U.S. government removes detailed pollution map from internet
popsci.com
popsci.com
It seemed from the comments that the Toxmap is going away, but most/all of the data 5hat feeds it is still available. There are several other related datasets that were "retired" around the same time, and those seem to be truly gone.
This is bad. Another reason that we need to demand that all public data should be available in a machine-readable raw format, not just a web frontend for access, and that we need to systematically upload datasets to archive.org.
Is there any information available about how widely this was used beyond the anecdotes provided in the article? How costly was this to maintain? Is there an alternative that makes this redundant? Are there plans to replace it which simply haven't been published yet?
It sounds like the data sources used by Toxmap are still accessible. Was the visualization provided by Toxmap useful or was it just novel? Judging by the screenshots, the visualization doesn't seem to provide any insights that couldn't be easily inferred by simply looking at a population heat map. Did many people even know what Toxmap was before reading the article?
If this is a politically-motivated play, it's not a smart one. It's very on-the-nose and will probably do more harm than good to "anti-green political movement" (for lack of a better term).
It would be great if that could be extended from science to also include regulatory agencies. That would include Toxmap source data. Better than an executive order would be a federal statute. It's even worth a constitutional amendment.
Have you seen our budget? <wink>
There are two problems I see. First, people seem to lack empathy -- it could just as easily be them suffering through no fault of their own. Second, people subconsciously know they could be struck by any number of random bad things, and there is nothing they could do about it, and no one would help; they rationalize this as the victim somehow being at fault. Same as crops failing because of sins or inadequate sacrifices.
Maybe explain to him that these businesses are run by big Democrat donors, and they are getting a free lunch by having tax payers pay for their pollution.
Pollution is not like that. Pollution, toxic wastes and looking after industrial activity to make sure it plays by the established rules, is simply a cost center. No one wants to pay for looking after someone else's wastes, someone else cheating the rules to reduce costs or simplify an industrial process. This is a responsibility of government because the actions of a few are expensive to others with no control over it, and pollution and toxic wastes do not have value, they are a cost. So society decides to use tax revenue and the authority of government to deal with pollution, toxics and industrial regulation.
Your older relatives have probably seen a tax money used badly, and this is true. However, not many people have the time and resources to even know about pollution and toxics, let alone do anything effective about it.
That's a deeply sad, but I suspect increasingly common view of the role of government
Put another way, we pretend to give people we dislike the benefit of the doubt and they pretend to believe us, to avoid the unpleasant fact of an underlying social conflict.
The effect of money in politics is tremendous and if not for the degree to which corporate profits dictate government policy through lobbying and outright corruption has no equal other than in the one country where 'the market' is given free rein to abuse the country to whatever degree they can get away with.
I was all for harsh punishment of VW execs because of the diesel scandal, at the same time everybody was up in arms about that and this sort of thing gets a free pass without so much as a raised eyebrow.
Australia does that one.
Removing inconvenient truths has been done and will be done under any system. Be it tribal, religious, monarchist, communist, capitalist, or a loose band of tree huggers. It really does not matter.
But capitalism is so successful by the one metric that matters to it - money - that it has the potential to destroy everything else whilst still maximizing for that one metric. The concentrating effects of wealth make this even more likely. After all, people will rarely bite the hand that feeds them, guaranteeing docility whilst marching them right into the abyss.
Poverty does not have to exist. Having “only” 750million people living beneath the poverty line globally (and a similar proportion in the U.S., about 11%) is not success!!! It is a mitigation of failure!
[1] - One commenter on this site last week or so in the VC community commented there are “trillions sloshing around.”
That's more about the motives of people, all people, rather than a commentary on capitalism or anything else.
Essentially the United States just removed a bunch of stuff that is embarrassing to corporate interests, in order to allow them to pollute some more but this time without any accountability.
Maybe that _does_ boil down to just the political parties in charge at the time. If so then does politics trump capitalism?
Just think of all the copper in landfills.
That's just human nature.
There is no incentive for sustainability unless governments interfer, which would technically be against capitalism.
I think capitalism was a great system, it's just going to screw us within the next 100yrs or so. We definitely wouldn't be where we are without it though
Is there a system that incentivizes sustainability?
If there is any interest in producing anything... you're back to your same argument.
Meanwhile capitalist systems there are companies that produce renewable products and etc... seemingly more than ever before.
Sorry if I made it sounds as if there are any alternatives.
Capitalism is still the best system known to work, despite its incentives for pure profits at the cost of sustainability.
It's just good to keep in mind that... It's not good, despite being the best