If you are a US tax payer, it's important to realize that:
1. The federal government has already invested hundred of millions of dollars and millions of person years of scientific effort to collect all the valuable data that NOAA, CDC, NIH, the National Weather Service, etc. have collected, curated, and analyzed
2. The DOGE-ies and their ilk are flushing that all down the toilet -- all your investment will now be lost, or at least inaccessible to you or anyone else who might do something useful with it.
Excerpts from Project 2025. Godspeed, America. We’re all toast, and while we can compliant all we want about it, are we really doing anything to stop it?
> The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.
> Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department's $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department's personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures).
> This industry's mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful func-tions. It should be broken up and downsized.
> NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.
> Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather.
> Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.
> The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.
I can't speak for others but in my experience, NOAA gave me the most accurate weather for my area, and it wasn't even close. If they take the site down I hope they at least keep the API's up so folks here can build frontends
its going to be like twitter, anything that remains up will be broken beyond any utility. And since this is not something which derives values from others' contributions, it won't even survive beyond this in any form.
I am related to people who voted for it, and none of them are what I'd call enthusiastic. But they are not smart enough to imagine a way out of their little boxes.
They shouldn't be surprised. Stuff like this is exactly what they said they were going to do and ~70 million voted for it and ~90 million weren't compelled enough to vote for the other viable choice or choices
> They shouldn't be surprised. Stuff like this is exactly what they said they were going to do and ~70 million voted for it and ~90 million weren't compelled enough to vote for the other viable choice or choices
But the problem is this was one of a million facets to the choice, and people were only able to vote on the whole package.
Personally, I blame the Democrats, because they knew what the Republicans "said they were going to do" and pretty much only used it for uninspired attack ad fodder. They should have been focusing on fixing the shit that causes voters to disapprove of them:
> The Democratic Party’s approval rating remains at a low point, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released to The Hill on Monday.
> ...
> “Democrats continue to be seen as out of the mainstream. Their ratings are at record lows and, they will have real problems in the midterms if they can’t lift themselves up from this nadir,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the poll.
> The latest polling matches similarly dismal numbers for Democrats found in other surveys.
It takes a special level of awfulness to lose to Trump worse than the first time.
This has been my take throughout the last 2 losses. There's a massive divide between what the vast majority of Americans need/want to change and what the top Democrats have been pushing for the past 30 years. I mean, it's not to the level of a "death-cult" status that has pervaded the Republican mindset, but really are they that far off? > $1 Bil. was spent on the last presidential election cycle and for what? All they had to do was drop the corporate puppet-masters and speak to the general population with some sensible plans for getting America back to a place where the general population can live decent lives.
"Personally, I blame the Democrats" amazing how history repeats itself everytime one party starts destroying things: The other side is blamed. Sure, "both sides" have responsibility, but this really attempts to shift the focus inappropriately. "Blame" is such a funny concept, as if it's always floating nearby, looking to attach itself to something.
I really think the correct attribution is the Democrats are the conservative party and the Republicans are the right wing party.
The Democrats value formalism, institutions, status quo, rules, procedures, convention, incrementalism, stability ... They reject populism or anything radical or fundamentally different. The also court various flavors of conservatives and routinely claim they aren't conservative enough when they lose and they're key to victory is tacking more conservative.
Harris ran a campaign that was anti immigration and pro police. Gavin Newsom has a podcast with guests like Steve Bannon, Michael Savage and Charlie Kirk.
If an alien landed and tried to bucket parties based on current behavior, the Democrats would be conservative
The wink makes me feel like you think that's a joke but it really isn't. "Forcing the End" is a common endpoint for cults, where they get tired of their doomsday predictions not coming true and decide the path forward is making them true, and it seems Evangelicals are hitting that point.
Groups with these ideologies typically leave power only after everything is reduced to smoldering collapsed ruin. It's time to seriously think about leaving. This isn't going to be corrected in my lifetime.
Given this particular cult has access to one of the major stocks of nukes on this planet, I'm not sure "leaving" is a realistic option unless you have a timeshare on Mars.
There's a reason all the billionaires built their hidey-holes in NZ and bought citizenship. Stable liberal democracy that probably won't seize all their shit, relatively rich, not so tiny that there's little to do, really good natural environments, not likely to turn totally awful under climate change, really hard for climate or other refugees to reach, out-of-the-way and non-threatening enough that it's unlikely to be attacked by anyone or put entirely under the thumb of a great power for the next century or so, at least.
I can't think of a single other country that even comes close to matching that list of benefits. Only major downside is Christmas in Summer.
Fuckin mad fair, and I hope that didn't read as criticism of you. If it helps I'm an American with zero power stuck in a red-state hellhole, so I feel you.
I can't even imagine what the rationale would be for doing this:
>The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency is poised to eliminate most websites tied to its research division under plans for the cancellation of a cloud web services contract, a move that could snarl operations at several labs.
If Bloomberg is correct, it seems that the contract was cancelled prior to developing (and testing and announcing to the public etc.) any replacement.
>A contract for the services across NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research — known as NOAA Research — has been targeted for “early termination,” according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg News. As a result, almost all external websites reliant on Amazon, Google and WordPress services are poised to vanish early Saturday morning in Washington, wiping the bulk of the unit’s work, which includes climate and environmental science research, from public view.
Many Americans rely upon NOAA Research communications, both businesses and individual citizens. This worries me, not because I think that Trump is a fascist or because of my political views, but rather, because it suggests a lack of competent government leadership. NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore? I'm not a Bloomberg subscriber, so what I quoted was all I could read about it. I hope there's more info, e.g. about what the replacement delivery system to the public, will be...
> NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore?
You are not thinking far ahead enough. This is just the first step.
Step 1: these Amazon and Google cloud contracts are extraneous; let's cancel. The public can always find an alternate way of getting the research data.
Step 2: the number of times such research data is accessed has drastically decreased, suggesting that the public has not found them useful; let's cancel the research projects.
Step 3: these researchers aren't doing any research any more; they don't seem to have any work output; let's fire them for cause.
Republicans have for a long time wanted to end free weather information and hand that job over to for-profit companies like AccuWeather[1]. Trump v1 nominated AccuWeather's CEO to run the organization[2]. Project 2025 calls for breaking up NOAA and commercializing it[3]. This is not some hidden agenda, and you don't have to speculate about their intentions. As is the case for everything these guys do, they are open and brazen about it.
I doubt that was the intent. They are cancelling contracts willy nilly right now. NOAA is getting hit harder because of their association with climate science but this administration is not doing a lick of diligence on any of these moves.
I ran into the same thing recently. Did you end up seeing a boiler plate template site filled with Lorem Ipsum?
I believe there were certain DNS resolvers that seemed to have been incorrectly resolving. Whether that was intentional or not I didn't have time to look into.
archive.is blocks most DNS requests coming from Cloudflare. One would either have to hard code one of their IP's in their hosts file or use a different resolver.
We'll likely never know for sure, since they will just claim that the goal is to save money. There's even a grain of truth to it: AWS and GCP are the most expensive offerings in that class. Of course, if the goal was actually to save money -- then first off, Wordpress wouldn't be getting cut. Also, the plan would be to migrate to more cost effective alternatives (of which there are several), not to just turn the thing off.
Firstly, they want to dismantle the government piece by piece and sell it off to the highest bidder, privatizing it. Secondly, anything they view as contrary to their world view, despite of (or regardless of) scientific evidence stating otherwise. Eg: they believe anything to do with climate change is completely bogus and don't believe there's any value in studying it, or hiding it's results for the benefit of their friends in the oil/gas industries.
They were fired by the administration. Looks to me like the system working. Government agency does something stupid. Congress investigates. Situation corrected. I'm looking forward to that oversight of the current administration. Enjoy your kite.
> In November 2024, FEMA fired a supervisor for directing relief workers to avoid assisting homes displaying support for President Donald Trump in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. In response, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into political discrimination at FEMA and held a hearing with former Administrator Deanne Criswell. This week, FEMA informed the Oversight Committee that it has terminated three additional employees for failing to uphold the agency’s standards of conduct. The agency is also implementing additional training to reinforce that political affiliation must never be a factor in disaster relief efforts.
No one is getting rid of it? A couple, non-critical websites are being changed up. They will come back online once they are moved off over priced cloud providers. Its called efficiency.
I would like to add context for others that this was explicitly laid out in the "Project 2025" agenda. Accuweather was cited as an example, and Accuweather responded saying they do not agree with the agenda: https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-su...
The actions were bringing in a ton of people who worked on it, to the campaign and nascent administration before the election, which happened before Trump's lies about how that wasn't the plan.
The same Accuweather whose previous CEO (and founder's brother) was Donald Trump's nominee to run NOAA in the last administration?
Color me shocked that, under the last administration and when it looked like the Trump campaign had a good chance of self-destructing, they wrote a milquetoast "we don't support this at all ;-)" press release about his agenda.
You're referring to the Space Weather Prediction Research Center website, yes? I just checked the Newsroom for NOAA SWPC. There was nothing mentioned. I also visited their social media at https://x.com/nwsswpc and https://www.facebook.com/NWSSWPC/ Nothing there either; so far, so good.
The purpose is to enrich a few at the cost of the many. They will privatize the services we need to live, increasing the net cost of everything. They're destroying the American dream.
I remember when the USA government spaceweather websites and FTP sites went away in the early 2010s. It was terrible. They replaced them with the current javascript monstrosities and hid the raw directories. It made automating mirroring of space weather resources much harder.
Yeah, I could triple the "read this to learn more" links and it'd still not cover all of it.
"The entire history of the Republican Party since Goldwater, our bad system of elections, the entire history of postwar 'think tanks', the McLuhan-sense 'message' of TV and especially the Internet, and a slow-motion more-successful knock-off of the Business Plot" covers a lot of ground.
So that people like you (ingrates, from an administrative perspective) can stop paying the government to provide basic services and instead become habitually reliant on a paid alternative service.
I couldn't read the entire article due to paywall. From what I did read, it doesn't seem like there is ANY alternative, none at all now, for the public to access NOAA Research.
AccuWeather has been lobbying to remove weather data from the public view for years. The idea here is that AccuWeather will have access to this data and then sell forecasts to the rest of the country.
Since the headline is positively wrong, and the article paywalled here's what this actually is about:
NOAA uses cloud providers including AWS and GCP to host a bunch of services and sites under its "research division". The contracts under which these hosting arrangements are provided are to be terminated shortly. At that point those services and web sites will go offline.
afaics it's nothing to do with the actual weather service data feeds.
My job requires pulling large data dumps produced by research from a national lab from public S3 buckets. TB's of data.
This research is publicly funded, the data produced is public data, and it enables an entire ecosystem of business activity. imho, this is a good use of public funding and research, and hosting it in S3 buckets is a good solution that makes huge quantities of data easily accessible to people who would use this.
I don't use NOAA data, but this has chilling effects for my business (is my national lab next?). There is nothing "efficient" about forcing agencies to get rid of data and service hosting that works well at scale.
(If DOGE was actually about increasing efficiency of digital services like it's pre-rename/pre-takeover US Digital Services agency was actually doing, we'd be building a TB or PB-scale S3 alternative for government agencies to use, but we all know that's not the constructive efficiency they're doing here)
The headline is "US Weather Agency Websites Set to Vanish with Contract Cuts". Are you seeing a different version than I am? Your complaints don't make sense otherwise.
> NOAA uses cloud providers including AWS and GCP to host a bunch of services and sites under its "research division". The contracts under which these hosting arrangements are provided are to be terminated shortly. At that point those services and web sites will go offline.
The headline says that sites are going to go down because of contracts being cut. That seems like an accurate summary of this paragraph.
> it's nothing to do with the actual weather service data feeds
The headline doesn't say anything about data feeds.
Funny I was looking for some data from NOAA a few months ago and I ended up giving up. Their website has become a mess.
I remember doing the same a few decades ago it was pretty straightforward, if I remember correctly there was a well organised anonymous FTP server and you would connect and transfer what you needed.
So why not seeing this as an opportunity to go back to a simple, cheap and effective system? how hard can it be to serve those data with HTTP on a web server?
> The WPC makes available its Day 1-3 6-hourly QPF files in GRIB 1 format at 32km resolution. The GRIB files are available for download via the NCEP anonymous FTP server (ftp.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov)
Et c., there's more. I think that's forecast data.
I'm a scientist. I'm even a social scientist. Painting the "other" as some sort of one-dimensional malevolent retard isn't doing you or anyone else any favors. I promise.
There are real people, even smart people, on the other team. They have thoughts, kids, impressive degrees, goals unrelated to politics. They enjoy sunshine and hiking. They think they're doing what they're doing for good reasons. They believe themselves to be good people. They might even believe you to be a good person.
It is the case that the average person is way, way dumber than people here would like to admit to themselves. And half of the population is dumber than that!
I bet there's a small difference in the means between red and blue, but not much. The available literature exaggerates it because of publication bias / for political reasons. I guess what I'm saying here is: most people are idiots on both sides of the spectrum.
Team Blue has managed to capture more of the intellectual elite (nearly all of the institutions except the Supreme Court), which is probably the thing you're feeling here. I don't think they've managed to capture the hearts and minds of that much of the intellectual elite, though...they've just managed to create chilling effects, spirals of silence, suppress free speech, compel other speech, etc. Which is a huge part of why we are where we are.
In any event, I stand by my original comment. Painting them as one-dimensional doesn't help you. They aren't. Trump is...hard to understand, but Musk and Vance are smart people. There are a lot of other smart people involved on Team Red. Insofar as you operate on the assumption your opponents are as simple as you claim, you shoot yourself in the foot.
Third reason: privatizing government is good for $Big$Business (who also fund political campaigns)
Taxpayers are paying either way, except that now it'll go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders instead of at least providing jobs to fed employees.
Funny. NOAA spent 2015-now moving all their weather servers off premises and moving from HTML and static images with maybe a bit of client side javascript to entirely web application remote hosted monstrosities that all require javascript to even see. If they'd just stuck with what worked instead of chasing the shiny glimmer of modern web dev they wouldn't be in this exact situation. No doubt they'd be being attacked a different way. But I still miss the old sites that were actually websites. My bet is that the lingering ones like https://forecast.weather.gov/ will be the only remaining after these political attacks.
It's a fun mischarecterization. But the old sites were/are far more functional and less fragile. A single animated gif of the CONUS radar, for example, is way better user experience, incomparibly less fragile and easy to host, than a complex javascript application and associated backend databases, servers, etc. Just put the gif on akami, host the simple static html on noaa servers and it lasts a decade with no one touching it. It was how it worked for near 20 years.
But re: your mischaracterization, I thought I was clearly saying that they'd find another way to attack politically. It's just that the modern fragile web setup made NOAA particularly vulnerable.
1. The federal government has already invested hundred of millions of dollars and millions of person years of scientific effort to collect all the valuable data that NOAA, CDC, NIH, the National Weather Service, etc. have collected, curated, and analyzed
2. The DOGE-ies and their ilk are flushing that all down the toilet -- all your investment will now be lost, or at least inaccessible to you or anyone else who might do something useful with it.
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