Senate Bill S.786 could kill NWS internet weather products

Matt Whiting wrote:
Blueskies wrote:




This could end up like things in Russia. Public money funded
resources are deemed too inefficient to be run by the
government, so the assets are put up for bid to private companies.
The private company acquires the asset, and then
sells the service to the public.Very bad idea for the NWS, very
bad idea for our freeways, very bad idea for our
airways...

I'm not sure it is all that bad. I think if most "public" services
were
provided by a free enterprise system, then we'd get a lot more in
aggregate for our money.

Probably so for some services, I dunno about most. In the instant
case, it is not feasible for private concerns to operate the weather
bureau infrastructure, inclusing constellations of weather satellites
and so on. There is also a need for consistant (preferably high)
quality and availabllity from the standpoint of public saftey.

The proposal would not significantly reduce the goernment's costs,
but would significantly reduce the public benefit. Not good.

A similar program during the Reagan era privatized much of the
Landsat data, after the Governement had paid for the programs
to obtain and archive it. The result was that it was priced
beyond reach of a lot of researchers. Oil companies could
afford it though.


It all comes down to what is less costly, the waste in government or
the
profit margin that a private enterprise would require. If the
private
enterprise is efficient enough that it can make a profit and still
cost
less than a government agency, then it is a good deal overall.


Not in the instant case. The government would still have all
the expense of operating a weather service--then a private concern
would get to sell the fruits of that tax money. E.g. Corporate
Welfare without even the meager benefits that something like a
subsidized sports stadium brings a community.

The proper and effective way to privatize services of this sort
is to put the operational support for the service up for competative
bidding by prospective contractors and NOT by privatizing the data
themselves.

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FF