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U.S. government removes detailed pollution map from internet

web007 7y ago
There was some significant discussion around this and the data sources that feed it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ea0wx2/urgent_request_federal_databases_disappearing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ea0wx2/urgent_... It seemed from the comments that the Toxmap is going away, but most/all of the data 5hat feeds it is still available. There are several other related datasets that were "retired" around the same time, and those seem to be truly gone.
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago
  > There are several other related datasets that were "retired" around the same time, and those seem to be truly gone. This is bad. Another reason that we need to demand that all public data should be available in a machine-readable raw format, not just a web frontend for access, and that we need to systematically upload datasets to archive.org.
jacquesm 7y ago
All inconvenient truths shall be wiped under the carpet. Capitalism is a great thing and has brought us very far but you have to wonder if at some point it isn't going to undo all of that progress and put us back where we started or worse.
- pstuart 7y ago
  It's almost like the people behind these machinations don't care about sustainability and only about their immediate rewards.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    You can leave out the first three words of that sentence and it would be factually correct, more compact and less qualified. A win on all counts imo.
    - rabidrat 7y ago
      "It's almost like ___" is common internet vernacular for "I can't believe this isn't obvious to everyone, but apparently it's not, so here it is: __"
      - anigbrowl 7y ago
        Quite so, but (like Jacques, apparently) I've come to think that the posture of ironic disbelief expressed in that phrase is corrosive of public discourse. I suspect it's responsive to unfavorable external conditions, like the famous line from Casablanca where the police chief raiding Rick's cafe insincerely says 'I'm shocked - shocked - to find that gambling is going on here,' to offset his embarrassment at functioning as a tool of the Nazis' political strategy. Put another way, we pretend to give people we dislike the benefit of the doubt and they pretend to believe us, to avoid the unpleasant fact of an underlying social conflict.
- thecopy 7y ago
  I think your definition of capitalism is a bit far-reaching.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    You can think whatever you want but riddle me this: In what other country do large businesses get to dictate the contents of government websites, in what country is the head of the environmental protection agency a lobbyist for the oil and coal industry? The effect of money in politics is tremendous and if not for the degree to which corporate profits dictate government policy through lobbying and outright corruption has no equal other than in the one country where 'the market' is given free rein to abuse the country to whatever degree they can get away with. I was all for harsh punishment of VW execs because of the diesel scandal, at the same time everybody was up in arms about that and this sort of thing gets a free pass without so much as a raised eyebrow.
    - toomanybeersies 7y ago
      > In what other country do large businesses get to dictate the contents of government websites Australia does that one.
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  Why do people always have to shoehorn capitalism in any argument? Removing inconvenient truths has been done and will be done under any system. Be it tribal, religious, monarchist, communist, capitalist, or a loose band of tree huggers. It really does not matter.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Tribes, religion, monarchy and communism all failed to greater or lesser extent before they could take the planet down with them. Their built-in faults were such that they did not need to be reined in before they self destructed. But capitalism is so successful by the one metric that matters to it - money - that it has the potential to destroy everything else whilst still maximizing for that one metric. The concentrating effects of wealth make this even more likely. After all, people will rarely bite the hand that feeds them, guaranteeing docility whilst marching them right into the abyss.
    - randiantech 7y ago
      Capitalism is not only successful on economic matters. Poverty, for example, got reduced significantly during the last decades.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        Poverty is an economic matter if there ever was one.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - modwest 7y ago
        The fact that poverty exists at all when there is unfathomable amounts of wealth[1] is a glaring sign of capitalist failure. Pointing to a reduction in the rates of poverty is not proving capitalism’s success. It’s pointing out capitalism’s most damaging and least ameliorable problem: poverty! Poverty does not have to exist. Having “only” 750million people living beneath the poverty line globally (and a similar proportion in the U.S., about 11%) is not success!!! It is a mitigation of failure! [1] - One commenter on this site last week or so in the VC community commented there are “trillions sloshing around.”
- duxup 7y ago
  "All inconvenient truths shall be wiped under the carpet. " That's more about the motives of people, all people, rather than a commentary on capitalism or anything else.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I don't think so. Capitalism is what drives politics in the United States, the degree to which big businesses dictate the course the country charts is unparalleled. Everything revolves around the large companies that pollute and externalize where ever they can, all in the name of profits. Essentially the United States just removed a bunch of stuff that is embarrassing to corporate interests, in order to allow them to pollute some more but this time without any accountability.
    - cy_hauser 7y ago
      Interesting. Why wouldn't there be an opposite corporate side that would make money off the stuff being removed. For example, there are a LOT of companies in the U.S. making money from environmental and alternative energy that might benefit from information the corporate interests had removed. Maybe that _does_ boil down to just the political parties in charge at the time. If so then does politics trump capitalism?
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        That's because resource extraction from the planet is - for now - still cheaper than doing it in a sustainable way. At some point that will flip but by then it may well be too late, the 'mines of tomorrow are the garbage dumps of today' was recognized long ago. Just think of all the copper in landfills.
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        US politics is capitalism by other means.
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      I agree with duxup to the extent that any group of people can engage in such behavior - after all there have been plenty of corrupt regimes that are ostensibly communist or democratic but in practice are anything but. On the other hand I don't think that misbehavior is evenly distributed, and you make a good point that rule of law in capitalist countries means very little when authorship of laws is essentially available via auction.
Reason077 7y ago
So long as the underlying data sets are still available, this sounds like something that could be taken up by an NGO or advocacy group such as the Sierra Club. If anything it could benefit from better exposure and more funding.
- SolaceQuantum 7y ago
  It appears based on other comments several related datasets are also gone.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
This looks like an opportunity for some aspiring web developer to put together their own map. I'm sure there's a nonprofit that would be willing to host it.
- picantePepper 7y ago
  Im sure that a bunch of nerds (me included) would be able to add whatever sensors needed to upgrade their diy weather stations and upload the feeds somewhere
foolinaround 7y ago
Could'nt netizens add this kind of data as a layer on OpenStreetMaps? Over time, it could be comprehensive?
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
The leaders of the govt have at least basic rights to retract lots of things that are public, unless there some specific rule requiring something to be out there. This seems pretty clearly to be bad, is there any defense of this? My older relatives insist the current us govt 'changes' with Trump are what we need to succeed in the future. They aren't aware of things like this, but is there any defense of actions like this? My dad would probably say increasing business activity is the central goal of the govt, so it's okay not to cause trouble by pointing out all these pollution sources. But I can't see any good for this kind of stuff.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  The people in most governments are quite cheap,so no surprise here. However,what I don't get is that same people forget that they live in the same country, breathe the same air and their kids will continue to do so. It's like trying to burn neighbor's house without impacting your help own,even though they are both connected...
  - ljw1001 7y ago
    > The people in most governments are quite cheap... Have you seen our budget? <wink>
    - throwaway19271 7y ago
      Have you seen a government pay scale?
- angry_octet 7y ago
  I'll bet he wouldn't like it if he discovered toxic waste was being stored/leaked just next door. But as a theoretical situation he'd probably just say that it's fine as long as it's to code. Even if it were real, people cling to being told it is okay. There are two problems I see. First, people seem to lack empathy -- it could just as easily be them suffering through no fault of their own. Second, people subconsciously know they could be struck by any number of random bad things, and there is nothing they could do about it, and no one would help; they rationalize this as the victim somehow being at fault. Same as crops failing because of sins or inadequate sacrifices. Maybe explain to him that these businesses are run by big Democrat donors, and they are getting a free lunch by having tax payers pay for their pollution.
wnevets 7y ago
You dont have to burn the books, you just remove them.
CivBase 7y ago
Before jumping to conclusions, I have some questions that the article didn't answer. Is there any information available about how widely this was used beyond the anecdotes provided in the article? How costly was this to maintain? Is there an alternative that makes this redundant? Are there plans to replace it which simply haven't been published yet? It sounds like the data sources used by Toxmap are still accessible. Was the visualization provided by Toxmap useful or was it just novel? Judging by the screenshots, the visualization doesn't seem to provide any insights that couldn't be easily inferred by simply looking at a population heat map. Did many people even know what Toxmap was before reading the article? If this is a politically-motivated play, it's not a smart one. It's very on-the-nose and will probably do more harm than good to "anti-green political movement" (for lack of a better term).
hirundo 7y ago
> White House officials are working on an executive order that would ... require that publicly funded science be obtainable for free immediately [1] It would be great if that could be extended from science to also include regulatory agencies. That would include Toxmap source data. Better than an executive order would be a federal statute. It's even worth a constitutional amendment. [1] https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061836761 https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061836761
whydoyouasking 7y ago
really sh*tty site full of trackers

There was some significant discussion around this and the data sources that feed it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ea0wx2/urgent_request_federal_databases_disappearing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ea0wx2/urgent_... It seemed from the comments that the Toxmap is going away, but most/all of the data 5hat feeds it is still available. There are several other related datasets that were "retired" around the same time, and those seem to be truly gone.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago
> There are several other related datasets that were "retired" around the same time, and those seem to be truly gone. This is bad. Another reason that we need to demand that all public data should be available in a machine-readable raw format, not just a web frontend for access, and that we need to systematically upload datasets to archive.org.

jacquesm 7y ago

All inconvenient truths shall be wiped under the carpet. Capitalism is a great thing and has brought us very far but you have to wonder if at some point it isn't going to undo all of that progress and put us back where we started or worse.

pstuart 7y ago
It's almost like the people behind these machinations don't care about sustainability and only about their immediate rewards.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  You can leave out the first three words of that sentence and it would be factually correct, more compact and less qualified. A win on all counts imo.
  - rabidrat 7y ago
    "It's almost like ___" is common internet vernacular for "I can't believe this isn't obvious to everyone, but apparently it's not, so here it is: __"
    - anigbrowl 7y ago
      Quite so, but (like Jacques, apparently) I've come to think that the posture of ironic disbelief expressed in that phrase is corrosive of public discourse. I suspect it's responsive to unfavorable external conditions, like the famous line from Casablanca where the police chief raiding Rick's cafe insincerely says 'I'm shocked - shocked - to find that gambling is going on here,' to offset his embarrassment at functioning as a tool of the Nazis' political strategy. Put another way, we pretend to give people we dislike the benefit of the doubt and they pretend to believe us, to avoid the unpleasant fact of an underlying social conflict.
thecopy 7y ago
I think your definition of capitalism is a bit far-reaching.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  You can think whatever you want but riddle me this: In what other country do large businesses get to dictate the contents of government websites, in what country is the head of the environmental protection agency a lobbyist for the oil and coal industry? The effect of money in politics is tremendous and if not for the degree to which corporate profits dictate government policy through lobbying and outright corruption has no equal other than in the one country where 'the market' is given free rein to abuse the country to whatever degree they can get away with. I was all for harsh punishment of VW execs because of the diesel scandal, at the same time everybody was up in arms about that and this sort of thing gets a free pass without so much as a raised eyebrow.
  - toomanybeersies 7y ago
    > In what other country do large businesses get to dictate the contents of government websites Australia does that one.
gherkinnn 7y ago
Why do people always have to shoehorn capitalism in any argument? Removing inconvenient truths has been done and will be done under any system. Be it tribal, religious, monarchist, communist, capitalist, or a loose band of tree huggers. It really does not matter.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Tribes, religion, monarchy and communism all failed to greater or lesser extent before they could take the planet down with them. Their built-in faults were such that they did not need to be reined in before they self destructed. But capitalism is so successful by the one metric that matters to it - money - that it has the potential to destroy everything else whilst still maximizing for that one metric. The concentrating effects of wealth make this even more likely. After all, people will rarely bite the hand that feeds them, guaranteeing docility whilst marching them right into the abyss.
  - randiantech 7y ago
    Capitalism is not only successful on economic matters. Poverty, for example, got reduced significantly during the last decades.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Poverty is an economic matter if there ever was one.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - modwest 7y ago
      The fact that poverty exists at all when there is unfathomable amounts of wealth[1] is a glaring sign of capitalist failure. Pointing to a reduction in the rates of poverty is not proving capitalism’s success. It’s pointing out capitalism’s most damaging and least ameliorable problem: poverty! Poverty does not have to exist. Having “only” 750million people living beneath the poverty line globally (and a similar proportion in the U.S., about 11%) is not success!!! It is a mitigation of failure! [1] - One commenter on this site last week or so in the VC community commented there are “trillions sloshing around.”
duxup 7y ago
"All inconvenient truths shall be wiped under the carpet. " That's more about the motives of people, all people, rather than a commentary on capitalism or anything else.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I don't think so. Capitalism is what drives politics in the United States, the degree to which big businesses dictate the course the country charts is unparalleled. Everything revolves around the large companies that pollute and externalize where ever they can, all in the name of profits. Essentially the United States just removed a bunch of stuff that is embarrassing to corporate interests, in order to allow them to pollute some more but this time without any accountability.
  - cy_hauser 7y ago
    Interesting. Why wouldn't there be an opposite corporate side that would make money off the stuff being removed. For example, there are a LOT of companies in the U.S. making money from environmental and alternative energy that might benefit from information the corporate interests had removed. Maybe that _does_ boil down to just the political parties in charge at the time. If so then does politics trump capitalism?
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      That's because resource extraction from the planet is - for now - still cheaper than doing it in a sustainable way. At some point that will flip but by then it may well be too late, the 'mines of tomorrow are the garbage dumps of today' was recognized long ago. Just think of all the copper in landfills.
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      US politics is capitalism by other means.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    I agree with duxup to the extent that any group of people can engage in such behavior - after all there have been plenty of corrupt regimes that are ostensibly communist or democratic but in practice are anything but. On the other hand I don't think that misbehavior is evenly distributed, and you make a good point that rule of law in capitalist countries means very little when authorship of laws is essentially available via auction.

Reason077 7y ago

So long as the underlying data sets are still available, this sounds like something that could be taken up by an NGO or advocacy group such as the Sierra Club. If anything it could benefit from better exposure and more funding.

SolaceQuantum 7y ago
It appears based on other comments several related datasets are also gone.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

This looks like an opportunity for some aspiring web developer to put together their own map. I'm sure there's a nonprofit that would be willing to host it.

picantePepper 7y ago
Im sure that a bunch of nerds (me included) would be able to add whatever sensors needed to upgrade their diy weather stations and upload the feeds somewhere

foolinaround 7y ago

Could'nt netizens add this kind of data as a layer on OpenStreetMaps? Over time, it could be comprehensive?

NotSammyHagar 7y ago

The leaders of the govt have at least basic rights to retract lots of things that are public, unless there some specific rule requiring something to be out there. This seems pretty clearly to be bad, is there any defense of this? My older relatives insist the current us govt 'changes' with Trump are what we need to succeed in the future. They aren't aware of things like this, but is there any defense of actions like this? My dad would probably say increasing business activity is the central goal of the govt, so it's okay not to cause trouble by pointing out all these pollution sources. But I can't see any good for this kind of stuff.

cosmodisk 7y ago
The people in most governments are quite cheap,so no surprise here. However,what I don't get is that same people forget that they live in the same country, breathe the same air and their kids will continue to do so. It's like trying to burn neighbor's house without impacting your help own,even though they are both connected...
- ljw1001 7y ago
  > The people in most governments are quite cheap... Have you seen our budget? <wink>
  - throwaway19271 7y ago
    Have you seen a government pay scale?
angry_octet 7y ago
I'll bet he wouldn't like it if he discovered toxic waste was being stored/leaked just next door. But as a theoretical situation he'd probably just say that it's fine as long as it's to code. Even if it were real, people cling to being told it is okay. There are two problems I see. First, people seem to lack empathy -- it could just as easily be them suffering through no fault of their own. Second, people subconsciously know they could be struck by any number of random bad things, and there is nothing they could do about it, and no one would help; they rationalize this as the victim somehow being at fault. Same as crops failing because of sins or inadequate sacrifices. Maybe explain to him that these businesses are run by big Democrat donors, and they are getting a free lunch by having tax payers pay for their pollution.

wnevets 7y ago

You dont have to burn the books, you just remove them.

CivBase 7y ago

Before jumping to conclusions, I have some questions that the article didn't answer. Is there any information available about how widely this was used beyond the anecdotes provided in the article? How costly was this to maintain? Is there an alternative that makes this redundant? Are there plans to replace it which simply haven't been published yet? It sounds like the data sources used by Toxmap are still accessible. Was the visualization provided by Toxmap useful or was it just novel? Judging by the screenshots, the visualization doesn't seem to provide any insights that couldn't be easily inferred by simply looking at a population heat map. Did many people even know what Toxmap was before reading the article? If this is a politically-motivated play, it's not a smart one. It's very on-the-nose and will probably do more harm than good to "anti-green political movement" (for lack of a better term).

hirundo 7y ago

> White House officials are working on an executive order that would ... require that publicly funded science be obtainable for free immediately [1] It would be great if that could be extended from science to also include regulatory agencies. That would include Toxmap source data. Better than an executive order would be a federal statute. It's even worth a constitutional amendment. [1] https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061836761 https://www.eenews.net/stories/1061836761

whydoyouasking 7y ago

really sh*tty site full of trackers