this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Mildly Interesting

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I assume "Other purposes" is govt kickbacks to mining and gas companies 😬

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[–] instamat 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Is this hard to do in practice? I would love to see a breakdown like this in the United States, and especially on a local level. What’s involved in getting this information? Where does someone even start to request something like this?

[–] dyma 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I assume it has to just be based on the proportion of budget spending and not actually your dollars tracked

[–] instamat -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This might sound dopey so forgive me, but couldn’t my dollars be tracked? Wouldn’t that be a good use for blockchain technology?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would not be a good use for Blockchain technology. Besides the problem that your dollars are a fungible asset that don't have a physical object associated with it, as soon as you dollars get converted to another state, account, entity, whatever along with another thousands people's dollars you would lose the tracking. And ultimately even if you could achieve this it would then either all fall to one or two accounts so you would have the disheartening effect of seeing your entire annual contribution spent on something tedious like fuelling an aircraft carrier, or they would attempt to distribute it evenly in which case why not save all the effort and just track the average spend budgets? It's a solution looking for a problem here.

[–] instamat 3 points 1 year ago

Ah, thank you for the explanation. I thought that money could be tracked even through conversion, but now I see how that wouldn’t be possible. It’s better suited for tracking bitcoin and the like, right?

Part of me wants to see that tedious spending of my money but I suppose it wouldn’t do me any good. An average breakdown would be nice, starting with my property taxes.