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Discussion (181 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
My question is, how will this site stay relevant? The collection/analysis/monitoring of the current situation is as important as historic data. Turning current data into historical data takes significant resources.
You want data? https://www.noaa.gov/data or https://api.weather.gov/ or https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data are a good place to start.
As for your question: I personally don't want data, I want a service backed by sound data and expert validation+analysis.
Instead, each citizen has a volition and a voice and a vote—with exceptions, and at personal expense.
And as a humanitarian with reservations, I say tax the bots for UBI.
Don't expect to find it in the US.
How can the government "for the people by the people" claim propriety/intellectual-property over anything?
From the article:
> This is possible because US government data is public domain by law.
From the FAQ on the new climate.us [0]:
> Can I re-use this data/product/image/video?
> Yes! Any content dated prior to June 30, 2025 and credited to NOAA Climate.gov is in the public domain can be freely re-used with proper attribution.
> Any content after June 30, 2025 and credited to Climate.us, is under the Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 4.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
[0] https://www.climate.us/faqs
What a bizarre thing to say. It's in the public domain. Why would you need attribution?
I don't think this is what's going on here but CC0 was expressly created because not every jurisdiction had a concept of "public domain", so a special license was needed to make sure it acted as if it were in the public domain for those cases.
From a CC0 FAQ [0]:
> Do I have to attribute the person who applied CC0 to their work?
> No, there is no legal requirement that you attribute the affirmer ...
From a Berlin Universities Publishing FAQ [1]:
> ... Since a waiver of copyright protection is not possible under German copyright law, CC0 is equivalent to a waiver of all possible rights and legal claims by the creator.
But, regardless, public domain or CC0 doesn't need attribution whether it's in the US or Germany.
[0] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ#What_is_the_di...
[1] https://www.berlin-universities-publishing.de/en/beratung/li...
Is it feasible?
Should we push for this default?
First obvious objection is that lots of government services need backend and dynamic content, but let's say this requirement only goes for static content.
Technical tricks like IPFS can’t prevent even 1% of the damage caused by giving criminals this much power over society.
Once Trump dies of natural causes I assume some intrepid journalists will go through the mountain of evidence and dig out some exciting snippets of what went on behind closed doors. Maybe a few more people will have to resign because of it.
I'd be interested to hear the contrast between what the Trump Presidential Library considers his greatest accomplishments and what, say, Bob Woodward writes.
But I'm very in favor of maintaining "the record", as it were, for government websites. If we can have changelogs on bills then we should elsewhere. It informs the citizens of the actions of our government. What has changed and "who done it". That can go both ways and I hope it would incentivize those trying to actually do good and not just treated as a liability.
Hell, if the NSA can just gobble up all the Internet traffic and store it on servers in Utah then the least we can do is make public records accessible. The archival work has already been done and we've already paid for it
This admin absolutely will never take any steps towards transparency, education, sharing, or even simple kindness. Any hope of implementing something like this will have to come later.
We had the Climate Commission, which did alot of great work. It was a government department and fully funded by the government.
Then a conservative, climate denying government came to power and shut it down.
Literally within 48 hours, they obtained alternative funding from private sources, then rebirthed the organization as the independent Climate Council.
Many of the fired workers were re hired and the new organization does similar work to the previous one. It's still in operation today.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/
Hmm. I don’t believe that’s accurate.
1. The temporary situation (private copy with donations) is not sustainable.
2. The activity is within the proper role of the US federal government.
3. It gives diffuse public-benefits, which should be funded normally, rather than rely on concentrated private donations.
Disseminating the collected data publicly is not only a moral imperative--we already paid for it!--it's also how one maximizes the overall return on investment.
But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.
So then implying that tax dollars should be used instead of donations is wrong.
Would be an interesting exercise to poll the public. We could probably break the country up into a bunch of districts, then have them vote to elect representatives to get together in some special location and negotiate how taxpayer dollars are spent.
They could put something together like "a budget" and then that money gets actually committed directly to the purposes that our elected representatives negotiated about.
Would definitely be an interesting exercise to go through one day!
This is why we get people with expertise to figure out what’s important and temper the utterly, utterly childish impulses of easily corruptible politicians.
Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.
I think this is a great site, love what they are doing, and support them (including a literal donation). But a government maintained website for this data is low on my list of things of what tax dollars are for. In fact, I think this is better done privately. To be clear, many of the things every US administration does including this one I also think is better done privately.
That makes no sense to me. But we can agree to disagree.
And no, having all research be privately funded is a bad idea. No one will try to find a new antibiotic for example. Big Pharma rather researches cures for chronic diseases that will make money for the rest of a patients life
Someone has to be collecting the data. I believe that should be something our tax dollars pay for.
After the data is present, someone should make the data accessible and useable. That also seems like a good use of tax dollars.
Hiqh quality data on climate is relevant to many, many organizations and polities. That's the sort of coordination problem that I want my government to solve.
I almost wrote "even for the most asinine pro-market believers," but that's not true. There are plenty of pro-market believers so asinine that they can't even describe the classes of problems that markets are known to fail at solving – weather data collection falling into several of such classes.
If you see evidence of abuse, please flag their posts or email us. This is what helpful participants on HN have always done.
To that end, I hope the Trump administration's actions cause independent data collection and analysis by activists and independent scientists.
Meanwhile while you are willing to give $15 for good data, Koch is willing to spend $15 million for a guy with a degree in fine arts to tell us he's a scientist and actually CO2 is super healthy and awesome.
We elect officials and tax not just for the climate data most people will care about, but also for random things like sewage data that people might not be thinking about but is also important to public health. Trying to piecemeal fund all these studies and turning science into a game of advertising and begging for causes will put us right back into the dark ages where only the absurdly wealthy could engage in any sort of scientific research.
Do you care about roads, schools, fire stations and police too? Please donate to those please.
s/country/world/
There are many large projects to collect this information ranging from extremely specialized satellites to networks of ocean buoys. It turns out that weather is a global phenomenon and warming seas on the other side of the planet affect wherever you are.
Who exactly is going to pay for these non-governmental independent data collection/analysis efforts?
How about taxpayers pay for one analysis, private parties pay for theirs, courtrooms can resolve inconsistencies on a case-by-case basis.
And in any case, an imperfect adversarial judicial system is dramatically better than whatever la-la-land "government has no data of its own" dystopia GP is imagining.
Disagree. The primary check on the government is consequences for violating the law and the constitution. That's just all gone out the window.
Power without oversight, no matter how distributed, will tend towards either complete chaos or tyranny (or both, if such a thing is possible). Giving three mutually distrustful criminals guns will not cause law and order to spring out of nothing.
An informed, angry and unforgiving citizenry is the only check on government, and we ain't go that.
Glad you asked. That's actually the job of the Inspectors General. One of the first groups of people Trump completely eliminated.
It was their job to stop things like corruption, waste, and fraud in the federal government.
And do consider that the supreme court has ruled that they're immune for anything that's an 'official act'.
Accountability of the executive left the room in 2024
And I don’t think that’s wrong. But let’s clarify. Either we trust the process to elect leaders who actually hold power or we think voting is broken and we need a body of leadership which exists independently of the democratic process.
Your view isn't controversial because it's daring, it's just plain nihilistic. It's just anti-government dogma which is cultivated by an incredibly cynical media atmosphere.
I wish the same were true of all federal organizations though. For example, CIA regulates itself with its own supervision too.
Other orgs do it too. I don't think they do it well.
That's not true lol. There is a gigantic supervisory apparatus constantly breathing down the IC's neck, including but not limited to your very own elected Congressperson's investigative powers.
If a single organization proves too unwieldy, we could even have a federated solution.
Edit: another suggestion https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48898415&goto=item%3Fi...
The end result? Judges being elected that nobody knows. Some even running unopposed. Yet, they all are 'elected'.
No. I don't think Americans can elect more people. I would be shocked if over 10% formed their own opinion on which judge to pick for example. If you're lucky they did that for the ballot measures...
I think this falls under "least worst option". I confess that I (and most others) don't have the time or focus to properly evaluate judicial candidates, so I turn to "trusted resources" to help guide my vote.
It's easier to vote on higher level issues, like ballot propositions or state/federal representation.
That said, the fact that a significant portion of the voting public voted in a man who epitomizes the most unqualified and inappropriate person into the US presidency has shaken my faith in democracy.
Only private companies with some fantastical profit motive to install satellite and sensor networks all over and above the globe should do it, not the government?
Activists and independent scientists ... funded by whom? Data collected by whom? Data stored and distributed by whom? Data analyzed by whom? -- All of these roles are non-trivial, unlike your understanding of "the government" as a single monolithic entity; The government has/had different branches for the collection and study of climate vs (eg) the enforcement of emissions. The issue in our government today isn't the trust/separation of these different entities but the attack on them from above and abroad.
As soon as a government website is down, it's an outrage.
I'm sure money could've been saved. But the cost of this site really isn't the hosting, it's the data being gatherd with all the research
They used it to flat out destroy the economies in much of Europe, while somehow China and India were ignored despite being orders of magnitude bigger problems, according to their own narrative.
If any of the above were honest, there would have been blanket trade restrictions and sanctions on China and India so quickly it would make your head spin.
Strangle funding to a public service, complain that public service isn't performing, use the consequences of their own actions to justify eliminating the public service indefinitely.