Slashdot Mirror

And a lot of the stimulus money was in the form of loans to banks ...

That was something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. That was the TARP bailout. that was passed by a different president than the one who proposed the stimulus package.

Here is a break down of the stimulus spending:

Individual Tax Credits $131.8B
Making Work Pay $104.4B
Tax Incentives for Businesses $32.6B
Energy Incentives $10.9B
Manufacturing & Economic Recovery, Infrastructure Refinancing, Other $7.3B
COBRA $3.7B

And so on. Money to banks is not on the list.

There is no Polywell funding.

Yes there is

This has always been some internet myth. Polywell will never produce a viable power source because you will always need to put more energy into it than you will get out.

That remains to be seen, but in any case it's not relevant to whether or not they're receiving government funding.

I wouldn't say the Polywell project is languishing. AFAIK they're quietly getting on with testing WB8 and getting data; their research is still being funded by the US Navy. Sure, it'd be nice if they were getting more funding than they are but at least they're doing something.

From what I've read they're concentrating on finding out if the device will scale to larger sizes, which was one of the more contentious points (Bussard claimed that power scaled as size^7) when the idea was first presented. I'd be absolutely ecstatic if something like the Polywell turned out to be practical, because it's a much simpler proposition than ITER: vacuum chamber + ~2m SC coils vs. huge vacuum chamber wrapped in SC coils. That's not even considering the prospect of aneutronic fusion and the direct generation of electricity from fusion products.

Of the $787B stimulus (not $1T), over a third ($288B) went to tax breaks and tax incentives, a bit less than a third ($224B) to entitlements, and another third ($275B) to various government projects. So your question then is where did the $275B go. The answer, along with the info I included here, is all at Recovery.gov. I'm sure if you don't fully trust the source, you can at least find out the programs there and then track down details via other means like news sources. Total infrastructure including roads, water treatment, broadband, etc was $48.9B (roads got broken up into two separate categories: "Transportation" and "Infrastructure"). Unemployment insurance programs got $60B.

I want to see the max and min values with associated dates for the 1979 - 2009 periods. Also, I don't understand why we (US Citizens) have paid roughly 1.3 million dollars to get vague and inconclusive results like this. I really wish that the NSF would start funding real science for a change. Here's an example of other weird stuff they research with our money. http://majorityleader.gov/YouCut/Review.htm "This work was supported by NSF grants ANS 0909388 and ARC 0901962, the NASA Cryosphere Program, and the Ohio State University Climate Water and Carbon Program. Field work along the K-transect has been supported by NWO/ALW." Here's the grant information. http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0909388 http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecipientReportedData/pages/RecipientProjectSummary508.aspx?AwardIdSur=29630 I'm not totally against NSF I think it's an awesome idea but I would like some accountability.

As the Federal CIO sang the praises of Amazon.com-backed Animoto's use of the Amazon Cloud, the Chairman of the Recovery Board decided giving Amazon the contract to host Recovery.gov was the right thing to do, and called on the public to 'imagine if other, much larger federal agencies were to follow our lead.'

Credit for deciding to tap Amazon was given to government contractor Smartronix, who reportedly used AWS in the development and testing of recovery.gov, but did not go live with it in the initial roll-out.

The government planned to find another home for the more than $1 million in computer hardware and software that were previously purchased to host the (apparently) relatively low-traffic Recovery.gov site, but were no longer needed after hosting was switched to Amazon.

You are conflating the stimulus bill with TARP. Last I read, somewhat over half of the stimulus has been spent. Recovery.gov (the official tracking site for the stimulus) says 91% has been made available. So you can go with my vague recollection of something I read "a while back", or go with the Fed's 91%. None of the money has been or is ever intended to be returned.

The TARP money as well as the GM/Chrysler bailout money was intended to be at least partially recoverable. According to these guys the TARP is winding down and will end up netting a loss of $100 billion. If you believe the completely unbiased and disinterested reporting here the net of all of the bailouts and TARP will eventually be a $30 billion loss for taxpayers. (of course that estimate excludes the $30 billion confiscated from GM's creditors and the loss of all shareholder equity and any other externalized costs).

The webmaster job at http://www.recovery.gov/ was already filled?

Hell if I know!
You can read the page where it says it here, though:
http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/Accessibility.aspx

Exactly. I'm not blind, but I do prefer to browse with a larger-than-normal font. If sites just mark up content, then that works fine. Some pages override that control because they need to do complicated layout to say what they mean (like those interactive maps on recovery.gov), but most things that you need to say can be done with text.

I didn't think the Recovery.gov data was so bad (for my standards) once you clicked the "Text View of Data" button. Pull-down menus and standard HTML tables with hyperlinks. The problem the original article was complaining about was that it didn't have extra markups that most people won't notice, but that help the special-assistance tools. Like using TH tags for the table header row, instead of just TR and setting the color.

When I looked at the main state-summary table here just now, it did mark up the header row correctly (as far as I could tell). The original article makes some specific complaints, such as this:

To make the table more accessible, use TH [table header] tags around the state names, and include scope="row".

It looked like this is what they do. Maybe they have already acted on the report?

http://www.recovery.gov/Pages/Accessibility.aspx Looks like they took this story to heart!

No surprise at all. The right-wing anti-Obama crowd once again shows how petty they are... Poor accessibility on a web site? $10M for it? Well, here's an idea... we could give billions and billions to companies with strong ties to the Obama administration, and hide everything behind a vale of secrecy. It worked so well for the last administration.

I'm losing my central vision and ability to read, so accessibility is a hot-button topic for me. Gmail is terrible, and that effects me - Google should do something about it. Recovery.gov is far easier to navigate with a screen reader. The first item on their web site is a graphic which does nothing for the blind, but the first link under it is to a text version. It's not perfect, but at least average. Anyway, almost no sites pay attention to accessibility guidelines. It's up to programmers behind programs like JAWs to make them accessible anyway, and frankly, they do a pretty good job.

Recovery.org is a huge success. Even for the blind.

If you think that claiming accessibility without delivering it is fraud, and that the whole project cost was ridiculously inflated.... report them! http://www.recovery.gov/Contact/ReportFraud/Pages/ComplaintForm.aspx That's what the form is there for!

For a fraction of that $9.5 million, they could get a contractor who understands that data interchange does not equal Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word and Microsoft powerpoint. There's a whole bunch wrong with the site, quite aside from the accessibility issues. Either the buyer or the contractor is grossly incompetent, What a waste!

No competent tech startup would pay $18 million for recovery.org

Well, it was recovery.gov not org and really the comments the first time we discussed it noted worse problems. I mean, if they have a full time staff for the site and lots of servers and a lot of research going on, $18 million is about on par with what the government drops on crap like that. Fine. The fact that it was bidless and the company that got it gives tens of thousands of dollars to house majority leader Steny Hoyer (D) is what we really should be upset about. I thought the days of Haliburten were over ...

Actually, I believe it comes from Judeo Kashrut practices. We (Western European) societies are heavily influenced by the whole Judeo Christian ethic. This however doesn't explain our fascination with Pork (pun intended)

working out for you?

$2.5 Million for 2 lbs of ham. Wow, no wonder the fucking stimulus didn't work. Where was that oversight we were promised by Obama & Biden?

http://www.recovery.gov/?q=content/contracts-recipient-summary&id=12-AG3J14120297210&mode=details&primeid=4

I seem to remember reading that there's no standard format defined for this data, so expect to see a bunch of garbage initially. If you want an easily manipulated database you might have to *shudder* get involved.

They have defined the standard format for this data, as well as many of the procedures required, and then put the instructions to the agencies and departments up on the site. See the detailed guidance memorandum.

If you ask me, that is very transparent.

http://www.recovery.gov/ is running off Apache, so says the ServerSpy addon in Firefox.

all system files are exposed, for example: http://www.recovery.gov/modules/statistics/statistics.module

either they've set permissions wrong, or their .htaccess is failing, or...

...the source of the site is transparent:

http://www.recovery.gov/modules/system/system.module

Hmm they really might want to get that Drupal updated to 6.10!

All economists agree that government spending is important during times of contraction, as it helps to make up the shortfall in the economy from the side of the consumer, and helps "stimulate" the economy. Another advantage of government spending is that it's usually an investment in infrastructure that will last many decades and provide a platform for future growth in the economy.

      However, the United States has not taken advantage of the good times. They have failed to reduce their debt during those times- and in fact have increased it to record proportions. Not only that, but they have not even managed to maintain their infrastructure. This is at both the state and federal level. So we went INTO this mess already up to our ears in debt.

      People fail to understand that every dollar the US prints reduces the real value of all the other dollars that currently exist by a tiny fraction - because after all, fiat currency is only hard to forge pieces of paper. Once the shared belief in the value of that worthless piece of paper is destroyed, it will quickly return to its intrinsic value - ZERO. Ask Mugabe.

      Printing trillions of dollars at a time when you are already close to 60 trillion (when you count social security) in debt, and the WORLD GDP is only 150 trillion, will destroy the currency in short order. The US can't afford to bail ANYONE out - they are too deep in debt already. Yet the political temptation to appear to "do something" is too strong - despite the fact that it's already too late. The "stimulus" is currently designed to put almost $300BN back into the pockets of the consumer in the form of tax relief - consumers that are already deep in debt. That 300BN will disappear in a couple months, as people pay their overdue credit cards, mortgage payments and utility bills, or buy houses thinking that this is "the bottom" (HAH! The "bottom" will be in 2015 or so, because all bubbles are V shaped and this one started in 1998) - and THEN WHAT?

      Well, $126BN will be spent on infrastructure - great, let's do what FDR did and build, or re-build, interstates. Surely a plan that worked 70 years ago is still valid today, right? So after giving jobs to all the immigrants again (because who ELSE works with a shovel nowadays?), what's left? A few hundred billion to be spent giving cheap drugs to the elderly and other programs to win political points. Oh and NASA is going to get $2BN, so that should cover the fuel for 2 shuttle launches...

      Frankly by the time enough "infrastructure" is built that the government begins to require turbines from GE for their wind farms, or technological equipment for the new "smart grid", we will all be out of a job already, burning money by the bucketful in winter in order to keep warm.

      Oh and don't forget Chrysler and GM's "recovery plan" is to apparently ask the government for more money every quarter.

      America still hasn't woken up and realized that this is not just another "recession". This is the breaking of the previous consumer model, and a complete dissolution of the "American way of life". We can't ALL have SUV's, we can't ALL have big screen TV's, and we can't ALL live in dream houses. Especially not when it's bought on "credit". Well America, the credit has run out.

You can hand-pick talking points out of the bill. Or, you could actually see the breakdowns. Your call, I suppose. Once the grants start going out, that site will even have every last contractor, what's going to what congressional district for what projects in that district, and on and on.

Any chance we could look to put some REAL oversight into this round of spending?

http://www.recovery.gov/ is where the 'oversight' is supposed to happen...