it is also engaged in the most venal, short-sighted, and destructive assault on the basic functions of governance and civil society I can imagine.
I don't care what one's view is on the appropriate scale and role of federal governance, some operations are best and only accomplished at that level,
and this short of bullshit is not just a disservice to, it is an attack on the citizenry.
The high officials are the truly great ones who have restored the natural order. You don't need that. You just require being recognized as somewhat better than most.
Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games
> I fail to understand how someone could read about living in a dictatorship and go "yeah, I would like to live like that"
I can't help but think that this is typical self-loathing and ensuing self-destruction turned towards society itself. I need to read his actual writing, though. I'm sure there's also some element of actively pandering towards people in power desperate to justify their hold through some ideology.
CF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swakopmund#Until_Namibian_Inde...
> Swakomund was known for its continued glorification of Nazism after World War II, including the celebration of Hitler's birthday and "Heil Hitler" Nazi salutes given by residents. In 1976, The New York Times quoted a German working in a Swakopmund hotel who described the city as "more German than Germany". As of the 1980s, Nazi paraphernalia was available to buy in shops.
Although it seems more robust in the long term*, anti-intellectualism probably has a cliff of adaptivity, just like academia, ideology, or indeed any collection of values
*The foundations of China's rise can ultimately be traced to the cultural revolution? Now we wait.
What makes this mess even more disheartening is that about of third of the population loves it.
The ties between the fossil fuel industry and the far right are clear. Apathy, indifference, inertia, they are all products of propaganda and updated Cambridge Analytica methods.
Fossil fuel interests will stop at nothing to further their greed.
Wishful thinking. Ukraine losing the war will be the end of Europe, and Europe will increasingly be ran by right-wing autocrats shredding the social state and blaming immigrants.
Haha, care to elaborate? I'm legitimately curious how in the heck you came to that conclusion.
Remember, the U.S. is currently still #1.
How do you propose it becomes utterly irrelevant?
(proposed/desired reductions in federally funded (NSF) science positions for FY 2026. 250,000 (75%) reduction in numbers)
EDIT: see also: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/american-science-bra...
I don't agree that the US won't be relevant, it's more like the US will resemble the position of Russia in the next decade than the position it is in right now.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/exports
China exports more, but China also must import more, including more of the things needed for the survival of its people, like food, fertilizer, fuel.
US exports: https://www.ondeck.com/resources/every-states-top-import-exp...
Apple keeps half the sales price of every iPhone whereas the last I saw Foxconn gets only a few dollars per phone for the final assembly. It used to be that most of the expensive components (display, memory) in the iPhone were supplied by Japan, S Korea and Taiwan, but I admit that that might have changed over the years.
Record numbers of US citizens seeking to relocate to Canada & the UK. In the last couple months I remember seeing several news stories variously about Doctors, Professors and students applying and/or relocating.
Layoffs in the tech sector haven't slowed at all, and couple that with the DOGE Govt layoffs and the recent jobs numbers stories.
I feel quite certain that if the U.S. is actually measured "at #1" for anything good, it won't retain it much longer.
Bias Disclaimer: I'm a former software engineer working an hourly labor job.
In what? Prisons per Hamburger?
You‘re right! #1 among high income countries in Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, drug overdose deaths, Deaths from violence and accidents, Infant mortality, Obesity-related mortality.
It also has its lowest-ever World Happiness Rankings. The U.S. is currently leading in global declines in reputation, trust, happiness, and perceived positive influence.
So what is the plan for handling the US nuclear warhead stockpile as the empire crumbles? I'm worried about billionaires with nukes. Maybe not the person directly but people behind all that envision super wealthy city-states and I totally expect those to have nukes.
The nuclear codes won't stop anyone with time and engineers. These are intended for physically arming the strong link in the warhead that is supposed to send the signal to the exclusion zone but someone with unrestricted access should be able to override it and send the signal directly. Although over the years the mechanical systems were replaced with electronics that eventually become encrypted microelectronics, IIUC the actual device that does the kaboom remained with its original design and applying voltage will be able to trigger it. Safe against rough handlers(i.e. crazy solders) but won't stop people with unrestricted access.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16mab9x/when...
Just imagine Biden having commanded to trigger a process which destroys the nuclear material (by triggering some degeneratio process or something) would that have been accepted or would everybody have said that limits U.S.'s strategic options permantly in too high degree?
That is not my understanding. My understanding is that the proper implosion requires very precise timing of signals for each shaped charge element otherwise the implosion ends up being lopsided and the nuke fizzles instead of exploding. These timings depend not just on the shape of the charges, but also on the relative wire lengths from the detonator to the explosives. (In theory these wire lengths can be unique for each warhead, thus making the timings for each warhead unique). The detonation circuit is not just comparing the code with an expected one, but using it to create the right signal timings. In other words the right code plus the information in the electronics together gives the timings for the signals with which they propagate through the different length of wires such that they form the right implosion.
To reverse engineer this you need to figure out when each explosive element needs to be triggered to form the explosion. Then you need to figure out when the signals need to leave the electronics such that it travels through the wiring looms just right to create the desired explosive pattern. And then you need to figure out what code you need to supply the electronics so it produces this desired electronic timing to achieve the above.
That is three wickedly hard challenge. And you will only know if your people pulled each of them off corectly, when you try to detonate the warhead.
> won't stop people with unrestricted access
That is true. But it is not like all they would need to do is to apply voltage on a single line, like some crazy hot-wiring car tief. Their best and easiest bet is to dissasemble the warhead and use the fissile material from it inside of an implosion device of their own design.
The problem is that globalchange.gov is failing DNS lookup. The domain is still registered, and the nameservers are supposed to be these:
nserver: A.NS.GOV 199.33.230.1
nserver: B.NS.GOV 199.33.231.1
nserver: C.NS.GOV 199.33.232.1
nserver: D.NS.GOV 199.33.233.1
Edit: For those who insist on downvoting facts, other, better articles have both found the report on a NOAA server [1], and had official response from government spokespeople about what is actually going on [2]. There's no need to speculate.
[1] https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/61592
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
That’s usually the real test.
NPR notes that the report is here [1], so if someone is trying to hide it, they're not doing a particularly good job.
If the DNS is up and the domain is registered it starts to look like a takedown instead of a mistake.
I do know that the EPA took down their EJScreen [1] dataset so it’s not like politically motivated takedowns are unprecedented under the current regime.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
i’ve noticed a large uptick over the past couple years of some people insisting it’s unreasonable to consider context and known past behaviors when we try to discuss things.
again, no, it’s not unreasonable. actually it would be incredibly silly, more unreasonable to ignore their past behaviors when discussing this.
What's already known is that they fired the staff who prepared the report, and are presumably shutting down the agency. Is it really surprising that someone might have turned off the webserver before transferring the domain?
How far does it have to go before you assume malice? Do they have to tell you “I am malicious”? And if someone malicious is using the “dont admit it” strategy are you fucked?
Nobody is jumping to conclusions, lots of climate related information is being scrubbed. This website has been down for at least 12 hours. The fact that the domain is still registered proves precisely nothing.
Could it be a misconfiguration? Sure, but available evidence points to an ongoing attempt to erase everything related to climate change.
Except they did, as I found an NPR article with official comment, and there's a link downthread to this much better article about the same thing, again with authoritative reply:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
I'm not arguing that the overall fact pattern is good here. I'm saying this article is stupid and lazy.
> NASA will now take over, Victoria LaCivita, communications director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told ABC News. "All preexisting reports will be hosted on the NASA website, ensuring compliance with statutorily required reporting," LaCivita said, referring ABC News to NASA for more information.
So, they're explicitly answering the second half of that question. Again, not suggesting the fact pattern is good, just that this article is terrible. I assume the AP could have also managed to get the same quote before running to press with speculation?
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-administration-shutters-majo...
It's from your source. It's the very last sentence in the article as of right now.
Sorry, what? I don't have any affiliation with ABC. Someone else posted the link.
NPR has the same basic comments [2]:
> All five editions of the National Climate Assessment that have been published over the years will also be available on NASA's website, according to NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens. NASA doesn't yet know when that website will be available to the public.
How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
[2] https://www.npr.org/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5453501/national-climat...
I didn't say that. You've been posting it everywhere and called it a "better source" that we should all read. Calling it "your source" is a reasonable shorthand.
> How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
I didn't say that either. I only pasted a direct quote from an article you urged everyone to read. How you get from that to what you're saying is beyond me.
Mea culpa, I missed the line because it was at stranded at the bottom of a bunch of blocked ads. About the only thing I can say is that "NASA" and "any details" is doing all of the heavy lifting in that sentence.
The reporter just quoted someone from the administration saying that they'll follow the law. So the reporter runs over to NASA, doesn't get an immediate or exact answer, and says "OK, I'll just make it sound like maybe they're being dodgy about following the law, then."
Its a fairly standard reporter trick, but it's sleazy nonetheless: "At press time, we've received no answer from the man about when he stopped beating his wife."
> > How you get from that to "we don't know if they'll ever publish it again!" is beyond me.
> I didn't say that either.
I now realize that this language could be misconstrued. I wasn't literally talking about "you". I meant it as "how one gets from that statement to..", and I was talking about the reporters.
In case you've missed it, the current administration lies constantly and loves suppressing views it doesn't like. Hosting a document is not rocket science. There is zero reason to take something down before having the new host up and running. That this has been done anyway suggests malign intent. And the current administration is long past getting the benefit of the doubt.
What actually happened is exactly what this article said and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get no response from NOAA because of the administration’s well documented feud with the AP.
And if you believe NASA will publish anything beyond the most perfunctory version of this report under this administration I have a bridge to sell you.
I said that barring better information, you can't rule it out. Still true.
> posted some pointless name server addresses
They're government servers, is the point. And don't you find it a little bit curious that someone bothered to change the NS records? It's not the usual way that a website goes down. In fact, it's the sort of thing that happens when you're in the process of (potentially incompetently) moving a domain from one server to another.
> What actually happened is exactly what this article said and I wouldn’t be surprised if they get no response from NOAA
Yet other reporters, from multiple different left-leaning news outlets, managed to get these elusive comments from super hard-to-reach people like...the White House press secretary for science policy. It's almost like there was a press conference or something.
Sometimes you actually have to do work to be a reporter, and when you skip that part and jump directly to conspiracy, it's not defensible. It's just trash journalism.
Until they actually do it, it's more likely they will not and are just saying whatever comes to mind as a way to manipulate the narrative
I'm on HN, so I tend to want to blame the ad industry. It's pretty nebulous to think that "made in America" directly snowballed into this; so many things did. The freakier nativism in advertising really could use a break right about now though.
"Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman is 100% predictive and descriptive of how we got where we are.
I do also need to read Postman, though.
Since then it's been gradual attacks on press freedom (WL exposed fraud/propaganda in the Iraq/Afghan wars) and massive profits by the defense industry, resulting in dramatically more lobbying money. Not to mention the US automotive industry and major banks getting bailed out and preventing many small economic corrections that should have occurred.
Then 20 years after 9/11 when the US has spent 10s of TRILLIONS on wars and virtually nothing on infrastructure, industrial policy, etc., everyone wonders why China appears to be close to leapfrogging. The anti-brown propaganda and "USA USA" jingoism back in the early 2000s is still fresh, benefitting candidates with xenophobic and jingoistic messages. Many feel real economic pain but don't understand that you don't spend $20T without consequences -- plus scapegoating the weakest members of society is apparently more emotionally satisfying.
By the time we got the pandemic both parties realized that they had more to gain from fiscal irresponsibility, and the tribalism of the government's anti-brown propaganda combined with the "multicultural solidarity" focus over class warfare by Dems, led to increasing tribalism and tribe-focused media. Now a large percentage of the population lives in a complete information bubble and is close to worshiping its political favorites as though they are religious icons.
Thus now regardless of which party is in power, there will be a shift to censor and suppress information that is viewed as harmful to society. I honestly blame both parties for their share of this, but the ultimate culprit is feed algorithms that are optimized for emotionally potent content that creates engagement (and ad dollars) and nothing more.
What is actually fascinating about the orignal TikTok is that the algorithm was so much more useful at showing interesting/appealing content that it pretty much overtook Insta, YouTube, and Netflix and required government intervention to stop its growth. This shows us clearly how the major social media platforms were not just wrong about how to maximize profits but wrong on how to entertain and engage people, mistakes that are only possible when there is really not much competition, which is how we now do capitalism in the US -- and by the way if you win you get nationalized.
It's actually where the Heritage Foundation has been trying things out before using in America. The connection between Heritage, Orban, and Trump's circle is concerning. At this point, Trump is more their useful idiot who can be the populous frontman. He's a symptom of the larger frustration with govt and growth in inequality
Well, how many times has she seen a doctor in her life so far? Of course, more than one. Then, why did she do that if she is eventually going to die one day?
She is the living embodiment of the Lord Farquaad meme: “Some of you are going to die, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take”
However, there's a huge difference between dismissing the severity of the evidence vs. going out of your way to hide evidence. The first is born of arrogance. The later is naked cowardice - they know exactly how wrong they are. If they wanted to project strength, they could simply leave the reports up and say "we don't care". Instead they scurry around behind the curtains trying to cover their tracks. Fucking pathetic.
Or create the impossible requirement that a study have no bias.
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=35.90615740000...
still works.
triceratops•8h ago
NewJazz•6h ago
pstuart•5h ago
apgwoz•3h ago
bko•5h ago
For instance, over 175,000 people die from heat exposure each year across the WHO European Region. Compare that to 1-2k in the US.
In this case, the Don't Look Up scenario is that people don't want to get A/C and governments sometimes make it very hard for them, killing hundreds of thousands because... I don't know why. But at least EU has nice proclamations and accords on the risk of climate change.
https://www.who.int/europe/news/item/01-08-2024-statement--h...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2822854
triceratops•5h ago
bko•4h ago
Some excepts allow up to 25C like restaurants and some work places
The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning
There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations
90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it
Fun fact, some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK, there is a law that in any public building, windows must not open more than 100mm (about 4 inches).
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/spain-restricts-us...
https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/fluorinated-greenhous...
https://qualityautoglasstint.com/cracking-the-code-understan...
triceratops•3h ago
How does that make it "hard" to get A/C in private homes? And are there a lot of heat-related deaths at 27C?
> The EU's F-Gas Regulation creates significant restrictions on refrigerants used in air conditioning
You should maybe look into why those exist. Air conditioning refrigerants are themselves major greenhouse gases and many deplete the ozone layer. Try also comparing those regulations to American ones. They're likely not very different.
> 90% of US homes have AC while only 20% of European homes have it
The US is richer and hotter. There's nothing like Florida or south Texas or Las Vegas or Phoenix in Europe.
> There's significant red tape when installing AC due to building regulations
Do tell...
> some EU countries even have laws telling you how much you can open your windows! In the UK...
Did you write this with an LLM or something? The third link you provided says nothing of the sort. It's about tint regulations on automobile windows FFS.
billfor•5h ago
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/21/heat...
Brybry•4h ago
Or do the regions that matter the most get too cold for heat pumps?
mayneack•4h ago
Seems like a website with information about climate change without a mandate about max AC is a pretty conservative strategy all things considered.
Rexxar•3h ago
WHO European region also covered Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and other countries from central Asia so I don't see how you can conclude anything about EU with this piece of statistic. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WHO_regions)
dottjt•5h ago
timr•5h ago
Agreed. My problem with it was that it was self-congratulatory and snobby, which is always what you want out of Hollywood actors.
Being preached at about science by a population of people who probably mostly failed high school science is not a good time.
barbecue_sauce•4h ago
timr•4h ago
jahsome•4h ago
bee_rider•50m ago
Of course, it isn’t a universal rule, see Dolph Lundgren, etc etc.
* I don’t care if the actor delivering an environmentalist message in a movie is actually good at science for the same reason I don’t care if Keanu Reaves knows king fu.
p1necone•4h ago
triceratops•4h ago
I've confirmed that both writers of the movie graduated high school, and one of them even graduated college.
timr•3h ago
I guess we can infer that graduating from high school is no insurance against making a bad movie.
nothrabannosir•2h ago
I agree with the part about preaching, but fair is fair: they were preaching scientific consensus. They preach what is said by the overwhelming majority of active scientific researchers in this field.
You didn’t say they were wrong I agree, but still .. they were (/ are) right. And why should they be perfect, anyway? They are who they are, flawed and all, but they are right about this and they were right to make that movie and they were right about people being selfish.
Ironically you could say that we are now basically reenacting the movie, proving its point. There’s an asteroid heading for us and here we are, judging the high school grades of the people telling us about its trajectory.
I thought it was very depressing and surprisingly self reflective and poignant in that sense.
yongjik•37m ago
The main character (played by DiCaprio) is also depicted as a quite flawed and vain human being as well.
Also honestly, who doesn't feel frustration at the whole real-world situation the movie is actually about?
triceratops•4h ago
999900000999•4h ago