Decades to build up expertise and infrastructure. Days to destroy it.
this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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The government is evidently roughly as fragile as trust. Takes ages to build, and not long at all to destroy.
For comparison purposes, the previous record is 53 days.
Can't be any climate change if there is no one to report the climate change
Well this appears to be weather forecasting, rather than climate research. Guess weather forecasting isn't useful now.
Oh, I suppose the idea is that billionaries will sell weather forecasting services to the public at a huge profit. Worked for healthcare so why not? Edit - if there is a plan, of course.
You’re overthinking it. Look at all the other “government cuts”, it’s very much some Pavlov reaction, “hurr durr Noaaa climate hoax”.
Usually when billionaires take over a company they sell the real estate to their other companies and then rent it back. Milking the company for all it's worth.
So this is happening on a governmental level.
The process from regulatory capture to governmental capture/de-facto oligarchy, to now governmental asset stripping and explicit oligarchy has steadily taken place over many years now. No one, least of all the Democrat Party hierarchy did anything to stop it.
That’s pretty much exactly the plan.
A slightly older article (Sept. 2024), but illuminating: Fact-checking what Project 2025 says about the National Weather Service and NOAA.
I mean, they never hid their intentions.
From a European perspective, even though the Americans I have known in life have all been great, the fact is that the American people voted for all this, including the harmful alliance with Russia. It isn't just Trump.
Unless of course Trump wasn't lying again when he hinted at manipulating voting machines. No one has mentioned it other than Trump (as far as I am aware), so I assume it is nothing. But there certainly was concern pre-election from experts in the field regarding the security of voting machines.
I'm aware this sort of idea creates conspiracy theories, something I really am not trying to do. If anything I am just trying to find a reason that potentially lets American people off voting for Trump! https://apnews.com/article/election-security-voting-machines-software-2024-80a23479d8a767ba9333b2324c4e424b
the American people voted for all this, including the harmful alliance with Russia. It isn’t just Trump.
The Americans who were allowed to vote and chose to participated in a system that has resulted in Republican presidents twice in the last two decades who lost the popular vote but won the electoral college vote. Republicans have been suppressing the votes and Trump was even bragging about how easy Elon could hack voting machines.
I both think the election was rigged and want to make it clear that decades of voter suppression by Republicans is why the elections are even close and the fact that they complained about 'stolen' elections is consistent with all of the other things they accuse Dems of doing that Republicans are doing.
Yes, the broken US system resulted in him being in office. No, the whole public is not to blame. Not even half the population deserves the blame for it.
As an American… I don’t know.
I think we’re well and truly fucked.
I won't lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that's been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I'm at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like -- various forms of autocracy are what we're trying to avoid, and I've never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.
I still don't see how they plan to privatize weather forecasting. All it takes is one or two people from each city to scrape the data and upload it to a free alternative site. It's not like health care where each person needs individualized care, it's more like streaming services and we're all seeing how that's going. Never thought the future would involve pirating weather forecasts...
I don’t know anyone who owns a weather radar. Do you?
Climate data, local weather stations, generalized patterns, sure. But access to emergency data will be paywalled. Same for data that shows any kind of climatological trends, if it’s available.
They’ll have local governments paying for a subscription so the emergency alert system works.
“Union Pacific: We told them that a tornado was heading to a spot. Two trains stopped two miles apart, they watched the tornado go between. Then unfortunately it went into a town that didn’t have our service and a couple dozen people were killed. But the railroad did not lose anything,” Myers said. The Plan to Privatize Weather Forecasts
Joel Meyers, Accuweather’s founder and executive chair, was the subject of a John Oliver segment last year, and he is foaming at the mouth to tell people they better pay for his service or die.
No, any weather radar around here is either owned / operated by airports or the military. Although if the price were low enough that'd be a pretty cool hobby to get into, with many legal hurdles I'm sure lol. I'm sure some individuals would pay for the premium weather provider who have the radars, that's what I'm proposing they scrape the data from. Like you say, emergency data is really where this will hurt people, especially in areas with hurricanes and tropical storms.
I don't know if there is a plan. But if there is I would guess it is no more formulated than 'whatever the government now pays for is what we are going to insert ourselves into and get paid'.
So whatever a couple of individuals scrape and place on a free alternative is provided by a billionaire instead of the government.
Imagine how much homeowners insurance will cost when insurance companies can’t tell where the flood zones are anymore.
Shit, I've got to get a weather subscription, too?
Worse than that... The commercial weather services aren't doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there's no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won't necessarily follow.