Highlighted in earlier reports and included in this APNews brief:
In some places, the U.S. air quality monitors propelled nations to start their own air quality research and raised awareness, Krishna said.
In China, for example, data from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing famously contradicted official government reports, showing worse pollution levels than authorities acknowledged. It led to China improving air quality.
The United States since 2008 has monitored air quality through embassies—as a service to Americans overseas but also, increasingly, as a way to share accurate scientific data that may otherwise be censored overseas.
In China, authorities in 2014 banned a popular app from sharing data from the US embassy ahead of a major international summit attended by then president Barack Obama.
But researchers say that the transparency has had a noticeable effect, with China taking action after being embarrassed by US embassy data released on social media that showed far worse pollution than official figures.
Obama's ambassador to China, Gary Locke, faced scorn in state media after he presided over the introduction of monitors at the embassy and consulates that tracked the so-called PM 2.5 particulate matter carried in the thick blankets of smog pervading China's capital.
The air quality data from the US embassy is also frequently used as a reference in New Delhi, which has severe pollution issues.
This is a low cost to gather and deliver data stream that has a profound effect on global air quality and improving health and well being for all.
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...
The instrumentation is there. The personnel who run it are still there. All we're talking about is collecting and sharing the data. This cut will save chump change at best. Why take it down?
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.
From this side of the pond, it seems like US is now an (overt) empire which only cares about themselves and would be happy to crush anything and everything which doesn't acknowledge them as the kings of the planet or disrespect them the slightest sense.
The US has been an empire for a long time. They were just much more clever and effective about it and have been aligning themselves with western democracies.
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.
> They were just much more clever and effective about it...
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.
> For some reason everyone decided that breaking up and weakening Europe is a majorly important goal.
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.
I dispute the US is an empire. I get that all the time from Russian propagandists saying they are fighting the expansion of the US empire but there isn't one. I'm a Brit and we used to have a real empire where you'd appoint a viceroy to run the country and build colonial headquarters and station troops and beat up or imprison the locals if they go uppity.
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.
The Marshall Plan doesn't mention empire. Wikipedia defines them as
>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.
Seems like I like arguing.. let us go with your definition..
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.
I live in Europe / UK and I'm not aware of being in a subordinate periphery. We have cooperated with the US in opposing Russia / the USSR but I'm not aware of being in part of the US empire and you may note that now the White House has been occupied by the Kremlin and is telling Ukraine to surrender to Russia, we are telling them to sod off with that. Is the UK part of the US empire or is the US still partly part of the British Empire and how can I tell?
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.
I know it is several days, but Europe and Australia have given up their foreign policy independence in return being part of US defense umbrella. Western Europe and Australia will toe the US line pretty much always, even if it is against the detriment of their own citizens and countries.
This Munich security conference is a wake-up call for EU in many ways. The speeches by JD Vance and Jeffery Sachs were both shocking in different ways. The reason you are telling US to sod off now, is primarily because you want to return to the old ways of pre-Trump. Europe really likes the NATO security umbrella and the money from US. When the old ways are threatened, you are screaming to return to the old ways. I am not seeing a Europe that is saying we will be independent. I am seeing an Europe that desperately wants a return to the predicable security umbrella.
Sure they're friendly — to corrupt politicians who sold our country's rich natural resources to American companies for peanuts back in 1991, and continue doing so.
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.
The fact that the US does imperialism is common knowledge. The control and influence, by military, by corporations, by corruption, etc. is absolutely massive.
It is very silly to argue it does not exist just because the British allegedly had a larger one.
People (the majority of which are not Russian and hate modern day Russia) call the US an empire because of seemingly endless list of things like banana Republics, operation condor, sending death squads to Nicaragua, chevron genocide, wars for oil.
> I know this could be said of any country at any time, but please don't conflate the current administration with the whole American people. [...] 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.
But all the politicians in charge of the current administration are (and have been chosen to) do exactly that - blindly follow the wishes of the person in command. The voters may (or may not have) voted in the current administration either with or without electoral fraud and gerrymandering on Musk's part, we'll never know, but we do know the same political group were not against trying to take the Capitol forcibly last time, so not by democratic means. It was and is worth too much to Russia and China to not have their man in charge of their adversary (the US), doing their bidding. So they did was necessary to make that happen. Including Musk's takeover of X. His collecting of voter information. The foreign interference and disinformation campaigns. And so on. They play dirty these people, they do not represent democracy, they represent the taking down of the US and everything they used to represent. In a democracy we give the elected politicians a mandate. It means the administration only operates through the people via their vote and that only takes place typically every four/ five years. Until the next vote (if there is one, or at least there may be a rigged one), then no, it does not operate through the people, not on a day to day level of functioning. And to talk of the people rejecting the current administration before the next election is not practical. They have little power to do so. Unless you are referring to an armed insurrection against the government, a revolution. Which of course is not part of the democratic system, that is another means of the people responding all together. There have been revolutions to overturn dictatorships, yes.
A high percentage of people here in the states were so disgusted with the GOP, they foolishly didn't vote. Now, the only thing that can bring any relief, is the US Constitution. If followed, it will right the ship, hopefully at the mid-terms.
I live in Texas, I didn't vote for Trump. It's 20hrs by car to Washington DC.
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"?
I also have friends and relatives with different values, it's very hard to relate to them voting Republican again after what we went through with COVID. Had the party nominated someone else, maybe, but doing this again after all we knew already?
There’s always been a streak of self-loathing and nihilism in the US. Some kind of imposter syndrome writ large and handled with fake arrogance and real terror.
> please don't conflate the current administration with the whole American people.
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.
I agree. Mr. Trump can credibly argue that he received a mandate at the last election. It was not a squeaker, a “hold-your-nose-and-vote”, it was convincing and, as you say, cleanly won vote. America knew exactly who he was, and has known for some time. He was very clear in his statements what he was going to do when he was elected, who he was going to use to do it, and he is following through. all but one of the most controversial cabinet nominees sailed through their confirmations with flying colors, with barely token opposition from those who made a great public show of “being on the fence,” as we knew they would.
Part of me is curious to know exactly what those who “vote with their wallets” would abide. It is unfortunate for them that their Faustian bargain is turning out not to be true, and that neither inflation, nor the cost of living, has or will go down, and that services that they and their loved ones may rely on are being dismantled, but they were candidly advised that this would be the case.
There are dozens to maybe hundreds of moving parts when you set about to influence another country's politics. Conspiracy theories about hacking voting machines can't be confirmed. But an adversary would do it if they could. It's certain that they're doing just about everything else from co-opting religion to degrading the quality and availability of public information to bribing and/or coercing politicians. It's a war, just not a shooting war.
“Even worse” is an odd way to say “black woman”. I am not accusing you of sexism or racism; I am saying there is enough sexism and racism in the US to account for the difference in total popular vote, and certainly to account for the 115k votes that won the election for Trump.
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.
There's zero chance of that. Democrats didn't even trust their own base to have a primary for Kamala because she would repeat her 2019 primary performance.
One gamble her campaign made was that more people would vote for her specifically because she was black and/or female. I doubt there are any hard numbers, but I'd guess that number far overrode any racism/sexism vote.
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.
Maybe that wasn't the best way to put it but did you see her on stage saying 200 million Americans died from covid? Twice. I think someone of even moderate competence would be able to figure it's not true over half the US population was dead. It seems to me the only way she was lined up to be president was for reasons other than competence.
You think she's dim because she misspoke and said million instead of thousand?
Have... have you heard Trump speak? Or lifelong gaffe machine Biden? Or Bush Jr? Even Obama misspoke from time to time and he was a particularly gifted orator.
I almost can not imagine a worse president. I would rather vote for a random homeless person off the street.
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.
I'm not American. Harris didn't strike me as being worse than Trump either as a person or as a political leader. What about her was even worse than Trump?
Things may also be related to the ideologies Thiel et al are promoting that involve destruction of the state in favor or more, umm, entrepreneurial governance models. Where billionaires can be themselves and the world is their oyster. There are a whole lot of articles circulating that delve into various aspects. I don't know if the ideologies have formal names, but "techno fascism" was among them.
This predates Thiel. The wealthy elite want a return to the 19th century gilded age and spent the entire 20th century working at it. The Trump administration is the latest success in a continuous campaign of American internal self-destruction that dates back to the origins of modern "conservatism" with politicians like Goldwater and Nixon, with things really kicking off under Reagan.
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.
> The U.S. is happy to screw themselves in the process of screwing you.
Don't forget that Trump also hates environmentalism in any form. Air quality metrics would acknowledge that pollution exists, which contradicts his opinions.
Assuming the U.S ends up losing its grip on international relations in the next 4 years, or perhaps 8 if the Republicans are nominated again (something that is certainly possible), who do you think is best positioned to steal the crown? France? Germany? China? Israel?..
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.
IDK whether you know it, but in case you don't—you articulated Cippola's definition "stupid is one causing harm to others while not deriving any gain, even taking a small personal loss" above. If you are interested further, I encourage you to check his pamphlet "The Basic Laws Of Human Stupidity". (is "book" too big word for it?)
I must say I got a lot out of it and it's followups. It became much easier for me to understand the world around me, what is happening. And even predict what's to happen sometimes.
What you observe with Trump admin: 1) it's stupidity; 2) it's not low IQ or lack of rationality; 3) it's lack of morals, not caring about good/bad, or even considering good what the rest consider bad (and vice versa); 4) it's social more than individual, it's a "mind virus". (ha!-Musk)
Sabine Hossenfelder
"Collective Stupidity -- How Can We Avoid It?"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=25kqobiv4ng
(more cases, much more analytical, only about the group aspect not individual)
I don't necessarily disagree on the need - but it's not my (re)definition.
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).
Specifically on the S-Stupid in quadrant Q3 (-,-):
+ 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.
This is all on individual one unit level. Another relevant observation I can think of is Bismarck-ian most dangerous general — stupid and energetic.
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.)
I am familiar with this definition of stupidity as well as the Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
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.
Yep. If Putin managed to install a Trojan Horse president bent on attacking the country internally on all fronts, that president would do what Trump is doing.
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.
That's been the Republican MO since the 90's: break everything, then blame the Democrats for not cleaning up the mess fast enough. I always expected that behavior. What I never thought I'd live to see was watching the Republican Party of all people outright turn into a Russian fifth column.
It shouldn't be a surprise to see greedy selfish people being corrupted by foreign money. Russia is neither the first nor the only country to be doing this in the US.
it forced the Chinese to improve their air quality - but now:
"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).
> In my understanding it is not an attack on the country of china, to show their population a glimpse of truth.
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 think even that gives too much credit. Trump loves being antagonistic towards China (even though with the big picture of how much damage he's doing to global perceptions of technology, the reliability of the US as a trading partner and Western alliances they really don't mind) and actively threatening the national sovereignty of random smaller countries that won't respond. But air quality is the sort of thing than libs care about, so from the point of view of his administration this woke nonsense must be stopped
His power comes from managed appearances, bought with the destructive catharsis, that seems to sooth frustrated people with limited (social, economic, scientific, defense) horizons. Even his followers recognize that, but still respect him for pulling it off. “For them.”
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”.
The MAGA shtick is weaponised resentment and toddler rage against anyone who makes MAGAs feel stupid or morally defensive, on top of the usual conservative rage triggers against anyone "weird" or non-conforming, especially sexually.
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.
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.
Offering data on the germans embassy site about the foreign government (they do, or rather in the AA, Auswärtiges Amt) is not really the same as financing and organizing political campaings in other countries. And we are still talking about air quality sensor data ..
Yeah, no I understand it sounds trivial and "it's just air quality sensor data" but it's less about what the actual data is about, and more about the intention of publishing something.
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.
"see something like that as infringement on sovereignty"
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.
> 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".
Why is it an American interest to help the Chinese with their air pollution if they don't want to do it themselves? You are literally doing the meme from the famous https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12227-0 paper.
- 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.
> In China, for example, data from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing famously contradicted official government reports, showing worse pollution levels than authorities acknowledged. It led to China improving air quality.
That program, by the way, simultaneously managed to antagonize the Chinese government while being incredibly popular with the Chinese people.
It's not something I would expect a US administration hostile to China to cut.
> 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.
Judging how the US administration has turned against its historic allies, while pandering to authoritarian regimes, I'm pretty sure that it's by design, not reckless.
It’s likely a bit of both in this case: they probably equate air quality to “green, woke stuff,” and so want it gone. The reckless part comes from the decision maker not looking into this and seeing the benefit for Americans in any detail. And by not seeing a difference between air quality and climate change.
> And by not seeing a difference between air quality and climate change
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.
I honestly don't see how you can cut government spending at this point without being haphazard. Every administration for the last 70+ years has increased real spending (not to mention expanding executive power along the way, which got us here).
> Every administration for the last 70+ years has increased real spending
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.
> 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.
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.
1) A large portion of the government is unable to pass a simple audit.
2) The fundamental basis of government department budgeting is "spend everything you get or you'll get less next year". No department will willingly spend less.
I don't understand how either of those assertions answers my question.
1) Having a lot of problems doesn't mean you have to throw up your hands and take a totally unstructured approach to solving them.
2) So work on setting realistic budgets instead of slashing and burning things at random.
The problem with both of these is that they require people who a) know what they're doing and b) really want to make things better. The new US administration does not appear to fulfill either of those requirements.
> Having a lot of problems doesn't mean you have to throw up your hands and take a totally unstructured approach to solving them.
Having a lot of problems for a long time generally means other attempts have failed.
> So work on setting realistic budgets instead of slashing and burning things at random.
According to prior governments, the current budget is realistic. According to the current admin, a slashed and burned budget is realistic.
> The problem with both of these is that they require people who a) know what they're doing and b) really want to make things better. The new US administration does not appear to fulfill either of those requirements.
We ran a deficit the whole way through the greatest economic expansion since the post WW2 era. IMO no admin in the last 25 years has fulfilled those requirements.
Well, a more normal approach would be to tell various administrators that they're getting a lot less funding and let them figure out what they want to cut. There are some obstacles to doing that with the government, but if you could make it stick it's better in every fundamental way.
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.
1) There is no one that knows about it. There is no government agency that specializes in cost saving. Congress is the sole source of austerity, and they have every incentive to increase spending if it helps their district.
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 offices employ special agents (criminal investigators, often armed) and auditors. In addition, federal offices of inspectors general employ forensic auditors, or "audigators", evaluators, inspectors, administrative investigators, and a variety of other specialists. Their activities include the detection and prevention of fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement of the government programs and operations within their parent organizations
They do EXACTLY what DOGE is supposed to be doing.
Almost all global sensing data published by the US receives a lot of negative pushback from other countries around the world. I don’t think most people are aware of this.
The reasons are myriad. It makes it harder for other governments to control narratives in their own countries. It undermines efforts of governments to develop their own capacity; the US gives it away for free but those countries are not the customer and it does not serve them per se. It sets a much higher bar for domestic implementation than they have the capacity to implement. There is a sense the US exploits this data for their own ends. It doesn’t just irritate China, it irritates everyone.
Making the issue more political, the US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. This isn’t a secret but it taints the perception of US neutrality when making this data available.
The geopolitics and realpolitik of international sensing data is not clean.
So pointing out that the sky is blue when it is indeed blue would be a form of propaganda as well?
> 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..
If you collect novel domestic sensing data and share it with the world, that is exploitable as intelligence against your country. If another country gives you their domestic sensing data, it may be manipulated to effect some other national objective. These are not idle concerns because both have been done many times by many countries. It is a dual use technology. There is a lot of paranoia around the sharing of sensing data sets between countries because much of it is easy to abuse.
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.
I mean, Trump said on covid, 'if we stop testing, we'd have fewer cases'. People who deal in a steady stream of lies don't want the inconvenience of facts like scientific measurements. Same reason all the climate data is being removed.
> 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.
First I have heard of this, what's the source for the US editing & censoring global sensing data?
They remove things not germane to the purpose of the data they publish. For example, USGS seismic data is noticeably bereft of most seismic events that are not geological in nature or sometimes related to mining (though in some sources they often scrub the mining ones too). Events of military interest like weapons tests, some target getting blown up in the middle of nowhere that may never make the news, etc is removed.
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.
Well, you could go to the website where they clearly state that some data is reviewed before publication and may be removed or modified. It is a frequently asked question. Or you could find an obvious counter-examples in the data, since it is public. The detection and flagging of anomalous events for review has been automated for decades, also publicly mentioned. I don’t assume everyone knows, I’ve been working with government sensing data for 20 years, but they are quite explicit if you look.
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.
Like others nearby, I’d like to see something more specific.
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)?
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.
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.
> 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.
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 irony is that the US isn’t actively encouraging other countries to use this data, quite the opposite. But if it is public to anyone it is public to everyone. Countries became accustomed to freeloading on this data because they didn’t have their own, even though it wasn’t for them or designed to be fit for their purposes. The intended purpose of the data may not be the same purpose that other countries are trying to use it for.
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 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.
Not concerned about negative feedback from democratic countries that take care of their citizens.
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.
Some but a lot less than you might think. The US invests a lot in global sensing, in some cases operating redundant independent networks while many countries don’t even have domestic sensing. This is a consistent complaint of non-US scientists that work with sensing data; it is difficult to get their governments to invest in domestic sensor networks when the US kind of does it for you, so even many developed countries have limited domestic data. In Europe in particular, there are additional privacy concerns that stymie more creative approaches at aggregating these types of measurements by other means.
When one of these countries does build out a domestic sensor network, they are often unwilling to share the data because it is seen as advantaging the Americans. Resistance to data sharing is quite high, for many reasons, so if you need to do anything that spans many countries you often end up falling back on whatever the Americans can give you.
The geopolitics around data sharing has been a significant hindrance to scientific activities like trying to build accurate and detailed climate and environmental models. Natural processes don’t recognize national borders.
The only global sensor networks operated by several countries independently are related to weather, and even then there are fewer than people probably imagine.
If you knife all of your friends in the back and then make a slightly rude gesture at someone you’ve historically argued with, it’s probably fair to question who you’re aligning to.
I’d say making rude gestures at someone you historically didn’t like would suggest you remain hostile with that person. Whether you murdered someone else has no bearing on this.
This belief has got to be the biggest propaganda victory for the Trump administrations.
It was noticeable in the first term how weak he was on this topic, but apparently losing a nonsensical trade war to them and saying mildly racist things at rallies made him tough on them? More stupidly, did he just say he was tough on China enough that people believed him?
Now that he's losing nonsensical trade wars with US allies and giving the green light to seizing territory from neighbouring countries it just highlights in neon how good he was and is for China, but it's silence (at best!) from the media.
Add in Trump implementing isolationist policies that only help China by allowing them to fill those gaps left by the US. Then there's Musk who Tweets nonsense 24/7, but somehow never says a bad word about China. Propaganda victory indeed.
Would you expect them to cut the IRS, if they're trying to cut deficits?
Obama and Clinton (with Republican congresses) ACTUALLY cut deficits -- Clinton even got a surplus. Bush and Trump extended tax cuts which ballooned them back into trillions (also the trillion-dollar wars). A few quotes:
Cheney 2004 about deficits: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter"
Trump 2017 about deficits: "Yeah, but I won't be here"
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.
I kinda feel like you're not being charitable with the OP
My read is that the OP is saying that the air quality monitors in China were a massive soft-power win for the US, and it also shamed the Chinese government. So if you start from the assumption that this current administration sees the Chinese government as a rival who should be opposed, then this kind of effort that bypasses the Chinese government and provides a resource to the Chinese people should be supported.
If the administration claims to see China as a rival, but then cuts such an obviously beneficial project, reasonably, you gotta wonder if the administration is telling the truth about it's relationship with the Chinese government.
Their argument seems to be that the current administration is playing checkers with tennis rackets on trampolines. Nothing makes sense or actually serves any goals, and are just random child-like stomping and smashing.
In this case someone probably saw this as somehow related to "the environment" so it's bad.
I think it's more, any free service provided by the government shouldn't exist on principle (because this is a potential market opportunity for someone else).
That it had environment in the title is just extra bonus.
Domestically, that is correct, you are taking away an opportunity in the market. But in a foreign embassy there are no such competitors. And controlling air pollution is typically a job for the government.
> We all agree that the ultimate reduction in tax revenues can be less than this first order effect, because lower tax rates encourage greater economic activity and thus expand the tax base. No thoughtful person believes that this possible offset more than compensated for the first effect for these tax cuts. Not a single one.
This is kind of an embarrassing mistake for an economist.
The theory that lower taxes can increase tax revenues is that they increase the rate of GDP growth. For example, with a lower tax rate, GDP might grow at 8%/year instead of 4%/year. Under different circumstances the difference might be larger or smaller, but as long as the lower tax rate improves GDP growth at all, compounding will eventually cause it to yield higher tax revenue at the lower rate. 20% of 1.08^15 is more than 35% of 1.04^15, and 20% of 1.08^50 is more than 370% of 35% of 1.04^50.
This doesn't have to be an instantaneous effect for it to be real.
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.
> "major tax cuts" were actually very small [...] on the order of 1-3% of GDP
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.
It's a <10% reduction in total taxes. It's only enormous if the assumption is that taxes never really go down as a percent of GDP (even in the face of per capita real GDP growth), which has been the case in recent history, but that's kind of the issue.
> 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.
The obvious thing to do would be to increase the efficiency of each thing rather than cutting any particular thing entirely. Defense spending is full of notorious boondoggles and waste. US healthcare spending goes to a highly captured industry with a large amount of bureaucratic overhead and could be made significantly more efficient, e.g. if US healthcare spending per capita was on par with Canada then healthcare spending could be reduced by more than the identified amount percentage-wise.
Social security, by contrast, isn't exactly "waste" but the program is extremely poorly tailored to its intended purpose of providing a baseline for the elderly, because it pays out higher benefits to people who made more money and can be correspondingly expected to have more savings and need it less. A far more efficient program would be to provide the same amount to every retiree. Enacting that change would be politically difficult, just like making the US healthcare system more efficient would be politically difficult, but the question here is not "how hard would it be to get the votes for this" but rather "if we actually did this, would we be better off"?
That person speaks about the money not taxed being used for taxable economic activity on the same year, as opposed to that same money being spent on government programs, that generate less taxable revenue (e.g. because while paying contractors will generate taxable revenue, hiring a public servant to do the same job won't).
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.
The comment claims that it isn't possible for lower taxes to increase tax revenues. It's possible whenever the taxpayers would have used the money more productively than the government. Which may not always be the case, but it's certainly possible for it to be the case, and indeed is not an implausible default assumption because governments generally aren't subject to competitive pressure and consequently tend to allocate resources in ways susceptible to inefficiency, waste and corruption.
> This doesn't have to be an instantaneous effect for it to be real.
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.
> For the effect to be real business has generate more growth with the money than the government spending the money does.
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.
Take a step back, perhaps there's inefficiency but their current actions are blunt cuts despite selling the efficiency brand.
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.
> Take a step back, perhaps there's inefficiency but their current actions are blunt cuts despite selling the efficiency brand.
Whether efficiency could be improved and whether any given thing improves efficiency are two different questions. Obviously if you do it poorly then that is worse than doing it well, but that isn't an argument against doing it well.
> 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.
Wealth concentrates when you have uncompetitive markets, because then the incumbents have high margins which is what allows them to accumulate wealth at a higher rate than the overall economy. Taxes are only indirectly related to this and if market concentration is happening then that is the problem you should aim to solve directly rather than leaving it to fester and trying to ineffectually or inefficiently compensate with higher tax rates.
The actual goal, in competitive markets, is that you could increase investment without increasing concentration of wealth.
For example, if rents have to be very high before new construction is profitable, it doesn't happen until rents are very high. New construction happens when it's profitable and tax is a cost that goes into the ROI calculation, so if you lower taxes, construction becomes more profitable, so it happens until it stops being profitable again because rents have fallen to the level that it's no longer profitable even at the lower tax rate. But then people are paying less in rent, which isn't going to investors, it's going to tenants, who then spend it.
This is also the sort of thing that can reduce concentration of wealth, because then maybe the tenants don't have to spend all of it and can actually get ahead enough to invest some of it themselves.
You're talking around what they're doing. Yes I agree with all those things you're saying but they're not contrary to what I'm saying.
You agree efficiency would be good, but as I say this is not what the government is doing, blunt cuts to everything is not efficiency.
Yes competitive markets could be better but this is not the case here. As I say you could rely on some benevolent oligarch to pay the dividend down but that's not guaranteed. The proposed tax cuts are for the richest not the average person, they're also "less competitive", part of government is regulating the market to ensure it remains competitive as it's naturally not. Their actions so far are anti-competitive such as the removal of the CFPB which levels the playing field. The government also funds crucial high risk, low reward activities that are necessary to drive growth elsewhere (economic multipliers), they've made it clear they intend cutting these, such as cutting scientific research funding that wouldn't have been investigated otherwise.
Overall they are currently not doing anything that you mention.
> You agree efficiency would be good, but as I say this is not what the government is doing, blunt cuts to everything is not efficiency
But now you're talking about an entirely different question.
The original question was, should wasteful spending be cut in order to lower taxes? Now you're asking if the spending they're cutting is the wasteful spending. Even if the answer to that question is no, the solution would still be to cut the wasteful things instead of the worthwhile things, rather than to not reduce waste.
> Yes competitive markets could be better but this is not the case here.
Markets become uncompetitive as a result of the regulatory environment, via two primary pathways.
First, regulations exist that raise barriers to entry. Then the incumbents don't even have to do anything, they can just be terrible because it's too expensive for anyone else to enter the market to challenge them.
Second, a lack of antitrust enforcement. A couple of conglomerates buy the only two suppliers of some important component in the supply chain, are allowed to do this, and then leverage that into a vertically integrated market before someone else can spin up a new competitor, at which point the vertically integrated supply chains act as a barrier to entry and you have the same problem.
In the first case you have to get rid of the rules making it too expensive to create new competitors, which is one of the things being proposed. In the second case you have to break up the concentrated markets, which is another thing they're ostensibly doing (e.g. wanting Google to divest Chrome), though it would be more effective if the enforcement actions were more comprehensive, e.g. they should be divesting Android and no company should be running both a mobile OS and an app store.
> The proposed tax cuts are for the richest not the average person
The proposed tax cuts are approximately across-the-board. If you lower everyone's taxes by the same percentage, that percentage of $400,000 will be more than the same percentage of $40,000, so then people looking for a reason to object will compare the absolute dollar amounts rather than the percentages and feign shock that this is how taxes work.
Meanwhile tax incidence is complicated and who is nominally paying a tax and who is actually paying it are two different things, so that kind of comparison doesn't tell you much regardless.
> part of government is regulating the market to ensure it remains competitive as it's naturally not.
Corporations don't exist in a state of nature. There would be nothing to enforce their contracts or claims to property. Monopolization is always through the use of government rules.
The government does need to ensure that its rules don't facilitate monopolization, but that's often best by having fewer of them rather than more. Competitors appear whenever there is nothing inhibiting them. Notice that one of the best anti-trust rules is to make contracts that restrain competition unenforceable, i.e. have the government not do something.
> Their actions so far are anti-competitive such as the removal of the CFPB which levels the playing field.
CFPB was never an anti-trust agency. Its existence is controversial because it was an attempt to insulate the administrative bureaucracy from the political process. But that tends to do the opposite of an anti-trust agency: Adopt rules that prohibit an unpopular practice without considering why it was happening, e.g. because it was a trade off against the bank not making those loans to begin with.
Then fewer banks offer those loans and the people who need those loans end up paying higher interest rates or being forced into some worse situation because they e.g. have to pay $1000 to rent a car for a month because they couldn't get a car loan.
> The government also funds crucial high risk, low reward activities that are necessary to drive growth elsewhere (economic multipliers), they've made it clear they intend cutting these, such as cutting scientific research funding that wouldn't have been investigated otherwise.
This is a category of research, some of which is worthwhile and some isn't. It's quite plausible that a lot of money currently being spent on "research" is misallocated.
> Overall they are currently not doing anything that you mention.
What they're doing right now is investigating how the money is being spent, with some level of "stop doing things for a minute until we figure out if we should be doing them". To long-term reallocate it requires the Congressional budget process, which hasn't happened yet, and will ideally be happening with the benefit of more time and information.
You're getting caught up in the noise, as I say take a step back. Theoretically what you say makes sense but again my argument is this is not the reality.
For every single one of those points.
The whole inefficiency argument is futile if it's just a ruse to cut bluntly.
Your point on the CFPB is moot, anti-trust and regulation are two sides of the same coin, the point is to level the playing field. It ensures consumers are treated fairly. Anti-trust law and evenly applied consumer law means there isn't captured supply or captured demand.
It is possible some of the budget is missallocated, but again practically (by your own admission) some of the correctly allocated budget is being cancelled.
This is not how government is intended to work, there are checks and balances intentionally. You cannot cut off and investigate, you investigate then cut off or else this process can be abused. The current evidence already indicates this may not be in good faith (see Verizon contract cancellation). The court is already blocking many of these actions.
You're being very generous to them, a good analogy they have catchy marketing materials with great use of jargon and theoretical whitepapers, but client experience with the product is very different.
> The whole inefficiency argument is futile if it's just a ruse to cut bluntly.
Not necessarily.
Suppose you have a slew of programs and 50% of them aren't worthwhile. You cut all of them. This is bad in the sense that the other 50% of them were worthwhile, but the net effect of this is actually zero because eliminating the benefit of the good half is canceled by eliminating the losses from the bad half.
Meanwhile the good programs get reintroduced again over time, if they can be justified. But then they have to go through the process again and get subject to a reevaluation that they wouldn't if they all just continued on through inertia, which allows the bad ones to be filtered out. Then the short-term result is a wash and the long-term result is net positive because the worthwhile programs come back and the unjustifiable ones get filtered out.
This becomes net positive not just over time but immediately if you can produce even a slight bias toward removing net-negative programs over net-positive ones.
> Your point on the CFPB is moot, anti-trust and regulation are two sides of the same coin, the point is to level the playing field.
"Level the playing field" means that each competitor is on equal footing, instead of rules that e.g. favor incumbents or larger companies.
Most "consumer protection" laws like that are actually either Faustian bargains or bad trade offs with high memetic fitness. The rule sounds good because it's presented as a free lunch rather than a trade off against an undisclosed cost.
This is a Faustian bargain when it's an attempt to mitigate the consequences of an uncompetitive market without actually restoring competitiveness, because leaving the market uncompetitive is going to cause the consumer to get screwed in a hundred other ways regardless of what rule you pass. In that case you need to restore competitiveness rather than trying to mitigate uncompetitiveness. The mitigation -- purposely -- erodes support for the actual solution by making the abuses just tolerable enough to stymie a revolt, while still being worse than the actual solution.
It's a bad trade off when the market is competitive, companies are offering both alternatives and some consumers are willingly choosing that option because of some countervailing benefit like lower prices or better interest rates. The market was already providing both alternatives and some consumers were willingly, purposely choosing that option for a reason, so prohibiting it is a harm.
> This is not how government is intended to work, there are checks and balances intentionally. You cannot cut off and investigate, you investigate then cut off or else this process can be abused.
Checks and balances are generally about preventing the government from doing something unless there is broad consensus, because the government is a monumentally dangerous beast and having it do nothing is far less dangerous than having it do something bad. "A major part of the government doesn't want to do this, therefore it doesn't happen" is checks and balances.
> The current evidence already indicates this may not be in good faith (see Verizon contract cancellation).
There is obviously a potential conflict of interest when the government changes suppliers and the new supplier is associated with a government official, but that isn't the end of the investigation. The next question is, what are the terms? Is the government paying Starlink more or less than they were paying Verizon? If it's more, now you have a real objection. If it's not more, what's the problem? In that case they would be saving the taxpayer money, which is what they're supposed to be doing.
> You're being very generous to them, a good analogy they have catchy marketing materials with great use of jargon and theoretical whitepapers, but client experience with the product is very different.
They're humans. Humans are imperfect and reality is complicated. A lot of people want them to fail, which is ridiculous. Let them succeed if they can manage it. Maybe they won't, but they're the ones who won the last election so they're the ones who get to make the attempt right now.
Your last point is the basis of my argument. Humans are imperfect and reality is complicated.
Cutting and reintroducing programs has real implications in the short term for those individuals at the receiving end, even if it is ultimately reintroduced in the long term. People have monthly mortgages and have to eat daily.
This also goes for the second point. It is not a Faustian bargain as there is no such thing as a perfect market in the real world, primarily because of imperfect information. Humans are also a resource interacting in that market, leave it to the free market and people will literally die, as resources can be made redundant/obsolete in the market. This is simply untenable and no market can ever truly be laissez-faire.
Your comment on checks and balances is exactly my point, the government cannot willy nilly go in a different direction, the scale of government means there is inertia and displacement that can impact individuals.
Our governments ever since the enlightenment have been crafted with progressivism in mind. What point is a market in a democracy if it is cruel and serves only a select set of individuals, a lottery rather than there to improve the human condition.
I would never want someone to fail so long as they're acting in good faith and it doesn't screw me or others over. But in the same breath if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck...
> Cutting and reintroducing programs has real implications in the short term for those individuals at the receiving end, even if it is ultimately reintroduced in the long term. People have monthly mortgages and have to eat daily.
The same goes for the programs or rules that should be removed. The existing social assistance system has overlapping benefits phase outs that prevent lower income people from making a little more money because they money is then lost to the phase outs. It's a poverty trap.
Likewise, a lot of poorly-crafted regulations destroy jobs and then people can't make ends meet because they're unemployed or had to take a job with lower pay. These people have to eat too.
> It is not a Faustian bargain as there is no such thing as a perfect market in the real world, primarily because of imperfect information.
It isn't expected to be perfect. It's expected to be better than the alternative.
The general problem is that imperfect information applies more to the government trying to make rules for strangers than it does to people who are steeped in the details of their own lives. Nobody has perfect information but people know their own lives better than members of Congress do.
> Your comment on checks and balances is exactly my point, the government cannot willy nilly go in a different direction, the scale of government means there is inertia and displacement that can impact individuals.
The issue is that it goes in both directions. If the inertia is in the wrong direction then there needs to be a way to promptly stop it.
Whereas if the government doesn't prohibit you from doing something which is nominally bad for you, you still have the option to not do it of your own volition. If it's actually not in your interest to do it.
> What point is a market in a democracy if it is cruel and serves only a select set of individuals, a lottery rather than there to improve the human condition.
A lottery is better than the house deciding when to put their finger on the scale.
You're describing problems that don't exist or at least are a lesser problem than those that do.
You can't genuinely tell me someone on food stamps is/should be more worried about being caught in a poverty trap than ensuring they have their next meal.
Those steeped in the details of their lives will intuitively know they're been screwed, doesn't mean they have the information on hand to resolve this. Take a job negotiation for instance, in theory they know they're being given a low ball offer, but the risk/reward with a lack of perfect information means they won't take the risk and will just accept the offer. Much like taking action against a bank instead of the CFPB, they probably would win but they could also go bankrupt if it doesn't go their way. (The stakes are much higher for them than those with money and power, and thus unbalanced).
And if the scale is naturally leaning with no finger on the scale? (As I say imperfect market and world).
Sadly not everyone has a golden spoon or the starting capital to leverage their position in the world.
> You can't genuinely tell me someone on food stamps is/should be more worried about being caught in a poverty trap than ensuring they have their next meal.
Absolutely they should, because the poverty trap is the reason they're in such dire straits.
You have someone who works but doesn't make a lot of money, so is eligible for all of these programs. They don't have the capacity to become "rich" in any feasible way, but there are ways they could make $10,000 or $20,000 more than they do now, with some trade offs like accepting a job with higher commuting costs or moving to an area with a higher cost of living etc.
But if they take the higher paying job, they lose their benefits. The other job paid $15,000 more and required them to increase their costs by $5000/year, but that would have left them $10,000 ahead, until making more money causes them to lose $12,000/year to benefits phase outs and higher taxes.
Now suppose you remove the benefits and give them the money back in the form of lower taxes. It wouldn't even have to be all of it -- there is a $10,000 surplus to be had by getting rid of the poverty trap. If they lose $12,000 in benefits but got even a $3000 tax cut they'd be $1000 ahead of the status quo, because then they could take the better job.
Meanwhile in terms of the government budget, revenue neutral would be to give them a $12,000 tax cut even against the income from the higher paying job, and then they would be $10,000 ahead of the status quo because you removed the poverty trap.
> Take a job negotiation for instance, in theory they know they're being given a low ball offer, but the risk/reward with a lack of perfect information means they won't take the risk and will just accept the offer.
"Low ball offer" implies an offer below market. Someone would take this offer, why? There is more than one employer. Below market by definition means the other employers are offering more. Unless that employer is offering some countervailing benefit, there is no reason to take it instead of going across the street. Even if you need money right now, there are many jobs that will hire anyone with a pulse with no expectation that you stay there any longer than it takes to find a better job. How is any employer supposed to force you to take their job for below-market pay in the absence of a cartel?
> Much like taking action against a bank instead of the CFPB, they probably would win but they could also go bankrupt if it doesn't go their way.
You don't actually go bankrupt from filing a claim in small claims court. And then you stop using that bank and leave bad reviews so that other people stop using that bank.
But that isn't even most of what CFPB was doing. It was often things like banning aggressive collections practices even when the bank was going after someone legitimately in default. Obviously nobody likes debt collectors, but if more people borrow money and don't pay it back then the banks either have to charge higher interest rates or stop making those loans. Pretending you can ban those practices without any trade off is screwing the people who need those loans and don't default.
> And if the scale is naturally leaning with no finger on the scale?
Then someone is still putting their finger on the scale while pretending they're not, and you should be trying to stop them from doing that rather than using it to rationalize further corruption.
Bias doesn't balance. If Republicans are diverting money to affluent retirees, you can't counteract that by having Democrats divert money to healthcare companies, you're just taking even more from the people the money is coming from, which is ultimately the working class.
> You speak from a viewpoint of privilege.
This is an appeal to emotion, not an argument. There are a wide variety of policies that are intuitively attractive because their first order effects seem good until you consider their ultimate consequences. Many of those policies get enacted because they don't work, or even do the opposite of what they're claimed to do (e.g. rent control), when the people who benefit from the problem have a more sophisticated understanding than the people being impacted by it.
Assistance programs also tend to be implemented in ways that satisfy a politician's checkbox to claim they did something without actually doing something. For example, if you have no dependents, do you know what the maximum income is before you're ineligible for the earned income tax credit? It's equivalent to working full time for less than $9/hour. That's less than the minimum wage in two thirds of the states. So if you make even minimum wage you get zero and the maximum you could possibly get without dependents is only a few hundred dollars a year. EITC is potentially one of the strongest, most efficient methods of transferring wealth to the working class and we've set it up so that hardly anybody receives it. Less than 10% of the population is eligible for it at all (and those mostly as a result of having dependents) and most of them only get a pittance because they're almost but not quite making enough for it to to be fully phased out, despite still not making very much. It exists because every single economist on both sides thinks it's a good idea and then the phase outs are set to neutralize the benefit because politicians don't want something that allocates money to actually helping people when they could be allocating that money to their cronies.
Meanwhile money gets allocated to things like government housing projects which seem almost purposely designed to shovel money into the pockets of connected contractors while making no dent in the housing affordability problem and concentrating poverty into areas that then become slums controlled by gangs. People are finally starting to realize that these programs are net negative after decades of evidence that they're a disaster, but even now, when they try to remove their funding, we get articles like this, interviewing people who are obviously sympathetic as if the existence of people who need help is a way to justify a program that doesn't work:
Taking money from programs like that and giving it to people as actual money is a good thing whether in the form of lower taxes or otherwise. The way to solve the housing availability crisis is by building more market rate housing.
There's no point anymore since everyone has AQI & PM2.5 meters.
Incredibly popular is questionable, definitely among tier1 libtards in embassy and consulate cities on twitter at the time. There was just as much nationalist on renren then weibo who thought this was US interference.
>> It led to China improving air quality.
This is charitably western propaganda trying to take credit by fabricating notion that muh free speech can push CCP to change. Reality is BJ recognized pollution issue and had renewable policy underway a few years before this i.e. moving extra polluting factories out, controlling construction dust, vehicle registration systems, better emission standards etc. There was going to be coordinated effort to bring AQI down to <100s during 2008 Olympics and try to make it stick after, US Embassy was trying to stir shit leading up. Like if US embassy AQI shitposts was actually significant in pushing PRC enviromental policies, it would be an incredible own goal that pushed PRC to dominate renewable production chains and EVs while bankrupting western incumbants.
> There was just as much nationalist on renren then weibo who thought this was US interference.
But nobody ever took them seriously. The man on the street in China could just go outside and look at the air. And whether he liked what he saw or not, he still had to breathe it, so interest in the topic was very high.
Here's a conversation I had with a friend who worked in the Shanghai office of a major international conglomerate:
-----
[me] What do Chinese people think of America? [美国 = the United States]
[friend] Different people have different opinions.
[friend] Some people see it as the promised land.
[friend] Some people are very negative.
[friend] Where I work, there's one guy who is really down on America and never misses an opportunity to point out how it sucks.
[friend] But even that guy says there's one thing for which America deserves our thanks, the air quality numbers.
You have it backwards, less took your libtard friends from SH seriously. They're expat "cock suckers" (to put it bluntly) putting expats in their filter bubbles fueling western reporting that CCP got pressured to fix air QoL because muh strong US AQI free speech even from their anti US friends (equivalent of my Chinese wife said).
Of course the interest in the topic was high, the average person on the street are flooded with CCTV telling them all the various government plans to alleviate air quality even before the US embassy stunt. People joke US helped PRC with airquality, but it's a joke, the one's who take joke position seriously (some groups more prone to this) are mocked (and they should be).
> You have it backwards, less took your libtard friends from SH seriously. They're expat "cock suckers" (to put it bluntly) putting expats in their filter bubbles
The friend in question has started a number of conversations with me by mentioning how much she dislikes Muslims.
I'm not sure what you're imagining here, but it has no relationship with reality.
We were living in Beijing when that happened, and you cannot underestimate the impact that it had. It ultimately forced the Chinese government to publish the actual air quality data which in turn forced it to take significant action to improve air quality in Beijing.
Same. One thing I remember was that Twitter (where the data was reported) got blocked at about the same time. 2010 was a bit nuts. The government tried to explain it away that the area near liangmaqiao was especially bad for Beijing, which was hilarious.
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
We left exactly a year after you did and I’d say that it was somewhat better than in the early 2010s. There were still really bad days, but fewer of them. Also depended on which part of Beijing (we were near Beida).
I worked near PKU (Microsoft China) and lived in Chaoyang (Sanyuan Xiqiao/Tuanjiehu), but I really don't see how Haidian and Chaoyang were very different in AQI. We ultimately left because my wife got pregnant and the air still wasn't clean enough for a baby. I remember every night in the winter when we decided to or not to go for a walk at night based on the current AQI reading (come on honey, its only 200 2.5 pmi tonight!), so I feel like it didn't really get better in the winter, or maybe I was just fixating on it given our circumstances.
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).
To be slightly more specific, Chinese authorities consider PM2.5 levels of ≤70 mcg/m³ as safe, while by EU standards that same pollution level is considered "extreme".
The WHO yearly recommended limit is 5 mcg/m³, by the way.
To give you an idea of the difference in perception. When we lived in Beijing, anything below 150 mcg/m3 was a "good day", <50 was "amazing". We didn't start taking any precautions like closing windows until it was >250. We stayed indoors when it was >400 or >500.
I remember living in Beijing when the US Embassary Air Quality Twitter account tweeted "Error: value above measurable range" (paraphrasing) -- that was a fun day.
I like the take of System Science researchers on this matter -- they say that air/water quality monitoring works exactly because it introduces a feedback loop in the existing system.
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.
Adding a quick, tight feedback loop is often a high-ROI way to change the behavior of goverments (or people in general).
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.
You know, I have 1 litmus test that instantly lets me distinguish between capital-c Conservatives, and just plain reactionaries: how they feel about environmentalism.
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.
This goes beyond the device, it was about who was sharing the data: the US, which used to be a former global reference that was credible, reliable, and trustworthy with some good intentions towards Western ideals and progress.
That's now gone, but hopefully others will fill that void.
Edit: Gary Locke is a former governor of Washington State and a member of of the old guard, a member of the pre-internet Seattle. This is back when South Lake Union (where Amazon is now) was just trees and low rent commercial. It was the site of the local Greyhound bus station.
He was the first Asian American governor in the US. While he's not directly Seattle, it was his primary constituency and he married a prominent Seattle TV news caster and former beauty queen.
Later, he was the first Asian American ambassador to China, appointed by Barack Obama. His political career ran 30 years and I've heard his name mentioned for most of my life. [0]
For starters, don't complain about downvotes. It's boring and lazy.
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.
Not really sure what any of that has to do with anything. Seattle is second only to San Francisco in list of blue voting cities that have failed in addressing every single social problem over the last 25 years. Seattle political class and scene is one of the worst grifters in the country. They are just “blue” grifters, so we can’t criticize them despite their abysmal track record.
This is still mission creep even if it is a low cost. In fact this often how focus is lost and costs accumulate...
It is not embassies' role to provide this service. It is quite reasonable to stop.
Of course people will argue that it was perhaps useful to the people of Beijing, New Delhi, etc. but the real question is what does this have to do with US embassies and the US government?
> It is not embassies' role to provide this service
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.
It's a stretch by any measures that embassies must monitor air pollution in order to provide travel advice.
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?)
I doubt that "Air pollution can be high" is really enough. I don't think someone living in rural France or Scandinavia is really equipped to understand the level of pollution in a city like Beijing, without more information.
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.
That is a good point. Given that its' just the network, not the actual data collection that has been turned off, I wonder what it would cost to turn it back on. It's not going to be free, but it also can't be that expensive.
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.
So do you also disagree with the premise of the government providing to this service, or only that it’s not the stated role of embassies to do it?
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.
