grf27

Launching weather balloons is routine, and requires no special preparation. If you are launching at an airport, you usually have to notify ATC.

But radiosondes and balloons come under an exemption, so can be flown pretty much anywhere. I think the exemption allows up to 2kg payloads. Radiosondes (the new Vaisala ones) are around 120g, and it's pretty cool technology.

I think there's clearly a change. 10 years ago, we hired people for a specific technical role and paid them $80K/year. Now, we still hire people for that same job, but only pay them $60K/year.

Companies loudly announce they're laying off workers to cut costs. A short time later they're advertising those same jobs, but people are hired, or even hired back, at a lower wage.

What used to be a well-paid job 15 or 20 years ago, no longer has job security or the same benefits. It may have even be contracted as a 'gig' job, with no job security or benefits.

No, but if you're a government seeing your media industry shrinking because they can't make a profit to sustain themselves, meanwhile others are profiting off their work, then you want to try something, and I guess this is their attempt.

One of the other solutions proposed was taxes on media aggregators. This is similar to the taxes on entertainment aggregators currently in place that pay into a fund that supports domestic entertainers. These approaches have lots of complications.

Yes they do. But the income from one story doesn't pay the cost to generate all the other stories that the paper produces. According to our local paper that just shut down, their ads couldn't compete with the ads on Google/Facebook.

So the only profitable stories are very narrow, or the click-bait type that might be picked up by Facebook, assuming that Facebook doesn't just extract and show the core of the story.

This isn't a new problem. A friend of mine used to do articles on historical issues and post them on his blog. They were good enough that there were other sites that would just copy them and change the byline to themselves. Grounds for a lawsuit, but the cost of the lawsuit and the tiny amount of damages made it impractical. Now he does the articles but tries to sell them to publishers. His income from that is now so tiny that it's no longer cost effective.

Local papers now are money-losers, and the centralization of those many papers in the hands of a few corporations seems more to provide political influence than make money from news. In our recent election, the 160 papers owned by one corporation all made the same political endorsements.

Australia's moves to charge for local news was a first, I think, and at the time there was comment that it could be the wave of the future. Google/Facebook have financial incentive to try to head off the same action in other countries.

Isn't the issue that Google/Facebook sell ads and make money from linking to news sources? And those news sources have their costs but don't see any income?

I think about this often when I read a story on some small-town newspaper, and know that the newspaper is making nothing off of me and millions of others reading their story.

Didn't Australia implement a similar law and get Google/Facebook to pay something?

There's a similar issues with some news sites basically copying or rephrasing the content of a newspaper story. I've seen news stories by third-parties, where the story lists their source as "The New York Times"

It's tough to figure out a way to compensate the people who create the news, and the people who disseminate the news.