a third-party tracking service which collects a range of visitor data[0] which is stored by that third party. Third-party tracking is useful and mainstream, but you should have a privacy policy and disclos…

You clearly did your research.

We'll put up a cookie notification soon.

Also, we configured our analytics to not store the HTTP parameters 'address' and 'zip' (where the address is encoded), so I'm not lying when I say the addresses are "nuked."

That said, we'll implement everything you have mentioned as soon as we feel its safe to be pushing out changes... the traffic right now is high and we don't want to mess anything up.

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