61–70 of 227 posts
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do you care about climate data? then pay. or else you dont actually care enough to be inconvenienced. put up or shut up. i care, so I'll start. will make a $15 donation (as soon as i figure out how)
Can we do the same thing for military funding? Default its budget to zero, and if anyone cares, let them donate a few bucks?
This may be a controversial view, but I don't think we should trust the actor in charge of regulating and limiting emissions with its own supervision. The Federal Government has a plethora of agencies which regulate pollution and energy usage; how can we trust either its legislative or executive branch to ensure that their creations are effective or efficient? To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions ca…
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
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Private companies can pay for their own data collection and if they have a dispute with the government's analysis, they can go to court. Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts? How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.
That would be great if the courts were actually neutral arbitrators and not captured political entities.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
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> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent. They could put something together like "a budget" and then that mon…
You are skipping a few layers here. Like those who know stuff like «crumbling asbestos air ducts in schools may be a bad idea». Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?
They may have, unfortunately, proved DOGE's point. The new climate.gov probably costs a fraction of the old one.
That's easy to do. No one has expectations of this one. As soon as a government website is down, it's an outrage. I'm sure money could've been saved. But the cost of this site really isn't the hosting, it's the data being gatherd with all the research
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They’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service. But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent. They could put something together like "a budget" and then that mon…
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
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Would be amazing if the reps actually did what we wanted instead of what they are paid by outside entities to do. We should try that!
What do you mean by outside entities? Foreign governments?
January 2013: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/call-time-congressional-fundr...
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
April 2016: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-are-members-of-congr...
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
They may have, unfortunately, proved DOGE's point. The new climate.gov probably costs a fraction of the old one.
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.