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Comment by ano-ther | Hacker News Reader

And even the companies who are supposed to provide this “cheaper and more accurate“ vehemently object to it:

https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-su...

WTF is that press release. It says that "AccuWeather does not support Project 2025 Plan to fully commercializing NWS operations" and that "NOAA has critical role in American Weather Enterprise", but then it follows by basically saying "NOAA is just one of 190 inputs for us, NWS suuuuuuuucks; we're proud to be collaborating with them because we're better than them at everything; look ma', we have AI and Superior Accuracy™."

This is not a statement of support, it's a fucking ad. There's no actual "vehemently objecting" - in fact, between the lines, it basically says they don't think disbanding NOAA (as per Project 2025) is necessary - just cutting down to bare minimum will suffice.

My reading between the lines is that AccuWeather realizes that NOAA and NWS are golden geese which give them very cheap access to high quality data, and that if those were privatized, they'd probably have to pay more for that kind of data.

You're right that it doesn't read like they care as much about the public's ability to be directly able to access that data; They're just aware that if the taxpayer is funding it, they're going to be demanding some sort of access, and since a lot of that raw data still needs to be 'digested' to make sense to the average person, it's not a big deal if the raw data is publicly available. And anyone that tries to also commercialize it to compete can be crushed by their Superior Accuracy(tm).

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