Steve Ballmer Data Mines Local and Federal Government Spending

[ill]

This could be huge down the road if properly implemented and used by the public & local governance.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/...p-a-fascinating-data-trove.html?referer=&_r=0

http://usafacts.org

In an age of fake news and questions about how politicians and others manipulate data to fit their biases, Mr. Ballmer’s project may serve as a powerful antidote. Using his website, USAFacts.org, a person could look up just about anything: How much revenue do airports take in and spend? What percentage of overall tax revenue is paid by corporations? At the very least, it could settle a lot of bets made during public policy debates at the dinner table.

“I would like citizens to be able to use this to form intelligent opinions,” Mr. Ballmer said. “People can disagree about what to do — I’m not going to tell people what to do.” But, he said, people ought to base their opinions “on common data sets that are believable.”

“How many people work for government in the United States?” he asked, with the excitement of a child showing off a new toy, before displaying the answer. “Almost 24 million. Would you have guessed that?”

“Then people say, ‘Those damn bureaucrats!’” Mr. Ballmer exclaimed, channeling the criticism that government is bloated and filled with waste, fraud and abuse. “Well, let’s look at that. People who work in schools, higher ed, public institutions of education — they are government employees.” And they represent almost half of the 24 million, his data shows.

“And you say, O.K., what are the other big blocks?” Mr. Ballmer continued. “Well, active-duty military, war fighters. Government hospitals. Really? I didn’t know that.”

Suddenly, he explained, the faceless bureaucrats who are often pilloried as symbols of government waste start to look like the people in our neighborhood whom we’re very glad to have.

“Now people might not think they’re government employees, but your tax dollars are helping somehow to pay 24 million people — and most of these people you like,” Mr. Ballmer said.

 

[N.J.stan]

Read about this recently, really impressive and useful work the man is doing

 

[Regular_P]

Too bad this won't get covered like it should.

 

[ExodusNirvana]

Interesting and potentially destructive

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

website is down

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

If Ballmer ran for president

Not saying I'd vote for him

 

[Pressure]

Baller is a smart man. Very intelligent. He has great ideas. I think he struggles to some extent at fully implementing them.

I hope this works.

 

[FAH1223]

He can do this but has Doc Rivers being GM and Coach?

@pete clemenza

 

[David_TheMan]

Murray Rothbard did this in the 80s or early 90s.
The results were funny.
He found that all the republicans complaining about poor blacks living off the government were idiots. His data showed the poorest zip codes and neighborhoods typically paid more in taxes than those communities received in government services or outlays to the same community. On the flip side the zip codes with the highest income and wealth, were typically government income receivers.

 

[88m3]

 

[DEAD7]

 

[rapbeats]

If Ballmer ran for president

Not saying I'd vote for him

it would be all about the data. no nonsense. all sides could cry him a river. if the data says A, so be it. It's A. lets keep it pushing. Imagine how much more informed the american dummie..i mean people would be. where before we go crying about something we would run to the books/reports/internets for that data to back up our points.

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

it would be all about the data. no nonsense. all sides could cry him a river. if the data says A, so be it. It's A. lets keep it pushing. Imagine how much more informed the american dummie..i mean people would be. where before we go crying about something we would run to the books/reports/internets for that data to back up our points.

...thats not always a good thing.

"data" has sometimes lead to racist outcomes.