[opendtv] Re: The Weather and do these people have NO shame?
- From: "John Willkie" <JohnWillkie@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 10:36:31 -0700
Accuweather is in State College, PA, so Rick Santorum is the Senator from
Accuweather.
I have issues with governmental agencies competing with private insterests.
However, Accuweather and TWC entered this environment, and now they want to
change it. Also, free weather information is a necessity for many. After
this goes through, many people -- I don't mean farmers; they pay for much
more detailed weather/climate informaton than anybody else -- will only be
able to get weather information from free radio and tv.
Let's call it for what it is: greedy overreaching by commerical interests
that want to change the rules of competition that were in place when they
entered the marketplace.
John Willkie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Hogan" <billhogan1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "OpenDTV" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 1:30 AM
Subject: [opendtv] The Weather and do these people have NO shame?
> The following is what Television is all about these days..... at least
> for some in Congress and
> the Administration.
> Regards, Bill Hogan
>
>
> This page right here
>
<http://www.crh.noaa.gov/forecasts/NYZ072.php?warncounty=NYC061&city=New+Yor
k>
> is the one I go to to check the weather. It's put out by the National
> Weather Service. It's a lot like some commercial ones, only it has more
> information, costs nothing and contains no ads.
>
> But as the Carpetbagger Report notes here
> <http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/4032.html>, Sen. Santorum
> (R) of Pennsylvania has introduced a bill that would ban the federal
> government's meteorologists from making this information available for
> free since that creates a problem for outfits like The Weather Channel
> and AccuWeather, which want to sell it.
>
> Plenty of federal legislation these days boils down to this sort of
> rip-off of the public. But seldom is the equation so clear.
>
> You paid for the data. Your tax dollars fund a massive apparatus of
> meteorological data collection for reasons ranging from agriculture to
> disaster safety to keeping airplanes in the air -- everything under the
> sun. You pay for it and this is just the feds making it available to you
> on a website. The cost of letting you access it must be minuscule
> compared to that of collecting it. Indeed, most of the data these other
> guys sell is stuff they get from the feds or fed-subsidized data
> collection.
>
> So they're in the business of selling to you the information that your
> tax dollars already went into collecting. And apparently they add so
> little added value that they can't handle the competition when the
> National Weather Service just gives it away. Santorum wants to make
> these guys into some sort of information age tax farmers.
>
> This article in the Palm Beach Post
>
<http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/epaper/2005/04/21/m1a_wx_042
1.html>
> goes into greater detail on the bill. And you can see from its
> proponents' feeble justifications just what a con this is. They note,
> for instance, that the bill would not prevent the National Weather
> Service from alerting the public to imminent disasters, which is awfully
> generous of them.
>
> Indeed, the executive vice president of AccuWeather, Barry Myers,
> probably had to have his face specially treated with some sort of fixing
> agent to prevent him from laughing out loud when he told the Post that
> the "bill would improve public safety by making the weather service
> devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather
> than duplicating products already available from the private sector."
>
> You just can't make this stuff up.
>
> -- Josh Marshall
>
> Copyright 2004 Joshua Micah Marshall
>
>
>
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