Death and Taxes

[jducoeur]

Thanks to Aaron for the link to the Death and Taxes 2009 poster. It's a lovely, simple graphic that breaks down the national budget visually, to a reasonably fine level of detail. It provides a good gestalt understanding of where the money's all going.

Note that, while he's trying to sell it as a poster, the web page is itself a nicely-done Flash movie. If you go full-screen and zoom in, you can get up to a point where it's clearly readable for browsing...

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

McAfee SiteAdvisor was not happy with that site or link...

[jducoeur]

Curious -- Avast isn't picking anything untoward up. What is McAfee saying about it?

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

It said that the site was OK, but that it linked to dangerous sites.

[jducoeur]

Hmm. That's possible -- it does have a lot of links off-site, but I suspect that this is mostly McAfee being excessive in its blacklisting.

Taking a dig through the source code, most of the links are pretty innocuous, but some of them are to Big Aggregator Sites like flikr, feedproxy and tweeter, some are to the e-commerce site to buy the poster (e-junkie.com), and a lot are to random sites where people were talking about the poster. Wouldn't surprise me if one of those sites has on it somewhere something that McAfee doesn't like, but this strikes me as a somewhat excessive reaction.

If I had to make a guess, I'd say that e-junkie.com has been used to front some malware, and the result was that the whole site got onto one of the blacklists. But that's just a guess...

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Here is the McAfee SiteAdvisor report.

[jducoeur]

Huh. Odd -- no such link there that I can find on the main pages. Not sure what happened, but my guess would be that his blog got comment-spammed, and that's what McAfee is picking up.

The McAfee report seems a bit too coarse-grained to be useful in the current state of the net, if I'm right about what's going on. With blogs and comments all over the place, it's important to distinguish threats page-by-page -- knocking an entire site due to a comment link in a side-page just isn't very helpful...

[laurion]

It says something that we give (Give, outright give) the Israeli military somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5 Billion dollars, but we've slashed Public Broadcasting in half, to somewhere around 200 Million dollars...