“Researchers say the satellites themselves are operating normally and do not appear to have suffered any errors that would physically prevent the data from continuing to be collected and distributed, so the abrupt data halt might have been an intentional decision.”
Wait, the U.S. aren’t even going to try selling the satellites? We’re just scrapping them?
toomuchtodo · 4h ago
The intent is to disable the capability to ignore the data. If you allow access to someone else, you're not preventing the data capture and dissemination. If the data shows hurricanes are intensifying in strength due to climate change, and you no longer capture the data, you can say with a straight face "No it isn't and you can't prove it."
How large systems with exposure to these places (insurance, capital markets) respond is what you should look to next. What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
I think it’s even more nefarious than that. They can attack other countries that claim intensifying climate and weather scenarios by saying their data is biased while claiming to have the best data in the world but not share for national security reasons. While this may seem like something unbelievable to you or me it is easily eaten up by their supporters who love propaganda. Like, my republican parents are convinced robotaxi is amaxing after the unreasonably bad debut in Austin. They simply didn’t hear or want to hear that Tesla would not produce a working product.
whatshisface · 3h ago
They could claim that even with the satellites. The "alternate reality" can be anything - if facts aren't inserted into it the people inside won't know.
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
Idiots will buy it. The courts won’t. Cutting off the data stymies the latter.
pstuart · 2h ago
The courts are compelled to defer to SCOTUS, which has demonstrated that it is ideologically aligned with the regime.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> SCOTUS, which has demonstrated that it is ideologically aligned with the regime
If you read SCOTUS's opinions this is obviously false. Alito and Thomas are bought. But the others have their own quirks and agendas.
tialaramex · 2h ago
You could probably imagine that ACB is just very stupid I guess? She's made choices which only make sense if they're out of blind loyalty to the man who gave her a job she shouldn't have or because she's not smart enough to understand the consequences.
For ordinary people it can feel reasonable to keep your head down and hope that somehow this blows over. But for SCOTUS it's entirely within their power to draw a line, and it seems like at best their idea has become "Maybe if we give him what he wants he'll go away?" which is dumb, Kipling wrote his famous poem "Dane-geld" about this, it's well over a century old and it's about a mistake England (or rather one of its Kings) made last millennium (when he wrote it, ie now over 1000 years ago).
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> could probably imagine that ACB is just very stupid I guess? She's made choices which only make sense if they're out of blind loyalty to the man who gave her a job
Barrett has sided with the liberals on various decisions. SCOTUS has a problem. But its problem isn't blind loyalty to Trump. It's that there is a deeper conviction about the way the world should work that sometimes aligns with Trump in ways that are deeply damaging to our society.
If you want to see a judge who's blindly deferential to Trump, that's Aileen Cannon.
KerrAvon · 56m ago
SCOTUS is essentially blindly local to Trump — pay attention to the latest Constitution-shredding decisions; they sure wouldn’t be doing those under a Dem president, and they’re twisting themselves in knots trying to make the illogical logical — it just manifests differently at their level.
pstuart · 41m ago
This is clear to all except partisans who put loyalty to their party over their country.
It's not like we're asking for SCOTUS to accept constitutional slights from the left side of the aisle, its about consistency of reasoning regardless of which party is involved.
As you've noted, the conservatives of SCOTUS are working backwards from their desired goals rather than pursuing justice for all.
Buttons840 · 1h ago
> while claiming to have the best data in the world but not share for national security reasons
"The getaway car was green."
"No it wasn't!"
"What color was it then?"
"I don't know what color it was!"
...
mschuster91 · 3h ago
> What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
Insurance companies will just be sending up their own satellites, and that is the true goal. Force people to pay money to private entities for a service that used to be provided by the government for free.
Functionally, in such a system there is no difference between that and regular taxes, just in a private system there's opportunities for those in power (because you gotta have a lot of money to send up a powerful satellite) to make even more money.
With the current US administration, always look at the grifting opportunities, that will explain virtually all policy decisions.
wk_end · 3h ago
(…and guess who’s company they’ll be contracting those launches to?)
cma · 2h ago
SpaceX earns less money if we don't relaunch what we already have, and they have a satellite design division, Musk is somewhat on the outs with the admin right now but was behind lots of the cuts like this.
On the other hand, in the first Trump admin the AccuWeather spam site guy was trying to restrict NWS data to private companies:
I think AccuWeather opposed the Project 2025 plan to remove weather tracking frothe government though, they just wanted it to be tax payer paid but exclusively provided to corporations for sale to make competitive upstart weather sites harder to establish (you can bid more if you already have lots of users, without them you have to build something so great and potentially profitable that you can get VC to fund your purchases of the data).
It feels like the title here isn't accurate - we haven't lost the satellite at all. It wasn't destroyed, it wasn't de-orbited (on purpose or accidentally), it wasn't hacked or hijacked.
Can we ask dang to change the title to something like "Blocking of key US satellite data could...."?
ars · 1h ago
This story is NOT TRUE.
There is one operating satellite in this constellation, and congress voted to shut down the program in 2015.
The DMSP program was discontinued in 2015 by a vote in congress[1]. Virtually every working stallelite in this program has failed. As best as I can tell there's just a single working one specifically NOAA-19[2].
Instead the program has switched to JPSS[3] which is part of GEOSS[4].
- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data
- These data will continue to be measured after Monday
- the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data
- This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.
Which of the above are “not true”?
IAmGraydon · 20m ago
While you're correct that Congress voted to phase out the program, you're wrong on a number of levels. First, NOAA-19 is not a DMSP satellite. Second, many of the DMSP satellites are still in orbit and functioning - even the very Wikipedia article you linked to shows this. There was no legitimate reason to cut off their data that we've been given. Third, JPSS and GEOS lack some of the capabilities of the DMSP, for example the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder that was still providing highly valuable real-time microwave data, including precipitation rates, sea surface wind speeds, sea ice coverage, water vapor levels and cloud properties.
So to be frank, the only thing that's "NOT TRUE" is nearly all of your post.
timewizard · 4h ago
That claim does not seem justified.
> 2016 failure of DMSP 19 without replacement[edit]
On 11 February 2016, a power failure left both the command-and-control subsystem and its backup without the ability to reach the satellite's processor, according to the U.S. Air Force Space Command investigation released in July 2016 that also announced that DMSP 5D-3/F19 was considered to be 'lost'. The satellite's data can still be used, until it ceases pointing the sensors towards the Earth. The satellite was the most recent on-orbit, having been launched on 3 April 2014.[15]
> The failure only left F16, F17 and F18 – all significantly past their expected 3–5 year lifespan – operational. F19's planned replacement was not carried out because Congress ordered the destruction of the already constructed F20 probe to save money by not having to pay its storage costs. It is unlikely that a new DMSP satellite would be launched before 2023; by then the three remaining satellites should no longer be operational.[16]
To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That's the guardian for you. Remove context. Generate hyperbole. Beg for money.
counters · 3h ago
> To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That doesn't accurately capture the reason why there's outrage here. In the weather community, we're constantly thinking through contingencies because a great deal of things are out of our control - and we rely on aging infrastructure, much of which is already flaky to begin with.
Data outages and data loss happens. But there's no reason to allow a _preventable_ data loss to occur. The DMSP data is still being collected, it's just not being distributed downstream. And the decision to make this policy change was seemingly done rapidly and with no input or feedback from the user community of this data - both inside and outside the federal government.
There's no reason to turn off the spigot of this data. And there certainly is no reason to do so abruptly and with virtually no notice. As a consequence, the community is limited in its ability to adapt. For instance, it would take time (and money) to spin up more hurricane hunting resources to replace the overpass data that the SSMI/S instrument captures. Some private companies operate PMW satellite constellations and we could accelerate the acquisition of these data, but there are limited (read: none) federal mechanisms to do this and due to vertical integration in the weather industry, the operators of these constellations may not actually be inclined to do so - and certainly won't do so on the cheap, especially for the federal government.
So this isn't hyperbole. This is a really big deal. It might not be visible to you, but there is a panic and scramble occurring in the weather community to figure out what to do from here.
And for the record - yes, the same panic would happen if the DMSP satellites failed suddenly due to natural causes. But this current situation could've - and should've - been prevented.
mschuster91 · 3h ago
> Some private companies operate PMW satellite constellations and we could accelerate the acquisition of these data, but there are limited (read: none) federal mechanisms to do this and due to vertical integration in the weather industry, the operators of these constellations may not actually be inclined to do so - and certainly won't do so on the cheap, especially for the federal government.
That's the goal, actually. You can be sure someone in the admin owns stock of these companies and pushed for this policy for this very reason.
counters · 2h ago
The companies I'm referring to are (generally) not publicly traded, so it's not quite that simple. Is it possible that some sort of backroom shenanigans are going on here? Yeah, absolutely, especially as several knowledgable folks speaking publicly about this episode are pointing their fingers at opaque procedure within Space Force.
But Hanlon's razor ought to apply until shown otherwise.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> companies I'm referring to are (generally) not publicly traded
Stock doesn't have to be publicly traded to be traded.
counters · 21m ago
You're right, but I would stress that this is an over-simplification of the entangled financial interests that _might_ be at play - and there simply isn't any evidence that has been presented pointing in that direction.
cyanydeez · 27m ago
Trump uses hanlons razor to improve his grift outcomes.
mschuster91 · 2h ago
> But Hanlon's razor ought to apply until shown otherwise
I'm no longer willing to grant this administration this privilege. The last few months were an utter clownshow of corruption.
counters · 17m ago
It just isn't helpful to assume malice. Even for the most ardent, ideological Heartland Institute or Heritage Foundation conservative, there is still a path forward in discussing unintended consequences. Just look at the post-Liberation Day rollback of blanket tariffs. At some point, the consequences of actions are felt. Systems respond even when the firmest hand tries to steady them.
At some point you take your hand off the burning stove, even if it means amputating your arm. Some folks should prepare for that contingency while those of us who can still stomach it pursue reason.
margalabargala · 2h ago
Ah, so basically if you have a car that's 5 years out of warranty but still runs fine, and the government comes in and takes your keys so you can't drive it, that would be your fault for not having gotten a new car sooner?
mlyle · 3h ago
The article mentions the three remaining operational satellites.
Generally, you use space hardware until it dies, which is hopefully well beyond the design life.
trauco · 1h ago
The satellites that are still up are still collecting critical data. That’s not disputed.
mensetmanusman · 4h ago
NOAA-20 is better and will still be available.
Also from NOAA: “Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.”
It's part of the Administration's war on ... Florida?
Rebelgecko · 4h ago
The writing has been on the wall for decades, especially since 2015 or so when Congress basically started shuttering DMSP.
oksowhat · 3h ago
I was about to say this -- the impact is to deep red states -- Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama.
They all voted for this with extreme skew towards the current policies. What is the point of trying to save this satellite data if the very people most affected dont care for it?
throw0101c · 52m ago
> It's part of the Administration's war on ... Florida?
The administration of Florida has a war on the idea of climate change:
This allows (certain) Florida politicians to put their head in the sand even more than they already have.
ars · 1h ago
This is such a bad article. They shut down this specific program in 2015, and switched to JPSS instead.
There is no war on anyone, and this has nothing to do with Trump, DOGS, or Climate change. Rather there were too many satellite failures, leaving just a single operating one in orbit.
BriggyDwiggs42 · 1h ago
There was no reason not to continue providing the data from the satellite. It’s still operational.
BenjiWiebe · 12m ago
I agree with both of you. Unnecessary fear mongering, but also a shortsighted pointless (malicious?) move.
deadbabe · 4h ago
It could help lower insurance costs.
jonwachob91 · 3h ago
That's not at all how insurance companies price risk.
Unknown risk is more risk, and more risk is more expensive.
Therefore, unknown hurricane data is more risky and thus more expensive.
If you know your car's engine is going to need replaced after exactly 100,000 miles, you know to save up for a new engine or a new car - and you know how long you have to save, so you can precisely set aside an appropriate figure every month.
If you know your car's engine will die sometime within the next 15,000 miles, you know you need to start saving up immediately, but b/c you don't know when in the next 15,000 miles you have to rush your saving.
If you have no idea when your car's engine is going to die, you are likely to end up dead engine and little to no savings.
deadbabe · 3h ago
Hurricane risk has been grossly exaggerated for years. Every year people say it will be the end of Florida as we know it. But those promised hurricanes never come. The worst is some flooding and damage at coastal areas, but it’s always anti-climactic.
The real reason insurance is high is because of fraudulent claim risk. Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida. That data is useless.
counters · 2h ago
> Hurricane risk has been grossly exaggerated for years
Year-over-year, economic impacts and disruptions due to tropical cyclones are dramatically rising. Most of this is an exposure issue. But long-tail events - like Andrew's utter devastation of Homestead in 1992 or Katrina's unique confluence of storm surge in urban/suburban parishes in LA - can and do happen.
One day, there will be another Galveston or Homestead.
deadbabe · 2h ago
There won’t be another Andrew because the building codes were changed so that all new construction must withstand category 5 storm force, which when Andrew came around was not a requirement. Over time, there is a natural selection that occurs where destroyed buildings are replaced with stronger buildings with stricter codes.
counters · 14m ago
> There won’t be another Andrew because the building codes were changed so that all new construction must withstand category 5 storm force
I sincerely hope you're right, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting that this will not be the case, owing to a multitude of factors:
- not all housing stock is <30 years old and has been properly retrofitted to meet state specs
- the climates around the Gulf, which tend to be more humid, can lead to premature degradation of things like strengthened anchor bolts and roof attachments
- there continue to be immense factors related to cost and time-to-build which provide significant negative pressure towards cutting corners and minimum-compliance which may mitigate some of the attendant benefits of strengthened building codes
An event like Andrew _is the selection event_ that you're referring to.
buttercraft · 1h ago
What about the flooding?
sorcerer-mar · 1h ago
....all of which makes them more expensive to insure (and build, obviously)...
jonwachob91 · 1h ago
I'm from Florida - born and raised. I've never once heard anyone call any hurricane "the end of Florida as we know it". What I have heard, and seen, is extreme damages caused to homes and cars even hundreds of miles away from the eye of the storm.
In 2022, Hurricane Ian caused extreme flooding in the Orlando-region, including in areas that have never suffered from hurricane flooding before. For me personally, all 3 cars parked at my house were total losses b/c of the flood damage.
The extreme and extensive damages in the Appalachian region last fall is another great example of hurricane risk not being "grossly exaggerated".
margalabargala · 2h ago
> Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida.
I'm going to go with less, though I suppose you could call "experience widespread destruction, get bailed out by the federal government, rebuild in the same spot" to be a permanent solution.
Florida has maybe solved cat 1-2 hurricanes.
NickC25 · 1h ago
>The worst is some flooding and damage at coastal areas, but it’s always anti-climactic.
The residents of what used to be Ft. Meyers Beach would probably disagree with you.
>Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida.
I have been in Florida for nearly a decade now. I'd say that the above statement is at best, disingenuous. It's just not true. MAYBE Cat1 hurricanes are a solved problem, but nothing above that. The busiest economic center in Florida (Miami's Brickell area) is 6 feet above sea level. Any major storm locks that part of town down for days. My own building's parking lot is 5 feet above sea level, and yes, it's flooded every time we have a storm.
mindslight · 3h ago
"I'm not moving the goalposts because my argument doesn't have any"
whatshisface · 3h ago
Insurance companies aren't going to charge less for not knowing, they'll charge more.
oksowhat · 3h ago
The rebuilds happen with federal FEMA dollars and there is an entire cottage industry of re-builders who take federal funds, rebuild homes -- and then do it again two years later. https://www.fema.gov/node/what-home-repair-assistance
softwaredoug · 2h ago
The problem of important projects surviving political change is a tough one.
A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
I realize privatization is an ugly word, but could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Can we make it possible to fund initiatives in a multinational manner where countries contribute to these efforts, but if one country blinks out, then you still have it go along?
Shivatron · 1h ago
> A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
We already did. The legislative branch allocates funds for stuff that the people deem worthy. That budget becomes law. The Constitution says the "President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There's even a specific law that prevents the President from withholding Congressionally-approved funds.
What you are seeing here is not a lack of designed resilience, it's the wilful removal of that system.
cwillu · 2h ago
If a president can ignore the laws requiring those projects to exist, the president can ignore the laws protecting private companies from being nationalized and shut down.
So IIRC for the last 50 years the DMSP satellites broadcast all their data in the clear. If the program is only shutting down the ground stations and data distribution, it seems like an opportunity for some researchers to buy some SDRs and start collecting their own data.
I'm actually surprised that the successors to DMSP don't meet the same needs. Or is the problem that they do and the government just doesn't share that data?
HichamCh · 3h ago
Welp, guess I'll start investing in carrier pigeons with tiny barometers. Back to the old ways!
8bitsrule · 3h ago
Is loss of automobiles and reverting to horses next?
Frost1x · 3h ago
We can all become Amish while Bezos, Trump, etc. fly around in their privately owned 747s. Perfect society for our capital and power ownership class… that is until the hounds are at the door threatening the security of their capital or the economy downturn makes it far enough their wealth and power won’t buy the level of opulence they expect on the daily. Difficult to fly around if no one’s producing runways and jet fuel, etc.
No comments yet
sampl3username · 3h ago
Is the satellite link encrypted? Maybe radio amateurs can continue to receive its signals.
Rebelgecko · 3h ago
No encryption*. I think they broadcast on S-band which isn't necessarily compatible with a $20 hobbyist rtl-sdr, but still possible with more advanced amateur setups
* Ok that's an oversimplification. They actually turn encryption on while the satellite is over certain areas. But if you're in the Continental US I think it's in the clear
>The loss of DMSP comes as Noaa’s weather and climate monitoring services have become critically understaffed this year as Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative has instilled draconian cuts to federal environmental programs.
Translation:
"We can't actually say this was DOGE, so we're going to imply it using emotionally charged words, and 90% of folks with bad media literacy will come away thinking it was DOGE (just check the reddit comments)."
This in-vogue method of "lying without lying" is shockingly common nowadays, but apparently it's okay for media to lie because Bad Man Bad.
Larrikin · 3h ago
It was DOGE and preparation to sell the data or ignore the science so they can continue to profit until they are dead.
DOGE is an organization that exist with the goal to do things like this. You have no evidence it wasn't them other than empathically saying the emperor has clothes on. All evidence we have implicates them.
ars · 1h ago
DOGE did not exist in 2015. This project was shut down in 2015.
chomp · 3h ago
I don’t understand what you’re complaining about here. Lying?
schiffern · 3h ago
Yes, when the media lies it's bad. People used to understand that fact.
Now media gets a free pass on certain lies because Bad Man Bad, and (evidently) people aren't even allowed to point out the lie.
Hint: when the media can make up whatever they want about someone, they can quickly twist perception to make anyone into the Bad Man.
mlyle · 3h ago
Did DOGE not ditch hundreds of probationary employees at NOAA, cancel numerous contracts, get 1000 people to take early retirement offers, get rid of buildings, etc?
And now the current funding request enacts a ~30% funding cut.
I'm not sure the factual issue you're seeing. Is it that the statement wasn't definitive enough in saying that DOGE apparently was a large part of instituting these cuts?
(Yes, I know OPM implemented many of these programs, but they're apparently at DOGE's request, named after the "Fork in the Road" initiative at Twitter, using data gathered by DOGE IT staffers, &c. If we give credit for any cuts, we have to give them credit for significant cuts at NOAA.)
msgodel · 3h ago
My understanding is this was set up to happen roughly a decade ago and is just now manifesting. It has pretty much nothing to do with DOGE.
counters · 2h ago
We don't if, or to what extent, DOGE was involved or influential in the decision-making here.
Yes, the DMSP program was aging and slated to wind down as replacements - both federal and commercial - came online in the second half of the 2020's. But in general, if valid and useful data continues to stream from these types of satellites, you use it and monitor for disruption.
As someone who uses the DMSP data every single day, let me be very clear: there was no warning or expectation that such an abrupt change was going to happen. Yes, we all have contingency plans for if a satellite fails or a data link goes down. But to be given basically 5 days notice that a significant, mission-critical asset would be taken offline? That doesn't - and shouldn't - happen.
No comments yet
lynndotpy · 3h ago
Your premise that they're "lying" is unsubstantiated. Your comments read only like dress around the "fake news" bit.
schiffern · 3h ago
Before you claim there's nothing happening and The Guardian didn't mean it, check social media comments elsewhere to see how many people misinterpret this news item into "DOGE/Elon did it."
I would bet you, but that money's too easy. :)
Again, this exact conversation is the genius behind 'lying _without lying_.' You can always claim in high-literacy communities like HN that no, nobody would ever be silly enough misread it like that, all while watching your misinformation spread across the low-literacy communities like facebook and reddit.
The Guardian et al has done this too often for plausible deniability. Even I can pick up on the pattern, and that's without access to the big boy's social media engagement and sentiment tracking tools.
Larrikin · 50m ago
>check social media comments elsewhere to see how many people misinterpret this news item into "DOGE/Elon did it."
No, post news sources and researched articles. Your vibes about the Internet are irrelevant
mh- · 1h ago
> high-literacy communities like HN [..] low-literacy communities like facebook and reddit
I see this sentiment a lot lately, and I see your HN join date is similar to mine. HN is more mainstream than it used to be, for better or worse. There is a lot more overlap between commenters on HN and Reddit nowadays, especially in certain categories of subreddits.
Personally, I lament the web being a high-literacy community.
pstuart · 2h ago
It's an agreeable assessment that "the media" suffers from accuracy and bias in its reporting. Being that humans are involved, that's unavoidable.
But a couple of things should be considered here:
* Intention
* Degree
* Impact
Intention is a core element of assessing "crimes", with homicide being the most serious one of all we factor it out into: accidental, intentional but clouded by mental conditions in the heat of the moment, and pre-meditated. This is a reasonable metric to apply to the crime of "misreporting" as well.
Degree is likewise to be noted, where it can range from lost nuance to outright lies.
Impact is also a concern if it is a concern. A news article that compels people to randomly attack their neighbors is more of an issue than one that tempts you to buy a new snack.
And most importantly of all: "the media" is not a singular entity and they vary strongly in their veracity and scope, as well as their agendas. Some are at their core intending to serve the public, others are a business to sell advertising, and others are literally propaganda outfits to serve vested interests (e.g., Fox News was created to be the PR arm of the GOP -- this is a fact and not conjecture).
So yes, the NYT can get things wrong (like the lead up to the Iraq invasion), I trust them more than Fox News (which destroyed a community by spreading lies about their new immigrant neighbors eating people's pets).
Hope this helps!
timeon · 3h ago
> Now media gets a free pass on certain lies because Bad Man Bad, and (evidently) people aren't even allowed to point out the lie.
I thought that people supporting 'Bad Man Bad' are OK
with lies.
BenjiWiebe · 7m ago
Can't I disagree with someone, but also not support lies about them, even if their supporters are fine with lying? My standard is no lies at all, even for a "good cause".
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> We can't actually say this was DOGE
The article is saying it was DOGE. DOGE directly attacked our hurricane-forecasting capacity [1]. OMB, i.e. Vought, continues that attack [2].
Given the top three states by hurricane risk voted for Trump in ‘24 [3][4] this should make for an entertaining hurricane season. (Particularly if both a red and blue state get hit and request federal assistance.)
Yah, but it's the guardian. They aren't exactly reliable.
For it to be DOGE would require a time machine, because this project was shut down in 2015.
JumpCrisscross · 1h ago
> but it's the guardian. They aren't exactly reliable
This is valid and I'm open to someone calling out the reporting as non-factual with evidence.
Pretending The Guardian is trying to imply this was DOGE when it straight out says as much, on the other hand, is closer to a reading-comprehension issue.
cinntaile · 3h ago
What? They basically say it was the cuts by Doge?
charcircuit · 3h ago
How can it be set back decades? Even if you had to design new satellites and send them up it would not take a decade to do.
__MatrixMan__ · 2h ago
Decades is how far they were set back, not the duration of the setback.
Wait, the U.S. aren’t even going to try selling the satellites? We’re just scrapping them?
How large systems with exposure to these places (insurance, capital markets) respond is what you should look to next. What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
Relevant comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43366311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450680
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664750 (top comment of this thread aggressively relevant)
If you read SCOTUS's opinions this is obviously false. Alito and Thomas are bought. But the others have their own quirks and agendas.
For ordinary people it can feel reasonable to keep your head down and hope that somehow this blows over. But for SCOTUS it's entirely within their power to draw a line, and it seems like at best their idea has become "Maybe if we give him what he wants he'll go away?" which is dumb, Kipling wrote his famous poem "Dane-geld" about this, it's well over a century old and it's about a mistake England (or rather one of its Kings) made last millennium (when he wrote it, ie now over 1000 years ago).
Barrett has sided with the liberals on various decisions. SCOTUS has a problem. But its problem isn't blind loyalty to Trump. It's that there is a deeper conviction about the way the world should work that sometimes aligns with Trump in ways that are deeply damaging to our society.
If you want to see a judge who's blindly deferential to Trump, that's Aileen Cannon.
It's not like we're asking for SCOTUS to accept constitutional slights from the left side of the aisle, its about consistency of reasoning regardless of which party is involved.
As you've noted, the conservatives of SCOTUS are working backwards from their desired goals rather than pursuing justice for all.
"The getaway car was green."
"No it wasn't!"
"What color was it then?"
"I don't know what color it was!"
...
Insurance companies will just be sending up their own satellites, and that is the true goal. Force people to pay money to private entities for a service that used to be provided by the government for free.
Functionally, in such a system there is no difference between that and regular taxes, just in a private system there's opportunities for those in power (because you gotta have a lot of money to send up a powerful satellite) to make even more money.
With the current US administration, always look at the grifting opportunities, that will explain virtually all policy decisions.
On the other hand, in the first Trump admin the AccuWeather spam site guy was trying to restrict NWS data to private companies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers
I think AccuWeather opposed the Project 2025 plan to remove weather tracking frothe government though, they just wanted it to be tax payer paid but exclusively provided to corporations for sale to make competitive upstart weather sites harder to establish (you can bid more if you already have lots of users, without them you have to build something so great and potentially profitable that you can get VC to fund your purchases of the data).
https://www.masslive.com/news/2024/07/accuweather-rejects-pr...
Can we ask dang to change the title to something like "Blocking of key US satellite data could...."?
There is one operating satellite in this constellation, and congress voted to shut down the program in 2015.
The DMSP program was discontinued in 2015 by a vote in congress[1]. Virtually every working stallelite in this program has failed. As best as I can tell there's just a single working one specifically NOAA-19[2].
Instead the program has switched to JPSS[3] which is part of GEOSS[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli... (scroll up slightly)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Earth_Observation_Syste...
- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data - These data will continue to be measured after Monday - the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data - This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.
Which of the above are “not true”?
So to be frank, the only thing that's "NOT TRUE" is nearly all of your post.
> 2016 failure of DMSP 19 without replacement[edit] On 11 February 2016, a power failure left both the command-and-control subsystem and its backup without the ability to reach the satellite's processor, according to the U.S. Air Force Space Command investigation released in July 2016 that also announced that DMSP 5D-3/F19 was considered to be 'lost'. The satellite's data can still be used, until it ceases pointing the sensors towards the Earth. The satellite was the most recent on-orbit, having been launched on 3 April 2014.[15]
> The failure only left F16, F17 and F18 – all significantly past their expected 3–5 year lifespan – operational. F19's planned replacement was not carried out because Congress ordered the destruction of the already constructed F20 probe to save money by not having to pay its storage costs. It is unlikely that a new DMSP satellite would be launched before 2023; by then the three remaining satellites should no longer be operational.[16]
To anyone acting as if this is a surprise or they're suddenly caught out and have to switch to another provider, I have to wonder, with the writing on the wall for 8 years now, how have you not already updated your plans?
That's the guardian for you. Remove context. Generate hyperbole. Beg for money.
That doesn't accurately capture the reason why there's outrage here. In the weather community, we're constantly thinking through contingencies because a great deal of things are out of our control - and we rely on aging infrastructure, much of which is already flaky to begin with.
Data outages and data loss happens. But there's no reason to allow a _preventable_ data loss to occur. The DMSP data is still being collected, it's just not being distributed downstream. And the decision to make this policy change was seemingly done rapidly and with no input or feedback from the user community of this data - both inside and outside the federal government.
There's no reason to turn off the spigot of this data. And there certainly is no reason to do so abruptly and with virtually no notice. As a consequence, the community is limited in its ability to adapt. For instance, it would take time (and money) to spin up more hurricane hunting resources to replace the overpass data that the SSMI/S instrument captures. Some private companies operate PMW satellite constellations and we could accelerate the acquisition of these data, but there are limited (read: none) federal mechanisms to do this and due to vertical integration in the weather industry, the operators of these constellations may not actually be inclined to do so - and certainly won't do so on the cheap, especially for the federal government.
So this isn't hyperbole. This is a really big deal. It might not be visible to you, but there is a panic and scramble occurring in the weather community to figure out what to do from here.
And for the record - yes, the same panic would happen if the DMSP satellites failed suddenly due to natural causes. But this current situation could've - and should've - been prevented.
That's the goal, actually. You can be sure someone in the admin owns stock of these companies and pushed for this policy for this very reason.
But Hanlon's razor ought to apply until shown otherwise.
Stock doesn't have to be publicly traded to be traded.
I'm no longer willing to grant this administration this privilege. The last few months were an utter clownshow of corruption.
At some point you take your hand off the burning stove, even if it means amputating your arm. Some folks should prepare for that contingency while those of us who can still stomach it pursue reason.
Generally, you use space hardware until it dies, which is hopefully well beyond the design life.
Also from NOAA: “Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.”
Decommissioning old sensors?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...
They all voted for this with extreme skew towards the current policies. What is the point of trying to save this satellite data if the very people most affected dont care for it?
The administration of Florida has a war on the idea of climate change:
* "Ron DeSantis signs bill scrubbing ‘climate change’ from Florida state laws": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/16/desa...
* "Florida Officials Barred from Referencing “Climate Change”: https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/florida-officials-b...
This allows (certain) Florida politicians to put their head in the sand even more than they already have.
There is no war on anyone, and this has nothing to do with Trump, DOGS, or Climate change. Rather there were too many satellite failures, leaving just a single operating one in orbit.
If you know your car's engine is going to need replaced after exactly 100,000 miles, you know to save up for a new engine or a new car - and you know how long you have to save, so you can precisely set aside an appropriate figure every month.
If you know your car's engine will die sometime within the next 15,000 miles, you know you need to start saving up immediately, but b/c you don't know when in the next 15,000 miles you have to rush your saving.
If you have no idea when your car's engine is going to die, you are likely to end up dead engine and little to no savings.
The real reason insurance is high is because of fraudulent claim risk. Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida. That data is useless.
Year-over-year, economic impacts and disruptions due to tropical cyclones are dramatically rising. Most of this is an exposure issue. But long-tail events - like Andrew's utter devastation of Homestead in 1992 or Katrina's unique confluence of storm surge in urban/suburban parishes in LA - can and do happen.
One day, there will be another Galveston or Homestead.
I sincerely hope you're right, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting that this will not be the case, owing to a multitude of factors:
- not all housing stock is <30 years old and has been properly retrofitted to meet state specs
- the climates around the Gulf, which tend to be more humid, can lead to premature degradation of things like strengthened anchor bolts and roof attachments
- there continue to be immense factors related to cost and time-to-build which provide significant negative pressure towards cutting corners and minimum-compliance which may mitigate some of the attendant benefits of strengthened building codes
An event like Andrew _is the selection event_ that you're referring to.
In 2022, Hurricane Ian caused extreme flooding in the Orlando-region, including in areas that have never suffered from hurricane flooding before. For me personally, all 3 cars parked at my house were total losses b/c of the flood damage.
The extreme and extensive damages in the Appalachian region last fall is another great example of hurricane risk not being "grossly exaggerated".
I'm going to go with less, though I suppose you could call "experience widespread destruction, get bailed out by the federal government, rebuild in the same spot" to be a permanent solution.
Florida has maybe solved cat 1-2 hurricanes.
The residents of what used to be Ft. Meyers Beach would probably disagree with you.
>Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida.
I have been in Florida for nearly a decade now. I'd say that the above statement is at best, disingenuous. It's just not true. MAYBE Cat1 hurricanes are a solved problem, but nothing above that. The busiest economic center in Florida (Miami's Brickell area) is 6 feet above sea level. Any major storm locks that part of town down for days. My own building's parking lot is 5 feet above sea level, and yes, it's flooded every time we have a storm.
A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
I realize privatization is an ugly word, but could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Can we make it possible to fund initiatives in a multinational manner where countries contribute to these efforts, but if one country blinks out, then you still have it go along?
We already did. The legislative branch allocates funds for stuff that the people deem worthy. That budget becomes law. The Constitution says the "President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There's even a specific law that prevents the President from withholding Congressionally-approved funds.
What you are seeing here is not a lack of designed resilience, it's the wilful removal of that system.
I'm actually surprised that the successors to DMSP don't meet the same needs. Or is the problem that they do and the government just doesn't share that data?
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* Ok that's an oversimplification. They actually turn encryption on while the satellite is over certain areas. But if you're in the Continental US I think it's in the clear
"We can't actually say this was DOGE, so we're going to imply it using emotionally charged words, and 90% of folks with bad media literacy will come away thinking it was DOGE (just check the reddit comments)."
This in-vogue method of "lying without lying" is shockingly common nowadays, but apparently it's okay for media to lie because Bad Man Bad.
DOGE is an organization that exist with the goal to do things like this. You have no evidence it wasn't them other than empathically saying the emperor has clothes on. All evidence we have implicates them.
Now media gets a free pass on certain lies because Bad Man Bad, and (evidently) people aren't even allowed to point out the lie.
Hint: when the media can make up whatever they want about someone, they can quickly twist perception to make anyone into the Bad Man.
And now the current funding request enacts a ~30% funding cut.
I'm not sure the factual issue you're seeing. Is it that the statement wasn't definitive enough in saying that DOGE apparently was a large part of instituting these cuts?
(Yes, I know OPM implemented many of these programs, but they're apparently at DOGE's request, named after the "Fork in the Road" initiative at Twitter, using data gathered by DOGE IT staffers, &c. If we give credit for any cuts, we have to give them credit for significant cuts at NOAA.)
Yes, the DMSP program was aging and slated to wind down as replacements - both federal and commercial - came online in the second half of the 2020's. But in general, if valid and useful data continues to stream from these types of satellites, you use it and monitor for disruption.
As someone who uses the DMSP data every single day, let me be very clear: there was no warning or expectation that such an abrupt change was going to happen. Yes, we all have contingency plans for if a satellite fails or a data link goes down. But to be given basically 5 days notice that a significant, mission-critical asset would be taken offline? That doesn't - and shouldn't - happen.
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I would bet you, but that money's too easy. :)
Again, this exact conversation is the genius behind 'lying _without lying_.' You can always claim in high-literacy communities like HN that no, nobody would ever be silly enough misread it like that, all while watching your misinformation spread across the low-literacy communities like facebook and reddit.
The Guardian et al has done this too often for plausible deniability. Even I can pick up on the pattern, and that's without access to the big boy's social media engagement and sentiment tracking tools.
No, post news sources and researched articles. Your vibes about the Internet are irrelevant
I see this sentiment a lot lately, and I see your HN join date is similar to mine. HN is more mainstream than it used to be, for better or worse. There is a lot more overlap between commenters on HN and Reddit nowadays, especially in certain categories of subreddits.
Personally, I lament the web being a high-literacy community.
But a couple of things should be considered here:
Intention is a core element of assessing "crimes", with homicide being the most serious one of all we factor it out into: accidental, intentional but clouded by mental conditions in the heat of the moment, and pre-meditated. This is a reasonable metric to apply to the crime of "misreporting" as well.Degree is likewise to be noted, where it can range from lost nuance to outright lies.
Impact is also a concern if it is a concern. A news article that compels people to randomly attack their neighbors is more of an issue than one that tempts you to buy a new snack.
And most importantly of all: "the media" is not a singular entity and they vary strongly in their veracity and scope, as well as their agendas. Some are at their core intending to serve the public, others are a business to sell advertising, and others are literally propaganda outfits to serve vested interests (e.g., Fox News was created to be the PR arm of the GOP -- this is a fact and not conjecture).
So yes, the NYT can get things wrong (like the lead up to the Iraq invasion), I trust them more than Fox News (which destroyed a community by spreading lies about their new immigrant neighbors eating people's pets).
Hope this helps!
I thought that people supporting 'Bad Man Bad' are OK with lies.
The article is saying it was DOGE. DOGE directly attacked our hurricane-forecasting capacity [1]. OMB, i.e. Vought, continues that attack [2].
Given the top three states by hurricane risk voted for Trump in ‘24 [3][4] this should make for an entertaining hurricane season. (Particularly if both a red and blue state get hit and request federal assistance.)
[1] https://apnews.com/article/national-weather-service-layoffs-...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_under_the_second_presid...
[3] https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/states-most-at-risk-for-...
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...
Yah, but it's the guardian. They aren't exactly reliable.
For it to be DOGE would require a time machine, because this project was shut down in 2015.
This is valid and I'm open to someone calling out the reporting as non-factual with evidence.
Pretending The Guardian is trying to imply this was DOGE when it straight out says as much, on the other hand, is closer to a reading-comprehension issue.