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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

How much does Trump pay you to say such things?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  + We always underestimate the number of stupid people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

> 70 years ago we were reeling from WWII

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

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

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

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

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

2) The fundamental basis of government department budgeting is "spend everything you get or you'll get less next year". No department will willingly spend less.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Historically "major tax cuts" were actually very small:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

These were tax cuts on the order of 1-3% of GDP, so of course the effect on GDP growth was similarly muted.

Meanwhile the baseline level of recent US GDP growth isn't 4%, it's more like 2.5%, making a 0.5% increase much more significant for such a small tax cut, so it's not absurd that a hypothetical doubling of the growth rate could result from a hypothetical 15% of GDP reduction in taxes. The hypothetical was just using larger numbers on multiple dimensions.

You get a similar payback period if you use smaller numbers all around, e.g. a reduction in the overall tax rate from 23% to 21.5% resulting in an increase in the GDP growth rate from 2.5% to 3%.

Moreover, the exact rate is difficult to calculate given limited data (and depends on changing factors in the economy), but the point is the existence of the effect. And it's not obvious that even quite long payback periods wouldn't be worth it, since the lower tax rate and the higher growth rate could then be sustained thereafter indefinitely.

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.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If it rides for free in the existing infrastructure then how can it be shutdown? Or are the being dramatic as OP said and really they just turned off the api.

Let that sink it...

Many people work hard in Russia and spend nights with their families, it didn't stop them from getting shipped off to die in Ukraine or any other god forsaken Russian made hellscape.

In a way, the life Voltaire is describing is kind of, luxurious ?

It was easy to justify sitting out Trump I as a (former) US allied, Trump II demands immediate action.

All the actions potato head has taken are a deliberate slap in the face of all their allies. Maybe something we’d expect from potato head, but not from the United States. Even given he was elected we’d expect the rest if your political system to stop a single man from burning down all bridges. Clearly that was an incorrect assumption.

You are right to make the point that I couldn’t afford this lifestyle if I were alone without a family. Though I’d have very few interest in owning a 120m2 family house in this case, I’d probably live in a way cheaper apartment. I think being alone in the French countryside would be pretty boring, unless you are lucky enough to be near your friends and family.

Also, my point was absolutely not to compare European vs American lifestyle, saying which is better or going into the details, I just wanted to stress that comparing comfort of life by comparing revenue is not possible. It’s way more complex than "European earns less but don’t have to pay for healthcare".