It's another indication of the danger of the incompetency of the current administration as outlined in Michael Lewis' excellent book "The Fifth Risk". The Fifth Risk being "Project management", or lack thereof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Risk

The federal government is far more comparable to the first situation than the second. And most of the departments are extremely effective when they have leadership that believes in the mission of the agency.

Michael Lewis' the Fifth Risk highlights this pretty well.

Sad to see NOAA continue to be gutted. Michael Lewis's book the Fifth Risk provides a good look at the individuals behind services like Accuweather and how they're trying to monopolize public, tax-funded data for private profit.

>> 16. Some jobs in government may be easier to get than you imagine.

I will add to this my observation from reading Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk: if you can tolerate the bureaucracy, it's often possible to get to work on hugely impactful and highly-resourced projects early in your career by going into government.

https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/132400264...

I feel ya. I'm in a life phase where I have to believe most people are just trying to do a good job most of the time. The alternative is too bleak. Michael Lewis' The Fifth Risk most closely captures my current thinking. My TLDR: Strive to create systems and orgs which will increase likelihood of good outcomes. Peace.

A major thing the DOE does is keep track of where the world's plutonium is— it's energy-related, but also a national security matter. Michael Lewis's excellent book The Fifth Risk examines some of these agency functions in the context of what was lost when there Trump administration stepped into power with essentially no transition plan or concept of how to run them.

Yes! The Michael Lewis book is called _The Fifth Risk_, and it's an amazing read. It's a series of contrasting stories: earnest government workers who have dedicated their careers to protecting all of us from threats like nuclear proliferation, on the one hand, and on the other politicians and narrowly interested lobbyists who view government as either a threat to their self-interest or an opportunity to tilt the economic playing field.

https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/132400264...

From the NPR review of the book:

> Take Trump's choice to head National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department agency that, among other responsibilities, oversees the National Weather Service. For that critical position, Trump has chosen Barry Myers, who is CEO of the private forecasting service AccuWeather. As Lewis points out, AccuWeather repackages the weather service's own data and sells it to private concerns for a profit. Myers at one time argued that "the government should get out of the forecasting business." In other words, you want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow? Or which way that hurricane is tracking? Well, buy our app, or subscribe to our forecasts. Myers has yet to be confirmed.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/652563904/the-fifth-risk-pain...

For those interested in more background on NOAA and making money from it, I highly recommend reading The Fifth Risk[0] by Moneyball author, Michael Lewis[1]. It details how a couple private companies make a lot of money using NOAA data in interesting ways (e.g.: crop insurance (now acquired by Monsanto)). Another of those companies is AccuWeather whose CEO was appointed to head NOAA by Trump[2].

P.S.: Anyone notice that monitoring "Climate" was absent in the government announcement?

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324002646

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lewis

[2] https://oceanleadership.org/trump-taps-accuweather-ceo-head-...

>Let me recommend you read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, or at least listen to one of these interviews about it:

I'm not sure I need to read a biased polemic about how big government is good and the Trump admin is bad.

>The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day.

I've worked for government agencies, and this is certainly not how I would describe the workers there. I'd say this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21805768 would more closely represent my typical experience with civil servants.. rampant incompetence.

I know that upon entering office, the president has to appoint 1200 individuals - heads of various departments.
The president hasn’t filled these position and the ones he has have been incompetent or against its mission.

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis document this.

”Take Trump's choice to head National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department agency that, among other responsibilities, oversees the National Weather Service. For that critical position, Trump has chosen Barry Myers, who is CEO of the private forecasting service AccuWeather. As Lewis points out, AccuWeather repackages the weather service's own data and sells it to private concerns for a profit. Myers at one time argued that "the government should get out of the forecasting business." In other words, you want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow? Or which way that hurricane is tracking? Well, buy our app, or subscribe to our forecasts. Myers has yet to be confirmed.”

They almost got their dream leader of NOAA when Trump appointed the head of AccuWeather, Barry Meyers, to lead NOAA. He withdrew his nomination for health reasons, but believes the government shouldn't provide any type of direct forecasts to the public. Michael Lewis has a good write up of this in his book The Fifth Risk.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was quite effective until its leadership were unlawfully replaced with partisan hacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_...

One big federal problem with antitrust and other corporate–related law is that we have now had an unbroken half century of “conservative” domination of the US Supreme Court. Over that time consumer, worker, citizen, and small-business friendly interpretations of a wide variety of laws have been steadily replaced by interpretations friendly to wealthy/corporate interests.

That control should have been broken after Scalia died but the GOP-controlled Senate broke with any pretense of good faith or respect for norms or precedent and refused to allow even a moderate compromise candidate to come to a Senate confirmation vote. After regaining control of the presidency the Senate then eliminated the filibuster so it could force radical GOP ideologues through onto the bench.

> I'm not sure it's even possible anymore for the government to be functional at any deeper level.

This is absurd. The US civil service is full of highly competent experts without whom we would all be exposed to grave risks every day. They do their work conscientiously and seriously, largely out of the spotlight.

Let me recommend you read Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, or at least listen to one of these interviews about it:

https://www.scpr.org/programs/fresh-air/2018/10/02/65410/

https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-what-is-the-fifth-risk-with-mich...

Even without the shutdown, the U.S. air traffic control system may experience greater strain in the years to come due to a generational deficit in the number of new air traffic controllers being trained and staffed: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryncreedy/2016/01/28/contro...

This may have been an issue with Reagan firing all members of PATCO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...

Whereas before, sufficient military air traffic controllers were willing and able to take on the job, today there is no such reserve.

One book I read recently on the topic of arbitraging the social trust was "The Fifth Risk"; it's a good read. https://smile.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/1324002...

Doom and gloom as compared to what? I would say it's Doom and gloom before I'd call it a "hoax". If anything, I see a lot of people on here making flu-like comparisons. I'd say I'm more doomish than that, too.

Because so many people are trying to conceal information to keep tourism going, stability, re-election, GDP and so on, we really don't know how bad it is.

But when's the last time a flu caused a 13% sell-off? It seems pretty serious.

After reading The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, I'm really starting to be convinced our collective willful ignorance is becoming problematic.

This is a great time to check out Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk (https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/132400264...), which does a deep dive into NOAA, the weather service, and the wretched attempts to strangle the usefulness of this public service while keeping it alive enough to act as a massive subsidy to accuweather and related bottom feeders. It should disgust both libertarians and proponents of active government, and really anyone paying attention. Accuweather wants NWS to do all the forecasting work but then funnel all the data through Accu and a few other private hands, who of course want to profit from this data but not pay for it.

Weather Underground has a questionable track record with respect to foreclosing public access to weather data. Leadership at both the Weather Company and Accuweather are good friends with Trump. Shortly after Trump appointed Barry Myers head of NOAA (former CEO of Accuweather), NOAA dramatically curtailed its public data access in lieu of exclusive access to large companies like Weather Underground. For more on this, check out Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.

The meteorologist made some very valid points, though. The Sinclair alert system isn’t clear and well-designed, unlike the long-standing NWS alert system.

Indirectly related, but it’s worth reading up on some of the political battles being fought in the US meteorological world at the moment.

An Accuweather executive, Barry Myers, was nominated to head the NOAA, which he’s spent years lobbying against to cut off public access to government weather data[0]. This story was featured in Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Fifth Risk, which documented instances where private companies are trying to block public access to various types of government data.

Private interests are materially altering reporting systems that have worked for years, and many professional meteorologists are becoming more concerned about this influence.

0: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...

It's from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) [0]. The audience for OSTP is cross-Federal, and the contributing agency scope for this site is wide. The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) [1] used to do this kind of technology policy work too. OTA served US Congress, is no more, and may or may not be worthing bringing back [2].

Personally, I like seeing deep (no pun intended) technology expertise at work in US government. The Michael Lewis book "The Fifth Risk" was hagiographic that way.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/it-is-time-to-restore-the...

There's a lot about this in Michael Lewis' "The Fifth Risk". The most maddening part is that the company lobbying to weaken the National Weather Service can't replicate much of what the government is doing here and sells a lot of repackaged NWS data. I suppose it doesn't matter to them if dismantling the service leads to less weather data being available overall, as long as their piece of the market gets bigger.