5 ms·

I 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 gr

by mchusma 3mo ago

I 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 ago
Collecting 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 ago
Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.
- groundzeros2015 3mo ago
  Private companies don’t care about having accurate data? Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
  - bestouff 3mo ago
    Private companies care way more about making money.
    - groundzeros2015 3mo ago
      Making 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 ago
        This 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.
      - bumby 3mo ago
        You can make even more money if you make sure you have accurate data while your competitors do not.
    - autoexec 3mo ago
      Private companies care ONLY about making money.
  - 3mo ago
- counters 3mo ago
  Biased about what? There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
- jandrewrogers 3mo ago
  Companies spend a lot of money to remove and repair the idiosyncratic bias that already exists in this data.
hvb2 3mo ago
So, 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 ago
But 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 ago
  Making 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 ago
As 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 ago
  Operating 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 ago
    I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.
    - groundzeros2015 3mo ago
      So then we are subsidizing Google’s outsized usage of that API?
      - simonw 3mo ago
        Is 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 ago
        That 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 ago
I'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.

by mchusma 3mo ago

estearum 3mo ago

Collecting 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 ago

Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.

groundzeros2015 3mo ago
Private companies don’t care about having accurate data? Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?
- bestouff 3mo ago
  Private companies care way more about making money.
  - groundzeros2015 3mo ago
    Making 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 ago
      This 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.
    - bumby 3mo ago
      You can make even more money if you make sure you have accurate data while your competitors do not.
  - autoexec 3mo ago
    Private companies care ONLY about making money.
- 3mo ago
counters 3mo ago
Biased about what? There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
jandrewrogers 3mo ago
Companies spend a lot of money to remove and repair the idiosyncratic bias that already exists in this data.

hvb2 3mo ago

So, 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 ago

But 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 ago
Making 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 ago

As 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 ago
Operating 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 ago
  I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.
  - groundzeros2015 3mo ago
    So then we are subsidizing Google’s outsized usage of that API?
    - simonw 3mo ago
      Is 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 ago
        That 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 ago

I'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.