This - among many other reasons - is why I’m increasingly throwing my opinions behind shoving these roles onto the United Nations instead of nation states or private companies. Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
A UN program for weather forecasting and satellite tracking, complete with open data sources and REST APIs, would be a boon. Unfortunately, the current organizational structure makes that impossible due to the vested interests of the respective Security Council members. We’re more likely to see the EU take up those mantles.
jandrewrogers · 10m ago
I worked for the UN on more or less this in the 2000s. People have a naive perception of what the UN is like. It was one of the most openly dysfunctional, corrupt, and sclerotic organizations I have ever worked with or for.
It has nothing to do with who is or isn't on the security council, that entire organization is full of the kinds of people who occupy the average government in the world, which is a very low standard of excellence. The UN has neither data infrastructure nor technical expertise to do something like this in any case.
REST APIs? One of the big issues is that the data sources are measured in exabytes these days. That means there can only practically be a single copy. This creates an insurmountable hurdle: most countries contributing data want to keep their data in their country. This makes any use of that data computationally intractable because there is not enough bandwidth connect the disparate data sources together. Also, given this extreme (and mostly unnecessary) bandwidth consumption, now they have to severely restrict access to the data to keep the system usable, effectively making it no longer public.
I've been to this particular rodeo several times. I have zero confidence it could deliver on the promise.
It really would require someone with a singular vision, the technical expertise, and the courage to pull it off. A committee of bureaucrats isn't going to make it happen.
ben_w · 53m ago
> Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
While this is true, I suspect that putting the UN in charge of all global matters will cause them to become such a hegemony.
Until we have multiple planets (or equivalents), I think a multi-polar world with multiple superpowers capable and motivated to work on such things is important.
Hopefully the superpowers will keep their fighting to "indirectly", like the USA and the USSR used to.
dgrin91 · 1h ago
Also the practicality of this is that most of the UN funding will come from the US. When a situation like this where US is cutting funding arises you get the same problem. Almost all finding will dry up overnight and they won't have sufficient funding to continue
stego-tech · 1h ago
Yep, keenly aware of that, but if we’re building a new future that’s resilient to modern structural collapse and civilizational crises, then part of that is changing the structure of the UN, dues/fees, and its functions. There’s a lot to discuss there once enough folks have accepted the era of US Hegemony is over.
h2zizzle · 36m ago
High hopes, those. The point of sabotaging US hegemony was not to hand power over to a monolithic, democratic, primarily Western institution, I'll tell you that much. I suspect that the Galts want their gulches (with Do Not Create Rapture as the template).
bryanrasmussen · 1h ago
I sort of wonder when the UN is getting thrown out of New York by the current administration.
chgs · 51m ago
I have no doubt China would offer a far better location somewhere like Shanghai. The intelligence benefits of so many foreign diplomats and spies walking your street, drinking in your bars, paying your hookers, is incalculable.
orbisvicis · 42m ago
There's TraCSS, SST, RSSS. Each country needs to have their own satellite tracking program. There is international cooperation but do you really think the US is in charge? "Whoops", says the US as a small cubesat from another country collides with a Russian military space satellite. "Missed that one - my bad".
tomrod · 5h ago
I get the desire to reduce government spending. It looks like sticker shock seeing budgets in the billions and trillions.
This type of program has high value per dollar spent. It's an asset, not a waste. The first order, second order, and even third order effects are very large.
Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.
browningstreet · 3h ago
There’s no plausible discussion of reducing spending when the added debt commensurate with that effort is as astronomical as it is.
This is privatization and federal dismantling, and it’s happening so fast and recklessly it will also show up as cultural and civil destruction too. He’s wrecking America so that technocrats can buy it all up.
There’s no intended upside for citizens or for the society they make up. People die and his supporters shrug and defend. It’s Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish as political policy, but reduced by hyperscaling to “eviscerate”.
tomrod · 3h ago
Yep.
It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.
browningstreet · 3h ago
One reason I’m not especially hopeful is that the resistance is mostly still focused on highlighting the breaches with no actual follow-up. There’s no “Team Resistance”.
The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future.
But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle.
So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
tomrod · 3h ago
Aye. Dominionism winning was not on my mid-2000s Bingo card. Maybe we have elections again and reject this march towards Gilead.
browningstreet · 2h ago
I earnestly believe the midterms are a significant barometer of how the next 20 years of America goes. We need change in the midterms and then the next Presidential election. They’re still going to work hard to bend that further to their advantage. Cue the “we’re barely 6 months in” violins…
What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
tremon · 1h ago
I earnestly believe the midterm elections will happen far too late to have any impact. Look at how much has already been dismantled in the first six months:
- people are being disappeared in broad daylight, by masked mercenary squads and without due process
- the military has already been deployed domestically
- courts have been neutered/ignored
- the supreme court generally rules in favour of the regime, and when it doesn't even the supreme court gets ignored
- the first political adversaries have already been assassinated
- the majority of the Senate is happily cheering on all of the above
All three branches of government are already fully under control of this regime. Add to that the many agencies that have been gutted or clipped, and the dismantling of healthcare and social security. What do you think will be left of the US' institutions in 18 months?
browningstreet · 49m ago
Totally agree.
The Rosie O’Donnell thing today is another demonstration of his commitment to iterating against norms. He’ll push and push until he finds a front that collapses in his favor. The whole idea of the unassailable rights of citizens will continue to be tested. The Democrats need a “no F’ing way” line to hold. An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend. We’ll see what kind of pushback surfaces.
arrowsmith · 51m ago
Who was assassinated?
slater · 2h ago
More like, “we’re barely 6 months in” and look at all the things they've fucked up. Like an ignorant, blind and deaf bull in a china shop
fakedang · 1h ago
What's the point though? Dems don't want to play the Reps game, even though the arena has changed. Dems are too dumb to realize that they're in a playing field that has no rules, where the referees in the judiciary are in the Rep camp, where some of the referees themselves (like Sam Alito) are treasonous Arnolds, while others (like Clarence Thomas) are corrupt af. The Dems have a very very slim chance of winning the Senate, zero chance of a supermajority in any future to bypass the filibuster and pass extensive reforms, and zero inclination to support wideranging policies instead of more identity politics.
Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
efnx · 1h ago
Maybe you should run, then? It is a government of the people, as they say.
fakedang · 1h ago
I'm a foreign national so can't exactly run. Fact of the matter is, I've profited quite a bit from Trump's shenanigans, but I can still see the disastrous longterm consequences of their policies, and as a foreign national who once contemplated moving to the US, won't be doing so at all.
Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
mandmandam · 52m ago
> But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it
The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'.
The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked".
So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever.
Honestly, it would be better if they take a cycle to clean house and dedicate themselves to a couple things only. No niche groups hijacking the whole party. Jobs, economy, healthcare, taxes, debt. Everone with a different pet cause off the island otherwise you'll lose. My pet cause included as it isn't on that list. The hilarity will be that when the dnc flubs another election cycle doing the cleaning out, the gop winner will be stuck with the debt bomb they expected the opposition to inherit...
vjvjvjvjghv · 1h ago
The DNC is busy thinking about candidates whose turn it is next time, gender ratios, trans representation and paying $20 million for studies why they don't appeal to young men. They don't have time to think about policies that may benefit voters.
bugglebeetle · 3h ago
We’re watching the fire sale of America, like was imposed on Russia in the 90s, and resulted in one of the largest declines in life expectancy in the country’s history. I expect the same to happen here, including its eventual culmination in the rise of a Putin-like figure from the security state apparatus, after we similarly suffer a decade or more of internal collapse and humiliation.
TheOtherHobbes · 2h ago
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the people who promoted neoliberalism in Russia saw how it ended in authoritarian oligarchy- supported by a religious nationalism which displaced science and progressive democratic values - and decided same would be a good outcome for them personally if rolled out across the rest of the West.
While things are undoubtedly bad in the US, Trump's grip on everything - including personal health - is far more tenuous than Yeltsin's was. And (ironically) the US has more of a history of violent resistance and agitation for both worker rights and civil rights.
The US has always been a soft economic dictatorship. But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears.
It's a much more complicated picture than the one in Russia, which has essentially been the same kind of violent autocratic monarchy for centuries, even as the set dressing around it changed.
chairmansteve · 39m ago
Your link looks very interesting. Thanks.
watwut · 2h ago
I dont think America will have Putin like figure. It howver may have Trump like figure and Vance like figure.
Security state apparatus in Russia filled different role. These guys are true Putin equivalents.
adgjlsfhk1 · 2h ago
imo the US future probably looks more like Hungary than Russia. There is strong alliance being created between racism/nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and science-denial, led by people who don't believe any of this, but have discovered that these groups are a substantial plurality of the country and can be turned into single issue voters
mattkevan · 41m ago
I think it started out like that - the previous generation knew it was bullshit bud did whatever got them votes / viewers / attention or whatever, long term consequences be damned. Younger generations grew up in it, never exposed to anything else and think it’s all true. Much scarier.
tomrod · 1h ago
Neodark ages indeed.
danieldk · 3h ago
It seems very similar to how a clique bought up a lot of Russia and became their oligarchs. It's another transfer of wealth to the rich and/or Trump's cronies. The destruction of public goods, research, education, and the climate is extremely sad.
beezlewax · 1h ago
It's also hard to fathom. I don't believe these people believe what they're doing is for the greater good or that climate change is a hoax. They have children and want them to grow up to what exactly?
tremon · 48m ago
They believe their wealth can shield their chilren from the bad effects of climate change. They think there will be enough of the world left in a functioning state to retain their current level of luxury, and don't care about the rest.
toss1 · 47m ago
They want them to grow up in their privileged bubble, and that is all. They literally DGAF if the rest of of us, i.e., the NPCs, all starve. Does anyone think Russian oligarchs care about the Russian peasants or "meat cans" they send to the Ukranian front? And they've already got their bunkers in New Zealand, Hawaii, or wherever if it all goes really sideways. Musk, Theil, Vance, and the rest of them care about us less than the NPSs in their FPS games, and we should regard them exactly the same way.
nwatson · 5h ago
Someone will propose privatization of said program with insurance fees covering the reformulated collision-prevention service. Of course, privatization will leave out crucial aspects, lead to failures, increasing untraceable space debris from which nobody will be safe, and eventually bankruptcy of said privatized program, with no way back. As is happening in other parts of government.
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> Someone will propose privatization of said program
Someone would if given the time and infrastructure. This, on the other hand, is more DOGE-style idiocy.
staplers · 4h ago
Privatized profits, socialized costs
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tetris11 · 4h ago
so, Planetes then
sho_hn · 3h ago
I get this reference!
Even as an anime grump, I liked this one.
throwaway6734 · 3h ago
A fantastic show
yapyap · 4h ago
Orrrr said privatized thing will start out relatively cheaper than the norm and eventually end up costing way more than what the government was originally spending when it was still part of the government since the private company eventually outpriced everyone with their cheap prices and then when they finally got their monopoly scaled up their prices as much as they feasibly could and then some.
slater · 4h ago
Surely you jest! /s
Rebelgecko · 4h ago
The privatization of this data has always been the plan, IIRC that's why the first Trump administration pulled some of these efforts out of the military
jandrewrogers · 3h ago
I've worked as a related subject matter expert in a few countries. I can think of a possible reasonable justification for this.
In recent years, the operating environment in orbital space has changed rapidly, and it isn't just the number of objects. These changes are outside the design assumptions of traditional orbital traffic systems, degrading their effectiveness. In response to this reality, governments with significant space assets have been investing in orbital traffic systems that are capable of dealing with the modern environment. However, these rely heavily on classified technology and capability to address the limitations of the older systems.
An argument could be made that it no longer makes sense to fund a public system that is descending into obsolescence due to lack of capability and which can't be meaningfully fixed because that would require exposing classified technical capabilities that no one is willing to expose. In this scenario, the private sector is acting as an offramp from a system that had no future technically.
Space has turned into an interesting place, in the curse sense. It isn't as simple as it used to be.
counters · 3h ago
Sure. Great.
But that explanation isn't being offered by the powers-that-be. So there's no point trying to rationalize it post-hoc.
There's no evidence that this is anything more than yet another round of ideologically-fueled maladministration.
jandrewrogers · 3h ago
This isn't an explanation that can be offered, at least politically. It invites questions that governments in several developed countries have clearly decided they don't want as part of the public narrative influencing policy. This is the default choice when the real explanation is more complicated, obscure, or technical than will fit in a soundbite, which would be the case in the scenario I hypothesized.
Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to. Much easier to use a plausible soundbite related to the current thing. Most people aren't paying attention anyway.
counters · 1h ago
> Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to.
This is an absurdly cynical take. It certainly doesn't jive with how NOAA has historically operated - which has necessitated as much transparency as possible, because that is the only way it can engender the trust with the public necessary to steward life and property.
The standards have historically been much higher, and we ought to strive for them to be higher still.
notahacker · 2h ago
Understand the first part perfectly. Yes, a small portion of newspace involves [or will involve) spacecraft that don't spend most of their life orbiting in nice predictable arcs above ground stations with occasional also predictable small station keeping or conjunction avoidance adjustments, and it stands to reason that the most advanced and classified US SDA capability has access to better sensor data and models.
But that seems like a very poor argument for removing a system which might be approaching obsolescence in military terms but is still relied on for a rapidly increasing number of civil satellites to make rapidly increasing conjunction avoidance manoeuvres (and is also relatively inexpensive). Anything that makes them less aware threatens defence and critical civil government infrastructure too, and the private sector doesn't exactly seem to be embracing it as an exciting opportunity - look at the quote from Slingshot! Plus if anything the changes taking place would seem to be a reason to invest more in orbital traffic control with regulation to make it more like the FAA. You don't have to give away the classified tracking tech if you're barking out move orders rather than simply sharing predictions so operators come to their own conclusions about conjunction risk, and likewise orders and requirements for operators to broadcast position and intent are a much better way of dealing with a future of private servicing missions and space megastructures than "let them buy their own tracking data and make their own decisions"
tomrod · 1h ago
I work in a related area too. NOAA and others in the space game are great partners. I don't agree with the fundamentals of your assessment, seems post hoc ergo propter hoc.
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> get the desire to reduce government spending
It should be incredibly clear that the motivation for these folks isn’t reducing government spending (or cutting waste).
The problem is the programme is at NOAA, and NOAA tells a story about the climate that some folks don’t like. So they trash the messenger and his tools.
conartist6 · 4h ago
But people who send things to space are often liberal. For example they often have attended college and believe in science.
The political intent behind a new dark age makes sense if you think of the goal as being to destroy competent institutions which represent a real threat to an anti-science, post-truth administration
tomrod · 4h ago
> But people who send things to space are often liberal
I literally do not care if someone feels more liberal or conservative in their heart of hearts. There is more that unites people than the pissantry propaganda that plays to divide us.
Rather, like you, I hate waste, which this budget, through underfunding, will create. Probably also like you, I also strongly dislike know-nothing propaganda, especially regarding things about which I am well informed.
Post-truth millieu is a lie. Truth is more adaptive to long term survival.
> For example they often have attended college and believe in science.
One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to test hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
xpe · 2h ago
>> For example they often have attended college and believe in science.
> One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to test hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
The first quote is a shorthand. The second quote is accurate, technically, except that perhaps the author is misunderstanding the first quote. When many people write "person P believes in science", you can accurately translate that to "person P sees the value in science as a tool for truth-seeking."
JumpCrisscross · 4h ago
> One uses science as a tool
This requires a base rate of literacy and critical thinking that a lot of Americans, unfortunately, lack.
tomrod · 4h ago
Not the majority. A bit less than 20%, the remaining support coming from people who think politics is a tribal engagement like watching a sports team. Or those that listen to bags of hot wind like Yarvin, Rogan, or Thiel.
conartist6 · 3h ago
People want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge.
What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic).
At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc)
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justinrubek · 4h ago
> One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to rest hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
Yes, this is precisely that which they do not believe in. Plug your ears, bury your head in the sand, and whatever you do, do not use cause and effect, data, or evidence to backup your claims and positions. That is the platform upon which they stand.
Eextra953 · 3h ago
I agree with your statement. What I am always trying to understand is where does this lead us and how can we get back to belief in the scientific method? Removing cause/effect/data leaves all decisions to emotion and short term rewards. I don't think this will end well, especially against a background of countries and cultures that do believe in science and collaboration.
TheOtherHobbes · 2h ago
It's been systematically undermined for decades through cultivated conspiracy culture, with digressions into wellness woo and evangelical movements of all kinds.
The pitch is the usual anti-intellectual narrative: "How dare these people, with their fancy educations, look down on you and patronise you. Everyone's opinions are equally valuable. They're probably in it for the money."
It's been very organised, and both science and academia have completely failed to respond to it.
You can give science a pass because most scientists struggle to understand how craven politics and propaganda are.
Academia should have known better. Hannah Arendt described it far ahead of time. But somehow plain anti-authoritarianism became less sexy, and certainly less of a career move, than Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, which have turned out to be largely impotent when faced with full-on fascism.
tetha · 4h ago
> This type of program has high value per dollar spent. It's an asset, not a waste. The first order, second order, and even third order effects are very large.
This might also be a program in which the goals of a privatized for-profit company are rather bad in the broader context. If you pay me millions to track and possibly control your satellite in orbit so it doesn't collide... I'll invest in rocket companies to launch more satellites. Even if they are very silly satellites.
After all, if they collide, the debris will most likely miss the shareholders, and then you get more satellites to get contracts for.
And who cares if some of those invaluable scientific systems with year-long plans get knocked out?
epistasis · 4h ago
I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. Except political pork like price supports for large industrial farmers in the Midwest. ;-)
tomrod · 3h ago
For certain industries, there are reasonable arguments to be made to keep domestic and support via price controls.
Food at a high level, yes. Pork specifically, no.
(I know you didn't mean literal pork, but thinking through the spectrum here).
tbrownaw · 2h ago
Would something like mandating a significant amount of ethanol (from corn) in gasoline be an effective way to so this?
tomrod · 2h ago
No.
Subsidizing production of next gen/green energy production and grid operations, yes.
> I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment.
"Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated.
This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean.
Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.
kenjackson · 1h ago
This is good. Although I’d make it a 4-tuple to make “target” clear. There are two aspects to target: “where is the impact on the return” and “where is the cost of the investment”.
ModernMech · 51m ago
It depends what your investment strategy is. If your goal is to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, then government spending is a good idea. But some people would rather all boats not be lifted. They'd just like to lift some boats, but sink others. Still, other people would prefer to sink as many boats as possible while being in control of the remaining boats that float. For people who fit into those later categories, government spending is not a good ROI.
As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs.
Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".
pstuart · 3h ago
It can be, when it's invested in butter rather than guns.
Yes, military investments have paid off in new technologies (e.g., Arpanet) but as a whole only reward the owners of the Military Industrial Complex.
toss1 · 29m ago
Of course, nevermind that we may need to defend ourselves and/or our allies against exoansionist autocratic aggressors like Russia (see Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Baltics and explicit threats against Poland, Germany, England, & US), China (what happens to the tech industry every Taiwan goes up in smoke?), Iran, etc.
Fukyima (sp?) was right about the end of history sort of happening when all countries of the world embrace liberal democracy, but he was very wrong that we are anywhere near that point.
Until then, only strength will deter or oppose the aggressors.
laverya · 2h ago
Yeah except for arpanet, GPS, satellites in general, jet engines, composites, computers, and everything that came from there... What has military r&d ever done for us?
convolvatron · 41m ago
this is not at all simple. part of that causality is that fundamental research money was channeled through the military, because that was politically acceptable. is there a particularly good reason why DOE and DOD funding of university research is higher than NSF?
and its pretty easily to cleave off defense spending for basic research performed by universities from the more applied R&D that defense contractors do, much of that from the black budget. this is a place where every visitor leaves shaking their heads at the overt corruption and waste. but its necessary to have such programs in general to support our common goal of self-autonomy as a nation.
so if we're going to serious as a democratic political body about trying to get the most value from our tax money, we can't really can't fixate on reductionist statements that assert that defense or social support money is an unalloyed bad or good. we really need better transparency and to actually dig into the details.
LorenPechtel · 4h ago
Government is expensive because it does a lot.
There is a lot of trouble with bureaucrats defending fiefdoms that would be better consolidated, but you can't fix that with an axe.
ajmurmann · 4h ago
The vast majority of the government budget is entitlements and military. I'm sure there are other things that could be cut and there is always room for more efficiency but it's always gonna be a drop in the bucket compared to entitlements and military.
That said, regulations that make the economy less dynamic and slow stuff down have a high opportunity cost. While it's bureaucrats that write the implementation details and enforce them, it's congress who requires it to happen with AFAIK often little regard to how it would be executed in practice.
AnthonyMouse · 3h ago
> The vast majority of the government budget is entitlements and military.
The vast majority of the government budget is "entitlements and military" because donors have their pork classified as those things when they don't want it to be cut. A lot of entitlement programs are structured as handouts to the companies providing those services (e.g. drug and healthcare companies, or landlords) or vote buying of affluent retirees who don't actually need a government subsidy. And I'd like to see someone try to claim with a straight face that there is no waste in the military budget.
But even within those budgets, most of the waste and corruption isn't a single program going to a single place. It's millions of programs that each waste millions of dollars and collectively waste trillions of dollars. And then it doesn't matter if you classify the program as military or entitlements or something else; what matters is if the program is worth the candle.
The problem is that everybody will say that their program is worth it, many them are lying, and it's hard to tell who isn't.
But the thing that's unambiguously true is that the amount of government revenue has been stable as a percentage of GDP for generations and has been growing in terms of real dollars per capita, and yet the amount of government spending has outpaced that by a huge and growing amount.
Is DOGE making a hash of things? Maybe, but then let's do a better job instead of using it as an excuse to keep running reckless deficits until the largest item in the federal budget is interest.
alistairSH · 4h ago
It was never about reducing spending. It was always about the grift. See also the BBB - massive benefits to the donor class, and a shit sandwich for the rest of us.
pstuart · 3h ago
It would help if we had consensus on what Government is.
Many (including myself) believe that Government should be for "the common good", via a legal system, government investments in shared needs/resources, etc.
The current admin believes that Government exists for only two reasons: personal enrichment and punishing perceived enemies. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see that happening.
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moralestapia · 4h ago
>This type of program has high value per dollar spent.
Care to elaborate?
What's the value that comes back?
Rebelgecko · 4h ago
If you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead. And that's not even counting the negative externalities of unintended conjunctions. Kessler Syndrome is the boggieman of course, but even a few thousand pieces of debris from a single conjunction makes life harder for everyone who operates in space.
andsoitis · 2h ago
> If you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead.
Why should the (US) taxpayer foot the bill rather than the companies who operate and profit from the satellites?
CamperBob2 · 1h ago
Would you argue that every road should be a toll road, too?
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adgjlsfhk1 · 1h ago
the government already needs to track satellites to prevent its own from getting hit, and to track foreign spy satellites. IMO it would be reasonably for Congress to pass a law to allow the FAA to charge private companies who launch satellites in the US, but killing the program is just very dumb
moralestapia · 3h ago
Has this ever happened?
notahacker · 2h ago
Satellites make conjunction avoidance manoeuvres on a regular basis; about 275 Starlink satellites need to move every day. A non-trivial proportion of those would result in a collision otherwise. Satellites orbit at multiple km per second and manoeuvre to adjust orbit much more slowly, so they need advance warning.
Satellite operators obtain much their space situational awareness data directly or indirectly from US govt sources. The fact that collisions are presently infrequent because satellite operators act on that data isn't a particularly good reason to eliminate much of it
adgjlsfhk1 · 1h ago
measles was extinct in the US until the antibaxers gained enough momentum
There was a collision between two comm satellites about 16 years back [1], and that was with satellites that we could track and theoretically control - with the debris collision of 2005 [2], that makes two events.
We've been lucky that this is the only publicly known satellite to collide with another satellite, other than satellites that got shot down as a demonstration of power.
It's not about reducing spending (they just added $3+ TRILLION this year out of four)
It's about destroying science, not just current science but the future of science.
By destroying all existing structure so that it will cost trillions to rebuild so impossible anytime soon.
Including academia that seeds the science.
They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives".
vjvjvjvjghv · 1h ago
"They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives"."
That's how I feel too. "Conservative" should mean "cautious and slow", not "destroy as quickly as possible"
bpodgursky · 3h ago
The fundamental problem is that the public
1. Wants to cut the budget so we don't go broke
2. Punishes anyone who talks about unsustainable retirement, disability, and healthcare entitlement programs.
So, they get politicians who try to find a third way, even if it doesn't make a budgetary difference. To get out of this, the public (especially the boomer retiree population) needs to be more mature about the fiscal situation they put the country in and realize they are not living within their means.
watwut · 2h ago
Current big beautiful bill will:
- Make debt larger and risk make usa go broke.
- Cut retirement disability, and healthcare entitlement programs.
It will however cut taxes for bilionaires and republicans love it.
zer00eyz · 4h ago
> I get the desire to reduce government spending. It looks like sticker shock seeing budgets in the billions and trillions.
This is an international issue being funded by the US taxpayer regardless of their own utilization of said services.
Programs like these need to exist, but services like starlink should be the ones footing the bill. The military and weather services would need larger budgets to fund their portion of this effort so some of it would come back to "general taxes" but a much smaller amount.
Meanwhile, All those other groups and nations with launch capabilities and a vested intrest in NOT having issues could be contributing too.
> Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.
These efforts need to be funded with a tax to support them, and not all be drawn from the same general fund. It would make the arguments about "taxes" and "spending" much more reasonable.
ourmandave · 3h ago
What about a Universal Service Fund, like the FCC has for telecom?
Defund ICE and use that money to stop satellites from crashing into each other
DonHopkins · 1h ago
Crash satellites into ICE!
ThinkBeat · 3h ago
Clearly this should be funded by the countries and companies that own
the debris and sattlites that need to be tracked.
Which means Starling would probably pay for most of it.
Then there are various spy satellites countries have that they
dont want tracked? Or does the data from NOAA include spy satellites
in strange orbits?
Buttons840 · 7m ago
Assuming you mean "Starlink":
Don't all Starlink satellites have a plan to deorbit responsibly; specifically, do nothing, which results in a relatively quick deorbitting?
Starlink satellites are in low-Earth-orbit which can't accumulate much space debris, because everything deorbits naturally within a few years.
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> Which means Starling would probably pay for most of it
Then they’d switch to a user fee. Perhaps even at a profit, such that it’s deficit reducing.
That isn’t what they’re doing because that isn’t what this is about.
cantor_S_drug · 2h ago
I mentioned this scenario before but I was downvoted. Can a rogue disgruntled state like Iran actually bring about destruction of satellites, say Starlink ones, to set off space debris chain reaction to pollute, poison the earth orbit for everyone. The thinking goes like if I can't have the advantage then no one else should.
sitzkrieg · 2h ago
what next, osha? safety sure is a waste of time to these myopic tech idiots
JSR_FDED · 1h ago
Let’s not overthink this. Anything long-term is toast.
Ylpertnodi · 2h ago
Cool and normal.
ourmandave · 3h ago
Are they hoping satellites studying climate change get destroyed?
Also let's not forget Sharpie Gate and how the petty Orange Emperor appointed a climate science denier to a top position in NOAA.
Yet another systemic rat fucking so somebody can make a buck. It's only ever about the money.
macintux · 27m ago
During his first administration I was half-surprised he didn’t nominate a flat earther to head NASA.
djoldman · 3h ago
Here's the uncomfortable fact:
If the US Federal Government spent ZERO money on anything except:
1. Social Security
2. Medicare & Medicaid
3. National Defense
4. Net Interest on the Public Debt
5. Income Security
6. Veterans Benefits & Services
7. Federal Civilian & Military Retirement and Disability
... the US would still have a sizable deficit.
All the hoopla surrounding science spending, education, DEI, FDA, housing, foreign aid, disaster relief, etc., doesn't really address some huge issues if the goal is to reduce deficit spending.
declan_roberts · 3h ago
Debt servicing is now more than 16% of our spending and growing.
I hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it!
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it
No need for past tense. We’re currently in the most intense—the biggest, most beautiful, one might say—phase of deficit accumulation in American history.
declan_roberts · 3h ago
Thankfully we're getting all this cool stuff. You know like... actually what are we getting?
tomrod · 3h ago
More debt!
cco · 3h ago
A sizeable chunk, probably around half, of what we bought with that $36T was net worth for people like Bezos and the Kochs.
JumpCrisscross · 3h ago
> if the goal is to reduce deficit spending
Red herring. It’s not. It’s never been. We’re blowing out the deficit by trillions.
The motivation isn’t anything about the deficit. It’s that NOAA counters the climate narrative a narrow band of idiots would prefer to believe.
watwut · 2h ago
They are making the deficit much larger. So, can we stop parroting these bad faith "debt worry" arguments?
vjvjvjvjghv · 1h ago
They will worry about the deficits again once democrats are in power.
water9 · 3h ago
only works if everybody agrees and Noaa is not in charge of everybody
ben_w · 57m ago
I mean, that's one way for Trump to punish Musk…
hdb385 · 3h ago
bothered
OrvalWintermute · 4h ago
Part of the problem is you need to track all orbits for all constellations and free flyers as well as all orbital debris, and communicate across many communities of interest.
It is more national security & military adjacent
I’d stand up a joint agency for this requirement across DOD, NASA, NOAA, FAA, and Commercial Space/Newspace.
nsriv · 4h ago
Trying to save on a $55 million program by standing up a joint agency. I have truly heard it all now.
wongarsu · 4h ago
The US are by far not the only ones with satellites in orbit. Making it a UN body would make sense, just like the International Telecommunications Union coordinates telephone service and the International Postal Union coordinates international mail, and both are now UN bodies (despite predating the UN).
I have a feeling that the current US administration would not back such an idea, so this will end up back with the DOD, maybe the Space Force. Despite the DOD saying quite clearly they would prefer NOAA to do it
Having a joint program across all those would cost far more money.
vjvjvjvjghv · 1h ago
The project managers and consultants to plan such a thing would probably cost several years of the current budget.
maxlin · 3h ago
If they just figured out a way to not 10x overspend while getting the same results ...
ccorcos · 1h ago
Why isn’t the free market capable of doing this? Seems odd to spend money just to spend money. There’s plenty of incentive for other people to be doing this already…
duxup · 1h ago
I feel like this is like "free market should build roads thing" we fund roads so everyone has access and goods can move freely / more economic activity can take place without problems.
What would the free market solution be here? Someone builds all the infrastructure to track all the satellites, and maybe more than one (if not you have a monopoly) person does it. Then they charge for it?
But someone doesn't use it an now we have more space junk ...
If anything a government organizing this and everyone utilizing it seems like it makes for more efficient / lower risk situation with satellites.
OtherShrezzing · 1h ago
Usually I’d agree with you on this type of thing, but in this case I think the insurance industry could and should be picking this up.
They’re the bag holder here, and this system could be built for a marginal hit to their bottom line in exchange for a huge amount of de-risking across their entire supply chain.
stego-tech · 1h ago
Except they won’t, because current business is about short-term gains at the expense of long-term sustainability. Companies cannot be trusted to act in their own best interests in the long term, and they’ll just as soon exit an unprofitable market today than invest into making it profitable tomorrow.
notahacker · 1h ago
After launch, most of the stuff up there is self insured.
Also, the US government and it's affiliated institutions already has networks of ground stations and the insurance industry doesnt.
duxup · 1h ago
I don't think the insurance industry is all that interested providing services or enhancing commerce. They'd have some very mixed motivations all at once if they tried doing this. Including anything technical.
ccorcos · 52m ago
Side story regarding roads: I was recently in Shelter Cove, CA and was thinking that the is road probably exceeds the entire economic value of the town… Why is this road even here? It turns out, they used to harvest tan oak bark for the tannins to tan leather in the late 1800s which was a huge industry back then. Lots of logging roads out there since then… Free markets do build a lot of roads!
Insurance companies have the right incentive but they don’t need to be the ones building it. Safer cars get cheaper insurance, so there’s clear market pressure there without insurance companies having to build their own cars…
Pollution, kinds that suffer the “tragedy of the common”, are a good example where regulation is necessary to prevent a race to the bottom. But that’s a pretty simple and straightforward thing to democratically vote on without government spending.
I think the solution is fairly simple: private companies build these capabilities and offer them as a service. The idea that there won’t be a marketplace for this service seems misguided too. Adversarial militaries will want their own systems, likely contracted out to private companies, which will likely offer civilian use around the world…
michael1999 · 1h ago
The free market is famously unable to solve problems of diffuse risk and responsibility: air pollution, sea piracy, and in this case -- satellite collision avoidance.
A UN program for weather forecasting and satellite tracking, complete with open data sources and REST APIs, would be a boon. Unfortunately, the current organizational structure makes that impossible due to the vested interests of the respective Security Council members. We’re more likely to see the EU take up those mantles.
It has nothing to do with who is or isn't on the security council, that entire organization is full of the kinds of people who occupy the average government in the world, which is a very low standard of excellence. The UN has neither data infrastructure nor technical expertise to do something like this in any case.
REST APIs? One of the big issues is that the data sources are measured in exabytes these days. That means there can only practically be a single copy. This creates an insurmountable hurdle: most countries contributing data want to keep their data in their country. This makes any use of that data computationally intractable because there is not enough bandwidth connect the disparate data sources together. Also, given this extreme (and mostly unnecessary) bandwidth consumption, now they have to severely restrict access to the data to keep the system usable, effectively making it no longer public.
I've been to this particular rodeo several times. I have zero confidence it could deliver on the promise.
It really would require someone with a singular vision, the technical expertise, and the courage to pull it off. A committee of bureaucrats isn't going to make it happen.
While this is true, I suspect that putting the UN in charge of all global matters will cause them to become such a hegemony.
Until we have multiple planets (or equivalents), I think a multi-polar world with multiple superpowers capable and motivated to work on such things is important.
Hopefully the superpowers will keep their fighting to "indirectly", like the USA and the USSR used to.
This type of program has high value per dollar spent. It's an asset, not a waste. The first order, second order, and even third order effects are very large.
Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.
This is privatization and federal dismantling, and it’s happening so fast and recklessly it will also show up as cultural and civil destruction too. He’s wrecking America so that technocrats can buy it all up.
There’s no intended upside for citizens or for the society they make up. People die and his supporters shrug and defend. It’s Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish as political policy, but reduced by hyperscaling to “eviscerate”.
It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.
The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future.
But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle.
So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
- people are being disappeared in broad daylight, by masked mercenary squads and without due process
- the military has already been deployed domestically
- courts have been neutered/ignored
- the supreme court generally rules in favour of the regime, and when it doesn't even the supreme court gets ignored
- the first political adversaries have already been assassinated
- the majority of the Senate is happily cheering on all of the above
All three branches of government are already fully under control of this regime. Add to that the many agencies that have been gutted or clipped, and the dismantling of healthcare and social security. What do you think will be left of the US' institutions in 18 months?
The Rosie O’Donnell thing today is another demonstration of his commitment to iterating against norms. He’ll push and push until he finds a front that collapses in his favor. The whole idea of the unassailable rights of citizens will continue to be tested. The Democrats need a “no F’ing way” line to hold. An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend. We’ll see what kind of pushback surfaces.
Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'.
The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked".
So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever.
0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...
This is dense, but stunningly prescient.
https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/1230310...
While things are undoubtedly bad in the US, Trump's grip on everything - including personal health - is far more tenuous than Yeltsin's was. And (ironically) the US has more of a history of violent resistance and agitation for both worker rights and civil rights.
The US has always been a soft economic dictatorship. But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears.
It's a much more complicated picture than the one in Russia, which has essentially been the same kind of violent autocratic monarchy for centuries, even as the set dressing around it changed.
Security state apparatus in Russia filled different role. These guys are true Putin equivalents.
Someone would if given the time and infrastructure. This, on the other hand, is more DOGE-style idiocy.
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Even as an anime grump, I liked this one.
In recent years, the operating environment in orbital space has changed rapidly, and it isn't just the number of objects. These changes are outside the design assumptions of traditional orbital traffic systems, degrading their effectiveness. In response to this reality, governments with significant space assets have been investing in orbital traffic systems that are capable of dealing with the modern environment. However, these rely heavily on classified technology and capability to address the limitations of the older systems.
An argument could be made that it no longer makes sense to fund a public system that is descending into obsolescence due to lack of capability and which can't be meaningfully fixed because that would require exposing classified technical capabilities that no one is willing to expose. In this scenario, the private sector is acting as an offramp from a system that had no future technically.
Space has turned into an interesting place, in the curse sense. It isn't as simple as it used to be.
But that explanation isn't being offered by the powers-that-be. So there's no point trying to rationalize it post-hoc.
There's no evidence that this is anything more than yet another round of ideologically-fueled maladministration.
Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to. Much easier to use a plausible soundbite related to the current thing. Most people aren't paying attention anyway.
This is an absurdly cynical take. It certainly doesn't jive with how NOAA has historically operated - which has necessitated as much transparency as possible, because that is the only way it can engender the trust with the public necessary to steward life and property.
The standards have historically been much higher, and we ought to strive for them to be higher still.
But that seems like a very poor argument for removing a system which might be approaching obsolescence in military terms but is still relied on for a rapidly increasing number of civil satellites to make rapidly increasing conjunction avoidance manoeuvres (and is also relatively inexpensive). Anything that makes them less aware threatens defence and critical civil government infrastructure too, and the private sector doesn't exactly seem to be embracing it as an exciting opportunity - look at the quote from Slingshot! Plus if anything the changes taking place would seem to be a reason to invest more in orbital traffic control with regulation to make it more like the FAA. You don't have to give away the classified tracking tech if you're barking out move orders rather than simply sharing predictions so operators come to their own conclusions about conjunction risk, and likewise orders and requirements for operators to broadcast position and intent are a much better way of dealing with a future of private servicing missions and space megastructures than "let them buy their own tracking data and make their own decisions"
It should be incredibly clear that the motivation for these folks isn’t reducing government spending (or cutting waste).
The problem is the programme is at NOAA, and NOAA tells a story about the climate that some folks don’t like. So they trash the messenger and his tools.
The political intent behind a new dark age makes sense if you think of the goal as being to destroy competent institutions which represent a real threat to an anti-science, post-truth administration
I literally do not care if someone feels more liberal or conservative in their heart of hearts. There is more that unites people than the pissantry propaganda that plays to divide us.
Rather, like you, I hate waste, which this budget, through underfunding, will create. Probably also like you, I also strongly dislike know-nothing propaganda, especially regarding things about which I am well informed.
Post-truth millieu is a lie. Truth is more adaptive to long term survival.
> For example they often have attended college and believe in science.
One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to test hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
> One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to test hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
The first quote is a shorthand. The second quote is accurate, technically, except that perhaps the author is misunderstanding the first quote. When many people write "person P believes in science", you can accurately translate that to "person P sees the value in science as a tool for truth-seeking."
This requires a base rate of literacy and critical thinking that a lot of Americans, unfortunately, lack.
What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic).
At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc)
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Yes, this is precisely that which they do not believe in. Plug your ears, bury your head in the sand, and whatever you do, do not use cause and effect, data, or evidence to backup your claims and positions. That is the platform upon which they stand.
The pitch is the usual anti-intellectual narrative: "How dare these people, with their fancy educations, look down on you and patronise you. Everyone's opinions are equally valuable. They're probably in it for the money."
It's been very organised, and both science and academia have completely failed to respond to it.
You can give science a pass because most scientists struggle to understand how craven politics and propaganda are.
Academia should have known better. Hannah Arendt described it far ahead of time. But somehow plain anti-authoritarianism became less sexy, and certainly less of a career move, than Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, which have turned out to be largely impotent when faced with full-on fascism.
This might also be a program in which the goals of a privatized for-profit company are rather bad in the broader context. If you pay me millions to track and possibly control your satellite in orbit so it doesn't collide... I'll invest in rocket companies to launch more satellites. Even if they are very silly satellites.
After all, if they collide, the debris will most likely miss the shareholders, and then you get more satellites to get contracts for.
And who cares if some of those invaluable scientific systems with year-long plans get knocked out?
Food at a high level, yes. Pork specifically, no.
(I know you didn't mean literal pork, but thinking through the spectrum here).
Subsidizing production of next gen/green energy production and grid operations, yes.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
"Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated.
This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean.
Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.
As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs.
Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".
Yes, military investments have paid off in new technologies (e.g., Arpanet) but as a whole only reward the owners of the Military Industrial Complex.
Fukyima (sp?) was right about the end of history sort of happening when all countries of the world embrace liberal democracy, but he was very wrong that we are anywhere near that point.
Until then, only strength will deter or oppose the aggressors.
and its pretty easily to cleave off defense spending for basic research performed by universities from the more applied R&D that defense contractors do, much of that from the black budget. this is a place where every visitor leaves shaking their heads at the overt corruption and waste. but its necessary to have such programs in general to support our common goal of self-autonomy as a nation.
so if we're going to serious as a democratic political body about trying to get the most value from our tax money, we can't really can't fixate on reductionist statements that assert that defense or social support money is an unalloyed bad or good. we really need better transparency and to actually dig into the details.
There is a lot of trouble with bureaucrats defending fiefdoms that would be better consolidated, but you can't fix that with an axe.
That said, regulations that make the economy less dynamic and slow stuff down have a high opportunity cost. While it's bureaucrats that write the implementation details and enforce them, it's congress who requires it to happen with AFAIK often little regard to how it would be executed in practice.
The vast majority of the government budget is "entitlements and military" because donors have their pork classified as those things when they don't want it to be cut. A lot of entitlement programs are structured as handouts to the companies providing those services (e.g. drug and healthcare companies, or landlords) or vote buying of affluent retirees who don't actually need a government subsidy. And I'd like to see someone try to claim with a straight face that there is no waste in the military budget.
But even within those budgets, most of the waste and corruption isn't a single program going to a single place. It's millions of programs that each waste millions of dollars and collectively waste trillions of dollars. And then it doesn't matter if you classify the program as military or entitlements or something else; what matters is if the program is worth the candle.
The problem is that everybody will say that their program is worth it, many them are lying, and it's hard to tell who isn't.
But the thing that's unambiguously true is that the amount of government revenue has been stable as a percentage of GDP for generations and has been growing in terms of real dollars per capita, and yet the amount of government spending has outpaced that by a huge and growing amount.
Is DOGE making a hash of things? Maybe, but then let's do a better job instead of using it as an excuse to keep running reckless deficits until the largest item in the federal budget is interest.
Many (including myself) believe that Government should be for "the common good", via a legal system, government investments in shared needs/resources, etc.
The current admin believes that Government exists for only two reasons: personal enrichment and punishing perceived enemies. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see that happening.
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Care to elaborate?
What's the value that comes back?
Why should the (US) taxpayer foot the bill rather than the companies who operate and profit from the satellites?
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Satellite operators obtain much their space situational awareness data directly or indirectly from US govt sources. The fact that collisions are presently infrequent because satellite operators act on that data isn't a particularly good reason to eliminate much of it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
We've been lucky that this is the only publicly known satellite to collide with another satellite, other than satellites that got shot down as a demonstration of power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
[2] https://www.space.com/969-china-space-debris-collide-orbit.h...
It's about destroying science, not just current science but the future of science.
By destroying all existing structure so that it will cost trillions to rebuild so impossible anytime soon.
Including academia that seeds the science.
They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives".
That's how I feel too. "Conservative" should mean "cautious and slow", not "destroy as quickly as possible"
1. Wants to cut the budget so we don't go broke
2. Punishes anyone who talks about unsustainable retirement, disability, and healthcare entitlement programs.
So, they get politicians who try to find a third way, even if it doesn't make a budgetary difference. To get out of this, the public (especially the boomer retiree population) needs to be more mature about the fiscal situation they put the country in and realize they are not living within their means.
- Make debt larger and risk make usa go broke.
- Cut retirement disability, and healthcare entitlement programs.
It will however cut taxes for bilionaires and republicans love it.
This is an international issue being funded by the US taxpayer regardless of their own utilization of said services.
Programs like these need to exist, but services like starlink should be the ones footing the bill. The military and weather services would need larger budgets to fund their portion of this effort so some of it would come back to "general taxes" but a much smaller amount.
Meanwhile, All those other groups and nations with launch capabilities and a vested intrest in NOT having issues could be contributing too.
> Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.
These efforts need to be funded with a tax to support them, and not all be drawn from the same general fund. It would make the arguments about "taxes" and "spending" much more reasonable.
https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund
Star Link and other companies can charge back their customers what they pay into the fund.
Like how AT&T hits me for the Fed USF, the 20 States Fund, and state and local taxes.
https://www.att.com/legal/terms.otherWirelessFeeSchedule.htm...
Which means Starling would probably pay for most of it.
Then there are various spy satellites countries have that they dont want tracked? Or does the data from NOAA include spy satellites in strange orbits?
Don't all Starlink satellites have a plan to deorbit responsibly; specifically, do nothing, which results in a relatively quick deorbitting?
Starlink satellites are in low-Earth-orbit which can't accumulate much space debris, because everything deorbits naturally within a few years.
Then they’d switch to a user fee. Perhaps even at a profit, such that it’s deficit reducing.
That isn’t what they’re doing because that isn’t what this is about.
Also let's not forget Sharpie Gate and how the petty Orange Emperor appointed a climate science denier to a top position in NOAA.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-sc...
Yet another systemic rat fucking so somebody can make a buck. It's only ever about the money.
If the US Federal Government spent ZERO money on anything except:
1. Social Security
2. Medicare & Medicaid
3. National Defense
4. Net Interest on the Public Debt
5. Income Security
6. Veterans Benefits & Services
7. Federal Civilian & Military Retirement and Disability
... the US would still have a sizable deficit.
All the hoopla surrounding science spending, education, DEI, FDA, housing, foreign aid, disaster relief, etc., doesn't really address some huge issues if the goal is to reduce deficit spending.
I hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it!
No need for past tense. We’re currently in the most intense—the biggest, most beautiful, one might say—phase of deficit accumulation in American history.
Red herring. It’s not. It’s never been. We’re blowing out the deficit by trillions.
The motivation isn’t anything about the deficit. It’s that NOAA counters the climate narrative a narrow band of idiots would prefer to believe.
It is more national security & military adjacent
I’d stand up a joint agency for this requirement across DOD, NASA, NOAA, FAA, and Commercial Space/Newspace.
I have a feeling that the current US administration would not back such an idea, so this will end up back with the DOD, maybe the Space Force. Despite the DOD saying quite clearly they would prefer NOAA to do it
What would the free market solution be here? Someone builds all the infrastructure to track all the satellites, and maybe more than one (if not you have a monopoly) person does it. Then they charge for it?
But someone doesn't use it an now we have more space junk ...
If anything a government organizing this and everyone utilizing it seems like it makes for more efficient / lower risk situation with satellites.
They’re the bag holder here, and this system could be built for a marginal hit to their bottom line in exchange for a huge amount of de-risking across their entire supply chain.
Also, the US government and it's affiliated institutions already has networks of ground stations and the insurance industry doesnt.
Insurance companies have the right incentive but they don’t need to be the ones building it. Safer cars get cheaper insurance, so there’s clear market pressure there without insurance companies having to build their own cars…
Pollution, kinds that suffer the “tragedy of the common”, are a good example where regulation is necessary to prevent a race to the bottom. But that’s a pretty simple and straightforward thing to democratically vote on without government spending.
I think the solution is fairly simple: private companies build these capabilities and offer them as a service. The idea that there won’t be a marketplace for this service seems misguided too. Adversarial militaries will want their own systems, likely contracted out to private companies, which will likely offer civilian use around the world…