I can see Bobby Jindal making ironic quotation marks with his fingers while saying, "The government is wasting taxpayer money on something called 'earthquake monitoring'" in a condescending Mister Rogers voice.

Now the reason for all the fearmongering.

Deadbeats Sven Seattle and Wally Washington want to filch even more of my income.

If you scam artists are so worry, then raise your property taxes -- to protect your own property.

I've never seen such a bunch of Welfare Hogs in my life.

I'd love to see a public competition to come up with low-cost sensors connected to social networking - something that schools could install across the state. Outsource it to Google, Facebook, and students, encourage American know-how and entrepeneurial competition. What's not to like?

(Anyone who thinks we don't need this might want to move to another planet.)

Hey @2, where do you live? I'm guessing it's either a rural part of WA, or in a red state that has a large rural area. If so, you should realize that rural areas and states are by far the largest recipients of taxpayer money. It's far more efficient to support people living in dense urban or suburban areas, but providing services in sparsely populated rural areas is very expensive. Also, residents in rural areas tend to be less wealthy on average than others, so they receive significant benefits from programs like Medicaid. So it's actually places like Seattle and New York and California that support places like rural WA and Mississippi and Wyoming, despite the supposedly libertarian ideals of many of the people who live in those places.

But in Sydney's previous (and deeply stoopid article), all this technology-based and science-based earthquake stuff is just rude Colonial mansplaining to our revered Mother Gaia and the deep wisdom of the Original Peoples, whose mythology and oral histories were equally valid ways of understanding the natural world around us. Why aren't the Feds spending 40 million dollars to resurrect the rich Native traditions around predictive ground motion modeling? Why aren't you pissed about that?

This seems like such a paltry amount, as these things go (says the guy who makes minimum wage), that I'm surprised a handful of huge corporations based on the west coast don't find it in their own best interest to pony up a few million dollars each and just get the damn funded.