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Buried on page 25 of the 2019 budget proposal for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the heading "Fundamental Measurement, Quantum Science, and Measurement Dissemination", there's a short entry that has caused plenty of debate and even a fair deal of anger among those in the amateur radio scene:
NIST will discontinue the dissemination of the U.S. time and frequency via the NIST radio stations in Hawaii and Ft. Collins, CO. These radio stations transmit signals that are used to synchronize consumer electronic products like wall clocks, clock radios, and wristwatches, and may be used in other applications like appliances, cameras, and irrigation controllers.
The NIST stations in Hawaii and Colorado are the home of WWV, WWVH, and WWVB. The oldest of these stations, WWV, has been broadcasting in some form or another since 1920; making it the longest continually operating radio station in the United States. Yet in order to save approximately $6.3 million, these time and frequency standard stations are potentially on the chopping block.
Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/08/20/what-will-you-do-if-wwvb-goes-silent/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Monday August 27 2018, @07:26PM
Read a history book. First fire departments WERE created by the insurance industry. If you sell enough premiums in an area it pays to build a fire station to reduce claims so they did. Eventually the government took it over. Did cost / benefit improve or decline? Once you can answer that you can decide whether government should continue running them or explore other options. I remember when the ambulance company around here ran subscription drives. Members got close to free use, anyone else would of course be served but you got a hefty bill and most health insurance balked at covering it. Think most insurance just covers ambulance service now because there aren't membership drives anymore. But they aren't government agencies either so there is your example of private emergency services in action in $current_year.
Remember, just because government should not do something does not mean it should not be done. We used to have a wide ranging set of interlocking charities helping the poor and unfortunate. Mutual aid societies, churches, charitable foundations and trusts, etc. Now all that has been almost entirely replaced with a vast set of interlocking government agencies even when the final end point is a "private" charity in a "public / private partnership" where a private entity hands out government money. Did things improve? Has the poverty rate moved? Which is sort of a trick question since the official metric used to measure poverty incorporates a mechanism to assure a fairly unchanging percentage of the population will officially be "in poverty" regardless of presence of lack of material want that would impair health or the basics of living. Talk about job insurance. When obesity is the number one health issue for "the poorest" it is obvious we solved any actual problem that can be solved by throwing money at it generations ago. What is left is a self licking ice cream cone called the "poverty industry."