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President Obama Orders Government To Plan For 'Space Weather' (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: President Barack Obama today issued an Executive Order that defines what the nation's response should be to a catastrophic space weather event that takes out large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, healthcare, and transportation. The Executive Order ideally will coordinate the responses across government agencies such as NASA, the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy and others to help minimize economic loss and save lives by enhancing national security, identifying successful mitigation technologies, and ordering the creation of nationwide response and recovery plans and procedures, the White House stated. Further, the Executive Order will enhance the scientific and technical capabilities of the United States, including improved prediction of space-weather events and their effects on infrastructure systems and services. By this action, the Federal Government will lead by example and help motivate State and local governments, and other nations, to create communities that are more resilient to the hazards of space weather. The Executive Order reinforces the formal National Space Weather Strategy and accompanying Action Plan which were announced last year. It also bolsters other work such as the replacement of aging satellites that monitor and help forecast space weather, proposing space-weather standards for both the national and international air space, development of regulations to ensure the continued operation of the electric grid during an extreme space weather event, proposing a new option for replacing crucial Extra High Voltage (EHV) transformers damaged by space weather, and developing domestic production sources for EHV transformers, the White House wrote.
Would "Space Weather" be studied by meteorologists?
I guess he heard how many people were going to vote for Giant Meteor 2016....
what the hell was that?
until Obama is no longer president. He will be a giant black spot on our nation's history and will not be remembered fondly.
... SPACE MADNESS!
Then you don't seem to understand what an "Executive Order" is. The constitution gives the President of the United States (POTUS for short) the right to act as the head of the executive branch. This means that the POTUS is allowed to determine how best to implement laws that are passed if they ambiguous when it comes to specific implementation details (Almost EVERY law out there).
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has already ruled that executive orders are just the means by which the executive branch outlines the rules and procedures by which they want the executive branch to implement the laws as they were written.
If you don't like the fact that Executive Actions have a lot of potential differences in them, then you should argue that Congress should pass less ambiguous laws. (I agree with this too). But making blanket statements like this does nothing for the betterment of society other than you thinking you know better than the founding fathers/constitution/scotus... and that in and of itself might be the biggest problem facing our nation... People who don't actually understand how government works saying that what it does is bad/wrong.... but not being able to say 'how'. (At least make a coherent argument as to why the "Imperial Presidency" idea of the Nixon Whitehouse (Chaney, Rumsfeld, Wolfawitz (sp?), et. al. ) is harming our nation by giving the Executive Branch too much bilateral power.... Which -is- the point of what you said... but being stupid about it doesn't help things)
cannibals club
Yes.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/produ...
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Maybe Mr. Obama is preparing for some kind of nuclear attack which could wipe out power grid etc? That is certainly more likely to happen than some obscure "space weather event".
Someone's been watching too much Family Guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Summation 2
Trump will win and be in the Whitehouse soon enough. He's ahead in all the recent debate polls, he's answered all the fake rape and assault and fraud charges they've thrown at him totally and completely. He's feared by every foreign nation, especially China and Russia. He'll build that wall to keep out Mexicans and Mexico *will* pay for it, whatever they say now. He'll triple the number of people in Gitmo and torture them more, cut taxes for everyone, spend more on the military. And then he'll archive his emails properly in compliance with the 1972 records keeping act. Not like crooked Hillary.
Trump will make America Great Again!
Soon enough, be patient.
So if the pres can't say "hey guys, make a plan in case this happens" then what's the point of one? Just a 6 month national distraction every 4 years to pour heaps and heaps of money down a black hole for someone who is apparently "the most powerful person" in the world" yet they can't actually do shit?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
The whole constitution should be ripped up and all of congress fired.
our ability to not become outer space is our wager? cease fire stand down, hand in hand we stand,,, in the moms we trust.. sing along.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-kA3UtBj4M .. thanks again..
Given the increasing "it was the russians" rhetoric for everything, and the escalation in sword rattling (eg. military drills), this seems to me more like a preparation for the result of a nuclear exchange than obama actually caring about space weather (or space anything).
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Defence/article1618135.ece
http://uk.businessinsider.com/photos-russias-military-exercise-crimea-2016-9
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/22/east-asia-war-games-a-tour-of-the-hotspots-as-temperatures-rise-between-china-and-the-u-s/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-us-should-use-military-response-fight-cyberattacks-russia-china-1579187
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37605992
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/08/russian-stages-major-military-drills/
http://metro.co.uk/2016/10/11/gorbachev-warns-of-nuclear-war-risk-as-russia-america-tension-rises-6185847/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-idUSKCN0WL0EV
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nato-risks-nuclear-war-with-russia-within-a-year-senior-general-warns-a7035141.html
You may have noticed, there are a lot of stories like the above. And aside from the hypocrisy of the US/West accusing the Russians/Chinese for hacking their infrastructure/banks/elections/whatever, whether true or not, the war drums are increasing in intensity.
So, we're meant to think Obama's concerned about space weather? Oh please.
> potential differences
I see what you did there :-)
No it does not require legislation, and it is not circumventing the constitution. Some aspects of this order may require appealing to Congress for funding. But to order the various branches of the Executive branch to plan for and prepare for such an event is fully within his purview. The agencies in turn will look at what needs to be done to make needed changes and will then prepare budget requests to fund such actions. Said requests then go to congress for consideration and will either be funded or not.
President Obama has overstepped his authority many times but this is not one of them.
Humans are the cause of space weather phenomena, and the UN needs to establish a scientific commission to root out and expose the terrible danger man-made reductions in sun spot activity are causing. Our celestial EMF footprint must be reduced to pre-1970 levels immediately to avoid all sorts of catastrophic global........
and when they do, the world shall burn.
buried alive...
buried alive...
Should have been done years ago. Better late than never.
Greed is the root of all evil.
I think it's "most powerful in the free world" but the accuracy of that is waning as well. But I think you might want a benevolent dictator rather than a president.
All praise to His Highness The King Obama for taking on the tough subject of space weather and galactic climate change! It is clear. The science is settled. The debate is over. We are destroying our space. We're littering it with junk. We're bathing the Sun with galactic climate change causing radio waves, and we must stop it now!
Whether this is a good idea or not, it requires an act of Congress. This is another attempt by President Obama to circumvent the Constitution for the purpose of increasing government spending. It's a shame that it seems John Boehner was unsuccessful in his lawsuit over exactly this problem.
Relax. The poor guy is just trying to leave something positive after 8 years of suck.
Also, probably going to get paid a big more by Clinton after the election if he can keep people from being as horrified when Trump says "more of the same" will come from Hitlary. It's just politics, so relax.
It's far more likely to be preparation against a false-flag "Russian" EMP attack on the USA. ... you know ... if the White House were actually concerned about bad weather and disruption, there might be a little more planning for hurricanes.
Just saying
Seriously, every time a solar flare is supposedly coming to earth, people go INSANE about how it's the end of the world. If you start doing this, it will diminish these people's "efforts" at going crazy.
So back in the early-mid 1990s when the Internet was a new thing to most people/organizations and US Government agencies started using their discretionary funds to build websites to provide information to Citizens, that was impermissible because there was no law authorizing it? Interesting. In fact, I'd be surprised if even today there is a specific law authorizing Executive Branch agencies to "build websites" or "use the Internet".
sPh
A lot of sick, sick burns from the ACs today. Try reading up on the Carrington Event and consider what a geomagnetic storm that generated visible aurora in southern Florida would do to a modern electric grid and telecommunication system. Not quote so funny.
sPh
Actually, in its response to the FERC's requirement to develop plans for geomagnetic events the US provision-of-electricity industry explicitly said that preparations for ordinary geomagnetic storms (say up to G5-) were its responsibility, but preparation for catastrophic events such as G5+ Carringon Events was not within its capability and should be undertaken by government.
sPh
The Department of Homeland Securty is supposed to help protect the US, as funded by Congress. The Department of Commence, of which NOAA is a part, covers space weather, as funded by Congress. There is an office of science and technology policy (funded by Congress) that has the job of advising the government regarding science. They are have been working together to make strategy (see this NATIONAL SPACE WEATHER STRATEGY document.
The executive (i.e. Obama) is telling the different parts of government to implement the strategy. It coordinates the different parts of the government on which parts should do which things. They already have the budget and legal authority to do the things, but it requires coordination. Which is exactly what a chief executive should be doing.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Do you really think that DHS is supposed to ignore a threat to the US? Space weather is not a new thing: See: https://www.dhs.gov/publicatio... . The Department of Commerce (i.e. NOAA) has been working on space weather for a long time. The Air Force has a whole group devoted to it. All these things have gone through the funding cycles and been part of the budget for a while. The executive order tells the different departments to coordinate and who does what to respond; this is all in implementation to a National Space Weather Strategy document which went through the normal cycle of drafting, public comments, and approval.
The idea that this came out of nowhere, is not funded, or is not part of the legally directed activities of the executive branch is just insane.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
The comments on this story are a shitshow of idiocy. No good will come of you trying to read them.
So, I see you are new to Slashdot.
...there have been conversations about the consequences of such for 30+ years (certainly since the concept of EMP gained widespread understanding).
If the country's emergency planners haven't already taken that into account (insofar as they're able with whatever budget they're given) they should be fired.
-Styopa
Would you like to know more?
Like the government could fix anything.
I'm glad to see someone taking the risk of a Carrington event seriously. However, an executive order is simply not enough. Electric utilities, comm. carriers are not going to spend money to protect themselves from a very high impact, low probability event. It will take Congressional action to allocate money to harden to infrastructure to protect against such an event. Anything less is just political posturing.
[Insert pithy quote here]
"The idea that this came out of nowhere, is not funded, or is not part of the legally directed activities of the executive branch is just insane."
The Executive is charged with defending the country against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." Since space weather is not a State, and is not sentient, it cannot be classified as an enemy. An enemy is one who plans or conspires against you. Not having a conscience, space weather can do neither.
Now, do not hear what I am not saying. I am not saying this is the ONLY thing the executive is charged with, and I an NOT saying the executive is not charged with doing other things, of which studying space weather may be among them - it's just not part of the national defense commission.
In any case, I did not make any claim that this particular XO was unlawful. I was merely stating the truth about how XOs work and under what conditions they are legal.
In general, I think you need to try to do a better job at reading comprehension so that you might avoid jumping to conclusions and hearing what is not said.
Not true. Executive orders are permissible but only to the extent that they align agencies with existing public law.
Of which there are many. And presidents have always interpreted their authority under those laws broadly, with few challenges -- and even fewer successful. The most stunning example was the Emancipation Proclamation which interprets the president's war-fighting authority in a breathtakingly broad way.
It is of course possible for a president to take unconstitutional actions this way. But executive orders are not unconstitutional per se just because the president is not explicitly directed in legislation to do some specific thing. It would be impossible given the text of most laws to carry them out if that were what the Constitution required. What is more the President can use all the power this grants him to enact any kind of policy he wants, unless that policy is expressly forbidden by law.
This makes the office of the Presidency very powerful. The corresponding legislative check on this is Congressional oversight, which is similarly broad. The whole checks and balances thing only works when Congress effectively uses the tools the Constitution gives it; if Congress is ineffective, then the president will automatically be more powerful than the framers intended. That's unavoidable.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, the President is supposed to do this kind of thing - direct the executive branch to have plans and prepare for things that can negatively affect the well being of the country. It only oversteps constitutional authority if the Constitution (or other laws passed by Congress) say they can't; or if they want a single penny to enact these plans that hasn't already been appropriated by Congress.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This is another attempt by President Obama to circumvent the Constitution for the purpose of increasing government spending.
It's alarming as well as amusing, that people get quite so annoyed about trying to mitigate extreme threats.
I guess it's just another example of why we're doomed as a species.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The Executive is charged with defending the country against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." Since space weather is not a State, and is not sentient, it cannot be classified as an enemy. An enemy is one who plans or conspires against you. Not having a conscience, space weather can do neither.
I would have thought that preparing for space weather events would also have a dual role of hardening the infrastructure somewhat against nuclear EMP attacks. So there could be a loophole right there.
Ezekiel 23:20
But, if things go to shit catastrophically, if you aren't armed, you'll likely be a victim and dead soon....and if you don't have a good network of friends, you likely will trouble too as that numbers will matter.
And I mean REAL friends...not FB "friends" or the like that you just click buttons for.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Expect a shower in about a months time - I think its the Leonids
Probably named after the guy who played Spock
People who don't actually understand how government works saying that what it does is bad/wrong.... but not being able to say 'how'.
All powers, son.
And the Supreme Court seized long ago authority that was not granted to it.
Our government has been illegitimate since the early days. Arguing otherwise is daft. Whining about it is asinine, though.
President Obama and soon President Clinton get to decide who or what an enemy is. Not you. Not anyone else. Or are you a traitor?
Right. So leaving the country completely helpless in the wake of Carrington event has no defense implications.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
plans to deal with "Space weather" would also work when dealing with the result of an EMP.
When Obama starts a conflict with Russia, he will coordinate with Lindsey Graham and detonate a nuke in the upper atmosphere to generate an EMP. It will probably be over North Carolina.
Unfortunately it's a little too late in Obama's term to compensate for the space between his ears tho.
We can spend a few billion planning for events (the dollars add up over the years), or we could spend a few billion actually hardening the power grid.
If we just hardened the grid then we wouldn't need to spend so much on planning how to handle it when the power goes out.
As others pointed out, Congress also has oversight capabilities by controlling the budget. The President could call for an army of super-intelligent killbots and a thousand rockets to launch them across the world, but everything would be just plans on paper if Congress didn't approve the funding.
At times, you might not need specific funding - for example, drafting plans for "what would we do if a space weather event knocked out power across the US" and small actions might be able to be swallowed by an agency's existing budget, but where major funding is needed Congress acts as a check against the President's plans. (As it should be.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You people are laughable. The winners in that environment would be modeled on a mixture if Genghis Kahn, ISIS and Mexican drug gangs.
"Camps" like yours would be nothing but prey for mobile terrorists. If you didn't agree to hand over your loot, you'd quickly meet the same fate as the Waco cult.
No advanced preparation will be required to dominate a post-apocalyptic landscape, only a willingness to be inhumanly ruthless. Everything else, including weapons and fuel to smoke out opponents, can be looted in real time.
Well, they'll get a fight....and many of them picked off at 200-500+ yards before they can get close.
And its amazing what one can do with a 1000's of rounds in the zombie apocalypse type situation.
You know what they say, about bringing a knife to a gun fight....
And I have no problems being ruthless when it comes to your life or mine....I intend for you to lose.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Another thing an Executive Order does is set priorities for multiple agencies, coordinating their approaches to an issue. Defense isn't the only group interested in Space Weather, but left to themselves they might go off in interesting directions and develop information that could and should be shared with others, but keep it to themselves because ... Defense. Absolutely nothing wrong with an EO doing that (which this EO seems to be an example of) in the interest of efficient and effective government.
Congress (the opposite of progress) is going to get appropriations requests, and the public utilities will bring wheelbarrows full of critical failure points they haven't worked on for 50 years to the body.
considering that many city water and sewer systems are in default of the law already and running on baling wire and duct tape, ouch.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
and that's legal.
to fund anything requires Congress' budgeting authority.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
This should have been one of their top priorities for the stimulus spending in 2009. Better late than never; but if an event happens before they implement it wont matter will it?
Well, then throw it at FEMA for fuck's sake. Don't like the fact that FEMA exists? Blame the general welfare clause. Or was it interstate commerce? Fuck, I don't care. FEMA exists. Hurricanes. Carrington events. Who the fuck cares.
Your fire would handily be suppressed by 50-cal machine guns mounted on pickup trucks.
Meantime, you could dodge the incoming 55-gallon drums of gasoline.
Obama has taken enough unconstitutional actions over the past 7.5 years that there is no need to pretend that this is one of them. In fact, it's counterproductive in 'a boy cries wolf' way.
what you fail to understand is that we`re not talking a fantasy ZOMBIE apocalypse - where the foe is undead, slowitted and slowfooted. In a post-apocalyptic scenario involving HUMAN opponents (a "mad max" scenario) you and all other preppers become a handy source of ammunition for the raider gangs - and nothing more.
MacGyver 1.0 and the SG-1 team have eliminated the Go'auld, so no returning Egyptian Gods. . .
The executive (i.e. Obama) is telling the different parts of government to implement the strategy. It coordinates the different parts of the government on which parts should do which things. They already have the budget and legal authority to do the things, but it requires coordination. Which is exactly what a chief executive should be doing.
The president directing the business and coordination of the executive bureaucracies and agencies sounds like commie talk to me. I think we need to look into your past history as a communist sympathizer.
The best government is an uncoordinated government. Small and uncoordinated are basically the same thing.
And where exactly are civilian's going to be getting .50 cal machine guns?
Also, if grid is down, its gonna be mighty hard, mighty quick to get gasoline in any significant fashion.
And if others can get ahold of these weapons that easily, we plan to do the same.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If we needed Congress to give the nod every time the President wanted to direct departments of his own administration to make plans and study things, nothing would ever get done.
Also, that's not how the US Government works, and it never has been, going back to the times when the people who wrote the Constitution were serving as President.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
"Enemies, foreign and domestic" has nothing to do with natural disaster relief. A massive CME from the sun that puts massive amounts of infrastructure out of commission would fall under the Congressionally approved mandate of FEMA, which as I recall is an Executive Branch entity and thus reports to the President.
Remember the giant bitch-howl about Katrina, and how FEMA was unprepared, etc. and everyone blamed Bush? Maybe Obama learned from that fiasco and is helping the proper agencies to at least have some kind of plan in place for when more than just a large city gets fucked over, but instead the whole continent...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Feel free to try to "loot" my weapons in real time. My shotgun will be empty before you can get to it, with the contents of the magazine headed your way.
How would you have the machine guns if you started with no weapons and the idea that "weapons and fuel [...] can be looted in real time" ?
Chicken / egg problem in your logic.
"The idea that this came out of nowhere, is not funded, or is not part of the legally directed activities of the executive branch is just insane."
Oh, then the alt-right then.
I thought you were going to be in a camp somewhere? How are you going to find superior firepower when you are hiding out in a single location? Do you think there will be random loot drops like a video game?
If you need to fend for yourselves, that means there's no effective government.
But by definition, somebody is going to have the government's weapons. They're not going to be sitting unused in empty army bases.
I don't think that you were actually planning to do the same, because you had chosen an innefective defensive strategy from the start. You'd be a day late and a dollar short.
You'd be burned alive in your bunker holding onto you damned shotgun.
One thing to remember is that if a global event happened taking out much of the planet's electronics happened, even though our military is hardened against EMP, not EVERYTHING is the military is. I'm sure the Pentagon has wargamed this out, but if you are another power looking to take advantage of the chaos that would be the time to do it.
Your fire would handily be suppressed by 50-cal machine guns mounted on pickup trucks.
The 50-cal machine guns that you're saying nobody should bother preparing in advance? Are you assuming they're going to be looted from the National Guard or something?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Instead of storing up anything in advance, let's flip the coin on winning knife-fights in the street to bootstrap our supplies. Yeah, sounds real workable.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
If the president (any president) did call for such a windfall to the military-industrial complex, based on almost all of its past behavior, congress would very likely fall all over itself to approve the funding, and increase our taxes, in that order, but probably separated by only a few minutes.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What is your real reason for hating survivalist nuts? If he's hunked down in a bunker somewhere not hurting anyone, who cares?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
And just like the past eight years, it's very difficult to do that with a do-nothing, obstructionist congress doing everything it can to collect its pay while accomplishing as little as possible that's worth a damn.
Obama's been one of the best presidents we've had in my 45 years or so of paying attention (I give him 7/10, which is decent, room for improvement. Bush II The Moron, as a low-rated for-instance, gets a 2/10 — if Trump were elected, there's every sign he'd be the first 1/10 in my lifetime); congress... congress has been the very epitome of what congress should not be. 1/1, period. Idiots and incompetents. I'm voting against the incumbent congress-critter on my ballot. That's the only sane thing to do. Because:
Last election, congress had a 14% approval ratio, and a 94% re-election ratio. So we all pretty much agree congress is useless, or worse. But clearly, people always think it's the other congress member's fault, or vote for some local interest over the nation's interest. Clearly, that's a very bad group behavior. We should stop that. Until congress as a whole starts behaving, I am voting against the incumbent, period. I wish others would too. But. Sigh.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes.
If the National Guard were able to hold on to their weapons, then none of this prepper stuff would be necessary in the first place.
I don't care. I'm just trying to give them advice on how not to get killed. Setting up a tempting camp with their fishing buddies is not going to help them.
The only survivalists that I think have a chance in that environment are the ones who have prepared hidden spider holes and can exist almost invisibly. If they can hold out there, more power to them.
See article 5. Authority to effectively do that resides there.
See the voting ballot. Authority to do that resides there.
Consequently, if you actually want to accomplish anything, you should always couch your assertions along with (a) supporting reasoning and (b) quality exhortation to utilize the above. Without (a) and (b), you're just hand-waving and can (and should) be ignored.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We just dodged that bullet in 2012 too https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The national defense implications are huge, namely because it is down to the random odds of which side of the earth is facing the sun at any particular moment.
You know...ammo is VERY heavy.
And carrying many weapons isn't very easy.
So, I'm talking more of having a base of operations to work from.....if grid and all is down for a LONG period of time, well, you're gonna need a place to grow your own food, preserve it, etc...
If power and all goes down for long, there will be no effective government for awhile....till then, you'd be best served being part of tribes, much like the indians (feather not dot) were in the US old west.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Necessary planning? Sure, but it requires funding and accountability which should be passed by Congress and not EO. So much for the US Constitution, people no longer even question the activity of Probably illegal actions.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There is a lot of overlap between preparing for solar caused events like the 1859 Carrington event and modern EMP weapon detonation (which would be similar to a man-made Carrington event).
Based on the 1859 event accounts, we could expect massive infrastructure failure in certain parts of the world if such an event would repeat itself. The storm was a nuisance with the main damages being to telegraph operators and equipment back then. Today, it could be catastrophic.
There have been large solar events that have been near misses of earth in the past as well. It just takes one unlucky direct strike (or the use of an EMP by some nefarious actor) to bring large parts of our electrical grid to a halt. Some estimates put the damage expected at somewhere around $2 trillion.
No it does not require legislation, and it is not circumventing the constitution.
Stop right there. Take a step back and inspect. Discussing whether preparing for an extinction event is constitutional? Let me frame this in context right here. If an extinction event occurs, the entire context for the Constitution (human governance) has been lost. The Constitution is as good as cosmic toilet paper at that point. The level that people have taken polarized politics to is remarkable. We probably will go extinct because at some point in the future Congress will need to make a life or death decision that determines whether the human race survives and they will be in gridlock unable to agree while the extinction event occurs. And you know what? We'll deserve it for our failure to cooperate with each other for the benefit of humanity.
We'll make great pets
you seem to completely misunderstand the design of our government.
At the core of the design is "checks and balances" which means the three branches are designed to resist each other and to keep each other in check and mostly paralyzed from doing anything. The founders only intended the Federal government to do the very few things they could get sufficient support for in all 3 opposing branches. They did not create parties as part of the system and warned against forming political parties because party-loyalty would enable all sorts of stuff to get through that would not if all the lawmakers were independent and truly representing the people.
Like a bad software developer, you have confused "design feature" explicitly created by the designers of the system with "bug" because some people now want the system to do quickly and easily what it was never intended to do.
Obama has officially replace Jimmy Carter as the worst US President in history - he has demolished entire sectors of the workforce to achieve a labor participation rate so low only Jimmy Carter ever matched it, he has increased poverty so that he has more people on Food Stamps (twice what the idiot Bush had) than any President before him, and he has doubled the total accumulated national debt in less than 8 years. Breathtaking incompetence.
[A] The US Census bureau says there are approx 186,000,000 working age Americans.
[B] The US Department of Labor says there are approx 95,000,000 working age Americans out of the labor force.
[C] President Obama claims only a 5% unemployment rate.
This is Slashdot - most people here are supposed to be able to do basic math, like compute a percent and compare two percentages to see if they agree.
By what measure have the last 8 years sucked? Just curious, but please be objective and stick to the facts.
Stock market did well: http://www.macrotrends.net/135...
GDP slowly rising: http://www.tradingeconomics.co...
Unemployment steadily decreasing http://data.bls.gov/timeseries...
Steadily decreasing gas prices: https://blog.gasbuddy.com/Reta...
Believe it or not, decreasing crime rate: http://www.nationalreview.com/...
No major new gun control laws or other major trampling of the constitution
Many additional safeguards on disadvantaged segments of the population
And finally a reasonable record of kept campaign promises: http://www.politifact.com/trut...
To be sure not a perfect record; for example:
Middle East and Syria in particular - probably would have happened regardless
Relations with Russia and China - hard to say what could have been done differently
"Affordable" Health Care Act - although we couldn't live with what we had we should have done better. At least children are covered now...
Education - we owe our children and future more
Care for the environment - oils spills and global warming
Race relations and policing - Black Lives Matter
If you want to pin a failure on Barack Obama, blame him for not finding a way to reach out to congress - let's face it that situation is f'd up. Barack can't get an A on his report card because he failed that test. While maybe the most powerful person around, the president of the US certainly is not omnipotent. I challenge anybody to say they could have really done better.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Small and uncoordinated are basically the same thing.
Not the same - uncoordinated is very wasteful which means high taxes and little benefit.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Specifically they like the space weather data from STEREO, which comes down highly compressed on 30m dishes, rather than the larger Deep Space Network dishes. (70m?).
They keep insisting that image artifacts are evidence of space ships larger than earth that travel million of miles an hour. This of course assumes that what's being seen in the images are 1 AU away, and not simply particles that are inches away from the telescope (or even hitting the detector directly)
(I was designated 'Emergency On-Call' in the last government shutdown, because I manage services for distributing data that's used for space weather forecasting ... including STEREO)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Pointing out that a scary event could happen because there was once a small event is the exact logic failure I wrote about previously. Do you have any non fallacious arguments for why this should be done by Executive order and should not be done by Congress? Make sure you consider that a "Real" project would require tax payer funding and accountability.
I'm guessing that you can't find any, which is why you went to the appeal to emotion.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I'd mod this up if I could.
It's absolutely in the interests of US national security to keep the power grid keep working.
It's a perfect example of a situation where private industry cannot be counted on to prepare, as there is no motivation: There's no competitive advantage in taking any precautions - there's literally nothing to sell until after a Carrington event, and the odds of that happening during any company's lifetime is nearly zero.
Best case scenario: Your company did prepare, but everybody else didn't. So now the people in your service area can still buy power -- nothing has changed at all for you. But you can't grow into areas your competitors didn't service, because everybody that was in your competitor's area is fraking dead of dehydration, starvation, and diseases prevented by sanitation.
It's shocking how few people truly appreciate the way the refrigerator and pumped water changed our lives. It's what made our population growth possible.
The electrical grid is not a convenience. It's a life-critical necessity, without which most of us will die in weeks.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Remember the giant bitch-howl about Katrina, and how FEMA was unprepared, etc.
And that's with the entire resources of the rest of the unaffected US helping out (as well as some international help).
Now imagine that, but taking out the entire industrial production of the US, Canada, and Mexico.
It's a simple fact that even if the Entire World rushed to our aid, most of us would be dead before any help got to us. Electricity means refrigeration, water, and food factories. Without it, we're going to die back to pre-industrial levels long before help can make it to our coasts, let alone inland.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Who's this Obama fellow?
People might not know the exact details of the government's problems, but they know that there's something rotten in the state of the USA. Just because Executive Orders in general are Constitutional doesn't mean ALL Executive Order mean that criteria.
It's not just the government taking steps. A coalition of companies is joining together to stockpile power plant transformers (which normally have a long lead time, and last I read there weren't any US manufacturers the largest such transformers), among other high voltage bottleneck equipment.
Utilities are loving the sound of this increased government focus on hardening the grid. I wonder how much of this is to help struggling utilities. It should have been done long ago nonetheless, but I'm guessing some lobbying has helped push this along.
>no advanced preparation will be required to dominate a post-apocalyptic landscape,
>Your fire would handily be suppressed by 50-cal machine guns mounted on pickup trucks.
If raiders don't prepare in advance, how the fuck are they going to get their hands on pickup trucks and 50-cal machine guns?
Ask nicely and wave their pocket knives around?
Never liked the term. You mean "Solar Flares".
Oh no, I understand the design just fine. But unlike you, I also understand what it is, and am not confused by the difference between the two. So when it comes to action today, I talk about what the government is -- not what it was designed to be. Because, sadly, the latter ship has sailed, capsized, sunk, and rotted at the bottom of the ocean of congressional, judicial, and executive dishonor. It's dead, Jim. Welcome to reality. Deal with it.
As for unemployment figures, the government has a particular way to compute them. I don't mind your way; however, if you want to point the finger at Obama as having presided over a failure characterized as increasing unemployment, you need to compare those figures with the Bush years. I'd be very interested to see you do so, btw.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The government and electrical industry moves slow, very slow. FERC and NERC has been on this for 3 years.
http://www.nerc.com/pa/Stand/Pages/Project-2013-03-Geomagnetic-Disturbance-Mitigation.aspx