RSS feeds are available for many U.S. Government collections
govinfo.gov
govinfo.gov
The idea that Twitter, a private company, requires me to provide them personal information (phone number and OTP verification), to sell ads and to access, sometimes exclusively hosted Gov content needs to end. Politicians won’t use it, for that a new law is required. I really don’t want Elon vs Elizabeth Warren bullshit. Politicians need to be shamed into submission.
but then do you somehow draw a line somewhere arbitrarily on internet access as the requirement that the citizens have to privately provide for themselves? You currently have to pay for it, and if you don't, you also don't get access to the exclusively hosted gov content on the net.
Of course, i'm exaggerating, since the ISP "should" not have the ability to censor this content.
I think for important announcements, channels such as radio or emergency broadcasts is the way to go. For discussions and other political content, the gov should not mandate a specific place for it - and leave it up to the people's choices.
Generally speaking, any communication coming out of a Federal agency has been run through exec, counsel, public information office, and security at a minimum. At the state and local level, that includes plastering the executive’s name in anything good. (ie “Governor Dingleberry announced today that the sun will rise in the east tommorrow.”)
Additionally, civil servants can only be punished for doing their jobs. There is literally no upside for the people who know what they are talking about to speak.
Honestly, Twitter in some ways has been a benefit. In the 90s, you had to take a leap of fate that a rando congressman was a lunatic, fascist, moron, etc. (ie. The guy is a dentist, how dumb could he be?) Now, like the proverbial vegans, they tell you.
What you are describing sounds a lot like an emergency weather radio - if you live in the US and don’t have one, please get one. It is reliable, fast, fault tolerant and easy to “tune” for the alerts that are relevant for you. Also - they carry non-weather alerts for terror attacks or other events.
Something similar for the digital space would be amazing . It’s an idea that was knocked around when FirstNet was created in the 700mhz space, but never really had legs.
Right now there is no way to know how my city council member votes on anything without manually looking through PDFs.
I think there is a lot of room for innovation in this area.
In those cases, the specific site to follow would be https://www.regulations.gov/ and the api docs are at https://open.gsa.gov/api/regulationsgov/ and at least most administrations (last one excepted, although they didn't seem to have anyone on staff in the executive branch who was familiar with the APA to begin with) are pretty good about at least reading, if not agreeing - sometimes cruelly and sometimes nonsensically - to your comments.
It's good to see what the government is doing, but in a sense if you want change, that's already too late. Focus on the regulatory aspects of things, and you can make a real difference, possibly. The CFR feed on the RSS page shows how regulations are routinely promulgated, and it's not an ideological thing necessarily: DHS/ICE is an agency just like the FDA or EPA. Rules are, after all, rules.
Chicago seemed to have one but I haven't seen a single event on the calendar since I added it to my Google Calendar sometime in 2020.
It would be awesome to have a single place that has both history and the upcoming elections. Ideally, this should be done by the government, as they are in the best position to do so. Second best would be some kind of volunteer led effort. It is a ton of work though, to keep the information accurate and current
Give me a public, read-only Git repo with elected officials able to commit to the various branches.
Then we can mine the metadata for a better picture of what the Congrescritters are getting up to.
If they screwed up and left me in charge, Congress itself would live in a public git repo.
All non-classified content.
Let the data science folks see if any sense can be made of it.
Nor should a solo ninja effort be acceptable.
The post was operating at the "decree", no implementation level.
As an example of the information on each bill, here's the entry for last year's American Rescue Plan Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1319
See also: IRC, which I also like, but whose demise is fully complete. RSS isn't quite as dead as IRC, but it's on the way out.
I disagree. RSS is still the standard for following podcasts
RSS might be providing the syndication under the hood to these services, but it's firmly an implementation detail at this point and not a thriving protocol/community in its own right. Which isn't to say that I want it to fail or be replaced with something else, either!
Doesnt Feedly, for one, aggregate RSS subscriptions for all of its users? If I were subscribed to your blog through Feedly, would you see me as an individual subscriber, or all of your Feedly subscribers as one subscriber? If so, I imagine this would deflate your numbers.
For example, here's the UA that Feedly sent me a few hours ago:
Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 81 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)Pockets of activity don't mean that IRC as a whole isn't dead, the same way that the Pope doesn't make Latin a living language.
I pronounce the end of the discussion!
It's dying because it's not profitable for the big players (heck, you could say it's directly against their interest).
And it also isn't good at providing statistics, so small players see it as miniscule (thus dropping too).
The problem isn't that RSS isn't good or useful, it's that it doesn't fit into the incentive structures that we've bought into. An Internet in which RSS thrives is not one in which John Q. Programmer makes 250k a year at Facebook or Google.
I'd argue that accessible sites are realising its benefits.
New webpages rarely bother implementing a feed; old ones, when getting new iterations, often drop support too.
I've seen too many blogs without a feed...
It's a miracle YT still has them!
They even compromised on the acronym, being neither the English (“Coordinated Universal Time”, CUT), nor the French proposal (“Temp Universel Coordonné”, TUC).
Still, one can only applaud the brave souls that buck the trend and restore a sense that there is light at the end of this long and dark tunnel we live through.
Maybe its just the engineer in me but I would love to trace the money spent down to the roll of toilet paper.
Something has got to change because we are spending ourselves to collapse. Where is all this money going?
> PROPOSING AN AMENDMENT TO ARTICLE 4, SECTION 1 OF THE CONSTITUTION OF NEW MEXICO TO PROVIDE THAT A LAW ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE MAY BE REPEALED BY RESOLUTIONS OF THREE-FOURTHS OF THE COUNTIES IN THE STATE EXPRESSING OBJECTION TO THE LAW AND ASSENTING TO ITS REPEAL.
https://nmlegis.gov/sessions/21%20regular/bills/senate/prefi...
There are 33 counties in NM. The smallest 75% of counties have 572,637 residents, about 27% of the overall state[0]. So, it's pretty bad if you care about representative democracies.
0: https://www.newmexico-demographics.com/counties_by_populatio...
then use the search function to generate alerts for topics of interest
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don't know about these ones but sometimes RSS feeds can be generated for queries