As for the robbing: yes. Think BP: clearly, the value they added to society is very much inferior to what they got from it -- and I'm not talking about the latest incident: the Anglo-Persian oil company has a long and bloody history. Think about the telcos. Small or medium business owners are not "rich", they are "well-off". They might or might not pay fair amount of taxes (odds are, in the US, not quite) But the very rich? They owe society more than TARP and the stimulus bill together.
You think rich people invest their money? This is only part of the story: first, you'll invest in your business, which is good. Then in your house/car/leisure, which is cool. Then you will have plenty of money left, and you'll still want to invest it. Now you will not invest it in schools, because the return is nil, nor will you in roads, of trains, or utilities. You personally might, but this is not something which happens significantly.
The main reason is that indeed the returns are not good, or too long term, or the upfront costs too large. You you'll put your money in a fund to do the investing for you. Now if the taxes are really low and the society very unequal not many people having too much money not invested in the society's future try to get maximum returns. And never mind the details: you end up with a crisis like the one we just had.
You have to force people to invest in society. Not because they are bad, not because they would not want to, but because they don't in general, and cannot be trusted to, not when it's most needed. Not in the efficient coordinated way that the Government can. Because for all its flaws, for all the pork, the special interests, etc. it still represents the people, and its job is still to make society possible. And it's the the only business in town which does that.
About robbing: think of all the things which are provided to you, which are possible because of the government, try to be honest, and then ask yourself how much that costs, and compare that to the amounts you pay in taxes. And don't forget to add the cost of the education of all your employees... And if you are paying for all that, well done sir, you are paying your fair share. Basically, if you society is stably unequal, you have an adequate level of taxation. If it tends to become more equal than humans are, beware, you tax too much, and general poverty may lie this way. But if it becomes more unequal, you are undertaxing, and down that road lies blood. This is not rationalisation, sadly, this is how the score is played around the world.
"it took a while to get on board" hint: this movement was fabricated. It surfs on all manners of vile instincts latent in humans for political gain.
"sharing the tax burden". Yes, it means that if you earn a lot, you got out a lot from society, so you give back a lot. If you think you could have gotten rich without the infrastructure, the rule of law, and the education level of your citizens (thanks in great part to the government), you are deluded. You probably also were lucky. It is not desirable that life be a vast lottery, so everyone contributes back as a function of what he got. If you were unlucky, society takes care of you, and if you were lucky, you take care of your fellow humans. Think of taxes as a sort of self-sustaining charity. Which makes life in society possible in the first place.
Every item we use was created, produced transported through the countless contributions of an enormous amount of individuals, each with fairly unique skills. The rich guy who gets the larger cut of the profit could never have even started dreaming of the beginning of the notion of whatever widget was sold without a complete civilisation which made it possible. So yes, he should pay large taxes. He'll still be rich. He'll even still be richer. But not by such a margin that it makes a mockery of reality.
The government runs a deficit (which is normal, BTW, it is a not for profit organisation which can emit infinite amount of debt, over time -- and never go bust), the rich people get richer. Clearly the rich people are doing the robbing:)
Deficit went up during Bush years and no Tea Party movement: check. Legislation deemed terrible based purely on page numbers (costs are if anything going to be positively affected, but hey, we won't know for sure until 2020) vs terrible legislation based on what it says: check. Calling Obama "brazen" after Bush is comical (and no Tea Party during Bush). Basically you are (by association) a bigot.
As for the taxes. Has it occurred to you that it is sometimes socially useful that individuals have a net disincentive to increase their wages? For example, the salaries (and boni are just disguised salaries) of Wall street bankers are disproportionate to their social utility, which would be fine if such salaries were not an elicitation to pursue careers in finance despite inclinations towards medicine or engineering or fundamental science, for which there is a lack of qualified workers.
Some citizen paying net taxes, in fact a minority of citizen paying net taxes, is a necessary result for a society which is increasingly unequal: given a minimum standard of living rising with inflation and average income levels, more and more people will find themselves under the line as a vanishingly small minority syphons off all the income of the country. This cannot be fixed unless taxes are redistributive, or there are no taxes. Now you may think of no taxes as a good idea, but...
That is why, mechanically, your argument about taxes makes no sense: it just happens that way, automatically, unless there are no taxes. But morally? it is not a question of people having earned their money: at some point, objectively, they haven't. If the share of the income of the richest grows, and the absolute income of those under is stagnating or receding (as is the case) what you are witnessing is robbery on a grand scale.
But does it matter? Well, if all a significant part of the goods and services only go to a small minority of the potential customers (only they can afford these) then your economy swings with the mood of a small number of people. This means repeated booms and bust, great instability, even more inequality, and eventually a descent into societies looking like these of Latin America. And let's face it being rich in America is nicer than being rich in Brazil precisely because the people around you are rich enough that they don't want to kill you for your wallet.
No, but look at the facts: this movement was basically born of a black president being elected. And nothing else. Libertarians? Pah! They would have hated Bush more. Afraid of the consequence of the economic crisis? The movement would have been born when Bush was still president. Tax haters? Maybe. Though it seems like a crazy big movement seeing as you Americans basically pay next to nothing in taxes. And Obama has not raised taxes...
Look at the rhetoric "America was stolen from us", "reclaiming our country". This assumes that the you, tea-partier had a country which was stolen. Now since it was not stolen by some foreign force, it was stolen by some group of other citizens. Add to that that the ideal America is that of the 50s [1](look at the state of rights of various groups then), then I think one can safely conclude that the tea party is basically a bunch of bigoted racists. Not in the sense that they think the Blacks/Hispanics/Asians are inferior races, just that they happened to be exploited and it was perfectly acceptable; unacceptable would be if they became more equal. And a Black Americain president is a stark reminder that equality might well eventually happen [2].
[1] Some crazily deformed America from the 50s, with much History rewriting... [2] It is a sad fact that most humans are perfectly content with a miserable life, provided their neighbours are even more miserable.
Which is why the right is truly conservative: they like old ideas, good and bad. Unfortunately, they also hate the ideas of the left on principle. The consequence of that is that they never invent new ideas, but also cling for as long as they can to old discarded notions, which accumulate. This is a mindset that apparently accommodates itself with self-contradiction with amazing ease.
And since as time goes by, the world goes faster and the new ideas tend to be more rapidly accepted or rejected, the rate of accumulation of staggeringly stupid beliefs on the right becomes unsustainable. But they just might be able to take everyone down with them as they pundit themselves into oblivion.
English shares about 30 % of its vocabulary with French. So you are going to need an awfully bad spelling to get all the words properly wrong.
Also, the point is not that you misspelled a French word: you misspelled an English one. Knowing the French origin only helps remember what the correct English spelling is...
Because as soon as you start integrating/using a word, it becomes part of English. This is not a reason to get it wrong.
* Stealing focus. No, never stole focus: they are and have always been passive. * Colour scheme: same as that of the plasma theme. * Various expletive: you are a troll. But not a very good one.
Re:Notification System?
on
KDE 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
the notification system is hard: applications like to embed little applets in the tray, for one thing, and interaction with these in a clean, consistent way is not easy. Notifications are also hard to get right: you want all the information, you want it non-obtrusive, you want to know what is happening, you want to be able to respond to them in a timely manner.
Basically, it is a very small part of your desktop which can cause immense amounts of grief: a lot of the bad rap vista got was from the popups from there...
Re:Does it still require you to install a RDBMS?
on
KDE 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Because I have tens of thousands of mails with way too many attachments. And some people have ten or a hundred times as much.
So nothing short of a RDBMS will in fact cope with that volume. And I should also add that whining about is is a purely knee-jerk reaction as in most cases it will use very little resources (way less than your browser). I guess you are an old hand who remembers days when servers would be dedicated to running these beasts. Well, that still happens, but only for very, very large datasets. Desktops (in fact, even smartphones -- akonadi runs on the N900) are so powerful these days that the DB will not even register.
So your complain is in fact utterly silly. It is not even "wahh, it uses too many resources", it is "wah, it uses something I believe uses too many resources, but clearly I never checked in the last 20 years".
Re:Konqueror and Webkit?
on
KDE 4.5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Integration is not simply about having an extra widget (which has been there for some time). Integration is about saving sessions, integrating with kwallet.
It is also about providing the API which is used by other applications for purposes other than displaying web pages. All these things, KHTML does, and does well (as well as displaying the web pages), but the webkit kpart needed much development.
How do you measure RAM usage? not with top, I hope... Because most of the plasma memory is in fact the pixmaps which are counted thrice (once for the app, once for the xserver, and an extra time in the videocard for the double-buffering)
See, plasma runs on phones, so clearly it is not that heavy (not that phones are not pretty powerful these days, but still)...
most of them on the internet:) But polls (another one was published this week in The Economist) consistently show that Americans are more likely to be in denial (on that subject) than anyone else.
I guess it comes from the fact that you guys see it as a threat to your lifestyle, whereas in Europe it is more like "yet another thing going wrong":)
You know, you can buy on amazon for cheap excellent book on general relativity and quantum mechanics. My bet is that without a couple years in a good physics program you will no actually understand anything.
Because (advanced) maths are not simple. Because the level of abstraction reached is mind-boggling. Because these books build on centuries of maths and physics knowledge.
Now you can, perhaps, teach yourself to that level. It will take you probably more time than the college/university path. It is cute that you compare the level of education of Washington to today: basically, in his time, you could essentially know everything.
Now go read some articles on Riemanian manifolds on wikipedia. That's modern geometry for you. Go ahead. Teach yourself that.
The fascinating thing is that the result of the American system, where apparently one is taught to hug trees (according to you) is that Americans are impermeable to the reality of global warming, whereas in the rest of the world, everyone is pretty much convinced...
From which we must conclude that the system is so disastrous it can't even indoctrinate properly.
Because bandwidth costs nothing! Or rather, it costs a fixed price in maintenance, plus an upfront investment.
Having people pay per usage is basically saying you can reasonably expect people to give you money for exactly nothing in return. That is not how the market is supposed to work...
Oh well, this is what happens when you have a combination of information asymmetry (dumb users) and a quasi-monopoly (rogers).
I use primus. No cap, and acceptable bandwidth. Too expensive compared to Europe, but what can I do?
Actually, after just 20 weeks, they will go at 1048 km*s^-1 (assuming your calculations are correct). Which is an amazing speed. Speed of light is 300 000 km*s^-1, which you would reach during the 29th week, if speed could continue increasing that way.
So yeah, Jupiter (5 light-hours or so) in 2 years seems about right.
See, I don't work for monsanto. I hate and despise them. I also hate and despise people who, under the guise of fighting for Good are in fact destroying the possibility of intelligent debate. I might actually hate them more, because they ought to be on my side, but they are clearly helping the opponent.
You may shout, yes, but then don't expect anyone to respect what you say for its intrinsic value.
Horizontal transfer may never happen, but we still have a significant part of our DNA from it...
Also hydrogenated oil does not cause heart disease. it is a factor increasing the probability thereof. And this kind of stupid confusion is exactly why right-wing extremist end up having a field day on such things as AGW and GMOs[1]. They don't need straw men, you kindly provide for them.
[1] In both cases, they try to eliminate protective legislation which forces corporations into behaving. In both cases, they fill the air with counterpoints to minor errors which tree hugger fanatics kindly provide to them. Sometimes, I think Greenpeace/the WWF are Monsanto and BP's greatest allies...
Basically, GMO's are a brilliant idea. Much better (and safer) way to produce new cultivars than the traditional methods. However, IP "rights" and the behaviour of corporations as well as the market permission mechanism need revision/scrutiny/correction. Fight for that instead of crusading against technology: you cannot win against progress, but you may well undermine your side of the argument as you go, and make the whole world worse off because of your positions.
Oh, don't get me started on the drug control situation.
The worst part is that the mafia probably didn't even need to buy representatives to get the wonderfully favourable to itself legislation one can enjoy in the US.
Voter stupidity did that. And populism. And strident Right-wing arguments.
Why would a GM food be labelled and one produced through forced mutation not? This makes no sense from the point of public health. By now, if there were measurable public health issues with GM foods, we would know. We have a test population, the US and a control, the EU. And yes, people live longer in the EU, but for reasons due to better health care/living conditions. Not because of GM food.
When you are saying that GM food ought to be labelled so consumers can make a choice, you are really saying that the government ought to regulate with which technology goods are to be produced. And I thoroughly disagree.
The government should regulate working conditions. It should regulate the risks posed by products. It should clearly regulate labelling of substances present in significant quantities in the food.
But how it's been produced? Why not ask for the composition of the growth medium for tomatoes, then? Or demand to know whether your car was assembled by workers or robots, and in what proportion?
See. Monsanto is a bunch of assholes. Having any industry self-regulating itself is both stupid and evil. But asking for mandatory labels on how stuff is produced? This is idiotic. If you are breaking laws and norms in your production you should not be allowed to sell. How you produce stuff is what innovation is about. If you have a lobbying/corruption problem, fix that. Don't try to kill technologies which can be used for good because you have irrational fears about them.
Slashdot Mirror
As for the robbing: yes. Think BP: clearly, the value they added to society is very much inferior to what they got from it -- and I'm not talking about the latest incident: the Anglo-Persian oil company has a long and bloody history. Think about the telcos. Small or medium business owners are not "rich", they are "well-off". They might or might not pay fair amount of taxes (odds are, in the US, not quite) But the very rich? They owe society more than TARP and the stimulus bill together.
You think rich people invest their money? This is only part of the story: first, you'll invest in your business, which is good. Then in your house/car/leisure, which is cool. Then you will have plenty of money left, and you'll still want to invest it. Now you will not invest it in schools, because the return is nil, nor will you in roads, of trains, or utilities. You personally might, but this is not something which happens significantly.
The main reason is that indeed the returns are not good, or too long term, or the upfront costs too large. You you'll put your money in a fund to do the investing for you. Now if the taxes are really low and the society very unequal not many people having too much money not invested in the society's future try to get maximum returns. And never mind the details: you end up with a crisis like the one we just had.
You have to force people to invest in society. Not because they are bad, not because they would not want to, but because they don't in general, and cannot be trusted to, not when it's most needed. Not in the efficient coordinated way that the Government can. Because for all its flaws, for all the pork, the special interests, etc. it still represents the people, and its job is still to make society possible. And it's the the only business in town which does that.
About robbing: think of all the things which are provided to you, which are possible because of the government, try to be honest, and then ask yourself how much that costs, and compare that to the amounts you pay in taxes. And don't forget to add the cost of the education of all your employees... And if you are paying for all that, well done sir, you are paying your fair share. Basically, if you society is stably unequal, you have an adequate level of taxation. If it tends to become more equal than humans are, beware, you tax too much, and general poverty may lie this way. But if it becomes more unequal, you are undertaxing, and down that road lies blood. This is not rationalisation, sadly, this is how the score is played around the world.
"it took a while to get on board" hint: this movement was fabricated. It surfs on all manners of vile instincts latent in humans for political gain.
"sharing the tax burden". Yes, it means that if you earn a lot, you got out a lot from society, so you give back a lot. If you think you could have gotten rich without the infrastructure, the rule of law, and the education level of your citizens (thanks in great part to the government), you are deluded. You probably also were lucky. It is not desirable that life be a vast lottery, so everyone contributes back as a function of what he got. If you were unlucky, society takes care of you, and if you were lucky, you take care of your fellow humans. Think of taxes as a sort of self-sustaining charity. Which makes life in society possible in the first place.
Every item we use was created, produced transported through the countless contributions of an enormous amount of individuals, each with fairly unique skills. The rich guy who gets the larger cut of the profit could never have even started dreaming of the beginning of the notion of whatever widget was sold without a complete civilisation which made it possible. So yes, he should pay large taxes. He'll still be rich. He'll even still be richer. But not by such a margin that it makes a mockery of reality.
The government runs a deficit (which is normal, BTW, it is a not for profit organisation which can emit infinite amount of debt, over time -- and never go bust), the rich people get richer. Clearly the rich people are doing the robbing :)
Deficit went up during Bush years and no Tea Party movement: check. Legislation deemed terrible based purely on page numbers (costs are if anything going to be positively affected, but hey, we won't know for sure until 2020) vs terrible legislation based on what it says: check. Calling Obama "brazen" after Bush is comical (and no Tea Party during Bush). Basically you are (by association) a bigot.
As for the taxes. Has it occurred to you that it is sometimes socially useful that individuals have a net disincentive to increase their wages? For example, the salaries (and boni are just disguised salaries) of Wall street bankers are disproportionate to their social utility, which would be fine if such salaries were not an elicitation to pursue careers in finance despite inclinations towards medicine or engineering or fundamental science, for which there is a lack of qualified workers.
Some citizen paying net taxes, in fact a minority of citizen paying net taxes, is a necessary result for a society which is increasingly unequal: given a minimum standard of living rising with inflation and average income levels, more and more people will find themselves under the line as a vanishingly small minority syphons off all the income of the country. This cannot be fixed unless taxes are redistributive, or there are no taxes. Now you may think of no taxes as a good idea, but...
That is why, mechanically, your argument about taxes makes no sense: it just happens that way, automatically, unless there are no taxes. But morally? it is not a question of people having earned their money: at some point, objectively, they haven't. If the share of the income of the richest grows, and the absolute income of those under is stagnating or receding (as is the case) what you are witnessing is robbery on a grand scale.
But does it matter? Well, if all a significant part of the goods and services only go to a small minority of the potential customers (only they can afford these) then your economy swings with the mood of a small number of people. This means repeated booms and bust, great instability, even more inequality, and eventually a descent into societies looking like these of Latin America. And let's face it being rich in America is nicer than being rich in Brazil precisely because the people around you are rich enough that they don't want to kill you for your wallet.
No, but look at the facts: this movement was basically born of a black president being elected. And nothing else. Libertarians? Pah! They would have hated Bush more. Afraid of the consequence of the economic crisis? The movement would have been born when Bush was still president. Tax haters? Maybe. Though it seems like a crazy big movement seeing as you Americans basically pay next to nothing in taxes. And Obama has not raised taxes...
Look at the rhetoric "America was stolen from us", "reclaiming our country". This assumes that the you, tea-partier had a country which was stolen. Now since it was not stolen by some foreign force, it was stolen by some group of other citizens. Add to that that the ideal America is that of the 50s [1](look at the state of rights of various groups then), then I think one can safely conclude that the tea party is basically a bunch of bigoted racists. Not in the sense that they think the Blacks/Hispanics/Asians are inferior races, just that they happened to be exploited and it was perfectly acceptable; unacceptable would be if they became more equal. And a Black Americain president is a stark reminder that equality might well eventually happen [2].
[1] Some crazily deformed America from the 50s, with much History rewriting...
[2] It is a sad fact that most humans are perfectly content with a miserable life, provided their neighbours are even more miserable.
Which is why the right is truly conservative: they like old ideas, good and bad. Unfortunately, they also hate the ideas of the left on principle. The consequence of that is that they never invent new ideas, but also cling for as long as they can to old discarded notions, which accumulate. This is a mindset that apparently accommodates itself with self-contradiction with amazing ease.
And since as time goes by, the world goes faster and the new ideas tend to be more rapidly accepted or rejected, the rate of accumulation of staggeringly stupid beliefs on the right becomes unsustainable. But they just might be able to take everyone down with them as they pundit themselves into oblivion.
English shares about 30 % of its vocabulary with French. So you are going to need an awfully bad spelling to get all the words properly wrong.
Also, the point is not that you misspelled a French word: you misspelled an English one. Knowing the French origin only helps remember what the correct English spelling is...
Because as soon as you start integrating/using a word, it becomes part of English. This is not a reason to get it wrong.
I don't know. Viola will produce the wrong sound. Wala is at least a valid phonetic approximation.
But to be frank, I have not yet encountered it.
Etymologically, yes: "vois là" probably got contracted. However "there you go" is a more accurate (if not entirely satisfactory) translation.
It's voilà (French for "there you go"), not viola, which is a musical instrument related to the violin. Gah.
* Stealing focus. No, never stole focus: they are and have always been passive.
* Colour scheme: same as that of the plasma theme.
* Various expletive: you are a troll. But not a very good one.
the notification system is hard: applications like to embed little applets in the tray, for one thing, and interaction with these in a clean, consistent way is not easy. Notifications are also hard to get right: you want all the information, you want it non-obtrusive, you want to know what is happening, you want to be able to respond to them in a timely manner.
Basically, it is a very small part of your desktop which can cause immense amounts of grief: a lot of the bad rap vista got was from the popups from there...
Because I have tens of thousands of mails with way too many attachments. And some people have ten or a hundred times as much.
So nothing short of a RDBMS will in fact cope with that volume. And I should also add that whining about is is a purely knee-jerk reaction as in most cases it will use very little resources (way less than your browser). I guess you are an old hand who remembers days when servers would be dedicated to running these beasts. Well, that still happens, but only for very, very large datasets. Desktops (in fact, even smartphones -- akonadi runs on the N900) are so powerful these days that the DB will not even register.
So your complain is in fact utterly silly. It is not even "wahh, it uses too many resources", it is "wah, it uses something I believe uses too many resources, but clearly I never checked in the last 20 years".
Integration is not simply about having an extra widget (which has been there for some time). Integration is about saving sessions, integrating with kwallet.
It is also about providing the API which is used by other applications for purposes other than displaying web pages. All these things, KHTML does, and does well (as well as displaying the web pages), but the webkit kpart needed much development.
which basically tells us something about how mature fans of each desktop are...
How do you measure RAM usage? not with top, I hope... Because most of the plasma memory is in fact the pixmaps which are counted thrice (once for the app, once for the xserver, and an extra time in the videocard for the double-buffering)
See, plasma runs on phones, so clearly it is not that heavy (not that phones are not pretty powerful these days, but still)...
My point is that precisely you cannot do the same now. It used to be possible. Not anymore.
most of them on the internet :) But polls (another one was published this week in The Economist) consistently show that Americans are more likely to be in denial (on that subject) than anyone else.
I guess it comes from the fact that you guys see it as a threat to your lifestyle, whereas in Europe it is more like "yet another thing going wrong" :)
You know, you can buy on amazon for cheap excellent book on general relativity and quantum mechanics. My bet is that without a couple years in a good physics program you will no actually understand anything.
Because (advanced) maths are not simple. Because the level of abstraction reached is mind-boggling. Because these books build on centuries of maths and physics knowledge.
Now you can, perhaps, teach yourself to that level. It will take you probably more time than the college/university path. It is cute that you compare the level of education of Washington to today: basically, in his time, you could essentially know everything.
Now go read some articles on Riemanian manifolds on wikipedia. That's modern geometry for you. Go ahead. Teach yourself that.
The fascinating thing is that the result of the American system, where apparently one is taught to hug trees (according to you) is that Americans are impermeable to the reality of global warming, whereas in the rest of the world, everyone is pretty much convinced...
From which we must conclude that the system is so disastrous it can't even indoctrinate properly.
Because bandwidth costs nothing! Or rather, it costs a fixed price in maintenance, plus an upfront investment.
Having people pay per usage is basically saying you can reasonably expect people to give you money for exactly nothing in return. That is not how the market is supposed to work...
Oh well, this is what happens when you have a combination of information asymmetry (dumb users) and a quasi-monopoly (rogers).
I use primus. No cap, and acceptable bandwidth. Too expensive compared to Europe, but what can I do?
Actually, after just 20 weeks, they will go at 1048 km*s^-1 (assuming your calculations are correct). Which is an amazing speed. Speed of light is 300 000 km*s^-1, which you would reach during the 29th week, if speed could continue increasing that way.
So yeah, Jupiter (5 light-hours or so) in 2 years seems about right.
See, I don't work for monsanto. I hate and despise them. I also hate and despise people who, under the guise of fighting for Good are in fact destroying the possibility of intelligent debate. I might actually hate them more, because they ought to be on my side, but they are clearly helping the opponent.
You may shout, yes, but then don't expect anyone to respect what you say for its intrinsic value.
Horizontal transfer may never happen, but we still have a significant part of our DNA from it...
Also hydrogenated oil does not cause heart disease. it is a factor increasing the probability thereof. And this kind of stupid confusion is exactly why right-wing extremist end up having a field day on such things as AGW and GMOs[1]. They don't need straw men, you kindly provide for them.
[1] In both cases, they try to eliminate protective legislation which forces corporations into behaving. In both cases, they fill the air with counterpoints to minor errors which tree hugger fanatics kindly provide to them. Sometimes, I think Greenpeace/the WWF are Monsanto and BP's greatest allies...
Basically, GMO's are a brilliant idea. Much better (and safer) way to produce new cultivars than the traditional methods. However, IP "rights" and the behaviour of corporations as well as the market permission mechanism need revision/scrutiny/correction. Fight for that instead of crusading against technology: you cannot win against progress, but you may well undermine your side of the argument as you go, and make the whole world worse off because of your positions.
yes. Conversely, this also means nothing is poison. Poison is an emotional description that fits imperfectly with physical reality.
Oh, don't get me started on the drug control situation.
The worst part is that the mafia probably didn't even need to buy representatives to get the wonderfully favourable to itself legislation one can enjoy in the US.
Voter stupidity did that. And populism. And strident Right-wing arguments.
Why would a GM food be labelled and one produced through forced mutation not? This makes no sense from the point of public health. By now, if there were measurable public health issues with GM foods, we would know. We have a test population, the US and a control, the EU. And yes, people live longer in the EU, but for reasons due to better health care/living conditions. Not because of GM food.
When you are saying that GM food ought to be labelled so consumers can make a choice, you are really saying that the government ought to regulate with which technology goods are to be produced. And I thoroughly disagree.
The government should regulate working conditions. It should regulate the risks posed by products. It should clearly regulate labelling of substances present in significant quantities in the food.
But how it's been produced? Why not ask for the composition of the growth medium for tomatoes, then? Or demand to know whether your car was assembled by workers or robots, and in what proportion?
See. Monsanto is a bunch of assholes. Having any industry self-regulating itself is both stupid and evil. But asking for mandatory labels on how stuff is produced? This is idiotic. If you are breaking laws and norms in your production you should not be allowed to sell. How you produce stuff is what innovation is about. If you have a lobbying/corruption problem, fix that. Don't try to kill technologies which can be used for good because you have irrational fears about them.