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Weather Satellites Lose Funding
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."
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.
it's supposed to be cheaper.
[Just watch out for Amazon cloud crashes... ;-) ]
sigo ergo sum
Perhaps someone with a little more knowledge in this area can explain why these aren't a joint venture between multiple countries or why there is no alternative to these specific satellites. A single point of funding/failure for a system like this just seems silly.
We just have to wait for Nancy Pelosi to come and say it will be cheaper to clean up the damage than to fund the satellites.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
comcast / weather channel has the funds to have there own weather satellites.
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.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
ICE to keep the IP pirates at bay.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
In a world where communications media allow only one person with $5000 worth of equipment to share that equipment with people who have all the spare time (and there are lots, just look at us for an example) it'll be pretty much the same as before (visit a website, here's your data).
Can ham radio enthusiasts also put satellites into polar orbit to replace the ones that fail?
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?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
So let me get this straight. We're paying billions upon billions and sacrificing our constitutional rights to guard our airports from purely theoretical terrorist threats. Meanwhile, we're cutting funding for satellites that warn us about very real weather threats. Glad to see we've got our priorities straight.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
We can give hundreds of billions to the poor around the world, but we can't buy a satellite to watch the weather? How about we not build a few of those bridges we've built in Baghdad or something? Or maybe have those countries pay us back for some of the infrastructure we rebuilt from scratch? Hell - you can even deduct the value of the old infrastructure after some depreciation... Or maybe we could launch one or two fewer spy satellites? Hell - I bet that the interest on the debt we've borrowed over the last five years would cover a LOT of satellites... What a mess...
Excellent! With all those space cloud cameras gone, we'll be able to return to the proper, insurance-friendly version of "acts of god"!
I can't wait for heavy rain to invalidate my protections because god, and not monsoon season, hates me!
I hope the government put in more money for disaster relief!!!converse shoes
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.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
On what planet does a directional antenna and a radio receiver cost $5000?! Use a Yagi-Uda or helical antenna for anything below 1GHz, and an old 2m satellite TV dish (which you can often find for free if you're willing to haul it away) for anything over.
Radio amateurs have been designing, building, and launching satellites for years. (Well, they contract out the launching.) It is called AMSAT.
If they're the ones used for forecasts more than two days into the future, I'm in favor of cutting the funding. We're not getting any practical use out of them. 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 one-day forecasts ("What's it going to do tomorrow?") are occasionally useful (if, like, you're planning to visit the Big Room and want to know what it'll be like out there -- obviously if you stay indoors all the time it's somewhat less critical). I'm willing to continue funding the one-day forecasts. The two-day forecasts are pretty marginal, but I *might* be talked into continued funding for them, arguably, on the grounds that maybe with enough more decades of practice the meteorologists will get better enough that the accuracy might improve.
But the three-day and five-day ones are just pointless. Forget the satellites and just roll some dice. It won't have any impact on the accuracy.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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.
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 were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today.
I would say that the National Weather Service is exactly the kind of thing that a 21st century government should be doing.
And I'm a bit offended by the verbiage in the title of this story. The Weather Service did not "lose" funding as if they had it in their pants pocket and misplaced it, their funding was systematically and purposely cut by the members of a particular political party in power because the National Weather Service is a successful government agency and "successful" and "government" in the same sentence goes against that party's core ideology. They hate government, possibly because they are so bad at it.
Now watch for Congress to try to privatize the Weather Service by selling off the polar satellites to big corporations who will then offer weather forecasting and data in four tiers: 1 timely information for themselves. 2 delayed accurate information for those that pay for it. 3 accurate information for the military, but only if the military pay about 200% more than the US government currently would pay to fully fund the whole program itself, and 4 delayed information for the rest of us, and only as accurate as they want it to be to best suit their agenda. (for example, if there were a heavily Democrat-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee, they might want to wait a while before sending out the alert. After all, if there was a major flood and subsequent demographic upheaval in that place, scattering the concentration of Democratic voters as far as Idaho and Montana, it can only help the country, right?)
Not many people are aware of just how far certain politicians currently in office and the people they work for are willing to go to push their ideology, and practically none of us overestimate their capacity for inflicting pain on the population.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 and give them an honest review.
When It Counts.
>>Here in the US we're paying less taxes than we have in the past 60 years.
Wrong. Don't confuse the maximum marginal tax rate (which used to go up to 91%) with the actual amount of taxes paid per dollar of GDP. Hauser found (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_Law) that no matter what the tax rates are set to, we pay around 20% of our GDP in taxes. If you're talking about the recent dip due to the recession, you might be able to make an argument there, but the long term trend is actually pretty clear:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/75/U.S._Federal_Tax_Receipts_as_a_Percentage_of_GDP_1945%E2%80%932015.jpg
The federal government takes in plenty of money from taxes. The problem is that they spend too much. I suggest even, across the board, cuts to balance the budget. No partisanship, just chop the budget by whatever percentage excess they had the year before.
to privatize the government.
Something tells me free enterprise will determine if there is a market all the 'functions' the government is serving; from satellite programs to saving the snail darters...just sayin'
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.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The polar orbiting satellites carry COSPAS-SARSAT emergency beacon receivers. So do geostationary satellites, but the polar orbiting satellites are the only ones which can determine beacon location (using Doppler shift) from beacons that do not provide a GPS data signal. There is much more than pretty weather images for local news, these satellites provide a wide range of information, service and redundancy.
So who planted the NPR story, Northrup?
Yeah, I am "partisan". Dude I am not even a US citizen, I don't live in the US, but am forced to watch "americentric" news. This is what you get. Honestly I think that Americans only have room in their heads for two political parties and both of them suck. But then again, we get the governments we deserve. How's that for "partisan"? Pelosi is a dumbass, regardless of party.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
#DeleteChrome
I don't see that at all. He suggested they turn to their faith if they did not want to pay for science.
Let's raise the rates back up to 1970 levels and see what would happen then.
The problem is we subsidize oil companies, but not healthy school lunches to prevent obesity. We have military bases we don't need instead of funding scientific research that isn't profitable, but needed.
I've recently moved back to kansas, and i've been stricken by exactly how MUCH emphasis the weather forecasters put on their SCIENCE. It seems like every local news weather team promo is basically just an advertisement for science. "Local news team weather uses Science science science science science. Channel X Science team weather science predicts weather with science. Science!"
It made me want to make my own competing god-based weather forecasting service. It should sell well here, right???
Of course not. Even a bible-thumper will use science when it comes to doing something in the real world.
It's okay everyone, don't panic. The free market ferry will step in and take care of this for us, right? Right?
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.
Well thank god for that five days' heads up, lives and properties would have been lost otherwise.
Might be better off buying a used storm chaser Doppler radar off ebay if you are trying to detect tornadoes. Especially since the satellite won't have a view of the tornado belt of continental USA most of the time.
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...
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
The article mostly talked about why these satellites are important. For info on why the polar sats are delayed this article has the skinny: http://www.spacenews.com/civil/100202-white-house-dissolves-npoess-satellite-partnership.html
I assume the current article is more about jockeying between agencies and contractors than anything else.
Before they are born they aren't children. Of course, reality is too complicated for someone who actually believe in invisible spooks in the sky.
I'm pretty sure that the handouts to the rich which caused the recent problems were not done by a Democrat. then again, I wouldn't expect a neocon to ever man up to the truth when there are corporations and their profits to whore for.
It's not an issue of "room in our heads".
We've got a voting system that, given two strong parties, guarantees any third party cannot win. One of the existing parties must collapse before another can meaningfully compete, and with no external competition, the two parties are practically guaranteed to fight for "moderate" voters by approaching each others' position, and to crank up the rhetoric amplifying whatever notional differences they retain to prevent voters from seeing through the farce and staying home.
Bizarrely, both parties are resistant to all efforts to reform the voting system and remove their guaranteed 1-on-1 fight..
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 the past sixty years, I'll accept that. But right now, this year, 2011, we are paying the lowest actual amount of taxes paid per dollar of GDP that we have since 1951.
And by the way, if you could drill down a little closer to that graph, you'd find that the years we paid the highest amount of taxes as a percentage of GDP were years of solid economic growth and no economic bubbles. If you go back to WWII, you'll find that whenever the tax rate on the top income groups goes above 50%, we have dropping unemployment, greater growth of GDP and no economic bubbles. But whenever the top rate dips below 50% on top earners, we have rising unemployment, lower GDP and economic bubbles.
The chart that you have provided us shows that the federal government is NOT taking in enough money. Again, we're taking in less than we have in 60 years. Corporations used to pay about 15 percent of the total government revenue. Today, it's only about 6 percent, despite record corporate profits (even the average corporate profit is way up).
I think given that information it's clear to see what's happening.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
"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.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
"The federal government takes in plenty of money from taxes. The problem is that they spend too much. I suggest even, across the board, cuts to balance the budget."
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. So no, the government is not taking in plenty of money from taxes. I don't know about you but I really notice a ~20% drop in income and that's a major reason behind the current and projected budget deficits. So if we want to get serious about the budget we must start by repealing the disastrous Bush tax cuts, not by enacting recession-prolonging austerity measures borne entirely by the lower and middle classes.
>>Notice the data nodes at the year "2011"?
Did our tax rates suddenly change from 2008 to 2011, or did our economy collapse?
In fact, you see a high point in our tax rate by GDP in the mid 2000s, which took place after GWB's tax cuts to the rich - wait, what, tax revenues went up?
>>The chart that you have provided us shows that the federal government is NOT taking in enough money.
Right (if you put in terms of how much they want to spend), but neither are corporations or people. That's why it's called a depr^h^h^h^hrecession.
The point you're missing is that the tax revenues per GDP stay amazingly stable no matter what the tax rate is.
>>If you go back to WWII, you'll find that whenever the tax rate on the top income groups goes above 50%, we have dropping unemployment, greater growth of GDP
Let's test your theory.
From a liberal source: http://img.slate.com/media/86/marginalGrowth.jpg
There again doesn't seem to be any correlation between the highest marginal tax rate and GDP growth. And if you're suggesting returning to the 91% marginal tax rate, you have to remember to reintroduce all the loopholes that made people pay roughly the same taxes as they do today.
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.)
First, NOAA and NASA have developed a terrible institutional disease: they seek to put the newest most-cutting-edge sensors on every new probe. This means every new satellite is a handmade custom unit and it suffers from cost overruns and schedule slips as new technology encounters the inevitable development problems. It's nice to have better sensors, but let's face it.... we the taxpayers would have been better served if they had set-up an assembly line of the exact satellites we've been using, built a good production run of them (getting the production benefits of an assembly line) and then just pulled one from storage and launched it whenever one failed. We also would likely have been happy if NASA had built a dozen little Mars rovers like Opportunity and sent them to Mars at regular intervals to explore various regions. Instead, we watch as a perfectly good design has worked for years longer than predicted on Mars and now we will watch with trepidation as they launch the new billion-dollar boondoggle they're currently prepping. We will cross our fingers as it attempts to land.... and we will be angry and there will be investigations and recriminations if this hyper-expensive one-off rover fails.
Second, governments at all levels become arrogant and they like to lash-out at the taxpayers and voters when the people begin to complain about money. When a town has financial problems, it is far more likely to lay-off cops and firemen than administrators. When a state has tight budgets, the teachers, prisons, and parks are on the chopping block. When the feds are in trouble, the space program and weather satellites are threatened.... In each case, the government officials take an action that threatens the safety or national pride of the citizens in order to try to scare enough taxpayers into saying "ok, raise our taxes!" and they'll go right on building bridges to nowhere, tunnels for turtles, treadmills for shrimp, etc. and they'll keep sending billions every year to other countries that hate us....
Revenue to government in the US almost always rises. It rose through the eighties when Reagan cut taxes (unfortunately, congress increased spending faster than the revenue increases), money continued to flow into government during the Bush41, Clinton, and Bush43 years. Clinton grew the govenment faster than inflation, Bush43 grew it even faster in the aftermath of 9-11 as he created DHS and implemented Medicare part-D. Even under Obama, funds flowing into Washington are higher still (in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars) but government has grown even faster. The problem is that year-after-year politicians spend faster and faster and they scream about all the terrible things that will happen if we try to limit them. The politicians are usually not honest about the numbers, often claiming revenues have fallen when what has actually happened is that revenues have risen slower than the politicians expected and therefore have fallen short of expectations. Incidentally, there ARE places where revenue has actually fallen like California (where tax policy is so "progressive" that the upper-classes pay far more than their fair share... which seems to work wonders during boom times, but this backfires during economic downturns when many of those people see sharp income drops. During such drops, the upper classes stay comfortable atop their assets, but their income falls and hence their taxes plummet)
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.
>>However the federal government has taken in only 14.9% of GDP in 2009 and 2010
>>So if we want to get serious about the budget we must start by repealing the disastrous Bush tax cuts
Logic fail. The Bush tax cuts were in 2001 and 2003, but we had growing income tax revenues after 2003. You're blaming the Bush tax cuts on the drop in tax revenues in 2009-2010 on something that happened 7-9 years before? When in the meantime tax revenues both individual (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Federal_individual_income_tax_receipts_2000-2009.png) and total revenue as percentage of GDP *rose* during that time period? The data doesn't support your hypothesis.
>>not by enacting recession-prolonging austerity measures borne entirely by the lower and middle classes.
Whereas the drunken-sailor stimulus spending has resulted in... what?
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.
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
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. Many of the people who worked on the moonshot were religious from the lowest-level technicians working on hardware to the actual astronauts who took the journey. Did you realize how many of this nation's astronauts come from "fly-over country"??? Furthermore, much of the most-important science the modern world is built upon was produced by religious Christians and Jews. Does the name "Newton" ring a bell? Ever actually read the actual words of Kepler? (hint: he was religious so you probably think he was an idiot) Copernicus should also receive your disdain, I presume, given his position in the Catholic Church... Even the concept of "the big bang" was championed by a Christian and opposed by many secular scientists for years (because they were opposed to any theory that implied the universe had an origin). Try a little reading, you might be amazed at the things you can learn.
On the other hand, the anti-religious quack Holdren who is currently Obama's science advisor seems quite happy to destroy scientific and engineering activities at NOAA and NASA... and remember that He and Obama are the ones deciding on the allocation of the Funds congress provides... Not one single religious taxpayer in middle America has had any involvement in the policy decisions that have led to where we are now with the nation's weather satellites; these decisions are all being made in big cites on the coasts where people tend to be less religious. Anybody who wants to be seen as a champion of reason needs to do more than just attack religious people; he needs to actually deploy a little reason.
>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
It'll be the deficit hawks in climate change denying red states that are affected most by gaps in forecasting.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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.
Those that don't like facts or data collection about issues like global warming probably will be thrilled to end sat service to NOAH.
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 innovate (like making computers smaller).
If the govt has to print money to fund the challenges and pay biz to commoditize the best ideas, it won't matter because we will be producing things others want, which will keep the currency strong.
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. 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.)
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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 are only libertarian when "those people" are getting money and aid from the government.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Schematics or it didn't happen...
ie: Please share, I would love to build one of these...
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
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.
Take the Red Pill.
Logic fail? There were declines in five out of eight years and federal revenue from individual income taxes not only never recovered to 2001 levels, they're currently DOWN BY ~40%! You can't even read your own damn chart!
"Whereas the drunken-sailor stimulus spending has resulted in... what?"
A complete economic meltdown was averted and we still have an automotive industry that is now profitable and the taxpayers will soon be paid in full, and well over 1,000,000 jobs saved. Just imagine what would have happened if the stimulus were the 2-3 times larger (and little of it in unstimulatory tax cuts rather than ~half) that leading economists and proven economic policy were calling for.
Santa is going to be a little late next year.
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
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/ 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.
You want to keep voting for Democrats that REFUSE to cut ANY budget item ever, not matter how poorly run or how much is lost to fraud. Well, congratulations, the current level of government is unsustainable and the cuts have to come from somewhere. You have voted in assholes that have made a quarter of this country dependent on government hand outs, which can't be cut because whoever cuts them gets voted out.
You Democrat voters have overspent and set up spending so ONLY programs like this can be cut. Vote Democrat for more taxes and reduced services for the middle class, just one more example.
A good henchman, enter someone trying to get advanced
weather satellites cancelled.
Nice move...!
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That would be news to my friends in Huntsville and Tuscaloosa.
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
"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 were paying almost twice as much forty years ago than they do today."
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
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.
Why not sell the satellites? Congress just has to tell the officials at NOAA to post the satellites on Ebay or even Cregg's List(my preference, for the lulz).
I am confident that aerosace companies and foreign governments with fledgling aerospace programs would love to own a satellite or two. There is nothing quite like having a working satellite in orbit that you merely have to
I know that that might mean that weather forecasters would have to buy the data (assuming they don't have to right now and that the NOAA can control who gets the data), but that means that consumers of that data would pay for it rather than tax-payers. This issue brings up who should bear the cost of weather data gathering: tax-payers or weather forecasters. Also, I know that the cost to me is negligible, but I see private companies benefiting form owning the satellites in addition to the current weather data gathering.
At any rate, I am sure that the satellites will hit earth's atmosphere before the US government sells them.
Anyone else who's read Niven's "Fallen Angels" recognizing way too much of it coming true? It was supposed to be _fiction_, Larry! (Wasn't it?)
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 number the DemocRAT party. They spit it out like weeks-old leftovers. They want people to associate the Democratic Party of the United States of America with Rattus rattus norvegicus. Sort of like how Radio Rwanda associated the Tutsi tribe with cockroaches.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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.
does not square with
the years we paid the highest amount of taxes as a percentage of GDP were years of solid economic growth and no economic bubbles
You cannot have it both ways.
Furthermore,
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.
Why do tax rates of > 50% of income make people want to invest in a company? I am all ears.
As a ham I and a meteorologist. MacTO and DarthBart have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. DarthBart is able to use $200 worth of equipment because NOAA/NASA spent a few million dollars extra in terms of on-board equipment and satellite weight to maintain a signal they should dropped in 1975. No it isn't as easy as buying a cheap receiver and loading some software. The reason his images are poor is because it takes a lot of tuning and just the right timing to get a decent image. Having used APT imagery in the south Atlantic and in the North Pacific on field campaigns it takes a lot of effort and expensive hardware to get a clean image. An APT image once an hour is of little use when you are trying to tell which storm is moving where to give people more than a 30 second warning. MacTO: So I guess one of the AMSAT's has both 1km visible and 4km IR imagers? I guess one of the AMSAT's is in a Geostationary orbit so I can get imagery every 3 minutes? I guess one of the AMSET's has a profiler so I can receive vertical temperature, humidity and wind profiles every 30km every 3 minutes. Guess what AMSAT's are little more than a glorified repeater Since my students have built a cube sat I know that the bulk of the work has been done by NASA not hams. Hams serve an important role in society, to open them up to ridicule with foolish garbage does more harm than good
Here's a novel idea...start charging for access to the weather satellite data.
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.
There's no place like
I don't come around much anymore and reading through this thread I see why.
Current budget has been "unsustainable" since Alexander Hamilton assumed the states' War debts in the very first administration. And yet standard of living has risen continuously, and America's become the world's #1 economy. The yearly predictions of "unsustainable" (except during republican administrations, when conservatives say "Reagan proved deficits don't matter") have never come true...
We've already determined that you are not capable of rational thought, so who really cares what you believe.
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.
Do you seriously think raising taxes causes economic growth?
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
So, you've identified a causative action - the "top brackets" all run their own companies, but just won't invest in them unless they're taxed enough.
The Keynesian school of economic thought dominated the great depression and post-war eras you keep mentioning. They believed that government intervention via fiscal policy (adjustments to tax rates and government spending) could grow an economy faster than it would left to its own devices. You raise taxes in times of prosperity to cover deficit spending during times of recession.
In other words, you have cause and effect flipped around. The government raised taxes when times were good, and cut them when they weren't. To imply otherwise is like saying a traffic light's red because all the cars stopped, or that others modding you up caused you to hate on Reagan.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I thought all your US corporations were sending their money to tax havens and are involved in all kinds of tax avoidance schemes? Surely, if your corporations weren't avoiding the payment of tax (and I think it's been discussed a couple times on /.), then there would be more money to go into the good science and technology systems that are useful on a global scale...
assuming you aren't in a country like RSA where our government still manages to mismanage all the money it gets from taxes...
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 age leaves a lot of stone age people who might take stone age solutions get out of their poverty...
Currently your military spending is ten times larger than the second biggest military power in the world. If you scaled it down a little bit then that would pay for the satellites.
Does that mean that there won't be enough funding for more UFO's?
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.
That claim is false: the overwhelming majority of US government spending is proportional to the number of people - and in particular, a significant chunk of it is proportional to the number of old US citizens.
Think of the US government as an insurance company for the old, which has an army. That single sentence describes roughly 50% of all US government spending.
Much of the rest pays for equal-chance education (teachers), unemployment insurance (which cost goes up during crises and goes down during booms), poor families/children, roads and other infrastructure - none of those have fixed maintenance costs but go up linearly with the number of people.
So an income proportional tax rate which gets progressively larger for the luckier (richer) people is a very natural model if you think about it rationally: those should pay for civilization who benefit from it financially.
Did they try looking in the last place they had it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I prefer the new proposal on the table by a Democrat. Eliminate all Income Taxes and move to a 1% Transactional Tax. Every actual transaction in the US would be charged 1% and sent to the Government. In 2010 the total assets transacted in the US was $900 Trillion. Put a 1% transaction tax on all of it and you fund the Government with $9 Trillion. If you spend $10 million for a home, you send the Government 1%. No hiding of funds. You push money off shore the government takes 1% of it from the transaction. Any and all transaction taxed at 1%. It's not bad for day to day living. It sure would counter all the loopholes. Everyone of those loopholes is a transaction. 1% goes to the Government. Every stock trade is a transaction. 1% goes to the Government.
Actually, that sounds like a really easy way to get into some HAM stuff. Do you have any more information on your setup? It sounds like a good beginner project with little initial investment needed. As someone who has no experience with this, $125 is the kind of amount I can just throw at a project and see if it hits my interest.
Can this be done from Europe? Or is NOAA-N Specific to the US?
Do you have any schematics/instructions/etc...?
The real issue with the NPOESS polar orbiting meteorological satellite program was that it was 6 years behind schedule and $3B over budget. That's not a success by any measure. A textbook case of a government program gone bad, with the requisite calls for more good money to be thrown into the abyss after the bad....
Actually, no:
1) the satellites will increasingly *not* be there after 2016. They don't have endless lives. That is the whole point, if you'd cared to read the original newsitem.
2) if funding for mission maintenance is dropped, these satellites will go out of control. Then some of them might still be still up after 2016, but with controlled attitude lost their sensors will no longer automatically be pointed towards earth. I.e., they will be useless bricks circling Earth and your APT receiver will be useless as well..
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
Can someone explain to me how a satellite can orbit the North or the South Pole? I think junk science or pisspoor reporting has entered SlashDot once more.
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, and cutting government spending in a recession (or depression) is destructive.
That was my first response too when I saw the graphs, but if you look at the period post-Great Depression, each and every time it was the "good times" that followed the changes in tax rates on the top brackets, not the other way around.
Strange, no?
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, we're paying less as a percentage of GDP.
The total dollar amount has grown because the economy has grown. Have you seen the relative size of the economy between now and 1980?
There is a big pitfall in using total dollar amounts.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The NOAA satellites also transmit in L-band at much higher data rates. APT only gives you part of what is available. The geostationary GOES birds are in L-band as well, IIRC. The government isn't buying million-dollar ground stations just to receive APT.
I also think that either you got your computer, cables, motor drives, and scanner out of a dumpster or else the real cost of equipment is somewhat more than $125. And I notice that you didn't argue the 200 hours of time to put it together.
>>The data points are decades, for god's sake.
The data points are years.
>>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.
It doesn't show anything of the sort. Nominal tax rates and effective tax rates are two very different things. If the nominal tax rate is 91%, but there's enough loopholes and tax shelters that a rich guy pays 20% anyway, then unless you think the tax shelters themselves stimulate the economy (which you could make a case for), it's really no different than our current system with a 35% top marginal tax rate and less loopholes with the effective rate being 20%.
You also have to realize that it doesn't make much of a difference when there is only one person in America in the top tax rate (HuffPo, another liberal source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/top-marginal-tax-rates-chart_n_849596.html). Looking at the tax brackets by quintile is a more informative than just focusing on the highest marginal tax rate (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/business/31leonhardt.html?ex=1351569600&en=b1065bf4721795fa&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink)
Posting anonymously for that reason. JPSS is a reorganization of a joint NASA/NOAA/DOD satellite project. Both of them have been budgetary clusterfucks for ten years now - the precursor to JPSS went through mandatory congressional reviews when it massively overshot its budget, twice, and JPSS is in danger of the same fate due to schedule slips.
Problem is, we really DO need new satellites. The current satellites are approaching end-of-life, and it is critical for data validity to get the new ones up while the old ones are still working - a year's worth of data would do it.
There has been some time since I've looked on to it, but I'm pretty shure I've seen buit-your-own/use what you can get vhf receiver hooked up with serial converters to use with PCs at a fraction of the cost. This isn't the eighties anymore.
"No, We're paying less as a percentage of GDP"
False. We're actually paying higher when all tax sources are figured in.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/48/27/41498733.pdf
Doubled GDP, Doubled Economy, Quadrupled tax income. Sextupled spending.
when the Bush admin was cutting funding for similar satellites, and there was much rage. Now Obama's admin does it, and crickets are chirping.
Slashdot users - the definition of hypocrisy.
"That claim is false: the overwhelming majority of US government spending is proportional to the number of people - and in particular, a significant chunk of it is proportional to the number of old US citizens."
"Much of the rest pays for equal-chance education (teachers), unemployment insurance (which cost goes up during crises and goes down during booms), poor families/children, roads and other infrastructure - none of those have fixed maintenance costs but go up linearly with the number of people."
All spending is proportional, but some groups are more proportional than others?
The rest of your argument is nonsense too. If spending were linear, add 33% to to 1980s spending (1/3 more people) and track it to inflation. You'll get a lot smaller number than today's spending levels. Hint: $3.4 Tril - 2.6 Trillion less than last year's spending. All you've done is just prove that the government is overspending by nearly double.
We wouldn't need more taxes if we hadn't increased defense spending to huge amounts. You'll get no argument from me about cuts there. Medicare and Social Security are, while noble ideas, also unsustainable. Both are ponzi schemes with most people putting in less than they get out - in which case the first out get the benefits while those that stay in require a larger and larger burden. We are fast approaching the point when the number of recipients are larger than the number of payors, the only way to counter that is to make payors pay more (tax them, tax the rich ones more (even though they don't need medicare/SS and arn't the problem)) or to increase birth rates and/or immigration to have a larger economic base in which to pay for the next generation - basically creating economic slaves out of our children to pay for our own retirement. Bush actually had a good plan to help fix the problem - 4 cents on the dollar invested into individual accounts- but we know how that went.
We (as in the government) have also added numerous agriculture subsidies, dumped money into various new departments and bureacracies, given raises and benefit increases to federal workers - and then the federal unions have forced contractors to pay their workers federal wage rate, (you should see what the construction workers on federal projects get paid!) and paid for hundreds/thousands of pork-barrel projects (war on drugs, bridges to nowhere). If, instead of allowing special interests to mine out the money of the people in every way imaginable, we had simply focused on infrastructure, education, and modest social support, and modest defense spending, we'd be just fine.
of knowing this is going to kill some republitards too.
As opposed to Republic voters (see what I did there?) who want to keep every single program but decided that lowering taxes on the rich are a panacea. (Spend more, make less!). Looking at G.W. Bush, Republic fiscal policiy isn't very sound either.
In truth, I'm very disillusioned with both parties. I would vote Libertarian, but they have far too much crazy as icing on their cake. I can't vote Republican because they are moral fascists, even if they have fiscal sense, and they generally hate everyone who doesn't make $300k a year. I really can't vote Democratic because they are about as bad as Republicans these days, care for the rich corporations, hate the poor (ala Obamacare).
None of them care one bit for the average American. All of them are either to wrapped in the interests of their uber-rich donors, or too wrapped in mindless, blind, ideology. The Republicans are a wee bit worse because they also want to force their religion on my, and millions of other Americans. They also seem to be competeing with the Libertarians for being the most crazy, and giving the most support to the lunatic fringe.
We haven't had a government (left or right) that was worth a damn since FDR.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Unless your numbers are adjusted for inflation, that's a large part of the difference right there. Not to mention that U.S. spending on defense is up significantly from even the excesses of the Reagan years, due to the two (three?) wars that the U.S is actively fighting.
Add to that the greater-than-inflationary increases in health care costs (which are out of the government's control unless you want death panels), and you'll probably find that the U.S. spends less per person on non-war, non-health costs than it did in the 80s. At best, it's not a huge increase as you seem to be claiming.
Just to be clear, I do agree about the things that you think should not have been budgeted to nearly the degree that they have, but I think you'll find that in the bigger budgetary picture, those expenditures are almost lost in the noise when compared with defense spending, health care, and other big-ticket items. I've seen some estimates that as much as 54% of our federal budget is spent on military spending (including VA, etc.). According to Wikipedia's chart, about three quarters of our budget was spend on social security, medicare, medicaid, DoD, unemployment, and welfare when you add them up. Most of that isn't proportional to the population, but rather proportional to some rapidly growing portion of the population (the aging, the poor, etc.) or proportional to our level of military activity.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I have a hard time figuring out what would actually happen if that plan were put into place because it is so radically different from our current system of taxation. My suspicion is that the poor would take it on the chin, just like with a sales tax, and that the cost of goods would be further increased to make up for the increased cost of production, thus compounding the problem.
A far better way to raise the extra revenue is to simply change our tax structure so that capital gains are taxed as ordinary income (with a one-time-per-person exemption for selling your primary residence). This would substantially increase revenue, but unlike a transaction tax, businesses would not be able to hide it in the cost of doing business. Instead, it would come out of the money that the stockholders leech at the end of the chain.
Now, mind you, this would make retirement harder for a lot of people, but that could be largely solved by lowering the average marginal rates and removing or significantly changing limits on Roth IRAs.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Virtually none of the first sentence of your last paragraph is correct.
The answer to the second is thirty-three trillion dollars in debt.
Yes, it came from the sudden and cold realization that Russia was technologically superior in space as of Sputnik. The fact that a regime that we knew executed millions through forced starvation was in control of that tech was quite scary. That they were godless matters more to you than it did to this atheist as they routinely executed or hid away anyone who spoke openly.
Yes, context is everything. Technology and its possession has been a driving force forever, as well as economics and religion. They have and will always play a mix. But that push was mostly about technology. That they were murderous was much more a consideration than if they were religious.
I'm talking about the "shut up and help yourself" talk we heard after Katrina.
I must have missed that as a general attitude from any significant group. Could you please provide a link? Many thanks.
We were talking about Federal taxes. You keep trying to change the standard. If you want to include local sales tax, real estate taxes, etc, that's something you'll have to take up with your local government.
The current discussion is about Federal taxes. And we are indeed paying less as a percentage of GDP. For corporations, it's even more dramatically less.
Despite the nominative rates, US corporations pay less in taxes as a proportion of their profits than nearly every EU country, Japan, etc.
You are welcome on my lawn.
but you are already paying taxes for this, and the government themselves need the data (for everything from the military to managing air traffic to providing weather forecasts for multiple other government functions)
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.
You don't look at how high the marginal tax rates were, because due to all sorts of loopholes, virtually no one actually paid the 91% marginal rate. Instead, you look at what percentage of GDP the government takes:
Average growth during high tax periods was 1.08%, average growth during normal times was 2.45%. Every high tax period was a long period of economic stagnation, malaise, or decline or else contained a long period of decline. Such events were rare during normal tax periods.(Source)
We should beat the fucking shit out of the red states and make the useless conservative garbage and scum who live in them start paying their fair share of taxes. Conservatives are useless, stupid, lazy, good-for-nothing welfare parasites, look at Alaska for example, for every dollar that Alaska sends to Washington in federal taxes it receives $1.86 in federal spending. For every dollar California, a state which is home to Google, Apple and a few other companies, sends to Washington D.C. they get back 78 cents. I'll submit that the reason that red states don't contribute as much to the federal treasury as blue states do is because red states are full of conservatives and conservatives are stupid, drooling, inferior morons. Seriously,we live in a high tech world and expecting a bunch of evangelical fucktards who believe in stupid shit like the Rapture and who watch NASCAR to contribute anything of value to the US economy is ridiculous. If we could just get rid of all of the useless, good-for-nothing conservative parasites in this country we'd have plenty of money to keep monitoring these satellites.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Tornado Alley is in the Bible Belt. Citizens of those states should just go outside and stand with head bowed as a tornado approaches. Jesus will save you if you are worthy.
Flamebait? Really? What, then, is the point of following some allegedly omnipresent and omnipotent diety if they are not going to protect your from a lousy tornado that they allegedly made in the first place?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Shut the fuck up you goddamned worthless conservative shitrag. Conservative shitrags like you, cowardly little punks who post AC, have fucked this country up so badly that we may never recover. And conservative shitrags love stupid government programs, like ethanol subsidies, which are championed by conservative shitrag senators such as Charles Grassley of Iowa and Sam Brownback of Kansas. Oh, and it was a conservative shitrag congress and president that gave us No Child Left Behind, the Department of Homeland Security and the War in Iraq. Conservatives have zero credibility in making statements like this, which of course is why they always post this nonsense as AC. The last fiscally responsible Republican president we had was George H.W. Bush, and for his attempts to balance the budget he was knifed in the back by his own party.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
>The fact that a regime that we knew executed millions through forced starvation was in control of that tech was quite scary.
I'm not sure what your problem is with what I wrote.
I was disagreeing with the parent's statement that the Bible-Belt is interested in science. It's not. It never was. Going to the Moon for them was about ideology, not science.
--
BMO
Well I myself am highly in favor of meteorological disasters that kill lots of people in the red states, but don't worry, the red staters don't need any of those fancy satellites, they can just prey to evangelical NASCAR Je$u$ and he'll save them.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Hardly, the gross domestic product in 1980 was 2.788 Trillion dollars where as the gross domestic product in 2007 was 14.077 Trillion dollars. Tax revenue as a share of GDP has fallen, we are around 14% right now. The peak for tax revenue was about 23% which occurred during world war 2.
We have a spending problem but its not related to the amount we are spending, it is related to where we are spending and the artificially created deficit between what we are spending and what we need to collect in revenue for that spending. The amount we spend on health care to support our bloated corrupt private health care system is our greatest long term deficit problem, it ranks up their in corruption with all of the corporate welfare and subsidy give a ways we hand out. Our revenue problem is not one purely of any particular rate of taxation but also of the number of loop holes and special cases in our system, separate lower rates on income made from investments(capital gains), the giant and exponentially increasing in size hole cause by the health care deductions(around $450 billion in 2007), corporations and individuals using foreign tax havens to hide money from taxation.
After all, the Man Up There ought to have a good view of the weather, right? So why not send a daily Prayer his way for a weather forecast? Ought to be a snap.
Correct.
Also, the grandparent misses the fact that a lot of the costs are not only linear but superlinear: the baby boomers are retiring and the world did not become more peaceful.
What it is certainly not is what he claimed, i.e. a shrinking proportion of the whole pie:
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.
And this is the false claim I took issue with. With more people you cannot lower the burden on all, as more people means more costs and shifting demographics (people getting older) it means even more costs.
Well, if you want to know whether a tornado is likely to come to your home, I think the image quality will be your least worry.
More important is the fact that you're most likely lacking the knowledge to translate the data about the current situation (which is what the satellites give you) into accurate forecasts.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You probably don't encounter them much in "forget historyville".
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I think they really want to hide climate change evidence.
FYI that's well past inflation.
$1 spending in 1980 = $2.77 spending in 2007 (due to inflation). Federal spending rose from $894M to $2.7T (1980-2007), a factor of 3. Pretty close. Real GDP increased from 5.9T to 13.4T (1980-2007). If taxes remained a constant percentage of GDP, we should now be spending 6.3X 1980.
with more people you can lower the burden on all
The population grew from 227M to 300M (1980-2007). The idea that a larger population doesn't lead to proportionally larger demand for government services (roads, police, courts, etc.) is odd.
the government sextupled spending (>$1 Tril/year -> $6Tril/year)
Given inflation and growth in GDP and population, you'd expect a large growth in federal spending. The actual growth was 3X. (0.894 to 2.7). The U.S federal government spent $3.5T in FY 2010 and is expected to spend $3.8T in FY2011 - large but significantly less than $6T.
Both parties have been simultaneously increasing spending and cutting taxes. It's the combination that has driven the country to its parlous financial state. To blame it all on spending increases is counter-factual.
Wow. Tinfoil hat on your head I hope!
I call satellite weather and sirens "protection."
Most Christians do not feel the need to wait on a miracle if a way out has been provided. Why wait on a miracle to escape flood waters when a boat drives up to the house? Nothing says there need be angels driving.
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.
This is incorrect. These satellites are among the easiest birds to catch. If you have a VHF scanner and a computer with a sound card you almost have a complete downlink station for these birds. An "egg beater" receiving antenna can be constructed for literally a few dollars in a couple hours. APT decoding software is available at no cost. Just about the easiest downlink station there is.
more brilliant "conservative" governing. saving a tiny bit of money short term to ensure spending lots of money long term + add in unnecessary human death and suffering. this is one of a thousand examples.
(old thread so no one will read this, but oh well:))
I wonder just how much could have been done if taxes had stayed higher (40% income tax, 30% capital gains tax, less corporate loopholes that have increased over time, etc..)
Complete smart grid with high percent of renewables?
Updated infrastructure with fast trains?
Less crumbling understaffed inner city schools?
Perhaps more job re-training and less unemployment?
100% free college?
Just because the total gross amount of revenue has increased doesn't mean we need to lower taxes just for the heck of it. We've been prosperous and happy with high taxes at many times in our Nation's history. Cutting taxes just for the sake of cutting taxes, when we have so many big problems to solve, and are so far behind the rest of the world in so many categories, just doesn't make sense to me.
" ... and with more people you can lower the burden on all."
Except that it costs more money to run services for more people, too.