O'Reilly Giving Away Open Government As Aaron Swartz Tribute 87
jones_supa writes "The classic hacker book publisher O'Reilly is releasing their book Open Government for free as a tribute for Aaron Swartz. The book asks the question, in a world where web services can make real-time data accessible to anyone, how can the government leverage this openness to improve its operations and increase citizen participation and awareness? Through a collection of essays and case studies, leading visionaries and practitioners both inside and outside of government share their ideas on how to achieve and direct this emerging world of online collaboration, transparency, and participation. The files are posted on the O'Reilly Media GitHub account as PDF, Mobi, and EPUB files."
Re:change the voting system (Score:5, Interesting)
Everything is more complex than everyone thinks.
No it's not. The fact that they have you tricked into believing that is proof as to how well the Duopoly is at keeping it's power. There are a LOT of problems, the majority in fact, that the country has no partisan disagreement about. But the political parties are not interested in those problems. They are only interested in problems that they can disagree on, and win political points on. Gun control, Abortion, Climate change, fracking. All this stuff is just to distract you from what they're not doing and focus you in on their arguments.
Kids are starving in this country. I know it's hard to believe, but children go hungry every night. Is there political disagreement on that? Are we going to have a political argument on sunday morning between a Democrat and Republican on weather a 5yr old should have FOOD? No? Then why the hell are kids still starving? We have troops in every country on earth practically. Would there be any disagreement on withdrawing troops from, lets say, Germany? I know the Keiser could rise from the dead any minuite... but how about we shut down just 2 or 3 bases and use that money to feed kids that are starving. Or for cancer research... or AIDs... or maybe, just maybe, we could just NOT speand the money so the country isn't bankrupt for the kids that don't manage to starve to death before their 20th birthday...
Yes, this country has some intractible, impossible to solve problems... fortunately it has far far more problems that are easy. Lets start focusing on easy to solve, high impact problems. And stop focusing on shit that gets the current office holders re-elected.
Re:change the voting system (Score:4, Interesting)
In this country, many people go without health insurance, because premiums are too high. As a result, people get sick every day but don't go and see their doctor because they can't afford it. The US has the best quality health care in the world! why can't sick people get affordable treatment?
This should really be an easy, high impact problem to solve, right?