The inefficiencies of correctly recording and distributing data will be, I think, greatly outweighed by the increased efficiencies of having standardized machin

The inefficiencies of correctly recording and distributing data will be, I think, greatly outweighed by the increased efficiencies of having standardized machine-readable data that's easy to access and use. I work at a think tank that uses various government data sets across agencies and jurisdictions, and the cleaning that goes into analysis is a nightmare. Some agencies have their own quirky conventions--I've seen "-1" used as a flag for "no data" before, which as you can imagine returned some strange results on analysis. A regulation that says "publish data and do it precisely this way" will be a welcome one for me.