I wish they could sue Trump and Musk personally for making dumb decisions.
Why didn't a well-funded FEMA prevent what happened in Puerto Rico?
Yeah, so how did a massive agency with plenty of money (over $30 BILLION annually) not immediately begin work to restock their Puerto Rico warehouses immediately after some of the supplies were sent to help with hurricane Irma?
That's roughly $1.5 million per employee of FEMA, so they should have plenty of funds after personnel costs for buying and transporting whatever emergency supplies they need.
Trump campaigned on cutting government services.
Everyone is okay with cutting a public service (at the expense of others) until they need that particular service
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To clarify, I'm not cheering on this disaster or hoping that those who voted for Trump "get what they deserve"
But if you're in the mood for not feeling sympathy, because most cities have heat domes that tend to "push" storms away from them, storms tend to leave the more-liberal cities alone and instead wreak havoc through more rural towns.
One metro area generally outweighs 90% of the counties in a state.
Take Oregon for example. Look at eastern Oregon where trump ran away with like 80% of the vote. But then you look at population numbers for those counties and you'll quickly realize that ONE NEIGHBORHOOD in Portland has 5x as many residents as that entire county. One neighborhood in Portland actually has more people than most of Oregon counties. It's kinda wild how empty they are.
The fact is that conservatives are pretty outnumbered. Which is why conservatives disenfranchise voters and rely on gaming the electoral college. It's also why conservatives tend to move to where other conservatives live, among other reasons. If people showed up to vote then Republicans would lose elections way more often.
But looking at a map and seeing red counties is not "more people voted trump". It's just "sparsely populated counties voted trump" which is not the same thing.
There's a subreddit called "People Live in Cities" that makes fun of this misinformation tactic. It's just maps that show where people live, but cite other metrics.
The popular vote went ~2/3 in OK to Trump.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...
Cherry-picking aside, the victory margin in the 2024 election was the smallest in over five decades, only the 2000 and 2020 elections (where the loser of popular vote was able to seize power on technicalities, they had negative victory margins) were smaller.
ANY critical pipeline that can be broken by one missing seat is overdue for technical reinforcement
Edit: Really? Downvote me for asking a super simple question? Sorry if I threaten the narrative.
https://www.weku.org/the-commonwealth/2025-05-17/kentucky-nw...
You do not need a radio license as things can be called in by phone, too.
https://www.weku.org/the-commonwealth/2025-05-17/kentucky-nw...
Edit: and during death marches those can be worked overtime on weekends to make a deadline. They're "fully staffed" and work for the short-term until burnout and turnover begins. Then those projects are always behind.
It's worth being specific: the National Weather Service operates some of the most robust automation and radar ingest pipelines on Earth, but the final go/no-go warning call is almost always human—often a single overnight forecaster on a console, monitoring a swath of counties. Automation (e.g., Warn-on-Forecast guidance) can surface threats, but the NWS intentionally doesn't have an 'auto-warn' button for tornadoes, because of the asymmetry of false positives (blow credibility, cost lives in the long run).
Budget cuts reduce redundancy and experience in those overnight shifts. When you have only one person monitoring instead of a team of two or three, you get decision fatigue and coverage holes, especially during clustered, multi-cell outbreaks. We've seen near-misses in the past, and every pro-meteorologist I know says they're playing defense against process errors, not just technology failures.
Before we point fingers or blame 'technology/automation' shortfalls, let's quantify the concrete bottleneck: skilled human decision-makers are the limiting reagent; machine learning warning aids are still years away from majority trust.
All the automation in the world with useless without a human guide to either transform production into a useful product, or useful knowledge to heed. That's why this act of trying to remove human labor is asinine. Even skilled human can't always get the right readings, so expecting a robot to do it all at this stage is just selling snake oil.
The current human-in-the-loop model exists largely because our technology hasn't been good enough yet, not because there's something inherently special about human judgment in this context. Weather prediction is fundamentally a pattern recognition problem. Pattern analysis at scale is exactly what computers do better than us.
Perhaps someone could apply to YC with this idea. There is one YC startup doing this already: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/atmo
I'm not too worried about the human factor being replaced as a whole here. Even with AI, someone needs to interpret the output and make sure the the prediction models actually work.
sanderjd•8mo ago
atotic•8mo ago
casefields•8mo ago
Abimelex•8mo ago
Have a look on "Heuristics That Almost Always Work" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
throw0101d•8mo ago
There's a problem here though: if things do eventually deteriorate (which, admittedly, there is a change will not happen), it may be too late to fix things.
If things get broken they are broken, and in this case you have risk of people's lives. And the people who did the jobs that were fired have probably moved on because they have bills to pay. If you can realize your mistake quickly enough, you can fix it quickly. This is what happened when the Very Stable Geniuses fired the folks who maintained US nuclear weapons:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43130613
Perhaps instead of l33t h4ck3rz in DOGE they should hire carpenters or woodworkers: people who, instead of a mantra of "move fast and break things", live more by "measure twice and cut once". Some measure of where the (alleged) waste is could be useful before cutting.
sanderjd•8mo ago
If it's true that they got all the tornado warnings out because they were able to be "all hands on deck" for a night they knew would have high risk, then I think this just isn't the example of DOGE getting people killed that the article wants it to be.
I fully believe that understaffing these offices could get people killed. But we don't need to claim it did until it does.
And that doesn't mean we should wait for something awful to happen to criticize the risky situation!
nisa•8mo ago
sanderjd•8mo ago
But another problem with our current government is that I'm skeptical any investigation to answer those questions will ever happen.