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Total Members Voted: 23

[Sheb]

Because if its not cultural Marxism, then LW doesnt get to rant about the left? :p

[SirQuiamus]

It does seem odd to label sky-scraper-building real-estate developers as anything other than philistine capitalists, but you never know... ideology is a sneaky thing.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler: Spoiler because Monsanto made me do it (click to show/hide)

Because if its not cultural Marxism, then LW doesnt get to rant about the left? :p

Tbh I am left-wing myself but have all the social mores of some country Texan swinging around guns and bibles or something along those lines
Left or right is not important here

Jack the Ripper is knife deep in East London history m8,

You mean he's some kind of folk hero around there? Gr8!

Nah, but embedded in it like Hitler on a Hitler moustache
Hence embedded knife deep in Whitechapel

By the way, did you know that there's some evidence suggesting he might have been a Polish Jew?

That's why I said he was kosher

No wonder the readers of BBC History voted him the Worst Briton in History – he was one of the first Polish Plumbers and a prototypical Cultural Marxist!

Pardon me but I'm not surprised in the least, most people tend to agree opening people up inside out is not a good thing

That's very enlightened of you, but how is that a Cultural Marxist thing if people of every possible political orientation have been eager to demolish old buildings at some point of time?

Because they all come out of cultural marxist schools stressing the deconstruction of previous values

The biggest architectural atrocities in Finland were committed during the 60s and 70s, and they absolutely, positively had nothing to do with culture, Marxism, or indeed any ideology besides cold, hard cash.

When conservatives conserve nothing you must ask where they come from

Guardian attest that GM crops are safe to grow. Still unclear on whether GM crops are safe to eat. I guess it's progress at least.
“Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment – and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status,” Rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead said in a statement at the time.
“A growing number of governments are rejecting the commission’s drive for GM crop approvals,” Greenpeace’s E.U. food policy director Franziska Achterberg told the Guardian. “They don’t trust the E.U. safety assessments and are rightly taking action to protect their agriculture and food. The only way to restore trust in the E.U. system now is for the commission to hit the pause button on GM crop approvals and to urgently reform safety testing and the approval system.”
Hmmm. If the Scots don't like it then it gives me cause for concern too. Can Bt toxins kill things like bees, moths and other innocent insects and arachnids?

In other news:
Portugal vote: Governing coalition ahead, exit polls suggest. This is the government which has presided over government budget cuts in an effort to stave off a Portuguese economic crash, and so far it has been working. Could fail, but let's all hope they succeed.
Merkel: VW scandal won't damage Germany's reputation, if true, good news for Germany
Personally I hope it's true, Germans must be allowed to build more bagger 288s

[Strife26]

Monsanto is one of those companies that has scary amounts of power, scary amounts of potential to abuse and grow that power, combined with a scary history.



Not saying that our cyberpunk future is inevitable, but Monsanto would have to be one of the major considerations for it.

[scriver]

So apparently sweden may be trying something interesting? Starting to shift over and run experiments and whatnot on rolling with six hour workdays. Anyone closer to the place hear anything about this?

I often wonder if I should be jealous of Sweden, having a government that seems to care about being sensible.

I have heard nothing of this, so I doubt it is anything happening on a broad front. But then again I've been paying less attention to news lately as it is all just bringing me down a lot.

[Loud Whispers]

Monsanto is one of those companies that has scary amounts of power, scary amounts of potential to abuse and grow that power, combined with a scary history.



Not saying that our cyberpunk future is inevitable, but Monsanto would have to be one of the major considerations for it.

Private armies, private armies of lawyers, private bees, private scientists, secret science bases; on the one hand this is horrible but on the other hand I am most pleased that Bond villains are real. I hope Monsanto finds an excuse to build a volcano base in Hawaii or something, and begins employing Serbian war criminals with robotic prosthetics.

[Frumple]

Monsanto is one of those companies that has scary amounts of power, scary amounts of potential to abuse and grow that power, combined with a scary history.

Yeah, some of the companies peddling the newer stuff is a bit concerning, but GM in general is seriously good shit. Potential to do a hell of a lot in a lot of areas, already helping out pretty substantially in a bunch of places -- the pesticide related parts isn't even half the equation. Ruggedization (or whatever the hell it's called) of crops is a bit part of already existent and up and coming stuff, just as a example, and opens up some hella' venues for a lot of the rougher parts of the world. We've been doing this stuff for a long bloody time, s'nice to see the development of better tools and techniques finally kicking into high gear. Just a bit of a shame about the reactionaries, heh.

[Strife26]

Oh yeah, GM in general is ridiculously important shit. It's just going to run squarely into the same blockages that pharmaceutical companies tend to fall into. Massive development costs which then have to be recouped with a product that has a supply cost.

And that tends to exist in markets without full, free competition because there's no effective substitute.

[Baffler]

I used to dislike Monsanto too, but I realized recently that they do the things they do for the same reason the pharmaceutical industry is so protective of their intellectual property. It probably won't surprise anyone who cares to think about it that genetic engineering is a difficult and expensive process, that requires an even greater amount of difficult and expensive research to get right. If they slack off on protecting their IP, they'll be in a situation where they sink ridiculous sums of money into developing new strains of crops only to have that strain get out there one way or another and they won't be able to recoup their investment.

They're in an even more precarious position than the pharmaceutical industry in that regard, because it's much easier for people to reproduce their product. Easy enough that it can happen accidentally. When you consider their standing from their shoes, the litigiousness and the terminator genes start making a little bit more sense. I don't know enough about their business to say whether or not it's actually necessary, but it's certainly more understandable thought of that way.

Edit: And I'm ninja'd by Strife for the third time today.

[Sheb]

The hilarious part is that Greenpeace and Co. are pushing Bt toxin really hard as an alternative to chemical pesticide... when it's produced by its native bacteria, and not in a plant.

[Loud Whispers]

I used to dislike Monsanto too, but I realized recently that they do the things they do for the same reason the pharmaceutical industry is so protective of their intellectual property. It probably won't surprise anyone who cares to think about it that genetic engineering is a difficult and expensive process, that requires an even greater amount of difficult and expensive research to get right. If they slack off on protecting their IP, they'll be in a situation where they sink ridiculous sums of money into developing new strains of crops only to have that strain get out there one way or another and they won't be able to recoup their investment.

They're in an even more precarious position than the pharmaceutical industry in that regard, because it's much easier for people to reproduce their product. Easy enough that it can happen accidentally. When you consider their standing from their shoes, the litigiousness and the terminator genes start making a little bit more sense. I don't know enough about their business to say whether or not it's actually necessary, but it's certainly more understandable thought of that way.

Edit: And I'm ninja'd by Strife for the third time today.

Easy for em to sell infertile seeds, it's also the responsible thing to do so ubercrops don't end up dominating the countryside

The hilarious part is that Greenpeace and Co. are pushing Bt toxin really hard as an alternative to chemical pesticide... when it's produced by its native bacteria, and not in a plant.

I suppose it's like planting clover instead of using fertilizer, sometimes there really is a better way
Granted, I don't like Greenpeace much. Intention are good, heads not in good places. Still can't forget what they did to the Nazca lines :|

[mainiac]

According to the food and agriculture organization of the united nations statistics division, from 1961 to 2013, the average person on earth has gone from 2196 to 2870 calories a day.  That is to say that as recently as when your parents were born, the average person on earth was at risk of famine in the event of a fluctuation in the food supply while today the average person on earth has a very large buffer between them an famine.  In fact this greatly understates the progress because one of the first things people do when they escape food insecurity is start eating more expensive foods which represent wasted calories.  One meal of beef could have fed you for 10 or meals of beans and vegetables.  Just from 1991, the percentage of people undernourished has fallen from %18.6 to %10.9.  The remaining undernourishment that exists is due almost exclusively to general problems of poverty and almost not at all due to general problems of food production.  The UN has it's eyes set on and end to world hunger before the year 2030.

There have not been huge innovations in artificial fertilizers or mechanization that have raised crop yields this much.  The green revolution of the 20th century was genetically engineered high yield crops.  That is what has more then doubled yields per acre in the developed world even as the amount of labor and machinery and water per calorie fell and more expensive foodstuffs have crowded out old staples.  Yields in South Asia and Latin America per acre are now higher then 1960 yields in the developed world despite them still not having the same level of mechanization the developed world had in 1960.  India is now rich enough that voters can start accusing each other of being welfare queens.

So GM crops are a pretty fucking good thing.  When someone comes along and slays one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you dont complain that they tracked mud on your rug doing it.

[Grim Portent]

Ideally most GM crops would be researched as a public investment by governments and then made freely available rather than made by corporations and copyrighted, but the budget for public/academic funding is pretty abysmal and usually goes into more immediate interests. As is it we just need to maintain proper regulations of GM crops and try to sort out issues of copyright infringement that come from GM crops crossbreeding with non-GM crops in their vicinity, that's still an odd situation legally as I recall.

In general though GM is something to welcome, though I am biased in it's favour somewhat seeing as it's the direction much of my education has been dedicated to.

If the Scots don't like it then it gives me cause for concern too. Can Bt toxins kill things like bees, moths and other innocent insects and arachnids?

Last time I checked the information on that was indicating that it doesn't hurt bees, but it was being introduced around the same time as a few other things that caused problems for some insects, especially bees, that muddied the waters so to speak. I think the pollen is toxic to some butterflies though, the American monarch butterfly certainly, but they only get exposed to wind blown pollen from most crop plants rather than direct exposure, so it can be manageable.

Most of the studies done on the subject are based on American fauna, so it's not clear how they'd affect European insects. 

[Sheb]

Yeah, re:agriculture, I'm way more excited by agroecology and agroforestry than by gene technology, at least for the major crop. We already went so far to improve germplasm, we're hitting diminishing return on investment.

What did Greenpeace do to the Nazca lines?

Edit: mainiac, the Green Revolution was accomplished using conventionally bred varieties, not GM crops. GM crops only started popping up in the 90's.

[Sheb]

You're probably thinking of Norman Borlaug, who create wheat resistant to stem rust, and pushed very hard for the Green Revolution in India. But his work was done using smart, hard work and conventional breeding.

LW, if you like stupid regulation, you will love the ones about genetic engineering. Randomly mutating a gene through PCR will make your organism GM and will cause you endless regulatory pain, but mutating that gene by frying it with UV is fine. There is a whole industry of biologist trying to find ways around the regulations to have their creating declared not GM. The biggest group in my lab work on ways to get yoghurt bacteria to incorporate DNA from their environment into their own chromosomes, so you don't need to GM them, you just "let that interesting piece of DNA lay about" and let nature do its work.