Should the NWAC be publicly funded?

Lofty rhetoric costs nothing and is meaningless without action. Pay up for what you believe!

Sorry, I thought the thread was about whether NWAC should be publicly funded (with my tax dollars, and I certainly pay up).  Based on that misunderstanding, I replied yes, and why I thought so.  I guess I didn't know that attempting to communicate that point of view as effectively as possible (through "lofty rhetoric", evidently) was "meaningless".

Saying that someone can only legitimately argue for public funding of something if they have privately funded that same thing is a strange and circular argument, it is a snake eating its own tail.  The whole point of public funding (of worthwhile things like NWAC, and heart transplants, but not foreign wars) is so that people, having already paid their taxes, don't have to assume the whole burden of funding.

Why stop with NWAC, most non-commercial traffic is for frivolous activities like skiing or visiting grandma on the E side. DOT could stop plowing all but 1 lane for trucks past Denny Creek. No private vehicles allowed. If people want to ski, let them get together, rent some plows, hire some drivers and plow their own way. PLOW UP!

I did an unscientific ad hoc poll of 11 snowmobilers this morning.
11/11 have never visited the NWAC site.
2 of 11 knew of its existance but still did not go there.
11/11 are highly skilled, high wage earner, union craftsmen.

Snowmobiler deaths are the still one of the groups most prone to death by avalanche.
Snowmobiler deaths are increasing.
Conclusion: NWAC is doing a poor job of getting their message and data to smowmobilers
Reason: ?????????????

avalanche.state.co.us/acc/acc_images/Slide9.JPG .
shows avy deaths increasing despite NWAC and their like in different states?? Maybe for saving recreational users lives it's not very effective and a better use of the funds could be made?

I think using this data to delegitimize the effectiveness of NWAC forecasts misses the point that BC usage likely has been growing by leaps and bounds due to better gear, ski porn influences, media, population growth etc.

Thus, to imply that correlation implies ineffectiveness @ NWAC misses some important external factors.

Also, to echo points made earlier, a distributed funding model for state/public services is much more to my liking, even though I never play tennis or baseball, or go to Seahawks games, or take advantage of any number of other opportunities afforded me by public funding. Privatization and isolation of user segments subtracts from the greater good, IMHO, which ultimately affords us all less chances to recreate as we see fit.

EDIT-Can't speak to snowmobiler perspective beyond assumptions and stereotypes, so I won't try!

I think using this data to delegitimize the effectiveness of NWAC forecasts misses the point that BC usage likely has been growing by leaps and bounds due to better gear, ski porn influences, media, population growth etc.

Thus, to imply that correlation implies ineffectiveness @ NWAC misses some important external factors.

Interesting point and therefore your argument is that avy deaths are increasing due to more people being in avalanche terrain and that they would be even larger if NWAC did not exist. Seems like a plausible theory.... tough to prove or disprove.

However, perhaps one needs to look at the statistics and see what part of the user population is having increased deaths before assuming your  theory is correct. For instance if skier deaths were constant or not increasing despite more use then it would be a good argument that NWAC is having an effect on that statistic. Conversely, if AT THE SAME TIME snowmobile deaths were increasing at the same rate as that populations increased usage it woul infer that NWAC is having no effect on that population. Don't know the answer but it would be interesting to find out and see whose theory is correct.

As to your second point re public funding. If NWAC is so essential for the public good, the nations nature GNP effect, commerce, keeping I90 open and all the reason advocated above then it should be funded completely every year by taxpayer dollars and never ever considered for cuts or even complete withdraw of funding and shouldn't need FOAC and private donations. Nobody has answered me why that is not the case. ANybody know why?

1) Do you have any statistics that show/prove that the NWAC has caused a reduction in avy deaths since its inception in it's current form. ( graph of avy deaths against NWAC budget for example or something like that?)

avalanche.state.co.us/acc/acc_images/Slide9.JPG .
shows avy deaths increasing despite NWAC and their like in different states?? Maybe for saving recreational users lives it's not very effective and a better use of the funds could be made?

I believe you've said you are an engineer or otherwise in a quantitative field so I'm kind of confused by your insistence that somebody can produce statistical evidence of NWAC effectiveness.  A controlled trial would need 1) a cohort of NWAC users and a cohort of non-users who are identical except for their use of NWAC products.  Then you'd need to follow them for long enough that there are some (like 10>) avalanche incidents in each group, which would probably mean more than 100,000 person-hours of exposure.  Does it even seem slightly conceivable that somebody has collected this sort of info?

The problems with using changes in avalanche deaths across a  time series are manifold.  First, there are identifiability (used in the econometric sense) problems.  If we assume that there's any effect of NWAC at all, the only reasonable assumption is that its effectiveness depends on its use.  If we double NWAC use in a target group (say occasional snowshoers), then we've double the "supply" of NWAC, without even spending a penny more on increasing the quality or frequency of its forecasts.

And we don't know how to measure the "demand."  Obviously, the number of avalanche deaths will go up as a) population increases or b) backcountry use per capita increases.  I can think of some proxies to b) and we could use the census for a), but this is the kind of stuff that companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying market research firms to measure accurately.   And you think that the NWAC with its 300k/year budget could somehow do this?

Lastly, even if we did magically have the avalanche incidence per bc user, and the number of nwac users, we would expect that education/outreach to explain little of the year-to-year variation in incidence.  Weather drives most of the variance.  This means that you'd need to model how hazardous the snowpack is or collect many years of data in order even know if a failure to reject the null hypothesis actually meant there was no effect from NWAC or that you just don't have enough/good enough data to see the effect.