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> In China, for example, data from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing famously contradicted official government reports, showing worse pollution levels than authoritie

> 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.
- jordanb 2y ago
  I kinda feel like you're not being charitable with the OP My read is that the OP is saying that the air quality monitors in China were a massive soft-power win for the US, and it also shamed the Chinese government. So if you start from the assumption that this current administration sees the Chinese government as a rival who should be opposed, then this kind of effort that bypasses the Chinese government and provides a resource to the Chinese people should be supported. If the administration claims to see China as a rival, but then cuts such an obviously beneficial project, reasonably, you gotta wonder if the administration is telling the truth about it's relationship with the Chinese government.
  - llm_nerd 2y ago
    Their argument seems to be that the current administration is playing checkers with tennis rackets on trampolines. Nothing makes sense or actually serves any goals, and are just random child-like stomping and smashing. In this case someone probably saw this as somehow related to "the environment" so it's bad.
    - ikr678 2y ago
      I think it's more, any free service provided by the government shouldn't exist on principle (because this is a potential market opportunity for someone else). That it had environment in the title is just extra bonus.
      - lodovic 2y ago
        Domestically, that is correct, you are taking away an opportunity in the market. But in a foreign embassy there are no such competitors. And controlling air pollution is typically a job for the government.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > 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. This is kind of an embarrassing mistake for an economist. The theory that lower taxes can increase tax revenues is that they increase the rate of GDP growth. For example, with a lower tax rate, GDP might grow at 8%/year instead of 4%/year. Under different circumstances the difference might be larger or smaller, but as long as the lower tax rate improves GDP growth at all, compounding will eventually cause it to yield higher tax revenue at the lower rate. 20% of 1.08^15 is more than 35% of 1.04^15, and 20% of 1.08^50 is more than 370% of 35% of 1.04^50. This doesn't have to be an instantaneous effect for it to be real.
  - frikskit 2y ago
    Redo your analysis with something less absurd than 8%. For example 4.5% and you see no improvement in 100 years. 5% growth and it takes 59 years. Historically major tax cuts in the US increased GDP growth by -1 to 1.5%. You bring up a good point but in all realistic scenarios it actually misleads.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The actual numbers depend on the state of the economy, but you can't just lower the one without considering the others. Historically "major tax cuts" were actually very small: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S These were tax cuts on the order of 1-3% of GDP, so of course the effect on GDP growth was similarly muted. Meanwhile the baseline level of recent US GDP growth isn't 4%, it's more like 2.5%, making a 0.5% increase much more significant for such a small tax cut, so it's not absurd that a hypothetical doubling of the growth rate could result from a hypothetical 15% of GDP reduction in taxes. The hypothetical was just using larger numbers on multiple dimensions. You get a similar payback period if you use smaller numbers all around, e.g. a reduction in the overall tax rate from 23% to 21.5% resulting in an increase in the GDP growth rate from 2.5% to 3%. Moreover, the exact rate is difficult to calculate given limited data (and depends on changing factors in the economy), but the point is the existence of the effect. And it's not obvious that even quite long payback periods wouldn't be worth it, since the lower tax rate and the higher growth rate could then be sustained thereafter indefinitely.
kelnos 2y ago
> It's not something I would expect a US administration hostile to China to cut. I think in this case it's just a result of the haphazard approach to all of these cuts where nothing has actually been analyzed and planned. They are cutting things without thinking about repercussions, and of course their knee-jerk response to air-quality measurement is "it has to do with the climate and climate change, so we must suppress it". Or it's even more "innocent" than that: they were given a target dollar amount or percentage to cut, and they're scrambling to find ways to get there, without really thinking things through.
- BobbyJo 2y ago
  I honestly don't see how you can cut government spending at this point without being haphazard. Every administration for the last 70+ years has increased real spending (not to mention expanding executive power along the way, which got us here).
  - danparsonson 2y ago
    Why does that necessitate a haphazard approach? It's surely still possible to make a detailed assessment and prioritise properly?
    - BobbyJo 2y ago
      1) A large portion of the government is unable to pass a simple audit. 2) The fundamental basis of government department budgeting is "spend everything you get or you'll get less next year". No department will willingly spend less.
      - danparsonson 2y ago
        I don't understand how either of those assertions answers my question. 1) Having a lot of problems doesn't mean you have to throw up your hands and take a totally unstructured approach to solving them. 2) So work on setting realistic budgets instead of slashing and burning things at random. The problem with both of these is that they require people who a) know what they're doing and b) really want to make things better. The new US administration does not appear to fulfill either of those requirements.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
Almost all global sensing data published by the US receives a lot of negative pushback from other countries around the world. I don’t think most people are aware of this. The reasons are myriad. It makes it harder for other governments to control narratives in their own countries. It undermines efforts of governments to develop their own capacity; the US gives it away for free but those countries are not the customer and it does not serve them per se. It sets a much higher bar for domestic implementation than they have the capacity to implement. There is a sense the US exploits this data for their own ends. It doesn’t just irritate China, it irritates everyone. Making the issue more political, the US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. This isn’t a secret but it taints the perception of US neutrality when making this data available. The geopolitics and realpolitik of international sensing data is not clean.
- NooneAtAll3 2y ago
  I wonder what data on the US by others is there
  - jandrewrogers 2y ago
    Some but a lot less than you might think. The US invests a lot in global sensing, in some cases operating redundant independent networks while many countries don’t even have domestic sensing. This is a consistent complaint of non-US scientists that work with sensing data; it is difficult to get their governments to invest in domestic sensor networks when the US kind of does it for you, so even many developed countries have limited domestic data. In Europe in particular, there are additional privacy concerns that stymie more creative approaches at aggregating these types of measurements by other means. When one of these countries does build out a domestic sensor network, they are often unwilling to share the data because it is seen as advantaging the Americans. Resistance to data sharing is quite high, for many reasons, so if you need to do anything that spans many countries you often end up falling back on whatever the Americans can give you. The geopolitics around data sharing has been a significant hindrance to scientific activities like trying to build accurate and detailed climate and environmental models. Natural processes don’t recognize national borders. The only global sensor networks operated by several countries independently are related to weather, and even then there are fewer than people probably imagine.
paulddraper 2y ago
They weren’t targeting China.
consumer451 2y ago
> a US administration hostile to China... Based on actions alone, what is the evidence for this?
- ZeroGravitas 2y ago
  This belief has got to be the biggest propaganda victory for the Trump administrations. It was noticeable in the first term how weak he was on this topic, but apparently losing a nonsensical trade war to them and saying mildly racist things at rallies made him tough on them? More stupidly, did he just say he was tough on China enough that people believed him? Now that he's losing nonsensical trade wars with US allies and giving the green light to seizing territory from neighbouring countries it just highlights in neon how good he was and is for China, but it's silence (at best!) from the media.
  - matwood 2y ago
    Add in Trump implementing isolationist policies that only help China by allowing them to fill those gaps left by the US. Then there's Musk who Tweets nonsense 24/7, but somehow never says a bad word about China. Propaganda victory indeed.
- scott_w 2y ago
  The extra tariffs being put on Chinese goods?
  - bregma 2y ago
    The tariffs on Chinese goods is still lower than those recently applied to goods from favoured trading partners and allies.
    - scott_w 2y ago
      I don’t see how that’s relevant to this point.
      - 2y ago
maxglute 2y ago
There's no point anymore since everyone has AQI & PM2.5 meters. Incredibly popular is questionable, definitely among tier1 libtards in embassy and consulate cities on twitter at the time. There was just as much nationalist on renren then weibo who thought this was US interference. >> It led to China improving air quality. This is charitably western propaganda trying to take credit by fabricating notion that muh free speech can push CCP to change. Reality is BJ recognized pollution issue and had renewable policy underway a few years before this i.e. moving extra polluting factories out, controlling construction dust, vehicle registration systems, better emission standards etc. There was going to be coordinated effort to bring AQI down to <100s during 2008 Olympics and try to make it stick after, US Embassy was trying to stir shit leading up. Like if US embassy AQI shitposts was actually significant in pushing PRC enviromental policies, it would be an incredible own goal that pushed PRC to dominate renewable production chains and EVs while bankrupting western incumbants.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > There was just as much nationalist on renren then weibo who thought this was US interference. But nobody ever took them seriously. The man on the street in China could just go outside and look at the air. And whether he liked what he saw or not, he still had to breathe it, so interest in the topic was very high. Here's a conversation I had with a friend who worked in the Shanghai office of a major international conglomerate: ----- [me] What do Chinese people think of America? [美国 = the United States] [friend] Different people have different opinions. [friend] Some people see it as the promised land. [friend] Some people are very negative. [friend] Where I work, there's one guy who is really down on America and never misses an opportunity to point out how it sucks. [friend] But even that guy says there's one thing for which America deserves our thanks, the air quality numbers.
  - maxglute 2y ago
    >nobody ever took them seriously. ... >friend who worked in the Shanghai You have it backwards, less took your libtard friends from SH seriously. They're expat "cock suckers" (to put it bluntly) putting expats in their filter bubbles fueling western reporting that CCP got pressured to fix air QoL because muh strong US AQI free speech even from their anti US friends (equivalent of my Chinese wife said). Of course the interest in the topic was high, the average person on the street are flooded with CCTV telling them all the various government plans to alleviate air quality even before the US embassy stunt. People joke US helped PRC with airquality, but it's a joke, the one's who take joke position seriously (some groups more prone to this) are mocked (and they should be).
yapyap 2y ago
Is this administration really hostile to China though or just for show

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.

jordanb 2y ago
I kinda feel like you're not being charitable with the OP My read is that the OP is saying that the air quality monitors in China were a massive soft-power win for the US, and it also shamed the Chinese government. So if you start from the assumption that this current administration sees the Chinese government as a rival who should be opposed, then this kind of effort that bypasses the Chinese government and provides a resource to the Chinese people should be supported. If the administration claims to see China as a rival, but then cuts such an obviously beneficial project, reasonably, you gotta wonder if the administration is telling the truth about it's relationship with the Chinese government.
- llm_nerd 2y ago
  Their argument seems to be that the current administration is playing checkers with tennis rackets on trampolines. Nothing makes sense or actually serves any goals, and are just random child-like stomping and smashing. In this case someone probably saw this as somehow related to "the environment" so it's bad.
  - ikr678 2y ago
    I think it's more, any free service provided by the government shouldn't exist on principle (because this is a potential market opportunity for someone else). That it had environment in the title is just extra bonus.
    - lodovic 2y ago
      Domestically, that is correct, you are taking away an opportunity in the market. But in a foreign embassy there are no such competitors. And controlling air pollution is typically a job for the government.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> 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. This is kind of an embarrassing mistake for an economist. The theory that lower taxes can increase tax revenues is that they increase the rate of GDP growth. For example, with a lower tax rate, GDP might grow at 8%/year instead of 4%/year. Under different circumstances the difference might be larger or smaller, but as long as the lower tax rate improves GDP growth at all, compounding will eventually cause it to yield higher tax revenue at the lower rate. 20% of 1.08^15 is more than 35% of 1.04^15, and 20% of 1.08^50 is more than 370% of 35% of 1.04^50. This doesn't have to be an instantaneous effect for it to be real.
- frikskit 2y ago
  Redo your analysis with something less absurd than 8%. For example 4.5% and you see no improvement in 100 years. 5% growth and it takes 59 years. Historically major tax cuts in the US increased GDP growth by -1 to 1.5%. You bring up a good point but in all realistic scenarios it actually misleads.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The actual numbers depend on the state of the economy, but you can't just lower the one without considering the others. Historically "major tax cuts" were actually very small: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S These were tax cuts on the order of 1-3% of GDP, so of course the effect on GDP growth was similarly muted. Meanwhile the baseline level of recent US GDP growth isn't 4%, it's more like 2.5%, making a 0.5% increase much more significant for such a small tax cut, so it's not absurd that a hypothetical doubling of the growth rate could result from a hypothetical 15% of GDP reduction in taxes. The hypothetical was just using larger numbers on multiple dimensions. You get a similar payback period if you use smaller numbers all around, e.g. a reduction in the overall tax rate from 23% to 21.5% resulting in an increase in the GDP growth rate from 2.5% to 3%. Moreover, the exact rate is difficult to calculate given limited data (and depends on changing factors in the economy), but the point is the existence of the effect. And it's not obvious that even quite long payback periods wouldn't be worth it, since the lower tax rate and the higher growth rate could then be sustained thereafter indefinitely.

kelnos 2y ago

> It's not something I would expect a US administration hostile to China to cut. I think in this case it's just a result of the haphazard approach to all of these cuts where nothing has actually been analyzed and planned. They are cutting things without thinking about repercussions, and of course their knee-jerk response to air-quality measurement is "it has to do with the climate and climate change, so we must suppress it". Or it's even more "innocent" than that: they were given a target dollar amount or percentage to cut, and they're scrambling to find ways to get there, without really thinking things through.

BobbyJo 2y ago
I honestly don't see how you can cut government spending at this point without being haphazard. Every administration for the last 70+ years has increased real spending (not to mention expanding executive power along the way, which got us here).
- danparsonson 2y ago
  Why does that necessitate a haphazard approach? It's surely still possible to make a detailed assessment and prioritise properly?
  - BobbyJo 2y ago
    1) A large portion of the government is unable to pass a simple audit. 2) The fundamental basis of government department budgeting is "spend everything you get or you'll get less next year". No department will willingly spend less.
    - danparsonson 2y ago
      I don't understand how either of those assertions answers my question. 1) Having a lot of problems doesn't mean you have to throw up your hands and take a totally unstructured approach to solving them. 2) So work on setting realistic budgets instead of slashing and burning things at random. The problem with both of these is that they require people who a) know what they're doing and b) really want to make things better. The new US administration does not appear to fulfill either of those requirements.

jandrewrogers 2y ago

Almost all global sensing data published by the US receives a lot of negative pushback from other countries around the world. I don’t think most people are aware of this. The reasons are myriad. It makes it harder for other governments to control narratives in their own countries. It undermines efforts of governments to develop their own capacity; the US gives it away for free but those countries are not the customer and it does not serve them per se. It sets a much higher bar for domestic implementation than they have the capacity to implement. There is a sense the US exploits this data for their own ends. It doesn’t just irritate China, it irritates everyone. Making the issue more political, the US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. This isn’t a secret but it taints the perception of US neutrality when making this data available. The geopolitics and realpolitik of international sensing data is not clean.

NooneAtAll3 2y ago
I wonder what data on the US by others is there
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  Some but a lot less than you might think. The US invests a lot in global sensing, in some cases operating redundant independent networks while many countries don’t even have domestic sensing. This is a consistent complaint of non-US scientists that work with sensing data; it is difficult to get their governments to invest in domestic sensor networks when the US kind of does it for you, so even many developed countries have limited domestic data. In Europe in particular, there are additional privacy concerns that stymie more creative approaches at aggregating these types of measurements by other means. When one of these countries does build out a domestic sensor network, they are often unwilling to share the data because it is seen as advantaging the Americans. Resistance to data sharing is quite high, for many reasons, so if you need to do anything that spans many countries you often end up falling back on whatever the Americans can give you. The geopolitics around data sharing has been a significant hindrance to scientific activities like trying to build accurate and detailed climate and environmental models. Natural processes don’t recognize national borders. The only global sensor networks operated by several countries independently are related to weather, and even then there are fewer than people probably imagine.

paulddraper 2y ago

They weren’t targeting China.

consumer451 2y ago

> a US administration hostile to China... Based on actions alone, what is the evidence for this?

ZeroGravitas 2y ago
This belief has got to be the biggest propaganda victory for the Trump administrations. It was noticeable in the first term how weak he was on this topic, but apparently losing a nonsensical trade war to them and saying mildly racist things at rallies made him tough on them? More stupidly, did he just say he was tough on China enough that people believed him? Now that he's losing nonsensical trade wars with US allies and giving the green light to seizing territory from neighbouring countries it just highlights in neon how good he was and is for China, but it's silence (at best!) from the media.
- matwood 2y ago
  Add in Trump implementing isolationist policies that only help China by allowing them to fill those gaps left by the US. Then there's Musk who Tweets nonsense 24/7, but somehow never says a bad word about China. Propaganda victory indeed.
scott_w 2y ago
The extra tariffs being put on Chinese goods?
- bregma 2y ago
  The tariffs on Chinese goods is still lower than those recently applied to goods from favoured trading partners and allies.
  - scott_w 2y ago
    I don’t see how that’s relevant to this point.
    - 2y ago

maxglute 2y ago

There's no point anymore since everyone has AQI & PM2.5 meters. Incredibly popular is questionable, definitely among tier1 libtards in embassy and consulate cities on twitter at the time. There was just as much nationalist on renren then weibo who thought this was US interference. >> It led to China improving air quality. This is charitably western propaganda trying to take credit by fabricating notion that muh free speech can push CCP to change. Reality is BJ recognized pollution issue and had renewable policy underway a few years before this i.e. moving extra polluting factories out, controlling construction dust, vehicle registration systems, better emission standards etc. There was going to be coordinated effort to bring AQI down to <100s during 2008 Olympics and try to make it stick after, US Embassy was trying to stir shit leading up. Like if US embassy AQI shitposts was actually significant in pushing PRC enviromental policies, it would be an incredible own goal that pushed PRC to dominate renewable production chains and EVs while bankrupting western incumbants.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> There was just as much nationalist on renren then weibo who thought this was US interference. But nobody ever took them seriously. The man on the street in China could just go outside and look at the air. And whether he liked what he saw or not, he still had to breathe it, so interest in the topic was very high. Here's a conversation I had with a friend who worked in the Shanghai office of a major international conglomerate: ----- [me] What do Chinese people think of America? [美国 = the United States] [friend] Different people have different opinions. [friend] Some people see it as the promised land. [friend] Some people are very negative. [friend] Where I work, there's one guy who is really down on America and never misses an opportunity to point out how it sucks. [friend] But even that guy says there's one thing for which America deserves our thanks, the air quality numbers.
- maxglute 2y ago
  >nobody ever took them seriously. ... >friend who worked in the Shanghai You have it backwards, less took your libtard friends from SH seriously. They're expat "cock suckers" (to put it bluntly) putting expats in their filter bubbles fueling western reporting that CCP got pressured to fix air QoL because muh strong US AQI free speech even from their anti US friends (equivalent of my Chinese wife said). Of course the interest in the topic was high, the average person on the street are flooded with CCTV telling them all the various government plans to alleviate air quality even before the US embassy stunt. People joke US helped PRC with airquality, but it's a joke, the one's who take joke position seriously (some groups more prone to this) are mocked (and they should be).

yapyap 2y ago

Is this administration really hostile to China though or just for show