AccuWeather to discontinue free access to Core Weather API

It's free like riding the monorail at Disney World is free; included in the cost of your entry ticket, and utterly inaccessible to anyone who has not paid.

It doesn’t work as well as they wanted and it has been subject to various exploits over the years from people figuring out how to fake the participation to extract rewards.

Famously, the British found x was "fewer cobras" and y was "cobra tails", the opposite of x being "the locals bred cobras to get money for cobra tails".

Make a citizen science weather station that's free, it's all fine. Make it paid, someone's going to grab satellite pics and generate from them plausible but not necessarily accurate simulated weather station data for everywhere to get that money.

It's the same thing with ad networks, most of the effort goes into verifying that an ad click was legitimate and not a bot. Or that classic story of when the British government tried to eliminate Cobras in India by paying a bounty for every dead cobra, which just led to people breeding more cobras.

Looks like it can be done with home assistant and then pushed up to collection locations, so I suspect things are pretty open

But I barely understand how shit works when you operate at Google scale.

I wonder how many "Android-ish" devices like maybe in car entertainment systems are out there and reporting all their telemetry data back to Google? I wonder how much "Android" is in vehicles with AndroidAuto, and whether that hardware typically has temperature and pressure sensors like phones do?

If I had, say, a billion cars sending me data that includes temp, location, and possibly some vehicle specific CANBUS type data - I'd guess there could possibly be a signal in there that could reliably report temps and pressures at locations, based on heuristics that identify cars parked outdoors.

Same with phones. At the scale of "every single Android phone on the planet", the left over after "the majority of phone that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature" still leaves a huge number of devices. I suspect even something stupidly simple like "What's the p99 low temperature of all the Android temp reports in a suburb?" might be a really good indicator, when "all the Android phones in a suburb" might be 10,000 devices or more?

We've just let the wrong sort of people control our communication infrastructure, set the messages disseminated by that infrastructure, and take power in a multi-pronged attack.

There's no reason there couldn't have been an FDR-esque strongman driven emulation of China's approach.

Instead we're blowing up the national debt, cutting services, dismantling soft power, destroying our scientific and academic infrastructure, and expanding the military.

Today we should be building subways, a hub and spoke high speed rail system, and an automated hub and spoke freight system that uses trucks only for first and last mile. And maybe a tunnel at the Bering straight.

This is a perfectly rational set of policies as far as these people are concerned. How else are we going to stop the Jewish space lasers?

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/meteorologists-threats...

The billionaire class are bilking the country for every cent its worth, and when everything finally crumbles they will move to the next country with a stable middle class and start the process all over again.

They do not care about these consequences because they have enough resources at their disposal to protect themselves while everyone else suffers.

It just so happens that weather is a phenomenon which affects all people and requires large, distributed, passive infrastructure to effectively manage. It's a classic case where the public option is bound to be more efficient in terms of absolute resource allocation.

On what basis do I assert that it's "bound" to be more efficient? Simple: weather affects the production, transportation, and logistics of virtually all goods. The costs of weather are therefore distributed equally across society regardless of government policy. Government is very good at delivering this specific type of centralized basic infrastructure in a cost-effective way (see also: roads), so if we're all paying for it together regardless this is a no-brainer policy.

Every American has an interest in seeing the weather for no cost. It's vital to business and recreation, not to mention safety. It absolutely makes sense for us to all pay a tiny amount.

Would having to change APIs every 17 months as providers change their terms, constantly having to deal with breaking changes, etc, etc, etc be a "better deal"? There's an advantage in stability, and that's one thing governments typically provide. Yes, you can argue "a private provider could provide stability... for a fee". Which works great until it turns out even the fee isn't enough to keep them around. And you have to switch providers. Again.

In the USA it was the case that, if the taxpayer paid for it, then it was free. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Thatcher government decided that it would be best if government agencies earned their keep. As a consequence, in the UK, weather data became chargeable. This meant that there was no growth of third party applications that built on Met Office data.

This became a market distortion with TV weather, where the BBC had their data from the Met Office whereas ITV had to use American data, with a specialist broadcaster - The Weather Department - providing the video inserts. The Weather Department eventually came into competition with the Met Office providing their own video inserts, so the marketplace was uncompetitive yet 'competitive'.

Compare with the BBC online news, which does not have to pay for itself in the same way that the mainstream news organisations such as The Guardian, The Telegraph et al. have to either go for paywalls or a smorgasbord of adverts. It is essentially impossible to compete against the BBC for news eyeballs online in the UK due to this competition model.

With weather you need two independent supercomputer outfits that crunch the numbers and come up with forecast data. Why two (or more)? Because forecast models can be wrong in ways that human forecasters can understand and work with. If there are two 'sources of truth' then you can use your gut to go with which one feels right.

Vast supercomputer outfits cost lots of money and, until recently, only a government of considerable size could pay for such an investment. The investment isn't just in the computers, you need a constant stream of meteorologists that can work with the data, so that means one or more universities with the specialism. In the UK we have Reading, that is the best place to go to if you want to get into forecasting, for TV, the military, farming or aviation.

Free weather data is a public good and also 'soft power'. In Ireland they don't have their own weather supercomputers or universities that are renowned for producing expert weather forecasters, hence they need British or American help.

I also forgot the satellites, which is in another league of expense, but necessary for all kinds of observation data.

Observations are interesting as the reliance has historically been on airfields. We missed a chance to get mobile phone base stations reporting in to have vastly more data. Given the amount of money involved in mobile, when the governments sold off the spectrum they could have used the opportunity to insist on weather observation data being collected, in order to refine the model.

Sometimes you get a town next to a lake with a massive mountain behind it where the forecast will consistently be wrong due to how the modelling works and a lack of observation data to make corrections. There are many scenarios such as this and the mobile phone masts could have been used to fill the gaps.

If the UK provided free data (and the USA didn't) then we wouldn't talking about AccuWeather, it would be some British company that the world would be relying on for their apps. This British company would be modest in size but still providing good jobs and keeping graduates from Reading employed. In turn they would be working with people developing specialist apps, for example, weather for race courses and there would be much tax paid to government to make it worth their while, plus national prestige in having 'the best weather service' going.

Another example of a British mistake is the Ordnance Survey, purveyor of paid for maps. Nobody uses Ordnance Survey, it is always Google Maps, Apple Maps or OpenStreetMap. They get pennies from developers and architects that need the official Ordnance Survey maps but nothing from day to day usage, in effect they have lost out.

All these things need to be for the public good, paid for out of public taxation and a genuine free market of private enterprise fostered, otherwise nothing happens.

Can you imagine how things might be different if there was an additional group of people involved whose only goal is to siphon money out? Capitalism is predicated on the idea that the goal is to charge the most and deliver the least. In this case doing that would mean delays at best and death at worst. Weather is dangerous.

There are plenty of private weather companies, and many private companies employ their own meteorologists and massive computers to generate their own forecasts. (Think agriculture, logistics, aviation, oil exploration.)

Not every company can afford a supercomputer. The NWS forecasts and data are valuable to every other person and company.

Also, the addition of NWS data makes everyone's weather forecasts better. Note how television hurricane forecasts don't show one model, but many models from many sources. All this again is in the interest of commerce, which drives tax revenue.

And that this "private organization" is one of the supporters of "project 2025"?

This is not hidden. This is happening in public. And yes, the worst hasn't happened yet -- the government removing access to data that has long been free -- but if it does, would you agree that it is a bad thing?

If you think that the government should indeed do that, then this isn't a conspiracy theory; it's just saying out loud that this is a thing you're encouraging the government to do. If you think the government should not do that, then you should consider the evidence that it is in fact happening.

Highly recommend that book. Haven't gotten to his most recent Who Is Government?:

* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...

But from the interviews it sounds interesting as well. Colbert interview from April 2025:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T30BF32qPgg

While I agree this wouldn't make a meaningful dent in the deficit, every bit helps. Should we instead sit around until there's political will to take on the budget of the DoD, entitlements, and our debt's own interest payments?

Balancing our budget is going to hurt like hell and everyone will bleed. That doesn't mean the answer is to say fuck it and keep racking up debt.

Weather provided realtime marine, atmospheric, and solar weather to better equip theatres of war and aid.

Without weather, soldiers conducting defense, offense, or aid operations have that much less intel on making decisions. The side effect is less climate change and national weather reporting.

If anything, the stripping down soft power, intelligence, science, and everything seems like a plan to turn us into a 3rd world kleptocratic kakistocracy. Then again, capitalism has went from innovation and creation, to extraction and worsening.

Maybe its time to let China take the reins and show what socialism can accomplish. If the videos on Xiao Hong Shu (rednote) are any indication, they're doing absolutely superbly.