links for 2009-08-15

  • It's so great to see the federal government going after super-wealthy Americans who are hiding their money in Swiss bank accounts to illegally avoid paying taxes. UBS alone has $15B from 52,000 Americans.
  • Just last year, Glenn Beck went on a multi-day rant about how American's healthcare system is irredeemably awful, and about how he was wronged at the hands of an incompetent, uncaring system. Now he insists that it's the best in the world. Did our healthcare system really get awesome in the past 18 months?
  • This is a brilliant effort to take pay-subscription-required access to public court records via PACER and automatically, invisibly upload them to a public, open, community-run archive. PACER can't stop people from doing it (they can't even detect it), and it'll get a huge amount of public data available on the public internet. I'm extremely impressed by this—it's really ingenious.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »