Loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back 'decades'

The intent is to disable the capability to ignore the data. If you allow access to someone else, you're not preventing the data capture and dissemination. If the data shows hurricanes are intensifying in strength due to climate change, and you no longer capture the data, you can say with a straight face "No it isn't and you can't prove it."

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)

I think it’s even more nefarious than that. They can attack other countries that claim intensifying climate and weather scenarios by saying their data is biased while claiming to have the best data in the world but not share for national security reasons. While this may seem like something unbelievable to you or me it is easily eaten up by their supporters who love propaganda. Like, my republican parents are convinced robotaxi is amaxing after the unreasonably bad debut in Austin. They simply didn’t hear or want to hear that Tesla would not produce a working product.

They could claim that even with the satellites. The "alternate reality" can be anything - if facts aren't inserted into it the people inside won't know.

> What do you do when you don't have the data to accurately price risk?

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.

Idiots will buy it. The courts won’t. Cutting off the data stymies the latter.

(…and guess who’s company they’ll be contracting those launches to?)

The courts are compelled to defer to SCOTUS, which has demonstrated that it is ideologically aligned with the regime.

> SCOTUS, which has demonstrated that it is ideologically aligned with the regime

If you read SCOTUS's opinions this is obviously false. Alito and Thomas are bought. But the others have their own quirks and agendas.

You could probably imagine that ACB is just very stupid I guess? She's made choices which only make sense if they're out of blind loyalty to the man who gave her a job she shouldn't have or because she's not smart enough to understand the consequences.

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).

SpaceX earns less money if we don't relaunch what we already have, and they have a satellite design division, Musk is somewhat on the outs with the admin right now but was behind lots of the cuts like this.

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...

> while claiming to have the best data in the world but not share for national security reasons

"The getaway car was green."

"No it wasn't!"

"What color was it then?"

"I don't know what color it was!"

...

> could probably imagine that ACB is just very stupid I guess? She's made choices which only make sense if they're out of blind loyalty to the man who gave her a job

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.

SCOTUS is essentially blindly local to Trump — pay attention to the latest Constitution-shredding decisions; they sure wouldn’t be doing those under a Dem president, and they’re twisting themselves in knots trying to make the illogical logical — it just manifests differently at their level.

This is clear to all except partisans who put loyalty to their party over their country.

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.

Except they won't. There's no reason to expensively launch your own forecasting system when you can instead just wait for someone else to do it and then use their insurance rates to do your own forecasting.

Which is why the government running satellites it would need to run anyway is much more efficient.

The ultimate test will be if any future Democrat president (assuming we have fair elections after 2025) is able to use the same powers, justified by the same rulings. I think most people believe that SCOTUS will do a 180 turn and come to entirely opposite legal/Constitutional conclusions if a Dem president tries to argue the same things in front of them.

> There's no reason to expensively launch your own forecasting system when you can instead just wait for someone else to do it and then use their insurance rates to do your own forecasting.

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.

Regime indeed

well we've already seen one 180 degree turn in the past 3 years, the gutting of Chevron deference last year gave local judges massive power over the executive, and last week they undid that by removing the ability of district courts to make national injunctions

What I find interesting is how clear your media biases shine through even while attempting to make a statement about how this is something that's happening to the other side.

I haven't seen evidence that the Austin robotaxi launch was unreasonably bad. There were a couple viral incidents of undesirable behavior, though no collisions as far as I've heard, which is significantly better performance than one expects from typical human drivers.

And here it is: https://spacenews.com/spacex-scores-81-6-million-space-force...

You expect a group of less than twenty human drivers to have at least one collision per week?

Well exactly - it's a classic tragedy of the commons situation. The first one to solve the problem bears all the expense, and worse so long as no one solves the problem you can also just raise rates to cover the broader risk pool. Meanwhile the tax payer has still paid for the actual instrument to be built and operated - they just get no benefit from it.

Between 0 and 1 collisions per week, the actual number significantly more than FSD as a whole system experiences.

The European tornado models have been superior to the US models for a long time, and the US has relied on them heavily. Not sure if the European models use the data from those satellites though, probably.

To what end? What is the benefit of shutting down and ignoring data when for the last decade and a half even with data didn’t matter? I didn’t matter before why would it now?

This is a very reasonable question.

When you control the propaganda that lies between the data and the public, the underlying availability of the data is irrelevant. The propaganda already overwrites the data.

Honestly I would suspect that limiting the data is a strategic asset. The US can use its knowledge of weather events as leverage to cow other countries, or a weapon against countries it dislikes.

"Hello <other_country>, are you worried about the impact of weather on your population? Lower your tariff rate on us and we will be glad to help give you advanced warnings so you evacuate your people"

And likewise they would completely withhold such data from "enemy" countries.

There are a lot of things that Republicans hate, but truth and facts must top the list.