I hear America’s literacy rate has fallen from the high 90 percentile a few decades ago to 74% today. I shouldn’t expect you to comprehend plain English. You still don’t.
And not all ‘actual meteorologist(s)’ work for the government.
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Have yet to get a response from you that actually includes any substance. Just some insults and what aboutisms. Good luck with your almanac this year.
You’ve hit on something really critical here. It’s very trendy to use crowdsourced data for all manner of things. NOAA has obviously been using the Voluntary Observing Ship (VOS) Program for years and to great effect. It’s part of a world wide effort and it adds a significant amount of data in terms of real time observations and data points for use in models, especially in certain ocean areas where there is no other source of observations. However it is CRITICAL that crowdsource data is curated and QA/QC’d to ensure that you are not including erroneous or incorrect readings. The old garbage in, garbage out situation. This is where an agency like NOAA with rigorous scientific standards and technical experts plays a key role.
Now when we look to other uses for crowdsourced data this instance comes to mind:
As part of that discussion there’s the NOAA data which is up to date, entirely correct, and includes the rock involved in the allision:
Then there’s apparently a Navionics image with an unidentified source or collection of data:
No idea what data was or wasn’t used in the second image but the rock is nowhere to be found. To me this is a prime example of a competently surveyed and properly sourced chart product in stark contrast with a privately available product that comes from dubious or incomplete sources with zero ground truthing. If we cut, or even take away public, not for profit agencies like NOAA, we are destined to arrive at the cutting corners and good enough efforts that we too often see coming from the uninformed public or worse, private industry emphasizing profit over public safety or the public good.
You can bet that to survey just this little part of Alaska was not cheap. Putting actual people (NOAA mariners) out on the grounds for weeks at a time to entirely insonify an area for complete bottom coverage is a time consuming, laborious, and to extent dangerous task. But how else can you ensure that you have identified all the rocks and shoals present as well as their least depth? This location happened to be relatively close to Kodiak so, while the rest of the US considers this area isolated and remote, by Alaska standards this area was low hanging fruit and easy to access. Expand these survey efforts to all areas of Alaska including the Arctic and you are likely talking billions of dollars over decades to try and get up to date, accurate, and complete charts.
Here’s a summary of what NOAA is doing just this year through a combination of NOAA ships and private contractors.
NOAA Hydrographic Survey Projects 2025
Unfortunately the list of 2025 projects has changed from what was originally planned as NOAA has been forced to scale back their operations due to a shortage of mariners given that they remain unable to hire for any of their existing vacancies.
When cutting corners, arbitrarily firing ALL recent hires, and refusing to allow hiring of technical experts to fill critical vacancies, who will ultimately be responsible when resulting faulty data or products result in significant damage or even death?
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Aha, yea ok. Not a pure cost saving measure. Virtual works for large commercial craft if your head is glued to a ECDIS/ radar screen but eliminates visual cues, reinforcing the continued trend to not looking out the windows. Job well done.
The cutting of the recent hires simply because they were called probationary employees is a minor issue compared to the cutting of all probationary employees as DOGE did. Anyone even with 10+ years of on the job experience who is promoted is automatically classed as probationary for one year. Firing these people was just ignorant and an indication of the incompetence of DOGE.
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DOGE has no authority to fire anybody … as you know.
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True the sycophant clueless secretaries did the firing on DOGE’s recommendations. Hitler didn’t kill any Jews either.
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You are absolutely right that DOGE has no actual legal authority, really in regards to anything, and yet here we are with every single government employee, uniformed and civilian, required to report every week 5 things they accomplished. The information generally gets sent no where and is used for nothing but all agencies and certainly their employees are too frightened not to comply. One could easily look at people’s time cards, or job descriptions, or performance reviews or all manner of things to get the info on what people do each week, but somehow all that isn’t enough.
Imagine how much productivity is lost when you multiple the small bit of time it takes to report 5 accomplishments each week times the thousands and thousands of federal workers across every agency every week. Talk about inefficiencies and wasting of resources and yet it has been going on for 3 months straight with no end in sight. It certainly doesn’t help reduce the deficit in any way. The new normal and completely unprecedented in the history of almost 250 years of government, but somehow DOGE has no authority?
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DOGE savings per taxpayer $4,212. Wasting? Inefficiency?
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Godwin’s Law. You lose.
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I’d be very curious to see where you got that statistic.
Speaking of statistics here’s a graph of federal tax rates:
Imagine how big the deficit would be if throughout the 20th century (when America was great) we had always had the same tax rates as we do now.
I suspect if we went back to 1970 tax rates we could balance the budget and eliminate the deficit a lot faster than DOGE is.
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Who really knows what the debt is? Nobody does.
A couple of tried and true maxims spring to mind.
Firstly, Chesterton’s Fence.
Essentially don’t change things until you understand why they are as they are. Why change to 1970s taxes? Why did they change 1970s taxes?
Secondly, the Laffer curve.
Levy zero tax rate and you’ll get zero revenue. Levy 100% tax rates and you’ll get zero, so simply increasing the rate of tax doesn’t necessarily increase your revenue. Beyond a certain rate, any increase will reduce revenue as behaviour changes because of the tax rate. But somewhere in between is a sensible rate that can maximise or increase revenue.
— The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.
Attributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
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This thread has wandered too far off-topic.
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