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USA Facts – Federal, state, and local data from government sources
- neilsimp1 9y ago503: Service Unavailable
- holtalanm 9y agoGot a CloudFlare error here. Error 522.
- drewbailey 9y agoYeah I got a Cloudflare DDOS check then a 503. Non HTTPS seems to be working, http://usafacts.org/ http://usafacts.org/
- digi_owl 9y agoDear deity i hate those...
- 27182818284 9y agoCloudflare lately has become an immediate tab-closing prompt the way paywalls usually are
- SnowingXIV 9y agoDefinitely. Anytime this pops up I leave the site to never return. Why is CF doing this? Instead of preventing ddos you prevent actual users.
- ajross 9y agoIs CloudFlare flagging a HN stampede as a DDoS?
- buro9 9y agoNo. 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.
- Mango_Diesel 9y agoCan anyone see this?
- xanderstrike 9y agoNo, site appears to be down.
- blobbers 9y agoso that's what the healthcare.gov team has been building after they got fired and replaced by the googlers.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mcdan 9y agoDrop https.
- thisisandyok 9y agoThis worked for me too
- ams6110 9y agoCool. I like to get my "facts" from an unverified source.
- abraves10001 9y agoWhile it is more than a bit absurd it doesn't work with https, I am not sure the "s" provides much fact verification.
- jrodthree24 9y agoIt doesn't verify the facts but it helps to verify the source as in making sure you are actually connected to this site.
- 0xfeba 9y agoThey 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- seanlinehan 9y agoHere is a NYT article that explains what USAFacts.org is: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-ballmer-serves-up-a-fascinating-data-trove.html?_r=0&referer=https://t.co/a4Y8D8bncI 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.
- hackuser 9y agoDiscussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14136081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14136081
- sandworm101 9y agoThere 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.
- bhtru 9y agoThat'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.
- splawn 9y agoClimate change is impossible to dispute, unless you ignore the data. I doubt that ideological willful ignorance will ever go away.
- sandworm101 9y agoBut 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.
- jbuild 9y agoWith http seems to be working http://usafacts.org/ http://usafacts.org/
- cpburns2009 9y agoFor such a simple looking website, the page performance itself is awfully slow. From the markup, it appears to use React (bias confirmed).
- Phlarp 9y agoGiven the amount of media attention it garnered in the last 48 hours it's very likely the website is under significant load.
- cpburns2009 9y agoI mean the page performance is poor after everything has loaded which shouldn't be affected by the amount of traffic.
- panarky 9y agoThis 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. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-ballmer-serves-up-a-fascinating-data-trove.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/business/dealbook/steve-b...
- avar 9y agoIf you drill down to any individual metric, e.g. http://usafacts.org/metrics/12892 http://usafacts.org/metrics/12892 it says "Sources for this data are coming soon" & "Download coming soon". Give them some time, they just launched.
- jdc0589 9y agothats pretty important... The entire point of this thing is to be transparent.
- droopyEyelids 9y agoThats 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.
- true_religion 9y agoWell 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.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoBefore anyone goes putting a ton of trust in these charts... Compare the following: http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815 http://usafacts.org/metrics/31815 vs http://usafacts.org/metrics/12966 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 http://imgur.com/a/tY02j )
- taormina 9y agoIsn't this just likely to be caused by the census data?
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoYou 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. :)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- odonnellryan 9y agoI think it's just that the intermediary years are estimations and the chart isn't compensated. The estimates are just bad and not adjusted historically. Doesn't make the chart bad... just makes the data a little wonky.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoIt 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.
- bruleyii 9y agoSeems to be unfinished as in the UI.
- hickmanish 9y agoYou are probably missing some of the static resources. I am still getting 503 and 522 for several requests.
- archeantus 9y agoWhat 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.
- bruleyii 9y agoSeems to be unfinished as in the UI.
- sergiotapia 9y agoSuper slow for what should amount to HTML - why is this website so slow?
- coldtea 9y agoBecause thousands (millions?) are stomping to it, as it was just announced and went viral?
- corford 9y agoStill 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.
- sergiotapia 9y agoStill, it's just HTML.
- ebbv 9y agoI'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.
- notheguyouthink 9y agoFair 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.
- ebbv 9y agoUnfortunately 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.
- cookiecaper 9y agoRaw 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.
- lloydde 9y ago"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. USAfacts was born. Months later... Wife: are we ready to really help the poor? Steve: this data is fascinating!
- neap24 9y agoI 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.
- caseysoftware 9y agoIt'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.
- austenallred 9y agoIt's entirely likely that USAFacts does more for the underprivileged than Steve Ballmer Philanthropist ever could
- GCA10 9y agoI'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.
- lloydde 9y agoI 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.
- dschuetz 9y agoIt's funny that it says 'four missions', but I only count 2 in the quote of the constitution... wow, it's still beta indeed.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
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- lkbm 9y agoI'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-finances&view=spending 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.
- wonderwonder 9y agoUSA Fact: We're #1 ?
- marcgcombi 9y agoAnd 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.
- peterwwillis 9y agoCan 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.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoThe 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.
- cookiecaper 9y agoBeyond 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.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- maverick_iceman 9y agoI'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] [1] http://usafacts.org/us-population http://usafacts.org/us-population
- brilliantcode 9y agoexcellent link, I think it offers a great deal of transparency into USGOV and it's spending in a way that's never been done before.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dandare 9y agoDear USA Facts team, we would like to offer you few hints for public spending visualizations based on our experience. We are the creators of https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016 https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016. - Government spending is only a small part of the public finance. People need to see all public organisations: states and cities, departments, offices, bureaus and agencies, schools, hospital and prisons and obviously all public benefit corporations. If they spend our money we have the right to see their budgets. - Governmental organisations borrow money outside of the government budget(!). This increases the government debt but does not show in the deficit. Just because the deficit is smaller than last year does not mean the debt is not growing faster. - There is a world outside the US. The internet needs a one time stop for all public spending of the world, not just the US. Also you may want to connect the government receipts and expenditures from/to the international organisations, OSN, World Bank, the foreign aid etc. - Public spending and receipts do not follow a tree hierarchy, it is a pseudograph. You will have to deal with so called offsetting receipts, extra budgetary fees, negative expenditures, positive taxes, transfers between organisations etc. We believe the only suitable visualisation style is a sankey diagram. - There are huge size differences between individual budget items. Inside the executive branch you do not want to hide the $3 million sent to Marine Mammal Commission (https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=f224f7560 https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=f22...) but you can not realistically show it next to the $7.52 billion sent to the Railroad Retirement Board (https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=3caea97da https://us.wikibudgets.org/w/united-states-budget-2016?n=3ca...). We solved this by a zoomable interface. (They call it the universe of public spending so let's give them a map!) - The federal government does not even have a definite list of all governmental agencies. I am not kidding. - You will never get all the data but you could build a wiki platform where city officials, school principals, government employees etc contribute with their bits and pieces. They can connect their receipts to the spendings of the superior organisations. If it does not match, citizens can investigate why. (If you want ordinary people to contribute with data you may need a human friendly editor too.) - Different data dimensions will be useful to different people. Show the spending by agency, by programme, by function, by geography, by source etc. Let people combine the dimensions and create custom aggregates. - Let people seamlessly share custom views and comparisons to social media (with relevant OG tags). We have a fake news industry to fight. We wish you best luck.
- adventured 9y ago$12,536 - "paid in taxes by the average single parent in 2015" Noticed that on the front page. That's about as silly as referencing the average household net worth in the US, or the average income - both of which are astronomical due to how well off the top 1/3 are. Show me the median taxes paid.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- the_unknown 9y agoI love the idea of this and hope that it expands to other countries... If only I were a billionaire - CanadaFacts.org
- excalibur 9y agoWait, what? This claims there are 133,564 people currently married in the US, out of a population of 321,418,820. That's 0.04% of the population. Are married.
- phonon 9y agoLooks like they dropped some `000.
- beefman 9y agoCompare to http://www.usgovernmentspending.com http://www.usgovernmentspending.com and associated sites
- Zren 9y agoPDF Report Mirrors: * USAFactsSummary2017.pdf (7.1Mb) https://mega.nz/#!U7ZDHDhb!YXaC9K5U9DG9xjQXdhGGA6PuHE6fT9szhocnd7P6B6I https://mega.nz/#!U7ZDHDhb!YXaC9K5U9DG9xjQXdhGGA6PuHE6fT9szh... * USAFactsReport2017.pdf (48.7Mb) https://mega.nz/#!cupD1DRK!xFIfFl7fbx4XTpifCDhCM-wh7BQps11NOmNpr1vIkbY https://mega.nz/#!cupD1DRK!xFIfFl7fbx4XTpifCDhCM-wh7BQps11NO... * USAFacts_10-K_2017.pdf (0.8Mb) https://mega.nz/#!MyBDXKwJ!mYxTgNJG33Yy0u9m2X4RyfADcKNczRKS_q4nT1L8dRU https://mega.nz/#!MyBDXKwJ!mYxTgNJG33Yy0u9m2X4RyfADcKNczRKS_...
- Cshelton 9y agoI'm seeing many things (if this data is accurate, which assuming it is as it's from all government sources) and trends that go against a large percentage of what the media on both sides are perpetuating. That is my first takeaway at a glance. My second takeaway at a glance is the giant problem that is Social Security. It's been said over and over, and the aggregation of more data into charts comes to the same conclusion. The way Social Security works is not sustainable. Period. Something has to give. A $405 B shortfall on SS in 2015. If that was at least half, we would actually not be running a deficit. We would have a budget surplus if we actually made Social Security/other Gov. retirement program replacement actually sustain itself perpetually. What. A. Concept. A quick third take away seems to be the unprecedented rise in non-cash government aid (food stamps) during the Obama administration. The data is there, needs more analyzing of course. Lastly, it seems that Government revenue for Federal and State/Local has actually increased pretty linearly with the population. Despite all the different changes in the income tax rate/other progressive taxes. This supports an overhaul to the tax code to a more simple, flat tax system. From another data source outside this report, I'd have to find it, but historically, no matter the top bracket tax rate, the Federal government collects about 15-17 % income tax. Including when the top rate was 90%+. As far as the presentation, my favorite part is each piece of government data is tied to 4 distinct duties of government outlined in the Constitution. That's pretty brilliant.
- xienze 9y ago> We would have a budget surplus if we actually made Social Security/other Gov. retirement program replacement actually sustain itself perpetually. What. A. Concept. The problem is that there are a lot of people who believe that SS isn't broken because you can simply increase retirement age, make people pay in more, and other assorted band-aids. SS will be "solvent" until it suddenly isn't, and people need to realize that.
- bigtimeidiot 9y ago>SS will be "solvent" until it suddenly isn't, and people need to realize that. And with a stroke of the pen, they'll make adjustments. SS isn't a real debt obligation; it's merely a "promise".
- uiri 9y agoThe site claims that 100% of payroll taxes are Federal. It looks like they missed San Francisco's Payroll Expense tax http://sftreasurer.org/2016-gross-receipts-tax-payroll-expense-tax-online-filing-instructions http://sftreasurer.org/2016-gross-receipts-tax-payroll-expen... Maybe I am misunderstanding how this tax works though.
- lettergram 9y agoIt's also possible that they couldn't collect the data from SF. Although, that is probably just a FOIA request away.
- gurubavan 9y agoSeems very similar to http://datausa.io http://datausa.io
- lewis500 9y agoI was suuuper excited about this. But this site is cringeworthy, even for a beta, given they spent $10 million on this effort. For one, the division into the constitutional categories is kind of awkward; most people would just like to see by function or department. When the drafters of the constitution wrote these clauses into the constitution, they had no sense that one day the government would be so large or do so many things. It is anachronistic to impose these clauses on a modern state. If everything the government does is somehow serving some role in the US constitution, isn't it kind of funny that virtually all democratic countries provide more or less the same services? The only major difference between the US, with its special constitution, and other democracies' spending is that the US government only directly provides health insurance to about half the population, and the US government spends more on defense and security. I don't think that difference is because of the constitution, but rather historical/cultural factors and randomness. So the application of the constitution simply reflects some kind of delusion on Ballmer's part. Second, the data is sloppily put together. There is a line for "Social insurance administration" which includes federal and local employees but has no combined federal and local total. Then there is another line for "Social Insurance Administration (federal)" which has no federal/local breakdown but has a total. So are there no local social insurance workers? Why not just put everything in one line? Third, this is almost entirely data you could get from the federal reserve's FRED system. In some cases you might need to go to the OECD site or the BLS site. But I'm left wondering: how did they spend years on this? This is more like an extended hackathon project. The data vis really sucks, too.
- dang 9y agoAn article/thread about Steve Ballmer and the origins of this project is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14136081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14136081.
- danso 9y agoIt's a nice effort, but I'm disheartened at the lack of labeling for sourcing, as if the source (nevermind the methodology of collection) is subordinate or ancillary to the data itself. There is a massive difference between stats (and taxonomy) collected by local jurisdictions and, say, by the FBI. I know it's a beta, but it's not as if source labels are some optional feature when it comes to the integrity of data. edit: Exhibit A: Firearms licenses http://imgur.com/a/IggVx http://imgur.com/a/IggVx Where did this data come from? What kind of firearms? What kind of licenses? This data is absolutely useless without context.
- 40acres 9y agoHas this data always been publicly available? Get job by the guys at usafacts.
- intrasight 9y agoNot really useful to me until they add an API. Hope they do soon.
- ruffrey 9y agoGraduation rate seems awfully low, at 59% in 2012. http://usafacts.org/metrics/34352 http://usafacts.org/metrics/34352 --I do not think this is accurate.-- Edit: this is the college graduation rate. I assumed it was high school. Page needs more info!
- zajd 9y agoWhy not?
- bitexploder 9y agoThat is for higher education. You don't think that 41% of people drop out of college / post high school education? My gut says it seems correct.
- flatline 9y agoThe pages are so lacking in info right now that at first glance they appear worse than useless: something that anyone can point to and make any sort of rhetorical conclusion about and have supposed data to back it up. It not only needs the actual data (and...units?), but some broader context behind each data point. I assume these are in the works, but releasing it in this state, with this much press, is a potentially dangerous move for its future.
- yuliyp 9y agoThe population charts (http://usafacts.org/us-population http://usafacts.org/us-population) are interesting. It looks like the government continually underestimated the population, resulting in the "spikes" as each Census brought numbers up toward reality
- ryanmarsh 9y agoCivilian deaths from fires had a big anomaly in 2001.... I assume that was 9/11? http://usafacts.org/metrics/15818 http://usafacts.org/metrics/15818
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- spitfire 9y agoUnfortunately they only give references to their sources, rather than the actual original sources. This might be hard to recreate. Perhaps even impossible. I imagine Steve Balmer opens more doors and gets more cooperation than any of us here would get in accessing the same data. Edit: It seems they're in the process of documenting the processes and methods they used to obtain their datasets. When this is released it could be a very useful tool.
- justanotheratom 9y agoThere is a Visas granted metric. But it is not clear if that is just any type of visa? I would be interested in number of citizenships granted. http://usafacts.org/metrics/25906 http://usafacts.org/metrics/25906
- moondrops 9y agoyou're in luck :D that exists under the metric "naturalizations", which describes the process of acquiring citizenship. http://usafacts.org/metrics/13058 http://usafacts.org/metrics/13058
- justanotheratom 9y agoAah fancy word, thanks. That number seems smaller than I expected.
- emodendroket 9y agoIt seems like a lot of the historical data is complicated by inflation (like the growth in productivity per capita is interesting, but how much is it in real vs. nominal dollars?), but at a glance it doesn't seem to be accounted for.
- rplst8 9y agoWhat the heck is this? http://usafacts.org/metrics/11699 http://usafacts.org/metrics/11699
- _rpd 9y agoI believe it is the number, in thousands, of US persons aged 25 and over having an 8th grade education or higher. As scraped from this web site ... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_104.30.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d15/tables/dt15_104.30.a...
- _pastel 9y agoCan anyone give me some intuition into why 77k people are employed by the Social Security Administration? [1] That's bigger than Google, and I didn't think their scope was that wide. [1] http://usafacts.org/government-finances/employment?comparison=by_government_type&government_type=combined&table=employment--number-of-employees&year=2014 http://usafacts.org/government-finances/employment?compariso... under "Secure the Blessings of Liberty to Ourselves and Our Posterity". The combined count is "n/a" - maybe that's because the State & Local count has some overlap with the Federal count? So I took the maximum of the two.
- StreamBright 9y agoIt might have to do something with efficiency.
- vermontdevil 9y agoThere are SSA offices all over the country that actually meet people. Lots of older voting public that demands this. Same reason why we still have post offices in tiny towns.
- imglorp 9y agoI think so too. I've been in one. Once the non-internet generation goes away, those offices can go away. Or fold it into the Postal system like they have done with passport applications.
- ianai 9y agoUh, I don't think it's a case of people being "non-internet". If the needed wires haven't been ran to your locality then you're not "going internet". Further, the postal service is still critical. We might not use it for every day letters anymore, but it service important functions that nothing else can.
- burkaman 9y ago~1,230 field offices. https://www.ssa.gov/org/ https://www.ssa.gov/org/
- peterkshultz 9y agoThe site isn’t going to mean anything unless people in power use it for their decisions about policy. I sometimes think that half the reason political polarization has gotten so bad is that politicians aren’t citing the same data. One lobbying group can provide one dataset, and that’ll get picked up by Democrats to support their idea. Another lobbying group will provide another dataset, and that’ll get used by Republicans for their counterarguments. If this site could become the definitive source of data—the one that both sides of the aisle trust—there’d be a common data source in policy talks. That could lead to consensus much quicker.
- ianai 9y agoMy take-away is that this is a very 'raw' deployment. i.e. Hopefully they maintain and change this to something much more informative and authoritative over time.
- jedberg 9y agoMan I'm dense. It was only as I dropped my tax forms in the mail just now did I realize why he chose today to release this.
- grandalf 9y agoBy restricting the project to data provided by governments there is absolutely zero chance of much additional accountability being offered by this platform. I think all recipients of public funds should be required to account for all spending per hour, project and employee, and should also publish highly granular KPI and transactional data. I don't necessarily want to see a 10-K, I want access to google analytics, the ERP system, and the financial ledger. It should be possible for anyone with a copy of OpenOffice to determine the cost of the top 10% of patients at any public hospital, the cost of all high level "missions" the US Military is involved in, and the Federal employees who have received the most disciplinary action (or the most complaints).
- yourapostasy 9y agoIs there some common data feed interchange format that can share arbitrary data feeds in arbitrary structures between data sources like this and statistical programs like R or data analysis programs like Mathematica (or Wolfram Alpha)? Kind of like a CSV for the web age? A use case I'm thinking of as an example is on the data source web site I construct a data feed that is represented by a URI to a data feed, consisting of say headers, columns and rows in a table data structure. I paste the URI into R, which pulls it over the wire and then analyzes the data, instead of me downloading the feed and massaging the data into a format ingestible by R. Ideally the format comes out of the box supporting some common data structures like tables and directed graphs, and lets users/developers create their own data structures. Bonus points for the format supporting differential, incremental updates of previously-downloaded cached feeds.
- btym 9y agoWhat's with the spikes every tenth year on the "population changes" graphs? http://usafacts.org/us-population http://usafacts.org/us-population
- clarkmoody 9y agoThe US Census is taken each decade. It's probably an artifact related to that: better data on Census years, worse data otherwise.
- perseusprime11 9y agoOn an unrelated note, Is Steve Ballmer getting ready to contest for President? He's got the colorful personality to be one.
- the_cat_kittles 9y agonote: the expenditures and revenues suggest the net calc here is opposite what it should be http://usafacts.org/government-finances/government-run-businesses?comparison=by_years&government_type=combined&table=grb--all--combined&year=2014 http://usafacts.org/government-finances/government-run-busin...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bobosha 9y agoFunny that a site run by ex-Microsoft CEO doesn't use the MS stack: https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fusafacts.org https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fusafacts.org
- dobeos 9y agois there any way to add comps to this site? it would be very interesting to see how our split of gov't spending compares to other countries
- beams_of_light 9y agoIs this not a glorified data.world?
- Aron 9y agoNeeds logarithmic axis!
- macawfish 9y agoHere is a video of said character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY&t=12s
- heurist 9y agoThis is a landmark in the communication of complex data. Obviously room for improvement but very well done.