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NOAA Weather will delete websites using Amazon, Google cloud services Saturday

103 points by ck2 2y ago

ck2 2y ago
Please tell me the Space Weather website is not going away Why is the country being destroyed like this? It will cost ten times more than it saves, it's just chaos on purpose
- bigyabai 2y ago
  > Why is the country being destroyed like this? So that people like you (ingrates, from an administrative perspective) can stop paying the government to provide basic services and instead become habitually reliant on a paid alternative service.
  - feraloink 2y ago
    I couldn't read the entire article due to paywall. From what I did read, it doesn't seem like there is ANY alternative, none at all now, for the public to access NOAA Research.
    - hello_moto 2y ago
      Private will show up and be a hero any given day from now!
    - cmiles74 2y ago
      AccuWeather has been lobbying to remove weather data from the public view for years. The idea here is that AccuWeather will have access to this data and then sell forecasts to the rest of the country. https://www.washington.edu/news/2005/05/16/plan-to-privatize-most-forecasting-would-cripple-weather-service-expert-says/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2005/05/16/plan-to-privatize... Trump's nominee to run the NOAA? The CEO of AccuWeather!
- josefritzishere 2y ago
  The purpose is to enrich a few at the cost of the many. They will privatize the services we need to live, increasing the net cost of everything. They're destroying the American dream.
- feraloink 2y ago
  You're referring to the Space Weather Prediction Research Center website, yes? I just checked the Newsroom for NOAA SWPC. There was nothing mentioned. I also visited their social media at https://x.com/nwsswpc https://x.com/nwsswpc and https://www.facebook.com/NWSSWPC/ https://www.facebook.com/NWSSWPC/ Nothing there either; so far, so good. NOAA Office of Space Weather Observations news https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news-events/search-news?combine=&created%5Bmin%5D=&created%5Bmax%5D=&field_office_target_id%5B201%5D=201 https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news-events/search-news?combine=... didn't list any changes either. I hope you don't lose access on Saturday morning.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  > Why is the country being destroyed like this? Long story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Rise_of_the_Chicago_School_(1970s–present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Costs That's a start. And a rise to dominance of populist conspiratorial thinking. ContraPoints had a good intro video about it recently.
  - krapp 2y ago
    And Obama. A lot of this is a trauma response from the American right to the election of a Black president.
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      Yeah, I could triple the "read this to learn more" links and it'd still not cover all of it. "The entire history of the Republican Party since Goldwater, our bad system of elections, the entire history of postwar 'think tanks', the McLuhan-sense 'message' of TV and especially the Internet, and a slow-motion more-successful knock-off of the Business Plot" covers a lot of ground.
  - conception 2y ago
    You missed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
- superkuh 2y ago
  I remember when the USA government spaceweather websites and FTP sites went away in the early 2010s. It was terrible. They replaced them with the current javascript monstrosities and hid the raw directories. It made automating mirroring of space weather resources much harder.
feraloink 2y ago
I can't even imagine what the rationale would be for doing this: >The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency is poised to eliminate most websites tied to its research division under plans for the cancellation of a cloud web services contract, a move that could snarl operations at several labs. If Bloomberg is correct, it seems that the contract was cancelled prior to developing (and testing and announcing to the public etc.) any replacement. >A contract for the services across NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research — known as NOAA Research — has been targeted for “early termination,” according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg News. As a result, almost all external websites reliant on Amazon, Google and WordPress services are poised to vanish early Saturday morning in Washington, wiping the bulk of the unit’s work, which includes climate and environmental science research, from public view. Many Americans rely upon NOAA Research communications, both businesses and individual citizens. This worries me, not because I think that Trump is a fascist or because of my political views, but rather, because it suggests a lack of competent government leadership. NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore? I'm not a Bloomberg subscriber, so what I quoted was all I could read about it. I hope there's more info, e.g. about what the replacement delivery system to the public, will be...
- mooreds 2y ago
  > I'm not a Bloomberg subscriber, so what I quoted was all I could read about it. https://archive.is/VRQZO https://archive.is/VRQZO
  - feraloink 2y ago
    Thank you! I've had trouble accessing that site *.is recently. Your link worked just fine.
    - windexh8er 2y ago
      I ran into the same thing recently. Did you end up seeing a boiler plate template site filled with Lorem Ipsum? I believe there were certain DNS resolvers that seemed to have been incorrectly resolving. Whether that was intentional or not I didn't have time to look into.
9283409232 2y ago
The plan is to privatize weather and sell out the country to Accuweather.
- lynndotpy 2y ago
  I would like to add context for others that this was explicitly laid out in the "Project 2025" agenda. Accuweather was cited as an example, and Accuweather responded saying they do not agree with the agenda: https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-support-project-2025-plan-to-fully-commercializing-nws-operations-noaa-has-critical-role-in-american-weather-enterprise/1670156 https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-su...
  - move-on-by 2y ago
    The current administration was also cited during elections as not being part of Project 2025 and not going to follow it. Actions speak louder than words. We will see how it plays out I suppose.
    - garciasn 2y ago
      “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - GOP / Project 2025
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      The actions were bringing in a ton of people who worked on it, to the campaign and nascent administration before the election, which happened before Trump's lies about how that wasn't the plan.
  - InitialLastName 2y ago
    The same Accuweather whose previous CEO (and founder's brother) was Donald Trump's nominee to run NOAA in the last administration? Color me shocked that, under the last administration and when it looked like the Trump campaign had a good chance of self-destructing, they wrote a milquetoast "we don't support this at all ;-)" press release about his agenda.
kristopolous 2y ago
About half the country think this is an amazing job and on the right track! It's an absolute death cult.
- damnesian 2y ago
  I am related to people who voted for it, and none of them are what I'd call enthusiastic. But they are not smart enough to imagine a way out of their little boxes.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    Me too. They're addicted to cable news that gives endless praise with animations of waving flags. It's clearly just non-stop propaganda. The lying some people do to sell a couple ads...
  - ilikecakeandpie 2y ago
    They shouldn't be surprised. Stuff like this is exactly what they said they were going to do and ~70 million voted for it and ~90 million weren't compelled enough to vote for the other viable choice or choices
    - palmotea 2y ago
      > They shouldn't be surprised. Stuff like this is exactly what they said they were going to do and ~70 million voted for it and ~90 million weren't compelled enough to vote for the other viable choice or choices But the problem is this was one of a million facets to the choice, and people were only able to vote on the whole package. Personally, I blame the Democrats, because they knew what the Republicans "said they were going to do" and pretty much only used it for uninspired attack ad fodder. They should have been focusing on fixing the shit that causes voters to disapprove of them: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/5224072-democrats-low-approval-rating/ https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/5224072-de... > The Democratic Party’s approval rating remains at a low point, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released to The Hill on Monday. > ... > “Democrats continue to be seen as out of the mainstream. Their ratings are at record lows and, they will have real problems in the midterms if they can’t lift themselves up from this nadir,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the poll. > The latest polling matches similarly dismal numbers for Democrats found in other surveys. It takes a special level of awfulness to lose to Trump worse than the first time.
dboreham 2y ago
Since the headline is positively wrong, and the article paywalled here's what this actually is about: NOAA uses cloud providers including AWS and GCP to host a bunch of services and sites under its "research division". The contracts under which these hosting arrangements are provided are to be terminated shortly. At that point those services and web sites will go offline. afaics it's nothing to do with the actual weather service data feeds.
- financetechbro 2y ago
  Read the excerpt I posted in this thread from Project 2025. Hope that gives you a clear perspective of the plan Edit: typo
- rimunroe 2y ago
  > the headline is positively wrong The headline is "US Weather Agency Websites Set to Vanish with Contract Cuts". Are you seeing a different version than I am? Your complaints don't make sense otherwise. > NOAA uses cloud providers including AWS and GCP to host a bunch of services and sites under its "research division". The contracts under which these hosting arrangements are provided are to be terminated shortly. At that point those services and web sites will go offline. The headline says that sites are going to go down because of contracts being cut. That seems like an accurate summary of this paragraph. > it's nothing to do with the actual weather service data feeds The headline doesn't say anything about data feeds.
- floatrock 2y ago
  My job requires pulling large data dumps produced by research from a national lab from public S3 buckets. TB's of data. This research is publicly funded, the data produced is public data, and it enables an entire ecosystem of business activity. imho, this is a good use of public funding and research, and hosting it in S3 buckets is a good solution that makes huge quantities of data easily accessible to people who would use this. I don't use NOAA data, but this has chilling effects for my business (is my national lab next?). There is nothing "efficient" about forcing agencies to get rid of data and service hosting that works well at scale. (If DOGE was actually about increasing efficiency of digital services like it's pre-rename/pre-takeover US Digital Services agency was actually doing, we'd be building a TB or PB-scale S3 alternative for government agencies to use, but we all know that's not the constructive efficiency they're doing here)
devwastaken 2y ago
[flagged]
superkuh 2y ago
Funny. NOAA spent 2015-now moving all their weather servers off premises and moving from HTML and static images with maybe a bit of client side javascript to entirely web application remote hosted monstrosities that all require javascript to even see. If they'd just stuck with what worked instead of chasing the shiny glimmer of modern web dev they wouldn't be in this exact situation. No doubt they'd be being attacked a different way. But I still miss the old sites that were actually websites. My bet is that the lingering ones like https://forecast.weather.gov/ https://forecast.weather.gov/ will be the only remaining after these political attacks.
- Telemakhos 2y ago
  > If they'd just stuck with what worked instead of chasing the shiny glimmer of modern web dev they wouldn't be in this exact situation. I'm going to think about that sentence for the rest of the day.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    "Dad, why did government services suddenly collapse to 1920s levels, in the 2020s?" "Well, son, the agencies chased the shiny glimmer of modern web dev."
    - superkuh 2y ago
      It's a fun mischarecterization. But the old sites were/are far more functional and less fragile. A single animated gif of the CONUS radar, for example, is way better user experience, incomparibly less fragile and easy to host, than a complex javascript application and associated backend databases, servers, etc. Just put the gif on akami, host the simple static html on noaa servers and it lasts a decade with no one touching it. It was how it worked for near 20 years. But re: your mischaracterization, I thought I was clearly saying that they'd find another way to attack politically. It's just that the modern fragile web setup made NOAA particularly vulnerable.
ryandvm 2y ago
Mmmmm. Does that mean the public NOAA feeds are going dark? https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/ https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/
tmshapland 2y ago
Sad.
katelynsills 2y ago
I suspect this is related to what Nikhil Rajpal was doing at NOAA. He was originally reported to be asking about Google sites. https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineer-noaa-data-google-musk-climate-project-2025/ https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineer-noaa-data-google-m... @nikrdc, if this is you, why are you doing something so destructive and stupid?
- walls 2y ago
  Because he's a piece of shit with no morals or stake in society. Seriously, how are people still asking questions like this.
  - katelynsills 2y ago
    Yes, I know. You don't need to tell me that.
- totalkikedeath 2y ago
  [dead]
NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
My first wonder: is there a good reason for canceling the contracts? Were the contracts reasonable, or was the U.S. gov't getting fucked? If they were paying reasonable, open-market rates to Amazon and Google, this could be a tragedy. If they were getting fucked, it could be a reasonable response to sloth and indifference on the part of our civil service. Has anyone bothered to check, or is this all just wailing and gnashing along party lines?
- walls 2y ago
  Why are you still assuming anything this government does is in good faith? How much will it take before you wake up?
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    What you said has been valid for as long as there has been a government.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      there are degrees of validity, and we're off the scale right now
- chneu 2y ago
  The reason is government bad. The next reason is a war on science/intellect. That's it. Stop trying to rationalize what they're doing as anything other than "smart people and science bad".
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Third reason: privatizing government is good for $Big$Business (who also fund political campaigns) Taxpayers are paying either way, except that now it'll go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders instead of at least providing jobs to fed employees.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
financetechbro 2y ago
Excerpts from Project 2025. Godspeed, America. We’re all toast, and while we can compliant all we want about it, are we really doing anything to stop it? > The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories. > Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department's $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department's personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures). > This industry's mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful func-tions. It should be broken up and downsized. > NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality. > Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather. > Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS. > The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.
- _fat_santa 2y ago
  I can't speak for others but in my experience, NOAA gave me the most accurate weather for my area, and it wasn't even close. If they take the site down I hope they at least keep the API's up so folks here can build frontends
  - financetechbro 2y ago
    Not sure what party of the excerpt gave you the impression that they are keeping any of NOAA around
palmotea 2y ago
It's too bad the Archive Team has halted their project to archive US government websites: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/US_Government https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/US_Government If you run their archiving appliance right now, it just archives stuff from the game Roblox.
- Kye 2y ago
  I don't see anything about them halting it there.
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > I don't see anything about them halting it there. The IRC channel says so, and try to run the project and it will not download anything.
pmags 2y ago
If you are a US tax payer, it's important to realize that: 1. The federal government has already invested hundred of millions of dollars and millions of person years of scientific effort to collect all the valuable data that NOAA, CDC, NIH, the National Weather Service, etc. have collected, curated, and analyzed 2. The DOGE-ies and their ilk are flushing that all down the toilet -- all your investment will now be lost, or at least inaccessible to you or anyone else who might do something useful with it.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
This isn't an accident or a random cut to save money. The less you track climate change, the less pressure there is to do anything about climate change.
cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
Surprised DOGE hasn't fire-bombed the Library of Congress and triumphantly boasted about how much money was saved.
caoduoclieu 2y ago
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caoduoclieu 2y ago
ok
caoduoclieu 2y ago
[dead]

103 points by ck2 2y ago

ck2 2y ago

Please tell me the Space Weather website is not going away Why is the country being destroyed like this? It will cost ten times more than it saves, it's just chaos on purpose

bigyabai 2y ago
> Why is the country being destroyed like this? So that people like you (ingrates, from an administrative perspective) can stop paying the government to provide basic services and instead become habitually reliant on a paid alternative service.
- feraloink 2y ago
  I couldn't read the entire article due to paywall. From what I did read, it doesn't seem like there is ANY alternative, none at all now, for the public to access NOAA Research.
  - hello_moto 2y ago
    Private will show up and be a hero any given day from now!
  - cmiles74 2y ago
    AccuWeather has been lobbying to remove weather data from the public view for years. The idea here is that AccuWeather will have access to this data and then sell forecasts to the rest of the country. https://www.washington.edu/news/2005/05/16/plan-to-privatize-most-forecasting-would-cripple-weather-service-expert-says/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2005/05/16/plan-to-privatize... Trump's nominee to run the NOAA? The CEO of AccuWeather!
josefritzishere 2y ago
The purpose is to enrich a few at the cost of the many. They will privatize the services we need to live, increasing the net cost of everything. They're destroying the American dream.
feraloink 2y ago
You're referring to the Space Weather Prediction Research Center website, yes? I just checked the Newsroom for NOAA SWPC. There was nothing mentioned. I also visited their social media at https://x.com/nwsswpc https://x.com/nwsswpc and https://www.facebook.com/NWSSWPC/ https://www.facebook.com/NWSSWPC/ Nothing there either; so far, so good. NOAA Office of Space Weather Observations news https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news-events/search-news?combine=&created%5Bmin%5D=&created%5Bmax%5D=&field_office_target_id%5B201%5D=201 https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news-events/search-news?combine=... didn't list any changes either. I hope you don't lose access on Saturday morning.
alabastervlog 2y ago
> Why is the country being destroyed like this? Long story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Rise_of_the_Chicago_School_(1970s–present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ailes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heritage_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Majority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_tax_cuts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror#Costs That's a start. And a rise to dominance of populist conspiratorial thinking. ContraPoints had a good intro video about it recently.
- krapp 2y ago
  And Obama. A lot of this is a trauma response from the American right to the election of a Black president.
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Yeah, I could triple the "read this to learn more" links and it'd still not cover all of it. "The entire history of the Republican Party since Goldwater, our bad system of elections, the entire history of postwar 'think tanks', the McLuhan-sense 'message' of TV and especially the Internet, and a slow-motion more-successful knock-off of the Business Plot" covers a lot of ground.
- conception 2y ago
  You missed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
superkuh 2y ago
I remember when the USA government spaceweather websites and FTP sites went away in the early 2010s. It was terrible. They replaced them with the current javascript monstrosities and hid the raw directories. It made automating mirroring of space weather resources much harder.

feraloink 2y ago

I can't even imagine what the rationale would be for doing this: >The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency is poised to eliminate most websites tied to its research division under plans for the cancellation of a cloud web services contract, a move that could snarl operations at several labs. If Bloomberg is correct, it seems that the contract was cancelled prior to developing (and testing and announcing to the public etc.) any replacement. >A contract for the services across NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research — known as NOAA Research — has been targeted for “early termination,” according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg News. As a result, almost all external websites reliant on Amazon, Google and WordPress services are poised to vanish early Saturday morning in Washington, wiping the bulk of the unit’s work, which includes climate and environmental science research, from public view. Many Americans rely upon NOAA Research communications, both businesses and individual citizens. This worries me, not because I think that Trump is a fascist or because of my political views, but rather, because it suggests a lack of competent government leadership. NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore? I'm not a Bloomberg subscriber, so what I quoted was all I could read about it. I hope there's more info, e.g. about what the replacement delivery system to the public, will be...

mooreds 2y ago
> I'm not a Bloomberg subscriber, so what I quoted was all I could read about it. https://archive.is/VRQZO https://archive.is/VRQZO
- feraloink 2y ago
  Thank you! I've had trouble accessing that site *.is recently. Your link worked just fine.
  - windexh8er 2y ago
    I ran into the same thing recently. Did you end up seeing a boiler plate template site filled with Lorem Ipsum? I believe there were certain DNS resolvers that seemed to have been incorrectly resolving. Whether that was intentional or not I didn't have time to look into.

9283409232 2y ago

The plan is to privatize weather and sell out the country to Accuweather.

lynndotpy 2y ago
I would like to add context for others that this was explicitly laid out in the "Project 2025" agenda. Accuweather was cited as an example, and Accuweather responded saying they do not agree with the agenda: https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-support-project-2025-plan-to-fully-commercializing-nws-operations-noaa-has-critical-role-in-american-weather-enterprise/1670156 https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-su...
- move-on-by 2y ago
  The current administration was also cited during elections as not being part of Project 2025 and not going to follow it. Actions speak louder than words. We will see how it plays out I suppose.
  - garciasn 2y ago
    “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - GOP / Project 2025
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    The actions were bringing in a ton of people who worked on it, to the campaign and nascent administration before the election, which happened before Trump's lies about how that wasn't the plan.
- InitialLastName 2y ago
  The same Accuweather whose previous CEO (and founder's brother) was Donald Trump's nominee to run NOAA in the last administration? Color me shocked that, under the last administration and when it looked like the Trump campaign had a good chance of self-destructing, they wrote a milquetoast "we don't support this at all ;-)" press release about his agenda.

kristopolous 2y ago

About half the country think this is an amazing job and on the right track! It's an absolute death cult.

damnesian 2y ago
I am related to people who voted for it, and none of them are what I'd call enthusiastic. But they are not smart enough to imagine a way out of their little boxes.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Me too. They're addicted to cable news that gives endless praise with animations of waving flags. It's clearly just non-stop propaganda. The lying some people do to sell a couple ads...
- ilikecakeandpie 2y ago
  They shouldn't be surprised. Stuff like this is exactly what they said they were going to do and ~70 million voted for it and ~90 million weren't compelled enough to vote for the other viable choice or choices
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > They shouldn't be surprised. Stuff like this is exactly what they said they were going to do and ~70 million voted for it and ~90 million weren't compelled enough to vote for the other viable choice or choices But the problem is this was one of a million facets to the choice, and people were only able to vote on the whole package. Personally, I blame the Democrats, because they knew what the Republicans "said they were going to do" and pretty much only used it for uninspired attack ad fodder. They should have been focusing on fixing the shit that causes voters to disapprove of them: https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/5224072-democrats-low-approval-rating/ https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/5224072-de... > The Democratic Party’s approval rating remains at a low point, according to a new Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released to The Hill on Monday. > ... > “Democrats continue to be seen as out of the mainstream. Their ratings are at record lows and, they will have real problems in the midterms if they can’t lift themselves up from this nadir,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the poll. > The latest polling matches similarly dismal numbers for Democrats found in other surveys. It takes a special level of awfulness to lose to Trump worse than the first time.

dboreham 2y ago

Since the headline is positively wrong, and the article paywalled here's what this actually is about: NOAA uses cloud providers including AWS and GCP to host a bunch of services and sites under its "research division". The contracts under which these hosting arrangements are provided are to be terminated shortly. At that point those services and web sites will go offline. afaics it's nothing to do with the actual weather service data feeds.

financetechbro 2y ago
Read the excerpt I posted in this thread from Project 2025. Hope that gives you a clear perspective of the plan Edit: typo
rimunroe 2y ago
> the headline is positively wrong The headline is "US Weather Agency Websites Set to Vanish with Contract Cuts". Are you seeing a different version than I am? Your complaints don't make sense otherwise. > NOAA uses cloud providers including AWS and GCP to host a bunch of services and sites under its "research division". The contracts under which these hosting arrangements are provided are to be terminated shortly. At that point those services and web sites will go offline. The headline says that sites are going to go down because of contracts being cut. That seems like an accurate summary of this paragraph. > it's nothing to do with the actual weather service data feeds The headline doesn't say anything about data feeds.
floatrock 2y ago
My job requires pulling large data dumps produced by research from a national lab from public S3 buckets. TB's of data. This research is publicly funded, the data produced is public data, and it enables an entire ecosystem of business activity. imho, this is a good use of public funding and research, and hosting it in S3 buckets is a good solution that makes huge quantities of data easily accessible to people who would use this. I don't use NOAA data, but this has chilling effects for my business (is my national lab next?). There is nothing "efficient" about forcing agencies to get rid of data and service hosting that works well at scale. (If DOGE was actually about increasing efficiency of digital services like it's pre-rename/pre-takeover US Digital Services agency was actually doing, we'd be building a TB or PB-scale S3 alternative for government agencies to use, but we all know that's not the constructive efficiency they're doing here)

devwastaken 2y ago

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superkuh 2y ago

Funny. NOAA spent 2015-now moving all their weather servers off premises and moving from HTML and static images with maybe a bit of client side javascript to entirely web application remote hosted monstrosities that all require javascript to even see. If they'd just stuck with what worked instead of chasing the shiny glimmer of modern web dev they wouldn't be in this exact situation. No doubt they'd be being attacked a different way. But I still miss the old sites that were actually websites. My bet is that the lingering ones like https://forecast.weather.gov/ https://forecast.weather.gov/ will be the only remaining after these political attacks.

Telemakhos 2y ago
> If they'd just stuck with what worked instead of chasing the shiny glimmer of modern web dev they wouldn't be in this exact situation. I'm going to think about that sentence for the rest of the day.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  "Dad, why did government services suddenly collapse to 1920s levels, in the 2020s?" "Well, son, the agencies chased the shiny glimmer of modern web dev."
  - superkuh 2y ago
    It's a fun mischarecterization. But the old sites were/are far more functional and less fragile. A single animated gif of the CONUS radar, for example, is way better user experience, incomparibly less fragile and easy to host, than a complex javascript application and associated backend databases, servers, etc. Just put the gif on akami, host the simple static html on noaa servers and it lasts a decade with no one touching it. It was how it worked for near 20 years. But re: your mischaracterization, I thought I was clearly saying that they'd find another way to attack politically. It's just that the modern fragile web setup made NOAA particularly vulnerable.

ryandvm 2y ago

Mmmmm. Does that mean the public NOAA feeds are going dark? https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/ https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/

tmshapland 2y ago

Sad.

katelynsills 2y ago

I suspect this is related to what Nikhil Rajpal was doing at NOAA. He was originally reported to be asking about Google sites. https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineer-noaa-data-google-musk-climate-project-2025/ https://www.wired.com/story/doge-engineer-noaa-data-google-m... @nikrdc, if this is you, why are you doing something so destructive and stupid?

walls 2y ago
Because he's a piece of shit with no morals or stake in society. Seriously, how are people still asking questions like this.
- katelynsills 2y ago
  Yes, I know. You don't need to tell me that.
totalkikedeath 2y ago
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NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago

My first wonder: is there a good reason for canceling the contracts? Were the contracts reasonable, or was the U.S. gov't getting fucked? If they were paying reasonable, open-market rates to Amazon and Google, this could be a tragedy. If they were getting fucked, it could be a reasonable response to sloth and indifference on the part of our civil service. Has anyone bothered to check, or is this all just wailing and gnashing along party lines?

walls 2y ago
Why are you still assuming anything this government does is in good faith? How much will it take before you wake up?
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  What you said has been valid for as long as there has been a government.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    there are degrees of validity, and we're off the scale right now
chneu 2y ago
The reason is government bad. The next reason is a war on science/intellect. That's it. Stop trying to rationalize what they're doing as anything other than "smart people and science bad".
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Third reason: privatizing government is good for $Big$Business (who also fund political campaigns) Taxpayers are paying either way, except that now it'll go into the pockets of wealthy shareholders instead of at least providing jobs to fed employees.
- NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago

financetechbro 2y ago

Excerpts from Project 2025. Godspeed, America. We’re all toast, and while we can compliant all we want about it, are we really doing anything to stop it? > The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories. > Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department's $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department's personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures). > This industry's mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful func-tions. It should be broken up and downsized. > NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality. > Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather. > Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS. > The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.

_fat_santa 2y ago
I can't speak for others but in my experience, NOAA gave me the most accurate weather for my area, and it wasn't even close. If they take the site down I hope they at least keep the API's up so folks here can build frontends
- financetechbro 2y ago
  Not sure what party of the excerpt gave you the impression that they are keeping any of NOAA around

palmotea 2y ago

It's too bad the Archive Team has halted their project to archive US government websites: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/US_Government https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/US_Government If you run their archiving appliance right now, it just archives stuff from the game Roblox.

Kye 2y ago
I don't see anything about them halting it there.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > I don't see anything about them halting it there. The IRC channel says so, and try to run the project and it will not download anything.

pmags 2y ago

If you are a US tax payer, it's important to realize that: 1. The federal government has already invested hundred of millions of dollars and millions of person years of scientific effort to collect all the valuable data that NOAA, CDC, NIH, the National Weather Service, etc. have collected, curated, and analyzed 2. The DOGE-ies and their ilk are flushing that all down the toilet -- all your investment will now be lost, or at least inaccessible to you or anyone else who might do something useful with it.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

This isn't an accident or a random cut to save money. The less you track climate change, the less pressure there is to do anything about climate change.

cantrecallmypwd 2y ago

Surprised DOGE hasn't fire-bombed the Library of Congress and triumphantly boasted about how much money was saved.

caoduoclieu 2y ago

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caoduoclieu 2y ago

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