You're referring to the Space Weather Prediction Research Center website, yes? I just checked the Newsroom for NOAA SWPC. There was nothing mentioned. I also visited their social media at https://x.com/nwsswpc and https://www.facebook.com/NWSSWPC/ Nothing there either; so far, so good.
I couldn't read the entire article due to paywall. From what I did read, it doesn't seem like there is ANY alternative, none at all now, for the public to access NOAA Research.
AccuWeather has been lobbying to remove weather data from the public view for years. The idea here is that AccuWeather will have access to this data and then sell forecasts to the rest of the country.
I can't even imagine what the rationale would be for doing this:
>The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency is poised to eliminate most websites tied to its research division under plans for the cancellation of a cloud web services contract, a move that could snarl operations at several labs.
If Bloomberg is correct, it seems that the contract was cancelled prior to developing (and testing and announcing to the public etc.) any replacement.
>A contract for the services across NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research — known as NOAA Research — has been targeted for “early termination,” according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg News. As a result, almost all external websites reliant on Amazon, Google and WordPress services are poised to vanish early Saturday morning in Washington, wiping the bulk of the unit’s work, which includes climate and environmental science research, from public view.
Many Americans rely upon NOAA Research communications, both businesses and individual citizens. This worries me, not because I think that Trump is a fascist or because of my political views, but rather, because it suggests a lack of competent government leadership. NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore? I'm not a Bloomberg subscriber, so what I quoted was all I could read about it. I hope there's more info, e.g. about what the replacement delivery system to the public, will be...
> NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore?
You are not thinking far ahead enough. This is just the first step.
Step 1: these Amazon and Google cloud contracts are extraneous; let's cancel. The public can always find an alternate way of getting the research data.
Step 2: the number of times such research data is accessed has drastically decreased, suggesting that the public has not found them useful; let's cancel the research projects.
Step 3: these researchers aren't doing any research any more; they don't seem to have any work output; let's fire them for cause.
Republicans have for a long time wanted to end free weather information and hand that job over to for-profit companies like AccuWeather[1]. Trump v1 nominated AccuWeather's CEO to run the organization[2]. Project 2025 calls for breaking up NOAA and commercializing it[3]. This is not some hidden agenda, and you don't have to speculate about their intentions. As is the case for everything these guys do, they are open and brazen about it.
I doubt that was the intent. They are cancelling contracts willy nilly right now. NOAA is getting hit harder because of their association with climate science but this administration is not doing a lick of diligence on any of these moves.
I ran into the same thing recently. Did you end up seeing a boiler plate template site filled with Lorem Ipsum?
I believe there were certain DNS resolvers that seemed to have been incorrectly resolving. Whether that was intentional or not I didn't have time to look into.
archive.is blocks most DNS requests coming from Cloudflare. One would either have to hard code one of their IP's in their hosts file or use a different resolver.
We'll likely never know for sure, since they will just claim that the goal is to save money. There's even a grain of truth to it: AWS and GCP are the most expensive offerings in that class. Of course, if the goal was actually to save money -- then first off, Wordpress wouldn't be getting cut. Also, the plan would be to migrate to more cost effective alternatives (of which there are several), not to just turn the thing off.
Firstly, they want to dismantle the government piece by piece and sell it off to the highest bidder, privatizing it. Secondly, anything they view as contrary to their world view, despite of (or regardless of) scientific evidence stating otherwise. Eg: they believe anything to do with climate change is completely bogus and don't believe there's any value in studying it, or hiding it's results for the benefit of their friends in the oil/gas industries.
They were fired by the administration. Looks to me like the system working. Government agency does something stupid. Congress investigates. Situation corrected. I'm looking forward to that oversight of the current administration. Enjoy your kite.
> In November 2024, FEMA fired a supervisor for directing relief workers to avoid assisting homes displaying support for President Donald Trump in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. In response, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation into political discrimination at FEMA and held a hearing with former Administrator Deanne Criswell. This week, FEMA informed the Oversight Committee that it has terminated three additional employees for failing to uphold the agency’s standards of conduct. The agency is also implementing additional training to reinforce that political affiliation must never be a factor in disaster relief efforts.
No one is getting rid of it? A couple, non-critical websites are being changed up. They will come back online once they are moved off over priced cloud providers. Its called efficiency.
The party that is NOT pushing tariffs is the one who said, between 2012 and 2016, that "they're NEVER coming back" (referring to return of factories and manufacturing jobs).
That same party DID try to bring back manufacturing between 2020 and 2024. I think they would have been more successful if it hadn't been for COVID19, for which neither party is to blame.
Manufacturers operate on a much longer timeline than 3,5 days. But your point is totally valid, about the flip-flopping. One reason might be because Trump is using tariffs as an economic weapon. Once he gets the concessions he wants (I don't know exactly what those are for... e.g. Canada) he then can say, okay, I won't tariff you after all.
EXACTLY! All the excitement over more and more automation means almost no one will have income to buy anything because almost everyone will be unemployed. So what is the use of producing goods and providing services then, even at lower cost? I don't know.
As for UBI, who is going to provide the money? I've never heard anyone talk about how that is supposed to work. YOUR comment is the first time I have ever heard, well, read, that point brought up. The government can't pay for UBI because there will no longer be a tax base of income earners due to lack of income. Companies can only contribute to the extent that they have customers. I suppose that a super-efficient, low labor economy could be almost entirely export-driven but that assumes the rest of the world isn't in the same situation.
I mean we could start taxing the ultra-rich, who have a greater share of the pool of dollars than they have at any point during history. Pick a number, ooh maybe 200% of the median income, something well below the point where you stop being human and become a giant bag of money pretending to be human, anything above that gets taken away by the state and redistributed to everyone. Rip up all the laws that create ways for people to hide money from taxes. The giant bags of money pretending to be people will scream, and try to make this stop; their money can buy a lot of politicians, and perhaps it will only happen if it’s that or the guillotine.
We could also acknowledge that money is a fiction; money is continually created by the banks under the authority of the government, and money can just be destroyed when it’s taxed instead of thinking it has to “balance the federal budget”. “A dollar” is not tied to any physical store of value but we still love to pretend it is. It’s just a fraction of the overall economic worth of the entire US, and entirely too many of those fractions are in the hands of huge bags of money pretending to be people.
Or we could just ditch “money” entirely. Add things like “lodging” and “food” to the Bill of Rights. There’s probably a lot of problems with this! And a lot of them probably rhyme with the problem that some people just really want to become big bags of money pretending to be people!
You think earning twice the median income (for an American, this means weekly earnings of US $2,278) turns people into "giant bags of money" that are no longer human?
I'm scraping by on less than that in an entire month so maybe the number I pulled out of my ass is a little low.
Bezos makes ~8mil an hour according to some quick Internet searches and that sure is way over the "giant bag of money pretending to be human" threshold IMHO. The idiot-in-chief is worth ~$5mil and he sure is way over that threshold too.
>Factoring the entire global supply chain into your product, it makes much more sense to do the work in a country where work costs less. If the additional cost to import is less than the delta on labor, you've won capitalism or something.
Yes, you've won capitalism, but sometimes, profit is a lower priority. Resiliency and the ability to avoid critical supply chain dependencies are important too. We learned that during COVID, when we only had one facility to make baby formula in the U.S., and we had a dire shortage of masks, gloves, etc. because we imported it all from China.
Another aspect of resilience is avoiding long attenuated supply chains, even if it is cheaper...for now. Why? Because there is a finite amount of fossil fuels (necessary in greater amounts for non-domestic maritime and air transit). Also, lower fossil fuel usage due to in-country sourcing would be better for the climate. I realize that the Trump administration isn't concerned about that! But it is true regardless.
I seem to recall the shortage being "dire", but short-lasting. The market adapted and supplied the needed materiel. Is there any evidence or theory showing that a more protectionist system would fare any better?
You don't have tariff regimes within the common market, that's true. You do have tariffs on goods that are imported from any country other than the 24 in the EEA.
Interesting! It says Apple investors haven't voted in favor of any proposals not endorsed by Apple management since 2022. Shareholders also rejected 3 separate proposals for Apple to write transparency reports about:
the risks of its work on AI; recent decisions related to child sex abuse material; the company's charitable giving practices.
NOAA Office of Space Weather Observations news https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news-events/search-news?combine=... didn't list any changes either. I hope you don't lose access on Saturday morning.
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