Comment by simonw

1 day ago

Urgh, this is nasty:

  curl -i 'https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook'
  HTTP/2 302 
  content-length: 0
  location: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/spotlighting-the-world-factbook-as-we-bid-a-fond-farewell/

They didn't even have the decency to give it a 410 or 404 error.

Same for all of the country pages - they redirect back to the same story: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/morocco/

The thing was released into the public domain! No reason at all to take it down - they could have left the last published version up with a giant banner at the top saying it's no longer maintained.

28 comments

simonw

Reply
CamperBob2  1 day ago

[flagged]

  • slg  1 day ago

    I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote. It being shutdown is more evidence of how broken the American political system is rather than an indication of the will of the people.

    • overfeed  1 day ago

      > I'd be surprised if there was a single American who had the CIA Factbook as the deciding factor in determining their vote

      That's just the specifics: Steve Bannon explicitly made it clear that one goal was to "dismantle the administrative state"

      1 reply →

    • bdcravens  1 day ago

      As a single issue, probably not. However, the meta-issue that they did vote for was eliminating anything the government pays for (other than military, ICE, or related to drilling oil)

      8 replies →

    • simonw  1 day ago

      Right, World Factbook single issue voters probably don't exist.

      That aside, something that frustrates me about US politics is that I rarely see any evidence of consideration given to taxpayers who want value for their money as opposed to having their taxes cut.

      I pay taxes here. I like it when those taxes spent on wildly ROI-positive initiatives like the World Factbook.

      The Trump lot appear to be killing off a huge range of useful things that I like getting in exchange for the taxes I pay.

      9 replies →