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Thanksgiving Bits
An anonymous reader writes "Whatis.com has a holiday themed tech quiz, Thanksgiving: Do you speak Geek?. Bit stuffing, anyone?" And reader Punboy writes with some hope of building a better turkey: "Apparently the biotech guys are at it again, this time with our poultry! They're mapping the turkey genome in hopes of providing better breeding techniques, and remove the 'guesswork'." And while food is on your mind, here's a story about the challenges of feeding a hungry planet.
I'm glad that after wasting most of the article talking about how we need to find better ways of growing crops in order to feed all the hungry people out there, the BBC article does make an off-hand mention towards the end that there is enough food to feed everyone, it's just a matter of distribution due to politics.
Puts the rest of the article in a totally different light. What would feed the most people soonest would be to topple a bunch of idiot dicators and stablize some chaotic countries, no bio-engineered crops required. Once those countries are stablized, they can grow their own food, reducing the problem even further.
There's really no point in giving drough-resistant super crops to a dirt poor family in a war ravaged land, especially when they'll probably have to flee before the crops even sprout.
It's so frustrating to see reporters still stuck on an old problem that's mostly irrelevant today. I fully expect them to wish that movies would have some way of determining, or rating them, so you'd know which ones were safe to take your kids to. If only there was a way to send mail to someone on the other side of the planet without having to wait months for it to arrive. If only someone other than Intel made CPUs. Imagine if there was an operating system, based on Unix but free to use however you wanted?
These kinds of scary FUD stories come up again and again, but the problem is not world production, it is a distribution problem. So while US farmers are payed to produce too much food and while thousands of tonnes of food go to rot in Canada, African's are left to starve.
The real obstacle to the world's food issues have far more to do with economics, politics and popular will rather than the production capacity of the planet. Perhaps this won't be a big deal anyway, the UN forcasts that the earth's population will begin to decline in our lifetimes
Is it just me or is it just some writer under a deadline attempting poorly to write something related to Thanksgiving? I mean, table? That's not something I'd associate Thanksgiving with. And "binary digits"? WTF?
read the bunni comic
Sorry but maybe I have missed something. Turkeys are prolific, we can already grow as many as we want to. The only limitation is what the market will bear. So how does making freaky genetically modified turkey change that.
Most poor people don't mind having "less". Not everyone is greedy and jealous. A lot of people would be quite happy just to have enough for survival.
apterous.org
I'm not sure I follow your logic. What I do know is that each step up the food chain there is less than on tenth of energy. To get one pound of meat you need to feed the cows more than ten times as much grain. Thus meat isn't a very efficient source of food. However, the advantage of animal products is that animals can eat food that humans can't.
Economics is not zero sum.
In every voluntary captilistic transaction, both parties are winners, the purchaser gets something he values more than the money he gave up, and the seller gets an amount of money he values more than the good he gave up to get it.
Win-Win. Everything isn't zero sum.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
No, it won't. It didn't any of the other times that idiots like you have cried wolf either. If we'd listened to you it was impossible to feed even one billion people, and the telephone was a luxury for the rich because of the huge number of people needed to staff it.
"destroying topsoil at 10 or sometimes 100s of times faster than nature creates it"
This statistic is meaningless on its own. It seems to have been calculated specifically to sound scary, while being totally useless. "Spacebats increased 40 times faster after Anonymous Cowards began writing meaningless nonsense on Slashdot".
Example:
Assume topsoil is created over period of 1 million years prior to outset of civilisation. Farmers begin somehow "destroying" it in a way which decreases topsoil by 1% of this starting quantity every thousand years. After 100 000 years all the topsoil would be exhausted if this process were allowed to continue. So we're destroying it 10 times faster than nature creates it. Just like the rant above...
Except that this assumes our current civilisation and technology continues to exist exactly as-is for 100 000 years. So far it's been changing so quickly that our ancestor's lives are almost unrecognisable to us. So the premise is hopelessly flawed.
If you have solid research to present, go present it to someone who cares and can make a proper case for you. If you just have more stories about the sky falling go tell Chicken Little instead of bothering us.
Thankyou for highighting the real cause of world hunger. I thought I was going to have to write a post myself. Well I will expand on what you said anyway.
it has been shown time and time again that the cause of world hunger isnt the lack of production, but in fact the lack of distribution due to corruption, civil unrest and war, and high levels of subsidies in both the US and Europe that make it impossible for countries out side these areas to compete and hence develop their own agriculture.
Being forced to open their markets to subsidied produce from Europe and the US via pressure from the world bank, local farmers are thus unable to sell their own cash crops at a fair price. This has happened with nut growers, coffee, corn and many others. You thought the war on terror is expensive? The US will spend $180 Billion over 10 years from 2002.
Infact, GM products increase the likelyhood of starvation in the third world, because now the farmers are forced to buy expensive seed stocks and breeding animals from the owners of the GM patents (usually Monsanto) instead of being able to resow part of last year's crop, or if they try to continue in the traditional manner, they face competition in a heavily subsidies market. Farming only becomes ecconomically viable for "big agriculture".
More here
Socialism isn't "evil". It's just impractical with the human psyche. Most of us want to be "better" than the next guy. We want a better stereo, a better car, or a better house than the Joneses down the street. To get these things some are willing to work harder than others around us. When you introduce wealth redistribution, or socialism, it can, and usually does, take away the incentive to work hard. This stiffles production and innovation. And you will always get a few in power who will take a great deal more than the "equal" portion everyone else gets (Soviet Union, China, Cuba, N. Korea, by no means did/does the ruling party live like the populace). Socialism doesn't work because we are human, not because there are a few "evil" rich people. Ah well, an off topic rant for the holiday.
All we have to do is care. There's enough food going to waste on this planet that no one need go hungry if we would only spend the money necessary to get the food to them.
Of course, that would cost money, and god knows we can't spend money on anything unless it lets someone make more money. There's no money in housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, or any of that touchy-feely humanitarian hippie shit...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"