I'd like to see the National Snow and Ice Data Center's data (soil moisture, sea ice cover/concentration, snow cover [looks like MODIS is already available], permafrost, glacier outlines) on AWS.
I know there are people there that want to see it happen, but it's a matter of cost. What incentives/programs does Earth on AWS offer to assist stewards of public data to make it available on AWS?
Additionally, I think some of this data is normally behind URS/Earthdata Login, what did the politics of making the data available on AWS without URS look like?
I had the chance to speak with the/a rep from Amazon who at the time was working to make the Landsat8 data available on AWS exactly a year ago at a conference. From what I remember, AWS covers the hosting cost of the datasets in exchange for being able to incentivize the use of AWS in working with them. The data storage and transfer costs, as well as logistics are enormous. I don't recall how the transfer was being managed but it was certainly describe more or less as a partnership.
On the NOAA side, there tend not to be loginwalls so that hasn't been much of a concern.
I work with one of the partners on this project, so if you have specific datasets or use case ideas feel free to drop me an email at zflamig uchicago.edu.
>selfishness and self-interest leads to isolation where nobody will help you with anything worthwhile
Cultivating relationships to one's own benefit is a form of self-interest. This is about self-interest, not antisocial behavior. You can have one without the other.
>fire worked as a technology well before we truly understood underlying physics.
Just following the analogy; what science was fire validating during that time? Just because something works doesn't mean it wasn't created by trial and error.
Nobody is suggesting prescribing mushrooms for any pain greater than a pulled muscle and covering it under insurance like we do with opioids. If I wanted an opioid recreationally, I'm pretty sure I'd have a hell of a time finding it. The opioid "epidemic" is _not in any way_ an issue of unrestrained access or availability.
Can you please elaborate? I don't think I've heard of this story, but when vaping started getting popular I wondered how the big tobacco companies would control the market. What do you mean by "several million in float per flavor"?
The recent FDA judgement is that basically vaping should be regulated identically to cigarettes.[1] You might think that's pretty reasonable. It would be, except that for this part (which also applies to cigarettes):
> Today’s rule also requires manufacturers of all newly-regulated products, to show that the products meet the applicable public health standard set forth in the law and receive marketing authorization from the FDA, unless the product was on the market as of Feb. 15, 2007
So cigarette products made before 2007 (which is most of them, but predates most vaping) are grandfathered in and can be sold without expensive review. (As can "substantially equivalent" products.) But any vape product is required to go through the "new tobacco product application" process.[2] That process is (apparently) very expensive and can result in rejection anyways.
Anyway, we all know cigarettes are bad. We don't have real data on how good or bad individual vaping products are. I think that in all likelihood, at least some of them will be less harmful than smoking. The FDA has taken the stance that all vape products should be banned until they go through the premarket research.
You can understand why vape businesses are upset.
(I'm not affiliated with any of these businesses and don't use any of their products, just follow it all with mild interest.)
This is my current understanding. I am not in the vape industry and i have not vaped for a while; this knowledge may be outdated or incorrect in the details of the PMTA process particularly.
Alright, so first there were indie juice producers and vape boutiques. Nicotine and the liquid (some kind of glycerol, i don't remember off the top of my head) are quite cheap, so early on the money was made off unique flavors. Boutiques would sell hundreds of flavors at cheap places; regulation still looks good because you have no idea what you're vaping.
Then phillip morris companies began selling vape kits at very expensive prices (for both their shitty electronic vapes and batteries and their juices). These are typically lines of 3-9 flavors in around 3 different nicotine levels, and frankly they're all pretty terrible.
However, the major difference between the vape boutique and the gas station are three things:
1. Nobody at a gas station can help you vape the juice at a safe, sub combustion voltage. This is really key.
2. There's no variety of flavors, and they all suck, and the ecigarettes you can buy there are generally pieces of shit desiged to break. Some i've tried are configured at high voltages, leading to an acrid taste and a hugely increased risk of inhaling carcinogens. Bluntly put, a great way to convince smokers not to switch to vaping.
3. The boutiques source from indie vape juice makers. These people are often just a few people and the brands are often in flux.
Now, for the most part i'm for regulation, and there are certainly questionable juices you can get. Off the top of my head, some of the flavorings combust at lower temperatures and are a genuine health concern; i've had my glass tubing cracked when trying out a new flavor. Scared the bejeezus out of me.
However, the way the PMTA regulations are structured, you need to go through a roughly $300k, 500 hour process for each SKU you sell containing a liquid intended for consumption in an ecigarette. Now you need to assign different skus to every (brand, flavoring, flavor version, nictone level) liquid. So this means the indie juice makers, which might have 20 flavors at 6 nicotine levels each, would have to pay $186M to continue their product line. Accordingly, the market no longer optimizes for convenience and sells a lot of nicotine separately to combine at home with the one or two levels of nicotine they already have in their flavors.
However, if you squint, you can see this is optimized for selling a shitty vaping product at gas stations with the money enriching tobacco companies. This is certainly going to put out of business pretty much every vape store i've talked to; the only ones that can survive need a massive amount of cash to pivot into a new product line (or recover from a suddenly absent supply list). If you look specifically at the laws just passed in California, this becomes more clear (not sure when these laws take effect, or if they already have):
1. Vape stores can't help you with hardware at all anymore. They literally can't show you how to change the battery on your own pen.
2. At vape stores, there is a flat $2 tax on every. Single. Item.
I'm probably missing more details, especially on the california side of things. There are also probably some companies that will survive serving this market who aren't Phillip Morris, but i can't feel optimistic about their lobbying power. Finally, i just want to point out that people want to regulate the juices—and i certainly believe it's necessary for the industry to grow—but this style of "brute forcing" every SKU for such a huge cost of time and money seems like beureacracy at its worst, and it only hurts the consumer and small business owner. Furthermore the recent studies put out about "DNA damage" seem to cherry pick the worst possible result to support the conclusion that "vaping is just as bad as cigarettes" without, you know, actually comparing the health effects emperically on humans. I have no doubt vaping is harmful; i have every doubt it's anywhere near as harmful as cigarette smoke.
This is an interesting idea. An information management tool like git could accomplish this, but it would be really interesting to see this automated or self-reported or something like that. Although... the kind of company that you would use a tool like this to "discover" is not the kind of company that would self-report this data.
>My feeling is that most people who commit suicide do it because they decided it on a rational basis. Some people commit suicide because they want to stop a pain they feel and in their view will apparently last forever or will get worse. I.e cancer, someone has to spend the rest of his life in a bed after an accident ... People can also commit suicide as a sacrifice to save others. But I guess you were not talking of these types of suicide.
You think that more people commit suicide for others than for themselves? Care to explain why or cite anything?
>Suicide due to mental instability is probably just a small fraction of all suicide.
From the graphic shown on the page, not all suicide are caused by mental illness. That was my main point.
I have some doubts about the mental illness importance shown in this graph. Anyway, the mental illness could be the source of pain leading to the rational decision to end it by suicide.
I know there are people there that want to see it happen, but it's a matter of cost. What incentives/programs does Earth on AWS offer to assist stewards of public data to make it available on AWS?
Additionally, I think some of this data is normally behind URS/Earthdata Login, what did the politics of making the data available on AWS without URS look like?