4 ms·
My concern here is that, although you are relating simple facts, you are also making a political statement. To see what I mean, let's say I wrote an app "See ho
by DanielBMarkham 15y ago
My concern here is that, although you are relating simple facts, you are also making a political statement. To see what I mean, let's say I wrote an app "See how many dollars of debt your elected representative approved" Even though it may all be based on publicly-available data, there would instantly be a conversation around "was this a vote for debt or was the expense offset" and "was it a one-time vote or was it an entitlement" or "Did he vote against it before he voted for it" and so on. That's because you can take the same data and present it in vastly different contexts. Heck, that's what politics is all about. I know you mean well and are not trying to spin me. It's just that "how Obama's budget will affect you" can be done a lot of different ways, all with different impacts on the user.
There's also an issue of timeliness -- things are moving faster on the ground, and all of your hard work could be for nothing just in a few day's time.
Happy to upvote you, though! Hope you got some good experience from it. But I also hope this doesn't start a trend of quick hacks that are really more political commentary than useful. Heck, I already knew that the rates would change and that "millionaires and billionaires" now officially starts at 200K per year.
- snikolic 15y agoThanks for the upvote! I agree with you. There's a bit of bias in all of this, and no matter how objective I try to be (or don't), I'm inherently making a political statement. Most political issues are way too complex to summarize with a website that spits out a binary answer in a giant font. It's dangerous to even try. On the other hand, I think it's a travesty that our system is so opaque to its own constituents. I'm upset at how difficult it was for me to find a simple datapoint about a widely discussed and hot political issue - namely, what happens to my taxes? I'm still not 100% sure I've got the datapoint correct, either. This is tricky: We lack information. Information isn't digestible by most folks unless it's in easily consumable soundbites and datapoints. But incomplete information, or information without context, might be just as dangerous as no information at all. So where do we start? I have no idea, but it's been fun seeing some strangers tweet my site around.
- Iv 15y agoPeople using facts and only true statements would be a refreshing change in politics or even journalism. Let them have the bias they want as long as they check their facts.
- Iv 15y agoPeople using facts and only true statements would be a refreshing change in politics or even journalism. Let them have the bias they want as long as they check their facts.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- temphn 15y agoEven more importantly, this is playing the ball and not the man. How much money has Obama printed? Last year's fed audit said $9 trillion. http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/01/news/economy/fed_reserve_data_release/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/01/news/economy/fed_reserve_dat... A government can seize resources in an above ground way with the guns of the IRS, or it can do it in the dark of night by printing money and devaluing currency. Printing money is the ultimate tax, a concept that is exactly the same as VC dilution. If one only sees tax and not inflation, you are not seeing the full picture.