Defense

Social Security

Medicare/Medicaid

The fact that we're the constituency, does mean that we have to temper our vociferousness with solid arguments and evidence. This stuff is important, but remember, there are programs out there to feed impoverished children. Is data.gov more important than that? Maybe not.

The point is though, that data.gov and open government data is, given our governing system should be more efficient, and provide better results than alternatives, such as making everyone go through FOIA or scraping individual agency sites, and relying on a patchwork quilt of agency disclosure.

Killing this program is going to cost more money in the future, and one very clear argument was articulated by David Eaves a couple days ago (http://eaves.ca/2011/03/30/access-to-information-is-fatally-... i also posted this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2386915 ).

This is terrible policy, but we do need to understand that the budget is a complicated beast.

As for those who can't feed their children without federal help should have learned to keep their legs closed or at least used a condom. I feel sorry for the kids, but there are soup kitchens or private charity.

As for the second one, I oppose heavy state interference in private affairs and social security too, but if you're suggesting that feeding poor children is less important than maintaining a website, quite frankly you're insane.

It seems to me that at this point, they're looking for politically low-hanging fruit rather than fiscally low-hanging fruit.

Democracy is a great idea so long as you limit whom you consider "the people".

Given the number of people employed in our industry without a university degree — many of whom are leaders in their subject matter area — i think your proposal is not just obviously discriminatory, but spitting into the wind of a gale of contrary evidence.

Get out, see the world, go talk to people in places and industries where a university education isn't paramount, and then tell me again that they should be denied a right to vote.

When people talk about the deficit, they're typically talking about the operating budget deficit, which is only funded from income tax and runs on a separate budget from the SS and medicare/medicaid administrations. So it doesn't really make sense to advocate cutting entitlements to address the deficit, they have problems too but they're separate problems.

Defense. Job program for millions of workers.

Social Security. Welfare 2.0 -- after the Clinton welfare reform, you get bumped out of welfare after a few years. So people get declared "disabled" instead. Also, checks for grandma and checks for people with chronic disabilities.

Medicare. Healthcare for grandma. Welfare for big hospitals and doctors. Ever notice hospitals are always under construction? Medicare is what pays for it.

Medicaid. Healthcare for the indigent, and tool to make red state more appealing to business. (Protip: Compare Medicaid benefits in South Carolina to New York or Michigan.)

See: http://www.thestreet.com/story/11061024/1/the-cannibalizatio...

We still have a substantial manufacturing base, it's just that we've squeezed the jobs out of it by emphasizing high productivity and automation, while outsourcing the dirtiest work. The developing countries can enjoy more industrial jobs because their wages are lower, but the U.S. is already facing a "robot economy." We just haven't raised the question politically yet.

These "cuts" are nothing more than talking points.

As long as you need dollars to buy oil, we'll continue with nonsensical debate like this.

"More than a third of our petroleum, about 37% of our total usage, is produced domestically by our own oil companies. I'm not sure why people seem to forget about those guys, ExxonMobil and Chevron and all of them; you may resent them but they are the principal source of our non-foreign-dependent energy. So this means that only a bit less than two thirds of our petroleum is imported. That still means most of our petroleum comes from OPEC, right? Wrong. Most of our petroleum imports come from non-OPEC countries; 56% of it, in fact. Of that 56%, the majority is from Canada and Mexico, who are about as far removed from the Middle East as can be. The rest of it is from other random places like Angola, Russia, the Virgin Islands, and Brazil [...]"

Source: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4032

Also interesting: Peak Oil, http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4100

Also, much of the oil "imported" from Canada actually transits through Canadian oil ports and is delivered to the US via pipeline.

A web site is also the 21th century way of providing this data, who goes to request data from an archive as a stack of papers these days?

It's pretty ironic indeed that this gets shut down. Obama started all kinds of sensible things at the beginning of his term, and now pulls them back one by one.

That said, the HN community makes a real point of how apolitical it is. Rather than organize and work with government transparency advocates to try to influence the system, the norms here discourage people from discussing politics. So it's pretty ironic to me to see all the disappointment about this here.

But when it comes to politics, where we recognize that our voices are small and we aren't empowered to do directly do anything and that what all the grandmothers want is going to overshadow what we want, we tell ourselves that we'd be able to affect change if only we got involved and became more political. Small voices have an uphill battle on trying to execute on political stuff.

If we have trouble communicating to people about what's important (or what should be important) when it comes to technology choices, we're going to have trouble communicating what's important (or what should be important) when it comes to things like government budgets or political positions. And I think we all recognize this. And that's why we're not politically involved and avoid discussing politics.

It's a waste of my time to have political discussions with almost everyone, it makes me feel bad about being a nerd and valuing things like rational discourse, the scientific method, and trying to being informed. I'd rather spend my time doing things that make feel good about being a nerd, and that's having discussions about technology things and not political things. Stereotypical technology discussions have the capability to advance the state of the art; stereotypical political discussions rarely advanced anything.

I think we also recognize that if you can't get people to take action on something obvious, such as that financing an expensive war machine is a massive waste and that we should spend more money on education, you're not going to have an easy time getting them to take action on something that's non-obvious. That being said, I think the value of transparency of government is obvious, but it's also hard to explain something that you find obvious to someone who doesn't also see that it's obvious.

The problem is that both political parties pay lip service to openness and transparency (although my partisan biases would claim one party favors this more than the other), the real difficulty is hold politicians to their promises in the face of the sausage-making of daily federal politics.

But, to quote Napoleon, never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'm more than willing to believe that this is being left out of a sense of benign neglect.

That this is being neglected is much more indicative of what Congress's actual priorities are. :(