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View Full Version : Steve Ballmer thinks you don’t have enough data about your government



Chris
04-19-2017, 07:38 AM
The former Microsoft CEO believes the government should be an open book like a public business and has put together a site of information on the government.

Steve Ballmer thinks you don’t have enough data about your government (https://www.recode.net/2017/4/18/15332902/steve-ballmer-usafacts-data-government-tax-money-microsoft)


...Unlike a lot of Silicon Valley in 2017, the entity we might hypothetically call America Inc. has already gone public. For better or worse, its founders still loom large over the aging place, but they actually don’t run it anymore. (Instead, it’s some new guy whom many folks find trenchant.) Nevertheless, this upstart operation regularly has to convince its shareholders that it can deliver on long-hyped promises of prosperity.

That’s some of the mentality, at least, behind USAFacts, a new effort by former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer to bring a business-minded eye to the U.S. government, its multi-trillion dollar budget and its effects on voters’ lives. For months, the numbers-obsessed Ballmer has toiled to harness a trove of publicly available — yet oft-ignored — state and federal government data stores. The result, debuting on Tuesday in time for Tax Day, stems from a belief that voters and regulators alike could make better decisions if only they had unbiased, unpolluted information at their fingertips.

“I think a lot of information is put out to make a point,” Ballmer told Recode in an interview. “People take a point of view, but then they pick the data that makes their point of view.”

To escape all the noise, Ballmer and his crew instead have sought to break down the government’s balance sheet with the help of the U.S. Constitution....

The site can be found here: http://usafacts.org/.