"At least 10 sites have suspended or limited weather balloon launches because of the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Weather Service."
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/weather-balloon...
If we don't get these people out and revert all they did there won't be much of a future for this country that isn't becoming another failed economy with a few places being a little bit better than the others. The US will be a third world country soon.
It took me a while to realize there’s just less money to be made when the system actually works.
One of the reason for governments to exist is to deliver services to the communities that, by essence, should not be seen as primarily a source of revenue, but enabling communities to thrive in order to generate an environment where the generation of wealth for the community is facilitated.
And tell me how actually efficient and cost saving having many entities that have as sole mission to generate profit really helped (take a look at privatisation of any entities that were of public interest and the good that it did long term... Spoilers It didn't...)
Maybe they were just too good and now everyone thinks this is easy and every single other country works like this with weather service. I'm in florida and I know i'm fucked this hurricane season.
Government weather data is exactly the kind of thing that should be private.
You guys rock! Big fan
I gotta say, though, these days I'm used these announcements all being "Two-month old FooBar startup announces $850M angel round at a $38B valuation"
No one should fund this.
The pro case for privatisation (that I happen to believe in) is: you were paying for it anyway, via your tax dollars, having it private leads to competition and stronger incentives to improve/cut costs meaning it will net cost you less.
I'm fine if they want to make new weather balloons and sell them to people to launch for whatever reason they want. Selling what by law should be public data is anathema.
It is not like this company is going to take over the management of weather balloons you have already paid for. Or I don't know how you imagine this is going to work.
> This is not privatization in the way that you seem to think it is.
Can you tell me more about how you think it is?
What do you think taxes are? Do we pay taxes once and that's it?
So, put another way, is it better for the government to continue going into debt to operate projects like this with potentially dubious returns - or better to allow the private industry to find a way to operate it instead?
Yes. The government is not a business. It does not need to turn a profit. Government services are not products for the generation of profit.
There is a difference between the government operating programs with tax dollars and operating programs with fantasy money that ultimately hurts every single citizen.
And, “dubious returns” ignores that some of the highest-leverage investments in history looked like this. Government-funded satellite weather programs, GPS, and early internet tech weren’t obviously profitable, but I'm so glad we wasted tax dollars on that.
Past tense. You could say that you have already paid for something where the cost is largely up-front. Like for example you could say it for the aircraft carriers. Imagine that (ad absurdum) the administration would want to sink all aircraft carriers. Then you, or Huslage, could rightfully say “I have already paid for the aircraft carriers…”. You could complain that your tax dollars are being wasted by sinking them.
But with a recurring cost like weather balloons the same sentence doesn’t make sense. There you could say “I have been paying for those balloons” (for which presumably you got the data you wanted from the balloons). Once they no longer are launching them, you are no longer paying for them. (Modulo some stock remaining on the warehouse shelves I guess. But that is basically a rounding error in a government budget.)
What Huslage said makes sense if they think of the weather balloons as a large up-front cost, like an aircraft carrier. Huslage already paid for them and now they won’t be used anymore! What a waste! But in reality it is more like a recurring cost. Like for example if the pentagon had a Netflix account and now they are canceling it. You wouldn’t say “I ALREADY paid for the netflix account”. You haven’t “already paid” for it. You were paying for it up until now, and you won’t be paying for it from now on.
There are many great reasons for why it is a good idea for the government to keep launching weather balloons. Huslage “already paid for it” is not one of those great reasons. It demonstrates a misunderstanding of how weather balloons work.
But do change my mind. Why do you think it matters that taxes too are recurring? How does that make the weather balloons “already paid”?
Weather reporting is a common good. It worked very well for pennies and benefitted the economy greatly. Why privatize it?
About 30% of Americans get (NWS) weather data for free. They pay no income tax yet receive the same level of public benefits. On the other hand, a handful of Americans pay millions for weather data, and receive the same thing as those who paid nothing.
For a private service though, it would just be $20/mo or whatever for everyone.
On the matter of taxes being proportional to income, I'm not going to argue about progressive taxation or any moralistic standpoint of proportional taxation. From purely a utility standpoint, those handful of people probably reap way more value from that NWS data being available. The richest people (those paying the millions for NWS) usually are that rich from the labor of others, and those labor forces all get value from the data to help plan their days, including getting to the workplace safely. Another even more direct use for the economy would be routing of trucks through snowy passes, or planning for large construction companies.
Nothing else you said is wrong, I'm just saying that government services are effectively progressively priced based on income.
Looking around, the exact number is quite hard to pin down because of the definition of it, but ~30% is probably a very fair estimate based on https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/tpc-number-those-who-dont...
I agree that weather data should be public but I don’t see why we should restrict innovation in the private market if there is demand for it.
Also more generally, I see no issue in the government outsourcing work to a competitive private market wherever possible.
The current regime has upended that process and has created a situation where the government has no choice but to outsource data gathering to third parties. This is corruption and not in the spirit or the letter of the law.
This startup is attempting to take advantage of an illegal situation which is just ridiculous.
I'm happy if they want to sell fancy weather balloons to anyone that they want, even the government, but selling data back to the government that should be already collecting the data in the first place BY LAW is just corrupt.
And the government already buys the helium, radiosondes, and ground systems from private vendors—so the money’s going to private industry anyway. It’s just inefficient.
With 50 of our systems doing 4 profiles a day (which is no where close to max scale), you get the same volume of data for way less. And on top of that, because we reach remote and oceanic areas that aren’t being measured today, the data is also more valuable!
Also, the data you’re referring to isn’t inherently public domain. It becomes public when the government buys it and redistributes it. That’s true whether they pay for the infrastructure themselves or buy the data directly from a company.
My problem is with baseline services that have already been stopped that you claim to want to replace. This data feeds all of our weather models and should be done with existing infrastructure until congress changes things. The data must be freely available.
The fact is that the data is available for anyone anywhere and is a valuable resource for scientists everywhere. Your current goals might be laudable right now, but that is not going to be the case when you have to pay back an investor 100x in 5 years. You will do everything you can to lock that data up and make it as expensive as you can. You will have no choice.
Sorcerer fits perfectly into the existing framework of the weather, water, and climate enterprise (WWCE). They produce complementary data and ensure that the government has access to it - even if the government must procure it (which they're happy to do - no one expects that these companies should give away all their data, gratis). But they could potentially greatly extend the core global synoptic observation system that powers conventional numerical weather prediction, especially for organizations which are more flexible and can work with broader data sources.
This is the WWCE working well. The real concern is on ensuring continuity - making sure innovative companies like Sorcerer can persist, in perpetuity if necessary (or at least the data products they collect and produce).
[1]: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/10610/fair-weather...
At this rate, we'll soon see YC startups raising money to maintain roads.
That model has existed for hundreds of years. It's called a turnpike. There were hundreds of them in the US and UK. [0] Many still exist today.
[0] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/turnpikes-and-toll-roads-in-nine...
ChrisArchitect•1d ago
Launch HN: Sorcerer (YC S24) – Weather balloons that collect more data
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41291219