The US stops sharing air quality data from embassies worldwide
apnews.com
apnews.com
In some places, the U.S. air quality monitors propelled nations to start their own air quality research and raised awareness, Krishna said.
In China, for example, data from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing famously contradicted official government reports, showing worse pollution levels than authorities acknowledged. It led to China improving air quality.
The United States since 2008 has monitored air quality through embassies—as a service to Americans overseas but also, increasingly, as a way to share accurate scientific data that may otherwise be censored overseas.
In China, authorities in 2014 banned a popular app from sharing data from the US embassy ahead of a major international summit attended by then president Barack Obama.
But researchers say that the transparency has had a noticeable effect, with China taking action after being embarrassed by US embassy data released on social media that showed far worse pollution than official figures.
Obama's ambassador to China, Gary Locke, faced scorn in state media after he presided over the introduction of monitors at the embassy and consulates that tracked the so-called PM 2.5 particulate matter carried in the thick blankets of smog pervading China's capital.
The air quality data from the US embassy is also frequently used as a reference in New Delhi, which has severe pollution issues.
That program, by the way, simultaneously managed to antagonize the Chinese government while being incredibly popular with the Chinese people.
It's not something I would expect a US administration hostile to China to cut.
Obama and Clinton (with Republican congresses) ACTUALLY cut deficits -- Clinton even got a surplus. Bush and Trump extended tax cuts which ballooned them back into trillions (also the trillion-dollar wars). A few quotes:
Cheney 2004 about deficits: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"
Trump 2017 about deficits: "Yeah, but I won't be here"
Clinton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX3a-2yrQwY
Andrew Samwick, Bush's chief economist: You are smart people. You know that the tax cuts have not fueled record revenues. You know what it takes to establish causality. You know that the first order effect of cutting taxes is to lower tax revenues. We all agree that the ultimate reduction in tax revenues can be less than this first order effect, because lower tax rates encourage greater economic activity and thus expand the tax base. No thoughtful person believes that this possible offset more than compensated for the first effect for these tax cuts. Not a single one.
And the Republicans have just done it again! Tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy.
My read is that the OP is saying that the air quality monitors in China were a massive soft-power win for the US, and it also shamed the Chinese government. So if you start from the assumption that this current administration sees the Chinese government as a rival who should be opposed, then this kind of effort that bypasses the Chinese government and provides a resource to the Chinese people should be supported.
If the administration claims to see China as a rival, but then cuts such an obviously beneficial project, reasonably, you gotta wonder if the administration is telling the truth about it's relationship with the Chinese government.
In this case someone probably saw this as somehow related to "the environment" so it's bad.
That it had environment in the title is just extra bonus.
This is kind of an embarrassing mistake for an economist.
The theory that lower taxes can increase tax revenues is that they increase the rate of GDP growth. For example, with a lower tax rate, GDP might grow at 8%/year instead of 4%/year. Under different circumstances the difference might be larger or smaller, but as long as the lower tax rate improves GDP growth at all, compounding will eventually cause it to yield higher tax revenue at the lower rate. 20% of 1.08^15 is more than 35% of 1.04^15, and 20% of 1.08^50 is more than 370% of 35% of 1.04^50.
This doesn't have to be an instantaneous effect for it to be real.
Historically major tax cuts in the US increased GDP growth by -1 to 1.5%.
You bring up a good point but in all realistic scenarios it actually misleads.
Historically "major tax cuts" were actually very small:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
These were tax cuts on the order of 1-3% of GDP, so of course the effect on GDP growth was similarly muted.
Meanwhile the baseline level of recent US GDP growth isn't 4%, it's more like 2.5%, making a 0.5% increase much more significant for such a small tax cut, so it's not absurd that a hypothetical doubling of the growth rate could result from a hypothetical 15% of GDP reduction in taxes. The hypothetical was just using larger numbers on multiple dimensions.
You get a similar payback period if you use smaller numbers all around, e.g. a reduction in the overall tax rate from 23% to 21.5% resulting in an increase in the GDP growth rate from 2.5% to 3%.
Moreover, the exact rate is difficult to calculate given limited data (and depends on changing factors in the economy), but the point is the existence of the effect. And it's not obvious that even quite long payback periods wouldn't be worth it, since the lower tax rate and the higher growth rate could then be sustained thereafter indefinitely.
3% of the GDP in tax cuts is pretty enormous.
> a hypothetical 15% of GDP reduction in taxes.
For reference, total federal spending was 23% in 2022. Total government spending was 36% in 2023.
So let's say you want to cut 15 of that 36%. That would mean cutting all of health care + all of pensions, or all of health care + all of education. Or defense + pensions + infrastructure. Good luck doing that.
It's a <10% reduction in total taxes. It's only enormous if the assumption is that taxes never really go down as a percent of GDP (even in the face of per capita real GDP growth), which has been the case in recent history, but that's kind of the issue.
> So let's say you want to cut 15 of that 36%. That would mean cutting all of health care + all of pensions, or all of health care + all of education. Or defense + pensions + infrastructure.
The obvious thing to do would be to increase the efficiency of each thing rather than cutting any particular thing entirely. Defense spending is full of notorious boondoggles and waste. US healthcare spending goes to a highly captured industry with a large amount of bureaucratic overhead and could be made significantly more efficient, e.g. if US healthcare spending per capita was on par with Canada then healthcare spending could be reduced by more than the identified amount percentage-wise.
Social security, by contrast, isn't exactly "waste" but the program is extremely poorly tailored to its intended purpose of providing a baseline for the elderly, because it pays out higher benefits to people who made more money and can be correspondingly expected to have more savings and need it less. A far more efficient program would be to provide the same amount to every retiree. Enacting that change would be politically difficult, just like making the US healthcare system more efficient would be politically difficult, but the question here is not "how hard would it be to get the votes for this" but rather "if we actually did this, would we be better off"?
For the effect to be real business has generate more growth with the money than the government spending the money does.
In most cases private enterprise clearly is more efficient that the government in the long term. In other cases, like health, it's clear from the USA example that government can supply better services for cheaper, freeing resources to further fuel to capitalist engine. This is probably true for other stuff we traditionally get our governments to manage like roads, k12 education, and local power and water distribution. If you can lower taxes so much private enterprise takes these functions over, the end result would be the same as you see for USA health - GDP goes backwards rather than forwards.
Then there is this reality: most of these tax reductions have been funded by government borrowing. The businesses could have borrowed those funds on the market. The net outcome is you are not reducing the level of government influence on the economy, you're just re-arranging the deck chairs, and doing so in a way that favours the business owners who now effectively get the funds interest free, with citizens (who are also their employees) paying it instead.
Given that the House Republicans unveiled blueprint to extend $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and lift the debt ceiling and that their current major backers are these super rich business owners, it's hard not to be a little cynical.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...
That is correct but it was also taken as a premise in the original claim and seems fairly plausible in general. In particular, government services would expect to have diminishing returns, so there are some threshold level which are worth the candle but as you exhaust the low-hanging fruit, further spending yields less public benefit than for the taxpayers to keep the rest of their money.
> In other cases, like health, it's clear from the USA example that government can supply better services for cheaper, freeing resources to further fuel to capitalist engine.
This isn't really the best example. The US healthcare system is highly dysfunctional in terms of costs, but basically all other countries have significantly lower costs regardless of whether their system is public or private, so that doesn't appear to be the distinguishing factor causing the dysfunction in the US.
But there are things governments could be better suited for, e.g. because they involve pricing major externalities or large fixed investments with a diffuse public benefit. Hardly anybody is suggesting that there shouldn't be one. The question is, are there things the government is currently doing that aren't worth the candle? Because the cost of that compounds over time.
> Then there is this reality: most of these tax reductions have been funded by government borrowing. The businesses could have borrowed those funds on the market.
This is actually an interesting question of a similar nature, because the government will generally be paying a lower interest rate than the corporate bond rate, and causing the economy to pay less interest to capital on borrowed money is probably an advantage.
In theory the interest could then be paid from the increased revenues resulting from a stronger economy, but whether this is worth it depends on the interest rate, which gets a lot more expensive when it isn't zero anymore.
> doing so in a way that favours the business owners who now effectively get the funds interest free, with citizens (who are also their employees) paying it instead.
The implication here is that the businesses would be the ones to receive the cuts but taxes would then be increased on the employees to pay the interest. There are other things that could be done than that.
> Given that the House Republicans unveiled blueprint to extend $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and lift the debt ceiling and that their current major backers are these super rich business owners, it's hard not to be a little cynical.
The cynicism is often warranted but there is also a lot of partisanship in the complaints. Saying "$4.5 trillion" is an obvious one; that's the sum total over a period of years rather than the difference in the annual budget and includes a lot of money that goes to W-2 employees rather than billionaires.
Meanwhile if you actually want super rich business owners to have less money the biggest thing you can do isn't related to top tax rates (which they generally find ways to avoid regardless), it's to increase the competitiveness of the markets in which they're extracting all of that lucre. It's better to make them give the money to the consumer as lower prices than try to hope the government can both take it from them and then not have it get lost in the pockets of some government official's cronies. But neither of the parties has historically been good at that, which is why we're in a bit of a mess.
This does nothing but decrease GDP.
GDP = C+I+G+(X-Z).
Being generous they're trying to increase investment (C) whilst decreasing government spend (G). There's zero guarantee the tax cut will be spent on C and as it concentrates it gets less efficient too anyway. Monopoly doesn't need to invest.
Also government expenditures can be a form of investment e.g. schools. So slashing G can also reduce investment.
And yes you're correct.
Whether efficiency could be improved and whether any given thing improves efficiency are two different questions. Obviously if you do it poorly then that is worse than doing it well, but that isn't an argument against doing it well.
> Being generous they're trying to increase investment (C) whilst decreasing government spend (G). There's zero guarantee the tax cut will be spent on C and as it concentrates it gets less efficient too anyway.
Wealth concentrates when you have uncompetitive markets, because then the incumbents have high margins which is what allows them to accumulate wealth at a higher rate than the overall economy. Taxes are only indirectly related to this and if market concentration is happening then that is the problem you should aim to solve directly rather than leaving it to fester and trying to ineffectually or inefficiently compensate with higher tax rates.
The actual goal, in competitive markets, is that you could increase investment without increasing concentration of wealth.
For example, if rents have to be very high before new construction is profitable, it doesn't happen until rents are very high. New construction happens when it's profitable and tax is a cost that goes into the ROI calculation, so if you lower taxes, construction becomes more profitable, so it happens until it stops being profitable again because rents have fallen to the level that it's no longer profitable even at the lower tax rate. But then people are paying less in rent, which isn't going to investors, it's going to tenants, who then spend it.
This is also the sort of thing that can reduce concentration of wealth, because then maybe the tenants don't have to spend all of it and can actually get ahead enough to invest some of it themselves.
You agree efficiency would be good, but as I say this is not what the government is doing, blunt cuts to everything is not efficiency.
Yes competitive markets could be better but this is not the case here. As I say you could rely on some benevolent oligarch to pay the dividend down but that's not guaranteed. The proposed tax cuts are for the richest not the average person, they're also "less competitive", part of government is regulating the market to ensure it remains competitive as it's naturally not. Their actions so far are anti-competitive such as the removal of the CFPB which levels the playing field. The government also funds crucial high risk, low reward activities that are necessary to drive growth elsewhere (economic multipliers), they've made it clear they intend cutting these, such as cutting scientific research funding that wouldn't have been investigated otherwise.
Overall they are currently not doing anything that you mention.
But now you're talking about an entirely different question.
The original question was, should wasteful spending be cut in order to lower taxes? Now you're asking if the spending they're cutting is the wasteful spending. Even if the answer to that question is no, the solution would still be to cut the wasteful things instead of the worthwhile things, rather than to not reduce waste.
> Yes competitive markets could be better but this is not the case here.
Markets become uncompetitive as a result of the regulatory environment, via two primary pathways.
First, regulations exist that raise barriers to entry. Then the incumbents don't even have to do anything, they can just be terrible because it's too expensive for anyone else to enter the market to challenge them.
Second, a lack of antitrust enforcement. A couple of conglomerates buy the only two suppliers of some important component in the supply chain, are allowed to do this, and then leverage that into a vertically integrated market before someone else can spin up a new competitor, at which point the vertically integrated supply chains act as a barrier to entry and you have the same problem.
In the first case you have to get rid of the rules making it too expensive to create new competitors, which is one of the things being proposed. In the second case you have to break up the concentrated markets, which is another thing they're ostensibly doing (e.g. wanting Google to divest Chrome), though it would be more effective if the enforcement actions were more comprehensive, e.g. they should be divesting Android and no company should be running both a mobile OS and an app store.
> The proposed tax cuts are for the richest not the average person
The proposed tax cuts are approximately across-the-board. If you lower everyone's taxes by the same percentage, that percentage of $400,000 will be more than the same percentage of $40,000, so then people looking for a reason to object will compare the absolute dollar amounts rather than the percentages and feign shock that this is how taxes work.
Meanwhile tax incidence is complicated and who is nominally paying a tax and who is actually paying it are two different things, so that kind of comparison doesn't tell you much regardless.
> part of government is regulating the market to ensure it remains competitive as it's naturally not.
Corporations don't exist in a state of nature. There would be nothing to enforce their contracts or claims to property. Monopolization is always through the use of government rules.
The government does need to ensure that its rules don't facilitate monopolization, but that's often best by having fewer of them rather than more. Competitors appear whenever there is nothing inhibiting them. Notice that one of the best anti-trust rules is to make contracts that restrain competition unenforceable, i.e. have the government not do something.
> Their actions so far are anti-competitive such as the removal of the CFPB which levels the playing field.
CFPB was never an anti-trust agency. Its existence is controversial because it was an attempt to insulate the administrative bureaucracy from the political process. But that tends to do the opposite of an anti-trust agency: Adopt rules that prohibit an unpopular practice without considering why it was happening, e.g. because it was a trade off against the bank not making those loans to begin with.
Then fewer banks offer those loans and the people who need those loans end up paying higher interest rates or being forced into some worse situation because they e.g. have to pay $1000 to rent a car for a month because they couldn't get a car loan.
> The government also funds crucial high risk, low reward activities that are necessary to drive growth elsewhere (economic multipliers), they've made it clear they intend cutting these, such as cutting scientific research funding that wouldn't have been investigated otherwise.
This is a category of research, some of which is worthwhile and some isn't. It's quite plausible that a lot of money currently being spent on "research" is misallocated.
> Overall they are currently not doing anything that you mention.
What they're doing right now is investigating how the money is being spent, with some level of "stop doing things for a minute until we figure out if we should be doing them". To long-term reallocate it requires the Congressional budget process, which hasn't happened yet, and will ideally be happening with the benefit of more time and information.
For every single one of those points.
The whole inefficiency argument is futile if it's just a ruse to cut bluntly.
Your point on the CFPB is moot, anti-trust and regulation are two sides of the same coin, the point is to level the playing field. It ensures consumers are treated fairly. Anti-trust law and evenly applied consumer law means there isn't captured supply or captured demand.
It is possible some of the budget is missallocated, but again practically (by your own admission) some of the correctly allocated budget is being cancelled.
This is not how government is intended to work, there are checks and balances intentionally. You cannot cut off and investigate, you investigate then cut off or else this process can be abused. The current evidence already indicates this may not be in good faith (see Verizon contract cancellation). The court is already blocking many of these actions.
You're being very generous to them, a good analogy they have catchy marketing materials with great use of jargon and theoretical whitepapers, but client experience with the product is very different.
Not necessarily.
Suppose you have a slew of programs and 50% of them aren't worthwhile. You cut all of them. This is bad in the sense that the other 50% of them were worthwhile, but the net effect of this is actually zero because eliminating the benefit of the good half is canceled by eliminating the losses from the bad half.
Meanwhile the good programs get reintroduced again over time, if they can be justified. But then they have to go through the process again and get subject to a reevaluation that they wouldn't if they all just continued on through inertia, which allows the bad ones to be filtered out. Then the short-term result is a wash and the long-term result is net positive because the worthwhile programs come back and the unjustifiable ones get filtered out.
This becomes net positive not just over time but immediately if you can produce even a slight bias toward removing net-negative programs over net-positive ones.
> Your point on the CFPB is moot, anti-trust and regulation are two sides of the same coin, the point is to level the playing field.
"Level the playing field" means that each competitor is on equal footing, instead of rules that e.g. favor incumbents or larger companies.
Most "consumer protection" laws like that are actually either Faustian bargains or bad trade offs with high memetic fitness. The rule sounds good because it's presented as a free lunch rather than a trade off against an undisclosed cost.
This is a Faustian bargain when it's an attempt to mitigate the consequences of an uncompetitive market without actually restoring competitiveness, because leaving the market uncompetitive is going to cause the consumer to get screwed in a hundred other ways regardless of what rule you pass. In that case you need to restore competitiveness rather than trying to mitigate uncompetitiveness. The mitigation -- purposely -- erodes support for the actual solution by making the abuses just tolerable enough to stymie a revolt, while still being worse than the actual solution.
It's a bad trade off when the market is competitive, companies are offering both alternatives and some consumers are willingly choosing that option because of some countervailing benefit like lower prices or better interest rates. The market was already providing both alternatives and some consumers were willingly, purposely choosing that option for a reason, so prohibiting it is a harm.
> This is not how government is intended to work, there are checks and balances intentionally. You cannot cut off and investigate, you investigate then cut off or else this process can be abused.
Checks and balances are generally about preventing the government from doing something unless there is broad consensus, because the government is a monumentally dangerous beast and having it do nothing is far less dangerous than having it do something bad. "A major part of the government doesn't want to do this, therefore it doesn't happen" is checks and balances.
> The current evidence already indicates this may not be in good faith (see Verizon contract cancellation).
There is obviously a potential conflict of interest when the government changes suppliers and the new supplier is associated with a government official, but that isn't the end of the investigation. The next question is, what are the terms? Is the government paying Starlink more or less than they were paying Verizon? If it's more, now you have a real objection. If it's not more, what's the problem? In that case they would be saving the taxpayer money, which is what they're supposed to be doing.
> You're being very generous to them, a good analogy they have catchy marketing materials with great use of jargon and theoretical whitepapers, but client experience with the product is very different.
They're humans. Humans are imperfect and reality is complicated. A lot of people want them to fail, which is ridiculous. Let them succeed if they can manage it. Maybe they won't, but they're the ones who won the last election so they're the ones who get to make the attempt right now.
Cutting and reintroducing programs has real implications in the short term for those individuals at the receiving end, even if it is ultimately reintroduced in the long term. People have monthly mortgages and have to eat daily.
This also goes for the second point. It is not a Faustian bargain as there is no such thing as a perfect market in the real world, primarily because of imperfect information. Humans are also a resource interacting in that market, leave it to the free market and people will literally die, as resources can be made redundant/obsolete in the market. This is simply untenable and no market can ever truly be laissez-faire.
Your comment on checks and balances is exactly my point, the government cannot willy nilly go in a different direction, the scale of government means there is inertia and displacement that can impact individuals.
Our governments ever since the enlightenment have been crafted with progressivism in mind. What point is a market in a democracy if it is cruel and serves only a select set of individuals, a lottery rather than there to improve the human condition.
I would never want someone to fail so long as they're acting in good faith and it doesn't screw me or others over. But in the same breath if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck...
The same goes for the programs or rules that should be removed. The existing social assistance system has overlapping benefits phase outs that prevent lower income people from making a little more money because they money is then lost to the phase outs. It's a poverty trap.
Likewise, a lot of poorly-crafted regulations destroy jobs and then people can't make ends meet because they're unemployed or had to take a job with lower pay. These people have to eat too.
> It is not a Faustian bargain as there is no such thing as a perfect market in the real world, primarily because of imperfect information.
It isn't expected to be perfect. It's expected to be better than the alternative.
The general problem is that imperfect information applies more to the government trying to make rules for strangers than it does to people who are steeped in the details of their own lives. Nobody has perfect information but people know their own lives better than members of Congress do.
> Your comment on checks and balances is exactly my point, the government cannot willy nilly go in a different direction, the scale of government means there is inertia and displacement that can impact individuals.
The issue is that it goes in both directions. If the inertia is in the wrong direction then there needs to be a way to promptly stop it.
Whereas if the government doesn't prohibit you from doing something which is nominally bad for you, you still have the option to not do it of your own volition. If it's actually not in your interest to do it.
> What point is a market in a democracy if it is cruel and serves only a select set of individuals, a lottery rather than there to improve the human condition.
A lottery is better than the house deciding when to put their finger on the scale.
You can't genuinely tell me someone on food stamps is/should be more worried about being caught in a poverty trap than ensuring they have their next meal.
Those steeped in the details of their lives will intuitively know they're been screwed, doesn't mean they have the information on hand to resolve this. Take a job negotiation for instance, in theory they know they're being given a low ball offer, but the risk/reward with a lack of perfect information means they won't take the risk and will just accept the offer. Much like taking action against a bank instead of the CFPB, they probably would win but they could also go bankrupt if it doesn't go their way. (The stakes are much higher for them than those with money and power, and thus unbalanced).
And if the scale is naturally leaning with no finger on the scale? (As I say imperfect market and world).
Sadly not everyone has a golden spoon or the starting capital to leverage their position in the world.
You speak from a viewpoint of privilege.
Absolutely they should, because the poverty trap is the reason they're in such dire straits.
You have someone who works but doesn't make a lot of money, so is eligible for all of these programs. They don't have the capacity to become "rich" in any feasible way, but there are ways they could make $10,000 or $20,000 more than they do now, with some trade offs like accepting a job with higher commuting costs or moving to an area with a higher cost of living etc.
But if they take the higher paying job, they lose their benefits. The other job paid $15,000 more and required them to increase their costs by $5000/year, but that would have left them $10,000 ahead, until making more money causes them to lose $12,000/year to benefits phase outs and higher taxes.
Now suppose you remove the benefits and give them the money back in the form of lower taxes. It wouldn't even have to be all of it -- there is a $10,000 surplus to be had by getting rid of the poverty trap. If they lose $12,000 in benefits but got even a $3000 tax cut they'd be $1000 ahead of the status quo, because then they could take the better job.
Meanwhile in terms of the government budget, revenue neutral would be to give them a $12,000 tax cut even against the income from the higher paying job, and then they would be $10,000 ahead of the status quo because you removed the poverty trap.
> Take a job negotiation for instance, in theory they know they're being given a low ball offer, but the risk/reward with a lack of perfect information means they won't take the risk and will just accept the offer.
"Low ball offer" implies an offer below market. Someone would take this offer, why? There is more than one employer. Below market by definition means the other employers are offering more. Unless that employer is offering some countervailing benefit, there is no reason to take it instead of going across the street. Even if you need money right now, there are many jobs that will hire anyone with a pulse with no expectation that you stay there any longer than it takes to find a better job. How is any employer supposed to force you to take their job for below-market pay in the absence of a cartel?
> Much like taking action against a bank instead of the CFPB, they probably would win but they could also go bankrupt if it doesn't go their way.
You don't actually go bankrupt from filing a claim in small claims court. And then you stop using that bank and leave bad reviews so that other people stop using that bank.
But that isn't even most of what CFPB was doing. It was often things like banning aggressive collections practices even when the bank was going after someone legitimately in default. Obviously nobody likes debt collectors, but if more people borrow money and don't pay it back then the banks either have to charge higher interest rates or stop making those loans. Pretending you can ban those practices without any trade off is screwing the people who need those loans and don't default.
> And if the scale is naturally leaning with no finger on the scale?
Then someone is still putting their finger on the scale while pretending they're not, and you should be trying to stop them from doing that rather than using it to rationalize further corruption.
Bias doesn't balance. If Republicans are diverting money to affluent retirees, you can't counteract that by having Democrats divert money to healthcare companies, you're just taking even more from the people the money is coming from, which is ultimately the working class.
> You speak from a viewpoint of privilege.
This is an appeal to emotion, not an argument. There are a wide variety of policies that are intuitively attractive because their first order effects seem good until you consider their ultimate consequences. Many of those policies get enacted because they don't work, or even do the opposite of what they're claimed to do (e.g. rent control), when the people who benefit from the problem have a more sophisticated understanding than the people being impacted by it.
Assistance programs also tend to be implemented in ways that satisfy a politician's checkbox to claim they did something without actually doing something. For example, if you have no dependents, do you know what the maximum income is before you're ineligible for the earned income tax credit? It's equivalent to working full time for less than $9/hour. That's less than the minimum wage in two thirds of the states. So if you make even minimum wage you get zero and the maximum you could possibly get without dependents is only a few hundred dollars a year. EITC is potentially one of the strongest, most efficient methods of transferring wealth to the working class and we've set it up so that hardly anybody receives it. Less than 10% of the population is eligible for it at all (and those mostly as a result of having dependents) and most of them only get a pittance because they're almost but not quite making enough for it to to be fully phased out, despite still not making very much. It exists because every single economist on both sides thinks it's a good idea and then the phase outs are set to neutralize the benefit because politicians don't want something that allocates money to actually helping people when they could be allocating that money to their cronies.
Meanwhile money gets allocated to things like government housing projects which seem almost purposely designed to shovel money into the pockets of connected contractors while making no dent in the housing affordability problem and concentrating poverty into areas that then become slums controlled by gangs. People are finally starting to realize that these programs are net negative after decades of evidence that they're a disaster, but even now, when they try to remove their funding, we get articles like this, interviewing people who are obviously sympathetic as if the existence of people who need help is a way to justify a program that doesn't work:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/affordable-housing-thr...
Taking money from programs like that and giving it to people as actual money is a good thing whether in the form of lower taxes or otherwise. The way to solve the housing availability crisis is by building more market rate housing.
Your reasoning is that the money spent by private people can also be investment, which will increase future gdp growth. However, you don't explain why government spending couldn't increase future gdp growth. Obvious counter-examples being money spent in schools, public research programs, etc.
I think in this case it's just a result of the haphazard approach to all of these cuts where nothing has actually been analyzed and planned. They are cutting things without thinking about repercussions, and of course their knee-jerk response to air-quality measurement is "it has to do with the climate and climate change, so we must suppress it".
Or it's even more "innocent" than that: they were given a target dollar amount or percentage to cut, and they're scrambling to find ways to get there, without really thinking things through.
2) The fundamental basis of government department budgeting is "spend everything you get or you'll get less next year". No department will willingly spend less.
1) Having a lot of problems doesn't mean you have to throw up your hands and take a totally unstructured approach to solving them.
2) So work on setting realistic budgets instead of slashing and burning things at random.
The problem with both of these is that they require people who a) know what they're doing and b) really want to make things better. The new US administration does not appear to fulfill either of those requirements.
Having a lot of problems for a long time generally means other attempts have failed.
> So work on setting realistic budgets instead of slashing and burning things at random.
According to prior governments, the current budget is realistic. According to the current admin, a slashed and burned budget is realistic.
> The problem with both of these is that they require people who a) know what they're doing and b) really want to make things better. The new US administration does not appear to fulfill either of those requirements.
We ran a deficit the whole way through the greatest economic expansion since the post WW2 era. IMO no admin in the last 25 years has fulfilled those requirements.
The not think part is a deliberate choice as described in project 2025 - to cause fear and chaos.
Whether that would preserve the Chinese air quality program is open to question. It's an extremely cost-effective way to look good (in front of most of the world, but especially in front of China) while making the CCP look bad. But while that may be a goal that the administration supports, it also isn't a goal that lends itself to a lot of hard objective metrics, which makes choosing to keep it a risk in some ways.
This is the logic a Victorian surgeon hacking at a patient, safe in the knowledge that sea sponges do alright with a fraction of a human’s organs.
70 years ago we were reeling from WWII. We were entering the Cold War with fragile new alliances and only had a middle class because of massive government spending. Our real GDP was 10x smaller, our population half as numerous. What we are doing today is recreating the conditions of the Great Depression because our public education apparently can’t teach history. There is waste and fraud abundant. But not where Musk is looking. DOGE itself would be near the top of the list.
Except its not? Every organizational takeover and efficiency push looks pretty much the same as what Doge is doing. He's not resorting to a playbook 500 years old, its today's playbook. Whether or not you agree it needs to be done, there isn't a much better way to do it.
> 70 years ago we were reeling from WWII
Kinda proves my point tho, no? We spend more per-capita now than we did fighting the most deadly conflict in our countries history. Normally spending increases when you're at war.
> Our real GDP was 10x smaller, our population half as numerous.
What about the year 2000? What differences between then and now in government services require the federal government to spend 50% more (inflation adjusted) per-capita in 2019?
> There is waste and fraud abundant. But not where Musk is looking. DOGE itself would be near the top of the list.
I get you're trying to make a point, but you aren't currently auditing the government, and, therefore, that statement is purely performative.
Step 2: don't speed run it in 4 weeks, give it time and do it properly. You know, scientifically. Adjust, measure, adjust again.
2) They have 4 years. Of course they're gonna speed run. They know they'll lose after people feel the pain they voted to feel.
> The offices employ special agents (criminal investigators, often armed) and auditors. In addition, federal offices of inspectors general employ forensic auditors, or "audigators", evaluators, inspectors, administrative investigators, and a variety of other specialists. Their activities include the detection and prevention of fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of the government programs and operations within their parent organizations
They do EXACTLY what DOGE is supposed to be doing.
Both of them would increase quality of life if we cared just a little bit about them, so I think in their eyes they're more or less the same? They seem hellbent on decreasing the quality of life as far as I can tell, even being outspoken about that "things will get worse before it gets better", so if you try to empathize with their perspective, it does make sense they see them as the same thing more or less.
The reasons are myriad. It makes it harder for other governments to control narratives in their own countries. It undermines efforts of governments to develop their own capacity; the US gives it away for free but those countries are not the customer and it does not serve them per se. It sets a much higher bar for domestic implementation than they have the capacity to implement. There is a sense the US exploits this data for their own ends. It doesn’t just irritate China, it irritates everyone.
Making the issue more political, the US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. This isn’t a secret but it taints the perception of US neutrality when making this data available.
The geopolitics and realpolitik of international sensing data is not clean.
When one of these countries does build out a domestic sensor network, they are often unwilling to share the data because it is seen as advantaging the Americans. Resistance to data sharing is quite high, for many reasons, so if you need to do anything that spans many countries you often end up falling back on whatever the Americans can give you.
The geopolitics around data sharing has been a significant hindrance to scientific activities like trying to build accurate and detailed climate and environmental models. Natural processes don’t recognize national borders.
The only global sensor networks operated by several countries independently are related to weather, and even then there are fewer than people probably imagine.
Less doublespeak version: The US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. Thus the data is not viewed as neutral.
The neutrality of some entity is not set by default by God and then “tainted” by their very own actions. The neutrality or lack thereof can be reasoned about directly.
The censoring and editing often isn’t nefarious, it is a useful data cleaning exercise that reflects why the data was collected. If they simply published the raw feed then they would be doing a disservice to their actual customers.
The way you worded it made it sound self-serving and underhanded to my interpretation. :p
I mean data cleaning is all neutral. I’m not gonna complain about that.
First I have heard of this, what's the source for the US editing & censoring global sensing data?
In the past I've heard similar statements and had people point at 'cooked' raw data as evidence of editing.
'Cooked" generally means raw data with warts removed, the raw data is still available, the cooked data is what's on offer as the primary data of record - typically it may have had sensor errors and saturated bursts removed, undergone light smoothing filtering, and perhaps been geolocated to earth coords rather than retaining raw instrument attitudes, etc.
'Censoring' can mean 'no longer linked on public webpages for easy downloading' - generally the raw and cooked data is still on servers and accessable by direct FTP.
I'd be interested to know what specifically the GP actually meant by that throwaway assertion.
There are a ton of artifacts that show up in other sensing systems that are indicative of interesting or sensitive things that are outside the scope of their purpose, and these too may be edited from the data.
The people deciding what constitutes an event that should be scrubbed is pretty opaque AFAIK. It is official policy and sensing companies that do a lot of work with the government seem to follow similar guidelines.
Due to the proliferation of crowd sourced and alternative sensing platforms, I would argue that this is increasingly an exercise in futility. Nonetheless people still view many of the US sensing data sources as authoritative for all practical purposes. There are countries with laws dictating that some alternative data they control must be treated as authoritative for all purposes for their country, but that US data is sitting out there.
What they remove is a secret AFAICT but if you are an expert in the sensing modality it becomes obvious what should be in the data but isn’t. There are now businesses that specialize in differentially finding or reconstructing things that have been removed or modified in sensing feeds, so the effectiveness has diminished greatly.
Less flippantly, I literally went to the USGS FAQ to find this question https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/does-latest-earthquakes-map-show-n... where it says mining events are not reviewed, but if they are identified, they are still included! So ... I'll ask more explicitly:
Can you provide an explicit LINK to anything that supports your claim? Thanks.
I’m willing to believe that in some silos (like relatively high-cadence seismographs) there might be some censoring. For example, it’s believable that siting of permanent stations is nudged away from some sensitive areas. Also, more believable in the past (say, 1980s) than the present.
Related, I’m sure that some sensors aren’t allowed to be flown over some areas (e.g., certain military bases) in the US.
However, you are claiming a broad based program of censoring US scientific data - gathered by the government or by government contractors. Like you, I’ve worked in this space for a long time. But I have not seen what you describe.
I wonder if we are working under different definitions of “censor” (see military base remark above)?
For people’s reference, the US-sponsored seismograph network is under EarthScope (https://www.earthscope.org/gsn/).
Your remarks caught my notice because I have personally worked with GNSS (lower cadence than seismograph) data, and personally know people who placed the sensors, wrote the data assimilation algorithms it uses, and set up the data pipeline. This data is not censored. (Although, famously, it was, before GPS was opened up.) I’m trying to find a way to rectify these two viewpoints.
However USA leadership seem very concerned about keeping happy face when talking to dictators. That tweet by Elon saying "this is what competent leadership looks like - of picture of Sergei "novichock" Lavrov and Mohammed "bonesaw" bin Salman.
Or how T could not say Putin is a dictator. Or anything bad about him at all. Never mind under Putin that country has no freedom of speech of or freedom of economy.
It is a “default deny” environment. The majority of international data sharing deals I’ve seen, and I’ve seen quite a few, never happen because they can’t get past what governments see as the political risks. The scientific mission barely even enters the discussion when it comes to getting sign-off from governments. When they do give their approval, it often comes with conditions that impede the scientific mission. I’ve also seen data sharing denied for unrelated petty geopolitical reasons between governments quite a lot.
It is less obvious in the US because so much sensing data resides there; there is still a lot of scientific sensing data in other countries that would be useful in the US if you could get it. Outside the US people feel it more acutely because of the relative paucity of available domestic data.
I’m not making an endorsement of any type, I’m just saying this is how it works internationally in my experience. You may have simple scientific missions but the approvals come from people that have a different agenda. It is a pain in the ass and really demotivating if you need that data for your research.
Literally literally, not figuratively literally.
> It undermines efforts of governments to develop their own capacity
If the government is so intent of concealing the problem that it is falsifying basic measurements then surely those efforts are not worth much?
We’re not talking about information that is in any way subjective, relative or biased.
it’s like a government trying to pretend that climate changes isn’t happening by getting pissed at other countries that have accurate thermometers in their embassies..
Based on actions alone, what is the evidence for this?
It was noticeable in the first term how weak he was on this topic, but apparently losing a nonsensical trade war to them and saying mildly racist things at rallies made him tough on them? More stupidly, did he just say he was tough on China enough that people believed him?
Now that he's losing nonsensical trade wars with US allies and giving the green light to seizing territory from neighbouring countries it just highlights in neon how good he was and is for China, but it's silence (at best!) from the media.
Incredibly popular is questionable, definitely among tier1 libtards in embassy and consulate cities on twitter at the time. There was just as much nationalist on renren then weibo who thought this was US interference.
>> It led to China improving air quality.
This is charitably western propaganda trying to take credit by fabricating notion that muh free speech can push CCP to change. Reality is BJ recognized pollution issue and had renewable policy underway a few years before this i.e. moving extra polluting factories out, controlling construction dust, vehicle registration systems, better emission standards etc. There was going to be coordinated effort to bring AQI down to <100s during 2008 Olympics and try to make it stick after, US Embassy was trying to stir shit leading up. Like if US embassy AQI shitposts was actually significant in pushing PRC enviromental policies, it would be an incredible own goal that pushed PRC to dominate renewable production chains and EVs while bankrupting western incumbants.
But nobody ever took them seriously. The man on the street in China could just go outside and look at the air. And whether he liked what he saw or not, he still had to breathe it, so interest in the topic was very high.
Here's a conversation I had with a friend who worked in the Shanghai office of a major international conglomerate:
-----
[me] What do Chinese people think of America? [美国 = the United States]
[friend] Different people have different opinions.
[friend] Some people see it as the promised land.
[friend] Some people are very negative.
[friend] Where I work, there's one guy who is really down on America and never misses an opportunity to point out how it sucks.
[friend] But even that guy says there's one thing for which America deserves our thanks, the air quality numbers.
...
>friend who worked in the Shanghai
You have it backwards, less took your libtard friends from SH seriously. They're expat "cock suckers" (to put it bluntly) putting expats in their filter bubbles fueling western reporting that CCP got pressured to fix air QoL because muh strong US AQI free speech even from their anti US friends (equivalent of my Chinese wife said).
Of course the interest in the topic was high, the average person on the street are flooded with CCTV telling them all the various government plans to alleviate air quality even before the US embassy stunt. People joke US helped PRC with airquality, but it's a joke, the one's who take joke position seriously (some groups more prone to this) are mocked (and they should be).
The friend in question has started a number of conversations with me by mentioning how much she dislikes Muslims.
I'm not sure what you're imagining here, but it has no relationship with reality.
Edit: Gary Locke is a former governor of Washington State and a member of of the old guard, a member of the pre-internet Seattle. This is back when South Lake Union (where Amazon is now) was just trees and low rent commercial. It was the site of the local Greyhound bus station.
He was the first Asian American governor in the US. While he's not directly Seattle, it was his primary constituency and he married a prominent Seattle TV news caster and former beauty queen.
Later, he was the first Asian American ambassador to China, appointed by Barack Obama. His political career ran 30 years and I've heard his name mentioned for most of my life. [0]
But I think you're actually getting downvoted because your comment has no context. I have no idea what Seattle has to do with any of this; if you'd actually explained what Seattle is doing in this space, it would have been an informative, useful comment that could teach people something, and lead to more interesting discussion. But as-is, your comment is just a drive-by, low-effort nothing.
The WHO yearly recommended limit is 5 mcg/m³, by the way.
It didn’t actually get that much better when we left in August 2016, but I hear it is much better today. Also, anyone can buy an AQI sensor of Amazon these days for $90, so it’s difficult to keep AQI readings under wraps
Totally relate. We also left because of our young kids; we couldn’t continue exposing them to that terrible air (we made the decision to leave in the summer 2016 but it took must a year). Also by then it had become crystal clear the direction China was going with Xi and l wanted not part of it or to raise my kids in that kind of society, even as foreigners. Ironically I came back to the US in time for Trump (it’s not nearly as bad of course but Trump 2.0 is heading that way).
It is not embassies' role to provide this service. It is quite reasonable to stop.
Of course people will argue that it was perhaps useful to the people of Beijing, New Delhi, etc. but the real question is what does this have to do with US embassies and the US government?
In deciding it’s quite reasonable to stop, is the thinking that “mission creep” = bad, so it justifies stopping something regardless of the big picture benefits? Or do you not consider the benefits significant?
Given a business with many departments, say you notice one department has some mission creep but somehow it’s also increasing profitability for the company overall.
What do you focus on - only mentioning stopping the department mission creep, or first mentioning people should make damn sure the value is preserved as they consider any reorganization?
But that's actually besides the point, which is mission and scope. It is not the job of the US government (or of any foreign governments) to provide air quality data in cities around the world and so I find it reasonable if they decide to stop. That's all.
I feel the reactions are much too strong and emotional, probably because many people here have been riled up by Trump and Musk so now overreact to anything they announce.
It is the job of an embassy to provide it's nation with travel advise and recommendations. If the host nation cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about air pollution, then the embassies must do it.
I'd agree that it's not the embassies job to inform the citizens of host nation with the data, but that's practically free, once you are already distributing the info to you own people.
What I don't understand is, if it's that useful, could some other embassies not just do the work? The US normally have fairly well staffed embassies, not just some dude in a suit, but surely the WHO could locate appropriate embassies in almost any nation.
Given the current US administration you kinda have to wonder how long it will take for Elon Musk to suggest replacing the existing network with StarLink, to save on cost of course.
If you really want to bring air quality to the attention of travellers it is of course possible to write "Air pollution can be high" on your country page, no need for real time data (why not also UV, pollens, water quality, then?)
The Danish government actually does write that "Air quality in major cities can be very poor" in their travel recommendations for China, and links to statistics (http://www.aqicn.info/city/beijing/). If that data is any good I don't know, but the US government feels that it need to collect it's own data.
Here is a relevant anecodote from Prof. Donella Meadows (who was a major proponent of environemental quality watches):
During the oil embargo and energy crisis of the early 1970s, the Dutch began to pay close attention to their energy use. It was discovered that some of the houses in this subdivision used one-third less electricity than the other houses. No one could explain this. All houses were charged the same price for electricity, all contained similar families.
The difference, it turned out, was in the position of the electric meter. The families with high electricity use were the ones with the meter in the basement, where people rarely saw it. The ones with low use had the meter in the front hall where people passed, the little wheel turning around, adding up the monthly electricity bill many times a day.
Yeah, to me it looks like that is not fine under the new administration. If it would help only Americans, or those in power at least, it would be okay, but something for all the humans? Naaah...
In my understanding it is not an attack on the country of china, to show their population a glimpse of truth.
It is maybe a slight attack on their government. But governments are not the same as the country, even though governments tend to disagree.
When one country wants to give the population of another "a glimpse of truth", no matter how well meaning, it's usually seen as a threat to the nations sovereignty, for better or worse.
As it stands right now, the US are no longer interested in either being in opposition to warmongering countries (Russia) nor stand up against countries it sees as oppressive to it's own population (China), it's clearly heading down a road of self-isolation which makes sense when you consider the ultimate goal of the current regime.
So yeah, there isn’t going to be a coherent plan behind this, other than adding chapters to the story he spins to keep his peeps engaged, as he dismantles and silences every form of effective opposition he can.
The stories of who’s to blame for people’s frustrations, How he is the answer. What “we” “deserve” and he should take, others be damned. Who is for him vs. who is the “enemy”. What helps him vs. what is “waste”.
Science, scientists, any morally secure adult professionals, are near the top of the list. "These people make me feel dumb, so I have to punch them in the face to compensate" is the underlying motivation.
If it's not checked it's going to turn into a bloodbath against science and rationality in general.
I don't think, that is a universal shared concept.
I mean we are talking about air quality sensor data here. Not analyzing and judging the countries politics.
Well, yeah. For example, Trump and his administration clearly lies about a lot of stuff, and it's fine and dandy if foreign news agencies report on these lies, no one bats an eye about that. But if you started seeing campaigns from German government for example, to "offer a glimpse of truth" to the US citizens, I think most nations would react negatively towards something like that, and most likely call it propaganda, even though it would actually be "spreading the truth".
Basically, what the US has been doing to the world for a long time ("Spreading democracy") is more and more seen as an act against a country's own sovereignty.
I agree that the quest for truth should always trump whatever politics are going on in a country, but the common person doesn't really have that "science" mindset so a lot of the population at large would see something like that as infringement on sovereignty, no matter if what's being spread is true or not.
I would ask the people. The stories shared here from Shanghai seem to indicate support of knowing about their air quality. They are the ones to breath it.
Does this apply to RT?
The "glimpse of truth" is coming from embassies within their borders. They could disallow the embassies if they honestly see the air quality data as a threat to their sovereignty.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which" (Orwell).
lmao, China improves air quality in China for Chinese people
"the world is not all about you" (SURACI)
- By forcing the Chinese to fix their air quality, this indirectly makes then economically less competitive, since they need to tighten their processes.
- Polution travels all over the globe, everyone eventually is impacted.
To infect them all with the woke mind virus, so it takes hold and destroys their country.
War won without even a shot fired.
If that’s woke then consider me wide awake.
Honestly, I think Trump is sending a deliberate message here and in a thousand other ways. If you trust the U.S. or rely on the U.S. for anything, no matter how tiny, the new U.S. is going to screw you. It doesn't matter if it was a mutually beneficial collaboration. The U.S. is happy to screw themselves in the process of screwing you. You can't bargain with them. Nothing you say or do will matter. They are going to hurt you because that is the U.S.'s new policy towards it's friends and especially its allies.
Trump is not being selfish or putting America's interests first. He's putting someone else's interests above those of the country he ostensibly serves. A lot of what he's doing makes absolutely no sense until you view it this way, and then it all makes sense.
I must say I got a lot out of it and it's followups. It became much easier for me to understand the world around me, what is happening. And even predict what's to happen sometimes.
What you observe with Trump admin: 1) it's stupidity; 2) it's not low IQ or lack of rationality; 3) it's lack of morals, not caring about good/bad, or even considering good what the rest consider bad (and vice versa); 4) it's social more than individual, it's a "mind virus". (ha!-Musk)
Bonhoeffer‘s "Theory of Stupidity" https://youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc (bad morals not low IQ, mind virus social more than individual)
Sabine Hossenfelder "Collective Stupidity -- How Can We Avoid It?" https://youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng (more cases, much more analytical, only about the group aspect not individual)
No need to redefine stupid. We have a word already for that: spite.
Having said that - I rather like the use. "Stupid" is part of quartet. All humans are categorised in four categories: intelligent (I), helpless (H), stupid (S), bandit (B). In X-Y coordinate system, by quadrant Q, actions taken by Tom, that affect both Tom (on X-axis) and Dick (on Y-axis):
- Q1 (+,+) Tom gain and Dick gain => Tom was intelligent (I).
- Q2 (-,+) Tom loss and Dick gain => Tom was helpless (H).
- Q3 (-,-) Tom loss and Dick loss => Tom was stupid (S).
- Q4 (+,-) Tom gain and Dick loss => Tom was a bandit (B).
+ There is no upper bound on the amount of stupidity that can exist within any particular individual.
+ We always underestimate the number of stupid people.
+ The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
+ A stupid person is someone who causes damage to another person, or a group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself (or herself), or even with some resultant self-damage. (Golden law of stupidity)
+ Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people, and that it's impossible to predict the actions of the stupid.
+ A stupid person S is the most dangerous person (compared to I, H, B), and crucially stupid S is more dangerous than a bandit B.
Bonhoeffer is the one to make a connection to morality. That looks very important observation to me. And that it happens in groups, like a mind virus-I can see that. Sabine's video is all about collective stupidity. (Extraordinary Popular Delusions as a mirror image to Wisdom of crowds.)
The thing is, I don't think what Trump is doing is adequately explained by stupidity. He's going well out of his way to harm the U.S.'s own interests in a way that, by too-strange a coincidence, helps Russia.
What's flabbergasting is how the Republican Party is enabling this. I thought they had more self-respect.
I think the dam will break and many people will start pretending they never supported Trump. And I think this Trump's minders know this, which is why they're destroying everything with such haste. They know they have limited time to gut the country.
Many, many of us are bewildered by Trump's actions, and consider him a some inscrutable mix of evil, stupid, and deranged.
I'm not even politically left (I'm pretty centrist), and I know I'm not alone in being perplexed by how he won the election.
No, never. I have enough experience on that matter due to where I live and due to friends I have all over Europe and US.
People and the administration of the country they happen to born/live in are completely detached in my mind.
However, sometimes people get more than what they bargained for, and I'm sure some people are in that situation right now.
Look, I'm from a country which is going through the exact process. It's much more complicated than that. It'd fill books.
The current administration didn't grow in a vacuum. It might not be the whole of the USA people, but a large enough fraction of the USA people supported the current administration, otherwise there would be no chance of it getting elected, even with all the brokenness of the USA electoral system. And the current administration still has a large enough support from the USA people, otherwise they could do nothing: the government is not some mechanical device which blindly follows the wishes of whoever is in command, it operates through people, and if all the people rejected the current administration, its orders would have no effect.
Trump is firing people at random, Musk is plugging his USB drive into all the databases, what can I practically do to "reject the current administration"?
Keeping in mind that the majority of what he's doing is a political "Gish Gallop" (https://effectiviology.com/gish-gallop/ ), as in "Gulf of America" to hide the meat of selling the FBI and Department of Justice buildings (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-t...), installing the newscaster of a propaganda network (https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/media/fox-news-reliable-sourc...) as the Secretary of Defense, dismantling USAID, and otherwise doing everything in his immediate power to break the bones of the US government?
Anything of consequence (eg: Civil War 2.0) is "even better" for Russia than what's going on now.
It's a horrifically complicated judo flip of nation-state proportions. Please get your act together, EU!
Had Walz been top of the ticket with exactly the same campaign and policies, he would have won. It sucks and it’s an indictment of the country, but pretending otherwise doesn’t help.
Walz suggested he may run for 2028 so we may get lucky enough to witness your prediction. I'd bet against him winning more than one state before primaries.
Harris may not have had a great campaign but it absolutely baffles me that a majority of voters would even consider voting for Trump after all the crap he pulled last time. He should be in prison, not the white house.
The whole? No, of course no leader should ever be conflated with the whole people of a country. A plurality, however? Definitely.
Trump won an evidently free and fair election, growing his vote-share over essentially the whole country. He has not conducted a heel-face turn since entering office, and his actions are broadly consistent with his campaign statements.
Moreover, Trump isn't the only elected official in the federal government. If Trump were some aberration then Congress would have every ability to thwart his agenda or remove him from office; they have not. The majority-Republican Congress approved even his controversial cabinet nominees on party-line votes, and to my knowledge they have not taken any major investigative or punitive steps since.
A majority of American voters may not have voted specifically for this, but they did vote for the party and candidate who are content to allow this to happen in the supposed service of other goals. Voters who earnestly believe the misinformation shared by demagogues and social media are a tragic case, but that does not excuse voters who 'voted with their wallet,' foreswearing their obligation to the common good in hopes of a tax cut.
Do not mistake me for a rabid partisan. I do not let the Democrats off the hook either for reasons that are another rant and are directionally in alignment with Nate Silver's published opinions.
Part of me is curious to know exactly what those who “vote with their wallets” would abide. It is unfortunate for them that their Faustian bargain is turning out not to be true, and that neither inflation, nor the cost of living, has or will go down, and that services that they and their loved ones may rely on are being dismantled, but they were candidly advised that this would be the case.
This seems to be ending now.
Europe is being bombarded by fascist propaganda internally, from Russia and now the US as well (primarily perpetuated by Musk). For some reason everyone decided that breaking up and weakening Europe is a majorly important goal. I can't shake the feeling that this is a coordinated effort.
I know. This is why I added an "(overt)" here.
> For some reason everyone decided that breaking up and weakening Europe is a majorly important goal.
People might not know it much, but Europe has some silent power about some very important aspects of this world. Removing this power will allow seeding of infighting and removal of tons of regulations in physical and digital realm, allowing much more "monies" for the rich.
Plus, Europe is leaving fossil based fuels faster than anyone else.
It's all about monies now. The rest can be (modern) peasants and merely survive. It doesn't matter as long as monies keep coming.
It's a fusion of Brave new World and 1984. Look at Australian politics. One prominent figure allegedly told that $2/day is enough for many people.
Calling the US an empire because it if friendly and does business with other countries is just propping up the fascist propaganda.
Under this plan, some countries are coerced to abandon building their own advanced goods (like planes), and given promises of supply from the US, fueling the technology gap with some countries in the mid-term.
This plan is what made Europe to be semi-dependent on US for defense and some advanced tech. My country had to re-invent the wheel countless times to close that gap, sometimes getting flak from the US, and even some technologies are outright denied to us to keep us vulnerable in some cases.
This plan is what made US a "soft-empire", though everybody signed into it because they had to. Now, the current US administration wants to discontinue these warranties, and Europe is starting the ReArm program.
Another face of the US (the Greater US) is discussed in this book [1], also worth reading, which is in my reading list.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Hide-Empire-History-Greater-ebook...
>An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries".
I've sort of argued with Russian propagandists going on about Europe being part of the US empire so the Russians are only doing the same by sending tanks into Ukraine but it isn't really like that. I mean the UK is obligated to help defend the US under NATO and we did sent troops to Afgansitan on their behalf so is the US part of the British Empire or is the the UK part of the US Empire and how can we tell? Where are the viceroys? At that point I mostly get blocked.
I mean you can redefine the words so everywhere that watches netflix is part of the US cultural empire but it's not empire in the traditional British Empire sense and gets a bit meaninless if you include everything.
US has several outlying territories. US has around 800 military bases around the world. In SK and Japan (and to a large extent in Australia), US dictates the policies. The world institutions have been mostly controlled by the US without putting itself under their jurisdiction. I see one dominant center with several subordinate peripheries - in Europe, Australia, SK, Japan and the island nations of Pacific. Unlike olden days, you do not need to send people as governers directly. You only need to control the trade, defence and foreign policies.
Also re Australia, it's a long standing military ally of the US but it still a constitutional monarchy under the British crown - I think they still have Liz on some of the bank notes. I guess military cooperation trumps head of state? It all gets confusing.
This Munich security conference is a wake-up call for EU in many ways. The speeches by JD Vance and Jeffery Sachs were both shocking in different ways. The reason you are telling US to sod off now, is primarily because you want to return to the old ways of pre-Trump. Europe really likes the NATO security umbrella and the money from US. When the old ways are threatened, you are screaming to return to the old ways. I am not seeing a Europe that is saying we will be independent. I am seeing an Europe that desperately wants a return to the predicable security umbrella.
As a resident of a supposedly developing country that's been stagnating for more than 30 years, I really see very few positive things coming out of the US and Europe. Their companies suck our country dry in exchange for kickbacks to the government (which has never won even a single honest election — but this never bothers anybody), their politicians are never worried about "human rights" or "democracy" in our country because they have significant monetary interests here. In spite of our horrific human rights record.
Lots of promises of large capital investments from the West were made by many diplomatic missions back in Spring of 2022; none have actually materialized.
Meanwhile, the Chinese and Russians are busy building roads, bridges, and power plants — playing the long game.
It is very silly to argue it does not exist just because the British allegedly had a larger one.
People (the majority of which are not Russian and hate modern day Russia) call the US an empire because of seemingly endless list of things like banana Republics, operation condor, sending death squads to Nicaragua, chevron genocide, wars for oil.
This is one of the silliest hills to die on.
If we assume that the US is in the process of moving away from being a democracy, or at least becoming an illiberal democracy (I personally think that this is _slightly_ pessimistic and that the Supreme Court may surprise us and save it yet, but it's an idea that's very much out there) then Europe (defined broadly) is left as the last major outpost of liberal democracy in the world (or second-last; you could argue India either way to some extent); it then makes some sense that it would be targeted by authoritarian and moving-towards-authoritarian states.
Let’s not ignore the obvious—He doesn’t seem interested in government or leadership, but he is interested in power.
If his long arms can take something away, then you must make treaty and negotiate to get it back. And it goes the other way, if China is upset about the service, he can turn it off and see what leverage or opening that gives him in negotiations.
I see these moves as distraction, and power play. It’s difficult to see any deliberation in service of values.
Don't forget that Trump also hates environmentalism in any form. Air quality metrics would acknowledge that pollution exists, which contradicts his opinions.
We should also consider the possibility that this is malicious compliance by people trying to embarrass Trump.
Trump is the chief executive of the United States. Either he ordered, or he hired some who ordered it. That's how it works.
> We should also consider the possibility that this is malicious compliance by people trying to embarrass Trump.
How much does Trump pay you to say such things?
heh. There is some region here (Shopsko), with somewhat weirdo's population, and they do have such a saying:
"i will burn my house if that would burn my neighbour's shed"
Additionally, as a Canadian, I wonder what will happen to us (and I suspect Mexicans are in a similar position) given our undeniable reliance on the United States. Canada, in its current political and economic climate, is not in a strong position, and right wing extremism has been on the rise. Some people are even literally advocating for _merging_ with the United States. While I think that is unlikely, I do wonder what our future will hold?
I personally don't know how to feel about the future.
”He’s a maverick, but he gets results!”
It’s just another part of their ongoing edgy, outsider, contrarian, disruptor narrative.
That's now gone, but hopefully others will fill that void.
Trust takes a lifetime to earn and a moment to lose. It's a shame.
If you're a conservative you have to care about preserving nature, the environment, clean air, outdoor spaces, etc. But if instead you're enthusiastic about coal, highway widenings, and your emotional support truck, you're just a base reactionary.
I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that these devices are a) not _that_ low cost and b) contain a wide array of intelligence sensors (think RadNet but on steroids).
The underlying programme will continue and will expand, at least it should.
Slapping a box with some sensors on a network of properties you have all round the world is an incredibly good and ultimately non-fraudlent, non-abusive and non-wasteful way of spending money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert_at_the_2006_Wh...
Hmm...
>The Washington Monument syndrome,[0] also known as the Mount Rushmore syndrome or the firemen first principle, is a term used to describe the phenomenon of government agencies in the United States cutting the most visible or appreciated service provided by the government when faced with budget cuts. It has been used in reference to cuts in popular services such as national parks and libraries or to valued public employees such as teachers and firefighters, with the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore being two of the most visible landmarks maintained by the National Park Service. This is done to put pressure on the public and lawmakers to rescind budget cuts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome
But it does sound "woke" and outside of what an incompetent know-nothing would say that the State Department shouldn't touch.
The "funding constraint" is almost certainly trying to rid embassies of the wokeness of monitoring pollution.
Disagree completely - saying "we had to turn off the air quality data network" is vague enough to be plausibly blamed on budget cuts for a non-tech-savvy audience, while still having a significant enough impact to attract coverage from outlets like the NYT. This, in turn, creates another "pro-science" talking point to rally "The Resistance".
It is not a "pro-science" talking point it is actually a real pro-science without the quotation marks talking point.
Science has been completely under attack for every second this administration has been in power, in every single way, from funding to scientific indpendence to censoring of words that are politically incorrect to the Trump administration.
Suggesting that this is an optional high profile shut down of science rather than something completely in line with what's happening every single day is a very odd take on the matter.
And as to the proof that this is not something that people really care about in a high profile way, the science rallies get about 1/10th the support of other sorts of rallies in those trying to resist Trump's changes.
If the State Department spends a crazy sum maintaining the air quality app, questioning that expense is fair and pretending otherwise only undermines scientific credibility.
This article is a "pro-science" talking point because it admits embassies were told to keep monitors running and data sharing could resume if funding returned.
So at this point, there's not even necessarily a gap in the actual data. The only proof this shutdown was unavoidable comes from those who carried it out. Funny how that goes...
Not that I'm saying you're doing that, of course. Although it is weird you use the phrase "pro-science talking point" as if being pro-science was a bad thing. Do you think it's a bad thing? Just asking questions.
How does spending and the debate around what what is justified have anything to do with scientific credibility?
I could live forever on $15mm, and help so many people off just dividends and yeild. $15mm is a lot of money.
15 million divided by the ~150million taxpayers in the US is ten cents per person. Do you pick up dimes off the street?
That's 5,273 people like me getting $15,000,000.
> It's this "this is cheap compared to the value it provides" has analogs in coupon clipping shopaholics: "you don't understand, it was 50% off!" Right, but it still cost money, a significant amount.
this is the main thrust. Sure, it's like a dime to the government. have you ever heard the phrase "nickel and dimed"? How many "$15 million dollar" nickels do you need to stack before it becomes a culture problem in the federal government?
It's thinking like you espoused in that last sentence that lead to waste and fraud. "it's like a dime compared to our budget, what's the big deal?"
there's a lot of dimes.
It's impossible to design a system with zero fraud, but keeping it under 0.5% is very impressive.
I still have to pay for that 0.5%. A nickel here, a dime there. Maybe it can be argued that spending $15,000,000 to "own the CCP" is worth it. After all, it's only a dime per taxpayer.
Harassing the CCP (and any other government we "owned") means that we also need to spend 800 billion on Defense.
> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.
> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:
> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.
> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.
> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.
i want you to explain to me how i don't grasp how big these numbers are, some more. I want you to explain how 79.1 billion in fraud or improper payments is "0.5%", and that's ok, and explain how ten times that amount, in 20% of the time, is ok, too.
please.
SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...
I'm done with all of you.
So idk what you mean its a lot of dimes.
> How many "$15 million dollar" nickels
Its 4 million "nickles", you can do the math to get to 6 trillion. 15 million is 0.00025% of what is spent per year. You need to save 15 million dollars, millions of times to do anything significant to amount being spent.
You going on about coupons doesn't really make sense here, the amounts aren't significant. Again because people think about large amounts of money how it applies to them personally without being able to grasp what actually gets spent by large organizations. Its like when someone posts here about saving 10k in AWS spend, when their company does millions in revenue and the engineer cost at least 100/hour
So if you have a bunch of machines you don't need anymore on AWS, you just leave them on, because it's only 0.5% of the total AWS spend? nevermind the potential attack surface of machines that aren't being actively maintained, are still connected to your other services, and so on?
Have you never heard the phrase "nickel and dimed"? Each individual "$15,000,000" is insignificant to a taxpayer. Thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of such "it's only $0.10 per taxpayer" adds up. If i have a million dimes, i can buy a nice car.
You can't grasp how big these numbers are
If you save 15 million dollars every day for a year you get about 5 billion
5 billion of the $6 TRILLION spent every year is 0.09% of the total amount spent
For the next 4 years if you cut $15 million every day from somewhere its still only 0.36%. A third of a percent!
6 trillion minus 20 billion is still about 6 trillion.
That hypothetical $5 billion a year in the best case would reduce the taxes needed by 26 dollars per tax payer on average per year.
> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.
> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:
> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.
> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.
> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.
i want you to explain to me how i don't grasp how big these numbers are, some more. I want you to explain how 79.1 billion in fraud or improper payments is "0.5%", and that's ok, and explain how ten times that amount, in 20% of the time, is ok, too.
please.
SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...
I'm done with all of you.
p.s., to you specifically, 6 trillion minus 350 billion is not 6 trillion.
That's also each American citizen getting... $23.27 each year for 10 years.
People are just awful at conceptualizing large numbers. Assuming that number is accurate, $7.9 billion is wasted in the process of delivering $1.6 trillion in 2024. Waste and loss scales with the work being done, it doesn't care that you got sticker shock.
I challenge you to find anything you do in your day with greater than 99.5% efficiency. You waste a higher percentage of the food you eat, stuck to the pan.
I certainly try not to leave 1/20th of my food in the pan!
> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.
> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:
> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.
> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.
> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.
i want you to explain to me how i don't grasp how big these numbers are, some more. I want you to explain how 79.1 billion in fraud or improper payments is "0.5%", and that's ok, and explain how ten times that amount, in 20% of the time, is ok, too.
please.
SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...
I'm done with all of you.
how about $750,000,000,000.00 in two years? Is that a number that's in the right magnitude to complain about?
>15 million for the government isn't a lot of money. and even for most big businesses it isn't a lot of money.
how about $750,000,000,000.00 over two years? is that a lot of money?
> The government spends trillions every year.
And in that trillions, is thousands and thousands of $15,000,000 spends like the one i commented about.
> 15 million divided by the ~150million taxpayers in the US is ten cents per person. Do you pick up dimes off the street?
$750,000,000,000.00 / 150,000,000 = $5000 per taxpayer.
Do you pick up sacks with "$" on the side you find laying in the street?
as i mentioned elsewhere, my issue is my having to spend a dime to harass the CCP and other antagonistic governments. How many thousands of my dimes are going to ends that i am fundamentally against?
If your so desperate for a comment from me, I wouldn't take that 750billion value as fact without seeing the methodology behind determining it, since we have already seen things like approved spending be labeled fraud and other misinformation.
Your bringing up unrelated topics, that's not how to have a discussion. That's just rambling.
This relates it. you said:
>I wouldn't take that 750billion value as fact
It's from the 118th congress. If you're going to say that congress can't determine waste, and GAO can't determine waste, and DOGE can't determine waste, or whatever - harp on methodologies - should i take that as "it's impossible to determine what money is going where, and therefore, one shouldn't worry about 15 million taxpayer dollars, or 750 billion in taxpayer dollars"
The fact the federal government hasn't been completely audited in a couple decades bothers me. Apparently, i can't complain about any government spending, because I
> really struggle with large numbers
$15 mil to shame the Chinese Govt (among others) to action and encourage citizen discontent was a bargain.
You couldnt possibly run an ad campaign to tell 1 billion people their govt was lying for less than $15mil.
Also have you ever been to the L.A. Basin?
You don't have to assume anything, this is a real (past) event that has happened:
> In 2008, the US Embassy in Beijing started regularly tweeting about the air quality in the city, which was gearing up to host China’s first Olympic Games. Two times a day, the embassy automatically published current pollution levels measured by an air quality monitor installed on its roof in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency. The data contradicted the figures published by the local government, angering local officials and eventually spurring China to clean up the air in its capital city.
https://www.wired.com/story/air-monitoring-beijing-state-dep...
Clearly, having numbers that are/seemed more trustworthy had a large and good impact on the city and it's inhabitants.
And if $15M seems like a lot, check out all the boondoggles that are par for the course in large corporations. The EPA system is a marvel of efficiency compared to what is frequently seen at large well-funded.
And if there actually is incompetence that resulted in overspending on the system, the financially prudent response would be to replace the decision makers rather than limiting the functionality of the existing system. The sunk-cost fallacy is endemic in these sort of low-information cost-cuts that actually end up costing us far far more than they save us, all so the outside consultants can pretend that they are doing something g to save a company.
I don't really care about the sensors or really the $15,000,000. I just think ignoring externalities like "poking the CCP via showing a billion people their government 'lied to them'." and thinking that 15 million against our defense budget was a good way to spend my "dime" of taxes. I don't want to go to war with China. I certainly don't want my taxes going to screw with the chinese citizens.
Since i can't control that, i'll complain about the costs.
Yes .. multiple parallel and redundant dedicated highly secure encrypted clean room communications between embassies and home with the bandwith for multiple high res video data, satellite feeds etc.
> because that would be grossly over engineered for the task.
You think US embassy networks are grossly over engineered to be resistant to Chinese, Russian, North Korean, Iranian, Isreali, spy networks?
Over engineered? .. there are museums dedicated to sneaky arse spy gear, eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
> Imagine, an entire dedicated network and all the gear and lease expense ...
and yet being unable to handle the tiny addition load of some once per minute analog sensor data?
In real terms the air quality network costs ride for free on what already exists.
If it rides for free in the existing infrastructure then how can it be shutdown? Or are the being dramatic as OP said and really they just turned off the api.
The literal at embassy upkeep costs for these atmospheric instruments is zero given it's minor work piggybacking on required existing staffed infrastucture that's not going away.
What's probably been cut is the "making it public" part that has a third party contractor take pooled embassy data and put it up on a website for all the world to see.
That needn't be expensive .. but it's been cut all the same.
Of course the US still runs embassy instruments, esp. in 'hostile' locations - seismic to detect tunneling, air quality to detect gassing, radiometric for nuclear hazards, network sanity and canary services to trip digital intrusion, etc. None of that is going away.
> I think a dedicated, secure blah blah network for air quality sensor data is indeed over engineered.
I'm sorry, are you on HN but don't actually have any IT experience?
The dedicated secure high bandwidth network is for the embassy .. a literal US outpost in a foreign potentially hostile land.
It's for secure comms, SCIF to SCIF comms, diplomatic communications, backup for military | intelligence usage.
Air quality and other met data is a trivial low bandwidth data load that could transmit in full on a shitty low baud POTS phone .. there's no issue having an embassy SIGINT officer set and forget a pipe on the existing network infrastructure, their time is paid for, the equipment is there.
The stations themselves run between $100 to $50,000.
If this happened in isolation, sure. We’re also firing random weapons stockpile experts, bird flu, customs agents (while raising tariffs? Bailout for smugglers?), IRS agents (while trying to cut fraud, mind you) and forest servicers (after record wildfires). Against that backdrop, chaotic shutdown has ample explanatory value.
You need a lot of ketamine to see the patterns in this madness. Instead, let’s take it at face value: these are illegal acts of random mendaciousness designed to demoralise federal workers before the courts cut Musk off. Musk, not Trump, is taking the lead because he can weather a lot more heat and Trump’s main deliverable to Thiel and Andreessen is his tax cut.
The IRS thing was particularly stupid. OMB has a report that said for every $1 put towards tax fraud enforcement they received some $4-$7 in return.
Difficult to see how they are saving any money by turning off something they've already bought that has essentially zero running costs.
Something doesn't add up for sure.
What costs are involved? Once set up the costs should be “an internet connection”. I assume the embassy didn’t have their internet cut off.
Sure it may require costs over time, but it reeks of “ill show them”.
If the financial restrictions are "cut everything non-essential" then this sort of makes sense. If the cuts are "this is woke science stop that" then it makes 100% sense.
Either way, blaming the State Department for this is neither reasonable nor prudent.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-plans-cut-va-cont...
For instance, in Canada he has repudiated a trade agreement he himself negotiated in his first term and threatened repeatedly to annex us.
Americans who treat foreigners as abstractions shrug off that sort of thing and assume you can go back to normal but reliability is shot and trust is broken.
In term one the remaining vestiges of Republican and state apparatus ensured continuity on many fronts. That's all gone.
They care about enriching themselves as much as possible. It's all short-term gain, without any view for the future. Get those tax cuts, reallocate money away from the government and away from those who work for a living and make a true oligarch class.
If events continue down this route, the US is looking at a lost decade or even permanent loss of leadership, letting China catch up and then step up, or maybe India.
I'm not trying to derail the thread, but framing your point as "magnitude of salary" is meaningless and perhaps reflects one of the issues.
It's not the size of the salary that's important- it's the quality of life. Salary is one factor in the equation, but it's not the only factor.
For example, in the US the plumber pays for health care. In Europe he mostly does not.
There are a million things that go into a very subjective quality of live assessment. Salary is part of it, yes, but ultimately only a part.
And, if we're being honest, the US certainly acts the part of leader, it talks a good game, and everyone is happy to take their money. But is anyone actually following their lead?
One measure of the lead of the US is how it is a destination for those looking to create great science, a great startup, build a business, or otherwise build a long-lasting contributor to our institutions. Europe, Japan, other places certainly rank highly here too, but the US is by far the biggest player and attracts the most people as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, VC money for nothing more than a good pitch is certainly easier in the US. Although even there it's limited to very small (very expensive) parts of the US.
One measure of QOL is indeed immigration. The US and Europe both struggle with illegal immigration. The US likely attracts more legal immigration, but to be fair even that is mostly from non-European places.
It's not like there's an army of European plumbers desperately trying to get into the US.
The weather is better in Europe (but both are waaaay worse than Australia. )
And yes QOL is very subjective. Which speaks to my point, simply plucking a single metric like salary out the air is meaningless- even within the US that 7k will mean different things depending on where you live.
I own a nice house in a countryside village that I bought recently (so at the current market price), 10 min walking distance from the train station. I can afford premium quality food, I have enough money (and time !) to go on vacation 4 to 5 weeks per year (not just holidays but going abroad as a tourist). I own two cars. I’ll have a retirement.
Life hasn’t been cool on me on the last decade : I had to go under a 100+k surgery, I now take a treatment of about 150€/month. My grandmother had a stroke and is now living hospitalized under my dad’s roof. I did a burnout and stayed 1 year at home to recover. And you know what ? Everything of this had barely any impact on our finances. Everything health related : 0 impact.
Now everything is fine, my health is better, I still have strong savings, still own my house, my grandmother is greatly taken care of…
I would never exchange that for the extra 4k I could lose at any moment without notice because life.
You are right to make the point that I couldn’t afford this lifestyle if I were alone without a family. Though I’d have very few interest in owning a 120m2 family house in this case, I’d probably live in a way cheaper apartment. I think being alone in the French countryside would be pretty boring, unless you are lucky enough to be near your friends and family.
Also, my point was absolutely not to compare European vs American lifestyle, saying which is better or going into the details, I just wanted to stress that comparing comfort of life by comparing revenue is not possible. It’s way more complex than "European earns less but don’t have to pay for healthcare".
More like in the US he pays for private health insurance (and/or he is covered by Medicare/Medicaid). In Europe he pays for public health system, something like 5% of his earnings, and he may choose to buy private health insurance on top of that (as many do) because the public health system is in shambles.
Yes, some people top up with private health. That is a discretionary spend. And while areas in Europe may vary, public health services are typically good.
These acts that teardown the information that the US makes available, that help us shape our decision making & view of the world, are deeply horrifically un-democratic. To march us from a nation that advocates sunlight & democracy, back into the dark is horror.
Yes.
>> towards a better place.
Weeelll, where the population steer it to isn't really determined by any principles. Rather it goes wherever the population steers it to.
Sometimes the population gets it wrong, and with open eyes pick an option that takes them to a worse place.
Yes, information helps (hence campaigning) but that information has always been gate-kept. That was seen as a flaw.
Turns out though information is like water; you need enough, but too much and you drown.
Anti-vaxers don't exist because of a lack of information. People who voted for tarrifs don't have restricted information. People have shown over and over a willingness to vote against their own best interest, as long as you provide someone else to blame.
How do we slow down or control the flow of information ? Genuine question. I'm just asking to see if there are any studies or proposals that already exist out there.
I've heard people talk about education. But this seems to be part of a long term solution. How can we solve this problem now so that in the next election (next 2 or 4 years) people will not vote against their own best interests ?
Convincing people to quit social medias or stopping listening to TV pundits ? So far that hasn't worked. Facebook/Tiktok just keeps growing.
There's no way that genie goes back into the bottle. And even if you could that's not the issue, people believe whatever they want to believe.
Ultimately education is a good start but if anything US education (which of course is very democratic) is getting worse not better. Book banning and burning spring to mind.
The real root of the issue is individualism over collective good. That's pretty baked into the American psyche (not to mention baked into the constitution) so no amount of education will change that.
For example it's obvious that fewer guns would reduce violence- that's been shown to be true many times over. But the individual's right to bear arms is baked in and not going away.
Of course this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The US acts as a counterbalance to other systems and other ways of life. It fights for women's rights in the middle east and Afghanistan. It traditionally stood up for the little guy against the neighborhood bully (think Kuwait and Iraq).
The pendulum will swing, but just as the USSR exited the world stage, the USA is now doing the same. All empires rise and fall. The gaps left by USaid will be filled by others. China is already buying influence in Africa and Asia.
Let that sink it...
It’s not a completely new problem. Voltaire wrote about this in Candide in the 1750s. I’m sure there are other (earlier or contemporary) examples that I don’t know, but Candide is the one obvious (partial) commentary on the “flood of information” phenomenon that always comes to my mind. Voltaire’s conclusion was to just ignore it. Worry about your own life. Live on a farm and work a physically exhausting job every day then spend your nights with your family and loved ones that you have no time for all the frivolous noise of news and world events that don’t affect you. When there is an actual signal among the noise, it’ll reach you and you should use your educated/good instinct that you have cultivated from the prior years when you were young and absorbing knowledge and information, and vote accordingly.
Obviously this is my interpretation of the work. Also obviously Voltaire was a very vocal opponent of voting and the will of the masses to enact real political and societal change through education and general shift in social beliefs and attitudes. He was also an advocate for acceptance of others and in Candide he had the wise old man who gives the final philosophical point in the book be a Turkish Muslim man in opposition to everything Christian French people believed in the 1700s. He was also a massive racist against black Africans and didn’t even consider them humans. Soooo your mileage may vary.
Many people work hard in Russia and spend nights with their families, it didn't stop them from getting shipped off to die in Ukraine or any other god forsaken Russian made hellscape.
In a way, the life Voltaire is describing is kind of, luxurious ?
I'm not a leftist, I'm a realist mate.
(Mis)Information is just the tool.
Being the world leader in everything was whatade the US great, these sort of data networks was part of what made it great.
What made it less great is the decimation of all industry except for PR,finance,services and software. Plus the fact corporates were allowed to buy politicians.
This caused all the wealth to be super concentrated.
The losers were gaslighted and completely lost trust in the system.
Now the vultures come to finish the job. Blaming transgenders and immigrants for all the problems.
Trivially true.
> Sometimes the population gets it wrong, and with open eyes pick an option that takes them to a worse place.
I think any truly governing body steers the ship in more or less the direction they collectively want. I’m anti-elitist but/and I believe that the elites manage to serve their own interests successfully.
You have to ask yourself if you really live in a democracy. Or if the demos is just another scapegoat when things to “bad”. But don’t worry though. These questionable anti-democratic lines of reasoning tend to fall into a contradiction sooner or later.
> Yes, information helps (hence campaigning) but that information has always been gate-kept. That was seen as a flaw.
Aaaannnnd you’re already there. A democracy where the information is gate-kept? By whom? It can’t be the population. Clearly there is some entity above the people. Then how the hell is that a democracy?
> Turns out though information is like water; you need enough, but too much and you drown.
> Anti-vaxers don't exist because of a lack of information. People who voted for tarrifs don't have restricted information. People have shown over and over a willingness to vote against their own best interest
Pray tell who controls either the gatekept information or the overwhelming firehose of information? The People!?
The people are so thoroughly manipulated, you lament. Well what kind of a farce of a “democracy” is one where the rich control the Media, the rich control the politicians through donations, and the rich control who even is realistically (within 99% chance) able to be voted for President of the US?
The latter boils down to two people. Two people chosen by the elites. And you have the gall to blame “democracy” for pushing the Clown Button?
> , as long as you provide someone else to blame.
The anti-democrats are always there to blame the demos. Thank you for your service.
Keep in mind you’re talking about air quality sensors. Just air quality sensors. In cities with multiple air quality sensors.
Let’s not go overboard
Infrastructure is also dependent on centralization. As opposed to some industries, the free market actually makes infrastructure less efficient.
Imagine there are 1000 companies developing roads and they all use different signage. All use different licenses. Would that work? Could you live your life? Probably not, and if you did, it would be absurdly expensive.
Some things MUST be a centralized public service. Pretty much all countries, independent of each other, figured this out 150 years ago. But here we are, still arguing the point.
But inevitably, someone comes around and creates something better and new. And it is actually better. Because the problem with standards is they age. They’re fundamentally compromises. They have flaws by their nature.
You even mention innovation. Those are two contradictory ideas. Centralization and standardization are anti-innovation, because they favor status-quo. They tend towards longevity, maintenance, and incremental improvement.
Building the Internet on top of voice lines was certainly a shitty solution. It was slow. But it also allowed existing citizens to access the Internet. I think this perfectly exemplifies the trade-off.
We, of course, can build new infrastructure. But when we do, we do it deliberately, centrally, and slowly. And we’re very careful to leave no gaps. The old and new must exist together, at least for a couple decades.
It seems that it is just what the US and its cronies claim to be. Which works on any topic:
1. If it does something “good”: self-evident
2. If it does something “bad” or fails to do something good: just say that it is failing to be a “leader” like it obviously has been since sometime (post-WWII maybe). Yeah, even negative evidence can perpetuate the same narrative. Just wistfully look at the mythic past without questioning the premise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
my point was regarding privitization of public goods (like GPS)
Soft power doesn't exist. Iterated games don't exist. Long-term consequences don't exist. Externalities don't exist. Positive sum utility gains don't exist. Systemic effects don't exist. It's all too abstract and cognitively difficult, it's the business of the arrogant intelligentsia.
The problem for them is that reality isn't going to adjust to fit their worldview. The decline will eventually reach people's purchasing power. The laws of reality will catch up to them.
The perpetual problem is that it will in the short term!
It’s just like the MBAs juicing profits by cutting R&D spending — this works every time!
It works, and it works long enough for a few to reap the benefits at the expense of the many.
This will play out over and over until we somehow magically achieve the Star Trek future utopia.
I just realised that per their own stories we’ve got a government headed by folks with extreme daddy issues. I’m not turning this into a Vox article. But perhaps there is overlap between leaders who can’t empathise and whose who admit to having had a trash upbringing.
Basically they are mostly below average intelligence. The ability to think about second, third, N order effects is a sign of intelligence which is clearly lacking here. Those in power are leveraging that lack of intelligence in the populist right to execute their larger plan of dismantling the government for the benefit of the super rich.
(It's almost a return to the old setup, back in the days of the Corn Laws etc - free markets used to be a left-wing position while the right was into mercantilism / protectionism)
More to the topic: why the hell are the US embassies reporting other countries' cities air quality? While it's a "nice" thing to do, it would be even nicer if those countries monitored that themselves. The fact that we think we need the US to do it because other countries tend to be dishonest about it is incredibly depressing.
You answered your own question, but there are also other reasons; see the first post.
Outside America? They’ll just fire the team responsible for maintaining the birds and then act surprised when they degrade.
And they will hand that contract to their friends.
AFAIK, the GPS system needs constant corrections, uploaded periodically from its ground base stations. Without these corrections, it will degrade very quickly (the satellites would still work fine, but their position estimate would no longer be good enough).
That whole process is just a dirty process at least it still was during the 20th century. In 2020s there are other that came or are coming online with the Chinese and Russians willing to build nuclear power plants in the developing world and off course renewable energy is becoming cheaper every year thanks to Chinese industrial and research capabilities.
It might be that China is the last country to go through an extremely dirty development cycle.
I sense that this is the level analysis that is going into these “cuts” and “optimisations”.
Naturally all of this does not carry over to the government where you can't just reinstall the whole thing if you mess it up.
But to the parents point we did figure out a bunch of things you could blast away and never use and the system would still boot (help files for example)
I think the 6 weeks of this second mandate have already made irreparable damage. When during the first mandate people tended to be "fed up with the US bullshit", now they are genuinely scared. Trump was not a one-off mistake. The people not only confirmed it, but seems generally okay with what's happening now; some Americans complain, but mostly when they are personally affected, it seems. It doesn't seem like the US people is shocked by the idea of destabilising the West. Not saying it is the case, but that is how it seems.
The trust is gone, I don't think it will come back. To the West, the US are partners, not friends anymore. It's still better than enemies, even though the US has been considering it... seemingly with the support of the people.
> Personally, I'm looking forward now for Europe to become self-reliant on technology.
Yeah, in a way, if Europe managed to be independent militarily, that would bring some stability. Let's hope they go there!
What is the actual recurring cost of broadcasting this data? The sensor and network infrastructure are presumably already established.
But that's beside the point. The sensors have already been purchased, the sensors are still being maintained, and the sensors are even still recording data. All they did is stop publishing the data.
[1] https://xk.usembassy.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/133/2016/0...
[2] https://store.bluinter.com/product/bam-1020-beta-attenuation...
And then they'll cut taxes, which will instantly blow the saved money 10x over.
Hell.. this escalated quickly..
I mean... who is mining for this stuff? The sheer SCOPE of the pettiness is mind-boggling, set against a backdrop of... no ideas whatsoever to move the country forward. No initiatives. No ambitious plan for Americans to get excited about.
Trump has never even submitted a PROPOSAL for anything. For example, his awesome new healthcare plan, promised over and over and finally promised "in two weeks," on July 19, 2020.
He uses same arguments as other friends of RF.
Considering the US typically has only a handful of embassies and consultants in countries, and they are located in major cities, it comes across as a hyperbole when describing the loss of a few stations as setting back air quality monitoring globally.
But in Beijing specifically, the US embassy air quality measurements had a significant impact on government policy to improve air quality. The same can be true in other countries where information is tightly controlled.
Your country has bad air quality? Of course we know it. Perhaps we will release that data, perhaps not. What can you give us back in return for keeping it private? Also, you have embarrassing data about my government? Let's talk and fix a deal so we (not the population) benefit the most.
However.
Let's not kid ourselves that this program probably cost upwards of several million dollars.
- Wired cut my access just before I was able to cite, but someone said the program cost "just tens of thousands of dollars a year, because equipment had already been purchased". The cost of procure install and maintenance I would imagine was wildly excessive.
> Let's not kid ourselves that this program probably cost upwards of several million dollars.
That's completely within the realm of possibility. I'd be surprised if you could set up any program at a federal level with less funding than that. 2 million dollars is a 25 man team if salaries and overhead are $80,000 per head. I really have no insight into what these kinds of programs cost, but I guarantee there is no way you're standing up servers in 100+ embassies for $10 a day.
> Wired cut my access just before I was able to cite
This is the same as not citing a source at all. Another user commented [0] that each of these servers cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $180,000 to $250,000 just to set up.
Maybe. I churn out solutions and designs based on fragmented tickets and hearsay user feedback all day long.
I imagine public Internet or Starlink would suffice to upload daily readings. But sure, that's speculation from someone who knows nothing about how it works.
If not, why isn't tailscale free for everyone?
The costs of this equipment get amortized for the duration of the equipment's useful life, so you can't just throw that away. Even if we do though, $10 is still too low of an estimate. For sake of argument, let's assume there was one guy running the entire network, part time, for half an hour per day. He will at minimum be making $30 an hour, add another %25 on top of that to account for overhead costs, so $37.50. $37.50 / 2 = $18.75. We're already over your threshold.
If other estimates that this equipment is in the realm of $200,000 per node to set up (that's presumably not just the cost of the server and other equipment but also the cost of delivering the equipment and standing it all up in the embassy), assuming 100 nodes you're talking about a $200,000,000 program just in capital costs. Amortized over a 10 year life span, assuming linear depreciation, the amortization costs alone are $3,650 per day, and that isn't including maintenance.
And yes, $10 is hyperbole, but we have AWOS (automatic weather observation systems) at airports all over the USA. I wonder how much it costs to transmit data from those.
By all means whittle the fat from a third party contract on data delivery .. the sensor maintainance part is likely tricky but not challenging and has a real cost far less than mean cost of an embassy security staffer, being the kind of thing that takes an hour or so a month at most (once setup and running).
( FWiW I maintained, coded aquisition for, wrote presentation layers, for high end professional multi channel geophysical instrumentation: gravity, magnetics, radiometrics, lidar, radar, barometrics, twin gps + base station, etc )
My understanding is that it just won't be _shared_ anymore. And the _sharing_ can't cost much.
None of the reporting I've seen on the issue has investigated the cost of the program. On the subreddit for State Department Foreign Service Officers, which I still frequent, the most plausible estimates for the installation of this equipment at a single foreign post range from $180k to $250k, plus ongoing maintenance that would require flying in private contractors from the U.S. and putting them up in a 5 star hotel (in countries where you need this type of monitoring, hotels less than 5 stars generally don't meet Western standards). [1]
There has to be some kind of middle path between take a chainsaw to anything that has the word "environment" in it, and spending the cost of four years at a private college to install equipment that is available off the shelf for a few hundred dollars. (Yes, I know consumer grade equipment won't cut it, there are major network security concerns, etc., but surely it could be done at 10x or 20x the cost of a consumer solution, not 500x).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/1j3owmk/com...
I don't think we're worried about particle sniffers transmitting porn, but then again they do like to sniff particles...
"The air we breathe: lessons from Beijing’s airpocalypse"
https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/air-we-breathe-lessons...
If this isn't just random unplugging of things and there's not a Trump aligned oligarch selling competing data (like the AccuWeather guy) it might be fossil fuel corps looking to hide the damage they do.
Actually, we are helping them to grow up and use their own legs. Distributed development, self-sustainability are some words.
Ultimately we rely on partnerships because - news flash - pretty much nothing is made entirely in the US. This is a Tom and Jerry level “bending the shotgun in your face” moment.
These NGO types will obviously sing one tune. They'll be even more worried if pollution is finally addressed. They'll do their best to stop that from happening.
The govt installs and collects the sensors around the world and makes it available to private companies who contractually provide a suitable and free API.
That sounds like a decent enough division of labor. We can even give a private company a tax credit for providing the API.
Because of course they're going to charge for it. Free API? Right.
While some oligarch turns a profit.. So efficient
For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-con...
There are many reports like this.
And just to be clear - Occam's razor to you suggests that this project hasn't actually been defunded, but rather that the people working on this project have chosen to stop work on it in order to project the appearance that it has been defunded?
Have people stopped working at the embassies? According to the submission, embassies will simply stop sharing air quality data.
Why are you all downvoting me? Am I not allowed to ask questions? Or am I only allowed to ask questions that don’t make DOGE look good because everyone who is anti-Musk is obviously correct, and the rest are wrong?