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".
I could live forever on $15mm, and help so many people off just dividends and yeild. $15mm is a lot of money.
$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.
15 million divided by the ~150million taxpayers in the US is ten cents per person. Do you pick up dimes off the street?
> 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
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!
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...
How does spending and the debate around what what is justified have anything to do with scientific credibility?
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.
The stations themselves run between $100 to $50,000.
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.