I like how the conservative talking points seem to have shifted in recent years away from whether global temperatures are actually warmer (they are) and on to whether or not these higher temperatures result in any noticeable effect.
Mod parent up. The OP is a perfect example of some non-scientist hating the players and not the game. Tesla's marketing gaffes do not alter the fact that their car is safer than pretty much anything out there. Al Gore's hyperbolic statements are irrelevant to the actual truth about climate change. And, please remind me, which UN committee was it that was unaffected by some agenda?
The OP maybe be marginally funny (to some) and possibly gratifying to climate change deniers, but it contributes nothing at all to any scientific discussion. Go find some real data if you want to have a serious discussion. Otherwise, stay on the porch with the little dogs.
I'm willing to accept the possiblity that carbon sequestration might be able to generate energy from coal -- potentially even with valuable by products like graphene generated via carbon vapor deposition.
Radioactive waste is not a valuable by-product. Especially the shit that stays dangerously radioactive for either thousands or millions of years. Apparently there are 10,000 metric tons of it created each year.
We should take all these dudes who try to apologize for and/or rationalize nuclear accidents and move them all to Yucca Mountain or Fukushima. That way, they can see first-hand just how safe and reliable it is!
Somebody got fleeced. $1B to translate 7M lines of code comes out to about $142.86 per line of code. As a taxpayer, I want my share of that money back.
Most people who have only a casual need for an office suite have always relied on affordable alternatives like Microsoft Works. But that still leaves about 16-20% of the US work force who are statistically defined as clerical workers and those in other trades and professions who rely on Word, Excel and so on.
I'd bet that 90% of folks defined as clerical workers have no idea what a PivotTable is. Even if they do, LibreOffice has this feature. This is just my opinion, but I believe the only reason most people are willing to shell out several hundred bucks for Office is because they are either too cowardly to learn new software or wealthy enough to afford the higher quality that it offers. Strictly speaking, I don't think the vast majority of people who use office actually need MS Office because of some critical or irreplaceable feature it has.
The reason people tout diversification isnt because you cannot be successful without diversifying, its because you take a big risk by not doing so. If iPhones / iPads ever stop being big, does Apple have a backup plan?
I think you are right that it's good to have some diversity in one's business portfolio and it's certainly true that Apple has not made inroads into the enterprise market, but I disagree that Apple is not diversified. I have an iPhone, I use Linux primarily and Windows 7 secondarily and don't consider myself a fanboy, but I would like to point out a few things:
* Aside from phones and tablets, Apple been stealing market share from MSFT's primary market, the PC Market, for some time. They also still do iPods and Apple TVs (and possibly other stuff sooner or later). Besides, why are we talking about iPhones and iPads going away? Consumers are supposed to buy 1.2 billion of them in 2013. Like I said, the PC market is not only smaller (349M units in 2012) but the market shrank year-over-year by 14%.
* They have essentially revolutionized/pioneered both the smartphone market and the tablet market. There's every reason to believe they will also capitalize on home entertainment and/or wearable computing.
* There is competition in all these markets but Apple's margins are exceptionally high
* Aside from hardware, Apple has been growing iTunes as a software and entertainment portal (almost $13B in 2012 and growing rapidly). They are the largest distributor of music in the entire world and they dominate the download-to-own movie business.
* Apple has introduced cloud services directed toward mass market consumers rather than esoteric cloud services directed toward software developers. These cloud servers are seamlessly integrated with their consumer products in such a way that consumers don't really have to learn any new skills to use them, which is actually kind of a software design triumph, IMHO
* Apple's general strategy, although consumer-focused (look how they seem to have abandoned Final Cut!), is pretty shrewd in that it offers consumers all the necessary devices, all their basic software needs, all their entertainment needs (music, videos, books, games), and all their communications needs (talk, text, email) whenever they want it and whenever they need it in easily digestible form and they make it hard to pack up all your email and your movies and music and software and move it to another service. They cover all the bases, serve them well, and make it difficult to switch to someone else. This is a lot like Microsoft's vendor lockin in the enterprise markets, only it's for the larger mass consumer market. Apple controls the interface point for the consumer and they control the portal through which all the content flows.
It's arguable that, much like IBM, Apple's strengths lie not in hardware manufacture but rather in brand, software capabilities, and media delivery. It's obvious that their market position is very, very strong and growing stronger.
I agree that OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not nearly as good as MS Office (and occasionally frustrating), but I have relied on Open/Libre for something like 8-9 years now for most everything I do. Also, I really don't like the monthly pricing model they are offering now -- it amounts to $150 annually (or $750 every five years which is how often I used to purchase MS Office if I had to). If you want to buy MS Office Professional 2013, it's $380 for a key at newegg. For heavy users, this might be worth the cost. For me, it's just not.
This is actually a really interesting point. I love IBM and am so delighted that they have evolved into what they are. It hadn't occurred to me that there might still be a place for Microsoft in a post PC world, but IBM would provide a pretty damn good template for what MSFT could become. On the other hand, IBM's stock trajectory has been decidedly more exciting than MSFT since 2000. At $35, MSFT's P/E is a suspicious 18.01 whereas IBM's current P/E is 14.2.
I would agree that Visual Studio is an excellent IDE. It's really stable and the autocomplete features and such are informative, useful, and stable. That said, I spend 99% of my development time using Eclipse and writing in FOSS languages because internet delivery of information services means I don't have to worry about platform compatibility at all. I also don't have to pay $1000 for it and I can write in C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, etc.
If windows ceases to dominate the desktop PC market -- which is a dying business they say (14% decline in PC sales from Q1 2012 to Q1 2013) -- then they will have to get Visual Studio to also run on linux and OSx or their revenues will inevitably shrink.
The fact is that most people don't need any of the advanced features offered by Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. They just need to add some numbers up or sort some data or print a letter (does anyone print letters any more???) or put up a slide show at a meeting or something. They don't know what a PivotTable is and they don't use the 500 statistical functions in Excel. They also don't need to buy Office to do this because they can use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or Google docs.
MSFT benefits greatly from vendor lock-in at large enterprises, which is kind of brilliant as a business strategy, but that business is not entirely safe either. Many vendors are moving to cloud solutions to facilitate fluid hardware provisioning, easier backups, and computing on demand. I was recently involved with a project to modernize a VB6 application at a food processing factory and it was totally painful. It would have been cheaper, and every bit as effective, to go with a FOSS solution. The client instead chose to stick with VB.NET and will likely have to rewrite the whole thing again when MSFT totally alters their language to something completely incompatible. This periodic abandonment of their own technology is part of the reason why MSFT makes so much money. Everyone has to buy new operating systems and new workstations and new programming tools.
MSFT has been flat ever since a massive drop when Steve Ballmer took over. How is that even possible in such a rapidly growing market? The company is a dinosaur compared to its rivals. Defenders of MSFT love to talk about 'record revenue' but meanwhile nobody even seems to mention it at GOOG and AAPL which, in addition to record revenues, are also growing their market share. AT&T used to also brag about record revenue while their rivals were gobbling up market share until the long distance market was utterly replaced by modern calling plans -- right before AT&T started to tank and got themselves bought by Southwestern Bell.
It also makes no sense to slam Apple because they 'rely on iPhone and iPad' because the number of phones sold every year totally dwarfs the number of PCs sold every year. Furthermore, Q1 PC sales in 2013 were down 14% from Q1 2012. Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are in total growth mode.
MSFT has become a creaky, reactive company and always seems to be following the market rather than defining it. They might well dominate the PC industry for some time, but their bread-and-butter is in a rapidly declining market (desktop PC OSes and applications) and even there they are losing market share.
There is nothing arbitrary about it - I oppose requiring producers to affix labels that have no scientific value. It adds cost and accounting issues with no demonstrated value. It wastes regulatory time and money as the regulators make sure that this meaningless gesture is being followed properly. And for all that, there is already a "non-GMO" label: "organic".
It seems arbitrary to me inasmuch as you require "scientific value" and fail to acknowledge that GMO is in fact distinct (or was at one time) AND genetically distinguishable from naturally occurring strains of wheat. Or is that not the kind of 'scientific value' you are talking about? The idea of 'scientific value' is in the eye of the scientist/beholder and you've hardly provided any concise definition of 'scientific value.'. As for the cost issues and regulatory time wasted, I would argue that regulating tobacco quality without realizing that it gives you fucking cancer is a waste of time and money. On the other hand, food producers no doubt once claimed that providing nutritional information was expensive, onerous, and a "waste of time." I disagree entirely.
As for the 'organic' label, you'll note that the USDA regulates certain phrases (e.g., 'free-range' and 'cage-free'). Why not add GMO free? That sounds voluntary and not particularly harmless -- until you consider that containment of GMO crops is not really possible, which is the thrust of the original article what we are all commenting on.
I fully support taking action to stop CCD once we know the cause. GMO stickers will not help bees.
You and I agree that CCD is bad, but here you assert that we don't know the cause of CCD and also assert that GMO will not help bees. Strictly speaking, you cannot assert this. This suggests that you somehow have a crystal ball to know that GMO strains are not the cause of CCD. I know I sound like a Luddite here but not without reason. It took a very long time for people to acknowledge that tobacco is bad for you. I would hardly be shocked if GMO had problems too.
Penn and Teller did a hilarious (but biased) episode of "Bullshit" on this. They quite obviously selected produce that would favor the conventionally grown product, but it was still funny and they made a solid point: organic can be just as flavorless as conventional. There's nothing inherent in a GMO regarding flavor.
P & T do everyone a great service by dispelling ignorance, but just because a food is labelled 'organic' doesn't mean it tastes better or that it's even grown ethically. On the other hand, a GMO crop that is 'pest resistant' or more likely to completely fill an ecosystem than a strain that lacks such an advantage. I have no proof for thinking so, but I can't imagine that Monsanto spends a great deal of effort cultivating rare strains of heirloom tomatoes or boutique strains of wheat that have superior taste. The old myth that everyone will have brown eyes in 50 years comes to mind.
It certainly would be, but notice that you had to use the word "imagine". Tomatoes are probably a bad example since they self-pollinate, but your point is valid. The nice thing about demonstrated harm is that represents a valid lawsuit in civil court. Seed companies probably have a strong incentive to make their plants sterile in any case.
I'm glad you've touched on non-scientific aspects of this discussion because they are entirely relevant. 'Demonstrated harm' as a legal concept is somewhat different and not nearly as tidy as "scientific value" inasmuch as Monsanto has been bankrupting farmers who grow crops if they don't pay up their Monsanto license but happen to have Monsanto genes in their crops. Given that they have such high market share AND that you must pay them every year for the privilege of using their seeds, it suggests a problematic future from a legal and economic standpoint.
For the sake of argument, consider this scenario:
* Monsanto makes patented crop of wheat
* Between the crop granting higher yields and Monsanto suing farmers whose crops contain their patented strain (which farmers might not have even planted this strain), Monsanto becomes a seed monopoly for wheat seed.
* Monsanto tweaks their GMO recipe such that their wheat crops produce little no seed at all. This is hardly a leap. They already sue farmers who fail to pay a license fee every year.
* Wheat industry becomes highly consolidated and everyone is sucking the Monsanto dick, paying every year for seeds to grow wheat which doesn't yield any seeds to plan next year's crop.
I like the gist of your argument, but legislating that things be labeled and consumers properly informed ignores the dynamics of the GMO crops in nature and also the legal tactics of Monsanto. Read the article synopsis we are all commenting on. These crops cannot be contained and will propagate. Monsanto is suing (and bankrupting) farmers whose crops contain their patented gene. The problem is bigger than one of labelling. They need to ban patents on genes.
I feel strongly against additional labeling on something that has been through our regulatory process, especially when anyone who cares can just buy "organic" labeled products. If there is a real danger in these foods, we need to fix our regulatory process.
Remember cigarettes? They went through the regulatory process.
And if you are going to label something that has no demonstrable harm, don't you then need to label things that have some science behind it? There's a certain amount of irony in selling a steak with a label warning about the feed containing something that is probably harmless, only to take it home and grill it, which then makes it a mutagen. (Grilled veggies would suffer the same fate.) Mustard and coffee are known mutagens. Organic products can be treated with "naturally-derived" pesticides (how's that for an arbitrary distinction?), each of which are obviously bio-active. You would have a multi-page MSDS on every pear.
I find it ironic that you are placing your faith in 'the regulatory process' and then arbitrarily taking issue with another form of regulation. Perhaps you should be more specific about what regulation is good and what is bad.
As for 'demonstrable harm,' how about Colony Collapse Disorder (i.e., the mass bee die-offs). Seems to me that harm has been demonstrated [albeit only indirectly against humans] but the source of harm has not yet been found. The point of labels is to help a consumer make wise choices according to their own judgement and conscience, possibly to avoid or prevent such harm. The labels need not be onerous. Personally, I like knowing the nutritional content of things I eat and am grateful for that type of regulation.
And lastly, what about flavor. Ever noticed how tasteless modern tomatoes are? Seems to me that mass agriculture, driven by an entirely understandable desire to maximize profit, has been sacrificing quality for quantity for years. Imagine a GMO tomato which has no "demonstrable" harmful effects on one's health but which, through natural forms of dispersion such as bees or even the wind, totally contaminates my delicious heirloom tomato crop with some kind of uber-dominant strain of tasteless MonSanTomato. Is this not "demonstrable harm?"
2) Label it, so those who are worried about it can avoid it.
You haven't been paying attention. For years, Monsanto has been suing farmers when they find evidence of their GMO crops in that farmer's field. Ever heard of bees? They propagate pollen from one field to another. Also, how about reading the article on which you are commenting? This farmer didn't even plant the GMO wheat that was growing in his field. How the hell are you supposed to avoid it?
It's been the case in PHP for years that various features which make it easy to use also make it easy to exploit (register_globals, for instance). It's that easy-to-use quality which draws low-grade coders to these technologies. Additionally, even an excellent Ruby/Rails coder might follow all best practices and yet the machine still gets compromised by a bug at the web server or OS level. It seems pretty obvious that the higher your stack of coding abstraction gets, the more holes it will inevitably have, and the poorer its performance. The more intuitive and simple you make it, the more bad coders it will draw.
On the other hand, your abstraction is easier to understand and more expressive. Try programming a (secure) web application in assembler.
I'm not going to feed your obvious trolling, but I do want to make one thing clear - I work in the solar industry, but my company receives no subsidies. They're not worth the hassle and the control you give up to marauding beureaucrats.
ORLY? Didn't you type this like an hour ago?
Solar's subsidy is a whopping 1600X the subsidy for coal, oil, or gas, and over 300X that of nuclear. (Not that I'm complaining - I work in solar - but let's at least be honest about the fact that solar is really only viable if it receives enormous subsidies...)
BTW, I love how you made up some stats and utterly failed to explain where they came from. Nice work!
You doubled down on your argument about prior times being better (without detailing any specifics) by simply asserting "it's based on actual truth." I expect an equivalent response from me would sound like "No it's not, and THAT is the actual truth!"
You refer to my accounting when I haven't provided any accounting of my own but rather have linked articles by fairly competent news organizations -- certainly more reputable than you or I.
You try to pick and choose what counts as a subsidy and what does not, which is awful convenient but fails completely to address the question of what energy, exactly, gets subsidized -- however indirectly.
You assert that "[my] premise is only remotely true if [I] blatantly lie with the statistics" when in fact my premise is that you provided some unsupported statements that contradict each other and present them as truth.
Perhaps most irritatingly, you have pulled some stats out of your ass without providing any sources for them. I won't bother doing this myself and I'm sure you'll try to justify them with some heavily political diatribe.
The impression one gets from your post is that you are either a troll or have no integrity at all because you have this nostalgia for ostensibly better people in better times who weren't corrupted by government money but at the same time you are sucking the gov't teat by profiteering from these supposed ludicrous subsidies.
I'm not sure whether to congratulate you on some good trolling or feel sorry for you.
Did *you* read the article I linked? I'm not sure what part of $4.5B you don't understand. Surely I deserve some credit for not using some left-wing-nutjob link like this one which chalks it up at $52B. To subsidize an industry that is comprised of the largest companies in the world pulling down profit margins as high as 12.5% in a given quarter (Exxon June 30, 2012) doesn't make any sense at all. To give tax breaks to these enormous (and enormously profitable companies) is really stupid. Please explain to me how heating energy gifts to the poor is not a subsidy that benefits energy companies? Apparently facts, such as this one, don't matter to you either:
Exxon's income tax rate is below the 35% rate mandated by corporate tax law
Falling for leftist catchphrases unexamined? Deliberately distorting the facts? I don't know what your problem is, but you're not getting away with it this time.
ChrisMaple (or whatever your real name is), to put an end to my villainous catchphrasing, surely you can save the day by finding some facts to back up the "fact" stated by dublin that "the oil industry evolved from the same people who ran the cattle industry, where a man's word was his bond and multi-million dollar deals were made on a handshake?" No? Well how about evidence that "Government (and 'free governemtn money') corrupts pretty much everything absolutely" and yet the oil industry is not corrupted by government money? How about identifying any "deliberately distorted facts" in my prior post (or this one)? You'll definitely need to do something like that, because calling me a moron is certainly not going to hamper me at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I like how the conservative talking points seem to have shifted in recent years away from whether global temperatures are actually warmer (they are) and on to whether or not these higher temperatures result in any noticeable effect.
Mod parent up. The OP is a perfect example of some non-scientist hating the players and not the game. Tesla's marketing gaffes do not alter the fact that their car is safer than pretty much anything out there. Al Gore's hyperbolic statements are irrelevant to the actual truth about climate change. And, please remind me, which UN committee was it that was unaffected by some agenda?
The OP maybe be marginally funny (to some) and possibly gratifying to climate change deniers, but it contributes nothing at all to any scientific discussion. Go find some real data if you want to have a serious discussion. Otherwise, stay on the porch with the little dogs.
I'm willing to accept the possiblity that carbon sequestration might be able to generate energy from coal -- potentially even with valuable by products like graphene generated via carbon vapor deposition. Radioactive waste is not a valuable by-product. Especially the shit that stays dangerously radioactive for either thousands or millions of years. Apparently there are 10,000 metric tons of it created each year.
We should take all these dudes who try to apologize for and/or rationalize nuclear accidents and move them all to Yucca Mountain or Fukushima. That way, they can see first-hand just how safe and reliable it is!
Somebody got fleeced. $1B to translate 7M lines of code comes out to about $142.86 per line of code. As a taxpayer, I want my share of that money back.
Most people who have only a casual need for an office suite have always relied on affordable alternatives like Microsoft Works. But that still leaves about 16-20% of the US work force who are statistically defined as clerical workers and those in other trades and professions who rely on Word, Excel and so on.
I'd bet that 90% of folks defined as clerical workers have no idea what a PivotTable is. Even if they do, LibreOffice has this feature. This is just my opinion, but I believe the only reason most people are willing to shell out several hundred bucks for Office is because they are either too cowardly to learn new software or wealthy enough to afford the higher quality that it offers. Strictly speaking, I don't think the vast majority of people who use office actually need MS Office because of some critical or irreplaceable feature it has.
The reason people tout diversification isnt because you cannot be successful without diversifying, its because you take a big risk by not doing so. If iPhones / iPads ever stop being big, does Apple have a backup plan?
I think you are right that it's good to have some diversity in one's business portfolio and it's certainly true that Apple has not made inroads into the enterprise market, but I disagree that Apple is not diversified. I have an iPhone, I use Linux primarily and Windows 7 secondarily and don't consider myself a fanboy, but I would like to point out a few things:
* Aside from phones and tablets, Apple been stealing market share from MSFT's primary market, the PC Market, for some time. They also still do iPods and Apple TVs (and possibly other stuff sooner or later). Besides, why are we talking about iPhones and iPads going away? Consumers are supposed to buy 1.2 billion of them in 2013. Like I said, the PC market is not only smaller (349M units in 2012) but the market shrank year-over-year by 14%.
* They have essentially revolutionized/pioneered both the smartphone market and the tablet market. There's every reason to believe they will also capitalize on home entertainment and/or wearable computing.
* There is competition in all these markets but Apple's margins are exceptionally high
* Aside from hardware, Apple has been growing iTunes as a software and entertainment portal (almost $13B in 2012 and growing rapidly). They are the largest distributor of music in the entire world and they dominate the download-to-own movie business.
* Apple has introduced cloud services directed toward mass market consumers rather than esoteric cloud services directed toward software developers. These cloud servers are seamlessly integrated with their consumer products in such a way that consumers don't really have to learn any new skills to use them, which is actually kind of a software design triumph, IMHO
* Apple's general strategy, although consumer-focused (look how they seem to have abandoned Final Cut!), is pretty shrewd in that it offers consumers all the necessary devices, all their basic software needs, all their entertainment needs (music, videos, books, games), and all their communications needs (talk, text, email) whenever they want it and whenever they need it in easily digestible form and they make it hard to pack up all your email and your movies and music and software and move it to another service. They cover all the bases, serve them well, and make it difficult to switch to someone else. This is a lot like Microsoft's vendor lockin in the enterprise markets, only it's for the larger mass consumer market. Apple controls the interface point for the consumer and they control the portal through which all the content flows.
It's arguable that, much like IBM, Apple's strengths lie not in hardware manufacture but rather in brand, software capabilities, and media delivery. It's obvious that their market position is very, very strong and growing stronger.
I agree that OpenOffice and LibreOffice are not nearly as good as MS Office (and occasionally frustrating), but I have relied on Open/Libre for something like 8-9 years now for most everything I do. Also, I really don't like the monthly pricing model they are offering now -- it amounts to $150 annually (or $750 every five years which is how often I used to purchase MS Office if I had to). If you want to buy MS Office Professional 2013, it's $380 for a key at newegg. For heavy users, this might be worth the cost. For me, it's just not.
This is actually a really interesting point. I love IBM and am so delighted that they have evolved into what they are. It hadn't occurred to me that there might still be a place for Microsoft in a post PC world, but IBM would provide a pretty damn good template for what MSFT could become. On the other hand, IBM's stock trajectory has been decidedly more exciting than MSFT since 2000. At $35, MSFT's P/E is a suspicious 18.01 whereas IBM's current P/E is 14.2.
AAPL stock's P/E is currently only 10.71.
But! But! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! . I miss Bill Gates.
I would agree that Visual Studio is an excellent IDE. It's really stable and the autocomplete features and such are informative, useful, and stable. That said, I spend 99% of my development time using Eclipse and writing in FOSS languages because internet delivery of information services means I don't have to worry about platform compatibility at all. I also don't have to pay $1000 for it and I can write in C, C++, Java, Python, PHP, etc.
If windows ceases to dominate the desktop PC market -- which is a dying business they say (14% decline in PC sales from Q1 2012 to Q1 2013) -- then they will have to get Visual Studio to also run on linux and OSx or their revenues will inevitably shrink.
The fact is that most people don't need any of the advanced features offered by Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. They just need to add some numbers up or sort some data or print a letter (does anyone print letters any more???) or put up a slide show at a meeting or something. They don't know what a PivotTable is and they don't use the 500 statistical functions in Excel. They also don't need to buy Office to do this because they can use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or Google docs.
MSFT benefits greatly from vendor lock-in at large enterprises, which is kind of brilliant as a business strategy, but that business is not entirely safe either. Many vendors are moving to cloud solutions to facilitate fluid hardware provisioning, easier backups, and computing on demand. I was recently involved with a project to modernize a VB6 application at a food processing factory and it was totally painful. It would have been cheaper, and every bit as effective, to go with a FOSS solution. The client instead chose to stick with VB.NET and will likely have to rewrite the whole thing again when MSFT totally alters their language to something completely incompatible. This periodic abandonment of their own technology is part of the reason why MSFT makes so much money. Everyone has to buy new operating systems and new workstations and new programming tools.
MSFT has been flat ever since a massive drop when Steve Ballmer took over. How is that even possible in such a rapidly growing market? The company is a dinosaur compared to its rivals. Defenders of MSFT love to talk about 'record revenue' but meanwhile nobody even seems to mention it at GOOG and AAPL which, in addition to record revenues, are also growing their market share. AT&T used to also brag about record revenue while their rivals were gobbling up market share until the long distance market was utterly replaced by modern calling plans -- right before AT&T started to tank and got themselves bought by Southwestern Bell.
It also makes no sense to slam Apple because they 'rely on iPhone and iPad' because the number of phones sold every year totally dwarfs the number of PCs sold every year. Furthermore, Q1 PC sales in 2013 were down 14% from Q1 2012. Smartphones and tablets, on the other hand, are in total growth mode.
MSFT has become a creaky, reactive company and always seems to be following the market rather than defining it. They might well dominate the PC industry for some time, but their bread-and-butter is in a rapidly declining market (desktop PC OSes and applications) and even there they are losing market share.
There is nothing arbitrary about it - I oppose requiring producers to affix labels that have no scientific value. It adds cost and accounting issues with no demonstrated value. It wastes regulatory time and money as the regulators make sure that this meaningless gesture is being followed properly. And for all that, there is already a "non-GMO" label: "organic".
It seems arbitrary to me inasmuch as you require "scientific value" and fail to acknowledge that GMO is in fact distinct (or was at one time) AND genetically distinguishable from naturally occurring strains of wheat. Or is that not the kind of 'scientific value' you are talking about? The idea of 'scientific value' is in the eye of the scientist/beholder and you've hardly provided any concise definition of 'scientific value.'. As for the cost issues and regulatory time wasted, I would argue that regulating tobacco quality without realizing that it gives you fucking cancer is a waste of time and money. On the other hand, food producers no doubt once claimed that providing nutritional information was expensive, onerous, and a "waste of time." I disagree entirely.
As for the 'organic' label, you'll note that the USDA regulates certain phrases (e.g., 'free-range' and 'cage-free'). Why not add GMO free? That sounds voluntary and not particularly harmless -- until you consider that containment of GMO crops is not really possible, which is the thrust of the original article what we are all commenting on.
I fully support taking action to stop CCD once we know the cause. GMO stickers will not help bees.
You and I agree that CCD is bad, but here you assert that we don't know the cause of CCD and also assert that GMO will not help bees. Strictly speaking, you cannot assert this. This suggests that you somehow have a crystal ball to know that GMO strains are not the cause of CCD. I know I sound like a Luddite here but not without reason. It took a very long time for people to acknowledge that tobacco is bad for you. I would hardly be shocked if GMO had problems too.
Penn and Teller did a hilarious (but biased) episode of "Bullshit" on this. They quite obviously selected produce that would favor the conventionally grown product, but it was still funny and they made a solid point: organic can be just as flavorless as conventional. There's nothing inherent in a GMO regarding flavor.
P & T do everyone a great service by dispelling ignorance, but just because a food is labelled 'organic' doesn't mean it tastes better or that it's even grown ethically. On the other hand, a GMO crop that is 'pest resistant' or more likely to completely fill an ecosystem than a strain that lacks such an advantage. I have no proof for thinking so, but I can't imagine that Monsanto spends a great deal of effort cultivating rare strains of heirloom tomatoes or boutique strains of wheat that have superior taste. The old myth that everyone will have brown eyes in 50 years comes to mind.
It certainly would be, but notice that you had to use the word "imagine". Tomatoes are probably a bad example since they self-pollinate, but your point is valid. The nice thing about demonstrated harm is that represents a valid lawsuit in civil court. Seed companies probably have a strong incentive to make their plants sterile in any case.
I'm glad you've touched on non-scientific aspects of this discussion because they are entirely relevant. 'Demonstrated harm' as a legal concept is somewhat different and not nearly as tidy as "scientific value" inasmuch as Monsanto has been bankrupting farmers who grow crops if they don't pay up their Monsanto license but happen to have Monsanto genes in their crops. Given that they have such high market share AND that you must pay them every year for the privilege of using their seeds, it suggests a problematic future from a legal and economic standpoint.
For the sake of argument, consider this scenario:
* Monsanto makes patented crop of wheat
* Between the crop granting higher yields and Monsanto suing farmers whose crops contain their patented strain (which farmers might not have even planted this strain), Monsanto becomes a seed monopoly for wheat seed.
* Monsanto tweaks their GMO recipe such that their wheat crops produce little no seed at all. This is hardly a leap. They already sue farmers who fail to pay a license fee every year.
* Wheat industry becomes highly consolidated and everyone is sucking the Monsanto dick, paying every year for seeds to grow wheat which doesn't yield any seeds to plan next year's crop.
Surely this scenario bothers other people too?
I like the gist of your argument, but legislating that things be labeled and consumers properly informed ignores the dynamics of the GMO crops in nature and also the legal tactics of Monsanto. Read the article synopsis we are all commenting on. These crops cannot be contained and will propagate. Monsanto is suing (and bankrupting) farmers whose crops contain their patented gene. The problem is bigger than one of labelling. They need to ban patents on genes.
I feel strongly against additional labeling on something that has been through our regulatory process, especially when anyone who cares can just buy "organic" labeled products. If there is a real danger in these foods, we need to fix our regulatory process.
Remember cigarettes? They went through the regulatory process.
And if you are going to label something that has no demonstrable harm, don't you then need to label things that have some science behind it? There's a certain amount of irony in selling a steak with a label warning about the feed containing something that is probably harmless, only to take it home and grill it, which then makes it a mutagen. (Grilled veggies would suffer the same fate.) Mustard and coffee are known mutagens. Organic products can be treated with "naturally-derived" pesticides (how's that for an arbitrary distinction?), each of which are obviously bio-active. You would have a multi-page MSDS on every pear.
I find it ironic that you are placing your faith in 'the regulatory process' and then arbitrarily taking issue with another form of regulation. Perhaps you should be more specific about what regulation is good and what is bad.
As for 'demonstrable harm,' how about Colony Collapse Disorder (i.e., the mass bee die-offs). Seems to me that harm has been demonstrated [albeit only indirectly against humans] but the source of harm has not yet been found. The point of labels is to help a consumer make wise choices according to their own judgement and conscience, possibly to avoid or prevent such harm. The labels need not be onerous. Personally, I like knowing the nutritional content of things I eat and am grateful for that type of regulation.
And lastly, what about flavor. Ever noticed how tasteless modern tomatoes are? Seems to me that mass agriculture, driven by an entirely understandable desire to maximize profit, has been sacrificing quality for quantity for years. Imagine a GMO tomato which has no "demonstrable" harmful effects on one's health but which, through natural forms of dispersion such as bees or even the wind, totally contaminates my delicious heirloom tomato crop with some kind of uber-dominant strain of tasteless MonSanTomato. Is this not "demonstrable harm?"
2) Label it, so those who are worried about it can avoid it.
You haven't been paying attention. For years, Monsanto has been suing farmers when they find evidence of their GMO crops in that farmer's field. Ever heard of bees? They propagate pollen from one field to another. Also, how about reading the article on which you are commenting? This farmer didn't even plant the GMO wheat that was growing in his field. How the hell are you supposed to avoid it?
Enough of this rye humor!
Botnet on Rails lol!
It's been the case in PHP for years that various features which make it easy to use also make it easy to exploit (register_globals, for instance). It's that easy-to-use quality which draws low-grade coders to these technologies. Additionally, even an excellent Ruby/Rails coder might follow all best practices and yet the machine still gets compromised by a bug at the web server or OS level. It seems pretty obvious that the higher your stack of coding abstraction gets, the more holes it will inevitably have, and the poorer its performance. The more intuitive and simple you make it, the more bad coders it will draw.
On the other hand, your abstraction is easier to understand and more expressive. Try programming a (secure) web application in assembler.
Mod parent up.
I'm not going to feed your obvious trolling, but I do want to make one thing clear - I work in the solar industry, but my company receives no subsidies. They're not worth the hassle and the control you give up to marauding beureaucrats.
ORLY? Didn't you type this like an hour ago?
Solar's subsidy is a whopping 1600X the subsidy for coal, oil, or gas, and over 300X that of nuclear. (Not that I'm complaining - I work in solar - but let's at least be honest about the fact that solar is really only viable if it receives enormous subsidies...)
BTW, I love how you made up some stats and utterly failed to explain where they came from. Nice work!
I'm not sure whether to congratulate you on some good trolling or feel sorry for you.
Exxon's income tax rate is below the 35% rate mandated by corporate tax law
That is also from a fairly balanced article.
Falling for leftist catchphrases unexamined? Deliberately distorting the facts? I don't know what your problem is, but you're not getting away with it this time.
ChrisMaple (or whatever your real name is), to put an end to my villainous catchphrasing, surely you can save the day by finding some facts to back up the "fact" stated by dublin that "the oil industry evolved from the same people who ran the cattle industry, where a man's word was his bond and multi-million dollar deals were made on a handshake?" No? Well how about evidence that "Government (and 'free governemtn money') corrupts pretty much everything absolutely" and yet the oil industry is not corrupted by government money? How about identifying any "deliberately distorted facts" in my prior post (or this one)? You'll definitely need to do something like that, because calling me a moron is certainly not going to hamper me at all.