1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
Their donors. In the USA members of congress spend an embarrassingly large amount of their time on the phone to their donors ensuring they are happy enough to fund their next run.
> A PowerPoint presentation to incoming freshmen by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, obtained by The Huffington Post, lays out the dreary existence awaiting these new back-benchers. The daily schedule prescribed by the Democratic leadership contemplates a nine or 10-hour day while in Washington. Of that, four hours are to be spent in "call time" and another hour is blocked off for "strategic outreach," which includes fundraisers and press work.
> Rep. Rick Nolan: Well, both parties have told newly elected members of the Congress that they should spend 30 hours a week in the Republican and Democratic call centers across the street from the Congress, dialing for dollars.
Agreed that money should be virtually eliminated from the system. That said, people actually tend to be pretty satisfied with their representatives. It's the other Congresspeople who suck.
This snide response would be a lot better if climate.gov had actually been taken down by those representatives you mention, rather than illegally destroyed by one man.
No no, the snide response works because this shutdown was a violation of aforementioned system. Downstream discussions on “oh hurrr ummm how do we decide what’s worth spending money on?!” are irrelevant. We already have a system to do that, and that system has decided to fund climate.gov
Clearly not, or it would be funded. The part of the system that’s supposed to decide decided to fund it. Then another part illegally blocked that and suffered no consequences.
Gerrymandering means that the house is a skewed representation of the people. The senate is a skewed representation of the people in its intentional structure.
Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.
They are doing the gag where they just describe representative democracy like it is a novel idea.
Practically we also need expert organizations and agencies to help advise the representative and implement their ideas, but I wouldn’t describe glossing over that sort of detail as “failing civics 101.”
You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.
It's like 50% if you also count the stuff I pay for that is a direct benefit to me at retirement (as does anyone who pays into social security).
So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.
Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.
Okay? If I pay in and then get that benefit when it's my time to draw that benefit, it doesn't matter if it's my actual dollar or not. Technically right isn't the best right sometimes.
Also my point was that the original claim of 2/3 of the federal budget going to social programs is just wrong. It's well under half unless you count ss. Then it's about half.
As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.
It makes me feel a little crazy seeing the constitutional architecture post-civil war used to diffuse responsibility away from the federal government and divide the people against each other working in action. People act like this isn't a country with very definite choices being made or that if something is bad over there, it doesn't matter over here. The wealthy, the corporations, the army, and the central government all deal with this place as a unified entity with various domestic fractures to exploit for their own purposes.
Social Security and Medicare have a separate, capped tax though. They're funded through that tax. Federal tax is effectively uncapped. Where does it go?
I agree with parent, the full quote is: "The whole thing relies on donations to keep it afloat, which is really what tax dollars are for."
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.
I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).
Operating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?
Google uses barely any weather data. Perhaps some tornado and wildfire tracking for its datacenters, but that's about it. The vast majority of its potential use comes from Android users, which is... the general public.
And it's not like Google is a charity, you're paying for it either way. The question is: do you want to pay for that weather API via your taxes, or do you want to pay for it via the advertising budget of the products you buy - with Google taking a decent chunk and selling your location data while they are at it?
And it's not like operating a weather API is that hard. You can easily find commercial parties who sell it for less than $1 per million API calls. Assuming you're polling for weather updates every 15 minutes 24/7, that's less than $0.03 of your yearly taxes going towards providing accurate weather information!
I work in this space. The load on private APIs -- and the management costs in general of reselling government data -- are utterly dwarfed by the upstream costs borne by the government.
The public __already__ pays for Google, The Weather Company, Apple, and really __everybody__ -- down to your local weather person and surf report -- to use weather data on a massive scale.
Government weather data underpins huge chunks of our modern, globalized economy. It should absolutely be better funded and even allowed to directly distribute data to the public and industry. NOAA and NASA et al could be given 10x their current allocation of tax money and you and I would still be getting a great deal.
So, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity?
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
Making the data available is non-trivial no matter who does it. There were many, many exabytes of this data a decade ago and countless petabytes of new data is generated every day. How to manage this has been an open question for a long time.
In practice access has always been restricted to this "public" data because there is not remotely enough bandwidth, either network or storage, to give everyone a copy of the data that may want it. They often don't even have enough capacity for internal users. A lot of it also sits in offline or near-line archival formats due to the scale of the data.
This is a general problem for data models of this type. You need to compute on the data in-situ or it won't scale but virtually no one can build that type of infrastructure at the scale required for these data models. It would also be extremely expensive to build and operate.
I'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.
There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!
They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.
Making money requires accurate information about the world. For example I was just learning about how farmers hire scientists to grade chicken feed. They are incentived by their own profit to get good information about grain quality they wish to purchase.
Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function
Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!
I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.