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This is a fantasy.

No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.

So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.


lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now. It took China putting on regulations on their side to disrupt that industry. Now you have to find other smaller economies to do that.


You appear to be agreeing with the person you’re replying to.


I'm not. Read their comment and mine. This was always, and will always be a thing. It's not a burden, just a marginal cost of business. Instead of paying a European company a €40k to destroy your broken products, you can pay an African one €10k to "recycle" your product. Best of all, you're legally forced to. I can see hundreds of companies lobbying for this because it completely takes them off the hook. "The law says we must do this. Please contact your representatives you dumb fucks"


The original comment says "sell them to «resale» companies". Selling goods means being paid for it, while you and the parent comment are both saying money goes in the opposite direction.


When you negotiate the price to ”sell” at, it’s perfectly legitimate for that price to be negative.


Outside of a few very rare circumstances, that’s not what “sell” means. 99.9999999999% of the time, “selling for a negative price” is more accurately called “buying”.


Selling for a negative price is completely different from buying, because the flow of 'goods' is in the other direction.


Then they'll sell at a profit, but the shipping cost will be inflated to offset that profit and then some. If this is identified and corrected in the law, then the sale will be at an actual profit, but there will be a corresponding price hike in goods purchased in the future through the same partner company. Or, a politician will be bought and it will be made it illegal to restrict shipping goods for destruction, citing damage to rising economies etc, and now it's 2 countries' laws creating a situation which will drag 20yrs in courts, while the goods keep getting destroyed. Or, the goods will be sold already in the first country to a separate entity, shipped through a 3rd country, and tracking will be lost due to unfortunate bugs, nobody's fault, really sorry.

There. 4 scenarios. I could make more.

They need more Italians helping draft these laws, we have a... cultural/genetic knack for figuring ways around regulations :) and I don't even think I'm particularly good at this. But maybe LLMs will make our devious disposition finally obsolete.

The law is naive, but well intended. Maybe with 20-30 patches it will achieve enough of its purpose.


You're buying a service, and the service is getting rid of goods.


I don't think you can sell at loss in Europe (not sure, happy to be corrected), so might be small but it'll still be positive. The bet is it will be high enough to be a deterrent. The other bet is that at some point the rest of the world will push back being a corporate dumpster.


This particular thread of the argument can go on for a while. I can't well articulate the doubts I have because I'm not in the industry, but many such well-meaning laws have a tendency to backfire once given enough time for bad/poor actors to game it.



There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the largest environmental case in Swedish history.

The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday", and the main reason the Swedish police caught wind in the earlier mentioned case was that the waste started to self-ignite.

The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.


Oil companies have been doing this for over a century in US. Sell abandoned well to a small llc, llc files bankruptcy, big OilCo off the hook! Everyone happy!



>The scheme is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner.

This is what these countries get for having weak laws that allow people to do illegal dumping and then hide behind a corporate veil to avoid accountability.


Trouble is if democracy worked properly then corporate entities wouldn't be able to lobby and influence governments to weaken laws out of self-interest.


Read their comment and yours? What great advice. I would suggest you do the same, but I think you'll continue to misread it.

> No one is going to pay you to take your waste away and dispose of it. You would have to pay them.

> lol, paying someone to "take your waste away and dispose of it" has been a stable of the "recycle" industry in western countries for 3 decades now.

They are saying that paying to dispose of the clothes/waste is how it's done. And then... you said the same thing. Perhaps you're assuming they're just taking a guess, rather than coming at it with understanding that this is how it has been done for a while.


There's already strong financial incentives to not over-produce. Nobody wants to dump cash into inventory that can't sell. Trying to force them to sell it all is going to reduce choice and availability for consumers, unless the businesses find a workaround. I'm pretty sure they will find a workaround, and it won't be to sell at a steep loss to the same market that refused the products to begin with. But these workarounds will cost money, and consumers will pay for the fantasy that waste is being reduced.


One man's trash is another man's treasure.

They will be able to sell them for pennies on the dollar so that some fraction of them can be resold for cheap in Africa or somewhere else poor. Those companies can then dispose of them however they wish.

The reseller makes a small profit, and the original moanufacturer gets the PR of "clothing the poor" or whatever.

And, as usual, EU regulations achieve absolutely nothing -- if anything, this is worse than nothing.


1. Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.

2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.

3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.


1. You can buy a cotton tshirt from LIDL for 3 bucks and it'll hold for years. It won't be cut perfectly or have the softest material but it's definitely not bad.

Of course, if I get it from Temu for 6 cents it'll probably fall apart in a week, but modern clothing isn't really covered by "the cheapest thing I can find".

Same for ultralight fabrics, that, while lovely in summer, usually get trashed in a season or two simply because the thing weighs fuck all.

I'd even say we're in a golden age for clothing. I can get a motorcycle jacket that can slide at 80kmh for 40 bucks with shoulder and elbow protectors and a thermo layer insert.


Cheap cotton cannot hold for years, the fiber length and yarn quality makes it simply impossible. On top of that, cheap cotton is bleached and fast dyied which makes the clothing change after few washings.

I mean if you mean "hold" like, you can't still wear it albeit it looks nothing like it did two washings before, of course it does.

But then you look exactly like what you buy, someone with worn low quality clothing which looked nice in the shop and first wear.


The 3 buck LIDL tshirt isn't really intended for casual business attire tbh.

If you want good looking (symmetrically cut, better stitched, etc) tshirts long term I then raise you Uniqlo with 7 bucks per DRY synthtic tshirt and 12 for a supima cotton one. I pretty much daily them and in over at least 3 years they haven't shown significant aging. Only the supima ones have mostly lost the "supima" text on the inside at the back of the neck area.

Comically enough I also have 3 shirts from Primark for 1$ each that are now at least 5 years old, probably more like 7 that still look fine. I still wear them to work without worry. The shaping of them was all over the place though. No two in the pile were identical.

Dying could be an issue, I wear gray and black ones so your mileage may vary with colored washing. I also don't blast them at 90 degrees C but rather 60 for black/gray, 40 for everything else.

Or your standards are just ultra high compared to mine, for better or worse. From my perspective tshirt quality ends at Uniqlo and I then go to Olympus business/casual shirts. From there the only option I have to look more businessman-y is the wool suit.


Same with my Jack and Jones T-shirts. 3 for 20€ and last for years.


> 2. The market for vintage quality clothing is super strong and booming. You don't need to export it.

The market for regular second-hand clothes is on the verge of collapsing in Germany though. Charities are flooded with low quality and unsalable stuff ever since it was made illegal to throw away clothes in the regular trash. You must bring them to recycling facilities instead now. It not profitable for charities to sort through them because of the volume. There is a market for quality vintage clothes but that's a totally different thing.

> 3. No fashion brand wants to be anywhere near associated to clothing the poor. It's a pr disaster.

That's probably the only thing that motivates brands not to overproduce. But lets be real, they will rather find loopholes for destroying them instead of selling them for cheap.


> Modern clothing is terrible, plastic filled, hardly resists multiple washings. This isn't the 1990s/2000s anymore where you could buy mid budged solid apparel and keep it forever. The gold existed, up to pre COVID. But since then and the rapid spread of fast fashion collecting cloth wastes is a bad business.

Hard disagree. Live in Central Asia, buy locally produced relatively cheap clothes and they have been lasting years so far.


You're not really describing fast fashion, aren't you?


No I am describing "modern closing", as in GP post.


modern clothing that is not made in the EU -- which is mostly fast-fashion.

and the ones usually making it outside of the EU are tied to large European corps.

"I eat apples grown down the street, so EU apple law is bad"


What about Uniqlo and Muji? They make exactly what you describe: mid-budget solid apparel. Their clothes last for years and resist multiple washings.


Both of those situations sound like a net win.


Isn't it a thing that poor countries can't get their own textile and clothing companies going because of donations or cheap used clothes? I'm fairly certain that's a thing.


There seems to be 3-4 other issues colluding with that. If customers prefer or can't afford new domestic clothes, then it would make it hard for a business to succeed.


a firm isn't going to sell them to reseller in the third world as it will cause brand dilution, additionally current customer base will feel shortchanged and shop elsewhere.

Much more likely is as the op said: selling to a company that will dispose of the stock.


How is achieving the exact goal worse than nothing?


Retailers don't want their excess inventory to be sold at a discount. They'd rather it be destroyed. A small fee to have someone else destroy it is just a business expense. The OP should have put "sell" in scare quotes.


> A small fee to have someone else destroy

They just write it off, Jerry.

All these big companies, they write off everything.


Donate it to some charity which will ship it to Africa for you, so you can get the tax write off, _even better_


China for decades paid the U.S. and Europe for their "recycling", this practice was only banned in recent years. Clothes seem more valuable than plastics waste.


clothes is plastics waste


Can be, but there are also natural fibers from e.g. cotton, wool or hemp. But yeah many fast fashion products are polyester..


That was because you could make money by turning old things into new things. Not so with garbage disposal, a service for which you almost always have to pay.


> Not so with garbage disposal

There is already a healthy trade for second-hand clothing to 3rd world countries (see pics of kids with "<Final's losing team> World Champions 2022"). The prices will be better for brand new clothes. The gray distribution channels already exist and will readily pay for new clothes - at steep discounts, but pay for them nonetheless.


Describing it as a market is not entirely correct. The clothes these people wear are garbage. As a species, we produce more clothes than we could ever wear. I am reminded of a story of a charity that accepted clothing donations for the victims of an American hurricane, and immediately had to stop because their warehouse filled up. Many clothes are not even worn once before they're thrown away, and one of the cheaper ways to dispose of them is dumping them on 3rd worlders. It's quite dystopic really the underclasses who dig through our trash.


… and put local African cloth producers out of business. The same happened with shoes sent to African countries by NGOs. Well intentioned, but local shoe manufacturers went out of business. The local population did not really benefit, because traders would get a hold of the free shoes and sell them on for just a bit less than locally produced shoes.


I’ve heard there’s a practice of selling bundles of clothes to Africa and then the purchases pick through the bundle for what’s good and what’s useless. The impression I was left with is that this used to be more lucrative but now you’re almost as likely to get complete garbage as something good. So it’s like a sad loot box.


It's a big issue in Africa, as it completely destroyed to local clothing industry. As a side effect, you see people wearing westerner style clothing even in the midst of Africa, which is quite unsettling.


Now that you mention it, whatever I was watching that talked about this, also addressed the negative impact on the local textile industry.

So do you expect this law will increase the amount of dumping? Sounds like it might.


That's not really true.

Some places sell their cardboard scrap. I'm guessing that places with the right sorts of metal scrap get paid for their waste.

And folks have to pay for much of the rest. Some of the issue with dumping waste in a business's trash is that the business pays directly for waste removal in many places, unlike a lot of private folks, which pay through taxes.

This is the current state of things. What has changed is the sort of service that they need to pay for. Instead of destruction, they'd be paying for recycling or resale. Like now, they have the option of donation or reduced prices.


> a) not over produce

Forecasting demand is hard. If you will produce less than needed you will sell less than could have sold (lost revenue) while overproducing is relatively cheap.

> b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

The main reason unsold items are destroyed is to avoid price depression - giving unsold items for next to nothing will reduce future demand for full priced items. It's wasteful and harmful for environment but as others noted it's hard to fight with this given that destruction could be outsourced to other countries.


"financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing."

That's not how it works in practice, with the economies of scale/production it makes more economic sense to produce goods surplus to requirements then destroy remaining stock so it will not detract from/devalue sales of next/forthcoming product.

It's an old trick and applies not only to clothes but many goods. There are variations such as destroying trade-ins, used equipment etc. rather than sell it to remove it from the market (thus only new equipment is available).

Some companies took this to extremes in that they'd only rent equipment which would be withdrawn from the market and deliberately destroyed at the end of its service life so it couldn't be sold or ratted for spare parts (photocopier manufacturers were notorious for this). IBM used a cleaver approach with its computers, they'd sell off old computers as 'valuable' scrap (some parts could be still useful to others) but anything deemed as spares for their existing machines would be partially disabled (still useful but couldn't be used as a spare part). For example, they'd break the edge connectors off circuit boards but leave the electronic components intact.


>So now there's a strong financial incentive to a) not over produce, b) sell the clothes - even if it means selling them for next to nothing.

I think now the incentive is to produce less.


They won’t “sell”. Imagine LV selling originals in Africa , Africa would immediately resell them in Europe and us and Asia for much higher price and dilute the brand. It will be officially sold to a reseller, not officially they will pay a special African company to destroy it.

So same shit as before. Slightly more expensive. No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap.


> No big brand would ever sell their originals that didn’t sell cheap

This is just inherently incorrect. In Europe we have a load of outlet villages which is where big brands do exactly that. It’s where I do most of my shopping. Last year I bought two pairs of Nike Dunks for £25 a pop. I bought Salomon hiking shoes for £60 instead of £140. A pair of Levis 501s for £20. Just an example or my most recent purchases.


Nike yeah, but not luxury brands usually.


Not sure what you’re considering luxury but it definitely is not just Nike et al: https://www.mcarthurglen.com/en/outlets/uk/designer-outlet-a...


> Levis 501s

Ewww, those are last years 501s


You are right. What will happen is somebody will pay “x” for the clothing, but the same company will charge “2x” for transport.


You have to pay to burn them, at home or abroad, and the cost is likely a few % of a clothing piece, where the margin is already >70%.

Tl;dr the EU will say "Mission Accomplished" because no clothing has been burned in the EU since 2026(tm), while all of the emissions are produced abroad.

The same show has been going on with industry, where the dirtiest parts are done in India or China, so that we can say that we are "clean".


The big brands should be penalized for doing the burning or destroying themselves, enforcing such destruction through contract laws or any formal communication, or even through punishment by denying future contracts.

The receiver on the other end should defect and renege on their contract and sell the goods in the open market for pennies on the dollar. While they won't be able to bring it back to western countries, they should absolutely be able to sell them locally. It should be legal for them to renege on any illegal contracts.

At least that's how I see it.


An unexpected consequence of such drastic rule is that sizes on both tails (xs/xl) may disappear as they become unprofitable for the producer.


I've reached a steady state where the rate of learning matches the rate of forgetting


How old are you? At 39 (20 years of professional experience) I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens, which have been replaced by nonsense like Kubernetes and aligning content with CSS Grid.

And I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade; to be fair, it gets to a point that most new ideas are just rehashing of older ones. When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.


> I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens

I'm a bit younger (33) but you'd be surprised how fast it comes back. I hadn't touched x86 assembly for probably 10 years at one point. Then someone asked a question in a modding community for an ancient game and after spending a few hours it mostly came back to me.

I'm sure if you had to reverse engineer some win32 applications, it'd come back quickly.


SoftICE gang represent :-)

That's a skill onto itself, and I mean the general stuff does not fade or at least come back quickly. But there's a lot of the tail end that's just difficult to recall because it's obscure.

How exactly did I hook Delphi apps' TForm handling system instead of breakpointing GetWindowTextA and friends? I mean... I just cannot remember. It wasn't super easy either.


I want to second this. I'm 38 and I used to do some debugging and reverse engineering during my university days (2006-2011). Since then I've mainly avoided looking at assembly since I mostly work in C++ systems or HLSL.

These last few months, however, I've had to spend a lot of time debugging via disassembly for my work. It felt really slow at first, but then it came back to me and now it's really natural again.


You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain. You forget skills you don’t use. Barring some pathology, if you’re doing something every day you won’t forget it.

If you’ve forgotten your Win32 reverse engineering skills I’m guessing you haven’t done much of that in a long time.

That said, it’s hard to truly forget something once you’ve learned it. If you had to start doing it again today, you’d learn it much faster this time than the first.


> You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain.

For what it’s worth—it’s not entirely clear that this is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia

The human brain seemingly has the capability to remember (virtually?) infinite amounts of information. It’s just that most of us… don’t.


You can't store an infinite amount of entropy in a finite amount of space outside of a singularity, well or at least attempting to do that will cause a singularity.

Compression/algorithms don't save you here either. The algorithm for pi is very short, pulling up any particular randomm digit of pi still requires the expenditure of some particular amount of entropy.


It's entirely possible for this to be literally false, but practically true

The important question is can you learn enough in a standard human lifetime to "fill up your knowledge bank"?


1) That's not infinite, just vast

2) Hyperthymesia is about remembering specific events in your past, not about retaining conceptual knowledge.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w

APL inventor says that he was developing not a programming language, but notation to express as much problems as one can. He found that expressing more and more problems with the notation first made notation grow, then notation size started to shrink.

To develop conceptual knowledge (when one's "notation" starts to shrink) one has to have some good memory (re-expressing more and more problems).


The point is that this particular type of exceptional memory has nothing to do with conceptual knowledge, it's all about experiences. This particular condition also makes you focus on your own past to an excessive amount, which would distract you from learning new technologies.

You can't model systems in your mind using past experiences, at least not reliably and repeatedly.


You can model systems in your mind using past experience with different systems, reliably and repetetively.


No you can't.

Your lived experience is not a systematic model of anything, what this type of memory gives you is a vivid set of anecdotes describing personally important events.


> It’s just that most of us… don’t.

Ok, so my statement is essentially correct.

Most of us can not keep infinite information in our brain.


It's not that you forget, it's more that it gets archived.

If you moved back to a country you hadn't lived or spoken its language in for 10 years, you would find yourself that you don't have to relearn it, and it would come back quickly.

Also information is supposedly almost infinite, as with increased efficiency as you learn, it makes volume limits redundant.


I do take your point. But the point I’m trying to emphasize is that the brain isn’t like a hard drive that fills up. It’s a muscle that can potentially hold more.

I’m not sure if this is in the Wikipedia article, but when I last read about this, years ago, there seemed to be a link between Hyperthymesia and OCD. Brain scans suggested the key was in how these individuals organize the information in their brain, so that it’s easy for them retrieve.

Before the printing press was common, it was common for scholars to memorize entire books. I absolutely cannot do this. When technology made memorization less necessary, our memories shrank. Actually shrank, not merely changing what facts to focus on.

And to be clear, I would never advocate going back to the middle ages! But we did lose something.


There must be some physical limit to our cognitive capacity.

We can “store” infinite numbers by using our numeral system as a generator of sorts for whatever the next number must be without actually having to remember infinite numbers, but I do not believe it would be physically possible to literally remember every item in some infinite set.

Sure, maybe we’ve gotten lazy about memorizing things and our true capacity is higher (maybe very much so), but there is still some limit.

Additionally, the practical limit will be very different for different people. Our brains are not all the same.


I agree, it must not be literally infinite, I shouldn’t have said that. But it may be effectively infinite. My strong suspicion is that most of us are nowhere close to whatever the limit is.

Think about how we talk about exercise. Yes, there probably is a theoretical limit to how fast any human could run, and maybe Olympic athletes are close to that, but most of us aren’t. Also, if you want your arms to get stronger, it isn’t bad to also exercise your legs; your leg muscles don’t somehow pull strength away from your arm muscles.


> your leg muscles don’t somehow pull strength away from your arm muscles.

No, but the limiting factor is the amount of stored energy available in your body. You could exhaust your energy stores using only your legs and left barely able to use your arms (or anything else).

If we’ve offloaded our memory capacity to external means of rapid recall (ex. the internet) then what have we gained in response? Breadth of knowledge? Increased reasoning abilities? More energy for other kinds of mental work? Because there’s no cheating thermodynamics, even thinking uses energy. Or are we just simply radiating away that unused energy as heat and wasting that potential?


It is also a matter of choice. I don’t remember any news trivia, I don’t engage with "people news" and, to be honest, I forget a lot of what people tell me about random subject.

It has two huge benefits: nearly infinite memory for truly interesting stuff and still looking friendly to people who tell me the same stuff all the times.

Side-effect: my wife is not always happy that I forgot about "non-interesting" stuff which are still important ;-)


  > When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.
Learn yourself relational algebra. It invariantly will lead you to optimization problems and these will also invariantly lead you to equality saturation that is most effectively implemented with... generalized join from relational algebra!

Also, relational algebra implements content-addressable storage (CAS), which is essential for data flow computing paradigm. Thus, you will have a window into CPU design.

At 54 (36 years of professional experience) I find these rondos fascinating.


> I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade;

I felt like that for a while, but I seem to be finding new challenges again. Lately I've been deep-diving on data pipelines and embedded systems. Sometimes I find problems that are easy enough to solve by brute force, but elegant solutions are not obvious at all. It's a lot of fun.

It could be that you're way ahead of me and I'll wind up feeling like that again.


That's one of several possibilities. I've reached a different steady state - one where the velocity of work exceeds the rate at which I can learn enough to fully understand the task at hand.


But just think, there's a whole new framework that isn't better but is trendy. You can recycle a lot of your knowledge and "learn new things" that won't matter in five years. Isn't that great?


I use spaced repetition for stuff I care for.

I use remnote for that.

I write cards and quizzes for all kind of stuff, and I tend to retain it for years after having it practiced with the low friction of spaced repetition.


to fix that you basically need to switch specialty or focus. A difficult thing to do if you are employed of course.


Would the data from this satellite be freely available to the public? I couldn't see anything obvious


As far as I can tell, they say: "Mission control and data distribution are managed by EUMETSAT." They have published their own blog post here: https://www.eumetsat.int/features/see-earths-atmosphere-neve...

There they say that: "Observations made by MTG-S1 will feed into data products that support national weather services …". So I guess there will be no simple, publicly available REST API or so... but if anybody finds anything, let us know here :)



nice find. so you need a client_id to access the API


For the datasets, I tried to access (like the full disc image in visible wavelength, MTG 0 degree), it is sufficient to register at eumetsat to get a username and password. The eumdac python tool is probably the easiest way to access the data:

https://pypi.org/project/eumdac/

(If you do not want to use python, the --debug option is quite useful to see exactly the request made. The output is either some JSON metadata or a large zip with the netcdf data)


Read the data store user guide. You have to register.


Most weather data isn't generally available by easy to query REST API's (at least not at the original sources). One side project I had I wanted to use NOMADs data, and it was quite a grind downloading and processing the raw datasets into something usable at an application level (or viable to expose via an API).


That’s why you have service/products that have the sole purpose of taking all these region specific data sources and processing them in to a generic json api.

The government orgs probably do it intentionally so they don’t have ten million devices pinging their servers to update weather widgets.


Check out open-meteo. They’ve got pretty extensive historical and forecast weather apis in easy to consume formats. https://open-meteo.com/en/features#available_apis


EU citizens can get free access to it via Eumetcast DVB-S service for non-commercial use. A registration, an off-the-shelf DVB-S data receiver, a satellite dish and their decryption USB key is required. FOSS software like Satpy is available for processing those radiometric data. More info: https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/eumet-cast-e...


Unlikely. EU countries are consistently restrictive about access to this kind of data. Even when it is available, it often has odd restrictive licensing. This is an area where the US, with its liberal data access policies, is far ahead of Europe.

Something else to keep in mind is that the data products are extremely large. It would be expensive to give the public access. I used to host these types of data sets for EU countries. The workload just from authorized users is resource intensive, it doesn't scale cheaply. (I once woke up to find a metaphorical smoking crater where my server racks were because an authorized user shared his credentials with a few friends overnight.)


I don't know what you mean.

Data from the Copernicus program has always been fully available, served with a nice web UI, API for both near real time data and archives.

It's the best source of open satellite data by far.

As for the licensing, I never actually looked it up, so maybe you're right.


There are two aspects to this.

The licensing commonly restricts you to small hobbyist use cases. There are typically restrictions on use of data, the amount of data, and retention of data. I've never looked at Copernicus data before but it appears to have the same kinds of restrictions. This is the licensing equivalent of "source available" rather than true "open source". Hopefully they are improving on this front.

While the data may be available in theory, no one ever invests in the data infrastructure that would allow people to access it in practice. They always have a nice website and API but it is like trying to watch Youtube over a dial-up modem. Usable access is reserved for researchers with an approved use case.

The US government does an unusually good job at both of these in my experience. Even when US public data sets that are not readily available online, you have to contact someone, it is usually for good reason. For example, because they are multi-exabyte data sets sitting on tape somewhere that almost no one ever asks for.


Well it makes sense the public API has restrictions. They probably have separate enterprise licensing.


Isn't EUMETSAT data usually under CC-by-SA 3.0? So all you have to do is to register with them and get your client ID for API access, or are there more hoops to jump through?


> restrictive about access to this kind of data

After all, we don't know if the weather consented to having its data displayed, or if it even allowed cookies.


Core data is CC-BY-4.0, "recommended" data is licensed with a fee for certain commercial uses.

https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/data-registr...


As most EU projects yes. There was test data released last year to get you started.

https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/getting-star...


Well, at least in my experience with EU projects, they tend to be much more restrictive with data sharing than equivalent US institutions: e.g. a lot of paid EUMET data has publicly available NOAA equivalents - though usually of worse quality.


Yes! That government agencies data is PD is a nice feature of US law, we should implement that in EU.


Try to ask the NRO for their images and see how you go :)


Intelligence gathering data vs weather data. Yeah, that's the same thing.


Not Public Domain, TD - Taxpayers Domain. :)


Not sure why you're being down-voted. US weather models are free. EU models are not.


Depends on which model. Only really the ECMWF weather model is not fully free. The German, French, Dutch, ... models are all free (regional and global models). Of course, these global models are generally less accurate than ECMWF, still ECMWF has a lot of free data available too. US models are also freely available, and quite easy to work with (as opposed to some European ones).


You can see the most important charts from the ECMWF model for free on ecmwf.int. But you will not get the data behind them.


Take a look at https://zenodo.org/communities/eu/

Yes, it's not everything, but it's a start.


It is not an EU project. It is an ESA and EUMETSAT project. Neither is an EU organisation. Both have multiple non-EU members, and I do not think all EU countries are members of either.


There was a good CCC talk on pulling images from weather sats (and data from other satellites) - https://youtu.be/fM5w7bFNvWI?si=Dq6S6nYOE_frAd7b

It's been done before, but this was a great talk imo.


Yes, it will be freely available to the public


EUMETSAT publishes data as CC-BY 4.0 past a timeliness of 1 hour https://www.eumetsat.int/data-policy/eumetsat-data-policy.pd...

Look for your dataset here https://data.eumetsat.int/ (Note: you need registration but it is free).


I guess you will be able to access the data with copernicus (usually thy even provide raw L0 data)


If they'll publish it through Copernicus, it'll probably show up here:

https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu/


Definitely not in anything like realtime, maybe an archive. There's a licence fee of 8000EUR/yr to access real-time EUMETSAT data. Welcome to Europe, where you pay for everything twice.


There's an 8k license for "recommended" (not "core", which is free under CC-BY-4.0 for all purposes) data if you are a service provider or broadcaster:

https://user.eumetsat.int/resources/user-guides/data-registr...

There are also fees in some other circumstances, but not for "personal, educational, research" use.


lame, with GOES-18 you can just download the latest full disk image in real time. Makes for a nifty desktop background when combined with a systemd user timer that fetches the current picture of the earth every 15 minutes.

https://www.goes-r.gov/multimedia/dataAndImageryImagesGoes-1...


Hah! I don't believe this for a second. No, you need the 8k, a business entity (at the very least), five different licenses of some sort, and then some form of accreditation.


Interesting and useful article, but:

> If you are new to 3D printing and/or CAD for 3D printing, this is not the right article for you.

I feel like I would have been fine with this article about a week into my 3d printing journey.


Original author here. Thanks for the feedback.

I always find it hard to determine what audience is appropriate for what I write. In this case I specifically didn't want to spend time on explaining what I consider basic terminology, and as deep as I am into 3D printing it can be hard to know what is at what level.


I don't think it's important to specify the target audience's required knowledge or level.

I often start to read article outside of my knowledge/competences and yes, often stop because I'm lost in terminology and don't want to read further.

But, it also happens that I want to know more and discover what specialists consider "basic knowledge".

This is the exact pattern that made me want to read your text. I knew vase mode existed but never cared for it because it's outside of my requirements for 3d printing.

Now I know and you explained it perfectly!


Just leave that remark out. You're likely to be wrong for the majority of readers. Just let the reader decide whether the article is right or wrong for them.


> I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long.

Well, you wouldn't, would you?

Sorry, not to detract from your other points, but I thought it was funny.


All of our planes came back with the wings shot up!


Agreed. Seemed like a particularly poor choice to show off the capabilities of an image compression algorithm


OP makes an app for his own needs and his own phone and decides to share it for free, at considerable cost ($100/yr), and your response is to ask him to remake it for you, from scratch (in another language), for an OS that OP doesn't use? Holy shit


Until you click the "accept" button, you haven't agreed to accept any cookies, so if you instead click through to settings, it shows you the current state: cookies off. I think the toggles could be a bit clearer, but I don't really have a problem with it.

Having worked at AI (a long time ago), I can assure you this isn't some mastermind plot to sneak a couple of cookies onto the computers of the one or two people who click through to settings.


A prominent "Deny" button is mandatory by privacy law (at least in Europe). It is missing.


It's not if the state without any button click is "Deny".


This will pair very well with my Anthropologie rock.


Can't you right-then-left-click the flagged mine? Iirc there's an awkward way of doing this


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