Day: April 18, 2017

[File under “Good Intentions Never Realized”]

Back in the late 70s, in a different century, my friend Harry and I contrived a plan to form a nonprofit corporation to be known as SPI, for Statistics in the Public Interest. This sprung from our observation that people were making political and economic and other choices based — does this sound familiar? — on information other than fact, particularly in terms of their understanding of the Federal budget. Our simple idea was to translate and demystify the complexities of the budget and government spending into understandable terms and equivalencies, often to be expressed in measures that anyone could relate to, and do it in a nonpartisan way.   Like how many movie tickets per capita would amount in value to the total foreign aid extended to African countries.  Or just cut expenditures by population, etc.  You’ve seen this kind of thing done sporadically with individual topics, but not in a comprehensive ongoing sort of way.

Harry, a guy who was definitely smarter than I was, was working as a research biologist and was becoming an accomplished mainframe programmer.  When he was hired away from Los Angeles by UC Berkeley, our effort faded away, despite a few attempts from time to time to resurrect the plan. Eventually, I lost track of Harry; haven’t seen him for at least 30 years. But I suspect that he, like myself, still thinks of these possibilities and laments the loss of fact in the ongoing dialogue at whatever level.

Now, we learn that Steve Ballmer — yes, that Steve Ballmer, the ex-CEO of Microsoft — is creating a high-powered organization, USAFacts, to slice and dice government data to achieve something of what we originally envisioned, but undoubtedly in a way that is much more exhaustive and highly resourced. Read more right here.

[P.S.  One day I might even tell you about the scheme, also unrealized, hatched by myself and a couple of Government (GAO, actually) co-workers, to create AutoCare, a business of prepaid insurance for automobile owners, modeled along the lines, sort of, of Medicare, which we had been studying and fancied ourselves as having national-level expertise around …]

An auspicious day in some respects … Out on the economy, blasting through the rain for customary Tuesday shopping and some windshield photography to honor the utterly banal.  The gregarious gas station attendant asks Kim if she is “staying out of trouble”.  When Kim tells him that she usually has little choice at her age, he tells of his 72-year-old father who was recently banned from a sporting goods store for sword-fighting with a hot dog roaster.  And we find a renewed source at G/O for my treasured Tillamook Garlic White Cheddar, superb with or without the wine of your choice.