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White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite
- Daishiman 1y agoIt is _wild_ seeing how the US is deliberately reducing state capacity in every area that would result in improvements to everyone, even the capitalist class it would be supposedly benefiting. The American Dream looks more and more like being a temperate, humid petrostate.
- quantified 1y agoBy increasing the gap between have and have-not, and making most things shittier (and escape from the shit more costly), the privilege of money increases. Amazing that everyone is so peaceful. One group just takes it all. Thanks Marc, Peter, Elon, Jeff, Mark!
- ujkhsjkdhf234 1y agoThese people genuinely believe that superintelligent AI will solve all the problems and all this climate noise is impeding progress.
- BoredPositron 1y agoThey will sit there in front of a data center like in hitchhikers and will get an answer (maybe it's 43) they don't like or don't understand and the solution will be to build an even bigger machine.
- nitwit005 1y agoPeople have been declaring the American dream dead before any of us were born. We're suffering from unusually poor governance, but it'll hardly be the first time.
- lrvick 1y agoWe will do a 180 and start walking the other way in 3 years. And then 4 years after that will be back here again. As is tradition. America never dies, it just walks in circles aimlessly while others march ahead in a mostly straight line laughing at us.
- Daishiman 1y agoYou are drastically underestimating how incompetent this government is compared to all others that preceded it and how deep the loss of expertise hits. You do not recover from lost bureaucratic competence for decades.
- lrvick 1y agoEroded public trust in government is however a good thing. Our biggest mistake as a supposedly free country was trusting centralized entities to forever act in accordance with the will of the majority. As a society we need to stop asking for permission to fix potholes. Just go fix them and dare them to fine you for it which would be catnip for journalists to call more attention to the dysfunctional government. NASA should crowdfund the weather satellites, with tax deductible donations, like right now. I would support them staying in the sky.
- Daishiman 1y agoSpoken like someone who has never lived in a country with limited state capacity.
- ht-syseng 1y agoThis is the state equivalent of a human gouging out their own eyes to avoid dealing with the fact that a train is barrelling towards them instead of stepping off the tracks.
- samelawrence 1y agoDeath cults be like...
- MisterMower 1y agoThe data this satellite collects is used to promote climate regulation and legislation. The authors of the article can’t even come up with other ostensible uses for it. Farmers care about carbon dioxide levels? Good one. The equivalent would be a democrat administration using government force to shut down data collection they don’t like because it will be used to promote policies they don’t want. Kind of like how the Biden admin’s FAA restricted drone use at the southern border during the migrant crisis. I think the word you’re looking for is “like” instead of “equivalent”.
- justinrubek 1y agoNo, these are not equivalent scenarios. Not even a little bit similar.
- MisterMower 1y agoIn both scenarios the government is using their power to prevent data collection they don’t like. How are they not equivalent?
- ht-syseng 1y agoIn the sense that restricting drone use does not destroy assets that were expensive to create and launch, and are currently generating significant value for the American taxpayer and the world. We already paid for them, and now we're maintaining them for next to nothing. Also, note that the yearly maintainance cost is in the same order of magnitude as a single presidential golf trip. TBC, I'm not against presidential leisure, everyone needs a break sometimes - but the cost argument doesn't hold up. Additionally, the migrant crisis is specific to current American political environment. Climate change is an issue which threatens humanity, and even if one is purely self-interested and doesn't care for famines in the third world, will directly cost the taxpayer trillions of dollars of the next century via extreme weather events and relocation/insurance bailouts, and indirectly cost hundreds of billions more via stunted productivity. Restricting drone use for petty political reasons is not equivalent to pro-actively de-orbiting functional satellites that are working to mitigate existential risk.
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoSource: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dioxide-satellite-mission-threatened https://www.npr.org/2025/08/04/nx-s1-5453731/nasa-carbon-dio... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44796597)
- insane_dreamer 1y agothe stupidity will continue until morale improves
- burnt-resistor 1y agoNow with complimentary beatings.
- gopher_space 1y ago"If I lie to the administration about disabling the satellite I won't have to worry about how this'll play out at Nuremberg."
- 4fterd4rk 1y agoI'm starting to think that the most effective form of protest might be to make it clear to the billionaires that we know about their bunkers and they won't be safe in them following a climate cataclysm.
- assword 1y agoThose bunkers are already defended. Think of them less as a schizo bug-out bunker and more of the castles of the new feudalism. Their purpose is solely to protect the land/the lord from people with ideas such as yours following the collapse of the empire.
- xg15 1y agoEven castles have been stormed.
- hungmung 1y agoSalt the land and wait for the rations to run out.
- jjk166 1y agoThe billionaire with a doomsday bunker probably has enough rations to outlast you. It's best not to wait until the doomsday bunker stage to do something about the situation.
- Ancalagon 1y agobest bring out the bunker busters then
- pavel_lishin 1y agoYou have a lot of those in the back of the garage, do you?
- 1y ago
- lrvick 1y agoI am noticing a distinct lack of maga apologists in this thread. I know you are reading. Please, explain why this is a good thing.
- SilverElfin 1y agoIt’s not a good thing. The only somewhat okay reason to go down this path is if you know you have to cut spending and want to terminate missions safely rather than leaving junk. But this seems like a biased decision for obvious reasons.
- Tadpole9181 1y agoThat's not even an okay reason. We know where it is, it's in one piece, it'll last for years even if we do nothing with it. Destroying it is insane, inexcusable Stalin-esque behavior.
- SilverElfin 1y agoYea but you may lose the people, hardware, whatever to remove it from orbit easily. SpaceX designs their satellites to passively deorbit within 5 years to remove the space junk risk. But satellites in higher orbits take much longer.
- dogleash 1y agoCalling out political opponents to defend every move of their party, so you can clown on them on the internet? Why bother?
- lrvick 1y agoNo need to clown them. I just want to know if people exist that are willing to even attempt to defend this rationally.
- MisterMower 1y ago
- wewtyflakes 1y agoDon't Look Up
- Mr_Eri_Atlov 1y agoWhat a deeply pathetic path for humanity to end on
- rwyinuse 1y agoHopefully China will invest even more into climate science to compensate for his madness. For a while I thought China might lose to America, but now it's clear we're living the age of Chinese golden age. They will win in all sciences, there's no question about it.
- aaomidi 1y agoChina is the only reason I’m not a climate doomer anymore.
- chrisco255 1y agoWhy is that? They emit more than any other country on the planet and they are absolutely bottom tier for air quality in global rankings. https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
- piva00 1y agoThey can brute force their way out of it by sheer political will, the transformation to electrify China's traffic, the hyperscaling of PV production, the rollout of high-speed trains were all accomplished in timelines the USA won't ever see in our lifetime since it lacks any political will to do big things anymore. They are installing more solar than the rest of the world combined, other renewables as well. China doesn't have oil, they don't want to depend on oil or fossil fuels, and the CCP needs to keep some kind of social cohesion by showing off to their citizens that "things are being done". Air quality over Chinese big cities has improved massively the past 10-15 years, they will only continue doing so, it was popular. > https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count... Well, well, well: https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-consumption-by-country/ https://www.worldometers.info/oil/oil-consumption-by-country... You probably have never visited China to be able to compare how it was in the 2010s to now, right?
- chrisco255 1y ago
- troelsSteegin 1y agoThey should at least try to sell it. Fine line, though, between leverage and extortion.
- prpl 1y agoTerrible, but predictable, as part of a continued assault on data.
- GianFabien 1y agoHere's a fantastic chance for a tech mega-billionaire or company to step up to the plate and take on the $15M p.a. commitment to keep the satellite orbiting. For example, for Google $15M is probably less than they spend on stocking their fridges with fizzy drinks. The PR benefits would be huge and they could probably sell the data to the current users of that info.