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Should Taxpayers Pay Twice For Weather Data?
theodp writes "Thanks to O.M.B. Circular A-130, taxpayers now enjoy free access to SEC, Patent Office, and IRS data over the Internet. Now the Bush administration must decide whether to order the National Weather Service to make taxpayer-funded weather readings freely available on the Net, ignoring complaints from an industry trade group that doing so violates pre-Internet era agreements."
We shouldn't even have to be paying once, weather data acquisition should be handled by the private sector and only the private sector. Really everything except for national defense should be handled by the private sector.
No need. The man has plenty of real faults and failures to bash.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Step 2 is dead people.
Australia does this. The result is lots of dead pilots and boaters every year because they didn't pay the money to get the services they need. The result is that other people end up paying far more for everything since the gov't is being too cheap.
This is just confusing -- the article briefly mentions the same thing:
"Now the Bush administration must decide whether to order the National Weather Service to make taxpayer-funded weather readings freely available on the Net, ignoring complaints from an industry trade group that doing so violates pre-Internet era agreements."
Eh? Isn't the information already free? Go to the NWS website. Everything is all there -- I visit it all the time. Seems like the decision has already been made, and the trade groups are arguing after the fact. Who cares if violates an agreement -- it's their right to change it? What does the Bush Administration have anything to do with this when the decision has already been made?
Silence. It lacks sound but has meaning. At this point, silence would mean no one is surprised by Bush's anti-technology and science views. Our silence is the silencing of the American tradition of intellectual pursuit.
And remember, when they say "intrest group" it usually means "(not in the citizen's) intrests group".
http://www.weather.com/c om/
/. are a bit off the mark.
http://www.wunderground.
Both are freely available to everyone with a net connection. Both rely on NOAA and NWS supplied data along with other, private sources.
The vast majority of the American public gets their weather from those or similar locations. Most wouldn't know it if the free feeds from the NOAA/NWS stopped. Lives would not be in danger as those that do use the feeds would either pay the fee or move over to feeds from the private sector.
That being said, it should NOT be made a fee service. This is a taxpayer supported service and should be freely available to the taxpayers.
I just think all those "people are going to DIE" posts here on
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This implies, but doesn't state clearly, that its information should be made easily available to all
What I don't get is what exactly the NWS provides to the commercial weather services, and what exactly the companies do that they believe is being "duplicated" by the government.
My understanding was that the NWS simply collects raw data and feeds it to the companies. The companies do not actually collect weather data independently. Prior to the new rules, the NWS data was only available to said companies, which packaged it up with fancy graphics or some such nonsense. Now, anyone can download the data and set up their own service. Is this all true?
So, if the NWS is making fancy weather websites (and hence, directly competing with the companies), I agree that this might not be entirely fair (although I've seen this argument extended too far on occasion). On the other hand, if some random private individual wants to set up their own website to interpret the public data, what possible argument is there against this? I'm not clear on what exactly the industry association is objecting too - it sounds like a combination of both cases.
I found a Wired article from last month that made it a little clearer:
"Weather-industry companies were promoting the idea that the government restrict special interests that have the ability to pay for the data -- like Major League Baseball teams or citrus growers -- from acquiring it for free, [some weather company honcho] said."
That sounds like bullshit to me. Why should private companies be discriminated against? They're taxpayers too, at least in theory. The government shouldn't force them to go through some hideously expensive service to get the same info that the public receives for free. (Actually, though, this practice is unfortunately very common in academic sciences, largely as a way for universities to supplement their grant income.)
You could argue that the government shouldn't be in the business of collecting weather data at all - although I think there's a very strong case for the NWS even for libertarian types, since the primary role of government should be to protect our lives and property. So, assuming the NWS is a justified agency, there's no possible case for restricting access to the data to a few private companies.
I say that if the weather industry doesn't like, maybe they should pick up the bill themselvs and pay it completely. Why should my tax money fully fund something I'll have to pay for anyway?
Is this slashdot.org or slashdot.org.us?
Don't assume "taxpayer" is well defined, 'cos it aint. Only some of us live in the USA.
I'm a student studying meteorology. I've got a lot of data and software available to me when I'm at school that simply isn't available when I'm not there. It's frustrating to search for certain data and find that it's unavailable.
The private weather industry reached an agreement with the NWS before the internet that defined the seperation between the two. There were certain things that private industry would not do that the government would. It set the responsibilities for both. However, with advances in technology and lower costs, private weather can perform many tasks that the government legitimately does. Thus, NOAA believes it's time to redefine the boundary between the two. Presumably this would allow for some overlap.
Government has always been responsible for things such as soundings, radars, and issuing watches and warnings. There's many other things the NWS does as well. NOAA has attempted to make data available to the public whenever possible. For example, you can get a lot of radar data shortly after it's received from a NOAA ftp site. This is a good thing.
The way I see it is private industry has spent lots of money investing in things the NWS already does. Instead of just accepting this, they want to make money by taking over things that are normally done by the government and reducing the government's role.
Research is rarely profitable in the short term. It's an investment. Research in the meteorological community is ongoing. Constantly, work is being done to improve the data collected, our understanding of the weather, and the methods used to analyze the data. By taking things such as radar out of the hands of the government, we sacrifice the research that is currently being done. Remember, private industry isn't going to make the investment in research that the government is. After all, research doesn't make a profit quickly and doesn't impress investors.
IMHO, private industry is overstepping their bounds here. They're infringing into things the government already does. And they're pretending to be the victims in this.
If private industry gets their way, everyone who doesn't have a financial stake in this loses.
2004 just called, and it wishes to point out that information is no longer scarce, nor costly to disseminate.
so when you say you can get the weather for free, can you get the weather in plain text? or do you have to go to a webpage with advertisements spewed across your screen. Or do you have to install some clientside program which includes boatloads of spyware built into it?
I do not believe that your definition of free is, in fact, free.
If the govt (the PEOPLE) funds this data to be collected, then the PEOPLE should have the right to view it freely. The internet pipe required to send this data would be CHEAP if all you are doing it spitting out ASCI text of the locations you wish to lookup information on--this is even more true when you compare it to the actual cost to collect said data.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
I'd just like to say that these things come in cycles. They are society's response to perceived threats and changing goals. Nixon's FBI did some horrible, horrible things (black bag jobs, intimidation, assassination, etc) and was never really held accountable for it. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and though he was assassinated, he wasn't assassinated because he'd thrown a lot of people in jail without charges.
Things will change, and if we focus on changing the average opinion rather than on "holding people accountable" we'll be okay.
I see a lot of the things that we do, and I think "this is what it looked like when Rome fell." But you know what? I think things are going to get better.
Here's something else: you want more liberty? Put more in your daily life. Think about how you live today and ask yourself: what can I do to make things more free? Oppose your own inner martinet, and work for freedom around you. You'll be a lot better off, and you'll actually get much more accomplished than railing against Bush.
Just an idea.
Oh: and make sure that you don't let Democrats rest on their laurels when they're in office. One thing I hate about the current split is that Republicans often refuse to criticize the president. Don't do the same thing when it's your guy in office (note: I'm a libertarian).
Traditionally, the data was in formats that required a lot of work to do much with... model data, radar data, even a "simple" METAR - a current observation - can be a bitch to decode.
Now technology has developed - XML - that makes it easier for a programmer to use the data. This actually lowers the cost of entry for someone to do something cool, useful or profitable.
Only the old-time commercial weather companies have a vested interest in keeping the status quo - after all they invested a lot of money writing decoders for wx data.
It's been long said if you business case is reformatting NWS data, you have a crappy business case. True value adds include:
* integrating other data that NWS doesn't have to NWS data. Things like pollen counts;
* running stats against NWS data to create new products - providing hourly or 30 minutes temperature curves.