Beware: here there be idiots.
Pennsylvania’s junior senator, Rick Santorum, has introduced a bill which, if passed, would keep the National Weather Service from publishing weather reports for free, thus making it the sole provenance of commerical outlets like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel.
Can you believe this quote?
Barry Myers, AccuWeather’s executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.
“The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people’s lives and property,” said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, “It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of ‘warm and sunny.’”
Never mind the fact that, in order for them to devote their efforts to weather-related disasters the NWS still has to forecast data. And, since that data is all computer generated, it is trivial to place that data on a webserver. I would bet next weeks’ paycheck that the NWS doesn’t come close to spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” making the data available.
So, if the government provides something for free, and it cuts into for-profit ventures, it must be stopped?
Like I said: idiots.
UPDATED: s/NOAA/NWS/g (um, I made a mistake). Also, read more about this on O’Reilly Radar, in which a commenter offers up this:
“The publicly available NWS weather products and services are a shining example of how government should be serving the people. To allow greedy and well-heeled commercial interests to shutter any of NWS’ public operations would be nothing short of criminal.”
Oh, in case you want to look up this execreble piece of wannabe legislation on THOMAS, it’s S. 786, aka “The National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005”. As of this writing, it’s been referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Now would be a good time to contact the membership of the committee.