Hannah Recht is one hell of a data visualizer and story teller on healthcare. She is assembling the bare county maps for Bloomberg and then she tweeted the following on Wednesday:
Here's CMS's map of 2018 insurer #'s. It's bad: missing Oscar and other expansions, incorrect bare counties in IN https://t.co/1Kdox2rEK7
— Hannah Recht (@hannah_recht) July 5, 2017
She goes on to explain how and why the government map is fundamentally wrong. It is a combination of people not being familiar with the data and an intent to deceive through malice or laziness.
American public data resources are an incredible asset. They are being degraded as we speak. This is why everyone who could yank a file from November 9-January 20, 2017 yanked files. We feared that there would be massive data degradation. And the solution of archiving public resource files on non-government servers is a reasonable solution to the feared problem of forgetting the past. It does nothing for the ongoing fear that current files will not be collected, corrupted or hideously and deliberately mis-interpreted.
This is just one small example in a domain where I have knowledge and passion. We know it is happening elsewhere such as the EPA and voting rights too. I think the safe assumption is that it is happening everywhere.
Major Major Major Major
Il Douche’s hallmark.
?BillinGlendaleCA
It’s OK David, Jared’s gonna put on the cloud.
Yarrow
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I thought Barron’s the one who’s really good at the cyber. Maybe Jared will bring him on as a consultant.
randy khan
This is an issue all over, but it’s particularly acute for climate data. It’s a good thing that commercial interests rely on reliable weather data; we only can hope it’s being preserved as it’s being collected.
rikyrah
Mayhew,
Did you see that the Government is refusing to release the results of the study of private Medicare plans?
Will you write about that?
I think it’s obvious- they show that those plans don’t remotely match the success of Public Medicare.
Major Major Major Major
@Yarrow: Jared is gonna replace all those inefficient remote data centers with the cloud, didn’t you hear?
Yutsano
@Major Major Major Major: I’m sure 200million+ taxpayers want all their tax info on an easy to breach cloud.
Wait…
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow: Barron might be good with “the cyber”, but Jared is the cloud dude.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yutsano: What could possibly go wrong?
Major Major Major Major
@Yutsano: Well, you know what they say in the ‘biz… easy to breach, easy to reach!
mai naem mobile
Weasel boy Jared just wants the Russians or the Chinese or the Turks or the Saudis or whoever is willing to save his ass on the 666 buidling in NYC be because the losses from that building are making the whole portfolio bleed red. Weasel Boy will be gone once that’s done .
Raven Onthill
Modern armies depend on intelligence and logistic management. Just think how it will be if the USA fights a war.
The Moar You Know
bad data in = bad decisions out.
A rule of programming, one of the first ones, commonly known as “garbage in, garbage out”.
One thing I was never taught is how you deal with a situation where bad data is being deliberately fed into systems. Nobody’s taught this.
Not really the purview of the programmer, although if you were a smart programmer, you put in a mechanism where if bad data is accidentally fed in, it can be corrected.
Guess our Tech Masters of the Universe better start thinking about how to keep one’s data pure, as it were. Of course, they have their own motivations to fuck with it as well. And they do.
Major Major Major Major
@The Moar You Know:
There are some very clever ways of doing this, but they mostly only work on bad data that’s accidentally fed in.
Yarrow
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, I heard Jared is against remote data centers but all for the cloud. Still, I think he’d better consult Barron.
@?BillinGlendaleCA: And the redesigning government dude, and the solving the Middle East problems dude, and fixing the VA dude, etc., etc.
I suspect this is intentional. Put the knowledge in the hands of the few who can afford it and make it out of reach or off limits to everyone else. Pretty much follows the Republican and Masters of the Universe playbooks. They want people to be dumb and afraid. Makes them easier to control.
pluky
@?BillinGlendaleCA: only if Jared resurrects Aristophanes as his speech writer.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Yarrow:
Put it on the cloud, Done!
Put it on the cloud, Done!
Put it on the cloud, Done!
See you easy that was, that Jared can do anything.
Tokyokie
Several years ago, while I was working for Nikkei in Japan, it turned out that whatever Japanese government agency puts out the official GNP numbers, deliberately fudged the numbers one quarter so that the economy would show a slight increase in GNP and therefore not technically be in recession. When the ruse was discovered (and I can’t remember how it was), LDP officials blamed bureaucrats, and continued with their stagnant economic policies as though the country was not actually in a recession. Problem solved!
Once Bush II took office, I feared something like that was possible to make the bastard look good. Apparently that didn’t happen, but with der Trumpenführer, I’d be surprised if such meddling didn’t occur. And if the data civil servants collect are subject to manipulation by the commissars who have been larded into every federal agency, we’re basically up shit creek.