Sounds grand, but it is not in scope.

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.

>As for your question: I personally don't want data, I want a service backed by sound data and expert validation+analysis.

Don't expect to find it in the US.

Why would you say it’s useless data?

Yeah, that is odd. Maybe a mistake?

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...

It's difficult to make money if you have to spend all the money on defense lawyers.

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.

It is owned by capital and doing what they bought it to do. Working as designed.

That's awesome. Thanks for letting me know. It's a great start

> But at that point you’re just in an argument over which public services are most important to whom.

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!

You kind of exemplify that drawing on this very topic where a bunch of people sit in a boat that is sinking stern first and the people in the bow section are expressing zero concern because their end isn’t under water.

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.

Quick question, what is your mental model of the climate?

That is the understanding that you've been presented with, likely by people looking to mislead you, but that's not at all what our actual budget reflects. The social safety nets that we supposedly don't have take up around 2/3rds of our federal budget.

As an American, tax dollars are for re-paving the parking lot at our middle school, establishing a water district for our town, buying another school bus, and funding our municipal fire department and ambulance corp.

Any money collected by the feds is whatever. Hopefully it goes toward NASA putting another robot on Mars.

66% of Federal spending is on entitlements.

As a counter example, the government manages and collects all kinds of weather station data. But the trend is for private companies to get contracts to privatize the dissemination of that data through fee-based APIs etc. I would rather the government provide it instead of taxpayers having to pay twice to enrich some rent seeker.

So, research that you pay for with tax dollars, it's results should be published through a private entity?

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

But why?

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.

Doing it privately is a sure recipe for ending with sponsored, biased data.

Collecting and distributing weather data is a canonical example of a government function, even for the most ardent pro-market believers out there.

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.

I'd argue is is absolutely within the mandate of government to collect, store, and publish weather and climate data at scale, as this work cannot be left to private companies or charity. It is fundamentally a collective action problem that will span generations and administrations, and one where there should be no incentive to profit or misinform. Citizens can only make sound decisions, both individually and collectively, if they have durable access to reliable facts.

HN is for curious conversation between humans and we have clear guidelines. That’s been unchanged for two decades. Bots, trolls and any other actors using HN in ways that breach the guidelines are banned, often automatically by our software, or failing that, by moderators, and in such cases we don’t “ask” first.

If you see evidence of abuse, please flag their posts or email us. This is what helpful participants on HN have always done.

Great, and through your effort you can raise a total of 100, maybe even 1000 dollars.

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.

Can we do the same thing for military funding? Default its budget to zero, and if anyone cares, let them donate a few bucks?

update: it turns out the parent org hasn't set up donations for this sub org, so i donated to climate action instead (also under the parent org)

I care that the data is out there and helps with weather forecasting. My taxes pay for that.

Do you care about roads, schools, fire stations and police too? Please donate to those please.

"The courts" writ large are doing just fine. SCOTUS in particular is a cesspool, but that is not the typical situation at all.

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.

> The primary check on government growth

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.

Not to this extent!

Yes, sadly, several decades ago, one of the parties started running on the platform of "the government is broken" and to help the electability of said platform, they kept breaking the government.

Your desire for a higher oversight authority beyond the chief executive suggests you may have concerns about the efficacy of democracy.

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.

Look at the recent ruling on this topic.

Ah ok. Well I don't see it limiting their misconduct and behavior, do you?

> Judges being elected that nobody knows.

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.