If you know your car's engine is going to need replaced after exactly 100,000 miles, you know to save up for a new engine or a new car - and you know how long you have to save, so you can precisely set aside an appropriate figure every month.
If you know your car's engine will die sometime within the next 15,000 miles, you know you need to start saving up immediately, but b/c you don't know when in the next 15,000 miles you have to rush your saving.
If you have no idea when your car's engine is going to die, you are likely to end up dead engine and little to no savings.
The real reason insurance is high is because of fraudulent claim risk. Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida. That data is useless.
Year-over-year, economic impacts and disruptions due to tropical cyclones are dramatically rising. Most of this is an exposure issue. But long-tail events - like Andrew's utter devastation of Homestead in 1992 or Katrina's unique confluence of storm surge in urban/suburban parishes in LA - can and do happen.
One day, there will be another Galveston or Homestead.
I sincerely hope you're right, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting that this will not be the case, owing to a multitude of factors:
- not all housing stock is <30 years old and has been properly retrofitted to meet state specs
- the climates around the Gulf, which tend to be more humid, can lead to premature degradation of things like strengthened anchor bolts and roof attachments
- there continue to be immense factors related to cost and time-to-build which provide significant negative pressure towards cutting corners and minimum-compliance which may mitigate some of the attendant benefits of strengthened building codes
An event like Andrew _is the selection event_ that you're referring to.
Since Katrina, the next 10 costliest hurricanes are all after.
We don't dwell on the Ikes, Idas, and Helenes because they often happen to smaller communities and they've become common enough that we've gotten a little fatigued.
I'm going to go with less, though I suppose you could call "experience widespread destruction, get bailed out by the federal government, rebuild in the same spot" to be a permanent solution.
Florida has maybe solved cat 1-2 hurricanes.
In 2022, Hurricane Ian caused extreme flooding in the Orlando-region, including in areas that have never suffered from hurricane flooding before. For me personally, all 3 cars parked at my house were total losses b/c of the flood damage.
The extreme and extensive damages in the Appalachian region last fall is another great example of hurricane risk not being "grossly exaggerated".
The residents of what used to be Ft. Meyers Beach would probably disagree with you.
>Hurricanes themselves are more or less a solved problem in Florida.
I have been in Florida for nearly a decade now. I'd say that the above statement is at best, disingenuous. It's just not true. MAYBE Cat1 hurricanes are a solved problem, but nothing above that. The busiest economic center in Florida (Miami's Brickell area) is 6 feet above sea level. Any major storm locks that part of town down for days. My own building's parking lot is 5 feet above sea level, and yes, it's flooded every time we have a storm.
They all voted for this with extreme skew towards the current policies. What is the point of trying to save this satellite data if the very people most affected dont care for it?
There may come a day when they have saved up enough grievance against the Republicans to look for an alternative. But right now they have a solid foundation of anti-woke grievance and they can be counted on to keep voting the same way.
There is no war on anyone, and this has nothing to do with Trump, DOGS, or Climate change. Rather there were too many satellite failures, leaving just a single operating one in orbit.
The administration of Florida has a war on the idea of climate change:
* "Ron DeSantis signs bill scrubbing ‘climate change’ from Florida state laws": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/16/desa...
* "Florida Officials Barred from Referencing “Climate Change”: https://climate.law.columbia.edu/content/florida-officials-b...
This allows (certain) Florida politicians to put their head in the sand even more than they already have.
Also from NOAA: “Noaa said they would not affect the quality of forecasting.”
Decommissioning old sensors?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...
I'm actually surprised that the successors to DMSP don't meet the same needs. Or is the problem that they do and the government just doesn't share that data?
* Ok that's an oversimplification. They actually turn encryption on while the satellite is over certain areas. But if you're in the Continental US I think it's in the clear
>The loss of DMSP comes as Noaa’s weather and climate monitoring services have become critically understaffed this year as Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) initiative has instilled draconian cuts to federal environmental programs.
"We can't actually say this was DOGE, so we're going to imply it using emotionally charged words, and 90% of folks with bad media literacy will come away thinking it was DOGE (just check the reddit comments)."
This in-vogue method of "lying without lying" is shockingly common nowadays, but apparently it's okay for media to lie because Bad Man Bad.
Now media gets a free pass on certain lies because Bad Man Bad, and (evidently) people aren't even allowed to point out the lie.
Hint: when the media can make up whatever they want about someone, they can quickly twist perception to make anyone into the Bad Man.
And now the current funding request enacts a ~30% funding cut.
I'm not sure the factual issue you're seeing. Is it that the statement wasn't definitive enough in saying that DOGE apparently was a large part of instituting these cuts?
(Yes, I know OPM implemented many of these programs, but they're apparently at DOGE's request, named after the "Fork in the Road" initiative at Twitter, using data gathered by DOGE IT staffers, &c. If we give credit for any cuts, we have to give them credit for significant cuts at NOAA.)
Yes, the DMSP program was aging and slated to wind down as replacements - both federal and commercial - came online in the second half of the 2020's. But in general, if valid and useful data continues to stream from these types of satellites, you use it and monitor for disruption.
As someone who uses the DMSP data every single day, let me be very clear: there was no warning or expectation that such an abrupt change was going to happen. Yes, we all have contingency plans for if a satellite fails or a data link goes down. But to be given basically 5 days notice that a significant, mission-critical asset would be taken offline? That doesn't - and shouldn't - happen.
I would bet you, but that money's too easy. :)
Again, this exact conversation is the genius behind 'lying _without lying_.' You can always claim in high-literacy communities like HN that no, nobody would ever be silly enough misread it like that, all while watching your misinformation spread across the low-literacy communities like facebook and reddit.
The Guardian et al has done this too often for plausible deniability. Even I can pick up on the pattern, and that's without access to the big boy's social media engagement and sentiment tracking tools.
I see this sentiment a lot lately, and I see your HN join date is similar to mine. HN is more mainstream than it used to be, for better or worse. There is a lot more overlap between commenters on HN and Reddit nowadays, especially in certain categories of subreddits.
Personally, I lament the web being a high-literacy community.
No, post news sources and researched articles. Your vibes about the Internet are irrelevant
But a couple of things should be considered here:
* Intention
* Degree
* Impact
Degree is likewise to be noted, where it can range from lost nuance to outright lies.
Impact is also a concern if it is a concern. A news article that compels people to randomly attack their neighbors is more of an issue than one that tempts you to buy a new snack.
And most importantly of all: "the media" is not a singular entity and they vary strongly in their veracity and scope, as well as their agendas. Some are at their core intending to serve the public, others are a business to sell advertising, and others are literally propaganda outfits to serve vested interests (e.g., Fox News was created to be the PR arm of the GOP -- this is a fact and not conjecture).
So yes, the NYT can get things wrong (like the lead up to the Iraq invasion), I trust them more than Fox News (which destroyed a community by spreading lies about their new immigrant neighbors eating people's pets).
Hope this helps!
The article is saying it was DOGE. DOGE directly attacked our hurricane-forecasting capacity [1]. OMB, i.e. Vought, continues that attack [2].
Given the top three states by hurricane risk voted for Trump in ‘24 [3][4] this should make for an entertaining hurricane season. (Particularly if both a red and blue state get hit and request federal assistance.)
[1] https://apnews.com/article/national-weather-service-layoffs-...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_under_the_second_presid...
[3] https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/states-most-at-risk-for-...
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...
Yah, but it's the guardian. They aren't exactly reliable.
For it to be DOGE would require a time machine, because this project was shut down in 2015.
This is valid and I'm open to someone calling out the reporting as non-factual with evidence.
Pretending The Guardian is trying to imply this was DOGE when it straight out says as much, on the other hand, is closer to a reading-comprehension issue.
DOGE is an organization that exist with the goal to do things like this. You have no evidence it wasn't them other than empathically saying the emperor has clothes on. All evidence we have implicates them.
Do you mean it was planned to be shut down in 2015? And where does that come from?
If it was planned in 2015, then I agree that's a relevant detail omitted by the article. Although it also doesn't take away completely from the larger context of government cuts and privatization.
A lot of these important projects have a single point of failure - who is the president every four years. I wonder how we build institutions and resources resilient to that?
I realize privatization is an ugly word, but could some of this stuff be provided by the private sector?
Can we make it possible to fund initiatives in a multinational manner where countries contribute to these efforts, but if one country blinks out, then you still have it go along?
We already did. The legislative branch allocates funds for stuff that the people deem worthy. That budget becomes law. The Constitution says the "President shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." There's even a specific law that prevents the President from withholding Congressionally-approved funds.
What you are seeing here is not a lack of designed resilience, it's the wilful removal of that system.
The GOES-R satellites seem to have equal or better resolution: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/4/4/1520-042... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES-16
DMSP resolves to 600m, while GOES-R resolves to 500m (not to be confused with GOES, which is older).
JumpCrisscross•7h ago
Wait, the U.S. aren’t even going to try selling the satellites? We’re just scrapping them?
toomuchtodo•7h ago
How large systems with exposure to these places (insurance, capital markets) respond is what you should look to next. What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?
Relevant comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43366311
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42450680
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664750 (top comment of this thread aggressively relevant)
mnky9800n•7h ago
whatshisface•6h ago
JumpCrisscross•6h ago
pstuart•5h ago
JumpCrisscross•5h ago
If you read SCOTUS's opinions this is obviously false. Alito and Thomas are bought. But the others have their own quirks and agendas.
tialaramex•5h ago
For ordinary people it can feel reasonable to keep your head down and hope that somehow this blows over. But for SCOTUS it's entirely within their power to draw a line, and it seems like at best their idea has become "Maybe if we give him what he wants he'll go away?" which is dumb, Kipling wrote his famous poem "Dane-geld" about this, it's well over a century old and it's about a mistake England (or rather one of its Kings) made last millennium (when he wrote it, ie now over 1000 years ago).
JumpCrisscross•4h ago
Barrett has sided with the liberals on various decisions. SCOTUS has a problem. But its problem isn't blind loyalty to Trump. It's that there is a deeper conviction about the way the world should work that sometimes aligns with Trump in ways that are deeply damaging to our society.
If you want to see a judge who's blindly deferential to Trump, that's Aileen Cannon.
KerrAvon•3h ago
pstuart•3h ago
It's not like we're asking for SCOTUS to accept constitutional slights from the left side of the aisle, its about consistency of reasoning regardless of which party is involved.
As you've noted, the conservatives of SCOTUS are working backwards from their desired goals rather than pursuing justice for all.
ryandrake•2h ago
adgjlsfhk1•47m ago
zeristor•1h ago
Buttons840•4h ago
"The getaway car was green."
"No it wasn't!"
"What color was it then?"
"I don't know what color it was!"
...
mschuster91•6h ago
Insurance companies will just be sending up their own satellites, and that is the true goal. Force people to pay money to private entities for a service that used to be provided by the government for free.
Functionally, in such a system there is no difference between that and regular taxes, just in a private system there's opportunities for those in power (because you gotta have a lot of money to send up a powerful satellite) to make even more money.
With the current US administration, always look at the grifting opportunities, that will explain virtually all policy decisions.
wk_end•5h ago
cma•5h ago
On the other hand, in the first Trump admin the AccuWeather spam site guy was trying to restrict NWS data to private companies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers
I think AccuWeather opposed the Project 2025 plan to remove weather tracking frothe government though, they just wanted it to be tax payer paid but exclusively provided to corporations for sale to make competitive upstart weather sites harder to establish (you can bid more if you already have lots of users, without them you have to build something so great and potentially profitable that you can get VC to fund your purchases of the data).
https://www.masslive.com/news/2024/07/accuweather-rejects-pr...
XorNot•2h ago
Which is why the government running satellites it would need to run anyway is much more efficient.
mschuster91•2h ago
Indeed but who's going to do that? The US government will, more likely than not, have lost the ability entirely, and Europe... good luck waiting on us.
> Which is why the government running satellites it would need to run anyway is much more efficient
Indeed. But there is no opportunity for continuous recurring grift revenue in that, and that is all that drives the current administration.
ars•4h ago
There is one operating satellite in this constellation, and congress voted to shut down the program in 2015.
The DMSP program was discontinued in 2015 by a vote in congress[1]. Virtually every working stallelite in this program has failed. As best as I can tell there's just a single working one specifically NOAA-19[2].
Instead the program has switched to JPSS[3] which is part of GEOSS[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satelli... (scroll up slightly)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA-19
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Polar_Satellite_System
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Earth_Observation_Syste...
trauco•4h ago
- DMSP satellites are up and measuring data - These data will continue to be measured after Monday - the government is discontinuing processing and public access to the data - This will impact our capacity to predict hurricanes and monitor sea ice.
Which of the above are “not true”?
IAmGraydon•3h ago
So to be frank, the only thing that's "NOT TRUE" is nearly all of your post.
MikeTheGreat•3h ago
Can we ask dang to change the title to something like "Blocking of key US satellite data could...."?
slg•2h ago
conartist6•1h ago