Summary

Elon Musk’s staffers entered NOAA and the Department of Commerce without clearance, raising concerns over budget cuts and downsizing.

Project 2025, a conservative plan linked to former Trump officials, calls for dismantling NOAA, citing its climate research as harmful to U.S. prosperity.

Critics warn such cuts could impact weather forecasting, ocean conservation, and fisheries.

NOAA declined to comment, while experts fear an aggressive strategy to weaken the agency before legal challenges can halt changes.

    • @IzzyScissor
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      153 hours ago

      Seriously. No clearance should mean no entrance. If they try to use force, the use of force to prevent their entry is both warranted and necessary.

  • @[email protected]
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    395 hours ago

    I’d like to remind everyone that NOAA is under the Department of Commerce because, as it turns out, understanding weather patterns, being able to accurately forecast weather changes, is kind of important to businesses.

    • @Treczoks
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      54 hours ago

      Yes, but they claim climate change is real, so they must be abolished! /s

  • @logicbomb
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    466 hours ago

    I remember when Musk bought Twitter and then immediately started trying to save money by literally just turning off services to see what breaks.

    That actually wouldn’t have been the stupidest idea if he had done it in a test environment rather than production, or even if Twitter was a small website that didn’t mind downtime. But he did it in production on a huge site that people relied on being up, so it actually was the stupidest idea.

    And now he’s bringing the same stupidest energy to government. No investigation. No calculation. Just a toddler who has been put in front of a lot of switches.

    • @NotMyOldRedditName
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      3 hours ago

      Unless twitter had a test system doing millions of varying actions a second, I’m not sure a test environment would find those problems, or at least not quickly. Sometimes those services get added to help spread loads that you might not encounter otherwise.

      Tbh I’m not sure what level of automated testing these sites have, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the services are tested in isolation at scale, but not against each other at scale, and that there’s some general understanding that the link between them at scale is okay if both individually are okay?

      Still absolutely terrible to do that to a live environment.

    • @[email protected]
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      205 hours ago

      Inevitable. At some point the United States would run out of countries and have to invade the United States.

  • @Treczoks
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    84 hours ago

    No more hurricane forecasts to make America safe again !

    • @[email protected]
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      3 hours ago

      Well they did it to themselves, if they just forecasted only sunny days then they could stay! But no they had to keep bringing in illegal Mexican hurricanes!

      spoiler

      /s cause at this point someone might actually believe this

  • @Boddhisatva
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    867 hours ago

    Rejoice people! We will no longer be terrorized by weather alerts reporting possibly devastating weather events! Trump’s Redhats led by his South African immigrant billionaire henchman will make sure that Trump’s Sharpy of Truth will protect us!

      • @P1nkman
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        85 hours ago

        It’s easier to just use a Sharpie to make the hurricane love.

  • @ceenote
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    186 hours ago

    Maybe this is the inevitable endgame of a society that tries to harness greed the way capitalism does. Something can be working completely sustainably and for the general good, like NOAA does, and they still try to take parts of it away just so they can extract profits by selling to you what used to be free.

    Its why they hate work from home. Covid came along and necessitated that workers en masse be given a benefit, and capitalists werent able to extract any concessions in return because it was an emergency. So, they claw it back, but you might be able to get a special exception if you play ball.

  • Flying Squid
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    557 hours ago

    They have already stated their intention of replacing the National Weather Service with the very ironically named, and privately-owned, AccuWeather, so I guess this is the start of that.

    • Admiral Patrick
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      407 hours ago

      …doesn’t AccuWeather (like most weather services) pull their data from NWS?

      • Flying Squid
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        417 hours ago

        For now, yes. Under the plan outlined in Project 2025, AccuWeather gets control of all of the NWS weather stations.

        • Admiral Patrick
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          7 hours ago

          Jesus.

          My empathy is all tied up with the marginalized groups, minorities, federal workers, and others already negatively affected by this administration. If some yokels in flyover states who voted for him get taken out by a tornado because they had to watch a 30 second ad before the weather alert would show up, I got nothing for them.

          • Flying Squid
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            267 hours ago

            Unfortunately, plenty of people who live in flyover states also tried to stop these people from getting into office. There are fewer of them, but still millions.

    • HubertManne
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      66 hours ago

      um. so. do they know accuweather relies on the government to do their forecasts. almost all weather forecasts originate with the us or european agencies and then have some local radar and sensors to get local temps, windspeeds, and precipitate.

      • Flying Squid
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        156 hours ago

        Yep, but they plan to give AccuWeather all the NWS monitoring stations.

        • HubertManne
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          46 hours ago

          The sattelites because I was under the impression most monitoring stations were owned locally but everyone shares with the government and in return gets access to the information?

          • skulblaka
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            44 hours ago

            “What’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine.” I expect Musk just assumes he owns all of those and if he ever finds out he doesn’t then he will then assume ownership of it. And then probably try to sell you access to your own weather station.

    • @[email protected]
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      25 hours ago

      I get the impression that if you chopped off his head, he would just grow 2 back. Then we would have twice as much bullshit excreting from his blowhole