I've been working on legislative data for 15 years now, on open source scrapers with OpenStates and running a commercial product targeted at professionals (competitor to those in the article).

We tried for years with OpenStates to run a free legislative tracking product before eventually having it partner with a commercial provider who was willing to contribute the resources to keep it alive and help out with the open source pieces (shout out to Plural, nice folks).

Believe me when I say that this space is a classic nerd tar pit. It looks like a relatively easy problem, a few hundred scrapers, search, and some basic CRM functionality and you're off to the races.

The problem is that behind the scenes the data is very complicated, and the sources constantly change and break in goofy ways. You need to be running hundreds of scrapers constantly (many of them against akamai or cloudflare), and working around new source website bugs or procedural edge cases every week. It doesn't scale like something like product or web search where you can just ignore broken pages, the penalty for missing things is too high. Tuning your workflow so people find what they need without getting buried is tough, because there are tens of thousands of bills a session about things people think they care about like "AI" or "taxes". On top of that, the low or zero budget clientele is often that mix of high-expectation and low domain knowledge that makes them a big support burden.

Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this and just went under this week, granted with a series of spectacular own-goals.

I wish this author the best of luck, and if you want to team up on scrapers please give us a shout. But please be aware that you're promising the moon, and try to build a model that will be financially and effort-sustainable. Keeping this stuff going is a _slog_. I'm really hoping that someone can bring the professional level tools to normal people.

> Fiscalnote burned 750 million dollars in VC money on this

What percentage of that went towards solving the actual problem?

3/4 of a billion dollars is enough to pay many, many people 50$ an hour to sit at a screen 24/7 and refresh any number of websites you want.

Classic example of a problem we need to solve with policy instead of technology. The law isn’t even that hard:

1) Government authored/sponsored materials are not considered “published” until they are available in both human and machine readable digital formats at no cost to the reader.

2) Publications of such materials

2.1) must not keep a record of individual usage beyond that technically necessary to provide access to the publication

2.2) not withstanding 2.1, take reasonable steps to secure digital publications from abuse that creates an undue administrative burden

Unfortunately that just isn't true in large parts of the US. Many cities have no public transit, and no accessible grocery stores.

Being able to live car free is pretty much limited to (expensive) major cities and some (expensive) mid-sized college towns.

The city of about 50,000 I'm from not only has no public transit and limited sidewalks, it doesn't even have crosswalks across the two main 6-lane roads that divide the city, so you can't safely walk more than about a mile even if you wanted to.

Even in cities with public transit often it is so bad that isn't reasonable to expect someone to use it. Reasonable transit must run 24x7/365, at least every half an hour. Miss a day and someone can't get someplace they might want to. More than half an hour between bus/trains and it isn't reasonable. Miss the over night - maybe you can do this if you have taxi service for the same price (which might be cheaper overall for the few people who want to ride at 3am). Half hour is the minimum, it is possible to plan your life around that level of service and not be impacted too badly, but you will hate it (particularly when the line is a little longer than you expected: you miss your bus and so your ice cream melts by the time the next comes)

Not just the US, it's like that everywhere. Private transport will always be necessary as people need to go on routes with low demand. Only counterexample I can think of is Singapore, which has a vast network of buses and trains that go to everywhere.

I'm trying to think of a city of 50,000 people in western europe with no public transport, do you have one in mind?

Even in cities with public transit cars have a very high mode share in rich countries. Some of it is 'trades' that need to carry tools and parts with them, but a lot could take transit but don't for unknown reasons

As an American I can report there are sidewalks nearly everywhere. They are used for exercise only: getting anywhere is frusterating but if you just need to run (or walk the dog) they are great.

"Space" is 100km. The moon at its closest is about 350,000km.

So the jump from the former to the latter is... significant.

Distance is usually the wrong measure in space. Something like delta-v will give you a much better scaling as once you manage to get something to orbit the rest is actually a lot closer than it would seem on the ground.

Not to say the effort somehow becomes peanuts, cheap, or easy... but the jump in delta-v needed to go from "100 km vertical ascent" to "hit the moon 350,000 km away" is more like a ~6-7x increase than a 3,500x one. If the moon were instead 700,000 km away the factor would still be ~6-7x.

Cool site for delta-v estimates https://deltavmap.github.io/

Everything you've said is correct, but Delta-V scales logarithmicly with fuel load - you need to carry the new fuel. So for purpose of discussing altitude (a valid way to look at getting to the moon) the size of the rocket, and the fuel expended, does in fact grow much closer to linearly.

I think I'll go land on Mun and Minmus now...

What I actually started with was comparing Electron to the current bos.space rocket and seeing the relationship was nowhere near linear. The above is the largest component of why I could think of but there is always more than 1 thing going in.

Wow even as a bit of a rocket nerd i'd never thought about it that way, that's pretty cool!

And you need a serious amount of money, effort and expertise to each 100km with a rocket.

Pronatalist also usually implies a racist/nationalist angle, some of the reason you want more births is because your people are genetically better than immigrants in some way. This isn't universal, but it's often true.

I think I phrased this poorly. Obviously nobody is genetically "better" than anyone else, but that's what many Pronatalists think.

I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs.

If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.

For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.

A thou on any decent mill is no problem.

Given the teeny tiny endmill the author was using, I suspect they were using a small mill with a very fast spindle. Maybe something like a Taig or a Sherline.

Edit -- I see on another post the author has a Sherline 5400 mini mill.

I just want to second this; a ton of parents I know had kids ready to do it earlier but waited until a major holiday/break when everyone would be home anyway to knock it out.

Related, the longer you wait to do it, the faster they seem to catch on. We waited until each of our kids’ third birthday to potty train and knocked it out in a weekend, no major subsequent accidents.

A lot of parents will tell you they’ve potty trained their kids and also tell you their two-year-old wets the bed evey other week.

A friend wanted to try this, but no daycares would do it.

Nappies were an essential part of “industrialising” child care (and thus making both parents available as a labour pool outside of the home).

Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.

The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.

How does this not fall afoul of states with two party consent laws around recording conversations? Particularly since California is one of the strictest states.

How does your phone's camera? Ultimately, it's up to users to obey laws with their recording devices.