As I mentioned, I’ve been working overtime to hit a deadline — that sort of thing comes up when you suddenly get word that Steve Inskeep is going to start mentioning your URL. Having my laptop suffer a catastrophic logic board failure on Tuesday afternoon didn’t help matters.
But we got the site up, and if you’re interested in checking it out you can do so at subsidyscope.com. You might’ve already seen the earlier version of the site. This update was to get things beyond the brochureware stage, and to put some actual data online. We were under the gun, and consequently didn’t get to do as much as we’d like, or in the way we’d like — witness my ugly inline CSS. But we’ll be adding to the site and fixing those problems in the near future.
Thanks to the unexpected end of the American economy, we’ve shifted gears somewhat and are focusing our early attention on the federal bailout of the financial and automotive sectors rather than examining the even more formidable problem of energy subsidies. Don’t worry — we’ll still be getting to energy, and transportation, and a bunch of other sectors. But we felt that a project focusing on subsidies couldn’t just ignore one of the largest economic interventions of all time.
Unfortunately, data on the bailout is still pretty hard to come by. Despite the congressional complaints you may have heard regarding its transparency, the TARP program is actually the best-characterized part of the bailout of any substantial size — and hey, I made a fancy Javascript visualization thingy for it! But TARP is a relatively small part of the bailout. Part of the problem is that the agencies handing out money haven’t released information about what they’re doing, either because doing so would violate the privacy of the institutions receiving funds (something that many would call a pretty lame excuse — FOIAs and lawsuits are in process); or simply because they have no idea how much money they’ve handed out: in a lot of cases the government’s promised to cover someone’s horrible screw-up, but the bill for the screw-up hasn’t yet arrived.
A big part of our job will be to chart and revise the estimates of those costs — and, in particular, to establish how much of the government’s payments are subsidies, rather than just market-rate loans being made because everyone else is too scared to lend.
Technically, I’ve gotten to do a lot of fun stuff. I’m still hopelessly amateurish at Django, but I’m starting to really appreciate Python. Django’s pretty handy, too, although I can already see why I’ve heard others complain about the relatively limited nature of its template system (when unmodified, anyway). I was in a hurry to get the visualizations done — there were a number that got scrapped prior to launch, unfortunately — and settled on Raphael JS a bit earlier than I should have. As it turns out, its IE performance is not great. But I was mostly pleased with it, and of course jQuery remains very pleasant to work with. I’m working to port the TARP visualization into Flash anyway, though (via the Flex framework) — IE’s performance is just too lousy to stick with Javascript.
Site looks great Tom. Nice work!
Meh. It’s no TIGTS.
True! And as it happens, I came across an archived copy of that site today, as I was backing up some old hard drives. Also: old doom levels!
Wow! And here I thought it had been lost to the sands of time.