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The US stops sharing air quality data from embassies worldwide

639 points by geox 2y ago

asix66 2y ago
https://map.purpleair.com/ https://map.purpleair.com/
rqtwteye 2y ago
This is just nuts. Stuff like this is what made the US a leader. I bet next is to turn off GPS outside the US because no money. That's how you lose world leadership.
- evan_ 2y ago
  don't give them any ideas.
- kevmo 2y ago
  Does Peter Thiel still get a piece of all the YC startups?
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  Our "world leadership" is rapidly becoming a distant memory.
  - metalliqaz 2y ago
    it's already gone. as soon as we re-elected the felon, everyone knew they couldn't trust us
    - wraaath 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - Sabinus 2y ago
        The sense I got is that it could be overlooked as an anomaly. The second time he was elected, and the actions he has taken since, have absolutely ended all that. The Allies are truly incensed, the US's reputation won't recover for decades.
        Aeolun 2y ago
        It’s a loss of trust. We were in the process of getting better relations with Russia, but then when Putin goes and invades Ukraine you can sort of rationalize it. Communist gonna communist right? All the actions potato head has taken are a deliberate slap in the face of all their allies. Maybe something we’d expect from potato head, but not from the United States. Even given he was elected we’d expect the rest if your political system to stop a single man from burning down all bridges. Clearly that was an incorrect assumption.
        School-Cotton 2y ago
        Putin isn’t in any way a communist.
        wraaath 2y ago
        He's an autocrat acting on delusions of empire building. That is the root of Russia invading Ukraine. All the other excuses are ancillary or nonsense (Nazis etc)
        School-Cotton 2y ago
        True, but unrelated to whether he's a communist. There are authoritarian and libertarian communists but Putin is neither.
        Braxton1980 2y ago
        As a former KGB officer wouldn't he be the most likely to want a return to the old ways?
    - graeme 2y ago
      This is downvoted but for those outside the US it's actually true. Or more specifically once the new admin began acting erratically. 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.
- epistasis 2y ago
  The elites of the country that are now in power don't care about world leadership, much less the soft power that we had that made us all very rich, that made a plumber in the US make $7k a month while in much of Europe that plumber would only make $3k a month. 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.
  - 9283409232 2y ago
    The view for the future is cutting the US into city-states that they control. They are just following the playbook of Curtis Yarvin.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    >> that made a plumber in the US make $7k a month while in much of Europe that plumber would only make $3k a month. 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?
    - epistasis 2y ago
      Quality of life is something that many people evaluate along very very different metrics at different weights. But losing that $7k and bringing it down to $3k does not look like it will be accompanied by plumbers no longer paying for healthcare out of pocket. 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.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  In general, the principles of democracy are that the people of the nation can steer the nation towards a better place. To do so, people need access to information, need access to information on what the state of their nation and the state of the world is. 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.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    >> In general, the principles of democracy are that the people of the nation can steer the nation 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.
    - tuan 2y ago
      > Turns out though information is like water; you need enough, but too much and you drown. 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.
      - bruce511 2y ago
- hello_moto 2y ago
  Makes the Krasnov theory even stronger... how the tide has turned in terms of Conspiracy Theory no?
- Freedom2 2y ago
  The US can still be a leader, I think. I'm curious as to if this is the time for a YC-funded startup to take the reins for a lot of the programs and policies being cut. As geohot showed unequivocally yesterday, who else is better to lead than the technical minds of the 21st century!
  - epistasis 2y ago
    What sort of startup could ever replace the services that are being performed? The point of a startup is increase value massively by building revenue. The services that are being cut are meant to be public infrastructure upon which everybody else builds their startup, that enables all the innovation that makes the US a leader.
  - maigret 2y ago
    You’ll see people not wanting to buy a lot of US stuff soon. I definitely increased my activities around that lately. Netflix is next to go.
  - consteval 2y ago
    You can’t replace infrastructure with the private sector because infrastructure doesn’t generate any money. Instead, it works like a velocity multiplier that helps others generate money. 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.
    - Freedom2 2y ago
      I don't know if I agree, but I'm not as smart as PG or Garry Tan to evaluate what incoming infrastructure startups could make the cut for YC funding. Put it this way, if we as a tech community can band together and create protocols for various bits of infrastructure, then each startup is free to build upon that protocol so we can standardize what we need. That way we get the benefits of the free market while also gaining efficiency in government. Eventually I envision a world where the best implementation wins, but others are still free to compete. If I wanted to create a startup if I had better ideas for road protocols or standards, then I am blocked by government. It's effectively a non-starter, and a gap in the ability for the US to innovate.
- throwccp 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- keybored 2y ago
  The US is a world hegemon. That’s a well-defined concept. I don’t know what being a leader means in this context. 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.
- hujun 2y ago
  nah, GPS is needed by US outside US as well, I bet someone will propose a 'great' idea to start charging for it
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    or they could replace it with Starlink (no conflict of interest, obviously), which can be used for global positioning
    - simondotau 2y ago
      Galileo already exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
      - insane_dreamer 2y ago
        sure, but the US isn't going to switch to a network run by the ESA my point was regarding privitization of public goods (like GPS)
- energy123 2y ago
  To the populist right, everything is zero-sum, all effects are first order, all effects are immediate, and all effects only impact the parties to a transaction. 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.
  - ainiriand 2y ago
    You have put into words exactly my thoughts on this topic.
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    > The problem for them is that reality isn't going to adjust to fit their worldview. 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.
  - globular-toast 2y ago
    I've said it before, it's like these guys turned up to study economics, learnt about free markets on day 1, then just went home.
    - aqueueaqueue 2y ago
      In a free market, Doge would fire Elon.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Soft power doesn't exist 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.
- brabel 2y ago
  Well, it's a good thing that the US stop acting like the world leader/police in everything. The US is just a country among many and it is about time it starts acting like that. And it's about time the "Western world" stops relying on the US for basic stuff like national defense. 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.
  - Steve16384 2y ago
    > 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.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > bet next is to turn off GPS outside the US because no money Outside America? They’ll just fire the team responsible for maintaining the birds and then act surprised when they degrade.
  - zfg 2y ago
    And then they will say, "You see? Government doesn't work. We must privatize this service." And they will hand that contract to their friends.
  - cesarb 2y ago
    > They’ll just fire the team responsible for maintaining the birds and then act surprised when they degrade. 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).
- fundatus 2y ago
  I've always wondered "Why would the EU spend so much money to build Galileo?". I now get it.
- dragonelite 2y ago
  It was mostly used to slow down development and industrialisation of nations. Probably by guilt tripping developing world with the idea that the developing world would need to get western loans and green technology from the west. 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.
- sega_sai 2y ago
  I think GPS is a very good point. I wonder if the capability to disable it exists, and I don't know what effects that will have - i assume many new devices can now use European's Galileo system. (while writing this I can see GPS had 'selective availability' mode, but US claimed it is not possible with new satellites)
  - simondotau 2y ago
    The essential question isn't whether selective availability could be reinstated (software can change, so the answer is yes, period, end of story) but rather whether there's any situation where it wouldn't also cripple a substantial portion of the US Government. How many GPS receivers even have support for military decryption these days, let alone contain keys which are ready to work in a crisis?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
adamiscool8 2y ago
>The stop in sharing data was “due to funding constraints that have caused the Department to turn off the underlying network” read the statement, which added that embassies and consulates were directed to keep their monitors running and the sharing of data could resume in the future if funded was restored. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome
- epistasis 2y ago
  I don't think your link is comparable. Air quality data is not a high profile valued thing. 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.
  - adamiscool8 2y ago
    >Air quality data is not a high profile valued thing. 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".
    - epistasis 2y ago
      Maybe to you, but not to any of the Trump voters I know. And not to a lot of other people, either. This is in the State Department, not EPA, and embassies spending resources on pollution monitoring sounds like the very epitome of government waste that DOGE is trying to eliminate. 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.
msie 2y ago
The GOP are so petty.
- outside1234 2y ago
  And stupid, because you just know that this is still costing us the same amount of money.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  That is exactly what came to mind when I read this. 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.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
What could this have possibly cost? $10 a day worldwide? Pathetic.
- lurk2 2y ago
  I have a hard time believing a service like this wouldn't have employed at least one person full time. There is no way it cost anywhere remotely in the neighborhood of $10 a day.
  - the_sleaze_ 2y ago
    This is an absolutely paltry change in light of other avenues to recoup revenue. And even if it were not, the way to change these systems is not to delete them but to restructure their incentives. 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.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      I don't disagree that cutting the program seems shortsighted. The issue I took with the grandparent comment is that it was simply uninformed. > 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. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276805
      - 2y ago
defrost 2y ago
Highlighted in earlier reports and included in this APNews brief: 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. ( earlier: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-embassies-pollution-popular-china-india.html https://phys.org/news/2025-03-embassies-pollution-popular-ch... + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265021 ) 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. This is a low cost to gather and deliver data stream that has a profound effect on global air quality and improving health and well being for all.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > 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. 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.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    Would you expect them to cut the IRS, if they're trying to cut deficits? 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 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.
ta988 2y ago
They really found the most efficient way to reduce every dependency the rest of the world had on the US. When the US will finally wake up, there will be nothing left but countries ready to sell their better technology to the US and maybe not even sell it in dollars.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  They are burning the "cards" and "leverage" they had. The trust Europe, West and other democratic countries had in US will take generations to rebuild. And meantime US provoking other countries to ally against itself to punish this behavior. That's just game theory. It makes strategic sense for all other countries to co operate against the US now. Personally, I'm looking forward now for Europe to become self-reliant on technology.
  - palata 2y ago
    I believe the image of the US in the West started changing considerably during Trump's first mandate. Biden coming back hasn't completely repaired that change, but really it mostly came back (as in, "The US screwed up with Trump, but that's done now"). 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!
iamshs 2y ago
Indian Government would be so relieved. US Embassy data was the most reliable one cited to highlight the pollution crises in Delhi, the nation's capital. Otherwise for their own sensors, they sometimes just sprayed them with artificial water showers to change climate around the sensors.
owenpalmer 2y ago
> The stop in sharing data was “due to funding constraints that have caused the Department to turn off the underlying network” What is the actual recurring cost of broadcasting this data? The sensor and network infrastructure are presumably already established.
- feverzsj 2y ago
  Sensors are very cheap. Have no idea why they cut them. [0]: https://aqicn.org/gaia/list/ https://aqicn.org/gaia/list/ [1]: https://www2.purpleair.com/products/list https://www2.purpleair.com/products/list
  - schiffern 2y ago
    US embassies seem to use a pair of Met One BAM-1020 sensors,[1] which run about $40,000 apiece.[2] 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/133/2016/08/psd.pdf https://xk.usembassy.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/133/2016/0... [2] https://store.bluinter.com/product/bam-1020-beta-attenuation-mass-monitor/ https://store.bluinter.com/product/bam-1020-beta-attenuation...
- YetAnotherNick 2y ago
  My $150 air purifier does all of that and working perfectly for 4 years. It gets data and syncs with cloud. I can't think of any reason apart from protest from the Department and cutting high visibility thing that cost nothing.
bvan 2y ago
Absolutely tragic. Trump is literally dragging the country back into the proverbial cave or dark ages. Just take NOAA for example: gutting this agency has widespread 2nd and 3rd order consequences the Trump administration is either clueless or willfully ignorant about. This administration is screwing over generations to come.
Aeolun 2y ago
In light of all recent news, this seems stupid, but almost banal in comparison to everything else.
BurningFrog 2y ago
[flagged]
- Braxton1980 2y ago
  Would you do this with a prod deployment? This also isn't some eshop, it's the US government
- defrost 2y ago
  Like the ebola program they "turned off and then back on again" ? "I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," says Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health, who has worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa. Musk says work to stop Ebola was accidentally cut but restored. Experts raise doubts ~ https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-50929/elon-musk-ebola-usaid https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-... Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team, Many regulars at HN understand how poorly complex systems in the real world respond to hard outages and cold restarts.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  These aren’t systems you just toggle off and then back on if you realize you miss it. Once you do the layoffs and shrink the organizations, those people go get other jobs. You can’t just flip a switch and have everyone back like before. You have to rebuild the organization. It’s expensive. It’s not efficient. I think we’re in this mess because people who don’t understand how to operate organizations, departments, and government systems are treating these like servers in a closet that can be turned off and back on again. Doesn’t work like that.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  Perhaps the fire department can start trying setting fire to homes — the ones that don't catch fire can become the new building code.
refurb 2y ago
If I open IQAir, I see dozens of monitoring stations in every country. Even in Myanmar, which is a developing country in the middle of a civil war there are 7 monitoring stations in Yangon. 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.
- ImaCake 2y ago
  Not all stations are built equal, but I do agree that this is mostly symbolic. But it could be a harbinger of much more problematic censoring of US air quality data.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  It's the symbolism of it that has the greatest impact. 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.
declan_roberts 2y ago
I think this is a good place for a public/private partnership. 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.
- the_sleaze_ 2y ago
  I'll set up a server tonight.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Or we can just keep using the system that's already there and already works, rather than tearing it down and funneling money into some company run by a buddy of Trump or Musk to build it again, with likely worse reliability and fewer features, and charge people for access to it. Because of course they're going to charge for it. Free API? Right.
- mola 2y ago
  So the people pay for the system, then pay again for access to data? While some oligarch turns a profit.. So efficient
sitkack 2y ago
1984 was a manual.
lunarboy 2y ago
How does this reduce the fraud in the federal spending? How does this decrease inflation, and make america great again?
- sixothree 2y ago
  [flagged]
andreygrehov 2y ago
DOGE is sharing all the data. Is there a specific line item that addresses the defunding of air quality monitoring? I couldn’t find one. If I were anti-DOGE, I could say, “Hey, people love air quality. Let’s stop sharing the air quality data and blame it on Musk! That’ll make people really angry at him.”
- apical_dendrite 2y ago
  The quality of the data DOGE is sharing is terrible. For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-contracts-wall.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-con... There are many reports like this.
- 1986 2y ago
  DOGE's shared data has been consistently off: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/doge-says-its-saved-55-billion-itemized-data-show-far-less https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/doge-says-i... https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5313853/doge-savings-receipts-musk-trump https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5313853/doge-savings-re... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-contracts-wall.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-con... 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?
  - andreygrehov 2y ago
    So, is there a specific line item? The AP wrote a low-quality article with zero proof. 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?
dyauspitr 2y ago
Our president is an enemy of the state.
- oneshtein 2y ago
  ... or friend of an enemy state. He uses same arguments as other friends of RF.
feverzsj 2y ago
Good or bad, influence is the most powerful weapon of a superpower in peace time. Cutting it off won't save your money but instead weaken the country.
teekert 2y ago
Thank you US for providing us with air quality data for all those years!
- eliaskg 2y ago
  Have you said thank you once?
  - xdkyx 2y ago
    he isn't wearing a suit either
    - nakedneuron 2y ago
      Easy now, you're gambling with WW3! Hell.. this escalated quickly..
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
ZeroGravitas 2y ago
Beijing air quality problems famously put China's renewables and EV programs into overdrive. I don't think you needed scientific measurements to know there was a problem but I wonder how much the outside data helped crystallize a real engineering response rather than a coverup. "The air we breathe: lessons from Beijing’s airpocalypse" https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/air-we-breathe-lessons-beijings-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.
meindnoch 2y ago
This is just petty. I refuse to believe any measurable amount of money could be saved here.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  That's the story of most of the cuts. And then they'll cut taxes, which will instantly blow the saved money 10x over.
Havoc 2y ago
If they keep going with this sort of self imposed irrelevance it’ll eventually threatened USD reserve currency status.
xyst 2y ago
Yet another blow to the American hegemony by the kleptocracy cabinet.
nelblu 2y ago
I'm going to strongly recommend they consider defunding NASA's APOD /s
bsaul 2y ago
i’m surprised by the relatively low number of posts on this site regarding the craziness that currently takes place at the white house. This is for sure going to have a huge impact on the future of tech companies, and on the economy in general. Is this because of moderation ?
- howard941 2y ago
  Flagging. Try browsing the site in chronological order with showdead on.
  - bsaul 2y ago
    ha, indeed, now i see. seems like users (and @dang apparently) decided this topic was too hot to let it go through. it’s a bit sad, as it’s probably the largest news since the fall of USSR, but i get the idea. maybe let just a few pass each day ?
zkmon 2y ago
The pampered people complain about every change. Say that they need to pay tariff to sell their products in our country, they complain. Say that we can't provide them with free climate data, they complain. Say that we can't provide them with free billions or security guarantees, they complain. And if we say they can't enter or live in USA illegally, they complain. Actually, we are helping them to grow up and use their own legs. Distributed development, self-sustainability are some words.
- urbandw311er 2y ago
  I think the issue is more that the guy you elected seems to think it’s ok to ignore climate change and destroy the planet, which in case you’d forgotten, doesn’t actually belong to the US.
  - zkmon 2y ago
    USA is not the caretaker of the planet. We are not even allowed to own greenland :)
- consteval 2y ago
  And making other countries more independent helps the US… how? 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.
N_Lens 2y ago
I remember when I was a wee lad and wanted to optimise the free space on my windows 95 computer. I deleted program files and everything in the windows directory to free up some space on my 1.2GB Hard Disk. The pc, ofcourse, stopped booting (in hindsight it was weird that I could delete system files on a running machine, but in some ways Win95 gave a lot more power to the user I suppose). I sense that this is the level analysis that is going into these “cuts” and “optimisations”.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  On the flip side, when you did this to a Windows 95 system a few times in a row, you eventually came to learn what was really critical and what wasn't. I remember young me thinking "Spooler? Why would anyone need that?". Truth be told, looking at corporate life today, I think young me was on to something. 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.
  - hypercube33 2y ago
    I remember doing this as a kid trying to install visual basic and having a very small hard drive in my 386. Good times. Who needs fonts anyway? 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)
- L_226 2y ago
  Similar experience here with task manager and killing processes to free up RAM
- nedt 2y ago
  I had Windows 95 running with just 4 MB of RAM. Obviously it kept swapping to disk. When shutting down it always crashed, because in the process it turned of swapping and couldn't run some of the drivers anymore. Even Microsoft support didn't know how to solve it. That thing was wild. After adding 16 MB of RAM I never had this issue again.
gtirloni 2y ago
Trump wants a world of private government deals and he's showing other governments they can count on him if they want to join the game. 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.
landsman 2y ago
I saw that there is some communith, open source project who manage database by volunteering. That's the way.
kopirgan 2y ago
It's silly to assume countries like India that are democracies can't address pollution without data from one or two embassy buildings in a 2.3m sq km nation! 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.
sylware 2y ago
How many tens of billions of $ was that program paid by US tax payers?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

639 points by geox 2y ago

https://map.purpleair.com/ https://map.purpleair.com/

This is just nuts. Stuff like this is what made the US a leader. I bet next is to turn off GPS outside the US because no money. That's how you lose world leadership.

evan_ 2y ago
don't give them any ideas.
kevmo 2y ago
Does Peter Thiel still get a piece of all the YC startups?
DidYaWipe 2y ago
Our "world leadership" is rapidly becoming a distant memory.
- metalliqaz 2y ago
  it's already gone. as soon as we re-elected the felon, everyone knew they couldn't trust us
  - wraaath 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Sabinus 2y ago
      The sense I got is that it could be overlooked as an anomaly. The second time he was elected, and the actions he has taken since, have absolutely ended all that. The Allies are truly incensed, the US's reputation won't recover for decades.
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        It’s a loss of trust. We were in the process of getting better relations with Russia, but then when Putin goes and invades Ukraine you can sort of rationalize it. Communist gonna communist right? All the actions potato head has taken are a deliberate slap in the face of all their allies. Maybe something we’d expect from potato head, but not from the United States. Even given he was elected we’d expect the rest if your political system to stop a single man from burning down all bridges. Clearly that was an incorrect assumption.
        School-Cotton 2y ago
        Putin isn’t in any way a communist.
        wraaath 2y ago
        He's an autocrat acting on delusions of empire building. That is the root of Russia invading Ukraine. All the other excuses are ancillary or nonsense (Nazis etc)
        School-Cotton 2y ago
        True, but unrelated to whether he's a communist. There are authoritarian and libertarian communists but Putin is neither.
        Braxton1980 2y ago
        As a former KGB officer wouldn't he be the most likely to want a return to the old ways?
  - graeme 2y ago
    This is downvoted but for those outside the US it's actually true. Or more specifically once the new admin began acting erratically. 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.
epistasis 2y ago
The elites of the country that are now in power don't care about world leadership, much less the soft power that we had that made us all very rich, that made a plumber in the US make $7k a month while in much of Europe that plumber would only make $3k a month. 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.
- 9283409232 2y ago
  The view for the future is cutting the US into city-states that they control. They are just following the playbook of Curtis Yarvin.
- bruce511 2y ago
  >> that made a plumber in the US make $7k a month while in much of Europe that plumber would only make $3k a month. 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?
  - epistasis 2y ago
    Quality of life is something that many people evaluate along very very different metrics at different weights. But losing that $7k and bringing it down to $3k does not look like it will be accompanied by plumbers no longer paying for healthcare out of pocket. 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.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
In general, the principles of democracy are that the people of the nation can steer the nation towards a better place. To do so, people need access to information, need access to information on what the state of their nation and the state of the world is. 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.
- bruce511 2y ago
  >> In general, the principles of democracy are that the people of the nation can steer the nation 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.
  - tuan 2y ago
    > Turns out though information is like water; you need enough, but too much and you drown. 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.
    - bruce511 2y ago
hello_moto 2y ago
Makes the Krasnov theory even stronger... how the tide has turned in terms of Conspiracy Theory no?
Freedom2 2y ago
The US can still be a leader, I think. I'm curious as to if this is the time for a YC-funded startup to take the reins for a lot of the programs and policies being cut. As geohot showed unequivocally yesterday, who else is better to lead than the technical minds of the 21st century!
- epistasis 2y ago
  What sort of startup could ever replace the services that are being performed? The point of a startup is increase value massively by building revenue. The services that are being cut are meant to be public infrastructure upon which everybody else builds their startup, that enables all the innovation that makes the US a leader.
- maigret 2y ago
  You’ll see people not wanting to buy a lot of US stuff soon. I definitely increased my activities around that lately. Netflix is next to go.
- consteval 2y ago
  You can’t replace infrastructure with the private sector because infrastructure doesn’t generate any money. Instead, it works like a velocity multiplier that helps others generate money. 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.
  - Freedom2 2y ago
    I don't know if I agree, but I'm not as smart as PG or Garry Tan to evaluate what incoming infrastructure startups could make the cut for YC funding. Put it this way, if we as a tech community can band together and create protocols for various bits of infrastructure, then each startup is free to build upon that protocol so we can standardize what we need. That way we get the benefits of the free market while also gaining efficiency in government. Eventually I envision a world where the best implementation wins, but others are still free to compete. If I wanted to create a startup if I had better ideas for road protocols or standards, then I am blocked by government. It's effectively a non-starter, and a gap in the ability for the US to innovate.
throwccp 2y ago
[dead]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
keybored 2y ago
The US is a world hegemon. That’s a well-defined concept. I don’t know what being a leader means in this context. 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.
hujun 2y ago
nah, GPS is needed by US outside US as well, I bet someone will propose a 'great' idea to start charging for it
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  or they could replace it with Starlink (no conflict of interest, obviously), which can be used for global positioning
  - simondotau 2y ago
    Galileo already exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      sure, but the US isn't going to switch to a network run by the ESA my point was regarding privitization of public goods (like GPS)
energy123 2y ago
To the populist right, everything is zero-sum, all effects are first order, all effects are immediate, and all effects only impact the parties to a transaction. 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.
- ainiriand 2y ago
  You have put into words exactly my thoughts on this topic.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  > The problem for them is that reality isn't going to adjust to fit their worldview. 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.
- globular-toast 2y ago
  I've said it before, it's like these guys turned up to study economics, learnt about free markets on day 1, then just went home.
  - aqueueaqueue 2y ago
    In a free market, Doge would fire Elon.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Soft power doesn't exist 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.
brabel 2y ago
Well, it's a good thing that the US stop acting like the world leader/police in everything. The US is just a country among many and it is about time it starts acting like that. And it's about time the "Western world" stops relying on the US for basic stuff like national defense. 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.
- Steve16384 2y ago
  > 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.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> bet next is to turn off GPS outside the US because no money Outside America? They’ll just fire the team responsible for maintaining the birds and then act surprised when they degrade.
- zfg 2y ago
  And then they will say, "You see? Government doesn't work. We must privatize this service." And they will hand that contract to their friends.
- cesarb 2y ago
  > They’ll just fire the team responsible for maintaining the birds and then act surprised when they degrade. 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).
fundatus 2y ago
I've always wondered "Why would the EU spend so much money to build Galileo?". I now get it.
dragonelite 2y ago
It was mostly used to slow down development and industrialisation of nations. Probably by guilt tripping developing world with the idea that the developing world would need to get western loans and green technology from the west. 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.
sega_sai 2y ago
I think GPS is a very good point. I wonder if the capability to disable it exists, and I don't know what effects that will have - i assume many new devices can now use European's Galileo system. (while writing this I can see GPS had 'selective availability' mode, but US claimed it is not possible with new satellites)
- simondotau 2y ago
  The essential question isn't whether selective availability could be reinstated (software can change, so the answer is yes, period, end of story) but rather whether there's any situation where it wouldn't also cripple a substantial portion of the US Government. How many GPS receivers even have support for military decryption these days, let alone contain keys which are ready to work in a crisis?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

adamiscool8 2y ago

>The stop in sharing data was “due to funding constraints that have caused the Department to turn off the underlying network” read the statement, which added that embassies and consulates were directed to keep their monitors running and the sharing of data could resume in the future if funded was restored. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_syndrome

epistasis 2y ago
I don't think your link is comparable. Air quality data is not a high profile valued thing. 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.
- adamiscool8 2y ago
  >Air quality data is not a high profile valued thing. 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".
  - epistasis 2y ago
    Maybe to you, but not to any of the Trump voters I know. And not to a lot of other people, either. This is in the State Department, not EPA, and embassies spending resources on pollution monitoring sounds like the very epitome of government waste that DOGE is trying to eliminate. 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.

msie 2y ago

The GOP are so petty.

outside1234 2y ago
And stupid, because you just know that this is still costing us the same amount of money.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
That is exactly what came to mind when I read this. 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.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

What could this have possibly cost? $10 a day worldwide? Pathetic.

lurk2 2y ago
I have a hard time believing a service like this wouldn't have employed at least one person full time. There is no way it cost anywhere remotely in the neighborhood of $10 a day.
- the_sleaze_ 2y ago
  This is an absolutely paltry change in light of other avenues to recoup revenue. And even if it were not, the way to change these systems is not to delete them but to restructure their incentives. 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.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    I don't disagree that cutting the program seems shortsighted. The issue I took with the grandparent comment is that it was simply uninformed. > 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. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43276805
    - 2y ago

defrost 2y ago

Highlighted in earlier reports and included in this APNews brief: 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. ( earlier: https://phys.org/news/2025-03-embassies-pollution-popular-china-india.html https://phys.org/news/2025-03-embassies-pollution-popular-ch... + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43265021 ) 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. This is a low cost to gather and deliver data stream that has a profound effect on global air quality and improving health and well being for all.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> 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. 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.
- EGreg 2y ago
  Would you expect them to cut the IRS, if they're trying to cut deficits? 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 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.

ta988 2y ago

They really found the most efficient way to reduce every dependency the rest of the world had on the US. When the US will finally wake up, there will be nothing left but countries ready to sell their better technology to the US and maybe not even sell it in dollars.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
They are burning the "cards" and "leverage" they had. The trust Europe, West and other democratic countries had in US will take generations to rebuild. And meantime US provoking other countries to ally against itself to punish this behavior. That's just game theory. It makes strategic sense for all other countries to co operate against the US now. Personally, I'm looking forward now for Europe to become self-reliant on technology.
- palata 2y ago
  I believe the image of the US in the West started changing considerably during Trump's first mandate. Biden coming back hasn't completely repaired that change, but really it mostly came back (as in, "The US screwed up with Trump, but that's done now"). 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!

iamshs 2y ago

Indian Government would be so relieved. US Embassy data was the most reliable one cited to highlight the pollution crises in Delhi, the nation's capital. Otherwise for their own sensors, they sometimes just sprayed them with artificial water showers to change climate around the sensors.

owenpalmer 2y ago

> The stop in sharing data was “due to funding constraints that have caused the Department to turn off the underlying network” What is the actual recurring cost of broadcasting this data? The sensor and network infrastructure are presumably already established.

feverzsj 2y ago
Sensors are very cheap. Have no idea why they cut them. [0]: https://aqicn.org/gaia/list/ https://aqicn.org/gaia/list/ [1]: https://www2.purpleair.com/products/list https://www2.purpleair.com/products/list
- schiffern 2y ago
  US embassies seem to use a pair of Met One BAM-1020 sensors,[1] which run about $40,000 apiece.[2] 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/133/2016/08/psd.pdf https://xk.usembassy.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/133/2016/0... [2] https://store.bluinter.com/product/bam-1020-beta-attenuation-mass-monitor/ https://store.bluinter.com/product/bam-1020-beta-attenuation...
YetAnotherNick 2y ago
My $150 air purifier does all of that and working perfectly for 4 years. It gets data and syncs with cloud. I can't think of any reason apart from protest from the Department and cutting high visibility thing that cost nothing.

bvan 2y ago

Absolutely tragic. Trump is literally dragging the country back into the proverbial cave or dark ages. Just take NOAA for example: gutting this agency has widespread 2nd and 3rd order consequences the Trump administration is either clueless or willfully ignorant about. This administration is screwing over generations to come.

Aeolun 2y ago

In light of all recent news, this seems stupid, but almost banal in comparison to everything else.

BurningFrog 2y ago

[flagged]

Braxton1980 2y ago
Would you do this with a prod deployment? This also isn't some eshop, it's the US government
defrost 2y ago
Like the ebola program they "turned off and then back on again" ? "I disagree fully, completely, wholly, that they recognized the mistake and put it back," says Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency physician and professor at Brown University School of Public Health, who has worked on Ebola for more than a decade and responded to Ebola outbreaks in Africa. Musk says work to stop Ebola was accidentally cut but restored. Experts raise doubts ~ https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-50929/elon-musk-ebola-usaid https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/27/g-s1-... Within USAID's Global Health Bureau there was a team of people that specialized in high risk outbreaks, like Ebola. "Virtually all of those people have been pushed out of the agency, and they have not been brought back. Only a very small handful — like low single digits — remain from what had been something like a 30 person team, Many regulars at HN understand how poorly complex systems in the real world respond to hard outages and cold restarts.
Aurornis 2y ago
These aren’t systems you just toggle off and then back on if you realize you miss it. Once you do the layoffs and shrink the organizations, those people go get other jobs. You can’t just flip a switch and have everyone back like before. You have to rebuild the organization. It’s expensive. It’s not efficient. I think we’re in this mess because people who don’t understand how to operate organizations, departments, and government systems are treating these like servers in a closet that can be turned off and back on again. Doesn’t work like that.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
Perhaps the fire department can start trying setting fire to homes — the ones that don't catch fire can become the new building code.

refurb 2y ago

If I open IQAir, I see dozens of monitoring stations in every country. Even in Myanmar, which is a developing country in the middle of a civil war there are 7 monitoring stations in Yangon. 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.

ImaCake 2y ago
Not all stations are built equal, but I do agree that this is mostly symbolic. But it could be a harbinger of much more problematic censoring of US air quality data.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
It's the symbolism of it that has the greatest impact. 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.

declan_roberts 2y ago

I think this is a good place for a public/private partnership. 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.

the_sleaze_ 2y ago
I'll set up a server tonight.
kelnos 2y ago
Or we can just keep using the system that's already there and already works, rather than tearing it down and funneling money into some company run by a buddy of Trump or Musk to build it again, with likely worse reliability and fewer features, and charge people for access to it. Because of course they're going to charge for it. Free API? Right.
mola 2y ago
So the people pay for the system, then pay again for access to data? While some oligarch turns a profit.. So efficient

sitkack 2y ago

1984 was a manual.

lunarboy 2y ago

How does this reduce the fraud in the federal spending? How does this decrease inflation, and make america great again?

sixothree 2y ago
[flagged]

andreygrehov 2y ago

DOGE is sharing all the data. Is there a specific line item that addresses the defunding of air quality monitoring? I couldn’t find one. If I were anti-DOGE, I could say, “Hey, people love air quality. Let’s stop sharing the air quality data and blame it on Musk! That’ll make people really angry at him.”

apical_dendrite 2y ago
The quality of the data DOGE is sharing is terrible. For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-contracts-wall.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-con... There are many reports like this.
1986 2y ago
DOGE's shared data has been consistently off: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/doge-says-its-saved-55-billion-itemized-data-show-far-less https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/doge-says-i... https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5313853/doge-savings-receipts-musk-trump https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5313853/doge-savings-re... https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-contracts-wall.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/us/politics/doge-musk-con... 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?
- andreygrehov 2y ago
  So, is there a specific line item? The AP wrote a low-quality article with zero proof. 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?

dyauspitr 2y ago

Our president is an enemy of the state.

oneshtein 2y ago
... or friend of an enemy state. He uses same arguments as other friends of RF.

feverzsj 2y ago

Good or bad, influence is the most powerful weapon of a superpower in peace time. Cutting it off won't save your money but instead weaken the country.

teekert 2y ago

Thank you US for providing us with air quality data for all those years!

eliaskg 2y ago
Have you said thank you once?
- xdkyx 2y ago
  he isn't wearing a suit either
  - nakedneuron 2y ago
    Easy now, you're gambling with WW3! Hell.. this escalated quickly..

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]

ZeroGravitas 2y ago

Beijing air quality problems famously put China's renewables and EV programs into overdrive. I don't think you needed scientific measurements to know there was a problem but I wonder how much the outside data helped crystallize a real engineering response rather than a coverup. "The air we breathe: lessons from Beijing’s airpocalypse" https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/air-we-breathe-lessons-beijings-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.

meindnoch 2y ago

This is just petty. I refuse to believe any measurable amount of money could be saved here.

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
That's the story of most of the cuts. And then they'll cut taxes, which will instantly blow the saved money 10x over.

Havoc 2y ago

If they keep going with this sort of self imposed irrelevance it’ll eventually threatened USD reserve currency status.

xyst 2y ago

Yet another blow to the American hegemony by the kleptocracy cabinet.

nelblu 2y ago

I'm going to strongly recommend they consider defunding NASA's APOD /s

bsaul 2y ago

i’m surprised by the relatively low number of posts on this site regarding the craziness that currently takes place at the white house. This is for sure going to have a huge impact on the future of tech companies, and on the economy in general. Is this because of moderation ?

howard941 2y ago
Flagging. Try browsing the site in chronological order with showdead on.
- bsaul 2y ago
  ha, indeed, now i see. seems like users (and @dang apparently) decided this topic was too hot to let it go through. it’s a bit sad, as it’s probably the largest news since the fall of USSR, but i get the idea. maybe let just a few pass each day ?

zkmon 2y ago

The pampered people complain about every change. Say that they need to pay tariff to sell their products in our country, they complain. Say that we can't provide them with free climate data, they complain. Say that we can't provide them with free billions or security guarantees, they complain. And if we say they can't enter or live in USA illegally, they complain. Actually, we are helping them to grow up and use their own legs. Distributed development, self-sustainability are some words.

urbandw311er 2y ago
I think the issue is more that the guy you elected seems to think it’s ok to ignore climate change and destroy the planet, which in case you’d forgotten, doesn’t actually belong to the US.
- zkmon 2y ago
  USA is not the caretaker of the planet. We are not even allowed to own greenland :)
consteval 2y ago
And making other countries more independent helps the US… how? 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.

N_Lens 2y ago

I remember when I was a wee lad and wanted to optimise the free space on my windows 95 computer. I deleted program files and everything in the windows directory to free up some space on my 1.2GB Hard Disk. The pc, ofcourse, stopped booting (in hindsight it was weird that I could delete system files on a running machine, but in some ways Win95 gave a lot more power to the user I suppose). I sense that this is the level analysis that is going into these “cuts” and “optimisations”.

Etheryte 2y ago
On the flip side, when you did this to a Windows 95 system a few times in a row, you eventually came to learn what was really critical and what wasn't. I remember young me thinking "Spooler? Why would anyone need that?". Truth be told, looking at corporate life today, I think young me was on to something. 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.
- hypercube33 2y ago
  I remember doing this as a kid trying to install visual basic and having a very small hard drive in my 386. Good times. Who needs fonts anyway? 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)
L_226 2y ago
Similar experience here with task manager and killing processes to free up RAM
nedt 2y ago
I had Windows 95 running with just 4 MB of RAM. Obviously it kept swapping to disk. When shutting down it always crashed, because in the process it turned of swapping and couldn't run some of the drivers anymore. Even Microsoft support didn't know how to solve it. That thing was wild. After adding 16 MB of RAM I never had this issue again.

gtirloni 2y ago

Trump wants a world of private government deals and he's showing other governments they can count on him if they want to join the game. 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.

landsman 2y ago

I saw that there is some communith, open source project who manage database by volunteering. That's the way.

kopirgan 2y ago

It's silly to assume countries like India that are democracies can't address pollution without data from one or two embassy buildings in a 2.3m sq km nation! 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.

sylware 2y ago

How many tens of billions of $ was that program paid by US tax payers?

deleted 2y ago

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