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.

  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.

Yeah, to me it looks like that is not fine under the new administration. If it would help only Americans, or those in power at least, it would be okay, but something for all the humans? Naaah...

Honestly, I think Trump is sending a deliberate message here and in a thousand other ways. If you trust the U.S. or rely on the U.S. for anything, no matter how tiny, the new U.S. is going to screw you. It doesn't matter if it was a mutually beneficial collaboration. The U.S. is happy to screw themselves in the process of screwing you. You can't bargain with them. Nothing you say or do will matter. They are going to hurt you because that is the U.S.'s new policy towards it's friends and especially its allies.

Trump is not being selfish or putting America's interests first. He's putting someone else's interests above those of the country he ostensibly serves. A lot of what he's doing makes absolutely no sense until you view it this way, and then it all makes sense.

This seems to be ending now.

Europe is being bombarded by fascist propaganda internally, from Russia and now the US as well (primarily perpetuated by Musk). For some reason everyone decided that breaking up and weakening Europe is a majorly important goal. I can't shake the feeling that this is a coordinated effort.

I know. This is why I added an "(overt)" here.

> For some reason everyone decided that breaking up and weakening Europe is a majorly important goal.

People might not know it much, but Europe has some silent power about some very important aspects of this world. Removing this power will allow seeding of infighting and removal of tons of regulations in physical and digital realm, allowing much more "monies" for the rich.

Plus, Europe is leaving fossil based fuels faster than anyone else.

It's all about monies now. The rest can be (modern) peasants and merely survive. It doesn't matter as long as monies keep coming.

It's a fusion of Brave new World and 1984. Look at Australian politics. One prominent figure allegedly told that $2/day is enough for many people.

If we assume that the US is in the process of moving away from being a democracy, or at least becoming an illiberal democracy (I personally think that this is _slightly_ pessimistic and that the Supreme Court may surprise us and save it yet, but it's an idea that's very much out there) then Europe (defined broadly) is left as the last major outpost of liberal democracy in the world (or second-last; you could argue India either way to some extent); it then makes some sense that it would be targeted by authoritarian and moving-towards-authoritarian states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Calling the US an empire because it if friendly and does business with other countries is just propping up the fascist propaganda.

Under this plan, some countries are coerced to abandon building their own advanced goods (like planes), and given promises of supply from the US, fueling the technology gap with some countries in the mid-term.

This plan is what made Europe to be semi-dependent on US for defense and some advanced tech. My country had to re-invent the wheel countless times to close that gap, sometimes getting flak from the US, and even some technologies are outright denied to us to keep us vulnerable in some cases.

This plan is what made US a "soft-empire", though everybody signed into it because they had to. Now, the current US administration wants to discontinue these warranties, and Europe is starting the ReArm program.

Another face of the US (the Greater US) is discussed in this book [1], also worth reading, which is in my reading list.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/How-Hide-Empire-History-Greater-ebook...

>An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries".

I've sort of argued with Russian propagandists going on about Europe being part of the US empire so the Russians are only doing the same by sending tanks into Ukraine but it isn't really like that. I mean the UK is obligated to help defend the US under NATO and we did sent troops to Afgansitan on their behalf so is the US part of the British Empire or is the the UK part of the US Empire and how can we tell? Where are the viceroys? At that point I mostly get blocked.

I mean you can redefine the words so everywhere that watches netflix is part of the US cultural empire but it's not empire in the traditional British Empire sense and gets a bit meaninless if you include everything.

US has several outlying territories. US has around 800 military bases around the world. In SK and Japan (and to a large extent in Australia), US dictates the policies. The world institutions have been mostly controlled by the US without putting itself under their jurisdiction. I see one dominant center with several subordinate peripheries - in Europe, Australia, SK, Japan and the island nations of Pacific. Unlike olden days, you do not need to send people as governers directly. You only need to control the trade, defence and foreign policies.

Also re Australia, it's a long standing military ally of the US but it still a constitutional monarchy under the British crown - I think they still have Liz on some of the bank notes. I guess military cooperation trumps head of state? It all gets confusing.

As a resident of a supposedly developing country that's been stagnating for more than 30 years, I really see very few positive things coming out of the US and Europe. Their companies suck our country dry in exchange for kickbacks to the government (which has never won even a single honest election — but this never bothers anybody), their politicians are never worried about "human rights" or "democracy" in our country because they have significant monetary interests here. In spite of our horrific human rights record.

Lots of promises of large capital investments from the West were made by many diplomatic missions back in Spring of 2022; none have actually materialized.

Meanwhile, the Chinese and Russians are busy building roads, bridges, and power plants — playing the long game.

Many, many of us are bewildered by Trump's actions, and consider him a some inscrutable mix of evil, stupid, and deranged.

I'm not even politically left (I'm pretty centrist), and I know I'm not alone in being perplexed by how he won the election.

The current administration didn't grow in a vacuum. It might not be the whole of the USA people, but a large enough fraction of the USA people supported the current administration, otherwise there would be no chance of it getting elected, even with all the brokenness of the USA electoral system. And the current administration still has a large enough support from the USA people, otherwise they could do nothing: the government is not some mechanical device which blindly follows the wishes of whoever is in command, it operates through people, and if all the people rejected the current administration, its orders would have no effect.

Trump is firing people at random, Musk is plugging his USB drive into all the databases, what can I practically do to "reject the current administration"?

Keeping in mind that the majority of what he's doing is a political "Gish Gallop" (https://effectiviology.com/gish-gallop/ ), as in "Gulf of America" to hide the meat of selling the FBI and Department of Justice buildings (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-t...), installing the newscaster of a propaganda network (https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/22/media/fox-news-reliable-sourc...) as the Secretary of Defense, dismantling USAID, and otherwise doing everything in his immediate power to break the bones of the US government?

Anything of consequence (eg: Civil War 2.0) is "even better" for Russia than what's going on now.

It's a horrifically complicated judo flip of nation-state proportions. Please get your act together, EU!

No, never. I have enough experience on that matter due to where I live and due to friends I have all over Europe and US.

People and the administration of the country they happen to born/live in are completely detached in my mind.

However, sometimes people get more than what they bargained for, and I'm sure some people are in that situation right now.

Look, I'm from a country which is going through the exact process. It's much more complicated than that. It'd fill books.

The whole? No, of course no leader should ever be conflated with the whole people of a country. A plurality, however? Definitely.

Trump won an evidently free and fair election, growing his vote-share over essentially the whole country. He has not conducted a heel-face turn since entering office, and his actions are broadly consistent with his campaign statements.

Moreover, Trump isn't the only elected official in the federal government. If Trump were some aberration then Congress would have every ability to thwart his agenda or remove him from office; they have not. The majority-Republican Congress approved even his controversial cabinet nominees on party-line votes, and to my knowledge they have not taken any major investigative or punitive steps since.

A majority of American voters may not have voted specifically for this, but they did vote for the party and candidate who are content to allow this to happen in the supposed service of other goals. Voters who earnestly believe the misinformation shared by demagogues and social media are a tragic case, but that does not excuse voters who 'voted with their wallet,' foreswearing their obligation to the common good in hopes of a tax cut.

Do not mistake me for a rabid partisan. I do not let the Democrats off the hook either for reasons that are another rant and are directionally in alignment with Nate Silver's published opinions.

Had Walz been top of the ticket with exactly the same campaign and policies, he would have won. It sucks and it’s an indictment of the country, but pretending otherwise doesn’t help.

Walz suggested he may run for 2028 so we may get lucky enough to witness your prediction. I'd bet against him winning more than one state before primaries.

Harris may not have had a great campaign but it absolutely baffles me that a majority of voters would even consider voting for Trump after all the crap he pulled last time. He should be in prison, not the white house.

heh. There is some region here (Shopsko), with somewhat weirdo's population, and they do have such a saying:

  "i will burn my house if that would burn my neighbour's shed"

Let’s not ignore the obvious—He doesn’t seem interested in government or leadership, but he is interested in power.

If his long arms can take something away, then you must make treaty and negotiate to get it back. And it goes the other way, if China is upset about the service, he can turn it off and see what leverage or opening that gives him in negotiations.

I see these moves as distraction, and power play. It’s difficult to see any deliberation in service of values.

Additionally, as a Canadian, I wonder what will happen to us (and I suspect Mexicans are in a similar position) given our undeniable reliance on the United States. Canada, in its current political and economic climate, is not in a strong position, and right wing extremism has been on the rise. Some people are even literally advocating for _merging_ with the United States. While I think that is unlikely, I do wonder what our future will hold?

I personally don't know how to feel about the future.

Don't forget that Trump also hates environmentalism in any form. Air quality metrics would acknowledge that pollution exists, which contradicts his opinions.

We should also consider the possibility that this is malicious compliance by people trying to embarrass Trump.

Trump is the chief executive of the United States. Either he ordered, or he hired some who ordered it. That's how it works.

> We should also consider the possibility that this is malicious compliance by people trying to embarrass Trump.

How much does Trump pay you to say such things?

No need to redefine stupid. We have a word already for that: spite.

Having said that - I rather like the use. "Stupid" is part of quartet. All humans are categorised in four categories: intelligent (I), helpless (H), stupid (S), bandit (B). In X-Y coordinate system, by quadrant Q, actions taken by Tom, that affect both Tom (on X-axis) and Dick (on Y-axis):

  - Q1 (+,+) Tom gain and Dick gain => Tom was intelligent (I).

  - Q2 (-,+) Tom loss and Dick gain => Tom was helpless (H).

  - Q3 (-,-) Tom loss and Dick loss => Tom was stupid (S).

  - Q4 (+,-) Tom gain and Dick loss => Tom was a bandit (B).

  + There is no upper bound on the amount of stupidity that can exist within any particular individual.

  + We always underestimate the number of stupid people.

  + The probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

  + A stupid person is someone who causes damage to another person, or a group of people, without any advantage accruing to himself (or herself), or even with some resultant self-damage. (Golden law of stupidity)

  + Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people, and that it's impossible to predict the actions of the stupid.

  + A stupid person S is the most dangerous person (compared to I, H, B), and crucially stupid S is more dangerous than a bandit B.

Bonhoeffer is the one to make a connection to morality. That looks very important observation to me. And that it happens in groups, like a mind virus-I can see that. Sabine's video is all about collective stupidity. (Extraordinary Popular Delusions as a mirror image to Wisdom of crowds.)

The thing is, I don't think what Trump is doing is adequately explained by stupidity. He's going well out of his way to harm the U.S.'s own interests in a way that, by too-strange a coincidence, helps Russia.

What's flabbergasting is how the Republican Party is enabling this. I thought they had more self-respect.

I think the dam will break and many people will start pretending they never supported Trump. And I think this Trump's minders know this, which is why they're destroying everything with such haste. They know they have limited time to gut the country.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which" (Orwell).

lmao, China improves air quality in China for Chinese people

"the world is not all about you" (SURACI)

”He’s a maverick, but he gets results!”

It’s just another part of their ongoing edgy, outsider, contrarian, disruptor narrative.

In my understanding it is not an attack on the country of china, to show their population a glimpse of truth.

It is maybe a slight attack on their government. But governments are not the same as the country, even though governments tend to disagree.

When one country wants to give the population of another "a glimpse of truth", no matter how well meaning, it's usually seen as a threat to the nations sovereignty, for better or worse.

As it stands right now, the US are no longer interested in either being in opposition to warmongering countries (Russia) nor stand up against countries it sees as oppressive to it's own population (China), it's clearly heading down a road of self-isolation which makes sense when you consider the ultimate goal of the current regime.

The "glimpse of truth" is coming from embassies within their borders. They could disallow the embassies if they honestly see the air quality data as a threat to their sovereignty.

I don't think, that is a universal shared concept.

I mean we are talking about air quality sensor data here. Not analyzing and judging the countries politics.

Well, yeah. For example, Trump and his administration clearly lies about a lot of stuff, and it's fine and dandy if foreign news agencies report on these lies, no one bats an eye about that. But if you started seeing campaigns from German government for example, to "offer a glimpse of truth" to the US citizens, I think most nations would react negatively towards something like that, and most likely call it propaganda, even though it would actually be "spreading the truth".

Basically, what the US has been doing to the world for a long time ("Spreading democracy") is more and more seen as an act against a country's own sovereignty.

I agree that the quest for truth should always trump whatever politics are going on in a country, but the common person doesn't really have that "science" mindset so a lot of the population at large would see something like that as infringement on sovereignty, no matter if what's being spread is true or not.

I would ask the people. The stories shared here from Shanghai seem to indicate support of knowing about their air quality. They are the ones to breath it.

Does this apply to RT?

So yeah, there isn’t going to be a coherent plan behind this, other than adding chapters to the story he spins to keep his peeps engaged, as he dismantles and silences every form of effective opposition he can.

The stories of who’s to blame for people’s frustrations, How he is the answer. What “we” “deserve” and he should take, others be damned. Who is for him vs. who is the “enemy”. What helps him vs. what is “waste”.

Science, scientists, any morally secure adult professionals, are near the top of the list. "These people make me feel dumb, so I have to punch them in the face to compensate" is the underlying motivation.

If it's not checked it's going to turn into a bloodbath against science and rationality in general.

- By forcing the Chinese to fix their air quality, this indirectly makes then economically less competitive, since they need to tighten their processes.

- Polution travels all over the globe, everyone eventually is impacted.

If that’s woke then consider me wide awake.

Here is a relevant anecodote from Prof. Donella Meadows (who was a major proponent of environemental quality watches):

  During the oil embargo and energy crisis of the early 1970s, the Dutch began to pay close attention to their energy use. It was discovered that some of the houses in this subdivision used one-third less electricity than the other houses. No one could explain this. All houses were charged the same price for electricity, all contained similar families.

  The difference, it turned out, was in the position of the electric meter. The families with high electricity use were the ones with the meter in the basement, where people rarely saw it. The ones with low use had the meter in the front hall where people passed, the little wheel turning around, adding up the monthly electricity bill many times a day.

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that these devices are a) not _that_ low cost and b) contain a wide array of intelligence sensors (think RadNet but on steroids).

The underlying programme will continue and will expand, at least it should.

Slapping a box with some sensors on a network of properties you have all round the world is an incredibly good and ultimately non-fraudlent, non-abusive and non-wasteful way of spending money.

It didn’t actually get that much better when we left in August 2016, but I hear it is much better today. Also, anyone can buy an AQI sensor of Amazon these days for $90, so it’s difficult to keep AQI readings under wraps

Totally relate. We also left because of our young kids; we couldn’t continue exposing them to that terrible air (we made the decision to leave in the summer 2016 but it took must a year). Also by then it had become crystal clear the direction China was going with Xi and l wanted not part of it or to raise my kids in that kind of society, even as foreigners. Ironically I came back to the US in time for Trump (it’s not nearly as bad of course but Trump 2.0 is heading that way).

The WHO yearly recommended limit is 5 mcg/m³, by the way.

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.

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.

Both of them would increase quality of life if we cared just a little bit about them, so I think in their eyes they're more or less the same? They seem hellbent on decreasing the quality of life as far as I can tell, even being outspoken about that "things will get worse before it gets better", so if you try to empathize with their perspective, it does make sense they see them as the same thing more or less.

This is the logic a Victorian surgeon hacking at a patient, safe in the knowledge that sea sponges do alright with a fraction of a human’s organs.

70 years ago we were reeling from WWII. We were entering the Cold War with fragile new alliances and only had a middle class because of massive government spending. Our real GDP was 10x smaller, our population half as numerous. What we are doing today is recreating the conditions of the Great Depression because our public education apparently can’t teach history. There is waste and fraud abundant. But not where Musk is looking. DOGE itself would be near the top of the list.

Except its not? Every organizational takeover and efficiency push looks pretty much the same as what Doge is doing. He's not resorting to a playbook 500 years old, its today's playbook. Whether or not you agree it needs to be done, there isn't a much better way to do it.

> 70 years ago we were reeling from WWII

Kinda proves my point tho, no? We spend more per-capita now than we did fighting the most deadly conflict in our countries history. Normally spending increases when you're at war.

> Our real GDP was 10x smaller, our population half as numerous.

What about the year 2000? What differences between then and now in government services require the federal government to spend 50% more (inflation adjusted) per-capita in 2019?

> There is waste and fraud abundant. But not where Musk is looking. DOGE itself would be near the top of the list.

I get you're trying to make a point, but you aren't currently auditing the government, and, therefore, that statement is purely performative.

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.

Step 2: don't speed run it in 4 weeks, give it time and do it properly. You know, scientifically. Adjust, measure, adjust again.

2) They have 4 years. Of course they're gonna speed run. They know they'll lose after people feel the pain they voted to feel.

The not think part is a deliberate choice as described in project 2025 - to cause fear and chaos.

Whether that would preserve the Chinese air quality program is open to question. It's an extremely cost-effective way to look good (in front of most of the world, but especially in front of China) while making the CCP look bad. But while that may be a goal that the administration supports, it also isn't a goal that lends itself to a lot of hard objective metrics, which makes choosing to keep it a risk in some ways.

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.

> It undermines efforts of governments to develop their own capacity

If the government is so intent of concealing the problem that it is falsifying basic measurements then surely those efforts are not worth much?

We’re not talking about information that is in any way subjective, relative or biased.

it’s like a government trying to pretend that climate changes isn’t happening by getting pissed at other countries that have accurate thermometers in their embassies..

Literally literally, not figuratively literally.

It is a “default deny” environment. The majority of international data sharing deals I’ve seen, and I’ve seen quite a few, never happen because they can’t get past what governments see as the political risks. The scientific mission barely even enters the discussion when it comes to getting sign-off from governments. When they do give their approval, it often comes with conditions that impede the scientific mission. I’ve also seen data sharing denied for unrelated petty geopolitical reasons between governments quite a lot.

It is less obvious in the US because so much sensing data resides there; there is still a lot of scientific sensing data in other countries that would be useful in the US if you could get it. Outside the US people feel it more acutely because of the relative paucity of available domestic data.

I’m not making an endorsement of any type, I’m just saying this is how it works internationally in my experience. You may have simple scientific missions but the approvals come from people that have a different agenda. It is a pain in the ass and really demotivating if you need that data for your research.

First I have heard of this, what's the source for the US editing & censoring global sensing data?

There are a ton of artifacts that show up in other sensing systems that are indicative of interesting or sensitive things that are outside the scope of their purpose, and these too may be edited from the data.

The people deciding what constitutes an event that should be scrubbed is pretty opaque AFAIK. It is official policy and sensing companies that do a lot of work with the government seem to follow similar guidelines.

Due to the proliferation of crowd sourced and alternative sensing platforms, I would argue that this is increasingly an exercise in futility. Nonetheless people still view many of the US sensing data sources as authoritative for all practical purposes. There are countries with laws dictating that some alternative data they control must be treated as authoritative for all purposes for their country, but that US data is sitting out there.

I’m willing to believe that in some silos (like relatively high-cadence seismographs) there might be some censoring. For example, it’s believable that siting of permanent stations is nudged away from some sensitive areas. Also, more believable in the past (say, 1980s) than the present.

Related, I’m sure that some sensors aren’t allowed to be flown over some areas (e.g., certain military bases) in the US.

However, you are claiming a broad based program of censoring US scientific data - gathered by the government or by government contractors. Like you, I’ve worked in this space for a long time. But I have not seen what you describe.

I wonder if we are working under different definitions of “censor” (see military base remark above)?

For people’s reference, the US-sponsored seismograph network is under EarthScope (https://www.earthscope.org/gsn/).

Your remarks caught my notice because I have personally worked with GNSS (lower cadence than seismograph) data, and personally know people who placed the sensors, wrote the data assimilation algorithms it uses, and set up the data pipeline. This data is not censored. (Although, famously, it was, before GPS was opened up.) I’m trying to find a way to rectify these two viewpoints.

What they remove is a secret AFAICT but if you are an expert in the sensing modality it becomes obvious what should be in the data but isn’t. There are now businesses that specialize in differentially finding or reconstructing things that have been removed or modified in sensing feeds, so the effectiveness has diminished greatly.

Less flippantly, I literally went to the USGS FAQ to find this question https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/does-latest-earthquakes-map-show-n... where it says mining events are not reviewed, but if they are identified, they are still included! So ... I'll ask more explicitly:

Can you provide an explicit LINK to anything that supports your claim? Thanks.

In the past I've heard similar statements and had people point at 'cooked' raw data as evidence of editing.

'Cooked" generally means raw data with warts removed, the raw data is still available, the cooked data is what's on offer as the primary data of record - typically it may have had sensor errors and saturated bursts removed, undergone light smoothing filtering, and perhaps been geolocated to earth coords rather than retaining raw instrument attitudes, etc.

'Censoring' can mean 'no longer linked on public webpages for easy downloading' - generally the raw and cooked data is still on servers and accessable by direct FTP.

I'd be interested to know what specifically the GP actually meant by that throwaway assertion.

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.

However USA leadership seem very concerned about keeping happy face when talking to dictators. That tweet by Elon saying "this is what competent leadership looks like - of picture of Sergei "novichock" Lavrov and Mohammed "bonesaw" bin Salman.

Or how T could not say Putin is a dictator. Or anything bad about him at all. Never mind under Putin that country has no freedom of speech of or freedom of economy.

Less doublespeak version: The US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. Thus the data is not viewed as neutral.

The neutrality of some entity is not set by default by God and then “tainted” by their very own actions. The neutrality or lack thereof can be reasoned about directly.

The censoring and editing often isn’t nefarious, it is a useful data cleaning exercise that reflects why the data was collected. If they simply published the raw feed then they would be doing a disservice to their actual customers.

The way you worded it made it sound self-serving and underhanded to my interpretation. :p

I mean data cleaning is all neutral. I’m not gonna complain about that.

Based on actions alone, what is the evidence for this?

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

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.

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.

In this case someone probably saw this as somehow related to "the environment" so it's bad.

That it had environment in the title is just extra bonus.

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.

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.

Historically "major tax cuts" were actually very small:

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.

3% of the GDP in tax cuts is pretty enormous.

> a hypothetical 15% of GDP reduction in taxes.

For reference, total federal spending was 23% in 2022. Total government spending was 36% in 2023.

So let's say you want to cut 15 of that 36%. That would mean cutting all of health care + all of pensions, or all of health care + all of education. Or defense + pensions + infrastructure. Good luck doing that.

Your reasoning is that the money spent by private people can also be investment, which will increase future gdp growth. However, you don't explain why government spending couldn't increase future gdp growth. Obvious counter-examples being money spent in schools, public research programs, etc.

For the effect to be real business has generate more growth with the money than the government spending the money does.

In most cases private enterprise clearly is more efficient that the government in the long term. In other cases, like health, it's clear from the USA example that government can supply better services for cheaper, freeing resources to further fuel to capitalist engine. This is probably true for other stuff we traditionally get our governments to manage like roads, k12 education, and local power and water distribution. If you can lower taxes so much private enterprise takes these functions over, the end result would be the same as you see for USA health - GDP goes backwards rather than forwards.

Then there is this reality: most of these tax reductions have been funded by government borrowing. The businesses could have borrowed those funds on the market. The net outcome is you are not reducing the level of government influence on the economy, you're just re-arranging the deck chairs, and doing so in a way that favours the business owners who now effectively get the funds interest free, with citizens (who are also their employees) paying it instead.

Given that the House Republicans unveiled blueprint to extend $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and lift the debt ceiling and that their current major backers are these super rich business owners, it's hard not to be a little cynical.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/house-republicans-budget-blueprin...

That is correct but it was also taken as a premise in the original claim and seems fairly plausible in general. In particular, government services would expect to have diminishing returns, so there are some threshold level which are worth the candle but as you exhaust the low-hanging fruit, further spending yields less public benefit than for the taxpayers to keep the rest of their money.

> In other cases, like health, it's clear from the USA example that government can supply better services for cheaper, freeing resources to further fuel to capitalist engine.

This isn't really the best example. The US healthcare system is highly dysfunctional in terms of costs, but basically all other countries have significantly lower costs regardless of whether their system is public or private, so that doesn't appear to be the distinguishing factor causing the dysfunction in the US.

But there are things governments could be better suited for, e.g. because they involve pricing major externalities or large fixed investments with a diffuse public benefit. Hardly anybody is suggesting that there shouldn't be one. The question is, are there things the government is currently doing that aren't worth the candle? Because the cost of that compounds over time.

> Then there is this reality: most of these tax reductions have been funded by government borrowing. The businesses could have borrowed those funds on the market.

This is actually an interesting question of a similar nature, because the government will generally be paying a lower interest rate than the corporate bond rate, and causing the economy to pay less interest to capital on borrowed money is probably an advantage.

In theory the interest could then be paid from the increased revenues resulting from a stronger economy, but whether this is worth it depends on the interest rate, which gets a lot more expensive when it isn't zero anymore.

> doing so in a way that favours the business owners who now effectively get the funds interest free, with citizens (who are also their employees) paying it instead.

The implication here is that the businesses would be the ones to receive the cuts but taxes would then be increased on the employees to pay the interest. There are other things that could be done than that.

> Given that the House Republicans unveiled blueprint to extend $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and lift the debt ceiling and that their current major backers are these super rich business owners, it's hard not to be a little cynical.

The cynicism is often warranted but there is also a lot of partisanship in the complaints. Saying "$4.5 trillion" is an obvious one; that's the sum total over a period of years rather than the difference in the annual budget and includes a lot of money that goes to W-2 employees rather than billionaires.

Meanwhile if you actually want super rich business owners to have less money the biggest thing you can do isn't related to top tax rates (which they generally find ways to avoid regardless), it's to increase the competitiveness of the markets in which they're extracting all of that lucre. It's better to make them give the money to the consumer as lower prices than try to hope the government can both take it from them and then not have it get lost in the pockets of some government official's cronies. But neither of the parties has historically been good at that, which is why we're in a bit of a mess.

This does nothing but decrease GDP.

GDP = C+I+G+(X-Z).

Being generous they're trying to increase investment (C) whilst decreasing government spend (G). There's zero guarantee the tax cut will be spent on C and as it concentrates it gets less efficient too anyway. Monopoly doesn't need to invest.

Also government expenditures can be a form of investment e.g. schools. So slashing G can also reduce investment.

And yes you're correct.

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.

Trust takes a lifetime to earn and a moment to lose. It's a shame.

That's now gone, but hopefully others will fill that void.

If you're a conservative you have to care about preserving nature, the environment, clean air, outdoor spaces, etc. But if instead you're enthusiastic about coal, highway widenings, and your emotional support truck, you're just a base reactionary.

It is the job of an embassy to provide it's nation with travel advise and recommendations. If the host nation cannot be trusted to provide accurate information about air pollution, then the embassies must do it.

I'd agree that it's not the embassies job to inform the citizens of host nation with the data, but that's practically free, once you are already distributing the info to you own people.

What I don't understand is, if it's that useful, could some other embassies not just do the work? The US normally have fairly well staffed embassies, not just some dude in a suit, but surely the WHO could locate appropriate embassies in almost any nation.

Given the current US administration you kinda have to wonder how long it will take for Elon Musk to suggest replacing the existing network with StarLink, to save on cost of course.

If you really want to bring air quality to the attention of travellers it is of course possible to write "Air pollution can be high" on your country page, no need for real time data (why not also UV, pollens, water quality, then?)

The Danish government actually does write that "Air quality in major cities can be very poor" in their travel recommendations for China, and links to statistics (http://www.aqicn.info/city/beijing/). If that data is any good I don't know, but the US government feels that it need to collect it's own data.

In deciding it’s quite reasonable to stop, is the thinking that “mission creep” = bad, so it justifies stopping something regardless of the big picture benefits? Or do you not consider the benefits significant?

Given a business with many departments, say you notice one department has some mission creep but somehow it’s also increasing profitability for the company overall.

What do you focus on - only mentioning stopping the department mission creep, or first mentioning people should make damn sure the value is preserved as they consider any reorganization?

But that's actually besides the point, which is mission and scope. It is not the job of the US government (or of any foreign governments) to provide air quality data in cities around the world and so I find it reasonable if they decide to stop. That's all.

I feel the reactions are much too strong and emotional, probably because many people here have been riled up by Trump and Musk so now overreact to anything they announce.

But I think you're actually getting downvoted because your comment has no context. I have no idea what Seattle has to do with any of this; if you'd actually explained what Seattle is doing in this space, it would have been an informative, useful comment that could teach people something, and lead to more interesting discussion. But as-is, your comment is just a drive-by, low-effort nothing.

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

If this happened in isolation, sure. We’re also firing random weapons stockpile experts, bird flu, customs agents (while raising tariffs? Bailout for smugglers?), IRS agents (while trying to cut fraud, mind you) and forest servicers (after record wildfires). Against that backdrop, chaotic shutdown has ample explanatory value.

You need a lot of ketamine to see the patterns in this madness. Instead, let’s take it at face value: these are illegal acts of random mendaciousness designed to demoralise federal workers before the courts cut Musk off. Musk, not Trump, is taking the lead because he can weather a lot more heat and Trump’s main deliverable to Thiel and Andreessen is his tax cut.

The IRS thing was particularly stupid. OMB has a report that said for every $1 put towards tax fraud enforcement they received some $4-$7 in return.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-plans-cut-va-cont...

Difficult to see how they are saving any money by turning off something they've already bought that has essentially zero running costs.

Something doesn't add up for sure.

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.

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".

$15 mil to shame the Chinese Govt (among others) to action and encourage citizen discontent was a bargain.

You couldnt possibly run an ad campaign to tell 1 billion people their govt was lying for less than $15mil.

Also have you ever been to the L.A. Basin?

You don't have to assume anything, this is a real (past) event that has happened:

> In 2008, the US Embassy in Beijing started regularly tweeting about the air quality in the city, which was gearing up to host China’s first Olympic Games. Two times a day, the embassy automatically published current pollution levels measured by an air quality monitor installed on its roof in collaboration with the US Environmental Protection Agency. The data contradicted the figures published by the local government, angering local officials and eventually spurring China to clean up the air in its capital city.

https://www.wired.com/story/air-monitoring-beijing-state-dep...

Clearly, having numbers that are/seemed more trustworthy had a large and good impact on the city and it's inhabitants.

And if $15M seems like a lot, check out all the boondoggles that are par for the course in large corporations. The EPA system is a marvel of efficiency compared to what is frequently seen at large well-funded.

And if there actually is incompetence that resulted in overspending on the system, the financially prudent response would be to replace the decision makers rather than limiting the functionality of the existing system. The sunk-cost fallacy is endemic in these sort of low-information cost-cuts that actually end up costing us far far more than they save us, all so the outside consultants can pretend that they are doing something g to save a company.

I don't really care about the sensors or really the $15,000,000. I just think ignoring externalities like "poking the CCP via showing a billion people their government 'lied to them'." and thinking that 15 million against our defense budget was a good way to spend my "dime" of taxes. I don't want to go to war with China. I certainly don't want my taxes going to screw with the chinese citizens.

Since i can't control that, i'll complain about the costs.

15 million divided by the ~150million taxpayers in the US is ten cents per person. Do you pick up dimes off the street?

> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.

> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:

> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.

> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.

> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.

i want you to explain to me how i don't grasp how big these numbers are, some more. I want you to explain how 79.1 billion in fraud or improper payments is "0.5%", and that's ok, and explain how ten times that amount, in 20% of the time, is ok, too.

please.

SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...

I'm done with all of you.

It's impossible to design a system with zero fraud, but keeping it under 0.5% is very impressive.

> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.

> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:

> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.

> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.

> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.

i want you to explain to me how i don't grasp how big these numbers are, some more. I want you to explain how 79.1 billion in fraud or improper payments is "0.5%", and that's ok, and explain how ten times that amount, in 20% of the time, is ok, too.

please.

SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...

I'm done with all of you.

I still have to pay for that 0.5%. A nickel here, a dime there. Maybe it can be argued that spending $15,000,000 to "own the CCP" is worth it. After all, it's only a dime per taxpayer.

Harassing the CCP (and any other government we "owned") means that we also need to spend 800 billion on Defense.

That's also each American citizen getting... $23.27 each year for 10 years.

People are just awful at conceptualizing large numbers. Assuming that number is accurate, $7.9 billion is wasted in the process of delivering $1.6 trillion in 2024. Waste and loss scales with the work being done, it doesn't care that you got sticker shock.

I challenge you to find anything you do in your day with greater than 99.5% efficiency. You waste a higher percentage of the food you eat, stuck to the pan.

I certainly try not to leave 1/20th of my food in the pan!

So idk what you mean its a lot of dimes.

> How many "$15 million dollar" nickels

Its 4 million "nickles", you can do the math to get to 6 trillion. 15 million is 0.00025% of what is spent per year. You need to save 15 million dollars, millions of times to do anything significant to amount being spent.

You going on about coupons doesn't really make sense here, the amounts aren't significant. Again because people think about large amounts of money how it applies to them personally without being able to grasp what actually gets spent by large organizations. Its like when someone posts here about saving 10k in AWS spend, when their company does millions in revenue and the engineer cost at least 100/hour

So if you have a bunch of machines you don't need anymore on AWS, you just leave them on, because it's only 0.5% of the total AWS spend? nevermind the potential attack surface of machines that aren't being actively maintained, are still connected to your other services, and so on?

Have you never heard the phrase "nickel and dimed"? Each individual "$15,000,000" is insignificant to a taxpayer. Thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of such "it's only $0.10 per taxpayer" adds up. If i have a million dimes, i can buy a nice car.

You can't grasp how big these numbers are

If you save 15 million dollars every day for a year you get about 5 billion

5 billion of the $6 TRILLION spent every year is 0.09% of the total amount spent

For the next 4 years if you cut $15 million every day from somewhere its still only 0.36%. A third of a percent!

6 trillion minus 20 billion is still about 6 trillion.

That hypothetical $5 billion a year in the best case would reduce the taxes needed by 26 dollars per tax payer on average per year.

> SEC. 403. Policy statement on improper payments.

> (a) Findings.—The House finds the following:

> (1) The Government Accountability Office defines improper payments as any reported payment that should not have been made or was made in an incorrect amount.

> (2) Since 2003, improper payments have totaled $2.7 trillion with a reported Federal Government-wide error rate of 5.42 percent in fiscal year 2023.

> (3) Improper payments between 2021-2023 have exceeded $750 billion and totaled more than the budget of the U.S. Army in 2023.

i want you to explain to me how i don't grasp how big these numbers are, some more. I want you to explain how 79.1 billion in fraud or improper payments is "0.5%", and that's ok, and explain how ten times that amount, in 20% of the time, is ok, too.

please.

SOURCE https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-concurren...

I'm done with all of you.

p.s., to you specifically, 6 trillion minus 350 billion is not 6 trillion.

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.

If the State Department spends a crazy sum maintaining the air quality app, questioning that expense is fair and pretending otherwise only undermines scientific credibility.

This article is a "pro-science" talking point because it admits embassies were told to keep monitors running and data sharing could resume if funding returned.

So at this point, there's not even necessarily a gap in the actual data. The only proof this shutdown was unavoidable comes from those who carried it out. Funny how that goes...

How does spending and the debate around what what is justified have anything to do with scientific credibility?

Not that I'm saying you're doing that, of course. Although it is weird you use the phrase "pro-science talking point" as if being pro-science was a bad thing. Do you think it's a bad thing? Just asking questions.

[1] https://www.highergov.com/contract/EPD09097/

I'm not sure what maintenance you mean there, but it surely is reminiscent of "I could code Twitter in a weekend."