Weather Satellites Lose Funding 275
ianare writes "Federal budget cuts are threatening to leave the US without some critical satellites, and that could mean less accurate warnings about events like tornadoes and blizzards. In particular, officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are concerned about satellites that orbit over the earth's poles rather than remaining over a fixed spot along the equator. These satellites are 'the backbone' of any forecast beyond a couple of days, says Kathryn Sullivan, assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction, and NOAA's deputy administrator. It was data from polar satellites that alerted forecasters to the risk of tornadoes in Alabama and Mississippi back in April, Sullivan says. 'With the polar satellites currently in place we were able to give those communities five days' heads up,' she says."
The satellites will still be there, just listen in (Score:3, Informative)
Ham radio enthusiasts have been doing this forever. Point your favorite directional antenna at a weather satellite and download today's weather fax. Not that difficult.
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Ham radio enthusiasts have been doing this forever. Point your favorite directional antenna at a weather satellite and download today's weather fax. Not that difficult.
Not that difficult if you have $5000 worth of equipment and 200 hours of spare time to devote to it. Once you have that, it's easy.
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Well, a couple of hundred bucks plus a fairly lo-noise receiving location with space for a small turnstile or crossed dipole antenna will do it.
But regardless, what your $200 (or $5000) gets you is the APT transmissions - a low-res 1 or 2 channel image which bears about as much relationship to the images the weather bureau uses for forecasting as YouTube does to Bluray...
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Bullshit. You can receive APT images from the NOAA-N series of using a $20 homebrew turnstile antenna, a radio scanner, and a Windows/Linux box with a soundcard.
I think I have $125 invested in my system here.
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Schematics or it didn't happen...
ie: Please share, I would love to build one of these...
- Dan.
Re:The satellites will still be there, just listen (Score:4, Informative)
I can't find the plans directly online for the turnstile antenna I have, but here's an antenna that actually works a bit better, and probably costs about the same to build:
http://www.g4ilo.com/qfh.html [g4ilo.com]
For the radio, I use a Radio Shack PRO-433 scanner I picked up a pawn shop for $50. It doesn't have the IF bandwidth to create perfect images, so I'll eventually upgrade that to an ICOM IC-100.
For the software, I use a package a friend of mine and I wrote running on a NetBSD server, but there are other packages for Linux and Windows:
http://www.wxtoimg.com/ [wxtoimg.com] is the first that springs to Google.
You can also pick up a copy of the Weather Satellite Handbook from ARRL for some other goodies.
Maybe Corporate America Should Loose Up the Purse? (Score:3)
Ham radio enthusiasts have been doing this forever.
This may be so. But...
There are a *LOT* of big-time commercial orgs that make use of government funded weather sats. Maybe it's time that some of the Big Money Bags that make bank off of publicly funded things like the National Weather Service started ponying up a little cash-ola?
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And lots and LOTS of small-time commercial orgs, non-commercial orgs, and individuals who make use of government-funded weather satellites.
Which is why it should be supported by taxpayer money.
Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years. During the "Reagan Recovery" (sic) we were paying about 15 percent more across the board and the top tiers were paying more than that. Corporations w
Re:Maybe Corporate America Should Loose Up the Pur (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me help you with this. I don't think its the "ideology" that drives them, though this "ideology" certainly is trumpeted. You have to look at motivation and the key term that you used is privatization. Privatization equates to corporate take over. The "ideology" is a smoke screen, its a well crafted piece of propaganda. It plays to sense of greed, hidden in all of us. Its mostly fantasy, much like buying a lottery ticket is.
What one has to do is see through the obfuscation, the red herrings and the propaganda. Easier said than done, but look at the end game. De-fund something, then it becomes up for grabs. This is a great trick if you can find politicians crooked enough and people dumb enough to fall for it. Sadly we have acres of both. And it isn't getting any better.
Re:Maybe Corporate America Should Loose Up the Pur (Score:5, Informative)
You mean we're paying less per person. While our economy doubled in the same time frame, actual US tax income has actually quadrupled $500Mil -> $2.5 Trillion from 1980 - 2007 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/U.S.-income-taxes-out-of-total-taxes.JPG [wikimedia.org]
FYI that's well past inflation.
It's a tired and out of context argument that somehow we needed to keep these top tax rates (as much as 70%!) and that we've shortchanged ourselves, corporations are not paying enough, etc. Instead the truth is we've got about 100 million more people (and many more businesses) in the US than we did in 1980, and with more people you can lower the burden on all. In fact, if we had maintained government spending at 1980's levels (>$1 Trillion) and tracked to inflation we'd be just fine today - in fact we'd have a slight surplus. Instead, despite a doubling of the economy and the quadrupling of tax income, the government sextupled spending (>$1 Tril/year -> $6Tril/year)
The problem has not been taxes, instead it has been both parties spending far beyond revenues, and taking loans out to pay for it (or just pushing the bills into the future, which is why some reports have us at 70 Trillion in unfunded mandates)
Should these satellites go away? Probably not. But I'd like to see something else (or everything) cut first rather than to just add more tax burden.
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And this particular political party also has a vested interest in denying anthropogenic climate disruption. So they defund weather satellites. How utterly convenient!
BTW, this comment:
for example, if there were a heavily Democrat-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee
should be fixed thusly:
for example, if there were a heavily Democratic Party-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee
The same political party in question likes to call their opposite numbe
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Look a little bit closer at that graph that you have linked. Notice the data nodes at the year "2011"?
We are paying the lowest amount of taxes as a percentage of GDP than we have since 1951, which according to my calculations is sixty years ago.
Now if you want to say that in four years we're going to be paying about the average percentage of GDP in taxes that we have in th
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the years we paid the highest amount of taxes as a percentage of GDP were years of solid economic growth and no economic bubbles
The highest peak on that graph comes at the end of the 90s. Surely you're not trying to tell me the dot-com boom was solid economic growth without a bubble?
It's also worth noting that that was the end of a long period of relatively increased government take that began with the 1986 tax reforms. Lower rates with a broader base can and do work when rates are too high and deductions too numerous. (And no, that's not a Laffer curve argument, because the base was broadened significantly.)
Re:Maybe Corporate America Should Loose Up the Pur (Score:5, Informative)
You missed what I said. It was the highest tax rates on the top income brackets that brought the years of economic growth, lowest unemployment and fewest bubbles, not total tax revenue over GDP.
During the dot bomb days, the top earners were paying 38% (if I remember correctly). The reason we had such high revenues is that we were well into the "Reagan Revolution" when the middle class was getting hit the hardest while the rich were skating.
If you really want to see economic growth and strong, stable economies, you have to look for the years where the top brackets paid over 50% in federal income tax. Strangely, those were also the years when the rich did the best, too - even after taxes. Overall, if you carefully analyze the data, you'll find that the nation's economy does best when the top brackets pay well over 50%, because they are more inclined to invest in their companies, add workers, and thus end up making more money in the long run. Unfortunately, it seems like the economic elite have lost all taste for the "long run" and are looking to bust out the country for everything they can and then hope there are enough police still around to protect them. They'll have to be private police, of course.
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That's only part of it. The rest choose to create new companies, or even better choose to take less salary (the ones who are paid salaries) and less bonus (which is a good thing because it leaves more money in the corporation for investment and dividends).
I'm not a Keynesian. Economists are dangerous people. I'm just pointing out a trend, and I'm saying that cutting taxes has never helped an economy,
Re:Maybe Corporate America Should Loose Up the Pur (Score:5, Informative)
The tax rates did not, but the tax laws have, in favor of the biggest earners.
Your "liberal source" graph is not nearly fine enough to prove or disprove my assertion. The data points are decades, for god's sake. Go look at one that shows the numbers by year and you'll see what I mean.
And Slate is every bit as corporate as CNN. They are not a "liberal source" unless you're from the Far Right. Here's an authentic liberal source that shows what I'm talking about. [thomhartmann.com] Drill down into the charts themselves.
By the way, you'll notice that even the source you cited doesn't claim that high taxes hurts GDP or that lowering taxes helps the economy. In fact, it shows the opposite, demolishing the most important "conservative" talking point of all: that we are "over-taxed" and that such "over-taxing" hurts the economy or stifles growth.
(note: I know the poster, so if you want to see the spreadsheet that created those graphs, along with the exact IRS, Census and Bureau of Economic Analysis sources that were used, I'd be willing to send them to you, as long as you're willing to admit you are wrong in a Slashdot Journal associated with your user ID.)
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Amazing how two people can look at the same data and come to radically different views. Yes, the federal government has typically taken in around 18% of GDP in taxes (of one form or another). However the federal government has taken in only 14.9% of GDP in 2009 and 2010 (lowest since 1950) according to your chart; here's the actual numbers [taxpolicycenter.org].
Re:Maybe Corporate America Should Loose Up the Pur (Score:5, Interesting)
tax revenues pretty much always increase. there's are these thing, called inflation, population growth, productivity increases.. thing is, after tax cuts, you are increasing FROM A LOWER POINT. in other words, you're collecting less than you would have otherwise.
sound economic policy is very simple. rack up huge deficits in down times to keep the economy going. pay them down when things are going well. problem is, every republican administration since reagan has set massive record after massive record for deficit spending EVEN DURING BOOM TIMES. now when we NEED that spending, they cry about the deficit. it would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.
the stimulus spending has saved our auto industry (and in the end cost very little) though that was a republican, of course, that started it... Kudos to him. and the stimulus very certainly helped blunt the full force of this recession. Biggest boom ever to biggest bust ever, this very easily could have been the great depression, and I can say that stimulus projects were the ONLY thing keeping many engineering and construction firms afloat for the last couple of years. And those people are the people who drive the economy. They have mortgages and car payments and kids, suppliers and workers, and the cash they get flows through the economy very rapidly. Unlike tax giveaways to people who already have enough money.
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What we should do now is give money directly to individuals (a basic income guarantee, like Tom Paine proposed in 1795), and encourage them to innovate on their own and in ad-hoc groups communicating through the wonderful tool of the internet, without the need for business hierarchies and salespeople.
The National Weather Service could hold challenges to stimulate individuals to create better solutions for weather balloons and such. Take the best ideas, and let biz do what they do best - incrementally innova
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Re:Maybe Corporate America Should Loose Up the Pur (Score:5, Interesting)
If Big Weather (The Weather Channel, Intellicast, Accuweather, and a few others) start putting money into the system you know damn well that their first requirement will be to lockout anyone else.
Accuweather tried that one a few years back by buying Rick Santorum and getting him to start legislation (see S. 786) that prohibited the NWS from providing forecasts/data/whatnot to the public if a private corporation (*cough*Accuweather*cough*) could do it instead.
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There are a *LOT* of big-time commercial orgs that make use of government funded weather sats.
Weather data is also important to Generals and commercial shipping. My guess, it's not going away any time soon.
Dead satellites, they're no fun [Re:The satell...] (Score:2)
"The satellites will still be there, just listen in"
Well, no. Satellites don't last forever. If the satellites don't get replaced when they fail, while they will in some sense "still be there", it won't do you any good to "just listen in;" they won't be broadcasting.
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Ham radio enthusiasts have been doing this forever. Point your favorite directional antenna at a weather satellite and download today's weather fax. Not that difficult.
Are you downloading the raw data or a fax service for ships at sea?
Information is not a substitute for understanding.
Re:The satellites will still be there, just listen (Score:4, Informative)
Radio amateurs have been designing, building, and launching satellites for years. (Well, they contract out the launching.) It is called AMSAT.
Re:The satellites will still be there, just listen (Score:5, Interesting)
They can put the satellite in "the cloud" (Score:3, Funny)
it's supposed to be cheaper.
[Just watch out for Amazon cloud crashes... ;-) ]
Re:They can put the satellite in "the cloud" (Score:4, Funny)
This will never work. The Amazon is nowhere near the poles !
Re:They can put the satellite in "the cloud" (Score:4, Funny)
Something has to give to pay for (Score:2)
ICE to keep the IP pirates at bay.
Got our priorities straight! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course tornadoes never attack airports... (Other than the one that hit Lambert Field in St. Louis a month or so ago.)
Well, see, you've made the case for Homeland Security. Thanks to our enhanced security infrastructure, we can pretty much guarantee that particular tornado will NEVER strike again!
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Of course tornadoes never attack airports...
It's because they don't last as long as it takes to get through a TSA security checkpoint and there is some concern about small funnels being inapropriately touched.
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Which ones were those?
The only ones I have heard of were the one the passengers stopped. Tornadoes killed over 100 people this year, terrorists on US planes 0.
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Nice argument. It works as long as the damages between terrorists and tornados are with a magnitude or two of each other. If the Taliban manage to make off with one of Pakistan's nukes, then the stakes are bit higher. Then again there may not be big distinction between the Pakistan government and the Taliban.
Re:Got our priorities straight! (Score:5, Insightful)
Calculate the number of people dying from terrorist attacks, compare to number of people dying from natural disasters, compare the funding.
Is it me or is there something off the mark?
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Your statement actually implies that the TSA is doing very well at their job, because increased funding is correlated with lack of terrorist-related deaths.
That said... I totally agree with you that the TSA sucks and really isn't worth it. Correlation/causation and all that. Just came to say, your justification does not make for a sound argument.
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Is it me or is there something off the mark?
Well, yes, your math is wrong.
a. If 9-11 had gone a little differently, up to 100,000 people would have died.
b. The economic ramifications of what happened after were not short-lived or small in size.
It's still off the mark, but not as badly as you first assumed.
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Cause of shortfall? (Score:2)
If people are still paying taxes and the population size hasn't become smaller, what is the cause of these budget shortages? Is the military getting more, are there more anti-terror branches, high politician salaries, are we sponsoring private firms, or what?
I am not an economist so beyond what the media says, I would be interested in some insight.
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Re:Cause of shortfall? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't forget that taxes are lower than they were during the Reagan Era. About 15% less for most, and an even more generous cut for the rich.
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When people lose jobs they move from paying taxes to collecting unemployment. In a somewhat oversimplified way, if you go from 5% unemployment to 10%, your outlays have increased not a 5% increase in government spending, much more than that, a couple of percent of GDP, and your revenue has fallen by 5%.
Then you have extra spending, for things like bailouts, stimulus (some of which essentially comes out of the unemployment insurance you're paying) and so on.
Oh, and all the while because companies are making
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In the U.S. we could leave Iraq and Gitmo, and disband the TSA. All that killing brown people, gate rape and nudie scanning costs quite a lot for nearly zero return.
Of course, actually addressing unemployment (other than for finance executives) might be helpful.
Re:Cause of shortfall? (Score:5, Insightful)
People are not paying taxes, that's actually the problem. The middle class is being eliminated, poor people have no money to pay tax with and the rich get tax exemption.
Where do you think the money should come from?
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Almost half of individuals in the U.S. pay no taxes.
The same can be said for the corporations in the U.S.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/08/12/us-usa-taxes-corporations-idUSN1249465620080812 [reuters.com]
NOAA survey (Score:2)
NOAA is currently seeking submissions to a survey of how they are doing. If you like their stuff, as I do, please go to the survey [cfigroup.com] and give them an honest review.
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Cool, happy to help. I am glad that you get value out of NOAA's services. NOAA is one of the things that I am very happy to pay taxes for.
Why is it... (Score:2)
Why is it we can fund NPR and the National Endowment for the Arts, and all kinds of fluffy things, but when it comes to cutting the budget all the demagogues can think of is cutting essential funding? Oh, wait, I forgot they don't have the best interests of the nation in mind.
Never mind.
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Let's see... $422M annually for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (a small portion of which funds NPR), $160M for NEA... how does that compare to the $1B annually for JPSS?
By the way, it's worth noting that while NPR only gets 2% of their budget from CPB, $94M went to fund local radio stations. NPR estimates 100 local radio stations would stop broadcasting if they lost CPB money, and many of the rest would be substantially crippled. Are you ready for all your radio stations to be ClearChannel and CB
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Karma is a bitch (Score:2)
It'll be the deficit hawks in climate change denying red states that are affected most by gaps in forecasting.
Really? Just what every conspiracy theorist needs! (Score:2)
A good henchman, enter someone trying to get advanced
weather satellites cancelled.
Nice move...!
-AI
"five days' heads up'?" (Score:2)
If ifs and buts were candy and nuts... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anyone actually read the article? It was full of "what if" scenarios: If we don't get the funding... this COULD be an incredible loss. No one at NOAA would ever find a worthless waste of money like WEFAX over short wave that could be eliminated and no one would miss it, instead they go for the most popular, useful tool they have and threaten to kill that off if they don't get fully funded.
Doesn't anyone realize that the first line of defense for a bureaucracy is to find the most important program and threaten to kill it if it doesn't get what it wants?
Like every time someone mentions selling public land, the first thing some policy wonk at the Dept of Interior mentions is selling off Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. The government could make millions from selling off land around ski resorts that no one would miss, but it will never happen because the bureaucrats will always threaten the worst case scenario. NPR is all too happy to play along, since they have the same problem. I'm sure NPR could find 10% of their operating budget to cut and still provide 95% or more of their current offerings, but instead they go for the jugular and threaten to kill Garrison Keillor.
A novel idea... (Score:3)
I'd pay $1/mo for being able to access the weather forecast...and there are what? 300,000,000 Americans? That should be enough to keep the damn satellites up. If not, charge $2/mo.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Interesting)
If these are the satellites that I'm thinking of, this would be very bad indeed. There isn't any inherent reason why the US needs to be the only ones with satellites doing this work, but the reason it's being cut is to appease climate change skeptics. And unless the ESA or somebody else gets satellites up there to prevent a potential gap in recordings we'll largely have to start over.
From the article, we're not the only ones with those sorts of satellites, there apparently aren't enough of them to fill the gap that we'd be leaving.
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Nonsense. The reason it's being cut is there's less money around to pay for stuff and it's easier to cut spending on satellites than over-funded "think of the children" schools and other stuff that money is wasted on but is considered untouchable.
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Republicans don't care about children after they are born. However, if you mention that bad weather forecasts might drive up abortions - you'll get funds in a nanosecond.
Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
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Either that or some people have a more nuanced view.
There is a point where abortion becomes nasty, since it is a fully developed child who could survive outside the mother. This is why parital birt abortion is nasty, and pretty much anyone, Democrat or not will agree.
When the debate gets silly is when people decide that 5-100 undifferentiated cells are somehow imbued with magic because of their subjective religious beleifs that not everyone is our society agrees with. When the only basis to your argument
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Defense and bailouts would be a good place to start. There's also the most to get.
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Those satellites are expensive high-tech toys that a lot of countries either can't make or afford.
Launching them is also expensive and few of the countries that can afford them even have launching facilities.
The data from those satellites is valuable for military purposes, and always suspected of spying by everyone else.
The ground stations for those things tend to be expensive as well.
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Because the US is not the only one running these.
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Informative)
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Interesting. From what I'm reading, this is not a partisan cut at all, but rather axing a program that has shown absolutely no results in the time its been running. In that case, it absolutely should be axed.
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Military application. Weather is very important for things like routing strategic bombers and reconnaissance aircraft flying across north pole into former Soviet Union.
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Funny (Score:2)
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"Reagan proved deficits don't matter," said Dick. I believe he was one of your guys.
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Yeah, as an american it pisses me off that we fund so much, essentially subsidizing european socialism.
We need to cut back way big on the military, and let countries like germany have one.
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comcast / weather channel has the funds to have there own weather satellites.
False.
Pentagon Pegs New Cost Estimate For NPOESS At $11.5 Billion [aviationweek.com]
"The Pentagon's latest cost estimate for the scaled-back National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) program is $11.5 billion through 2020"
Lockheed Martin Lands $1 Billion Weather Satellite Contract [spacenews.com]
"The GOES-R system — whose total estimate life-cycle cost is $7.7 billion — will replace the GOES-N satellite series"
These are the two major NOAA weather satellite programs under current develo
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This article is nothing more than a troll from NASA to scare people into thinking that if they don't get ALL their funding, people will die in blizzards and tornadoes.
Re:comcast / weather channel has the funds to have (Score:5, Insightful)
This article is nothing more than a troll from NASA to scare people into thinking that if they don't get ALL their funding, people will die in blizzards and tornadoes.
Or perhaps NASA is right to complain: people WILL die if they have to stop running those satellites?
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NASA will get their funding for the Sats.
This is just bureaucratic games
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Pretty sure they're like Accu-weather and the rest.. they get the raw data from the satellites/NOAA/NWS and make their own interpretations.
Re:One has to wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
How many fighter bombers would have to be decommissioned to pay for them?
Defence is one thing, being the number one spender, by far, on the military on earth is something else entirely.
I'm guessing one*. F-18 Hornets cost $80 million per plane. The proposed NOAA budget cut is $57 million. There are 128 of these craft on order. So just buy 127 and NOAA can keep its budget levels intact.
*You're not actually going to save much decommissioning them. But you can cut back on how many you buy year to year.
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You would save bunches decommissioning them. They have to be fueled, maintained, and kept ready. That stuff ain't cheap.
I suggest we order 126 and decommission a couple more. That should get us a couple spare satellites.
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Hrm. Reminds me of all the hubbub over Hubble, when in fact there are 25 Hubbles pointed down at the earth. I know Al Capone said walk softly and carry a big stick, but then again he was a syphillitic madman.
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To be fair we probably did blow up those bridges to begin with.
How about we have less wars and buy satellites with the saved money? I bet cutting that "War on Drugs" would buy more than one satellite.
Your defence spending blew up the bridges.... (Score:3)
Well, your military blew up the bridges in the first place. How about you cut out the middle process of blowing up other people's bridges, then you don't have to consider the cost of rebuilding them? Depends on your priorities I suppose. Blowing up other countries infrastructures and not rebuilding them is one solution, but this may lead to a lot of disaffected, disadvantaged people who might see the solution as coming over to the USA and blowing up US people in revenge. Bombing people back into the stone a
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Especially the heavy duty construction industry regularly needs to be able to plan ahead for several days.
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Three-day weather forecasts aren't significantly more precise or accurate than what you can get from the farmer's almanacs, or what any intelligent, observant person who's lived in the area for a few years can tell you by virtue of what month it is.
The weather forecast community is claiming that they do far better than that. If you disagree, you'd better back it up with some credible arguments.
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I live in Kansas. I noticed that all of the subtly racist vitriol against "those people" stupid enough to live in a hurricane zone has been remarkably silent as tornadoes ravage the Midwest and the victims beg the rest of the country for assistance.
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I live in Kansas. I noticed that all of the subtly racist vitriol against "those people" stupid enough to live in a hurricane zone has been remarkably silent as tornadoes ravage the Midwest and the victims beg the rest of the country for assistance.
Apparently, looking on the grandparent post - that subtly racist vitriol has been supplanted by not-so-subtly bigoted anti-bible-belt vitriol.
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I don't see that at all. He suggested they turn to their faith if they did not want to pay for science.
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>There is no evidence that religious people in middle America are unwilling to pay for science or oppose the purchase and launch of weather satellites. Indeed, middle America happily paid for the Apollo moon program and took great pride in it
That was 50 years ago. And it wasn't about science, it was about "them godless communists that beat us to space first, but we'll beat them to the moon."
Context is everything.
--
BMO
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That's because it isn't there. I'm talking about the "shut up and help yourself" talk we heard after Katrina. You'll note that you've heard none of that for the Joplin disaster. Side note; friend of mine from Iowa smugly noted after their floods when I observed how quickly their infrastructure was restored "We just get it done, we don't wait for someone to help us." Obviously not knowing that FEMA had burned the rest of their budget for the year bailing their happy asses out. Lots of people around here
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You do realize defunding the National Weather Service and turning to ostensibly private organizations such as AccuWeather (which unsurprisingly gets 90% of its data from the NWS, and thus essentially serves as nothing but a middle man) has been a long time goal of the Republican party.
And heaven forbid someone actually examine the cost-benefit ratio of a government program to determine whether or not that it is actually effective.
No. Of course not. Facts have no place in your worldview. It's just cheerleadi
Re:Now (Score:4, Informative)
"has been a long time goal of the Republican party" Do you have a reference for this?
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to privatize the government.
Didn't that happen years ago?