Summary
Elon Musk’s staffers entered NOAA and the Department of Commerce without clearance, raising concerns over budget cuts and downsizing.
Project 2025, a conservative plan linked to former Trump officials, calls for dismantling NOAA, citing its climate research as harmful to U.S. prosperity.
Critics warn such cuts could impact weather forecasting, ocean conservation, and fisheries.
NOAA declined to comment, while experts fear an aggressive strategy to weaken the agency before legal challenges can halt changes.
I mean, if a hurricane is coming, you can always nuke it, right?
Nah, this isn't even about data control. This is about selling off the data, the forecasting infrastructure, the hardware, models, and most important, SATELLITE NETWORK that allow accurate forecasting. Commercial launches of scientific instruments are very very expensive with very little immediate ROI. It's much cheaper to simply buy an existing entity out that HAS THAT and then piggyback their data - which is effectively what this is. AccuWeather has been wanting this for almost 20 years.
Inevitable. At some point the United States would run out of countries and have to invade the United States.
I'd like to remind everyone that NOAA is under the Department of Commerce because, as it turns out, understanding weather patterns, being able to accurately forecast weather changes, is kind of important to businesses.
I think there have been businesses trying to get it shut down for years because they want to sell the data rather than giving it out for free. I forget which ones, but I’d swear I read about this years ago.
Just did a quick search with no luck, but apparently it’s part of Project 2025 to commercialize it or get rid of it.
AccuWeather.
I remember when Musk bought Twitter and then immediately started trying to save money by literally just turning off services to see what breaks.
That actually wouldn't have been the stupidest idea if he had done it in a test environment rather than production, or even if Twitter was a small website that didn't mind downtime. But he did it in production on a huge site that people relied on being up, so it actually was the stupidest idea.
And now he's bringing the same stupidest energy to government. No investigation. No calculation. Just a toddler who has been put in front of a lot of switches.
People relied on Twitter? That doesn't sound right.
A lot of companies still use it for customer relations, sadly.
Unless twitter had a test system doing millions of varying actions a second, I'm not sure a test environment would find those problems, or at least not quickly. Sometimes those services get added to help spread loads that you might not encounter otherwise.
Tbh I'm not sure what level of automated testing these sites have, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the services are tested in isolation at scale, but not against each other at scale, and that there's some general understanding that the link between them at scale is okay if both individually are okay?
Still absolutely terrible to do that to a live environment.
They have already stated their intention of replacing the National Weather Service with the very ironically named, and privately-owned, AccuWeather, so I guess this is the start of that.
For now, yes. Under the plan outlined in Project 2025, AccuWeather gets control of all of the NWS weather stations.
Jesus.
My empathy is all tied up with the marginalized groups, minorities, federal workers, and others already negatively affected by this administration. If some yokels in flyover states who voted for him get taken out by a tornado because they had to watch a 30 second ad before the weather alert would show up, I got nothing for them.
Unfortunately, plenty of people who live in flyover states also tried to stop these people from getting into office. There are fewer of them, but still millions.
Yes.
um. so. do they know accuweather relies on the government to do their forecasts. almost all weather forecasts originate with the us or european agencies and then have some local radar and sensors to get local temps, windspeeds, and precipitate.
Yep, but they plan to give AccuWeather all the NWS monitoring stations.
The sattelites because I was under the impression most monitoring stations were owned locally but everyone shares with the government and in return gets access to the information?
"What's yours is mine and what's mine is mine." I expect Musk just assumes he owns all of those and if he ever finds out he doesn't then he will then assume ownership of it. And then probably try to sell you access to your own weather station.
And then AccuWeather leases out the data to all those foreign and domestic weather agencies and makes heaps of cash saying "well if you want accurate forecasting data that's gonna be $200k/yr."
Seriously. No clearance should mean no entrance. If they try to use force, the use of force to prevent their entry is both warranted and necessary.
Maybe this is the inevitable endgame of a society that tries to harness greed the way capitalism does. Something can be working completely sustainably and for the general good, like NOAA does, and they still try to take parts of it away just so they can extract profits by selling to you what used to be free.
Its why they hate work from home. Covid came along and necessitated that workers en masse be given a benefit, and capitalists werent able to extract any concessions in return because it was an emergency. So, they claw it back, but you might be able to get a special exception if you play ball.
You're right, except it's the only game, not the endgame. Since neoliberalism became consensus, public assets have been sold off and paid for again by the public, but privately. We bought the roads, railways, waterways, weather stations etc with our taxes, they were sold, and we didn't see a penny of the profits, and then we have to buy them again with our wages. The endgame is where there's nothing left to sell off, no more exponential growth to be had, that's when it all collapses. Greed, it seems, allows you to see past the fact that this collapse is inevitable.
Just chop off his head wtf
I get the impression that if you chopped off his head, he would just grow 2 back. Then we would have twice as much bullshit excreting from his blowhole
Well then the only option is to throw him into an active volcano
Id love to see a Cat 5 wipe out his Maralago with no warning, while NOAA just shrugs.
Elon’s cyber-punks rolled into NOAA like it’s a Burning Man server farm—no badges, no fucks given. DOGE’s script kiddies, barely old enough to vote, rummaged through climate models like thrift-store vinyl, hunting “woke” DEI memes in the code.
Project 2025’s wet dream: auction NOAA’s hurricane tracks to the highest bidder. 12,000 jobs? Slash ‘em. 50-year datasets? Oops, legacy system. Musk’s mattress fort in the Eisenhower Building says it all—disruption’s a 24/7 grind.
Meanwhile, Florida retirees’ storm alerts get paywalled. But sure, privatize tornado warnings. What’s next, a Tesla-branded rain dance? The West Coast elite smirk; Middle America’s weather app glitches.
Efficiency, my ass—this is a digital coup.
Well they did it to themselves, if they just forecasted only sunny days then they could stay! But no they had to keep bringing in illegal Mexican hurricanes!
spoiler
/s cause at this point someone might actually believe this
Deport
Pretty good supervillain arc through, right? Just in real life.
@lemmy.world
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
go to feed...
save