[pavedwalden]

There's a lot about this in Michael Lewis' "The Fifth Risk". The most maddening part is that the company lobbying to weaken the National Weather Service can't replicate much of what the government is doing here and sells a lot of repackaged NWS data. I suppose it doesn't matter to them if dismantling the service leads to less weather data being available overall, as long as their piece of the market gets bigger.