> The NWS was giving away forecasts on its website, radio stations, and elsewhere, when businesses such as AccuWeather charged its clients for theirs—never mind that AccuWeather relied on the service’s free data to formulate its own predictions. Santorum agreed that commercial weather companies deserved protection.
Well, not if you don't understand how hard accurate weather forecsts are to get, or why a private entity couldn't do better. After all, that's why the news shows have weathermen, right?!
And if the NOAA goes away, the government becomes smaller, and their taxes go down, right?
:/
EDIT: Dear downvoters - while this is not my opinion, this is how people think, what people believe. Dismiss it at your own risk.
NWS is an amazing resource for pre-trip planning for a variety of different people. I frequently consult it for weather forecasts prior to hiking. I'm not sure a company like Accuweather could provide me with access to such great forecasts or sensor data as NWS does given how reliant they are on NWS data themselves.
The other problem here is that Accuweather charges huge fees for access to their forecasts and I'm not sure that I, as a private citizen, could afford that. So my choices go from pay a little bit of tax to get access to high-quality, reliable weather forecasts and warnings, to being totally unable to get access to this information without paying exorbitant fee. Or alternatively just not knowing these things and having to pay higher insurance costs for my ignorance.
This is a really good example of how making government smaller makes a lot of peoples' lives much crappier.
Yes, you're right, I over-simplified. Many of them are (or have) meteorologists. To give the data itself a pretty face (interpretation). But that's not the primary reason that news stations hire "weather people". If it was, they would just contract out to some other company.
> I don't care who you voted for, this should make every American really, really mad.
There exists a certain group of people that think private sector and The Market™ should handle many/most/all things. Do you want to guess which political party those people tend to associate with?
Also, should we be more or less mad about this than someone trying to overturn fair elections like is happening now? Do you want to guess which political party is trying to do that? Do you want to guess if it's the same political party which believes in The Market™?
So you may not think it matters who people voted for, and that this should be a universal feeling… but that's not what reality is. Do you know what other things should have universal consensus?
First, there's no way to compare the election stuff with this weather thing. Sometimes different things happen at the same time for different reasons.
>There exists a certain group of people that think private sector and The Market™ should handle many/most/all things
I think the Accuweather problem is worse, much worse. What has happened is that NOAA & NWS had been happily supplying data to..whoever..when some people decided to create a commercial service with the same data. Then they hired disgraced Jesus-freak Santorum to play lobbyist and try to kill the NOAA/NWS public services. Note that Accuweather is not going to fly their own satelites, they just want you to be locked out.[1]
That's right: if a private company decides to commercialize something the government is already doing, using the same government services that that government function is using, then the government should stop doing the thing and let the private company have the market.[2][3] This is a continuation of the Republican principle of privatizing profits and socializing risk, as well as colonizing publicly-funded resources.
