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Another Science Facility Bites the Dust, Temporarily

Posted by timothy on from the spending-bills-must-originate-in-the-house dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Today, the latest victim of the U.S. government shutdown, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory shut its doors and essentially mothballed all three of its radio telescope facilities: the Very Large Array or VLA (think Jodie Foster, Contact); the Green Bank Telescope, and the Very Long Baseline Array or VLBA. While the ALMA telescope is not yet affected (mainly due to it being run by a consortium of European, Japanese, Chilean and U.S. organizations), the U.S. funds for that will soon also dry up. Not only does this furlough most of the ~550 employees, it has also thrown a monkey wrench into many long-term carefully planned observations (to the tune of wasting half a million dollars and a year's worth of work). Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society also has a commentary on the closure — and a plea to 'stop the madness.'"

1 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Re:that's Obama's choice by vux984 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now we're seeing, and a LOT of people are having buyers remorse.

    Majority of the country favors obamacare. The majority of the country that republicans like to say support getting rid of it are split - 2/3rds actually think it goes too far... 1/3 doesn't think it goes far enough. that 1/3rd of so called group 'against the bill' doesn't want the act repealed ... they wanted it expanded. Couple that with nearly 50% that identify as supporting the bill and you have a clear majority.

    So I don't really see buyers remorse yet, what I see is 40 odd republican tea party candidates from election proof gerrymandered disctricts that literally cannot lose no matter how braindead they act have decided to hold the entire country hostage.

    As an aside, Bill O'Reilly while a guest on the daily show suggested, really, the most sane compromises I've heard.

    The US government is so absurdly screwed up -- giving state governers the electoral powers they have was idiotic. All aspects of elections should be run by completely non-partisan groups with no interfering with the state or federal political parties. From identifying districts to running the election itself.

    That same episode of the daily show had another good factoid -- 90% incumbency rate, 10% approval rate. It's broken.