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.
There’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”.
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.
GOP-MAGA isn't conservative, it's reactionary, and the people running the corps will sell their own mothers for a broken penny and a half-percent tax reduction. Don't expect them to jump in and save you.
No, it absolutely is conservative, just not the conservatives you might have hoped for (Frum, Reagan conservatives, etc.). Conservatives are not libertarian/classical liberal. They value strongmen and even go to the monoarchial extreme. They value hierarchy -- their full throated worship of the theory of military veterans (though typically failing in practice) is strong evidence, but also glorification of warmaking and foreign hawkish policy, their push for unitary executive, etc.
Make no mistake, MAGA is exactly what the folks that felt they failed Nixon hoped for.
American conservatives in 2025 are liberal because liberalism is the current most recent stable status quo. American colonial conservatives in 1776 were monarchist because monarchism was the most recent stable status quo at that time.
Conservatism isn't an ideology unto itself, but merely a pointer to some other ideology based on a prioritization of caution and stability over first-principles thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, per se; at an organizational or societal scale, more conservative influence just means higher activation energy to move forward with major decisions. Excess conservatism can ossify a suboptimal status quo, but too little can lead to major mistakes, regressions, or whiplash between governing philosophies and policies.
Even if aspects of a particular status quo are obviously bad (e.g. slavery), there's a difference between defending such aspects on a first principles basis and doing so based on "tradition" or "this is how it's always been". Of course the latter can result in ordinary people staking out positions that look monstrous in hindsight, but on the flip side sometimes Chesterton's fence is there for a reason. For every good thing conservatives have opposed (e.g. American democracy and emancipation), one could just as easily rattle off a list of bad things they've opposed (e.g. French Revolution, end of the Weimar Republic, Cultural Revolution, Challenger launch, Arab Spring). We also have no idea how many other historical disasters simply never occurred as a result of conservative resistance.
Of course, the modern popular bastardization of these terms into "whatever I think the [blue/red] guys support" would make my comment endlessly confusing to most Americans. It will never not be amusing to me that half the population of the land of freedom has somehow turned an etymological cousin of "liberty" into a dirty word.
Here's another fun example that flips the American "conservative"-"liberal" axis on its head: just a few decades ago, conservatives were opposed to the liberalization of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. In other words, in that time and place, conservatives were communists and liberals were the right wing of the Overton window.
One 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.
> But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it
The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'.
The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked".
So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever.
Honestly, it would be better if they take a cycle to clean house and dedicate themselves to a couple things only. No niche groups hijacking the whole party. Jobs, economy, healthcare, taxes, debt. Everone with a different pet cause off the island otherwise you'll lose. My pet cause included as it isn't on that list. The hilarity will be that when the dnc flubs another election cycle doing the cleaning out, the gop winner will be stuck with the debt bomb they expected the opposition to inherit...
The party has been hijacked by capital. And has been since Clinton at least. As an ancient anarchist, I remember when the Dems held policy positions, but just barely. The party these days is just wealthy folks hoping they can hold norms stable long enough to cash out.
I'm seeing the old party in folks like Mamdani, rallying around policies that actually help working class folks, even if it costs some money to do so.
Persistent anarchy is a utopia in both senses of the word. But "the land of do as you please" certainly would be nice if human nature allowed for it. My concerns with Mamdani and AOC is lots of promises without any plans on how to pass the taxes to pay for them. If we don't pass the taxes to support universal healthcare, but implement it anyway, life will be worse for workers than if we hadn't, eventually. Also, while I don't think US left wing populists are currently likely to turn into authoritarians, power is dangerous. The temptation to fix one more thing before relinquishing it turns into an addiction and you get a Chavez. Though he was a lot more obvious from the start. I always thought the democrats would produce our first autocrat, yet another race they lost.
Given the choice between losing their big-money donors or losing elections, the current Democratic party probably prefers to lose elections. The gap between party and/or party leadership and its voters has never been wider, no doubt in part due to Citizens United
I earnestly believe the midterms are a significant barometer of how the next 20 years of America goes. We need change in the midterms and then the next Presidential election. They’re still going to work hard to bend that further to their advantage. Cue the “we’re barely 6 months in” violins…
What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
I earnestly believe the midterm elections will happen far too late to have any impact. Look at how much has already been dismantled in the first six months:
- people are being disappeared in broad daylight, by masked mercenary squads and without due process
- the military has already been deployed domestically
- courts have been neutered/ignored
- the supreme court generally rules in favour of the regime, and when it doesn't even the supreme court gets ignored
- the first political adversaries have already been assassinated
- the majority of the Senate is happily cheering on all of the above
All three branches of government are already fully under control of this regime. Add to that the many agencies that have been gutted or clipped, and the dismantling of healthcare and social security. What do you think will be left of the US' institutions in 18 months?
The Rosie O’Donnell thing today is another demonstration of his commitment to iterating against norms. He’ll push and push until he finds a front that collapses in his favor. The whole idea of the unassailable rights of citizens will continue to be tested. The Democrats need a “no F’ing way” line to hold. An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend. We’ll see what kind of pushback surfaces.
> An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend.
A certain German clergyman write a poem about this.
The Constitution applies to everyone on US soil, ceding any ground undermines the next norm to be broken. It's a deliberate scope creep from Criminal illegal immigrants -> illegal immigrants -> immigrant-looking and criminals in general -> enemies of the state and criminal/enemy sympathizers. Having to "defend" American-born citizens means you've ceded a lot of ground, and are nearing your last stand.
What's the point though? Dems don't want to play the Reps game, even though the arena has changed. Dems are too dumb to realize that they're in a playing field that has no rules, where the referees in the judiciary are in the Rep camp, where some of the referees themselves (like Sam Alito) are treasonous Arnolds, while others (like Clarence Thomas) are corrupt af. The Dems have a very very slim chance of winning the Senate, zero chance of a supermajority in any future to bypass the filibuster and pass extensive reforms, and zero inclination to support wideranging policies instead of more identity politics.
Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
I'm a foreign national so can't exactly run. Fact of the matter is, I've profited quite a bit from Trump's shenanigans, but I can still see the disastrous longterm consequences of their policies, and as a foreign national who once contemplated moving to the US, won't be doing so at all.
Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
I suspect the person you're responding to was suggesting your energy could be better channeled to more productive pursuits, rather than aping bluesky-level analysis on an internet forum.
As a citizen of the world, this option absolutely remains available to you. As an extractive capitalist, I imagine you will continue to fuel the populist movements you're analyzing, but reminder: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
> As an extractive capitalist, I imagine you will continue to fuel the populist movements you're analyzing, but reminder: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Eh, it depends. To put it succinctly, a leading investor from the sovereign wealth fund of an autocratic Gulf state once told me that while the Republican govt., especially under Trump, is super friendly to letting them get away with shit, a Democrat government is better for returns. From an investment standpoint, everyone craves stability and is happy to double down and reinvest, but given cases like Trump, we're happy to move out our American extractions.
That high rent Americans pay to their landlords? Yeah, we're LPs of Blackstone, who brag about bleeding renters dry annually. That new war Mr President wants to start? Carlyle is very happy about its strong showing. All those farm running out of water in California, Arizona, etc.? They're happily eating local mutton and dairy derived from cows, goats and sheep fed on American alfalfa. Oh, and my mom absolutely loves those water-hungry almonds you grow there, especially when they come for a nice hefty discount.
The DNC is busy thinking about candidates whose turn it is next time, gender ratios, trans representation and paying $20 million for studies why they don't appeal to young men. They don't have time to think about policies that may benefit voters.
I think you've identified the symptom, but not the root cause. Democrats are inept. The party lost my vote recently. But it has nothing to do with trans support or gender support, and everything to do with they have calcified into "at least we're not the other guy." There is no platform except, "look at how bad the other party is!"
My evidence for this is Mamdani. He won handily, and he crushed it with young men. And young people in general, but also among middle age people.
Mandani is strongly pro trans. But he's also putting forward a platform of values that people actually care about. Housing, affordability, wages, access to food and healthcare. He's not just "not the other guy", he's focused on painting a picture that resonates with many people.
And he didn't have to abandon trans people to do it.
One clarifying viewpoint (does not counter what you have stated about Mamdani): I don’t believe the democrats were ever too focused on trans rights. The Republicans just do a better job selling woke criticisms and claiming all dems care about is LGBTQ rights. And the lack of a solution from the dems for all the problems Mamdani is addressing, fed that narrative.
I don't believe either that they focused too much on trans rights. But they don't have a clear focus on anything so they are easy to attack on minor issues like trans rights (yes, it's a minor issue only a very small part of the population cares about). And they constantly fall for the bait. They should run on something like Medicare For All and stick to it. Seems whenever they face some resistance they drop the issue.
Democrats and progressives believe that factual arguments are what wins elections, so they are tripping over themselves to present the lectorate with proof. this would be a winning strategy if the whole electorate were like Dems and progressives, but it's not.
They need to develop parallel atavistic messaging that bypasses the prefrontal cortex and goes straight for the limbic system, but they're (mostly) terrible at this because they're so conflict averse. Democrats are the party that always wins gold stars at policy debate but can't figure out how to avoid getting shoved in a locker afterward.
You cannot defend against it any more than you can joust with ghosts.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses.
Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world.
Abstract, abstract, abstract,
my hat is red,
your hat is blue
that is why -
I hate you.
Like with Newton, any force you exert against an object will be met with an exact opposing force. The net result is just the production of waste energy. The fight becomes the system.
I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality.
That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.
We’re watching the fire sale of America, like was imposed on Russia in the 90s, and resulted in one of the largest declines in life expectancy in the country’s history. I expect the same to happen here, including its eventual culmination in the rise of a Putin-like figure from the security state apparatus, after we similarly suffer a decade or more of internal collapse and humiliation.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the people who promoted neoliberalism in Russia saw how it ended in authoritarian oligarchy- supported by a religious nationalism which displaced science and progressive democratic values - and decided same would be a good outcome for them personally if rolled out across the rest of the West.
While things are undoubtedly bad in the US, Trump's grip on everything - including personal health - is far more tenuous than Yeltsin's was. And (ironically) the US has more of a history of violent resistance and agitation for both worker rights and civil rights.
The US has always been a soft economic dictatorship. But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears.
It's a much more complicated picture than the one in Russia, which has essentially been the same kind of violent autocratic monarchy for centuries, even as the set dressing around it changed.
> But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears
I would argue that was happening way before Trump, it's precisely why he was elected. He didn't just scapegoat but also pretended to take their economic grievances seriously and was the only permitted political outlet to people's grievances.
I think what happens is just the natural course of neoliberalism in the west, not any conscious long term strategy. That's why you can see the far-right gaining ground in every western country.
It's a concerted effort enabled by social media platforms and rise of "alternative" media/news.
The reason we're seeing it happen now is the peak user saturation of social media and because the machine has proven its formula works and can be translated across languages and cultures.
I think a different ruling cohort would have tightened the screws of neoliberalism, but might have felt the need to keep up the facade of the legitimacy of the system they run and their own leadership, throwing us a bone every once in a while.
imo the US future probably looks more like Hungary than Russia. There is strong alliance being created between racism/nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and science-denial, led by people who don't believe any of this, but have discovered that these groups are a substantial plurality of the country and can be turned into single issue voters
I think it started out like that - the previous generation knew it was bullshit bud did whatever got them votes / viewers / attention or whatever, long term consequences be damned. Younger generations grew up in it, never exposed to anything else and think it’s all true. Much scarier.
This is very naive and a typical US-exceptionist take. EU is going through the same thing: the bill for neoliberal policies and globalization came due.
Neoliberalism and globalization were the state ideology of the American empire, of which the EU (was) a part, so of course they’re experiencing the same. They’ll now either re-align themselves with China (who capitalized best on the prior era) or face a similar fate.
How would realignment with China help EU? EU has the same systemic issues as the US, the o lot difference is a better (for now) social safety net, eg healthcare and unemployment.
Not really. Just authoritarian scooping up capital, same as always after the end of hegemony. Next come the dark ages. I'm not sure it was ever as deliberate as Trump's losses.
It seems very similar to how a clique bought up a lot of Russia and became their oligarchs. It's another transfer of wealth to the rich and/or Trump's cronies. The destruction of public goods, research, education, and the climate is extremely sad.
It's also hard to fathom. I don't believe these people believe what they're doing is for the greater good or that climate change is a hoax. They have children and want them to grow up to what exactly?
They believe their wealth can shield their chilren from the bad effects of climate change. They think there will be enough of the world left in a functioning state to retain their current level of luxury, and don't care about the rest.
This happens at every level of society. It's over 100 degrees where I live today. That would have been exceptional 20 years ago, but now it's normal. I have air conditioning in my house, I have air conditioning in my car. The homeless guy on the corner? He's gonna die from heat stroke. He didn't contribute to global warming but he's going to pay the price, while I can afford to insulate myself
They want them to grow up in their privileged bubble, and that is all. They literally DGAF if the rest of of us, i.e., the NPCs, all starve. Does anyone think Russian oligarchs care about the Russian peasants or "meat cans" they send to the Ukranian front? And they've already got their bunkers in New Zealand, Hawaii, or wherever if it all goes really sideways. Musk, Theil, Vance, and the rest of them care about us less than the NPSs in their FPS games, and we should regard them exactly the same way.
I think Trump is dangerous because he's a particularly explosive combination of Evil and Stupid.
Evil alone (i.e. intelligent evil) isn't as dangerous most of the time, because usually it's manifested as ultra-egotism -- usually if they're smart enough they don't come to government at all. Because, as Trump saw, that's just asking to get shot in the face; although sometimes e.g. in the form of racism taken as a life goal, there's more power-seeking, but then intelligence excludes most stupid forms of racism as simply demonstrably false, and it's very difficult to run on blatantly evil missions like that, post-Hitler.
Stupid alone obviously is useless: they usually don't even achieve power, and if by sheer luck they do, assuming they're not evil, they just fumble around and ask for assistance without too much damage, and might end up resigning or being effectively sidelined.
Now Trump isn't 100% stupid, or 100% evil. He's a very dangerous combination: he probably really doesn't believe in climate change due to very seriously stupid propaganda (in turn produced and stimulated by evil parties) from the far-right/inforwars/whatever, which is pretty stupid. You can even disagree climate change is harmful for yourself (some scientists even did -- at least a few decades ago), but denying it just reflects not having studied the matter at all or listened to anyone that understands a tiny bit of the science. And he is evil in the sense that he might think that, even if this were true, the US stands to profit from oil (again, evil and stupid!). He is evil in his reckless commitment to rile up hate speech, while not seeing the policies he is pursuing are incredibly stupid, and just self-destructive.
The end result is I expect this to be a huge enormous mess for the US, but also for the world. We live in the same planet, and unlike some who like to cheer on their perceived enemies' demise, everyone will be affected if the US (and for example the science they support) destroys so much value. Just like Russia and others, they hold massive nuclear arsenals. I shudder at those who cheer for US's total demise.
The hopeful thing is that insanity inevitably shows how great sanity is. Evil tends to self-destruct. Just do what you can, and brace for impact. Then rebuild from the wreckage. Never lose hope in human potential for good stuff. Good night and good luck.
Racism, ironically, doesn't discriminate. Anyone can be racist, even otherwise "intelligent" people. I agree that racism precludes my idea of intelligence, but there are plenty of conventionally intelligent people with some really stupid beliefs across the spectrum.
Second, evil can self-destruct, but it can also reign for millennia.
Agreed. Basically, intelligence doesn't transfer from one task to another in a straightforward manner, unfortunately. More gravely, people can find ways to self-censor that are very powerful and very unfortunate (i.e. fooling yourself).
Also, I don't really like to portray people as evil. That tends to dehumanize them and try to separate them into something entirely different, and something distant. Much has been said about this post-WWII, and I agree. Those are people like us, just from a different psycho-social background, which could have been our own; and there is always the possibility of change, if not from leaders from followers. To me the greatest danger of claiming evil is when you stop (or try to get people to stop) thinking there; when you try to find the exact source of harm and carefully explain your reasoning, that's less bad. I didn't know what else to write instead...
who exactly are 'trump's cronies' and how are they getting richer? thats what they kept saying about him in 2016. did he ( or his) actually get richer from his time in office ?
Someone 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.
Orrrr 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.
The 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
I'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.
This 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.
> Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to.
This is an absurdly cynical take. It certainly doesn't jive with how NOAA has historically operated - which has necessitated as much transparency as possible, because that is the only way it can engender the trust with the public necessary to steward life and property.
The standards have historically been much higher, and we ought to strive for them to be higher still.
> The standards have historically been much higher, and we ought to strive for them to be higher still.
My take isn't cynical, it is what I've seen first hand. I've worked for the US government (and others) and NGOs off and on since Clinton was President. The standards were pretty mediocre when I first got involved and they've only become worse.
The standards were probably higher before the 1990s. All of these organizations have a few true believers in the mission but those are the old guard. They've slowly been replaced by the equivalent of DMV bureaucrats, even in the more science-y parts of the government. People interested in doing science have known those organizations are not where you go to do science since long before the current administration, which has been a long, vicious spiral.
Understand the first part perfectly. Yes, a small portion of newspace involves [or will involve) spacecraft that don't spend most of their life orbiting in nice predictable arcs above ground stations with occasional also predictable small station keeping or conjunction avoidance adjustments, and it stands to reason that the most advanced and classified US SDA capability has access to better sensor data and models.
But that seems like a very poor argument for removing a system which might be approaching obsolescence in military terms but is still relied on for a rapidly increasing number of civil satellites to make rapidly increasing conjunction avoidance manoeuvres (and is also relatively inexpensive). Anything that makes them less aware threatens defence and critical civil government infrastructure too, and the private sector doesn't exactly seem to be embracing it as an exciting opportunity - look at the quote from Slingshot! Plus if anything the changes taking place would seem to be a reason to invest more in orbital traffic control with regulation to make it more like the FAA. You don't have to give away the classified tracking tech if you're barking out move orders rather than simply sharing predictions so operators come to their own conclusions about conjunction risk, and likewise orders and requirements for operators to broadcast position and intent are a much better way of dealing with a future of private servicing missions and space megastructures than "let them buy their own tracking data and make their own decisions"
I work in a related area too. NOAA and others in the space game are great partners. I don't agree with the fundamentals of your assessment, seems post hoc ergo propter hoc.
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.
But 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
>> For example they often have attended college and believe in science.
> One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to test hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
The first quote is a shorthand. The second quote is accurate, technically, except that perhaps the author is misunderstanding the first quote. When many people write "person P believes in science", you can accurately translate that to "person P sees the value in science as a tool for truth-seeking."
I fully appreciated the intended connotation. I simply chose to point out, perhaps with some pedantry, that one does not believe in science. Such looseness in verbiage opens up the bad faith gish gallopers that have become MAGA's "thought" leaders.
Yes, the principles of the universe that science uncovers don't require anyone to believe in them.
But the institutions of science are built on trust and faith. Science is more or less just generations of individuals who have had faith that the spirit of scientific inquiry is how we learn about the universe and about the nature of human existence
No, the institution of science is built on repeatability and patsimony. I'm not sure why you want to put science into a fallible know-nothing epistemological foundation, but I suspect the effort will be futile.
Not 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.
People 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)
That common source of trust has been eroded as certain populations cling to ideas long proven false and/or maladative, and rather than adapt they instead become exclusionary and xenophobic.
Once your tribe meets another, you either adapt or die.
> One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to rest hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
Yes, this is precisely that which they do not believe in. Plug your ears, bury your head in the sand, and whatever you do, do not use cause and effect, data, or evidence to backup your claims and positions. That is the platform upon which they stand.
I agree with your statement. What I am always trying to understand is where does this lead us and how can we get back to belief in the scientific method? Removing cause/effect/data leaves all decisions to emotion and short term rewards. I don't think this will end well, especially against a background of countries and cultures that do believe in science and collaboration.
It's been systematically undermined for decades through cultivated conspiracy culture, with digressions into wellness woo and evangelical movements of all kinds.
The pitch is the usual anti-intellectual narrative: "How dare these people, with their fancy educations, look down on you and patronise you. Everyone's opinions are equally valuable. They're probably in it for the money."
It's been very organised, and both science and academia have completely failed to respond to it.
You can give science a pass because most scientists struggle to understand how craven politics and propaganda are.
Academia should have known better. Hannah Arendt described it far ahead of time. But somehow plain anti-authoritarianism became less sexy, and certainly less of a career move, than Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, which have turned out to be largely impotent when faced with full-on fascism.
I 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. ;-)
It depends what your investment strategy is. If your goal is to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, then government spending is a good idea. But some people would rather all boats not be lifted. They'd just like to lift some boats, but sink others. Still, other people would prefer to sink as many boats as possible while being in control of the remaining boats that float. For people who fit into those later categories, government spending is not a good ROI.
As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs.
Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".
Of course, nevermind that we may need to defend ourselves and/or our allies against exoansionist autocratic aggressors like Russia (see Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Baltics and explicit threats against Poland, Germany, England, & US), China (what happens to the tech industry every Taiwan goes up in smoke?), Iran, etc.
Fukyima (sp?) was right about the end of history sort of happening when all countries of the world embrace liberal democracy, but he was very wrong that we are anywhere near that point.
Until then, only strength will deter or oppose the aggressors.
Let me get this out of the way to quiet you down: I recognize the need for (and the value of) a strong military.
People rightfully worry about waste, fraud, and abuse of government funds, but that should extend to all avenues of the government -- not just the stuff you don't like.
A GOP Secretary of Defense had announced he was going to investigate two trillion dollars of funds that couldn't be accounted for; and then 9/11 happened. Oops. Last we heard of that.
We all know that the military can waste money like the best of us, so lets find a happy median where we protect ourselves but avoid setting piles of money on fire just because it's end of the budget cycle.
However, it is often (and especially now) is a mere cover for a LOT of other even more massively wasteful concepts.
In ANY large organization, and in ANY organization doing innovative work, there will ALWAYS be significant literal waste, especially when viewed in hindsight. Trying to root it all out is merely a straight-up recipe for different kinds of waste — a dense bureaucracy of requirements but the waste is predictable and "accepted". I do work as a 2nd- or 3rd-tier military supplier, and working with "CUI" (Confidential Unclassified Information) has a very significant overhead, and every single contract comes with a list of huge "flow-downs", literally pages of lists of federal regulations that apply to the contracts — and that is just the list of regulations, reading the actual regs is hundreds or thousands of pages — and that is all to prevent WF&A.
Start talking innovative weapons systems, hardware and software, and we have ALL of the issues of any kind of hardware and software development, sometimes the need to very rapidly develop, and all kinds of constraints, and when a program that looks good doesn't pan out, people screaming "WASTE!!!". Often it happens even when the program works in the end.
Even in bog-standard stuff with a long lead time, such as artillery shells, the cries of "WASTE!!" are a problem. The situation in Ukraine is showing that we have very low and inadequate artillery shell production capacity and inventory for fighting an actual war. Startup time for new production lines in measured in years. Yet, to prevent ""WASSTE!!" almost all of it was shut down. And now we cannot supply enough for even a tightly constrained active hot war. But, if the USG had done the right thing and paid contractors to keep active those lines and stockpiled millions of rounds, everyone would be screaming bloody murder about the "WASSSTE!!".
And what happens when you do go after it without being careful? Just look at DOGE: In an early example they fired the people in the energy department responsible for safety of our nuclear weapons stockpile because the "efficiency" people literally did not know what the DOE did; they had to scramble to hire them back when the press called it out. Or, this week, it turned out that the NOAA employee in central Texas responsible for coordinating severe weather warnings with local officials had taken the DOGE early buyout, so was not available to help. NOAA still did the best they could with what they had, but we're now picking hundreds of dead bodies out of river banks and trees.
How efficient is that?
Yes, there are always problems of efficiency at scale, and you can always find somebody scamming something. But even some of the DOGE employees that quit publicly expressed surprise at how actually efficiently the govt ran. So, I must say I'm a bit skeptical of the $2T unaccounted funds (and over what period?). That said, we could definitely do better in terms of budget rules, and the "use it or lose it" rule creates problems. The question is whether or not it creates more problems than other sets of rules.
I'm of the mind that DOGE was created specifically to destroy programs ideologically opposed by Project 2025, as well as give Elon an opportunity to steal data and cripple investigations into his chicanery.
Yeah except for arpanet, GPS, satellites in general, jet engines, composites, computers, and everything that came from there... What has military r&d ever done for us?
this is not at all simple. part of that causality is that fundamental research money was channeled through the military, because that was politically acceptable. is there a particularly good reason why DOE and DOD funding of university research is higher than NSF?
and its pretty easily to cleave off defense spending for basic research performed by universities from the more applied R&D that defense contractors do, much of that from the black budget. this is a place where every visitor leaves shaking their heads at the overt corruption and waste. but its necessary to have such programs in general to support our common goal of self-autonomy as a nation.
so if we're going to serious as a democratic political body about trying to get the most value from our tax money, we can't really can't fixate on reductionist statements that assert that defense or social support money is an unalloyed bad or good. we really need better transparency and to actually dig into the details.
> I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment.
"Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated.
This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean.
Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.
This is good. Although I’d make it a 4-tuple to make “target” clear. There are two aspects to target: “where is the impact on the return” and “where is the cost of the investment”.
> 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?
The 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.
> 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.
You start out right then make a totally unsupported leap to concluding that DOGE might help. DOGE most certainly won't help because it's the cutting with an axe I referred to.
DOGE is an artificial stupid looking for keywords. It doesn't understand anything.
It 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.
Sticker 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.
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.
If 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.
the government already needs to track satellites to prevent its own from getting hit, and to track foreign spy satellites. IMO it would be reasonably for Congress to pass a law to allow the FAA to charge private companies who launch satellites in the US, but killing the program is just very dumb
Satellites make conjunction avoidance manoeuvres on a regular basis; about 275 Starlink satellites need to move every day. A non-trivial proportion of those would result in a collision otherwise. Satellites orbit at multiple km per second and manoeuvre to adjust orbit much more slowly, so they need advance warning.
Satellite operators obtain much their space situational awareness data directly or indirectly from US govt sources. The fact that collisions are presently infrequent because satellite operators act on that data isn't a particularly good reason to eliminate much of it
There 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.
It 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.
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.
> 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.
This - among many other reasons - is why I’m increasingly throwing my opinions behind shoving these roles onto the United Nations instead of nation states or private companies. Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
A UN program for weather forecasting and satellite tracking, complete with open data sources and REST APIs, would be a boon. Unfortunately, the current organizational structure makes that impossible due to the vested interests of the respective Security Council members. We’re more likely to see the EU take up those mantles.
I worked for the UN on more or less this in the 2000s. People have a naive perception of what the UN is like. It was one of the most openly dysfunctional, corrupt, and sclerotic organizations I have ever worked with or for.
It has nothing to do with who is or isn't on the security council. That entire organization is full of the kinds of people who occupy the average government in the world, which is a very low standard of excellence. The UN has neither data infrastructure nor technical expertise to do something like this in any case.
REST APIs? One of the big issues is that the data sources are measured in exabytes these days. That means there can only practically be a single copy. This creates an insurmountable hurdle: most countries contributing data want to keep their data in their country. This makes any use of that data computationally intractable because there is not enough bandwidth connect the disparate data sources together. Also, given this extreme (and mostly unnecessary) bandwidth consumption, now they have to severely restrict access to the data to keep the system usable, effectively making it no longer public.
I've been to this particular rodeo several times. I have zero confidence it could deliver on the promise.
It really would require someone with a singular vision, the technical expertise, and the courage to pull it off. A committee of bureaucrats isn't going to make it happen.
Also the practicality of this is that most of the UN funding will come from the US. When a situation like this where US is cutting funding arises you get the same problem. Almost all finding will dry up overnight and they won't have sufficient funding to continue
Yep, keenly aware of that, but if we’re building a new future that’s resilient to modern structural collapse and civilizational crises, then part of that is changing the structure of the UN, dues/fees, and its functions. There’s a lot to discuss there once enough folks have accepted the era of US Hegemony is over.
High hopes, those. The point of sabotaging US hegemony was not to hand power over to a monolithic, democratic, primarily Western institution, I'll tell you that much. I suspect that the Galts want their gulches (with Do Not Create Rapture as the template).
I have no doubt China would offer a far better location somewhere like Shanghai. The intelligence benefits of so many foreign diplomats and spies walking your street, drinking in your bars, paying your hookers, is incalculable.
Sure. But if US gov is doing it, there's no clear way for other countries to just jump in and foot the bill. If UN is in charge, other countries could just keep paying for it.
Whether that would happen is to be seen, but now it's down right impossible.
> Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
While this is true, I suspect that putting the UN in charge of all global matters will cause them to become such a hegemony.
Until we have multiple planets (or equivalents), I think a multi-polar world with multiple superpowers capable and motivated to work on such things is important.
Hopefully the superpowers will keep their fighting to "indirectly", like the USA and the USSR used to.
My most recent commute took me over the line of the Berlin wall. While what you say is true, a direct conflict between the USA and USSR would have been so much worse for most of the world.
Co-incidentally, home discussion about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" this evening.
I didn't mean to suggest direct conflict would be any better, I just found out disturbing to see NINBYism applied to war. Basically "let's hope it continues to be other people who suffer from our conflicts and never us."
…but also I think NINBYism is the wrong metaphor for the point you make: if everyone NINBYs housing, we have an end to housing and all suffer the shortage; if everyone NINBYs war, we have an end to war.
But everyone can't do that. There are tremendous global power disparities. That's why there's near continuous proxy conflicts but it rarely flares up to the point that aggressor nations have to suffer directly.
Turns out that people bombing your infrastructure and your people actually makes life worse, regardless of your ranking in the world economic stack ranking...
Is the suggestion that we should fight all our wars in the most impoverished places because it makes the least difference to the people there? I'm not sure what you're trying to imply.
There's TraCSS, SST, RSSS. Each country needs to have their own satellite tracking program. There is international cooperation but do you really think the US is in charge? "Whoops", says the US as a small cubesat from another country collides with a Russian military space satellite. "Missed that one - my bad".
This isn't about budget, it's about reducing the USA's capability as a leader in science and research as commanded from certain parties in the former soviet union.
I mentioned this scenario before but I was downvoted. Can a rogue disgruntled state like Iran actually bring about destruction of satellites, say Starlink ones, to set off space debris chain reaction to pollute, poison the earth orbit for everyone. The thinking goes like if I can't have the advantage then no one else should.
In theory, yes, sure, why not? In practice, I would think that any nation with the capacity of launching such an attack would realize that that would be catastrophic not just for their enemies but for themselves. Not to mention that I'm sure various nations have intelligence about any nations that might consider such an attack and would attempt to thwart it.
Not to toot my own horn, but I've been building this free site with space weather and a lot of free data for folks to be able to do their own satellite conjunctions. We've even got a 7 day forecast with covariance so it's even easier.
We want to give out all the data we possibly can for free.
Why isn’t the free market capable of doing this? Seems odd to spend money just to spend money. There’s plenty of incentive for other people to be doing this already…
I feel like this is like "free market should build roads thing" we fund roads so everyone has access and goods can move freely / more economic activity can take place without problems.
What would the free market solution be here? Someone builds all the infrastructure to track all the satellites, and maybe more than one (if not you have a monopoly) person does it. Then they charge for it?
But someone doesn't use it an now we have more space junk ...
If anything a government organizing this and everyone utilizing it seems like it makes for more efficient / lower risk situation with satellites. Everyone just gets on with more important business.
Usually I’d agree with you on this type of thing, but in this case I think the insurance industry could and should be picking this up.
They’re the bag holder here, and this system could be built for a marginal hit to their bottom line in exchange for a huge amount of de-risking across their entire supply chain.
Except they won’t, because current business is about short-term gains at the expense of long-term sustainability. Companies cannot be trusted to act in their own best interests in the long term, and they’ll just as soon exit an unprofitable market today than invest into making it profitable tomorrow.
I don't think the insurance industry is all that interested providing services or enhancing commerce. They'd have some very mixed motivations all at once if they tried doing this. Including anything technical.
Side story regarding roads: I was recently in Shelter Cove, CA and was thinking that the is road probably exceeds the entire economic value of the town… Why is this road even here? It turns out, they used to harvest tan oak bark for the tannins to tan leather in the late 1800s which was a huge industry back then. Lots of logging roads out there since then… Free markets do build a lot of roads!
Insurance companies have the right incentive but they don’t need to be the ones building it. Safer cars get cheaper insurance, so there’s clear market pressure there without insurance companies having to build their own cars…
Pollution, kinds that suffer the “tragedy of the common”, are a good example where regulation is necessary to prevent a race to the bottom. But that’s a pretty simple and straightforward thing to democratically vote on without government spending.
I think the solution is fairly simple: private companies build these capabilities and offer them as a service. The idea that there won’t be a marketplace for this service seems misguided too. Adversarial militaries will want their own systems, likely contracted out to private companies, which will likely offer civilian use around the world…
The free market is famously unable to solve problems of diffuse risk and responsibility: air pollution, sea piracy, and in this case -- satellite collision avoidance.
This is a good argument for passing a one-page bill which clarifies "if your sat leaves its assigned orbit, you're responsible for the resulting damages". It's a poor argument for spending $50 million dollars per year.
Right, there's no way such simplicity could ever be gamed in the legal system! We could also eliminate crime with a simple law that forbids committing it!
Bankrupt companies leave no assets. Same problem as wildcat oil wells.
So now what? Do you try to make every company in the world with a sat to post a damages bond? Held by who? The UN? Adjudicated by which courts? This is naive.
Collective action problems are real, and this is one of them.
The sleazy (edited - shouldn't call this standard) playbook for old oil wells is for the operators to sell them to a shadier operator company and transfer the risk. The shady firm then siphons the money out and declares bankruptcy.
The standard cycle is that they pump while the money is good. Then when commodity prices crash, those shell companies are insolvent. Industry lobbies for easements on their cash reserves as a favour during the "temporary downturn". The shady guys just walk away with their pockets stuffed full of money, and the regulator is left holding the bag.
Most operators are responsible, and decommission the wells. But the industry has to maintain a whole insurance policy for "orphan wells", and it is always under-funded. Alberta alone is going eat a couple of billion in orphan cleanup.
This process only gets harder when the satellite is "owned" by a shell-company domiciled in Mauritius.
The actual solution is a series of international treaties. The USA government has signed a global promise that they are directly liable for any object launched by any actor in the USA . All treaty signatories are on the same hook. The government in turn then has to track them all, else how do they manage their liability?
How could a private company possibly play this role in a global treaty process? Over decades?
Handing a natural monopoly to corporate America is a very extremely bad idea. Allowing bean counters to control what could eventually disrupt global communications and a huge military advantage is as bad an idea as allowing an unstable billionaire to control a significant portion of your future space program.
These satellites are in a rather thin band of space and it's clearly a problem as debris has already hit the space station and satellites. Tracking satellites is clearly a necessity. Could we use some partners? Probably worth look into with the ESA and Japan/India to share cost, burden, and information. Not doing it because of a trite expression doesn't seem like a good idea.
If the US Federal Government spent ZERO money on anything except:
1. Social Security
2. Medicare & Medicaid
3. National Defense
4. Net Interest on the Public Debt
5. Income Security
6. Veterans Benefits & Services
7. Federal Civilian & Military Retirement and Disability
... the US would still have a sizable deficit.
All the hoopla surrounding science spending, education, DEI, FDA, housing, foreign aid, disaster relief, etc., doesn't really address some huge issues if the goal is to reduce deficit spending.
> hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it
No need for past tense. We’re currently in the most intense—the biggest, most beautiful, one might say—phase of deficit accumulation in American history.
> I see these headlines a lot. Honest question: do we know if these programs actually do anything?
The Pentagon themselves seem to think so, "Space Force officials and more than 450 aerospace companies are against the White House's proposal":
> Space Force officials are eager to exit the business of warning third-party satellite operators, including rivals such as Russia and China, of possible collisions in orbit. The military would prefer to focus on managing ever-growing threats from satellites, an intensive effort that requires continual monitoring as other nations' increasingly sophisticated spacecraft maneuver from one orbit to another.
> But until someone else is ready to take over, the Space Force will remain saddled with the responsibility of issuing these alerts. The Space Force calls these alerts conjunction assessments, and there are national security reasons for sharing the warnings far and wide, because a traffic accident in orbit would endanger the Space Force's own satellites.
Likewise, and that's despite me finding LLMs impressive.
I only trust LLMs for a first draft, where I can actually fact-check everything, or light copy-editing for tone and style.
I wouldn't expect a fresh graduate to be dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's on their research; and as LLMs are like a fresh graduate at coding, I assume they're like that at everything else, too.
Useful, sure, but not what I'd call a "high quality source".
LLMs lie far far more often. It would take a year+ of good experiences for me to start reconsidering my bad experiences with any technical topic outside of programming.
I similarly dismiss people's opinions that rely on LLMs to inform them on important subjects, rather than using them as a search engine to find more reliable sources.
You can't trust a person that educated themselves with an LLM, because they have filled their head with bad foundations. That's very difficult to correct later on.
Having worked in the private satellite indsutry, I would dismiss most of the information on Google, Wikipedia and Britannica on this topic, yes. Most of the information online about satellite operations is very, very wrong.
Not really? If one seeks to gain basic information these are reasonable sources but they are not authoritative, nor are they deep enough to generate deep and rich understanding of most phenomenon.
I was taught since at least high school that you don’t cite encyclopedias as sources because they are not sources - they are summaries of sources.
LLMs are similar but worse. They are a statistical approximation of truth, without a concept of truth. They are fuzzing sources that you and I have access to already. I find calling that hand off of agency and responsibility “being informed” deeply disturbing.
I've set some of these models to work synthesising summaries etc. based on my own blog posts; LLMs are surprisingly middling at synthesising info from documents — I've seen even good models elide significant content, go on distracted rambles about other topics in the same area, and even invert the meanings of points being made.
Use them the way you'd have used Wikipedia in 2008: a starting point from which you can do actual research, but you have to watch out for a lot of unverified junk as well.
Part of the problem is you need to track all orbits for all constellations and free flyers as well as all orbital debris, and communicate across many communities of interest.
It is more national security & military adjacent
I’d stand up a joint agency for this requirement across DOD, NASA, NOAA, FAA, and Commercial Space/Newspace.
The US are by far not the only ones with satellites in orbit. Making it a UN body would make sense, just like the International Telecommunications Union coordinates telephone service and the International Postal Union coordinates international mail, and both are now UN bodies (despite predating the UN).
I have a feeling that the current US administration would not back such an idea, so this will end up back with the DOD, maybe the Space Force. Despite the DOD saying quite clearly they would prefer NOAA to do it
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.
There’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”.
Yep.
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.
GOP-MAGA isn't conservative, it's reactionary, and the people running the corps will sell their own mothers for a broken penny and a half-percent tax reduction. Don't expect them to jump in and save you.
No, it absolutely is conservative, just not the conservatives you might have hoped for (Frum, Reagan conservatives, etc.). Conservatives are not libertarian/classical liberal. They value strongmen and even go to the monoarchial extreme. They value hierarchy -- their full throated worship of the theory of military veterans (though typically failing in practice) is strong evidence, but also glorification of warmaking and foreign hawkish policy, their push for unitary executive, etc.
Make no mistake, MAGA is exactly what the folks that felt they failed Nixon hoped for.
American conservatives in 2025 are liberal because liberalism is the current most recent stable status quo. American colonial conservatives in 1776 were monarchist because monarchism was the most recent stable status quo at that time.
Conservatism isn't an ideology unto itself, but merely a pointer to some other ideology based on a prioritization of caution and stability over first-principles thinking. There's nothing wrong with that, per se; at an organizational or societal scale, more conservative influence just means higher activation energy to move forward with major decisions. Excess conservatism can ossify a suboptimal status quo, but too little can lead to major mistakes, regressions, or whiplash between governing philosophies and policies.
Even if aspects of a particular status quo are obviously bad (e.g. slavery), there's a difference between defending such aspects on a first principles basis and doing so based on "tradition" or "this is how it's always been". Of course the latter can result in ordinary people staking out positions that look monstrous in hindsight, but on the flip side sometimes Chesterton's fence is there for a reason. For every good thing conservatives have opposed (e.g. American democracy and emancipation), one could just as easily rattle off a list of bad things they've opposed (e.g. French Revolution, end of the Weimar Republic, Cultural Revolution, Challenger launch, Arab Spring). We also have no idea how many other historical disasters simply never occurred as a result of conservative resistance.
Of course, the modern popular bastardization of these terms into "whatever I think the [blue/red] guys support" would make my comment endlessly confusing to most Americans. It will never not be amusing to me that half the population of the land of freedom has somehow turned an etymological cousin of "liberty" into a dirty word.
Here's another fun example that flips the American "conservative"-"liberal" axis on its head: just a few decades ago, conservatives were opposed to the liberalization of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. In other words, in that time and place, conservatives were communists and liberals were the right wing of the Overton window.
One 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.
> But what feels true, too, is that the DNC hasn’t read it either. Or if they have, they’re not working against it
The DNC are sheepdogs, at best. Their role is to shepherd any sort of leftist energy into safely neutered channels. And science in general has big 'leftist energy'.
The campaign promises: "We'll end corporate donations! We'll end executive orders! We'll copper-fasten Roe! We'll end ICE! We'll stop the illegal forever wars! We'll legalize cannabis!" - have now devolved to, "vote for us and if you're lucky the Gestapo we funded won't raid your house in the middle of the night without a search warrant - or if they do, at least they won't be masked".
So, no. We're not going to get much help from the guys that 'failed' [0] to stop a rapist insurrectionist con-man from taking the Presidency, and it's really pretty silly to have any hope in them whatsoever.
0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/servants-of-the-mafia-s...
Honestly, it would be better if they take a cycle to clean house and dedicate themselves to a couple things only. No niche groups hijacking the whole party. Jobs, economy, healthcare, taxes, debt. Everone with a different pet cause off the island otherwise you'll lose. My pet cause included as it isn't on that list. The hilarity will be that when the dnc flubs another election cycle doing the cleaning out, the gop winner will be stuck with the debt bomb they expected the opposition to inherit...
The party has been hijacked by capital. And has been since Clinton at least. As an ancient anarchist, I remember when the Dems held policy positions, but just barely. The party these days is just wealthy folks hoping they can hold norms stable long enough to cash out.
I'm seeing the old party in folks like Mamdani, rallying around policies that actually help working class folks, even if it costs some money to do so.
Persistent anarchy is a utopia in both senses of the word. But "the land of do as you please" certainly would be nice if human nature allowed for it. My concerns with Mamdani and AOC is lots of promises without any plans on how to pass the taxes to pay for them. If we don't pass the taxes to support universal healthcare, but implement it anyway, life will be worse for workers than if we hadn't, eventually. Also, while I don't think US left wing populists are currently likely to turn into authoritarians, power is dangerous. The temptation to fix one more thing before relinquishing it turns into an addiction and you get a Chavez. Though he was a lot more obvious from the start. I always thought the democrats would produce our first autocrat, yet another race they lost.
> the DNC hasn’t read it either
Given the choice between losing their big-money donors or losing elections, the current Democratic party probably prefers to lose elections. The gap between party and/or party leadership and its voters has never been wider, no doubt in part due to Citizens United
Aye. Dominionism winning was not on my mid-2000s Bingo card. Maybe we have elections again and reject this march towards Gilead.
I earnestly believe the midterms are a significant barometer of how the next 20 years of America goes. We need change in the midterms and then the next Presidential election. They’re still going to work hard to bend that further to their advantage. Cue the “we’re barely 6 months in” violins…
What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
I earnestly believe the midterm elections will happen far too late to have any impact. Look at how much has already been dismantled in the first six months:
- people are being disappeared in broad daylight, by masked mercenary squads and without due process
- the military has already been deployed domestically
- courts have been neutered/ignored
- the supreme court generally rules in favour of the regime, and when it doesn't even the supreme court gets ignored
- the first political adversaries have already been assassinated
- the majority of the Senate is happily cheering on all of the above
All three branches of government are already fully under control of this regime. Add to that the many agencies that have been gutted or clipped, and the dismantling of healthcare and social security. What do you think will be left of the US' institutions in 18 months?
Totally agree.
The Rosie O’Donnell thing today is another demonstration of his commitment to iterating against norms. He’ll push and push until he finds a front that collapses in his favor. The whole idea of the unassailable rights of citizens will continue to be tested. The Democrats need a “no F’ing way” line to hold. An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend. We’ll see what kind of pushback surfaces.
> An American born citizen should be an easy line to defend.
A certain German clergyman write a poem about this.
The Constitution applies to everyone on US soil, ceding any ground undermines the next norm to be broken. It's a deliberate scope creep from Criminal illegal immigrants -> illegal immigrants -> immigrant-looking and criminals in general -> enemies of the state and criminal/enemy sympathizers. Having to "defend" American-born citizens means you've ceded a lot of ground, and are nearing your last stand.
Who was assassinated?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...
More like, “we’re barely 6 months in” and look at all the things they've fucked up. Like an ignorant, blind and deaf bull in a china shop
We're ten years into a mess that took decades to make.
The direction doesn't matter, the barometer is in hell and so are we.
What's the point though? Dems don't want to play the Reps game, even though the arena has changed. Dems are too dumb to realize that they're in a playing field that has no rules, where the referees in the judiciary are in the Rep camp, where some of the referees themselves (like Sam Alito) are treasonous Arnolds, while others (like Clarence Thomas) are corrupt af. The Dems have a very very slim chance of winning the Senate, zero chance of a supermajority in any future to bypass the filibuster and pass extensive reforms, and zero inclination to support wideranging policies instead of more identity politics.
Yeah, it's not right to blame the Dems for this, but the Reps are responsible for this shitshow and far from redemption. The Dems are the only possible counterforce in the US (unlike most other countries), but they seem to be inclined to do jack shit to assume that role.
Maybe you should run, then? It is a government of the people, as they say.
I'm a foreign national so can't exactly run. Fact of the matter is, I've profited quite a bit from Trump's shenanigans, but I can still see the disastrous longterm consequences of their policies, and as a foreign national who once contemplated moving to the US, won't be doing so at all.
Instead, like all entities doing business in the US, foreign and otherwise, we'll just find novel ways to extract more from the US and send it elsewhere.
I suspect the person you're responding to was suggesting your energy could be better channeled to more productive pursuits, rather than aping bluesky-level analysis on an internet forum.
As a citizen of the world, this option absolutely remains available to you. As an extractive capitalist, I imagine you will continue to fuel the populist movements you're analyzing, but reminder: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
> As an extractive capitalist, I imagine you will continue to fuel the populist movements you're analyzing, but reminder: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Eh, it depends. To put it succinctly, a leading investor from the sovereign wealth fund of an autocratic Gulf state once told me that while the Republican govt., especially under Trump, is super friendly to letting them get away with shit, a Democrat government is better for returns. From an investment standpoint, everyone craves stability and is happy to double down and reinvest, but given cases like Trump, we're happy to move out our American extractions.
That high rent Americans pay to their landlords? Yeah, we're LPs of Blackstone, who brag about bleeding renters dry annually. That new war Mr President wants to start? Carlyle is very happy about its strong showing. All those farm running out of water in California, Arizona, etc.? They're happily eating local mutton and dairy derived from cows, goats and sheep fed on American alfalfa. Oh, and my mom absolutely loves those water-hungry almonds you grow there, especially when they come for a nice hefty discount.
The DNC is busy thinking about candidates whose turn it is next time, gender ratios, trans representation and paying $20 million for studies why they don't appeal to young men. They don't have time to think about policies that may benefit voters.
I think you've identified the symptom, but not the root cause. Democrats are inept. The party lost my vote recently. But it has nothing to do with trans support or gender support, and everything to do with they have calcified into "at least we're not the other guy." There is no platform except, "look at how bad the other party is!"
My evidence for this is Mamdani. He won handily, and he crushed it with young men. And young people in general, but also among middle age people.
Mandani is strongly pro trans. But he's also putting forward a platform of values that people actually care about. Housing, affordability, wages, access to food and healthcare. He's not just "not the other guy", he's focused on painting a picture that resonates with many people.
And he didn't have to abandon trans people to do it.
100%.
One clarifying viewpoint (does not counter what you have stated about Mamdani): I don’t believe the democrats were ever too focused on trans rights. The Republicans just do a better job selling woke criticisms and claiming all dems care about is LGBTQ rights. And the lack of a solution from the dems for all the problems Mamdani is addressing, fed that narrative.
I don't believe either that they focused too much on trans rights. But they don't have a clear focus on anything so they are easy to attack on minor issues like trans rights (yes, it's a minor issue only a very small part of the population cares about). And they constantly fall for the bait. They should run on something like Medicare For All and stick to it. Seems whenever they face some resistance they drop the issue.
Democrats and progressives believe that factual arguments are what wins elections, so they are tripping over themselves to present the lectorate with proof. this would be a winning strategy if the whole electorate were like Dems and progressives, but it's not.
They need to develop parallel atavistic messaging that bypasses the prefrontal cortex and goes straight for the limbic system, but they're (mostly) terrible at this because they're so conflict averse. Democrats are the party that always wins gold stars at policy debate but can't figure out how to avoid getting shoved in a locker afterward.
You cannot defend against it any more than you can joust with ghosts.
Trump is a symptom, not a cause - the embodiment of the inexorable collective decay of the idea of “America”, set against the slow collapse of a global order built on forgotten consensuses.
Empires and structures inevitably decay and ultimately fail in the same way - reification of that which was once novel, the pollution of minds with layers of abstraction so divorced from any objective reality that they find irreconcilable differences in the symbol maps they use to describe their world.
Like with Newton, any force you exert against an object will be met with an exact opposing force. The net result is just the production of waste energy. The fight becomes the system.I earnestly think the best thing we can be doing with our time against this backdrop is preserving knowledge and building stable islands of coherency amidst the growing chaos. The dark ages are often blamed on Christianity, but the reality is more that they were a result of the might of Rome - people forgot how to do things, how to exist in a society, as rather than understanding these things themselves, they relied upon the map that was handed to them and took it as reality.
That’s the risk we face now. Not Trump. Not whatever comes next - but the slow, uncomprehending loss of the ability to make sense of the world at all.
We’re watching the fire sale of America, like was imposed on Russia in the 90s, and resulted in one of the largest declines in life expectancy in the country’s history. I expect the same to happen here, including its eventual culmination in the rise of a Putin-like figure from the security state apparatus, after we similarly suffer a decade or more of internal collapse and humiliation.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the people who promoted neoliberalism in Russia saw how it ended in authoritarian oligarchy- supported by a religious nationalism which displaced science and progressive democratic values - and decided same would be a good outcome for them personally if rolled out across the rest of the West.
This is dense, but stunningly prescient.
https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/1230310...
While things are undoubtedly bad in the US, Trump's grip on everything - including personal health - is far more tenuous than Yeltsin's was. And (ironically) the US has more of a history of violent resistance and agitation for both worker rights and civil rights.
The US has always been a soft economic dictatorship. But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears.
It's a much more complicated picture than the one in Russia, which has essentially been the same kind of violent autocratic monarchy for centuries, even as the set dressing around it changed.
Your link looks very interesting. Thanks.
> But a lot of people still expect a functioning social contract, and they're going to become increasingly angry as that disappears
I would argue that was happening way before Trump, it's precisely why he was elected. He didn't just scapegoat but also pretended to take their economic grievances seriously and was the only permitted political outlet to people's grievances.
I think what happens is just the natural course of neoliberalism in the west, not any conscious long term strategy. That's why you can see the far-right gaining ground in every western country.
It's a concerted effort enabled by social media platforms and rise of "alternative" media/news.
The reason we're seeing it happen now is the peak user saturation of social media and because the machine has proven its formula works and can be translated across languages and cultures.
I think a different ruling cohort would have tightened the screws of neoliberalism, but might have felt the need to keep up the facade of the legitimacy of the system they run and their own leadership, throwing us a bone every once in a while.
I dont think America will have Putin like figure. It howver may have Trump like figure and Vance like figure.
Security state apparatus in Russia filled different role. These guys are true Putin equivalents.
imo the US future probably looks more like Hungary than Russia. There is strong alliance being created between racism/nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and science-denial, led by people who don't believe any of this, but have discovered that these groups are a substantial plurality of the country and can be turned into single issue voters
I think it started out like that - the previous generation knew it was bullshit bud did whatever got them votes / viewers / attention or whatever, long term consequences be damned. Younger generations grew up in it, never exposed to anything else and think it’s all true. Much scarier.
Neodark ages indeed.
> We’re watching the fire sale of America,
This is very naive and a typical US-exceptionist take. EU is going through the same thing: the bill for neoliberal policies and globalization came due.
No, it's like if the bill came due and instead we put it on a credit card and also ordered 6 extra porches on our other card.
Neoliberalism and globalization were the state ideology of the American empire, of which the EU (was) a part, so of course they’re experiencing the same. They’ll now either re-align themselves with China (who capitalized best on the prior era) or face a similar fate.
How would realignment with China help EU? EU has the same systemic issues as the US, the o lot difference is a better (for now) social safety net, eg healthcare and unemployment.
Not really. Just authoritarian scooping up capital, same as always after the end of hegemony. Next come the dark ages. I'm not sure it was ever as deliberate as Trump's losses.
It seems very similar to how a clique bought up a lot of Russia and became their oligarchs. It's another transfer of wealth to the rich and/or Trump's cronies. The destruction of public goods, research, education, and the climate is extremely sad.
It's also hard to fathom. I don't believe these people believe what they're doing is for the greater good or that climate change is a hoax. They have children and want them to grow up to what exactly?
They believe their wealth can shield their chilren from the bad effects of climate change. They think there will be enough of the world left in a functioning state to retain their current level of luxury, and don't care about the rest.
This happens at every level of society. It's over 100 degrees where I live today. That would have been exceptional 20 years ago, but now it's normal. I have air conditioning in my house, I have air conditioning in my car. The homeless guy on the corner? He's gonna die from heat stroke. He didn't contribute to global warming but he's going to pay the price, while I can afford to insulate myself
They want them to grow up in their privileged bubble, and that is all. They literally DGAF if the rest of of us, i.e., the NPCs, all starve. Does anyone think Russian oligarchs care about the Russian peasants or "meat cans" they send to the Ukranian front? And they've already got their bunkers in New Zealand, Hawaii, or wherever if it all goes really sideways. Musk, Theil, Vance, and the rest of them care about us less than the NPSs in their FPS games, and we should regard them exactly the same way.
It's easy to understand if you imagine that they don't particularly care about other people, their children included.
I think Trump is dangerous because he's a particularly explosive combination of Evil and Stupid.
Evil alone (i.e. intelligent evil) isn't as dangerous most of the time, because usually it's manifested as ultra-egotism -- usually if they're smart enough they don't come to government at all. Because, as Trump saw, that's just asking to get shot in the face; although sometimes e.g. in the form of racism taken as a life goal, there's more power-seeking, but then intelligence excludes most stupid forms of racism as simply demonstrably false, and it's very difficult to run on blatantly evil missions like that, post-Hitler.
Stupid alone obviously is useless: they usually don't even achieve power, and if by sheer luck they do, assuming they're not evil, they just fumble around and ask for assistance without too much damage, and might end up resigning or being effectively sidelined.
Now Trump isn't 100% stupid, or 100% evil. He's a very dangerous combination: he probably really doesn't believe in climate change due to very seriously stupid propaganda (in turn produced and stimulated by evil parties) from the far-right/inforwars/whatever, which is pretty stupid. You can even disagree climate change is harmful for yourself (some scientists even did -- at least a few decades ago), but denying it just reflects not having studied the matter at all or listened to anyone that understands a tiny bit of the science. And he is evil in the sense that he might think that, even if this were true, the US stands to profit from oil (again, evil and stupid!). He is evil in his reckless commitment to rile up hate speech, while not seeing the policies he is pursuing are incredibly stupid, and just self-destructive.
The end result is I expect this to be a huge enormous mess for the US, but also for the world. We live in the same planet, and unlike some who like to cheer on their perceived enemies' demise, everyone will be affected if the US (and for example the science they support) destroys so much value. Just like Russia and others, they hold massive nuclear arsenals. I shudder at those who cheer for US's total demise.
The hopeful thing is that insanity inevitably shows how great sanity is. Evil tends to self-destruct. Just do what you can, and brace for impact. Then rebuild from the wreckage. Never lose hope in human potential for good stuff. Good night and good luck.
Just a couple of nitpicks.
Racism, ironically, doesn't discriminate. Anyone can be racist, even otherwise "intelligent" people. I agree that racism precludes my idea of intelligence, but there are plenty of conventionally intelligent people with some really stupid beliefs across the spectrum.
Second, evil can self-destruct, but it can also reign for millennia.
Both thoughts are terrifying.
Agreed. Basically, intelligence doesn't transfer from one task to another in a straightforward manner, unfortunately. More gravely, people can find ways to self-censor that are very powerful and very unfortunate (i.e. fooling yourself).
Also, I don't really like to portray people as evil. That tends to dehumanize them and try to separate them into something entirely different, and something distant. Much has been said about this post-WWII, and I agree. Those are people like us, just from a different psycho-social background, which could have been our own; and there is always the possibility of change, if not from leaders from followers. To me the greatest danger of claiming evil is when you stop (or try to get people to stop) thinking there; when you try to find the exact source of harm and carefully explain your reasoning, that's less bad. I didn't know what else to write instead...
who exactly are 'trump's cronies' and how are they getting richer? thats what they kept saying about him in 2016. did he ( or his) actually get richer from his time in office ?
There are tons of cases like this, and they are only the really, really, really obvious ones https://www.propublica.org/article/us-officials-stock-sales-...
his "cronies" are some guy in his office that sold $30k stock?
Charles Schwabb (the person) and Roger Penske were on video with Trump bragging about making money off the stock market turmoil around tariffs: https://newrepublic.com/post/193860/donald-trump-brags-tarif...
> Elon Musk made a whopping $36 billion as Tesla stock soared up 23 percent
this sentence is ridiculous. he did not "make" $36 billion.
The journalist is repeating the framing of one of the subjects of the article, which is fair play.
so i guess we'll go with subject's framing in this one particular thing.
Someone 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.
> 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.
Orrrr 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.
Surely you jest! /s
Privatized profits, socialized costs
so, Planetes then
I get this reference!
Even as an anime grump, I liked this one.
A fantastic show
The 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
I'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.
Sure. 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.
This 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.
> Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to.
This is an absurdly cynical take. It certainly doesn't jive with how NOAA has historically operated - which has necessitated as much transparency as possible, because that is the only way it can engender the trust with the public necessary to steward life and property.
The standards have historically been much higher, and we ought to strive for them to be higher still.
> The standards have historically been much higher, and we ought to strive for them to be higher still.
My take isn't cynical, it is what I've seen first hand. I've worked for the US government (and others) and NGOs off and on since Clinton was President. The standards were pretty mediocre when I first got involved and they've only become worse.
The standards were probably higher before the 1990s. All of these organizations have a few true believers in the mission but those are the old guard. They've slowly been replaced by the equivalent of DMV bureaucrats, even in the more science-y parts of the government. People interested in doing science have known those organizations are not where you go to do science since long before the current administration, which has been a long, vicious spiral.
Your experience doesn't jive with what myself and many others have observed at NOAA over multiple decades.
Understand the first part perfectly. Yes, a small portion of newspace involves [or will involve) spacecraft that don't spend most of their life orbiting in nice predictable arcs above ground stations with occasional also predictable small station keeping or conjunction avoidance adjustments, and it stands to reason that the most advanced and classified US SDA capability has access to better sensor data and models.
But that seems like a very poor argument for removing a system which might be approaching obsolescence in military terms but is still relied on for a rapidly increasing number of civil satellites to make rapidly increasing conjunction avoidance manoeuvres (and is also relatively inexpensive). Anything that makes them less aware threatens defence and critical civil government infrastructure too, and the private sector doesn't exactly seem to be embracing it as an exciting opportunity - look at the quote from Slingshot! Plus if anything the changes taking place would seem to be a reason to invest more in orbital traffic control with regulation to make it more like the FAA. You don't have to give away the classified tracking tech if you're barking out move orders rather than simply sharing predictions so operators come to their own conclusions about conjunction risk, and likewise orders and requirements for operators to broadcast position and intent are a much better way of dealing with a future of private servicing missions and space megastructures than "let them buy their own tracking data and make their own decisions"
I work in a related area too. NOAA and others in the space game are great partners. I don't agree with the fundamentals of your assessment, seems post hoc ergo propter hoc.
> 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.
But 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
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>> For example they often have attended college and believe in science.
> One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to test hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
The first quote is a shorthand. The second quote is accurate, technically, except that perhaps the author is misunderstanding the first quote. When many people write "person P believes in science", you can accurately translate that to "person P sees the value in science as a tool for truth-seeking."
I fully appreciated the intended connotation. I simply chose to point out, perhaps with some pedantry, that one does not believe in science. Such looseness in verbiage opens up the bad faith gish gallopers that have become MAGA's "thought" leaders.
I didn't think it was loose verbiage.
Yes, the principles of the universe that science uncovers don't require anyone to believe in them.
But the institutions of science are built on trust and faith. Science is more or less just generations of individuals who have had faith that the spirit of scientific inquiry is how we learn about the universe and about the nature of human existence
No, the institution of science is built on repeatability and patsimony. I'm not sure why you want to put science into a fallible know-nothing epistemological foundation, but I suspect the effort will be futile.
> One uses science as a tool
This requires a base rate of literacy and critical thinking that a lot of Americans, unfortunately, lack.
Not 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.
People 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)
That common source of trust has been eroded as certain populations cling to ideas long proven false and/or maladative, and rather than adapt they instead become exclusionary and xenophobic.
Once your tribe meets another, you either adapt or die.
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> One doesn't believe in science. One uses science as a tool to rest hypotheses, using real world evidence to understand reality and truth.
Yes, this is precisely that which they do not believe in. Plug your ears, bury your head in the sand, and whatever you do, do not use cause and effect, data, or evidence to backup your claims and positions. That is the platform upon which they stand.
I agree with your statement. What I am always trying to understand is where does this lead us and how can we get back to belief in the scientific method? Removing cause/effect/data leaves all decisions to emotion and short term rewards. I don't think this will end well, especially against a background of countries and cultures that do believe in science and collaboration.
It's been systematically undermined for decades through cultivated conspiracy culture, with digressions into wellness woo and evangelical movements of all kinds.
The pitch is the usual anti-intellectual narrative: "How dare these people, with their fancy educations, look down on you and patronise you. Everyone's opinions are equally valuable. They're probably in it for the money."
It's been very organised, and both science and academia have completely failed to respond to it.
You can give science a pass because most scientists struggle to understand how craven politics and propaganda are.
Academia should have known better. Hannah Arendt described it far ahead of time. But somehow plain anti-authoritarianism became less sexy, and certainly less of a career move, than Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, which have turned out to be largely impotent when faced with full-on fascism.
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I 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. ;-)
It depends what your investment strategy is. If your goal is to be a rising tide that lifts all boats, then government spending is a good idea. But some people would rather all boats not be lifted. They'd just like to lift some boats, but sink others. Still, other people would prefer to sink as many boats as possible while being in control of the remaining boats that float. For people who fit into those later categories, government spending is not a good ROI.
As Timothy Snyder put it, authoritarian political capital is based on creating a "reservoir of fear" that the authoritarian can draw upon whenever he needs legitimacy or a mandate to enact cruel and inhumane policies. The reservoir of fear is created by making groups desperate, and you don't make them desperate by meeting their needs through funding government assistance programs.
Instead what you do as an authoritarian is you "other" and arrest their neighbors, take away their health care, allow their homes to be flooded, take away their information channels, prevent them from going to school, make sure they're unemployed, make food more scarce... make them desperate enough, blame their desperation on the "others" and they'll be happy to enact whatever cruelties you ask them to on the "others" if they think it'll lessen their misery, or at the very least bring more misery to the "others".
For 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).
Would something like mandating a significant amount of ethanol (from corn) in gasoline be an effective way to so this?
No.
Subsidizing production of next gen/green energy production and grid operations, yes.
By about 30x to 100x per acre (PV vs ethanol)...
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epub/10.1073/pnas.2501605122
Hear hear.
It 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.
Of course, nevermind that we may need to defend ourselves and/or our allies against exoansionist autocratic aggressors like Russia (see Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Baltics and explicit threats against Poland, Germany, England, & US), China (what happens to the tech industry every Taiwan goes up in smoke?), Iran, etc.
Fukyima (sp?) was right about the end of history sort of happening when all countries of the world embrace liberal democracy, but he was very wrong that we are anywhere near that point.
Until then, only strength will deter or oppose the aggressors.
I did not suggest we don't defend ourselves.
Let me get this out of the way to quiet you down: I recognize the need for (and the value of) a strong military.
People rightfully worry about waste, fraud, and abuse of government funds, but that should extend to all avenues of the government -- not just the stuff you don't like.
A GOP Secretary of Defense had announced he was going to investigate two trillion dollars of funds that couldn't be accounted for; and then 9/11 happened. Oops. Last we heard of that.
We all know that the military can waste money like the best of us, so lets find a happy median where we protect ourselves but avoid setting piles of money on fire just because it's end of the budget cycle.
A somewhat validating concurrence: https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2023/06/05/th...
Good to hear
I've got zero problem going after W, F, & A.
However, it is often (and especially now) is a mere cover for a LOT of other even more massively wasteful concepts.
In ANY large organization, and in ANY organization doing innovative work, there will ALWAYS be significant literal waste, especially when viewed in hindsight. Trying to root it all out is merely a straight-up recipe for different kinds of waste — a dense bureaucracy of requirements but the waste is predictable and "accepted". I do work as a 2nd- or 3rd-tier military supplier, and working with "CUI" (Confidential Unclassified Information) has a very significant overhead, and every single contract comes with a list of huge "flow-downs", literally pages of lists of federal regulations that apply to the contracts — and that is just the list of regulations, reading the actual regs is hundreds or thousands of pages — and that is all to prevent WF&A.
Start talking innovative weapons systems, hardware and software, and we have ALL of the issues of any kind of hardware and software development, sometimes the need to very rapidly develop, and all kinds of constraints, and when a program that looks good doesn't pan out, people screaming "WASTE!!!". Often it happens even when the program works in the end.
Even in bog-standard stuff with a long lead time, such as artillery shells, the cries of "WASTE!!" are a problem. The situation in Ukraine is showing that we have very low and inadequate artillery shell production capacity and inventory for fighting an actual war. Startup time for new production lines in measured in years. Yet, to prevent ""WASSTE!!" almost all of it was shut down. And now we cannot supply enough for even a tightly constrained active hot war. But, if the USG had done the right thing and paid contractors to keep active those lines and stockpiled millions of rounds, everyone would be screaming bloody murder about the "WASSSTE!!".
And what happens when you do go after it without being careful? Just look at DOGE: In an early example they fired the people in the energy department responsible for safety of our nuclear weapons stockpile because the "efficiency" people literally did not know what the DOE did; they had to scramble to hire them back when the press called it out. Or, this week, it turned out that the NOAA employee in central Texas responsible for coordinating severe weather warnings with local officials had taken the DOGE early buyout, so was not available to help. NOAA still did the best they could with what they had, but we're now picking hundreds of dead bodies out of river banks and trees.
How efficient is that?
Yes, there are always problems of efficiency at scale, and you can always find somebody scamming something. But even some of the DOGE employees that quit publicly expressed surprise at how actually efficiently the govt ran. So, I must say I'm a bit skeptical of the $2T unaccounted funds (and over what period?). That said, we could definitely do better in terms of budget rules, and the "use it or lose it" rule creates problems. The question is whether or not it creates more problems than other sets of rules.
I'm of the mind that DOGE was created specifically to destroy programs ideologically opposed by Project 2025, as well as give Elon an opportunity to steal data and cripple investigations into his chicanery.
Exactly. That is literally the full list of what was accomplished.
Yeah except for arpanet, GPS, satellites in general, jet engines, composites, computers, and everything that came from there... What has military r&d ever done for us?
this is not at all simple. part of that causality is that fundamental research money was channeled through the military, because that was politically acceptable. is there a particularly good reason why DOE and DOD funding of university research is higher than NSF?
and its pretty easily to cleave off defense spending for basic research performed by universities from the more applied R&D that defense contractors do, much of that from the black budget. this is a place where every visitor leaves shaking their heads at the overt corruption and waste. but its necessary to have such programs in general to support our common goal of self-autonomy as a nation.
so if we're going to serious as a democratic political body about trying to get the most value from our tax money, we can't really can't fixate on reductionist statements that assert that defense or social support money is an unalloyed bad or good. we really need better transparency and to actually dig into the details.
> I don't understand the desire to reduce government spending. It's all super high return on investment.
"Return on investment" (ROI) is only the start of the conversation. ROI is only part of the context. Think of it as a 3-tuple: (ROI, Target, TimeHorizon). One has to define all three for it to be clear. By "Target" I mean the target population and/or impact area. By "TimeHorizon" I mean the period of time over which the ROI is calculated.
This entire comment is intended to be completely non-ideological. Bring your own values and preferred ways of organizing society. (I'm not going to change your deep-seated values, anyway.) But to be intellectually honest, we have to say what we mean.
Even truth-seeking libertarians who prefer market-based approaches understand that many market-based mechanisms are sometimes not well suited for servicing to "hard to reach" customers. Practically, this might mean geographically remote. Generally, it means having a set of characteristics that make them sufficiently out of the parameter space that a market will serve. Some examples include: rural broadband and low-income urban areas that need medical services.
This is good. Although I’d make it a 4-tuple to make “target” clear. There are two aspects to target: “where is the impact on the return” and “where is the cost of the investment”.
> 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?
Government 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.
The 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.
> 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.
You start out right then make a totally unsupported leap to concluding that DOGE might help. DOGE most certainly won't help because it's the cutting with an axe I referred to.
DOGE is an artificial stupid looking for keywords. It doesn't understand anything.
It 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.
Sticker 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.
> 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.
>This type of program has high value per dollar spent.
Care to elaborate?
What's the value that comes back?
If 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.
> If you save a billion dollar satellite every decade, and it costs $50 million year, you come out ahead.
Why should the (US) taxpayer foot the bill rather than the companies who operate and profit from the satellites?
Would you argue that every road should be a toll road, too?
the government already needs to track satellites to prevent its own from getting hit, and to track foreign spy satellites. IMO it would be reasonably for Congress to pass a law to allow the FAA to charge private companies who launch satellites in the US, but killing the program is just very dumb
Has this ever happened?
Satellites make conjunction avoidance manoeuvres on a regular basis; about 275 Starlink satellites need to move every day. A non-trivial proportion of those would result in a collision otherwise. Satellites orbit at multiple km per second and manoeuvre to adjust orbit much more slowly, so they need advance warning.
Satellite operators obtain much their space situational awareness data directly or indirectly from US govt sources. The fact that collisions are presently infrequent because satellite operators act on that data isn't a particularly good reason to eliminate much of it
Yes it has.
Source? Google doesn't give me anything.
There 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
[2] https://www.space.com/969-china-space-debris-collide-orbit.h...
There is a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision
measles was extinct in the US until the antibaxers gained enough momentum
It 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.
It'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".
"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"
The 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.
Current 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.
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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 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.
What about a Universal Service Fund, like the FCC has for telecom?
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.htm...
This - among many other reasons - is why I’m increasingly throwing my opinions behind shoving these roles onto the United Nations instead of nation states or private companies. Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
A UN program for weather forecasting and satellite tracking, complete with open data sources and REST APIs, would be a boon. Unfortunately, the current organizational structure makes that impossible due to the vested interests of the respective Security Council members. We’re more likely to see the EU take up those mantles.
I worked for the UN on more or less this in the 2000s. People have a naive perception of what the UN is like. It was one of the most openly dysfunctional, corrupt, and sclerotic organizations I have ever worked with or for.
It has nothing to do with who is or isn't on the security council. That entire organization is full of the kinds of people who occupy the average government in the world, which is a very low standard of excellence. The UN has neither data infrastructure nor technical expertise to do something like this in any case.
REST APIs? One of the big issues is that the data sources are measured in exabytes these days. That means there can only practically be a single copy. This creates an insurmountable hurdle: most countries contributing data want to keep their data in their country. This makes any use of that data computationally intractable because there is not enough bandwidth connect the disparate data sources together. Also, given this extreme (and mostly unnecessary) bandwidth consumption, now they have to severely restrict access to the data to keep the system usable, effectively making it no longer public.
I've been to this particular rodeo several times. I have zero confidence it could deliver on the promise.
It really would require someone with a singular vision, the technical expertise, and the courage to pull it off. A committee of bureaucrats isn't going to make it happen.
Also the practicality of this is that most of the UN funding will come from the US. When a situation like this where US is cutting funding arises you get the same problem. Almost all finding will dry up overnight and they won't have sufficient funding to continue
Yep, keenly aware of that, but if we’re building a new future that’s resilient to modern structural collapse and civilizational crises, then part of that is changing the structure of the UN, dues/fees, and its functions. There’s a lot to discuss there once enough folks have accepted the era of US Hegemony is over.
High hopes, those. The point of sabotaging US hegemony was not to hand power over to a monolithic, democratic, primarily Western institution, I'll tell you that much. I suspect that the Galts want their gulches (with Do Not Create Rapture as the template).
I sort of wonder when the UN is getting thrown out of New York by the current administration.
I have no doubt China would offer a far better location somewhere like Shanghai. The intelligence benefits of so many foreign diplomats and spies walking your street, drinking in your bars, paying your hookers, is incalculable.
Sure. But if US gov is doing it, there's no clear way for other countries to just jump in and foot the bill. If UN is in charge, other countries could just keep paying for it.
Whether that would happen is to be seen, but now it's down right impossible.
And they can just pull out of it whenever and frame the UN as a boogeyman like with the WHO.
> Global needs should have global support, such that the failure of one hegemony doesn’t fuck up everything for the rest of humanity
While this is true, I suspect that putting the UN in charge of all global matters will cause them to become such a hegemony.
Until we have multiple planets (or equivalents), I think a multi-polar world with multiple superpowers capable and motivated to work on such things is important.
Hopefully the superpowers will keep their fighting to "indirectly", like the USA and the USSR used to.
Indirectly is great unless you don't live in the US/SR in which case it's in your backyard. Indirect fighting hasn't been so great for Afghanis.
My most recent commute took me over the line of the Berlin wall. While what you say is true, a direct conflict between the USA and USSR would have been so much worse for most of the world.
Co-incidentally, home discussion about "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" this evening.
I didn't mean to suggest direct conflict would be any better, I just found out disturbing to see NINBYism applied to war. Basically "let's hope it continues to be other people who suffer from our conflicts and never us."
Mm. I get your vibe.
…but also I think NINBYism is the wrong metaphor for the point you make: if everyone NINBYs housing, we have an end to housing and all suffer the shortage; if everyone NINBYs war, we have an end to war.
But I get your vibe.
But everyone can't do that. There are tremendous global power disparities. That's why there's near continuous proxy conflicts but it rarely flares up to the point that aggressor nations have to suffer directly.
Were they doing well before?
Turns out that people bombing your infrastructure and your people actually makes life worse, regardless of your ranking in the world economic stack ranking...
Is the suggestion that we should fight all our wars in the most impoverished places because it makes the least difference to the people there? I'm not sure what you're trying to imply.
There's TraCSS, SST, RSSS. Each country needs to have their own satellite tracking program. There is international cooperation but do you really think the US is in charge? "Whoops", says the US as a small cubesat from another country collides with a Russian military space satellite. "Missed that one - my bad".
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Defund ICE and use that money to stop satellites from crashing into each other
Icrease H1B fees to 30k and quota to 3 million and use that money to stop satellites from crashing into each other.
Crash satellites into ICE!
Clearly this should be funded by the countries and companies that own the debris and sattlites that need to be tracked.
Which means Starling would probably pay for most of it.
Then there are various spy satellites countries have that they dont want tracked? Or does the data from NOAA include spy satellites in strange orbits?
> Which means Starling would probably pay for most of it
Then they’d switch to a user fee. Perhaps even at a profit, such that it’s deficit reducing.
That isn’t what they’re doing because that isn’t what this is about.
Assuming you mean "Starlink":
Don't all Starlink satellites have a plan to deorbit responsibly; specifically, do nothing, which results in a relatively quick deorbitting?
Starlink satellites are in low-Earth-orbit which can't accumulate much space debris, because everything deorbits naturally within a few years.
This isn't about budget, it's about reducing the USA's capability as a leader in science and research as commanded from certain parties in the former soviet union.
I mentioned this scenario before but I was downvoted. Can a rogue disgruntled state like Iran actually bring about destruction of satellites, say Starlink ones, to set off space debris chain reaction to pollute, poison the earth orbit for everyone. The thinking goes like if I can't have the advantage then no one else should.
In theory, yes, sure, why not? In practice, I would think that any nation with the capacity of launching such an attack would realize that that would be catastrophic not just for their enemies but for themselves. Not to mention that I'm sure various nations have intelligence about any nations that might consider such an attack and would attempt to thwart it.
iirc Starlink satellites sit in a low orbit so they'll burn up/down pretty fast.
Not to toot my own horn, but I've been building this free site with space weather and a lot of free data for folks to be able to do their own satellite conjunctions. We've even got a 7 day forecast with covariance so it's even easier.
We want to give out all the data we possibly can for free.
https://spacebook.com/
It's paid for by our enterprise SSA tools, but the spacebook site will always be free and not need a login to get access to the public APIs.
Next month we're rolling out a historical API so you can get the data all the way back to the 1950s and visualize it in the explorer.
what next, osha? safety sure is a waste of time to these myopic tech idiots
I really hate the slash and burn style this admin is using to cut everything. It's almost as if there's another agenda.
It starts looks like a solution in the Fermi Paradox: intelligent species that aren’t intelligent enough will cut themselves of from space travel.
Why isn’t the free market capable of doing this? Seems odd to spend money just to spend money. There’s plenty of incentive for other people to be doing this already…
I feel like this is like "free market should build roads thing" we fund roads so everyone has access and goods can move freely / more economic activity can take place without problems.
What would the free market solution be here? Someone builds all the infrastructure to track all the satellites, and maybe more than one (if not you have a monopoly) person does it. Then they charge for it?
But someone doesn't use it an now we have more space junk ...
If anything a government organizing this and everyone utilizing it seems like it makes for more efficient / lower risk situation with satellites. Everyone just gets on with more important business.
Usually I’d agree with you on this type of thing, but in this case I think the insurance industry could and should be picking this up.
They’re the bag holder here, and this system could be built for a marginal hit to their bottom line in exchange for a huge amount of de-risking across their entire supply chain.
Except they won’t, because current business is about short-term gains at the expense of long-term sustainability. Companies cannot be trusted to act in their own best interests in the long term, and they’ll just as soon exit an unprofitable market today than invest into making it profitable tomorrow.
I don't think the insurance industry is all that interested providing services or enhancing commerce. They'd have some very mixed motivations all at once if they tried doing this. Including anything technical.
Side story regarding roads: I was recently in Shelter Cove, CA and was thinking that the is road probably exceeds the entire economic value of the town… Why is this road even here? It turns out, they used to harvest tan oak bark for the tannins to tan leather in the late 1800s which was a huge industry back then. Lots of logging roads out there since then… Free markets do build a lot of roads!
Insurance companies have the right incentive but they don’t need to be the ones building it. Safer cars get cheaper insurance, so there’s clear market pressure there without insurance companies having to build their own cars…
Pollution, kinds that suffer the “tragedy of the common”, are a good example where regulation is necessary to prevent a race to the bottom. But that’s a pretty simple and straightforward thing to democratically vote on without government spending.
I think the solution is fairly simple: private companies build these capabilities and offer them as a service. The idea that there won’t be a marketplace for this service seems misguided too. Adversarial militaries will want their own systems, likely contracted out to private companies, which will likely offer civilian use around the world…
After launch, most of the stuff up there is self insured.
Also, the US government and it's affiliated institutions already has networks of ground stations and the insurance industry doesnt.
The free market is famously unable to solve problems of diffuse risk and responsibility: air pollution, sea piracy, and in this case -- satellite collision avoidance.
This is a good argument for passing a one-page bill which clarifies "if your sat leaves its assigned orbit, you're responsible for the resulting damages". It's a poor argument for spending $50 million dollars per year.
Right, there's no way such simplicity could ever be gamed in the legal system! We could also eliminate crime with a simple law that forbids committing it!
This isn't reddit. Please refrain from the rude smart aleck schtick and attempt to articulate an actual argument.[0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Bankrupt companies leave no assets. Same problem as wildcat oil wells.
So now what? Do you try to make every company in the world with a sat to post a damages bond? Held by who? The UN? Adjudicated by which courts? This is naive.
Collective action problems are real, and this is one of them.
Regulation to provide a de-orbiting plan. I assume there something similar for oil wells and mining…
What kind of solution you’re proposing? Why can’t we suffice with just regulation?
You make assumptions contradicted by reality.
The sleazy (edited - shouldn't call this standard) playbook for old oil wells is for the operators to sell them to a shadier operator company and transfer the risk. The shady firm then siphons the money out and declares bankruptcy.
The standard cycle is that they pump while the money is good. Then when commodity prices crash, those shell companies are insolvent. Industry lobbies for easements on their cash reserves as a favour during the "temporary downturn". The shady guys just walk away with their pockets stuffed full of money, and the regulator is left holding the bag.
Most operators are responsible, and decommission the wells. But the industry has to maintain a whole insurance policy for "orphan wells", and it is always under-funded. Alberta alone is going eat a couple of billion in orphan cleanup.
This process only gets harder when the satellite is "owned" by a shell-company domiciled in Mauritius.
The actual solution is a series of international treaties. The USA government has signed a global promise that they are directly liable for any object launched by any actor in the USA . All treaty signatories are on the same hook. The government in turn then has to track them all, else how do they manage their liability?
How could a private company possibly play this role in a global treaty process? Over decades?
https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/lia...
Handing a natural monopoly to corporate America is a very extremely bad idea. Allowing bean counters to control what could eventually disrupt global communications and a huge military advantage is as bad an idea as allowing an unstable billionaire to control a significant portion of your future space program.
Let’s not overthink this. Anything long-term is toast.
This will go badly. We have probably reached the point where a major collision will cause a cascading effect.
I would love to hear a reason why this is a good idea?
Space is very big and satellites are very small.
These satellites are in a rather thin band of space and it's clearly a problem as debris has already hit the space station and satellites. Tracking satellites is clearly a necessity. Could we use some partners? Probably worth look into with the ESA and Japan/India to share cost, burden, and information. Not doing it because of a trite expression doesn't seem like a good idea.
Space is not actually very big when you’re talking about a thin slice above the earth.
Is this a serious comment?
Are they hoping satellites studying climate change get destroyed?
Also let's not forget Sharpie Gate and how the petty Orange Emperor appointed a climate science denier to a top position in NOAA.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/12/912301325/longtime-climate-sc...
Yet another systemic rat fucking so somebody can make a buck. It's only ever about the money.
During his first administration I was half-surprised he didn’t nominate a flat earther to head NASA.
only works if everybody agrees and Noaa is not in charge of everybody
Here's the uncomfortable fact:
If the US Federal Government spent ZERO money on anything except:
1. Social Security
2. Medicare & Medicaid
3. National Defense
4. Net Interest on the Public Debt
5. Income Security
6. Veterans Benefits & Services
7. Federal Civilian & Military Retirement and Disability
... the US would still have a sizable deficit.
All the hoopla surrounding science spending, education, DEI, FDA, housing, foreign aid, disaster relief, etc., doesn't really address some huge issues if the goal is to reduce deficit spending.
Debt servicing is now more than 16% of our spending and growing.
I hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it!
> hope all that stuff we bought with $36T was worth it
No need for past tense. We’re currently in the most intense—the biggest, most beautiful, one might say—phase of deficit accumulation in American history.
Thankfully we're getting all this cool stuff. You know like... actually what are we getting?
More debt!
A sizeable chunk, probably around half, of what we bought with that $36T was net worth for people like Bezos and the Kochs.
> if the goal is to reduce deficit spending
Red herring. It’s not. It’s never been. We’re blowing out the deficit by trillions.
The motivation isn’t anything about the deficit. It’s that NOAA counters the climate narrative a narrow band of idiots would prefer to believe.
They are making the deficit much larger. So, can we stop parroting these bad faith "debt worry" arguments?
They will worry about the deficits again once democrats are in power.
Cool and normal.
bothered
I mean, that's one way for Trump to punish Musk…
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> I see these headlines a lot. Honest question: do we know if these programs actually do anything?
The Pentagon themselves seem to think so, "Space Force officials and more than 450 aerospace companies are against the White House's proposal":
> Space Force officials are eager to exit the business of warning third-party satellite operators, including rivals such as Russia and China, of possible collisions in orbit. The military would prefer to focus on managing ever-growing threats from satellites, an intensive effort that requires continual monitoring as other nations' increasingly sophisticated spacecraft maneuver from one orbit to another.
> But until someone else is ready to take over, the Space Force will remain saddled with the responsibility of issuing these alerts. The Space Force calls these alerts conjunction assessments, and there are national security reasons for sharing the warnings far and wide, because a traffic accident in orbit would endanger the Space Force's own satellites.
* https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/nearly-everyone-oppose...
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You mean one group that is ignorant costcutters and another group that are subject matter experts? Hmm who to listen to.
Nope, just two ignorant groups who have hijacked the entire country.
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> I asked Chat what it thinks private systems would cost and it suggests around half+.
I am genuinely unsure why someone would think an LLM could accurately estimate that kind of cost and would like to know your reasoning.
I like when I see people cite LLMs as a source because it’s an easy heuristic to just dismiss them.
Likewise, and that's despite me finding LLMs impressive.
I only trust LLMs for a first draft, where I can actually fact-check everything, or light copy-editing for tone and style.
I wouldn't expect a fresh graduate to be dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's on their research; and as LLMs are like a fresh graduate at coding, I assume they're like that at everything else, too.
Useful, sure, but not what I'd call a "high quality source".
Why? Do you dismiss people who use Google? Or Wikipedia? Or Britannica? They are all just different sources of info with strengths and weaknesses.
LLMs lie far far more often. It would take a year+ of good experiences for me to start reconsidering my bad experiences with any technical topic outside of programming.
I similarly dismiss people's opinions that rely on LLMs to inform them on important subjects, rather than using them as a search engine to find more reliable sources.
You can't trust a person that educated themselves with an LLM, because they have filled their head with bad foundations. That's very difficult to correct later on.
Having worked in the private satellite indsutry, I would dismiss most of the information on Google, Wikipedia and Britannica on this topic, yes. Most of the information online about satellite operations is very, very wrong.
It’s funny I should’ve just said I work in the satellite industry and everyone would’ve accepted my ballpark :p
Yes, if you lie people will be deceived. Good to have this in your comment history I suppose.
Not really? If one seeks to gain basic information these are reasonable sources but they are not authoritative, nor are they deep enough to generate deep and rich understanding of most phenomenon.
I was taught since at least high school that you don’t cite encyclopedias as sources because they are not sources - they are summaries of sources.
LLMs are similar but worse. They are a statistical approximation of truth, without a concept of truth. They are fuzzing sources that you and I have access to already. I find calling that hand off of agency and responsibility “being informed” deeply disturbing.
my guess is people lend 'Chat' credibility since it's definitely read more of the internet than any one person.
of course (to your point) that credibility overlooks possibilities for algorithmic bugs
Yeah the whole point is it’s a quick way to synthesize a lot. It’s not foolproof but neither is anything else on the internet.
I've set some of these models to work synthesising summaries etc. based on my own blog posts; LLMs are surprisingly middling at synthesising info from documents — I've seen even good models elide significant content, go on distracted rambles about other topics in the same area, and even invert the meanings of points being made.
Use them the way you'd have used Wikipedia in 2008: a starting point from which you can do actual research, but you have to watch out for a lot of unverified junk as well.
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> The math for privatization does not make sense to me
When everything is considered, privatization rarely makes sense.
> The math for privatization does not make sense to me?
It does when you assume that some rich person will end up taking that over and the government(s of the world) paying for it.
Always, especially with this admin, assume grift of one or another kind behind anything.
If they just figured out a way to not 10x overspend while getting the same results ...
Part of the problem is you need to track all orbits for all constellations and free flyers as well as all orbital debris, and communicate across many communities of interest.
It is more national security & military adjacent
I’d stand up a joint agency for this requirement across DOD, NASA, NOAA, FAA, and Commercial Space/Newspace.
Trying to save on a $55 million program by standing up a joint agency. I have truly heard it all now.
Doesn’t mean it needs much staff if leveraging pre-existing capabilities
Could def be done for cheaper than 55M
The US are by far not the only ones with satellites in orbit. Making it a UN body would make sense, just like the International Telecommunications Union coordinates telephone service and the International Postal Union coordinates international mail, and both are now UN bodies (despite predating the UN).
I have a feeling that the current US administration would not back such an idea, so this will end up back with the DOD, maybe the Space Force. Despite the DOD saying quite clearly they would prefer NOAA to do it
It seems this is already a thing on some form https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/spaceobjectregister/index.htm...
Having a joint program across all those would cost far more money.
The project managers and consultants to plan such a thing would probably cost several years of the current budget.
Not if staffed with a tiny office and reuse of capabilities from each. Potentially very small, platoon sized or smaller
10M annual spend, rest allocated to spend for services