FYI Trump made the CEO of the company AccuWeather, Neil Jacobs, administrator of NOAA, which is the agency actually collecting weather data. AccuWeather is one of the biggest private competitors to NOAA, and this is obviously a huge conflict of interest.
For anyone interested to learn more about the topic, check out Michael Lewis’ book The Fifth Risk.
It’s also frustrating when so many weather apps just repackage freely available NOAA data into more user friendly presentations and charge for it. If I was being optimistic I’d say they’d make NOAA more user friendly but I’m not.
What a fucking dystopian world: copyrighted tools to detect natural dangerous events…
Like, pay us or die. Seems like blackmailing to me…
Weather alerts are FREE! Jesus people, you’ll believe anything that falls in line with your outlook.
Just got this, for FREE. Take a look at that pic, notice all the FREE options for weather alerts? My FREE weather app gives me alerts.
If people are dumb enough to pay, I got no problem taking their money.
They’re only free because NOAA publishes the information for free. Several private interest groups (companies) have been pushing to cut off public distribution so that people have to pay them to get access to severe weather alerts. Like, deliberate, targeted enshittification; no value adding, literally just inserting a paywall.
This is the future they want.
Why get warnings for “free”(tax funded) through a costly government service when you can get warnings for $19.99 per month, with annual price hikes for “inflation”. EULA declares warnings are not guaranteed, and subscription is non-refundable.
Won’t someone think of the C-Suite and defund NOAA and NWS already?!? /s
Don’t worry, Republicans already have that as a goal in their Project 2025. They said the NWS should only gather data and all forecasting should be commercialized. Also that no data support ant side of the “climate debate”. It’ll get here soon enough, once musk companies are protected from safety investigations.
Is this satire? Its hard to tell these days.
Our premium users already know if this is stire or not. Why don’t you join them?
Don’t be a dick… here you go OP:
[Content visible only to Lemmy Gold subscribers. Buy a 12 month tokens bundle and get 10% off!]
This 16 minute John Oliver piece should be required viewing regarding weather information: https://youtu.be/qMGn9T37eR8
FYI: The American Red Cross has a pretty nice (and completely free) app that’ll send you push notifications for all kinds of different emergencies.
You can set up multiple locations to monitor (in addition to your live location) and select which types of emergency events you want to hear about for each one.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cube.arc.hzd
Wait until Trump and Elon hear about this
I mean, Watch Duty once binged and would have woken me up at 2:15AM for an evacuation, had my neighbor not pounded on my window at 2AM as the fire roared down the hillside toward our town. We got lucky.
So how about a federated weather service.
The NOAA’s data already is crowdsourced. (Technically not the same as “federated,” but similar ethos.) Accuweather is trying to steal it.
More info:
https://www.weather.gov/iln/cwop
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/cooperative-observer-networkAnd, insanely, archive links because this is the worst fucking timeline:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250210082537/https://www.weather.gov/iln/cwop
https://web.archive.org/web/20250207182410/https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/cooperative-observer-networkThis is how it started too! People sharing observations over letters and then telegraph.
Because screenshots of social media posts are not journalism:Actually, I’ll restate that. Because people tend to believe screenshots of social media posts as gospel truth even though they are not journalism:
The link displayed in the image redirects to
Which doesn’t load, with or without the ?hss… part.
I’m not finding the X post by Accuweather, because the scroll only goes back to August 2024 so far as I can tell. However, this appears to stem from a May 8, 2024 storm
The page is cached by Kagi, but not in the web archives.
Yeah, I restated my first sentence, because I’m not throwing shade on you at all.
If I was going to throw shade on you, it would be for failing to embed Saddam Hussein in the image.
That’s reserved for special occasions.
