NASA will not warn us about asteroids over Twitter during the shutdown | Hacker News Reader

NASA will not warn us about asteroids over Twitter during the shutdown

washingtonpost.com

13 pointstareqak12 comments

Yawn, sorry its been done better before... I guess the sycophants in the press had to start somewhere.

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

That's a lovely straw man you're hacking to pieces there.

No-one has said anything of the sort except you.

Whoosh http://youtu.be/9S4cldkdCjE?t=2m19s

This is major Tom to ground control, I'm stepping through the door

And I'm floating in a most peculiar way

And the stars look very different today

Here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world

Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do

That's more than 140 characters.

And apparently some Panda in a reserve wont be fed according to the news. It's pretty sick when people believe this is the only way to partially shut down the government.

Most of the NSA (85%), FBI (85%), CIA (85%), Congress (Fully), The Judicial Branch, The Senate (Fully) will be paid and working.

If the US government partially shuts down the government, but chooses to spend on defense but not National Parks and NASA, then it chooses to shut down in that way...

I'm not sure who picks "essential" versus "non-essential" services, but IIRC that's the criteria for being funded versus not being funded during partial shutdown.

I guess my point was that if people are complaining about certain services being cut due to a shutdown, the people should be equally mad about what services get shut down during a shutdown. They've happened enough in the last 50 years to warrant a more open debate.

> And apparently some Panda in a reserve wont be fed according to the news.

I think you misheard. The panda web camera feed will be shut down. Pretty sure they'll still feed the little critter... http://jezebel.com/government-shutdown-might-kill-an-adorabl...

It's also economically in our best interest to keep feeding the pandas.

We're contractually obliged to China to feed pandas in the National Zoo — if a panda dies due to American misconduct, we have to pay them $800,000. See http://qr.ae/N5H14 // http://web.mit.edu/mherdeg/Public/smithsonian-panda-agreemen... .

I'm not sure how feeding the other zoo animals would qualify as "essential", but for pandas there are diplomatic (and monetary!) concerns.

Wow. Thanks for the detailed information!

Don't worry, my friend Rick[0] told me it was going to be okay.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_P._Binzel

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