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I get the desire to reduce government spending. It looks like sticker shock seeing budgets in the billions and trillions. This type of program has high value p
by tomrod 1y ago
I get the desire to reduce government spending. It looks like sticker shock seeing budgets in the billions and trillions.
This type of program has high value per dollar spent. It's an asset, not a waste. The first order, second order, and even third order effects are very large.
Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests.
- nwatson 1y agoSomeone will propose privatization of said program with insurance fees covering the reformulated collision-prevention service. Of course, privatization will leave out crucial aspects, lead to failures, increasing untraceable space debris from which nobody will be safe, and eventually bankruptcy of said privatized program, with no way back. As is happening in other parts of government.
- staplers 1y agoPrivatized profits, socialized costs
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- yapyap 1y agoOrrrr said privatized thing will start out relatively cheaper than the norm and eventually end up costing way more than what the government was originally spending when it was still part of the government since the private company eventually outpriced everyone with their cheap prices and then when they finally got their monopoly scaled up their prices as much as they feasibly could and then some.
- slater 1y agoSurely you jest! /s
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Someone will propose privatization of said program Someone would if given the time and infrastructure. This, on the other hand, is more DOGE-style idiocy.
- tetris11 1y agoso, Planetes then
- sho_hn 1y agoI get this reference! Even as an anime grump, I liked this one.
- throwaway6734 1y agoA fantastic show
- Rebelgecko 1y agoThe privatization of this data has always been the plan, IIRC that's why the first Trump administration pulled some of these efforts out of the military
- alistairSH 1y agoIt was never about reducing spending. It was always about the grift. See also the BBB - massive benefits to the donor class, and a shit sandwich for the rest of us.
- conartist6 1y agoBut people who send things to space are often liberal. For example they often have attended college and believe in science. The political intent behind a new dark age makes sense if you think of the goal as being to destroy competent institutions which represent a real threat to an anti-science, post-truth administration
- tomrod 1y ago[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> One uses science as a tool This requires a base rate of literacy and critical thinking that a lot of Americans, unfortunately, lack.
- tomrod 1y agoNot the majority. A bit less than 20%, the remaining support coming from people who think politics is a tribal engagement like watching a sports team. Or those that listen to bags of hot wind like Yarvin, Rogan, or Thiel.
- conartist6 1y agoPeople want and need to learn about science from sources they trust because actually parsing through a scientific paper critically (as a peer reviewer would do) is very hard and is likely only to leave you with more questions while providing an incredibly narrow kind of knowledge. What interests me is the politics of it. A paper in a vacuum is nothing. How do people really convince each other of the importance of one argument or observation over another? How do those arguments grow to the scale of a whole society? Science at the scale of society doesn't happen in the language of scientific papers, but rather in rhetoric: in appeals to what the Greeks categorized as Ethos (Emotion), Pathos (Authority), and Logos (Logic). At its most brilliant this is "Schroedinger's cat," which in two words encodes in our collective consciousness an appeal to logic which entreats us through contradiction to consider a philosophically meaningful set of ideas about the nature of reality. (shoutout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTXTPe3wahc)
- tetha 1y ago> This type of program has high value per dollar spent. It's an asset, not a waste. The first order, second order, and even third order effects are very large. This might also be a program in which the goals of a privatized for-profit company are rather bad in the broader context. If you pay me millions to track and possibly control your satellite in orbit so it doesn't collide... I'll invest in rocket companies to launch more satellites. Even if they are very silly satellites. After all, if they collide, the debris will most likely miss the shareholders, and then you get more satellites to get contracts for. And who cares if some of those invaluable scientific systems with year-long plans get knocked out?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> get the desire to reduce government spending It should be incredibly clear that the motivation for these folks isn’t reducing government spending (or cutting waste). The problem is the programme is at NOAA, and NOAA tells a story about the climate that some folks don’t like. So they trash the messenger and his tools.
- moralestapia 1y ago>This type of program has high value per dollar spent. Care to elaborate? What's the value that comes back?
- Rebelgecko 1y agoIf you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead. And that's not even counting the negative externalities of unintended conjunctions. Kessler Syndrome is the boggieman of course, but even a few thousand pieces of debris from a single conjunction makes life harder for everyone who operates in space.
- moralestapia 1y agoHas this ever happened?
- cco 1y agoYes it has.
- moralestapia 1y agoSource? Google doesn't give me anything.
- Bootvis 1y agoThere is a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
- mschuster91 1y agoThere was a collision between two comm satellites about 16 years back [1], and that was with satellites that we could track and theoretically control - with the debris collision of 2005 [2], that makes two events. We've been lucky that this is the only publicly known satellite to collide with another satellite, other than satellites that got shot down as a demonstration of power. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision [2] https://www.space.com/969-china-space-debris-collide-orbit.html https://www.space.com/969-china-space-debris-collide-orbit.h...
- epistasis 1y agoI don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment. Except political pork like price supports for large industrial farmers in the Midwest. ;-)
- tomrod 1y agoFor certain industries, there are reasonable arguments to be made to keep domestic and support via price controls. Food at a high level, yes. Pork specifically, no. (I know you didn't mean literal pork, but thinking through the spectrum here).
- tbrownaw 1y agoWould something like mandating a significant amount of ethanol (from corn) in gasoline be an effective way to so this?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pstuart 1y agoIt can be, when it's invested in butter rather than guns. Yes, military investments have paid off in new technologies (e.g., Arpanet) but as a whole only reward the owners of the Military Industrial Complex.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoGovernment is expensive because it does a lot. There is a lot of trouble with bureaucrats defending fiefdoms that would be better consolidated, but you can't fix that with an axe.
- ajmurmann 1y agoThe vast majority of the government budget is entitlements and military. I'm sure there are other things that could be cut and there is always room for more efficiency but it's always gonna be a drop in the bucket compared to entitlements and military. That said, regulations that make the economy less dynamic and slow stuff down have a high opportunity cost. While it's bureaucrats that write the implementation details and enforce them, it's congress who requires it to happen with AFAIK often little regard to how it would be executed in practice.
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago> The vast majority of the government budget is entitlements and military. The vast majority of the government budget is "entitlements and military" because donors have their pork classified as those things when they don't want it to be cut. A lot of entitlement programs are structured as handouts to the companies providing those services (e.g. drug and healthcare companies, or landlords) or vote buying of affluent retirees who don't actually need a government subsidy. And I'd like to see someone try to claim with a straight face that there is no waste in the military budget. But even within those budgets, most of the waste and corruption isn't a single program going to a single place. It's millions of programs that each waste millions of dollars and collectively waste trillions of dollars. And then it doesn't matter if you classify the program as military or entitlements or something else; what matters is if the program is worth the candle. The problem is that everybody will say that their program is worth it, many them are lying, and it's hard to tell who isn't. But the thing that's unambiguously true is that the amount of government revenue has been stable as a percentage of GDP for generations and has been growing in terms of real dollars per capita, and yet the amount of government spending has outpaced that by a huge and growing amount. Is DOGE making a hash of things? Maybe, but then let's do a better job instead of using it as an excuse to keep running reckless deficits until the largest item in the federal budget is interest.
- oklder 1y agoSticker shock to prior generations who feel fiat economics valuations aren’t just propaganda …this gossip really matters! Shock to the sort who have seen inflation get to where $600k/yr buying power in 2025 is equivalent to $200k/yr in the 1980s and well beyond the tiny earnings that would have been quite common when Chuck Grassley was a wee lad. It’s biological ossification. Physics is ageist. We should be reminding the elders rather than enable and ignore their ageism against youth they leverage through politics.
- eastbound 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- zer00eyz 1y ago> I get the desire to reduce government spending. It looks like sticker shock seeing budgets in the billions and trillions. This is an international issue being funded by the US taxpayer regardless of their own utilization of said services. Programs like these need to exist, but services like starlink should be the ones footing the bill. The military and weather services would need larger budgets to fund their portion of this effort so some of it would come back to "general taxes" but a much smaller amount. Meanwhile, All those other groups and nations with launch capabilities and a vested intrest in NOT having issues could be contributing too. > Let us get/return to more reasonable principles for doing these budget evaluations and requests. These efforts need to be funded with a tax to support them, and not all be drawn from the same general fund. It would make the arguments about "taxes" and "spending" much more reasonable.
- ourmandave 1y agoWhat about a Universal Service Fund, like the FCC has for telecom? https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund Star Link and other companies can charge back their customers what they pay into the fund. Like how AT&T hits me for the Fed USF, the 20 States Fund, and state and local taxes. https://www.att.com/legal/terms.otherWirelessFeeSchedule.html https://www.att.com/legal/terms.otherWirelessFeeSchedule.htm...
- jandrewrogers 1y agoI've worked as a related subject matter expert in a few countries. I can think of a possible reasonable justification for this. In recent years, the operating environment in orbital space has changed rapidly, and it isn't just the number of objects. These changes are outside the design assumptions of traditional orbital traffic systems, degrading their effectiveness. In response to this reality, governments with significant space assets have been investing in orbital traffic systems that are capable of dealing with the modern environment. However, these rely heavily on classified technology and capability to address the limitations of the older systems. An argument could be made that it no longer makes sense to fund a public system that is descending into obsolescence due to lack of capability and which can't be meaningfully fixed because that would require exposing classified technical capabilities that no one is willing to expose. In this scenario, the private sector is acting as an offramp from a system that had no future technically. Space has turned into an interesting place, in the curse sense. It isn't as simple as it used to be.
- counters 1y agoSure. Great. But that explanation isn't being offered by the powers-that-be. So there's no point trying to rationalize it post-hoc. There's no evidence that this is anything more than yet another round of ideologically-fueled maladministration.
- jandrewrogers 1y agoThis isn't an explanation that can be offered, at least politically. It invites questions that governments in several developed countries have clearly decided they don't want as part of the public narrative influencing policy. This is the default choice when the real explanation is more complicated, obscure, or technical than will fit in a soundbite, which would be the case in the scenario I hypothesized. Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to. Much easier to use a plausible soundbite related to the current thing. Most people aren't paying attention anyway.
- counters 1y ago
- browningstreet 1y agoThere’s no plausible discussion of reducing spending when the added debt commensurate with that effort is as astronomical as it is. This is privatization and federal dismantling, and it’s happening so fast and recklessly it will also show up as cultural and civil destruction too. He’s wrecking America so that technocrats can buy it all up. There’s no intended upside for citizens or for the society they make up. People die and his supporters shrug and defend. It’s Microsoft’s embrace, extend, extinguish as political policy, but reduced by hyperscaling to “eviscerate”.
- tomrod 1y agoYep. It is so weird to live in a world where the progressive movement is a better supporter of Chesterton's fence than the allegedly conservative GOP and even the corporate/neoliberal wing of the controlled opposition.
- browningstreet 1y agoOne reason I’m not especially hopeful is that the resistance is mostly still focused on highlighting the breaches with no actual follow-up. There’s no “Team Resistance”. The socials are replete with incremental accounting of how each step aligns with Project 2025. No shit. So, many of his voters didn’t read Project 2025, or if they did.. they’re not playing it forward to see what it looks like 10 years in the future. But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it. I know there are efforts in courts to deny some of these things, and that’s commendable.. but there are no real social or political unities arising to play offense in the next political cycle. So we have very little defense, and almost no offense. And the referees are bought.
- tomrod 1y agoAye. Dominionism winning was not on my mid-2000s Bingo card. Maybe we have elections again and reject this march towards Gilead.
- 1y ago
- ck2 1y agoIt's not about reducing spending (they just added $3+ TRILLION this year out of four) It's about destroying science, not just current science but the future of science. By destroying all existing structure so that it will cost trillions to rebuild so impossible anytime soon. Including academia that seeds the science. They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives".
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago"They aren't "conservatives" they are "regressives"." That's how I feel too. "Conservative" should mean "cautious and slow", not "destroy as quickly as possible"
- pstuart 1y agoIt would help if we had consensus on what Government is. Many (including myself) believe that Government should be for "the common good", via a legal system, government investments in shared needs/resources, etc. The current admin believes that Government exists for only two reasons: personal enrichment and punishing perceived enemies. I'd love to be proven wrong but I don't see that happening.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bpodgursky 1y agoThe fundamental problem is that the public 1. Wants to cut the budget so we don't go broke 2. Punishes anyone who talks about unsustainable retirement, disability, and healthcare entitlement programs. So, they get politicians who try to find a third way, even if it doesn't make a budgetary difference. To get out of this, the public (especially the boomer retiree population) needs to be more mature about the fiscal situation they put the country in and realize they are not living within their means.
- watwut 1y agoCurrent big beautiful bill will: - Make debt larger and risk make usa go broke. - Cut retirement disability, and healthcare entitlement programs. It will however cut taxes for bilionaires and republicans love it.
- root_axis 1y ago> I get the desire to reduce government spending I think we need to stop pretending like anyone cares about reducing government spending, it's a total waste of time and allows the discussion to be misdirected away from the specifics of what the money is actually being spent on.