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> The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for. Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
by cheschire 3mo ago
> The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for.
Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
- simonw 3mo agoWhat's not accurate?
- mchusma 3mo agoI agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for." I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
- estearum 3mo agoCollecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there. I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
- Terr_ 3mo ago> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years! I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
- bestouff 3mo agoDoing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoPrivate companies don’t care about having accurate data? Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
- bestouff 3mo agoPrivate companies care way more about making money.
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoMaking money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.
- munk-a 3mo agoThis is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- autoexec 3mo ago> Making money requires accurate information about the world. A company may have accurate information that their product causes cancer, but they aren't going to tell you that. They'll outright lie and say it doesn't, hire scientists to create fake research to "prove" that it's safe, and harass, threaten, and discredit anyone who tries to tell the public the truth.
- hvb2 3mo agoSo, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity? That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree. And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
- sethherr 3mo agoBut why? Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for. After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars. Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoMaking the data available is non-trivial no matter who does it. There were many, many exabytes of this data a decade ago and countless petabytes of new data is generated every day. How to manage this has been an open question for a long time. In practice access has always been restricted to this "public" data because there is not remotely enough bandwidth, either network or storage, to give everyone a copy of the data that may want it. They often don't even have enough capacity for internal users. A lot of it also sits in offline or near-line archival formats due to the scale of the data. This is a general problem for data models of this type. You need to compute on the data in-situ or it won't scale but virtually no one can build that type of infrastructure at the scale required for these data models. It would also be extremely expensive to build and operate.
- bumby 3mo agoAs a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoOperating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
- bumby 3mo agoI don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoSo then we are subsidizing Google’s outsized usage of that API?
- simonw 3mo agoIs this really an expensive problem to solve? Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoThat sounds like the arrangement you said we have. The government provides data to private companies who then mass distribute it in various forms because those costs and needs vary.
- toomuchtodo 3mo agoI'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.
- cheschire 3mo agoThey’re using the broadest definition possible, where tax dollars are generally meant to provide public service. But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
- estearum 3mo ago> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom. Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent. They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about. Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
- bborud 3mo agoYou are skipping a few layers here. Like those who know stuff like «crumbling asbestos air ducts in schools may be a bad idea». Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?
- atahanacar 3mo agoFrom my understanding of USA as a foreigner, tax dollars are for corporate bailouts and military.
- petcat 3mo agoAs an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp. Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
- tehjoker 3mo agoThis is kind of a strange take. Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
- petcat 3mo agoThis is kind of a strange take. > Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff My state has completely state-funded healthcare, and a renowned state-funded university system. USA is a nation of states and those states (mostly) make their own way. I live in one of the good ones.
- tehjoker 3mo agoIt makes me feel a little crazy seeing the constitutional architecture post-civil war used to diffuse responsibility away from the federal government and divide the people against each other working in action. People act like this isn't a country with very definite choices being made or that if something is bad over there, it doesn't matter over here. The wealthy, the corporations, the army, and the central government all deal with this place as a unified entity with various domestic fractures to exploit for their own purposes.
- Terr_ 3mo agoWhich part? I interpret it as: 1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable. 2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government. 3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations. Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.