> So, the cost to fix would be peanuts, but it's "not a priority"
But there are probably thousands of things that cost only peanuts and aren't a priority. If you fix them all they add up to not peanuts and then you don't have any money left and you didn't even fix any priority tasks!
Serving the public should always be a priority for a government institution. In the case of the weather, disseminating the forecasts is just as critical as making the forecasts in the first place.
These forecasts directly affect everything from air travel to crop planting/harvesting to sea travel. They are critical for our economic (and citizen's) ongoing health.
And the internet, for better or worse, is the primary means of dissemination for the NOAA. Failing in this is failing at one of their greatest duties, IMO.
Instead, government institutions which are funded by government, now serve government as their main client. Public, which pays government, not institutions, is not a priority. Effectively government became an entity which is not serving the public but only itself.
The “problem” is if NOAA directly provides data to the general public then an entire ecosystem of companies that simply gather NOAA data and pass it along to the public suddenly lose money. Those companies then try very hard to limit distribution of NOAA data by NOAA while maximizing the government spending on accurate forecasts.
It’s got nothing to do with government supporting it’s self and 100% to do with legislated corruption that’s dependent on public officials playing their role.
> Didn't downvote myself, but if I had to lay money on it, I'd guess that you got downvoted for not providing links to the raw NOAA data? Sources FTW.
Yeah probably true, I didn't post a source because I thought it was common knowledge which in retrospect I'm not sure why I thought that.
And I'm glad you enjoyed the links, when I first started looking into the raw NOAA data and PRISM[1] data it took a bit to figure out what to do with it. But I've found the GDAL library helpful for parsing various weather data formats, and there are a lot of them[2].
PRISM is not NOAA raw data. It's a product produced by interpolating data from validated weather stations, taking into account elevation among other things. For example, doing straight interpolation between weather stations without taking into account elevation can lead to some very wrong results. In fact, PRISM stands for "Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model"[0]. Also, the high-resolution PRISM data is not free, as it's a data product of OSU/NACSE. It costs real $$$.
Aside from point, weather station observations, most weather/climate data is gridded and you are right, GDAL provides lots of tools for processing and transforming gridded (raster) data products. DevelopmentSeed (no affiliation) creates some neat tools and I'd recommend following OSGEO[2] and the FOSS4G conference.
In a nutshell, we instinctively assume others know what we know. This was probably true when we lived in small tribes on the Serengeti, but not so much in the global information age.
It takes practice, but you can grow the habit of always providing a little extra context without sounding patronizing, as well, at least in-person, a better sense for when people are following the conversation.
What helped me grow this skill was lots of pair-programming, because that daily pair rotation forces you to be really good at context-sharing on the quick.
It’s reasonable to separate publishing data and providing data to the public. Their website only provides a subset of their API data so that missing data is provided to 3rd parties and curious computer savvy users, but not the public.
> Their website only publishes a subset of their API data so that missing data is provided to 3rd parked and curious users but not the public.
The majority of the data available to download is superfluous to most people hence why only a subset is shown on any weather app or website including forecast.weather.gov or Accuweather or whatever.
> It’s reasonable to separate providing data to providing data to the public
The NWS actually does provide visualizations for most of their data, and at this point I feel you don't know much about weather data/forecasting and are just looking to argue online. I provided a bunch of links below that allow curious people to look through American model data without having to use a company or having to program their own software. This list doesn't even include free to use apps/sites made by companies. American weather data is easy to access and view for free, Where as European model data is harder to access because you have to pay for it.
It’s actually the reverse. I was annoyed I couldn’t validate that I was correctly interpreting some of their API data on their website.
My original interest was displaying each days forecast vs what it had been the day before, but it turned out less interesting than I had expected. However, it’s easy to get sucked into this stuff.
Given that General Aviation uses NOAA weather data, that alone makes the NOAA data more useful than almost any other source. They also provide data to our fishing and ocean transport ships.
And, it's been available to the public via the internet for at least two decades I know of at nws.noaa.gov (which now redirects to weather.gov).
NOAA's data is a stupidly valuable resource, even discounting the resellers.
You can just go to national weather service site which uses NOAA data and it's quite human friendly[1]. Also I don't understand how you can call the raw data not very useful, when it's literally the backbone of weather forecasting in this country. Every weather forecasting app uses the raw NOAA data, its there for you to use as well[2]. The hardest part of using the raw data is the learning curve related to meteorological programing, not getting access to the data.
By use I am referring to people directly using NOAA or other government apps/websites to directly access it without intermediates. Other companies repacking that same data bring very little to the table.
It’s the same issue where the IRS could in theory cheaply provide a user friendly tax prep software for ~1$ per taxpayer. However, tax prep software manufacturers have a massive incentive to avoid that. Further, they are going to lobby heavily for the issue which impacts themselves where most people don’t care about losing out in ~50$ per year.
> By use I am referring to people directly using NOAA or other government apps/websites to directly access it without intermediates. Other companies repacking that same data bring very little to the table.
Huh? Did you even look at the links I provided above? They are literally what your talking about. One is a free government run website that any person can use to get a weather forecast, the other is a free government run website where any person can download raw weather data and use any way they like. So no intermediates or companies required.
No. The second link isn’t something 99.9% of the general public will directly access. So in terms of directly communicating with the public without intermediaries it’s again useless to 99.9% of the population. The first link is useable but hardly designed to maximize views by the general public.
This isn’t some major expense, even 3% of their budget spent on communicating with the general public would easily cover several clean apps etc. Instead, it’s clear their largely a giant subsidy for private profit. Other government agencies charge for this kind of large scale data access by private companies to lower costs to taxpayers by removing subsidies.
> The first link is useable but hardly designed to maximize views by the general public.
So you admit that forecast.weather.gov is usable to the general public, but because it "doesn't maximize views" its some how invalidated? You said above that the public shouldn't need to use an intermediary to get a weather forecast and that's exactly what forecast.weather.gov is. And not only that but its faster and better than the for profit apps such as Accuweather, Weather.com, Weather Underground, etc.
> This isn’t some major expense, even 3% of their budget spent on communicating with the general public would easily cover several clean apps etc. Instead, it’s clear their largely a giant subsidy for private profit. Other government agencies charge for this kind of large scale data access by private companies to lower costs to taxpayers by removing subsidies.
3% of a multi billion dollar budget is a lot of money also why would they waste money on a "several clean apps" as you put it when they already have a working weather forecasting app and that money could be used to address issues like the bandwidth one described in the article above, or updating weather models? It sounds like you just want a fancy new app even though they already have a working one.
First I suggested these companies should be paying for API access. Alternatively, one app per device is multiple apps. It’s not about making weather.gov outcompete private companies, it’s about getting value for taxpayer money. People shouldn’t be watching adds or paying for apps that simply show them data they already paid for.
Hell their API’s are providing a longer forecast than the actual website. That’s silly.
> Hell their API’s are providing a longer forecast than the actual website. That’s silly.
forecast.weather.gov doesn't show longer than 7 day forecasts because forecasts beyond 7 days are not very accurate[1]. So why show something that has a 50% chance of being wrong?
We're not discussing serving the public, we're discussing serving for-profit companies who make money off of the NWS's data. Those are the only people this policy change would affect, not you or me going to the NWS website.
This. Accuweather and weather.com have literally leeched all the data they can get from NOAA and then they resell it at a tidy profit. This change does not affect the general public but does affect the big players.
I was on the call. my work uses these data and we needed to know how things were changing. Not only external users but also some internal apps n such. One guy from a GIS section talked up and was like, hey is this going to affect the maps on water.weather.gov and other sites? The head dude was like, yup it is. So even internal agencies are getting affected by it.
Overall tho yes. Some large players take the data here , process it, and resell at larger value. Some might call it a value add. Accuweather is shit tho so dont ever go to them for anything
I think you need to consider whether it is the public who should be served in the free market or well connected lobbyists who have been highly paid to corrupt the executive branch. The NWS will not serve the public with what they trivially could so that a private corporation can make (more) money filling that niche and continue supporting politicians and their friend's lifestyle. That is the crony-capitalist way and corporate first amendment rights to spend money any way they want shall not be abridged (by this Supreme Court).
Because if there is one thing we know, government agencies are never captured and always have priorities well-aligned with the constituencies they serve.
I do understand that the peanut gallery normally has very skewed, ignorant views of what complex agencies do. I also understand if you don't question, audit, and occasionally yell at them, they go bad and (at best) stop serving the people they're supposed to.
> If you fix them all they add up to not peanuts and then you don't have any money left
The initial criticism is worthwhile in its original context (0.02% of the agency's budget). By scaling it up, you took it out of that context so that it runs up against worries about the total budget, implying a shortfall even though the argument is about the same 0.02%. The obvious answer to your comment is "well then it's easy to cut a little from $ELSEWHERE", which will inevitably devolve into overt zero-sum partisan bickering.
No, I was just looking a step ahead. The only thing your original comment added was an appeal to destructive penny pinching that often accompanies popular fiscal conservatism.
For context I'm personally against wasting money. But kneecapping an organization by tightening its purse strings such that it can't fulfill its function is itself a larger waste of money.
> Or why you're moving the goalposts to "reduce their budget".
Nobody mentioned this but you! It's entirely something you brought up and you're the only person with any opinion on it! I haven't expressed a single opinion on reducing their budget or what their budget should be! I haven't moved the goalposts to it because I didn't say anything about it!
> arguing about deep cuts ends up inherently partisan
You're the only one arguing about deep cuts, or any cuts at all! I haven't given any opinions on any cuts! I've said absolutely nothing about it! There's no competing opinions on this with which to argue!
You're not arguing with me you're arguing with someone completely imagined in your head! If you think I've got some opinion try to see where I actually said that before replying again.
You keep saying that I am imagining what I believe you said. From my perspective, this is gaslighting.
I will paraphrase what I think you said (and the straightforward context/implication). Please tell me where my understanding goes awry.
> But there are probably thousands of things that cost only peanuts and aren't a priority.
There are many other items that similarly need fixing (across all federal agencies). Each may not cost a lot individually.
> If you fix them all they add up to not peanuts
But if they were all fixed (applying a universal standard), the total cost would end up being a lot (spending a lot is bad, regardless of how much has been fixed)
> *and then you don't have any money left and you didn't even fix any priority tasks!
The total budget should not be increased, so a policy of fixing small things would take away significant spending from other things that are more important.
What’s happened here is you’ve seen an argument for ‘no budget currently available for’ which is just factual, and then you’ve assumed a lot more.
The bits you imagined out of nowhere is the opinion ‘and should not be increased’, and then you’ve even further imagined an argument for ‘cut’. I never argued those things. Go back and try to find where I argued for either of those.
Can you link to them?
I don’t think you’ll be able to. You’ll find you mentioned it first in both cases and even then I haven't given any opinion on them!
Why do you think everyone is flagging and downvoting you?
Perhaps where we actually start to diverge is that I view stories like this as appeals for increased funding from Congress. If NWS were going to rearrange the budget internally, they would have already done so. Did you not mean your comment in the wider context of managing the entire federal budget?
You haven't directly argued for cuts, but I still maintain that reflects the gist of your comment. "You don't have any money left" is an assertion of limiting the budget. The immediate implication is that increasing funding to something means having to cut something else. The cliched response pertaining to such tradeoffs in the federal budget is "well then, buy one less F-35".
The directly opposing argument is that would be worthwhile to increase the federal budget and taxes by 0.2% to fix similar problems across the board. I'm certainly not making that argument to increase taxes though - but we should be able to hold a critique of the government's foolish penny wise pound behavior in our heads without collapsing it to one of the two.
My comments were downvoted because HN abhors sarcasm, the exchange has generated much more heat than light, and that got attributed to me because I went meta. Next time I'll just copypasta the comment about the F-35.
But there are probably thousands of things that cost only peanuts and aren't a priority. If you fix them all they add up to not peanuts and then you don't have any money left and you didn't even fix any priority tasks!