James the Third's Comments RSS Syndication from SeekingAlpha.com http://seekingalpha.comuser/272115/comments http://seekingalpha.com/article/97681-the-fed-has-made-the-entire-u-s-a-hedge-fund-get-your-portfolio-ready?source=feed#comment-267943 267943
No one could rightly believe we're going back to a gold-standard, so let's talk about the one meaningful idea that was dispensed.

I am a huge fan of public, google-style databases for anything and everything deemed 'public information' (starting with tax revenue).

I can think of a lot of things I'd like the government to take tax-dollars away from, in order to pay for the creation of these databases. There should be an office, run by civil-servants (and therefore subject to what meager protections against poltical hackery that still exist), to maintain and occasionally run random audits of the these public-info databases.

Databases for, say, government spending or the loan-portfolios of publicly traded entities, will give the independent press (you and I) access to the information needed to expose incredibly poor decisions that could threaten the system through which we all must make our livelyhoods. We have the technology to spread the word, we just need access to the info.

What's the argument against getting these set-up? Let me hear it-

Of course like everything else run by the government it will take a long time and cost more than it should (especially if it's put out to a no-bid, no-accountability contract... after-all that's what were here to expose right?). Being familiar with creating and maintaining massive entry, multiple data-point DBs, I can fairly say that in the long-run the IT hours to set it up and maintain it, as well as the cost of a some random requests to verify info, would cost practically nothing in relation the kind of real security it would allow us to give to ourselves.]]> Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:28:27 -0400
No one could rightly believe we're going back to a gold-standard, so let's talk about the one meaningful idea that was dispensed.

I am a huge fan of public, google-style databases for anything and everything deemed 'public information' (starting with tax revenue).

I can think of a lot of things I'd like the government to take tax-dollars away from, in order to pay for the creation of these databases. There should be an office, run by civil-servants (and therefore subject to what meager protections against poltical hackery that still exist), to maintain and occasionally run random audits of the these public-info databases.

Databases for, say, government spending or the loan-portfolios of publicly traded entities, will give the independent press (you and I) access to the information needed to expose incredibly poor decisions that could threaten the system through which we all must make our livelyhoods. We have the technology to spread the word, we just need access to the info.

What's the argument against getting these set-up? Let me hear it-

Of course like everything else run by the government it will take a long time and cost more than it should (especially if it's put out to a no-bid, no-accountability contract... after-all that's what were here to expose right?). Being familiar with creating and maintaining massive entry, multiple data-point DBs, I can fairly say that in the long-run the IT hours to set it up and maintain it, as well as the cost of a some random requests to verify info, would cost practically nothing in relation the kind of real security it would allow us to give to ourselves.]]>