Would be amazing if the reps actually did what we wanted instead of what they are paid by outside entities to do. We should try that!

This snide response would be a lot better if climate.gov had actually been taken down by those representatives you mention, rather than illegally destroyed by one man.

Gerrymandering means that the house is a skewed representation of the people. The senate is a skewed representation of the people in its intentional structure.

Further, the Trump administration is happily destroying things that are funded by the lawfully passed budgets.

You are skipping a few layers here. Like those who know stuff like «crumbling asbestos air ducts in schools may be a bad idea».

Why do so many grown-ups fail civics 101 so blatantly?

It's like 50% if you also count the stuff I pay for that is a direct benefit to me at retirement (as does anyone who pays into social security).

So it might be a little nitpicky, and your point still stands. A lot of money is spent on defense and business, but not as much as the before portrays.

Where businesses benefit is in not paying the tax, instead of receiving payments. That's definitely a problem, but it's a different thing.

This is kind of a strange take.

Local taxes are for petty but useful stuff because the sovereignty of your locality is heavily circumscribed by state and national authorities. That means the real budgetary decisions made about the future of the nation, anything interesting, anything made with some level of self-determination, is made at the national level. Unfortunately, in the USA, budgetary discretion is used for war and rhetorically defended by all politicians while the non-discretionary spending on e.g. social security, is constantly attacked.

Social Security and Medicare have a separate, capped tax though. They're funded through that tax. Federal tax is effectively uncapped. Where does it go?

I'm not aware of any private company that has a contract with NOAA or the NWS to privately disseminate the agency's weather data (either acquired itself or purchased commercially).

The government already does that.

   https://api.weather.gov/ 
   https://www.noaa.gov/nodd/datasets
   https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/

Operating an API isn’t free either and the needs and scale change dramatically for customer. So you would rather the public pay for Google to use weather data on a massive scale?

Making the data available is non-trivial no matter who does it. There were many, many exabytes of this data a decade ago and countless petabytes of new data is generated every day. How to manage this has been an open question for a long time.

In practice access has always been restricted to this "public" data because there is not remotely enough bandwidth, either network or storage, to give everyone a copy of the data that may want it. They often don't even have enough capacity for internal users. A lot of it also sits in offline or near-line archival formats due to the scale of the data.

This is a general problem for data models of this type. You need to compute on the data in-situ or it won't scale but virtually no one can build that type of infrastructure at the scale required for these data models. It would also be extremely expensive to build and operate.

Biased about what?

There really isn't any Earth observation you could make that can't be grossly compared with other types of observations. There is literally no value in taking "biased" observations; where's the market for temperature stations that are _wrong_? I promise, energy and commodities traders don't want that data!

Companies spend a lot of money to remove and repair the idiosyncratic bias that already exists in this data.

Private companies don’t care about having accurate data?

Does the government have private access to forming unbiased information?

> Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function

Heck, it's not merely "canonical", it's goshdang prehistoric: Governments have been involved in weather tracking (and responding to bad events) for more than five thousand years!

I'm having a hard time thinking of any task with a better pedigree, aside from adjudicating disputes or waging war.