Someday perhaps we can return to those wonderful bygone era when we had no weather satellites and no one knew the hurricane was coming and thousands of people die and billions of dollars is lost. But the important thing is we bought more carriers.
White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
181–190 of 221 posts
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you spend too long trying to convince someone there's a problem, then you are the problem.
This is one of those comments that sounds profound if you give it a cursory glance, but actually makes no sense whatsoever.
I may have butchered the quote a little bit (not a famous quote, just something told to me once).
"If you spend too long convincing someone of a problem they can't see, they start to see you as the problem" gets the meaning better. It doesn't mean to give up, it just means that you are making yourself their enemy and thus probably making it harder to get your message across (look at the studies on showing scientific evidence to anti-vaxxers).
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#183http://weather.gov (run by NOAA and the national weather service) is my go to weather site. No ads, no hyperbole. I found out about it when some senator wanted to stop them from posting weather online because it competed with "private sector" weather companies. A couple times I've seen that tv news weather leaves the site up on their monitors during newscasts.
That was Rick Santorum pandering to his pals at Accuweather. My guess is that vendors with bigger pockets and a better track record of buying influence (IBM, Monsanto) wants to leverage its own weather property)
But doesn't even Accuweather, at least on some level, get their source data from government sources? If they generate their own forecasts using NWP models they still need initial conditions which usually come from from coarse-grid weather forecasts provided by the governments.
If the quality of these coarse-grid forecasts is degraded it's going to have an effect on all downstream processing/forecasts.
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll ignore the ad hominem. Minus SS, it's still less than 21% of total federal spending.
If you're going to concede that point (ss) then the same applies to Medicare. This completely destroying your argument coincidentally.
It doesn't. Defense spending is not 60% of the "budget". Further, it's not a large component of the total federal budget.
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
And? Mandatory spending is more than twice that of discretionary. Of discretionary, defense makes up less than 50%.
I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers: care to elaborate? This[0] directly contradicts you: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud...
Here:
http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/120/2017-Estimate
Mandatory: 2.56T Discretionary: 1.08T
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the proviso that US military support and materiel has been used as trade goods for alliance-making with other countries for most of the last century. A large portion of the US military budget is "being the substitute military for US allies." The key question of decreasing US government spending is how to get other countries to pony up for the "renting" of the US military forces that they're already doing (becaus…
You should take a look at world military budgets... actually look at the countries that are spending the money. $1.7T/year in total military spending worldwide. China at 200B, Russia at 70B. Iran? 22nd largest military budget at $10B. The rest of the big spenders are our friends and allies. I'm not going to count up every country, but roughly 1.3T to 1.4T is spent by the US + allies + friendly countries. Who are we p…
One of the scenarios that concern the EU is Russia invading and occupying EU states before Nato or the US can respond, present them with a kind of fait accompi and hoping the political will to respond won't be there. So the US needs the ability to convincingly be able to take on entrenched Russian occupation of multiple other countries and take them back.
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every state has weather that can be devastating; also weather does not usually confine itself to state boundaries.
I'm not sure what your point is. Is it that since every state benefits from NOAA data it's a sensible investment federally? What if a state requires 5x as many resources as another state? We already have a scenario where southern states draw a lot more than they contribute. We enable states to avoid managing their own citizen's welfare. A lot of people don't want to pay for other people to live in known tornado alley…
Let me put it to you this way:
There is no place to live that is totally safe from bad weather. It is in the best interest of every citizen of the United States to pay for climate and weather modeling as disastrous weather can have massive impact on the economy. Also, from a moral standpoint, I personally don't mind shelling out some money to try and keep people safe.
As to your point about people living in areas where weather tends to be statistically more dangerous: If the government came to your house and forced you to leave, how would you feel about that?
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the proviso that US military support and materiel has been used as trade goods for alliance-making with other countries for most of the last century. A large portion of the US military budget is "being the substitute military for US allies." The key question of decreasing US government spending is how to get other countries to pony up for the "renting" of the US military forces that they're already doing (becaus…
I think this is a good point, and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted. It's important to consider the sometimes positive externalities of the current levels of defense spending. Even more so, it's important to consider where we or others have come to rely on those positive externalities. For example, I'd be perfectly happy with the US withdrawing from many parts of the world and closing foreign bases. However, I do…
Does the US lending both hands to fucking up the Middle East make anything more stable? What stability was achieved by Vietnam, or all that stuff in South America? Not disastrous enough for you? Would you swap with even just ONE of the millions of people affected by some of the more insane atrocities this knight in shining armor committed? Thought so.
Another fact that is generally completely omitted is that best, soldiers defend against other soldiers (and in practice, they kill a lot of civilians because war is tough), so in a way those people justifying war machineries in other countries are not the excuse, they are the counterparts. It's an axis of sociopaths and conformists against humans, and this rift goes through all nations, even some families. The root causes for these rationalizations matter, not so much the rationalizations, those always shift. A child kicking a dog and Abu Ghraib differ in scale but not principle, as does looking on to either. Those onlookers love to use "we", but there is no "we" here, speak strictly for yourself.
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a good point, and I'm not sure why it's been downvoted. It's important to consider the sometimes positive externalities of the current levels of defense spending. Even more so, it's important to consider where we or others have come to rely on those positive externalities. For example, I'd be perfectly happy with the US withdrawing from many parts of the world and closing foreign bases. However, I do…
Does the US lending both hands to fucking up the Middle East make anything more stable? What stability was achieved by Vietnam, or all that stuff in South America? Not disastrous enough for you? Would you swap with even just ONE of the millions of people affected by some of the more insane atrocities this knight in shining armor committed? Thought so. Another fact that is generally completely omitted is that best, so…
Not seeing what you're trying to argue. Lots of appeal to emotion here. I'll make it simple for you:
1. Me: High levels of defense spending has easily identifiable consequences. But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.
2. You: The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.
I don't disagree with you, but you're not rebutting my point.
Re: White House proposes steep budget cut to NOAA
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does the US lending both hands to fucking up the Middle East make anything more stable? What stability was achieved by Vietnam, or all that stuff in South America? Not disastrous enough for you? Would you swap with even just ONE of the millions of people affected by some of the more insane atrocities this knight in shining armor committed? Thought so. Another fact that is generally completely omitted is that best, so…
Not seeing what you're trying to argue. Lots of appeal to emotion here. I'll make it simple for you: 1. Me: High levels of defense spending has easily identifiable consequences. But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them. 2. You: The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad. I don't disagree with you, but you're not rebutting my point.
And why would any positives matter, if there weren't actual people and their lives, and suffering inflicted or avoided, involved down the line? Lots of appeal to robots here. I'm not a robot.
> But we need to be careful that we also take time to identify the positives and consider them.
Yes, and then you need to circle back and consider both, in context, including opportunity costs.
> The US has done bad things in the past and war is bad.
Respond to what I said or don't, but don't appeal to a 3 year old you're not talking with.