[mchusma]

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.

[bumby]

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.

[strictnein]

The government already does that.

   https://api.weather.gov/ 
   https://www.noaa.gov/nodd/datasets
   https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/

etc etc etc

[ordersofmag]

I think the point is that there has been a push to move away from this data continuing to be available from these sources.

[counters]

There has not.

[ordersofmag]

Attempts have been made starting back in 2005 https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-bill/786...

[counters]

And I dare you to find another attempt in the intervening 20 years.

Santorum's bill was laughed out of Washington. It stands alone.

[counters]

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).

[groundzeros2015]

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?

[bumby]

I don’t follow. I would rather the government manage the API, like what NOAA does/did.

[groundzeros2015]

So then we are subsidizing Google’s outsized usage of that API?

[simonw]

Is this really an expensive problem to solve?

Give Google a continuous feed of the weather data which they cache locally. I can't imagine that being a particularly expensive thing to operate - no need to reply to an API call from Google every time someone searches for "weather".

[groundzeros2015]

That sounds like the arrangement you said we have. The government provides data to private companies who then mass distribute it in various forms because those costs and needs vary.

[bumby]

As long as it’s properly addressed to avoid abuse, I don’t have a problem with private companies and individual citizens both benefiting. You could easily put rate limits if you think it’s a major issue while still maintaining the free service for smaller users. I personally don’t like the privatization of profits while also maintaining the narrative that companies don’t benefit from public works.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Sure, why not. No problem.

That's a good example of how government open data can support both people and business.

[crote]

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!

[monodeldiablo]

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.

[hvb2]

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

[sethherr]

But why?

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.

[jandrewrogers]

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.

[toomuchtodo]

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.

[bestouff]

Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.

[counters]

Biased about what?

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!

[jandrewrogers]

Companies spend a lot of money to remove and repair the idiosyncratic bias that already exists in this data.

[groundzeros2015]

Private companies don’t care about having accurate data?

Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?

[throwaway_7274]

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.

[groundzeros2015]

And governments don’t face bad incentives that would cause them to hide information?

[munk-a]

Let's have the government collect the data and private companies can engage in that as well if they wish - both parties can call the other out if there's a discrepancy.

IMO the government's incentives are generally better aligned with truth telling but there are reasons[1] that independent studies may still catch the government out.

1. Famously, up here in Canada, Stephen Harper suppressed accurate dissemination of climate data during his administration that was only really discovered through independent analysis.

[groundzeros2015]

I would characterize it as the things the government would lie about are different than the things a company would lie about.

[throwaway_7274]

They do. Often for different kinds of things. It’s not “government good, private bad” or the other way around. Both are facile views.

[groundzeros2015]

Agreed. Different organizations with different incentives. Neither of them have the privileged or an unbiased view.

[bumby]

Depends if the accuracy is counter to profit. Not to say governments don’t have their own biased incentives, but they tend to be of a different kind.

[bestouff]

Private companies care way more about making money.

[groundzeros2015]

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.

[bumby]

You can make even more money if you make sure you have accurate data while your competitors do not.

[autoexec]

> Making money requires accurate information about the world.

A company may have accurate information that their product causes cancer, but they aren't going to tell you that. They'll outright lie and say it doesn't, hire scientists to create fake research to "prove" that it's safe, and harass, threaten, and discredit anyone who tries to tell the public the truth.

[munk-a]

This is probably an inopportune time to make that argument with Polymarket openly lying about their "truth telling machine" and paying influencers under the table to drive engagement.

[autoexec]

Private companies care ONLY about making money.

[estearum]

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.

[Terr_]

> 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.