
Trump’s pick for NOAA chief causes a storm - smacktoward
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/12/trump-noaa-chief-accuweather-barry-myers-243735
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ams6110
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument. On the one hand, weather and
forecast data that are collected and produced by the National Weather Service
(a taxpayer funded entity) should be available to the people.

However the development of consumer/end-user services, such as weather apps
for smartphones, seems to me more properly done by the private sector (by
which I do NOT exclude open-source projects).

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existencebox
If you read TFA though, the ambiguity you're citing doesn't seem to be the
line they're waffling over.

The santorum bill the new NOAA chief supported in the past was pretty explicit
about allowing _no_ competitive service, which would allow them to preclude
even the most basic data sharing.

We've shown during the last N crises that american weather forecasting is
already notably behind european models, and our lack of proper prediction and
information dissemination has been very visible over the last decade of storm
recoveries of varying success. I simply don't see the private sector
incentives that would lead to fixing this, and see the competition argument as
just another avenue to allow existing corporations to extract profit from even
the most basic aspects of human safety.

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creaghpatr
You see what they did there?

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medecau
Nope, it's too foggy.

