Ars Technica had an article discussing a memo sent out the the President requiring Federal agencies to offer “high-value data sets” for publication on Data.gov. Also there was a requirement that this data be “…data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format”. I applaud this move but do have some concerns.

I’m not really sure the Federal agencies are able to move at this speed and provide data that is properly scrubbed of sensitive data. My fear is a data set will be chosen and there will be information in that data set unknown to the people planning its release that will compromise privacy. Government agencies are not used to moving at this pace and can make mistakes. These mistake even happen in private technology companies that should know better. A great example would be the debacle with AOL in 2006 where they released search data was supposedly anonymized but because of some search behavior of users researchers where able to determine the person performing the searches. There is text included in the memo to preclude the release of sensitive data as required by law or regulation currently. My central point here I feel the release could happen accidentally and that would be unfortunate if it caused any kind of damage to person, property, reputation or investigations.

My hope is this will be properly executed by the government agencies and that it will not adversely impact their core missions. I also hope whatever system they implement will be an evergreen system where this data will be updated on a regular basis. It seems like it would be a waste to do this one time and then lack any ongoing updates to the data sets.

Apparently G. Edward DeSeve has no brain as he feels the governments recovery.gov is a “great success”. He also claims the mistakes “are relatively few and don’t change the fundamental conclusions one can draw from the data.” I would say this is only an indication that there are many more mistakes we have not identified. It also seems the calculations the Obama administration is using are inherently false. For instance counting pay raises as created or saved jobs. Since when is a raise saving a job? Its all a part of a coordinated scam to claim success with no material accomplishments. Additionally nearly all of the jobs that were created were an expansion of government. Government jobs don’t impact the economy like private sector jobs.

Techcrunch had an article about how some Nobel award winning scientists are supporting a proposed federal law that would make Federally funded research freely available to the public. Apparently this research is only available in expensive research publications. While I’m not a fan of some Federally funded research I do support the idea that this research should be made publicly available. After all its the taxpayers money that is paying for this research. I’m tired of seeing valuable information gathered by the government and horded to benefit a few select people and organizations. If you want to keep your funding private then you should fund it privately.

So I’ve been seeing many tweets today from @PoliticalMath regarding the data from Recovery.gov. Among my favorites was:

CA zip code 95814 added 75,000 jobs. Population: 16,600. That’s 5 jobs per person! http://bit.ly/14Uijc

As I read into the issue more I found that much of the jobs “saved or created” went to government agencies as this BigGovernment.com blog post shows:

But the most relevant information on Recovery.gov is that most of the jobs created or saved are in the public sector. For instance, according to Vice President Biden, out of the 640,329 jobs, 325,000 went to education and 80,000 to construction jobs. The difference we will soon find out is going to other government jobs.

You need more evidence? 13,080 grants went to the private sector, and 116,625 went to [federal] agencies.

Even when the money went to private ventures was completely wasted:

First, $159 billion has been spent so far. That’s $248,273 per job.

However, when you look at some specific contracts that were awarded you find that some jobs were created or saved at an insane cost to taxpayers. For instance, $1,359,633,501 were awarded to CH2M WG IDAHO LLC, in WA to create 2,183 jobs. That’s $622,827 per job. That’s not as bad though as the $258,646,800 awarded to the Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC in NY, to create 25 jobs. That’s over $10.3 million per job.

The whole stimulus is a joke and it always has been. Many conservatives complained about this boondoggle far before it was a law. When will the liberals learn you can’t buy your way out of a bad economy. You can in fact deregulate and lower taxes to improve and encourage the economy. Instead they have focused on ways to spend and regulate more.

Below is an excellent video from Reason.com about the a private analysis of stimulus spending by Recovery.org.

So Gizmodo has a picture about the “Worst Case Scenario” if we don’t have net neutrality. The picture shows a tiered pricing plan we are all familiar with from cable and satellite companies. Here’s the issue and this is the argument made by pro-net neutrality advocates that tiering would occur on the web site level. So for example AT&T would offer faster access to some sites versus others in exchange for a premium being paid. This could happen however I think it’s much more likely the companies will do what they are trying to do now which is slow down or limit those who use “excessive” network resources. The old pricing model these companies are using of “unlimited” use for a fixed price is no longer profitable. Instead they are trying to make the model work by ditching or limiting users that skew costs such as those that use large amounts of network resources. In my opinion we are more likely to see models that would vary based on caps or bandwidth limits. Neither are very desirable.

The issue I find frustrating is everyone thinks we can fix this by creating new regulations. The reality is increased regulation will not increase competition and it will not lower costs. What I do think it will do is lower quality of service and increase prices. What we need is more competition and to remove the regulatory support the government gives to these companies. These companies thrive in regulatory climates. They feign resistance to it but know they gain power every time the government reinforces their positions and drives up the cost of market entry. Thus reducing competition further.

One last rant. Not all packets are created equal. A voip packet needs a higher quality of service than say a bit-torrent packet. After all if my bit-torrent download takes a few minutes longer to download that’s fine but if I have a slow or small bandwidth connection for my voip call I will have a crappy or unusable phone call. The reality is we need to allow these companies to treat protocols differently and applications differently. If they kill competing services to favor their own that’s wrong and we have anti-competitive laws to address this. If the laws we have don’t apply make new ones. But, don’t say all packets are to be created equally.