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Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

It's tragic. Unfortunately, it's easy to see things like this in terms of a pattern of neglected infrastructure in the US. Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.

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In this case, it's a complex story. NSF has a collection of astronomical observatories (optical and radio).

Some of them have decades-old equipment, and keeping everything operating will eventually preclude building anything new. So, NSF has been trying to offload some older observatories to universities, or consortia of universities - Arecibo is one such.

For instance, some older solar observatories were taken offline to build DKIST (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_K._Inouye_Solar_Telesco...), which is an amazing instrument, just now coming online.

Of course, there is a lot of strife and anger caused by reallocation of resources like this.

I'm on my way to look up DKIST, but after SOHO, it's hard to imagine needing ground based solar observatories. Of course, SOHO will eventually come to end of mission, so we definitely need other observatories. It's just the SOHO imagery is stellar.

You’re a little out of date! SoHO is largely shut down, has been for a decade now. Its tent pole instruments were replaced by SDO in 2010. (https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission/)

Both of these are NASA, not NSF, observatories. They were (SoHO) and are (SDO) amazing resources that have advanced the whole area of heliophysics.

DKIST (NSF) has a 4m aperture. Unbelievable for a solar telescope, and of course, impossible to fly under reasonable NASA heliophysics budgets.

NSF's budget has has been anemic for the last 15+ years so projects get built then the maintenance budget evaporates in favor of some new program dictated by Congressional pork barreling. It wouldn't be a problem if the NSF budget grew at a steady pace, but the budget has only grown when one party has complete control of government and has shrunk otherwise (I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which party is which).

It's okay, we don't need Aracebo.

We've got China's FAST - Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

And Russia's RATAN-600 - радиоастрономический телескоп Академии наук – 600, an acronym for the "Academy of Sciences Radio Telescope – 600

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RATAN-600

Speaking of which FAST also illustrates that such dishes are constructed with material/structure that cannot take heavy loads. FAST requires maintenance personnel on the dish surface to be attached to helium balloons so that their weight is reduced during inspection/maintanence related walking on the dish.

I don't think either FAST or RATAN are capable of radar astronomy (i.e. sending out a strong radio pulse and listening to the reflection). Arecibo's radar capability has led to numerous important discoveries, taught us a great deal about Mercury (including the period of its rotation and the fact that it has ice at its poles), and is still one of the most effective tools we have for examining low albedo solid objects within a few AU of earth (e.g. asteroids).

Even without that, Arecibo is still a very capable observatory, and it's not like we have an excess capacity of observatories doing this sort of work. We could have twice as many similar facilities and still keep them all busy.

> Puerto Rico in general has been damaged and neglected to a criminal extent - this particular situation will get media attention for a bit, maybe be fixed but that's likely about it.

Its an issue fraught with peril. Puerto Rico has no statehood, so they're a lesser property within the US as a whole. They have very little economy besides tourism to speak of, enormous amounts of corruption through the various governmental levels, and a populace that is rapidly aging. They plugged budget wholes with debt until it reached levels requiring an independent oversight board stepping in to take over. If you're able to find work on the mainland, you bounce, and only stick around on the island if you can't.

I'm not sure what the solution is. You can't write blank checks to a broken government forever.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/puerto-rico-us-territory-cr...

Tourism is only about 5-7% of Puerto Rico's economy. The majority is pharmaceutical manufacturing and services. It's true there is a lot of corruption. Colonialism seems to select for opportunistic and unprincipled public servants. If you want to learn about the island, I recommend you read War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson A. Denis. It does a good job of summarizing Puerto Rico's history with the United States. Best of luck.

Expanding on Puerto Rico's primary export...

Per the FDA, Puerto Rico produced (pre-Maria) $40B of pharmaceuticals for the US alone. 40 of those products and devices were deemed critical as they're the only producer or there's no viable alternative [1].

The largest (in terms of unit count) production was Normal Saline with Baxter's P.R. factory supplying 50% of U.S. hospitals with small volume saline bags (<=250mL as opposed to the more common 1L) prior to Hurricane Maria which took out their production facility [2]. The hurricane is widely credited as the cause of our national saline shortage (though as [2] details, it exacerbated a shortage that already existed for several other reasons).

[1] (PDF warning): https://www.fda.gov/media/108975/download

[2]: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1800347

I was not aware pharma was still a significant part of the PR economy after the IRS Code Section 936 phase out. Thanks for the book suggestion, purchased, looking forward to the read.

Yes, the pharmaceutical tech there has decades of experience; one of the first companies I worked for was a Bay Area biotech firm. They moved a big chunk of manufacturing to Puerto Rico and seemed very impressed by the transition. It wasn't just a matter of lower expense. The tech experience in industrial chemistry was very good. Early 1990s.

I mean the obvious solution is statehood, but that's currently impractical for political reasons. Maybe an accident of fate will allow it within some years.

Not that it would fix all woes even, but it'd be a good start.

Agree statehood is the only fix, with a close second being NGO and similar efforts to get folks off the island to the mainland for better opportunities and quality of life. Anything else is a slow train wreck of despair over decades.

I live in Puerto Rico. Moving from here to the mainland is not a step up in quality of life, I can assure you.

That has not been the experience communicated to me by several Puerto Rican’s who relocated to central Florida. No work, crumbling infrastructure, and incompetent government was what I was told why they left.

To each their own (really; I wish you well if you have a good life there), but the emigration pattern is clear [1] [2].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/us/puerto-rico-migration-data...

[2] https://nacla.org/news/2018/02/22/puerto-rico%E2%80%99s-fore...

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