[HN Gopher] Weather Service faces bandwidth shortage, proposes l...
___________________________________________________________________
Weather Service faces bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key
data
Author : scott_s
Score : 106 points
Date : 2020-12-10 12:49 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| h2odragon wrote:
| The NWS radar web interface is one those great examples of a
| government service done right. They've been working on an
| upgraded version, the public deployment was just pushed back a
| week. The new stuff appears much more bandwidth intensive,
| especially since "shared cache" is dead.
|
| https://preview-radar.weather.gov/ still seems to be getting
| assets off arcgis.com ; surely theres room for a public map
| server that can stand this traffic?
|
| I haven't looked at the code; I suspect its amenable to hacking
| up one's own views.
| ashtonbaker wrote:
| That site breaks the "back" button for me pretty badly. Small
| complaint, though - I really love the new UI.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| xemoka wrote:
| Huh, made with Vue/Vuex + map via VueLayers (OpenLayers
| wrapper). Actual radar data is coming from a geoserver at
| https://preview-opengeo.ncep.noaa.gov/geoserver/
|
| AGOL (ArcGIS Online) is only providing the basemap and layer
| overlays (state boundaries etc), those probably come from
| Esri's "public" data portal and I doubt are part of the
| bandwidth issue.
| esaym wrote:
| I think the new site is horrible and bloated and slow. I've
| been using their multi sensor page for a couple of years now
| and think it is much better:
| https://mrms.nssl.noaa.gov/qvs/product_viewer/
| destitude wrote:
| Completely agree. They are even using tiles for the radar
| image which makes it look awful and blocky because they don't
| all load properly.. unlike the local radar of current version
| which is the entire image of that radar site.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yup. I can't even access the new version. I've attempted to
| email them asking if they'd keep the _perfect_ content-centric
| HTML-as-a-document site up but never received any responses.
| tyingq wrote:
| Opportunity for Cloudflare or some other CDN?
| jrnichols wrote:
| Or.. isn't this exactly what we had "Internet2" for in the
| first place?
|
| Universities used to host a LOT of stuff. Can't they pick up
| some of the traffic again?
|
| Offer data centers/hosting providers a tax incentive to help
| out?
|
| I don't have all the answers, but "whatever Accuweather wants"
| is probably not the right decision.
| agent86 wrote:
| I am by no means an expert in this space, but this was my first
| thought as well.
|
| A government agency with bipartisan support and positive public
| image seems like a good entity for Cloudflare, Google, Amazon,
| Microsoft or someone else with infrastructure and bandwidth to
| be a white knight for.
| zetazzed wrote:
| This is a great time to check out Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk
| (https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-
| Lewis/dp/132400264...), which does a deep dive into NOAA, the
| weather service, and the wretched attempts to strangle the
| usefulness of this public service while keeping it alive enough
| to act as a massive subsidy to accuweather and related bottom
| feeders. It should disgust both libertarians and proponents of
| active government, and really anyone paying attention.
| Accuweather wants NWS to do all the forecasting work but then
| funnel all the data through Accu and a few other private hands,
| who of course want to profit from this data but not pay for it.
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| Charge AccuWeather by the megabyte. Problem solved.
| jmount wrote:
| Likely this is on purpose. I remember some congressman (PA's Rick
| Santorum?) trying to forbid the US Weather Service from sharing
| weather reports/forecasts so a partner of his would have a better
| market to sell the same service into.
| jdc wrote:
| John Oliver did an episode on this chicanery last year.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8
| pavedwalden wrote:
| 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.
| plantain wrote:
| I've suggested multiple times to them and even offered to help
| them setup HTTP BitTorrent to reduce the loads, but there's just
| no actual interest in solving the problem...
| dsr_ wrote:
| The actual cost of a solution is tiny.
|
| (Use four different CDNs.)
|
| The political motivation is to portray the government as
| incapable of doing anything other than defense, so that the
| functions can be outsourced to the private sector.
|
| Expect a solution to appear shortly after the regime changes.
| chrismeller wrote:
| You still have to pay for those CDNs. If you think this is a
| red/blue issue you haven't been following along, though.
|
| Obama allocated funds specifically for satellites, but reduced
| the operating budget [1]. Trump actually increased funding for
| several areas as part of the stopgap funding in 2018,
| particularly for satellites [2].
|
| There are other examples over the decades of course, but
| something that seems to be a trend is the specificity.
| Satellites are flashy and exciting and get funding from
| politicians. Servers? Meh... why don't they just get a couple
| extra machines? My laptop is fast as hell and only cost like
| $600. Bandwidth? Why don't they just get whatever internet I
| have at home? That costs like $100/m and the Por-- I mean the
| CNBC videos start immediately.
|
| 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-
| gang/po... 2: https://qz.com/1204034/noaa-trump-signed-a-bill-
| that-gives-m...
| cobookman wrote:
| This why I'm so excited about Cloud in the public sector. Its
| so easy to defer upgrades on a server fleet, even though it
| might cost someone more money later on.
|
| The Public Cloud provides a monthly expense that just becomes
| part of the operation budget.
|
| It's exciting to think about the innovation to government
| services as an end-result.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The people who want to wreck the NWS don't want it outsourced
| to them. They still want the government to pay for producing
| all of the weather data and forecasts, then they want the
| government to designate them the exclusive distributor of that
| information so they can charge whatever they want.
| ris wrote:
| Timely reminder that S3 buckets support BitTorrent natively.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I've noticed weather.gov/<ZIP> has gotten slow recently.
|
| Which is a shame; it's a light website serving a dense block of
| reasonably formatted data that used to be super snappy.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| > According to companies that draw large amounts of this data,
| the proposed limit will substantially harm the services they
| provide to customers. The possible negative effect on forecasts
| has also raised concerns among congressional lawmakers.
|
| Well then maybe they should be paying for more efficient feeds
| instead of querying _more than once per second for a sustained
| duration_? Really? In what world did anyone think a good solution
| to ANY problem was "query a website over 60 times per minute
| continuously"???
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Users are accessing data in high volumes, especially during
| unusual weather events, which brings down the services. Is there
| something I'm not understanding about the problem here with
| bandwidth? Does cloudflare or another CDN for this stuff really
| cost an amount hard to include in the budget for such an
| essential public service?
|
| Or, shit, can cloudflare just go and donate this to the
| government? It would be pretty good publicity for them and
| probably not a huge cost on their scale.
|
| What am I missing? This seems ridiculous that the USA cannot
| afford to provide this high-value public service. When did we
| become a two-bit country when I didn't notice?
| chrismeller wrote:
| "The Weather Service's proposed remedy is to limit users to 60
| connections per minute on a large number of its websites that
| provide weather observations, forecasts, warnings, computer model
| data, air quality information, aviation weather support and ocean
| conditions."
|
| Well that sounds incredibly reasonable _in general_ , but it
| completely depends upon what type of interface they're providing.
| Do you have to query all of those things separately for every
| locality you serve?
|
| Honestly, this is why so many big companies still prefer things
| that HN would call "stupid" like an FTP drop of a file 5 times
| per day/hour/etc.
|
| Every FTP implementation I've ever seen has included either
| checking the timestamp, timestamping the filename and filtering
| on that, or moving to an "archive" folder after processing. Most
| of the API implementations I see ignore the fact that HEAD
| requests exist, cache headers can and should be used, etc.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Still, it's not 1971 anymore. Can we move to SFTP at least?
| adamcstephens wrote:
| Move to SFTP requires you to use authentication and increases
| load on the backend servers.
| chrismeller wrote:
| Heh. Well, perhaps, but for public data it doesn't really
| matter in general, does it?
|
| Just like that installer you just downloaded off the
| internet, did you check the md5/sha to make sure it wasn't
| tampered with? Just because it was over HTTPS doesn't really
| mean much.
| blantonl wrote:
| I think there are two key solutions for a resolution here:
|
| 1) CDNs are a tried a true method for getting content closer to
| the end user, properly cached, and for less cost.
|
| 2) Expose more services that NOAA and the NWS delivers as APIs.
| If you are providing services for the public good where the
| consumers are just scraping Web pages to gather the necessary
| data and content, then you are doing it wrong. It sounds to me
| like they are serving more API type content over Web pages than
| they are Web content to Web consumers.
|
| I don't want to second guess the NWS/NOAA technical architects,
| because I know they are probably doing the best they can. Someone
| simply needs to communicate these goals and solutions to the
| political appointees...
| tinus_hn wrote:
| I'm not sure if you can get a CDN for an ftp service. Certainly
| not as easy as you can for an http service.
| [deleted]
| pridkett wrote:
| This has been done for decades - long before HTTP took over
| as the standard we had sites like ftp.cdrom.com and
| ftp.kernel.org. Usually this is done by using a DNS that
| either is localized to your or round robin DNS. There were
| many times when I remember logging into ftp.kernel.org and
| being surprised that I was connected to a server in Finland,
| Europe, or Japan. Wasn't the smartest thing, but with more
| advanced DNS services, it certainly seems possible.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Yeah it's not difficult to implement. The question is, are
| there offerings that are as easy to set up like Cloudflare?
|
| If you implement it yourself you still have to set up
| geographically distributed servers and a syncing system, as
| opposed to registering an account and changing a pointer in
| DNS.
| nitrogen wrote:
| That just looks like a bunch of mirrors behind a round robin
| DNS.
| cratermoon wrote:
| A CDN is a bunch of mirrors behind a round robin DNS, just
| with more steps.
| jenkstom wrote:
| A scatter / gather / peering protocol makes a lot more sense.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Isn't this one of the services where Trump appointed a guy who
| runs a private, for profit, that wants to offer the same data for
| cash to lead it?
| pbourke wrote:
| Yes, the former CEO of AccuWeather was appointed but not
| confirmed to lead NOAA. He was not a scientist and had spent
| years attempting to undermine the agency from the outside.
|
| He also, in keeping with tradition for Trump appointees, was
| involved with various scandals.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's unfortunate that your comment is downvoted for simply
| stating relevant facts.
| forgotAgain wrote:
| I've had some experience dealing with the Weather Service when
| trying to develop a weather app using
| https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api#. It was a
| frustrating experience and my initial impulse was to vent about
| that. But I'm choosing not to do that mainly because it seemed at
| the time that every person that I dealt with at NWS was trying to
| do the best they could.
|
| The situation that NWS is facing is basically that massive tax
| cuts coupled with growth in defense and social programs has left
| most other areas of the federal government hollowed out. The
| amount of money needed to fix the problem being discussed here is
| minimal but after decades of budget cuts across non-defense and
| non social-welfare programs there is simply little left to invest
| in improving services.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25375739 -
|
| >>> The Weather Service held a public forum Tuesday to discuss
| the proposal and answer questions. When asked about the
| investment in computing infrastructure that would be required
| for these limits to not be necessary, agency officials said a
| one-time cost of about $1.5 million could avert rate limits.
| The NOAA budget for fiscal 2020 was $5.4 billion.
|
| They do, in fact, appear to have the money.
| xxpor wrote:
| How many of those dollars are going to satellites and Doppler
| radars? Those aren't exactly cheap.
| forgotAgain wrote:
| > They do, in fact, appear to have the money.
|
| $5.4 billion is indeed a huge number but gives no information
| as to the availability of the $1.5 million. Without knowing
| what the cost is of what they must accomplish with the $5.4
| billion no conclusions can be drawn.
| blakesterz wrote:
| Jonathan Porter, a vice president and general manager at the
| private forecasting firm AccuWeather, warns that the agency's
| proposed solution would harm the timeliness and accuracy of
| forecasts and severe weather warnings. He said the collection,
| processing and distribution of weather information are the
| agency's "most important services."
|
| That's an interesting quote coming from AccuWeather...
| https://citizentruth.org/the-politics-behind-the-movement-to...
|
| "Richard Hirn, an employee who represents the National Weather
| Service's Employee Organization, told Bloomberg, "We fear that he
| [Barry Lee Myers] wants to turn the weather service into a
| taxpayer-funded subsidiary of AccuWeather.""
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| AccuWeather is in the business of spreading FUD about the NWS.
| They are directly responsible for the current level of
| underfunding for their digital products.
| dboreham wrote:
| The underlying problem is a big one, that drives much of what's
| bad about the world today: there's no way to charge for internet
| services.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| There is, but it has its own downsides. Also, charging for
| internet services would have the effect of cementing the
| monopolies: why pay $5 for signal and $5 for mastodon when I
| can pay $5 for Facebook and get both?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| NWS could push the data commercial users want into a requestor
| pays S3 bucket. Archived/historical data could be rate limited,
| and made available for free (and I'd probably upload it into
| the Internet Archive for good measure).
|
| There is a solid case that citizens requesting weather data
| should have such requests fulfilled at no or minimal cost,
| similar to GPS services (a public good) or FOIA requests. The
| government _does_ charge user fees for some commercial services
| (IRS tax transcripts for income verification, for example).
|
| EDIT: Please take the time to submit a comment on this issue
| [1] (last page of the pdf, December 18th deadline).
|
| [1]
| https://www.weather.gov/media/notification/pdf2/pns20-85ncep...
| tjohns wrote:
| > There is a solid case that citizens requesting weather data
| should have such requests fulfilled at no or minimal cost,
| similar to GPS services (a public good) or FOIA requests.
|
| I totally agree that weather data should be provided for free
| as a public service. The NWS is one of the true gems of the
| US government.
|
| That said, this view isn't universally shared. Many other
| countries' meteorology services charge for access to data -
| especially if you want access to the raw model output. Most
| famously, the US's GFS output is provided for free while the
| EU's ECMWF output requires a paid subscription.
|
| If open access to weather data is something that's important
| to you, please make your voice heard!
| xxpor wrote:
| The EU has the ability to copyright things in general,
| which is horribly wrong IMO.
|
| This is one of the few areas I'll defend the US to the
| bitter end on. Content produced by a government can not be
| morally copyrighted. The funding comes from the people, and
| therefore the copyright belongs to them too. Another way of
| putting it is the public domain and government copyright
| are the same thing logically.
| sramsay wrote:
| I have written several command-line weather programs for
| different services -- many of which I had to abandon. For
| example, I wrote a popular one for Weather Underground that I had
| to retire because WU stopped allowing free access to their API.
|
| My latest effort is one that just deals with NWS/NOAA directly,
| and reading this article has me wondering if part of their
| bandwidth trouble is a product of the way their API works.
|
| The API is a huge set of _linked_ JSON documents. So it very
| often happens that a request for data is actually half-a-dozen
| requests through embedded URLs (all of which are made by the
| client one after the other). It 's all very logical in some ways,
| but at the same time a bit byzantine. I often wonder which entity
| is served by the way it's set up. From my perspective, it's
| easily the hardest API to work with. Weather Underground was
| wonderful, and so was Dark Sky (which I played with for awhile).
|
| I've had people over the years ask if one or another of my tools
| could be used for large scale or very rapid weather data
| collection, but all of the services I have worked with throttle
| connections exactly as NOAA is proposing. I suppose I'm at least
| relieved to hear that they're not restricting access by
| independent developers!
| rsync wrote:
| I'm curious - and perhaps you can help ...
|
| I hate wunderground - it is a giant, bloated mess of a website
| with a UI that jumps all over the place ...
|
| However, I can't find anyone else to give me a 10 day forecast.
| It seems like wunderground is the only place that collates it
| like that, which I like very much.
|
| Am I wrong ? Is there some other source for a proper, detailed,
| 10 day forecast ?
| nojito wrote:
| Weather gov provides a ton of extended forecasts.
|
| https://www.weather.gov/cae/FireWxextended.html
| AngryData wrote:
| Im in the same boat, their site performance has seem to just
| been getting worse over time and it is barely even functional
| on my phone, however I don't know of anyone else that
| condenses almost the entirety of a highly detailed 7+ day
| weather report into such a small and useful little graph with
| every detail you would want. What would take multiple pages
| worth of reporting is covered in a small graph the size of my
| hand.
|
| It was invaluable when I did outdoor work, everyone else was
| making guesses and extrapolations based on the shitty reports
| from different local news stations and radar and satellite
| maps, meanwhile I could tell exactly when a big storm would
| role through and if rain would be spotty or temperature
| swings with just a glance for multiple days ahead.
| nightski wrote:
| The NWS directly works well for me. Just type in the location
| in the upper left. I kind of appreciate the simplicity of
| their website.
|
| https://forecast.weather.gov/
| wtallis wrote:
| Could you be a bit more specific and demonstrate how to get
| a 10-day forecast out of that URL?
| drtillberg wrote:
| Accuweather will give you a 3 _month_ forecast! I had to
| blink a few times to make sure I got that right. Their
| existing long term forecast goes to March 10, 2021.
|
| https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/boston/02108/march-
| weather...
| anon2376 wrote:
| Spire Global does a 10 day forecast.
|
| https://developers.wx.spire.com/docs/weather-api/1/overview
| falcolas wrote:
| Here's the real story, to my mind:
|
| >>> The Weather Service held a public forum Tuesday to discuss
| the proposal and answer questions. When asked about the
| investment in computing infrastructure that would be required for
| these limits to not be necessary, agency officials said a one-
| time cost of about $1.5 million could avert rate limits. The NOAA
| budget for fiscal 2020 was $5.4 billion.
|
| Buchanan, however, stated the actual cost to address the issue
| would be higher because the $1.5 million "would comprise just one
| component of what has to be a multifaceted solution."
|
| The officials at the forum also said that senior management at
| the Weather Service was aware of the relatively small cost of
| addressing the issue but that the agency faced "competing
| priorities." <<<
|
| So, the cost to fix would be peanuts, but it's "not a priority".
| Sounds like pretty typical corporate bureaucracy against
| improving infrastructure and efficiency until they're forced to.
|
| Using their numbers, it'd still only something like .2% of their
| budget, if the cost was 10x the $1.5m figure.
| [deleted]
| jfrunyon wrote:
| No, the real story is that "we could slap a band-aid on it for
| $1.5 million, but that would only work for a little while, so
| why would we bother?"
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Remember with NOAA and NWS you always have GOP pressure
| originating from Accuweather, which really wants to be a the
| gatekeeper for this data.
|
| Over the years they have attacked the NWS web properties in
| particular (Rick Santorum was their attack dog a few years
| back) as their business of selling graphics to TV stations has
| declined along with traditional TV.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-
| s-p...
| e40 wrote:
| I don't care who you voted for, this should make every
| American really, really mad.
| falcolas wrote:
| Well, not if you don't understand how hard accurate
| weather forecsts are to get, or why a private entity
| couldn't do better. After all, that's why the news shows
| have weathermen, right?!
|
| And if the NOAA goes away, the government becomes
| smaller, and their taxes go down, right?
|
| :/
|
| EDIT: Dear downvoters - while this is not my opinion,
| this _is_ how people think, what people believe. Dismiss
| it at your own risk.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| No. The news shows have weathermen so that they have a
| presentable face on the data they get from the NWS.
| krapp wrote:
| Some weather forecasters are just "presentable faces."
| But some are actual meteorologists who try to put effort
| into interpreting that data.
|
| I used to work at a tv station and the Actual
| Meteorologists were _very_ particular about not being
| confused with the "weather people."
| jschwartzi wrote:
| NWS is an amazing resource for pre-trip planning for a
| variety of different people. I frequently consult it for
| weather forecasts prior to hiking. I'm not sure a company
| like Accuweather could provide me with access to such
| great forecasts or sensor data as NWS does given how
| reliant they are on NWS data themselves.
|
| The other problem here is that Accuweather charges huge
| fees for access to their forecasts and I'm not sure that
| I, as a private citizen, could afford that. So my choices
| go from pay a little bit of tax to get access to high-
| quality, reliable weather forecasts and warnings, to
| being totally unable to get access to this information
| without paying exorbitant fee. Or alternatively just not
| knowing these things and having to pay higher insurance
| costs for my ignorance.
|
| This is a really good example of how making government
| smaller makes a lot of peoples' lives much crappier.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _I don 't care who you voted for, this should make
| every American really, really mad._
|
| There exists a certain group of people that think private
| sector and The Market(tm) should handle many/most/all
| things. Do you want to guess which political party those
| people tend to associate with?
|
| Also, should we be more or less mad about this than
| someone trying to overturn fair elections like is
| happening now? Do you want to guess which political party
| is trying to do that? Do you want to guess if it's the
| same political party which believes in The Market(tm)?
|
| So you may not think it matters who people voted for, and
| that this _should_ be a universal feeling... but that 's
| not what reality is. Do you know what other things
| _should_ have universal consensus?
|
| * Taking a pandemic seriously.
|
| * Climate change.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Both sides!!111/s
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > The NWS was giving away forecasts on its website, radio
| stations, and elsewhere, when businesses such as
| AccuWeather charged its clients for theirs--never mind that
| AccuWeather relied on the service's free data to formulate
| its own predictions. Santorum agreed that commercial
| weather companies deserved protection.
|
| Corruption at its finest.
| JPKab wrote:
| I'm not arguing with this view, but I want to emphasize, that
| as someone who once worked in the Federal sector in numerous
| different agencies, that they waste tremendous amounts of
| money on things that have nothing to do with their core
| mission. The Pentagon is obviously horrendous, but other
| agencies that I expected to be better stewards of their
| dollars (EPA, DoE, IRS, and yes, NOAA) were horrifically
| wasteful, on dozens of fronts.
|
| The hiring is always a problem, even when there isn't a
| hiring freeze, but they don't fire enough lazy people, which
| demotivates hard workers who end up bailing for the private
| sector.
|
| As taxpayers, we should be furious at the GOP for the
| Accuweather bullshit, but we also need to be furious at any
| government agency which tolerates the level of fraud, waste,
| and abuse that most of these agencies perpertrate.
|
| As a person who happens to want universal healthcare like the
| NHS in Britain, it's infuriating to me that these agencies
| tolerate such constant mediocrity in their ranks (mixed in
| with the talented of course!!!) and are so bad with their
| spending efficiency.
|
| Bezos had something to say about the Seattle city government
| last year:
|
| "They don't have a revenue problem, they have a spending
| efficiency problem."
|
| It seems like we always get political about this, with one
| side wanting to "starve the beast" (as if government is this
| evil beast), and the other side just always letting them get
| away with the excuse that they need more revenue.
|
| Where are the people who BELIEVE in government that will
| demand that it be efficient?
|
| Edit:
|
| I love how people think that because corporations are
| inefficient, they assume that all organizations are equally
| ad inefficient as the US Federal Govt. The rate at which
| people are involuntarily terminated in the Fed Gov is far,
| far too low, because incompetence is routinely tolerated
| where it wouldn't otherwise be anywhere else. Why? Not
| because a person's supervisor in the Fed doesn't recognize
| the incompetence, but because the firing process is so
| difficult that they don't want to or can't expend the energy
| to do so. If you want government to have a bigger role in
| people's lives, but are so delusional as to not recognize how
| bad it is, then you aren't furthering your cause.
|
| The FDA still hasn't approved the Pfizer vaccine, while the
| NHS already did. Pfizer is an American company. That's a
| national embarrassment.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I find it funny when people think that big business isn't
| far more wasteful.
| cratermoon wrote:
| None of those inefficiencies are unique to government
| agencies. They all happen in the private sector two but you
| don't hear about them because corporations are not subject
| to an open records act. And that "oh but the free market
| will ensure inefficient companies fail" response some are
| about the write is total bs. Companies fail for all kinds
| of reasons, inefficiency is just one of several things and
| not always deadly to a corporation.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I've worked in both. Companies are dumb in different ways
| than government.
|
| Usually companies have better leadership and are more
| merciless with people. Unless they are unionized,
| problems get pushed out (unless they don't). Big
| companies waste lots of money on other things.
|
| Government agencies have by design a split between
| political/professional management. Sometimes that results
| in strange stuff. Also the programs in government are
| very meaningful -- legislation limits how money is spent,
| one unit or function may be drowning in funds, another
| may be dumpster diving.
|
| Companies waste money on things like exec compensation,
| marketing, etc.
| JPKab wrote:
| Have you ever worked in a Federal Government agency?
| verisimilidude wrote:
| I have. State government too. Also a couple BigCo orgs. I
| can confirm that all are absurdly wasteful. The
| incentives, culture, and flavor are different but the
| results are the same.
| ars wrote:
| Except that Obama reduced funding and Trump increased
| funding. So this is not exactly the way you're portraying.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376087
|
| And that bill you mentioned failed because the GOP did not
| support it. It was just the one congressman that wanted it.
| No one else agreed to join him. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/National_Weather_Service_Dut...
| makomk wrote:
| Errm, AccuWeather is one of the companies complaining about
| this proposal. From the article: "Jonathan Porter, a vice
| president and general manager at the private forecasting firm
| AccuWeather, warns that the agency's proposed solution would
| harm the timeliness and accuracy of forecasts and severe
| weather warnings. He said the collection, processing and
| distribution of weather information are the agency's "most
| important services.""
|
| Apparently not getting all that NWS weather data for free and
| then being abl to use it in their commercial weather
| forecasts would put a bit of a dent in their business model.
| Actually, I think commercial organisations like AccuWeather
| probably be the main ones affected; ordinary end users aren't
| going to be requesting large quantities of data.
| [deleted]
| cptskippy wrote:
| So NOAA and the NWS are playing 3D Chess against
| AccuWeather whose been loddying against them for years?
| Now, unless AccuWeather wants to start paying for the data
| they'll need to start lobbying for them... I love it.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > So, the cost to fix would be peanuts, but it's "not a
| priority"
|
| But there are probably thousands of things that cost only
| peanuts and aren't a priority. If you fix them all they add up
| to not peanuts and then you don't have any money left and you
| didn't even fix any priority tasks!
| _jal wrote:
| Because if there is one thing we know, government agencies
| are never captured and always have priorities well-aligned
| with the constituencies they serve.
|
| I do understand that the peanut gallery normally has very
| skewed, ignorant views of what complex agencies do. I also
| understand if you don't question, audit, and occasionally
| yell at them, they go bad and (at best) stop serving the
| people they're supposed to.
| falcolas wrote:
| Serving the public should always be a priority for a
| government institution. In the case of the weather,
| disseminating the forecasts is just as critical as making the
| forecasts in the first place.
|
| These forecasts directly affect everything from air travel to
| crop planting/harvesting to sea travel. They are _critical_
| for our economic (and citizen 's) ongoing health.
|
| And the internet, for better or worse, is the primary means
| of dissemination for the NOAA. Failing in this is failing at
| one of their greatest duties, IMO.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Instead, government institutions which are funded by
| government, now serve government as their main client.
| Public, which pays government, not institutions, is not a
| priority. Effectively government became an entity which is
| not serving the public but only itself.
| Retric wrote:
| The "problem" is if NOAA directly provides data to the
| general public then an entire ecosystem of companies that
| simply gather NOAA data and pass it along to the public
| suddenly lose money. Those companies then try very hard
| to limit distribution of NOAA data by NOAA while
| maximizing the government spending on accurate forecasts.
|
| It's got nothing to do with government supporting it's
| self and 100% to do with legislated corruption that's
| dependent on public officials playing their role.
| 2trill2spill wrote:
| NOAA already provides the data to the general public, its
| all there, so I'm not sure about the "if" in your first
| sentence.
| Retric wrote:
| It's possible to get NOAA data directly, but in terms of
| actual use it's very low, because of 'poor' execution.
| That's working as intended.
| falcolas wrote:
| Given that General Aviation uses NOAA weather data, that
| alone makes the NOAA data more useful than almost any
| other source. They also provide data to our fishing and
| ocean transport ships.
|
| And, it's been available to the public via the internet
| for at least two decades I know of at nws.noaa.gov (which
| now redirects to weather.gov).
|
| NOAA's data is a stupidly valuable resource, even
| discounting the resellers.
| kurthr wrote:
| I think you need to consider whether it is the public who
| should be served in the free market or well connected
| lobbyists who have been highly paid to corrupt the
| executive branch. The NWS will not serve the public with
| what they trivially could so that a private corporation can
| make (more) money filling that niche and continue
| supporting politicians and their friend's lifestyle. That
| is the crony-capitalist way and corporate first amendment
| rights to spend money any way they want shall not be
| abridged (by this Supreme Court).
|
| Stolen from a parallel thread:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-
| s-p...
| [deleted]
| jfrunyon wrote:
| We're not discussing serving the public, we're discussing
| serving for-profit companies who make money off of the
| NWS's data. Those are the only people this policy change
| would affect, not you or me going to the NWS website.
| Naac wrote:
| But out of those thousand things only this one made the news
| no? Doesn't it deserve some extra priority?
| mindslight wrote:
| Great way to drag the conversation into partisan territory of
| bickering over what can be obviously cut, and away from
| focusing on our shared problem of inappropriate penny
| pinching undermining services entirely!
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I didn't mention any political parties though? I didn't say
| anything could be cut though? What are you on about?
| mindslight wrote:
| >> _the cost to fix would be peanuts_
|
| > _If you fix them all they add up to not peanuts and
| then you don 't have any money left_
|
| The initial criticism is worthwhile in its original
| context (0.02% of the agency's budget). By scaling it up,
| you took it out of that context so that it runs up
| against worries about the total budget, implying a
| shortfall even though the argument is about the same
| 0.02%. The obvious answer to your comment is "well then
| it's easy to cut a little from $ELSEWHERE", which will
| inevitably devolve into overt zero-sum partisan
| bickering.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I think you're reading things I didn't write, there.
| mindslight wrote:
| No, I was just looking a step ahead. The only thing your
| original comment added was an appeal to destructive penny
| pinching that often accompanies popular fiscal
| conservatism.
|
| For context I'm personally against wasting money. But
| kneecapping an organization by tightening its purse
| strings such that it can't fulfill its function is itself
| a larger waste of money.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > But kneecapping an organization by tightening its purse
| strings
|
| I haven't seen anyone in this thread suggesting reducing
| their budget. You're coming out of nowhere arguing
| against things nobody said.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| So... what do YOU think can be cut to free up 0.02% of
| their budget?
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