[jaccola]

By this logic anything could become government run but never transition from government run to privately run, creating a ratcheting mechanism that would eventually lead to ~everything being government run!

The pro case for privatisation (that I happen to believe in) is: you were paying for it anyway, via your tax dollars, having it private leads to competition and stronger incentives to improve/cut costs meaning it will net cost you less.

[huslage]

You are oversimplifying here. I ALREADY paid for the weather balloons and they are no longer being launched. This is not privatization in the way that you seem to think it is. This is explicitly against the will of the people.

I'm fine if they want to make new weather balloons and sell them to people to launch for whatever reason they want. Selling what by law should be public data is anathema.

[CGMthrowaway]

You are also simplifying. You didn't pay for anything. You were taxed, and representatives selected in accordance with a social contract between government and the people (the Constitution), apportioned and spent (or didn't spend) the money.

[huslage]

That explicitly has not happened in this instance. Don't tell me how democracy works.

[CGMthrowaway]

Which part? And I wasn't describing democracy

[krisoft]

Weather balloons are a recurring cost. It is not like you launch a weather balloon once and it provides data forever. You need to launch new balloons once the ones previously launched land. (This is typically a very short amount of time. Days not weeks.)

It is not like this company is going to take over the management of weather balloons you have already paid for. Or I don't know how you imagine this is going to work.

> This is not privatization in the way that you seem to think it is.

Can you tell me more about how you think it is?

[tartoran]

> Weather balloons are a recurring cost.

What do you think taxes are? Do we pay taxes once and that's it?

[krisoft]

Huslage said “I ALREADY paid for the weather balloons and they are no longer being launched.”

Past tense. You could say that you have already paid for something where the cost is largely up-front. Like for example you could say it for the aircraft carriers. Imagine that (ad absurdum) the administration would want to sink all aircraft carriers. Then you, or Huslage, could rightfully say “I have already paid for the aircraft carriers…”. You could complain that your tax dollars are being wasted by sinking them.

But with a recurring cost like weather balloons the same sentence doesn’t make sense. There you could say “I have been paying for those balloons” (for which presumably you got the data you wanted from the balloons). Once they no longer are launching them, you are no longer paying for them. (Modulo some stock remaining on the warehouse shelves I guess. But that is basically a rounding error in a government budget.)

What Huslage said makes sense if they think of the weather balloons as a large up-front cost, like an aircraft carrier. Huslage already paid for them and now they won’t be used anymore! What a waste! But in reality it is more like a recurring cost. Like for example if the pentagon had a Netflix account and now they are canceling it. You wouldn’t say “I ALREADY paid for the netflix account”. You haven’t “already paid” for it. You were paying for it up until now, and you won’t be paying for it from now on.

There are many great reasons for why it is a good idea for the government to keep launching weather balloons. Huslage “already paid for it” is not one of those great reasons. It demonstrates a misunderstanding of how weather balloons work.

But do change my mind. Why do you think it matters that taxes too are recurring? How does that make the weather balloons “already paid”?

[Alupis]

It's extremely unlikely any of your tax dollars were allocated to projects like what is being discussed here. It's much more likely (given the Federal Government's total budget and allocations) that this money was being borrowed and/or printed.

So, put another way, is it better for the government to continue going into debt to operate projects like this with potentially dubious returns - or better to allow the private industry to find a way to operate it instead?

[skyyler]

>So, put another way, is it better for the government to continue going into debt to operate projects like this with potentially dubious returns

Yes. The government is not a business. It does not need to turn a profit. Government services are not products for the generation of profit.

[Alupis]

Nobody said anything about profit. We don't need to move the goal posts here.

There is a difference between the government operating programs with tax dollars and operating programs with fantasy money that ultimately hurts every single citizen.

[fragmede]

This framing is off. Weather data isn’t a fucking mars habitat, it’s core infrastructure. Airplane travel, agriculture, emergency response, and private weather services all depend on it. If anything, handing it off to profit-driven firms creates more risk with things like black-box pricing, gaps in data coverage, or national security issues.

And, “dubious returns” ignores that some of the highest-leverage investments in history looked like this. Government-funded satellite weather programs, GPS, and early internet tech weren’t obviously profitable, but I'm so glad we wasted tax dollars on that.

[Alupis]

The government obtains weather data in other ways. This isn't an all-or-nothing thing based on balloons...

[huslage]

I imagine the government is going to start launching weather balloons again after they get sued for illegally firing the staff that's supposed to do it.

[throwawaymaths]

can you explain by what criteria you decide what data should be public or not?

[thrance]

How's that working out for public health in the states?

Weather reporting is a common good. It worked very well for pennies and benefitted the economy greatly. Why privatize it?

[Workaccount2]

There is a key difference, privatization means a flat cost, whereas public means an income based cost.

About 30% of Americans get (NWS) weather data for free. They pay no income tax yet receive the same level of public benefits. On the other hand, a handful of Americans pay millions for weather data, and receive the same thing as those who paid nothing.

For a private service though, it would just be $20/mo or whatever for everyone.

[gusgus01]

Where did you get 30% from? I'm just curious since NWS data is widely used as a source for creating weather forecasts, which if I had to guess near 100% of people use in one way, shape, or form. I think Google uses it, so anyone with an Android phone is one click away from a forecast using the data.

On the matter of taxes being proportional to income, I'm not going to argue about progressive taxation or any moralistic standpoint of proportional taxation. From purely a utility standpoint, those handful of people probably reap way more value from that NWS data being available. The richest people (those paying the millions for NWS) usually are that rich from the labor of others, and those labor forces all get value from the data to help plan their days, including getting to the workplace safely. Another even more direct use for the economy would be routing of trucks through snowy passes, or planning for large construction companies.

[Workaccount2]

~30% of Americans do not pay income taxes, i.e. they get public services like NWS data for free.

Nothing else you said is wrong, I'm just saying that government services are effectively progressively priced based on income.

[gusgus01]

For the first part, I totally misread that several times. Sorry about that.

Looking around, the exact number is quite hard to pin down because of the definition of it, but ~30% is probably a very fair estimate based on https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-dont...