By James Kwak I was browsing for Christmas presents and came
across a brilliant xkcd cartoon, “Money.” (Click on it to zoom
in.) It includes all sorts of fun bits like this (this is just a
small excerpt; you can buy a poster-size version of the whole
thing): But this was actually my favorite part: I’ve written
elsewhere about the government’s role in collecting hurricane
data (including flying planes into hurricanes) and plotting
their course and intensity. I think this is one of those things
that we just assume the government should do—protect us from
hurricanes—yet we conveniently forget about when we talk about
evil big government spending. The source for that data is a blog
post by Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground (and
a former Hurricane Hunters pilot). In short, because of
improvements in the way the National Hurricane Center forecasts
hurricane paths, the NHC can issue much tighter forecasts than
twenty years ago. In the case of Hurricane Irene (the one that
hit the East Coast in late