[icehawk219]

I've used weather.gov for years and love the service. Every person I've talked to who complains about the crap coverage by the weather companies in the US that I've shown it to uses it exclusively as well. It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition. I know this isn't always the case but it certainly is here.

I don't agree with lots of things our government spends money on but stuff like this I absolutely support.

[dingaling]

> It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition

There is no better product because it's not commercially viable to compete against the free money that NOAA receives. If NOAA didn't exist, others would try to compete commercially in that space.

In the UK the Met Office is notionally a part of the Ministry of Defence[0] but is required to be profit generating, so basically operates as a commercial enterprise. Whilst they provide free weather forecasting and alerts for the public, commercial users have to pay for data ( raw and processed ).

After 93 years the BBC decided to change from the Met Office to another source, the free market at work. The Met Office has to improve its product and / or reduce its costs to keep competing; NOAA has no such incentives towards efficiency or improvement.

[0] Correction: transferred to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2011

[gech]

> the free money

It's not free. It's what patriots pay their taxes for.

[gpawl]

and how would competitors get funding? by making each member of the public individually pay for a subscription?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

[nojvek]

Is the logic here that by slashing NOAA funding, no real claims of climate change will be made and Trump will prevail?

[dragonwriter]

That's probably a part of it, but the budget cuts across the government (outside of defense and law enforcement) are also a realization of goal of at least the Bannon faction of the Trump White House to basically burn the whole system of government to the ground.

[lazugod]

If this is true, why are they not removing all funding entirely?

[dragonwriter]

Because its not (yet, at any rate) a dictatorship, and they need something that even Republicans in Congress will vote for, for one thing.

[squarefoot]

And probably also because by removing one hair at a time you can eventually make someone bald without he even noticing.

[veidr]

I'm afraid this might be the wrong place to look for logic.

However, at least it looks like they were able to finish modernizing their website before the budget got the ax:

https://forecast-v3.weather.gov/documentation?redirect=legac...