The site has probably configured themselves as "I'm under attack" as that will challenge almost everyone and ease load from their servers of bots (and those hitting F5 from the outset).
They're clearly on fire whilst they scale up, and I would expect that once they've got past the first week they'll ease up on the Cloudflare security level and challenges.
They just have a domain validation cert. That doesn't mean much, other than your communication with the site is secure. And there's HTTP resources being pulled in invalidating most of that security. Bonus derp points for being a COMODO cert.
> On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
There is no such thing as a politically neutral fact these days. Where leadership is based on fantastical assertions pulled from the air, the machine measuring daily rainfall is a partisan political pundit to be attacked and sidelined at will. Fact-reporting organizations are moot when those in power care only for opinion and "gut". While i support such efforts, I fear that at the current moment our problems are too fundimental for them to have any net impact.
That's the beauty of it though. These are cold hard facts and as long as the veracity of the data is held true the insight can be enormous. The recent dialogue of fake news has made the public think far more about the media and information they're consuming. With something like public records where there is a significant paper trail it'll be much harder to dispute than climate change. There's a tangibility to this versus the at times ephemeral quality of climate change. There's concrete dates printed or typed into documents versus trends and weather patterns. 538 in this past election cycle anecdotally to me received a huge boost in readership due in part from the data journalism. I do think people are inclined to be skeptical of any "fact" but with government records I believe that skepticism quietens.
But these aren't public records. This is a curated list of public records, curated by an organization backed by a retired billionaire. This isn't even a new GAO. It is just another layer of political reporting pretending to be neutral. It itself must be vetted and fact-checked.
Even if one gets beyond that and down to actual public records of facts, what is and isn't available to the public in the US is itself political. The public is denied so much information that in other nations they would expected. Want to see a candidates tax return? You have to ask. Want to know how many firearms are sold or how many people were shot by police last week? There are no electronic databases, even the government doesn't know. Want to see how much your neighbour pays in property taxes on his new house? Canadians can look that up on a website. Americans cannot as "privacy" too often trumps information. When access to facts is itself politicized anyone trying to neutrally report on those facts can only amplify divides.
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 police officers are employed in various
parts of the country and compare that against crime rates?
Want to know how much revenue is brought in from parking tickets
and the cost to collect?
Want to know what percentage of Americans suffer from diagnosed
depression and how much the government spends on it?
That’s in there. You can slice the numbers in all sorts of ways.
Unfortunately, I'm not seeing source data on the site. There are high-level charts and PDF reports so far.
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.
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.
Considering that this site isn't really involved with any of the organizations providing the data, it's not really "transparent" in the sense that it should be. Even if they provide the data for download, there's no way to verify that it hasn't been tampered or transformed since its initial collection. They would need to link to the actual sources directly and I don't think that's going to happen.
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...
Given that I'm just now writing a professional development series for using R in the classroom, these data sources would be really useful. Having a broad source of things we could analyze would be rad.
>Imagine if you could analyze the results of public policy, with clean and detailed data, independently curated, without political or bureaucratic distortions.
I would not be so sure. There's no such thing as a point of view from nowhere.
Bias can influence the collection and computation of data just as easily as it can influence its presentation and framing. The old saying is "never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself."
In some ways, presenting as neutral means that neither group is going to trust you. I'm not sure if it actually accomplishes anything.
You mean people are more likely to die in census years? I mean, it could be true, but I'm not willing to bet on it.
[edit] So I went and put "why is death rate higher in census years?" into the google search bar, and the first result is "Causes of Death - Census". I didn't actually click on the link to find out, but that title certainly sounds like the census kills people. So maybe you're right. :)
It sounds like you're inventing reasons to post-hoc rationalize bad data. What exactly are the intermediate years estimates of? What does "isn't compensated" even mean in this context?
Doesn't make the chart bad... just makes the data a little wonky.
The chart is great. It perfectly represents exactly the data in the tabular form. The data is apparently garbage though.
The intermediate years use statistical methods that better address some of the practical difficulties in getting complete and unique responses; the "actual enumeration" is well-known to be less accurate (in fact, the same methods used for between census estimates are also used by the census bureau to produce and publish estimates of the over- and under-counts in the actual enumeration.)
There was (probably still is, despite the fact that it seems to be a lost cause) a movement to use the better methods for all purposes, but given that it would be a constitutional change and the errors benefit the already politically powerful, there is pretty much no chance of it happening any time in the foreseeable future.
OTOH, I don't know ow that that actually has anything to do with the chart at issue: there is no information on sources or methodology, just "sources of this data are coming soon". If you don't have the sources ready to cite, you have no business publishing visualizations of the supposed data.
They aren't jumps suddenly correcting a bad estimate with new data. They are gigantic 25% spikes which are then immediately undone. There is no way to explain this chart by just saying that estimates worsen over time.
Depending on the estimate, the most recent census data might not be fully incorporated into the model until several years following the census?
I can't look at your link at the moment because the corporate firewall is currently blocking the domain.
But there really isn't any way to get around the fact that real census data are only collected once every 10 years (and the 1890 census was burned, so that point is missing).
When you can look at the links you'll see what I mean.
To give a description of the problem in text...
Both charts are labeled "Deaths", but I'm going to describe one of them for you.
The time span from 1981 to 1999 goes like this:
1,968,365 - 1,998,559 - 2,033,124 - 2,068,679 - 2,091,359 - 2,105,024 - 2,163,984 - 2,161,764 - [1,637,394] - [2,656,721] - 2,180,115 - 2,226,027 - 2,282,854 - 2,284,363 - 2,317,918 - 2,321,933 - 2,330,759 - 2,359,088 - 2,386,995
And then 2000 is [2,979,442]
And then 2001 is 2,430,225
And so on. Every 10 years, and also in 1989, there is a fluctuation by 500,000 deaths from the expected number given the surrounding trends.
All of the numbers that are _not_ between [] above look like a smooth upward trend, yeah?
So WTF is happening in the three that have [] if the data isn't bogus? I say the data must be bogus.
Births and deaths are derivatives. Thus a 25% spike is basically just an adjustment to reflect smaller (~2-3%) errors in the non-census years. To put numbers to this: imagine 100 people were born every year between 1991 and 2000, inclusive. The statistics only recorded 98 people being born every year, though. We then did a census, and discovered that the number of people <10 years old in 2000 was 1000 people, thus we recorded a number of births as 118 (since we thought that 882 people had been born so far in 1991-1999), and then back down to 100 in the next year.
Why would it extrapolate 25% lower values on all other years? If the 10th years are the actual data points, the computed trend line through only census years shouldn't be so radically different from the drawn markers.
In any case, the differences are small in this instance over the long run
>If the 10th years are the actual data points, the computed trend line through only census years shouldn't be so radically different from the drawn markers.
Except if the trend line is based on the other data source, and the peaks on the census data.
I can't access USAfacts right now but the census shouldn't matter for this if it's just crude deaths since those are reported through a different system and are a precise count. I can't think of any reason why there would be a 10 year spike in the data, it's definitely an error of some kind.
It's the trend line generation, not the data. The start and end points are the same between the two graphs. To say that this nitpick throws shade on the entire project is a bit overstated.
What you just said doesn't make any sense and is a post-hoc rationalization besides.
The start and end points are the same between the two graphs.
Actually they are not. The starting numbers (1980) differ between the two charts by ~500,000 deaths.
To say that this nitpick throws shade on the entire project is a bit overstated.
My very first search on the data came up with this. I suppose I could have kept searching but that puts me personally at a 100% error rate. Maybe I'm just really really unlucky, though.
This would not result in the spikes that we are seeing. If it was a readjusted population, then the number would rise sharply every tens years and stay up.
What a cool service. The spending by our country (and the associated deficits and debt) shouldn't have to be a partisan issue clouded by smoke and mirrors and political handwringing.
I didn't care much for how Ballmer ran Microsoft (except for his developer conference chants), but I'm really warming to the post-Microsoft Steve Ballmer.
Still surprising it's failing this hard given most of the data on the site is static (I think? Difficult to tell since almost none of the site loads).
Edit: tbh it's a shame they chose to do it all in react/js. I think this sort of data would be better served to the world as good old html for the most part - the build tool generated source for some of the pages on usafacts is horrendous.
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 put on the data it is providing. The idea that anything can be presented free of the biases introduced by the people presenting it is a silly myth. Which is not to say people shouldn't make an effort to be fair and unbiased when trying to present facts, but we all have inherent biases that are basically impossible for us to remove ourselves.
Raw numbers will not be unbiased because people are involved in collecting them. That's true of anything that passes through human hands, but it's especially true in anything involving public policy, where it's understood that the opposing side will be looking for any slant they can get, which means the publishing side will be looking to CYA as much as they can get away with.
Unfortunately which data they choose to show and how they frame it makes a big difference. There are objective facts but we all color them intentionally or unintentionally despite our best efforts.
"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: that's what the government is for.
Wife: I thought you might say that so I ran the numbers.
Steve: hmm, I'm not agreeing with your interpretation. I think we're going to have to do additional modeling.
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.
I've seen some well-intentioned foundations spin around in circles, burning through a lot of donor money as they adopt and discard naive models about the nature of teen pregnancy, over-fishing, recidivism, educational success and failure, etc., etc.
Yes. We do need both types of people in the world.
I have a ton of respect for Steve Ballmer. My intent is good fun.
The humor for me hinges on "[Mr Ballmer] thought it made sense to first ... government" implying he sees it as a necessary sequence for him to dig into the data and he wasn't satisfied with the data he had access to. It also humors me that it reads like he doesn't consider the initiative itself being philanthropic. Yes, I do enjoy that it also allows for words to be put in Mr Ballmer's mouth for some darker humor: Mr Ballmer believes it's the role of the government. And Mr Ballmer couldn't find any of the numerous paths paved with objective analysis that he could use to get more involved in philanthropic work.
Of course, none of these interpretations match reality. I do like the intro coming across, at least partially, as normal geek thinking. I like that the About hasn't yet been PR distilled.
Joking aside, it's eminently normal, if you're setting out to help people, to ask first where your help might do the most good. And when attempting to answer that question, if you find that nobody has bothered to collect the data, it's normal to proceed to collect the data. The effort itself is philanthropy, and it forms a foundation for future philanthropy.
Although that point of view appears to miss the point. It appears the inability to pay for food with the health budget would hide / obfuscate the data that might have otherwise shown a direct correlation between malnutrition and poor health.
Sure you could read a study to get the same information, but unless your own data screams to you what the problem is it's not always easy to convince folks you should be doing anything about it.
I don't blame the bureaucrat who denied this claim. While food is clearly required for your health, and there is a strong connection between healthy diet and general and specific health issues, including death, pharmacies don't dispense food. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that insurance would approve supplements, not food, for malnutrition since that is something traditionally associated with health care.
What would you say if the family was providing unhealthy food, and the doctor prescribed a year of vegetables from Medicaid? I agree, that would be a great program, but federal agencies can only do what they're specifically allowed to by law. I would imagine there is much data gathered on what conditions Medicare patients are suffering from, and i presume if malnutrition is common, that would be addressed in agency reports and in congress.
I'm not sure what data you're envisioning 'screaming' to responsible parties or what method they would be encountering this data by.
Depending on the age of the child, those programs may only provide food for a certain amount of time, over the lifetime of the adult applying for the benefits.
Or, if the adult has any property that increases their net worth over a certain amount, then they can't get the benefit at all.
That's true. But the appropriate programs should be created, budgeted, or extended to provide food appropriately, not to somehow mix basic daily nutrition with doctors, insurance and pharmacies.
If they found a medical relationship is more effective, great. But the answer is to budget and create appropriate rules for that first.
For those prone to confirmation bias, commentary and interpretation of data can be counterproductive. The fact that Ballmer is purposefully not setting an agenda makes this more powerful. Otherwise people tend to accumulate their own set of convenient facts.
>> Otherwise people tend to accumulate their own set of convenient facts.
>I think people will do this anyway...are we not human?
Be careful with this sentiment. It is defeatist cynicism masquerading as self-deprecation. As such it undermines the truly well-meaning among us, conflating their intellectual humility with another's willful ignorance.
Of course they will - just look at another set of comments on this page. Two people coming to diametrically opposed conclusions based on the same data w/r/t top marginal tax rates and US government revenue.
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.
I'm intrigued by the way they broke down the top-level categories for Federal spending: they used Constitutional phrases, which I haven't seen used this way before (at least not exact quotes, which look so antiquated): https://usafacts.org/the-big-picture?return_to=%2Fgovernment...
I know a lot of people would argue (reasonably) that all government spending should be clearly categorizable under such things, but not that they are.
It reminds me of the "ends policy monitoring" used by a non-profit I'm involved in. The staff pulls out each clause in our end goal ("Ends") policy and breaks down our activities based on those categories.
I'm wondering if this is something Ballmer got from corporate governance. It was new to me when we first started doing it. At any rate, I like it.
And of course, USAFacts' interpretation of the responsibilities of government are right out of the liberal progressive manifesto... but I think that is the way the data need to be reported, because there is no Constitutional anchor-point for 2/3rds of what the US Federal Gov't actually does.
Can you explain the obsession people have with the Constitution? It seems like some people believe all new laws shouldn't exist if they're not in the Constitution.
The Constitution limits the Federal government. One can therefore say that government programs that are outside the scope stated by the Constitution are outside the legitimate scope of the Federal government.
The Tenth Amendment is pretty clear: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Now, I know, the Supreme Court has effectively gutted the Tenth Amendment, but the intent was that the Federal government was restricted to a specific set of activities, rather than allowed to do everything everyone thought was a good idea.
So if you think that the intent matters, then you see much of what the Federal government does as being a power grab of things that it never should have had the power to do - and which it still does not have the legitimate authority to do.
Beyond the intent, the plain meaning of the text is clear. If the power is not explicitly enumerated as belonging to the federal government, it is reserved to the states. At most, this would allow the federal government to implement a policy based on a non-enumerated power, which state legislatures could then override. Only powers explicitly enumerated would be binding across the Union.
Telecommunication has really changed the way the world works with respect to all of this, and made us care much more about the federal government than the state governments that are, on paper, supposed to be much more powerful.
Without kind-of ignoring the limitations of the constitution, we'd likely have had an Articles of Confederation style crisis at some point, and had to replace (or heavily amend) the Constitution since then. Which would be better than kind-of ignoring it from our perspective, though not from that of the people who had to live through said crisis.
As it is, we de facto ignore the parts that would screw up operating a modern nation-state, the "must preserve the independence of states!" wing gets to not-vote for amendments that de jure reduce said independence in order to let things actually work well/sanely, and no-one has to live through a crisis bad enough to get that wing to abandon their position. So... win/win if you're happy with a local maximum, I guess?
The U.S. Constitution and its amendments establishes limits to the power of the Federal Government. The obsession with it is that governments tends to overstep their bounds. It's something the lay person can read and point to, and definitively say when the government is doing something it is not authorized to do.
I'm pretty sure that many people have had conflicting ideas about what the government is "definitively" allowed to do or not do, which is what things like the courts and the legislature are for - to decide those things, and ratify clarifications and changes if needed. "Constitutional Law" is not an easy thing for a lay person to interpret.
I think there's a pretty good analogy to be made between legislation and software. The Constitution is the "operating system" of the US government, and the laws are "applications" that run on that OS. If an application attempts to do something not permitted by the OS, it should be an error.
So, the system is full of users, each of whom want different features to be supported by the OS. And some features are needed to protect subsets of the users, while other users not so much. What seems to be happening is, some of the users don't want certain features implemented. In order to stop these features, they are claiming that the OS design specifically forbids these features.
But the OS is software. And the users collectively pay the contractors who write the software, and they can change it to say anything they want it to say, because the users are paying for it, and using it. Unlike religion, the design is not literally written in stone. The designers were well educated on the history of OS design, and knew that designs change over time. So their design allows for modifications without a total rewrite - something they saw as a feature.
So it seems to me the arguments and proclamations made by some users that "It's not in the design!!!" are equivalent to those made by, say, systemd opponents. There's a lot of people (myself included) that do not want systemd in their OS. But if all the other users vote and want systemd in the OS, I will capitulate and learn to deal with it.
We shouldn't get so caught up in the damn kernel or OS that we stop improving the whole system.
Changing the OS is fine, but there's only one way to do it: via constitutional amendment. Merely wanting it to say something different is not sufficient. The users have to follow the official enhancement process.
What I originally was trying to get at is how the Constitution has almost nothing to do with most of what the federal government actually does. It sets the boundaries of civil liberties, policy and procedure, federal authority, the separation of federal powers, and the differences between states and the federal government.
The Constitution is not an OS, or even a kernel - it is an access control policy. What the government actually does is implement that ACL. So when people invoke the constitution all the time, it's like saying "They're trying to download 10 gigabytes of data, but the ACLs!!!!!", when the ACLs don't have anything to do with disk quota. So this is my point: people keep bringing up the Constitution when it does not apply.
"Can you explain the obsession people have with the Constitution?"
It's the foundational document of the most powerful, prosperous nation in the history of the species. Things like that attract allegiance. It would be strange if it didn't.
"It seems like some people believe all new laws shouldn't exist if they're not in the Constitution."
Your "some people" straw man is likely fictional, or at least very rare. Laws that conflict with the constitution can be struct down via Judicial Review. Otherwise new laws are entirely compatible with the constitution. The US and its various states have no difficulty producing reams of new laws that survive the constitution just fine.
I'm frustrated that the plots are not accompanied by definitions. In the US population charts, what is meant by divorce rate? Also I have no idea what "currently married" means.[1]
358 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 285 ms ] threadThe site has probably configured themselves as "I'm under attack" as that will challenge almost everyone and ease load from their servers of bots (and those hitting F5 from the outset).
They're clearly on fire whilst they scale up, and I would expect that once they've got past the first week they'll ease up on the Cloudflare security level and challenges.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...
> On Tuesday, Mr. Ballmer plans to make public a database and a report that he and a small army of economists, professors and other professionals have been assembling as part of a stealth start-up over the last three years called USAFacts. The database is perhaps the first nonpartisan effort to create a fully integrated look at revenue and spending across federal, state and local governments.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14136081
Even if one gets beyond that and down to actual public records of facts, what is and isn't available to the public in the US is itself political. The public is denied so much information that in other nations they would expected. Want to see a candidates tax return? You have to ask. Want to know how many firearms are sold or how many people were shot by police last week? There are no electronic databases, even the government doesn't know. Want to see how much your neighbour pays in property taxes on his new house? Canadians can look that up on a website. Americans cannot as "privacy" too often trumps information. When access to facts is itself politicized anyone trying to neutrally report on those facts can only amplify divides.
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]:
Unfortunately, I'm not seeing source data on the site. There are high-level charts and PDF reports so far.[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...
Snarky? yes, but an important distinction. A truly objective point of view doesn't exist as far as we know.
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.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/
Use some examples from the above for the class presentations, then homework is to replicate with US data.
PS: if you decide to publish your presentations/course materials freely, do post the location to HN
I would not be so sure. There's no such thing as a point of view from nowhere.
Bias can influence the collection and computation of data just as easily as it can influence its presentation and framing. The old saying is "never trust a statistic you haven't faked yourself."
In some ways, presenting as neutral means that neither group is going to trust you. I'm not sure if it actually accomplishes anything.
Compare the following: http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815 vs http://usafacts.org/metrics/12966
In the second chart half a million more people decide to die every 10th year?
( imgur link to screenshots in case the links don't work: http://imgur.com/a/tY02j )
[edit] So I went and put "why is death rate higher in census years?" into the google search bar, and the first result is "Causes of Death - Census". I didn't actually click on the link to find out, but that title certainly sounds like the census kills people. So maybe you're right. :)
The estimates are just bad and not adjusted historically. Doesn't make the chart bad... just makes the data a little wonky.
Doesn't make the chart bad... just makes the data a little wonky.
The chart is great. It perfectly represents exactly the data in the tabular form. The data is apparently garbage though.
There was (probably still is, despite the fact that it seems to be a lost cause) a movement to use the better methods for all purposes, but given that it would be a constitutional change and the errors benefit the already politically powerful, there is pretty much no chance of it happening any time in the foreseeable future.
OTOH, I don't know ow that that actually has anything to do with the chart at issue: there is no information on sources or methodology, just "sources of this data are coming soon". If you don't have the sources ready to cite, you have no business publishing visualizations of the supposed data.
The big jumps on census years indicate that the census department does not estimate accurately when working with 9-year-old data.
They aren't jumps suddenly correcting a bad estimate with new data. They are gigantic 25% spikes which are then immediately undone. There is no way to explain this chart by just saying that estimates worsen over time.
I can't look at your link at the moment because the corporate firewall is currently blocking the domain.
But there really isn't any way to get around the fact that real census data are only collected once every 10 years (and the 1890 census was burned, so that point is missing).
To give a description of the problem in text...
Both charts are labeled "Deaths", but I'm going to describe one of them for you.
The time span from 1981 to 1999 goes like this: 1,968,365 - 1,998,559 - 2,033,124 - 2,068,679 - 2,091,359 - 2,105,024 - 2,163,984 - 2,161,764 - [1,637,394] - [2,656,721] - 2,180,115 - 2,226,027 - 2,282,854 - 2,284,363 - 2,317,918 - 2,321,933 - 2,330,759 - 2,359,088 - 2,386,995
And then 2000 is [2,979,442]
And then 2001 is 2,430,225
And so on. Every 10 years, and also in 1989, there is a fluctuation by 500,000 deaths from the expected number given the surrounding trends.
All of the numbers that are _not_ between [] above look like a smooth upward trend, yeah? So WTF is happening in the three that have [] if the data isn't bogus? I say the data must be bogus.
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1996/spring/1...
Or it's from another source that gives different metrics obtained every 10 years (e.g. from census) with some extrapolation?
In any case, the differences are small in this instance over the long run, it's the lack of source and other metadata that its more troubling.
In any case, the differences are small in this instance over the long run
The differences in those years are _huge_.
Except if the trend line is based on the other data source, and the peaks on the census data.
They look similar to me. One has less granular data than the other. What exactly are you implying?
Do a quick calculation for me, please.
What percent of 2 million is 500 thousand? Because the errors are 500 thousand on 2-2.5 million. That's a huge amount of error.
What you just said doesn't make any sense and is a post-hoc rationalization besides.
The start and end points are the same between the two graphs.
Actually they are not. The starting numbers (1980) differ between the two charts by ~500,000 deaths.
To say that this nitpick throws shade on the entire project is a bit overstated.
My very first search on the data came up with this. I suppose I could have kept searching but that puts me personally at a 100% error rate. Maybe I'm just really really unlucky, though.
This still shows the flaws in the website. It does not say what the scale is in on graph at all, and other graphs will not be so obviously incorrect.
I didn't care much for how Ballmer ran Microsoft (except for his developer conference chants), but I'm really warming to the post-Microsoft Steve Ballmer.
Edit: tbh it's a shame they chose to do it all in react/js. I think this sort of data would be better served to the world as good old html for the most part - the build tool generated source for some of the pages on usafacts is horrendous.
Anything that claims to be non-profit is merely hiding the slant that its people have put on the data it is providing. The idea that anything can be presented free of the biases introduced by the people presenting it is a silly myth. Which is not to say people shouldn't make an effort to be fair and unbiased when trying to present facts, but we all have inherent biases that are basically impossible for us to remove ourselves.
Note that i've not yet seen the site, even with http it's under a nearly dead load haha.
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: that's what the government is for.
Wife: I thought you might say that so I ran the numbers.
Steve: hmm, I'm not agreeing with your interpretation. I think we're going to have to do additional modeling.
USAfacts was born.
Months later...
Wife: are we ready to really help the poor?
Steve: this data is fascinating!
Frame it as "data-driven decision making" and we'll get 100s of think pieces from various tech luminaries and wannabe luminaries.
Yes. We do need both types of people in the world.
The humor for me hinges on "[Mr Ballmer] thought it made sense to first ... government" implying he sees it as a necessary sequence for him to dig into the data and he wasn't satisfied with the data he had access to. It also humors me that it reads like he doesn't consider the initiative itself being philanthropic. Yes, I do enjoy that it also allows for words to be put in Mr Ballmer's mouth for some darker humor: Mr Ballmer believes it's the role of the government. And Mr Ballmer couldn't find any of the numerous paths paved with objective analysis that he could use to get more involved in philanthropic work.
Of course, none of these interpretations match reality. I do like the intro coming across, at least partially, as normal geek thinking. I like that the About hasn't yet been PR distilled.
Steve: Did you know school teachers are one of the largest groups of federal employees?
Sure you could read a study to get the same information, but unless your own data screams to you what the problem is it's not always easy to convince folks you should be doing anything about it.
What would you say if the family was providing unhealthy food, and the doctor prescribed a year of vegetables from Medicaid? I agree, that would be a great program, but federal agencies can only do what they're specifically allowed to by law. I would imagine there is much data gathered on what conditions Medicare patients are suffering from, and i presume if malnutrition is common, that would be addressed in agency reports and in congress.
I'm not sure what data you're envisioning 'screaming' to responsible parties or what method they would be encountering this data by.
Or, if the adult has any property that increases their net worth over a certain amount, then they can't get the benefit at all.
If they found a medical relationship is more effective, great. But the answer is to budget and create appropriate rules for that first.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...
http://perotcharts.website/
Yes, its that Perot: Ross Perot.
Yes, I agree.
> Otherwise people tend to accumulate their own set of convenient facts.
I think people will do this anyway...are we not human?
>I think people will do this anyway...are we not human?
Be careful with this sentiment. It is defeatist cynicism masquerading as self-deprecation. As such it undermines the truly well-meaning among us, conflating their intellectual humility with another's willful ignorance.
Yes, but that's not relevant. The point is that there's nothing to be gained by encouraging that behavior.
Of course they will - just look at another set of comments on this page. Two people coming to diametrically opposed conclusions based on the same data w/r/t top marginal tax rates and US government revenue.
I know a lot of people would argue (reasonably) that all government spending should be clearly categorizable under such things, but not that they are.
It reminds me of the "ends policy monitoring" used by a non-profit I'm involved in. The staff pulls out each clause in our end goal ("Ends") policy and breaks down our activities based on those categories.
I'm wondering if this is something Ballmer got from corporate governance. It was new to me when we first started doing it. At any rate, I like it.
?
The Tenth Amendment is pretty clear: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Now, I know, the Supreme Court has effectively gutted the Tenth Amendment, but the intent was that the Federal government was restricted to a specific set of activities, rather than allowed to do everything everyone thought was a good idea.
So if you think that the intent matters, then you see much of what the Federal government does as being a power grab of things that it never should have had the power to do - and which it still does not have the legitimate authority to do.
Telecommunication has really changed the way the world works with respect to all of this, and made us care much more about the federal government than the state governments that are, on paper, supposed to be much more powerful.
As it is, we de facto ignore the parts that would screw up operating a modern nation-state, the "must preserve the independence of states!" wing gets to not-vote for amendments that de jure reduce said independence in order to let things actually work well/sanely, and no-one has to live through a crisis bad enough to get that wing to abandon their position. So... win/win if you're happy with a local maximum, I guess?
But the OS is software. And the users collectively pay the contractors who write the software, and they can change it to say anything they want it to say, because the users are paying for it, and using it. Unlike religion, the design is not literally written in stone. The designers were well educated on the history of OS design, and knew that designs change over time. So their design allows for modifications without a total rewrite - something they saw as a feature.
So it seems to me the arguments and proclamations made by some users that "It's not in the design!!!" are equivalent to those made by, say, systemd opponents. There's a lot of people (myself included) that do not want systemd in their OS. But if all the other users vote and want systemd in the OS, I will capitulate and learn to deal with it.
We shouldn't get so caught up in the damn kernel or OS that we stop improving the whole system.
The Constitution is not an OS, or even a kernel - it is an access control policy. What the government actually does is implement that ACL. So when people invoke the constitution all the time, it's like saying "They're trying to download 10 gigabytes of data, but the ACLs!!!!!", when the ACLs don't have anything to do with disk quota. So this is my point: people keep bringing up the Constitution when it does not apply.
It's the foundational document of the most powerful, prosperous nation in the history of the species. Things like that attract allegiance. It would be strange if it didn't.
"It seems like some people believe all new laws shouldn't exist if they're not in the Constitution."
Your "some people" straw man is likely fictional, or at least very rare. Laws that conflict with the constitution can be struct down via Judicial Review. Otherwise new laws are entirely compatible with the constitution. The US and its various states have no difficulty producing reams of new laws that survive the constitution just fine.
[1] http://usafacts.org/us-population