The doctrine is worth defending, but the fact remains: NSA-provided data has not been — and can not be, not by itself, anyway — used to frame an innocent person.
That's assuming it's real evidence. The problem with parallel construction (aside from the obvious fact that it allows the circumvention of our 4th Amendment rights) is that without the ability to know where the hell the evidence against you came from, there's no way to investigate it or question its validity. If the police or prosecution are just allowed to make up a story about where evidence came from, what's to prevent them from fabricating evidence in the first place?
I don't think that Coke is just pushing back against the idea that, say, corn syrup is particularly bad. They seem to be pushing back agains the idea that calorie intake is a big deal at all. Their groundbreaking scientific theory appears to be, "Sure, excess calories make you fat, but that doesn't mean it's your diet. Maybe you should just run a few extra miles a day so you can keep drinking your daily 3 liters of Coke!"
The thing about being a shareholder is that you get rewarded with money if your executives make good decisions and you lose money if they make bad decisions. That's pretty much the entire shareholder experience. The idea that shareholders exist to reap the rewards of good corporate governance but should be insulated from the pain of bad governance makes no sense. They already enjoy complete access to the upside with only limited liability. That's a pretty good deal as it is.
As for jailing, it seems like we should be jailing the people directly involved, not the shareholders or the board (unless the board knew about it). I'd be OK with reducing the fines to the corporation provided the corporation is very helpful in building criminal cases against everybody who was actually involved.
Not being allowed to start a career there is just an annoyance, but taking damage to (or ending) a career you've already built there over years is a bit more of a kick in the balls.
I think there's a good argument to be made that a lot of buyers were defrauded. The product they're driving doesn't have the performance characteristics they thought it did, and that's due to deliberate deception. I would not be a happy car owner if I had one of those models right now.
What makes it ridiculously high? The fact that it might put them under doesn't really say anything about whether it's the wrong number.
If I get a parking ticket three times a day every day for a few years, that number would probably end up being eye poppingly huge, but it's not like I didn't know what the consequences were when I started misbehaving, and it certainly doesn't mean that the fine for an individual violation is somehow unjust. If anything, it implies that the fine was not high enough to deter me.
In any case, I'd be happy to see that fine reduced as an incentive for the company to be very forthcoming with information needed for criminal prosecutions. Of course, that would require criminal prosecutions.
Having predicted 300 out of the past 2 crashes is not something to be proud of. Especially if the follow on prediction of prices spiraling out of control completely failed to materialize.
I know this is probably a waste of time, but in case there are people who are interested in something more than bald assertions:
It's pretty easy to make an herbicide. Just make something that's ridiculously toxic and kills stuff. Making a *good* herbicide that just kills plants is a lot harder. Roundup works by preventing a chemical process that happens only in plants and bacteria, which is pretty damned specific. Its toxicity to mammals is incredibly low, especially relative to the quantities it's used in as an herbicide. It's *possible* that it may have a chronic affect by damaging your gut flora, but in terms of what it actually does to you, it's pretty damned inert. Find me an example of a reasonably useful herbicide that's less toxic to humans.
Of course, it's made by MONSANTO, so it must be a super-duper-double-secret conspiracy to give us autism or something. Anybody who points to the actual toxicity data is just a shill, and anonymous trolls who toss off one-liners have the real truth.
I think that most cows that we farm for meat eat corn products. If I understand correctly, alfalfa is for dairy cows. There's also no good reason why we couldn't ship alfalfa in from elsewhere.
Letting the water price float out here wouldn't be primarily about residential users. Even at the lowest tier price, residential users pay far more for water than the average price across all uses. Letting the price float in California would mainly bite the agricultural users, who currently consume most of the water and pay a tiny fraction of the residential rate for it. Letting that rate to go a market price would solve our water problem, very likely without any more real changes to residential usage one way or another. There just aren't that many rich people with lawns to make a difference one way or another when you compare it to the cost of running big farms in the desert.
Do you have anything of substance to offer or do you simply parrot Monsanto's talking points?
I'm sorry, who are you? Did I miss you making an actual argument addressing anything I said somewhere? If so, I'm sorry.
1/3 of the posts in this story are you posting corporate drivel.
I don't know, your posting "Nuh uh!" after all of my posts could skew the numbers a little bit. If we keep it up we'll asymptotically approach 50% each.
Hopefully you also get sprayed with round up along with all the other Monsanto employees.
I'm not even in the biotech or agriculture industry. I just find pseudoscience fascinating, so I end up in threads about young earth creationism, anti vaccine nonsense, hilarious audiophile products, etc. The GMO debate has proved to be a rich source of all sorts of interesting half-truths, passionate ignorance, and general nutbaggery.
Unfortunately, while the creationists on/. come up with fascinating and engaging rationalizations in the face of overwhelming evidence, the anti-GMO people here seem to mostly just shout "Shill!" while arguments bounce right off them. It's like doing a card trick for an audience of housecats.
The only reason to use Monsanto's GM seeds is so you can spray poison on it.
Errr... you do know that there are other GM crops beyond herbicide tolerant ones, right? Like Bt corn, golden rice, and ringspot virus tolerant papaya? And a whole litany of other products coming down the pipeline that have nothing to do with herbicide one way or another? "You have to use chemicals" isn't true in any meaningful sense. It's peripherally related to some part of the subject, but for God's sake, it's not even technically correct enough to be called "true but misleading."
Well, if people watching the debate see factual points made on one side and "Keep shillin', dipshit" on the other, I suppose that's pretty good. I guess "shill" is the grown up hackey sack circle equivalent of "poopyhead" and they just don't realize it's not seen as a devastating comeback outside their own clique.
Stop perpetuating Big Corp lies. Selective breeding is not the same thing as genetically modifying. The latter involves transferring genes directly, typically from other species. You know that. Stop the lies. I would give you 100 trollop points if I had them.
That's right. And simple selective breeding and hybridization just means mashing together entire genomes (often across species) to get the one trait you want. Surely there's no chance of any unexpected traits that way. Totally under control, right?
I keep hearing this "insect-resistant crops mean less insecticide" argument.
And yet pesticide use in North America has risen exponentially over the past two decades, as GM crops have taken off. (Source: EPA.) So I put that argument firmly in the "pro-IP propaganda" bucket.
Well, your data source doesn't seem to cover two decades. Two years is what I see.
But your problem here is that you started with "insecticide" (which is what insect resistant crops would reduce) and jumped to "pesticides" which is a superset that includes herbicides and fungicides (which insect resistant crops would not affect at all). If you look just at the insecticide field in your own data set, you'll notice that it dropped from 2006 to 2007. If you want to grab 20 years' worth of data, we can look over it, but I'm guessing that the majority of the general pesticide use growth is in herbicides, just like it is for the two year window in that document.
Now to be fair, the increased herbicide use is almost certainly glyphosate used in concert with Roundup Ready crops. Those crops definitely increase herbicide use. But it's a pretty benign herbicide
You and a whole bunch of others are missing the point entirely. We don't NEED to or even HAVE to produce MORE food. WASTE is the problem. If we produce a GMO rice that yields 40% more product, it won't fucking matter because that is going in the trash!
1) Not every place has so much food that they can afford to let it go to waste the way we can.
2) Food waste is not the only problem GM crops can solve. Disease resistance (e.g. the papayas in Hawaii) helps make more efficient use of resources and prevent catastrophic collapse of farms or even full industries. Vitamin foritifcation (e.g. golden rice) can help prevent disease in areas where food variety is limited. Pest resistance can reduce the use of insecticide. Lowering water usage is another possible benefit. There are a bunch of others that are potentially out there as well (e.g. a peanut that doesn't trigger peanut allergies).
3) Even if you don't need more food, a 40% increase in yield would potentially mean a substantial decrease in land, labor, or other resources required to produce the same amount of food.
The GM foods that Monsanto are producing involve gene splicing with Glyphosphates, which is a main ingredient in their Round-Up weed killer.
This is one of those sentences that doesn't inspire confidence in the technical accuracy of what's to follow. Kind of like talking about sending your kid "an internet."
The World Health Organization has just announced that glyphosphates are known carcinogens.
You mean they've classified it in a class of carcinogens that includes "emissions from high temperature frying" and not quite in the class that includes "sawdust." Lots of things are probably carcinogenic. The question is how seriously carcinogenic they are and whether they're toxic in other ways. And all of that is assuming that you want to take this one agency's conclusions over the conclusions of a bunch of other agencies that reached a different one.
But I guess what you mean is, if we abolished plant patents today, no one will be willing and/or able to develop whatever the future, "new-and-improved" versions of these crops are. Or, if these hypothetical laws had been in place 20 years ago, we wouldn't have these crops today.
It's not a question of "no one" doing it. It's simply a question of how many. There will always be public research and non-profit funds for doing this type of work. Just not as much. Doing away with patent protection won't halt biotech. It will just slow it down. If that's a price we're willing to pay, then so be it. But in this particular industry, the cost/benefit analysis seems to me to go the other way.
Software development requires investment, but not nearly as much investment as biotech. Add in regulations and what it takes to get those GM lines into production (you'll note that there are lots of interesting new GM plants on the drawing board or in the lab, but very very few actually in the market for regulatory reasons) and you have huge startup costs when compared to most software or music projects. You note this, but I think it's important to really take in the scale. It's also worth noting that musicians generally make more money performing than they do on album sales, and that open source software companies still make money selling support and services. I don't think biotech companies really have much in the way of alternative ways to monetize GM crops beyond selling them.
On the other side of it, there's a difference in what the IP rules cost us in different industries. Software lifecycles are ridiculously fast. A 20 year patent might as well be 100 years. The costs to the industry of a 20 year patent are substantial. On the biotech side, planting cycles are annual and development timelines are generally measured in years, so a 20 year patent isn't all that long when compared to the time it takes for new ideas to become widely adopted products. Second, there's the bullshit factor. In software at least, the bullshit factor is high. I'd guess that most patents these days are given for bullshit rather than real innovation. On the GM crop side, the signal to noise ratio is still high. That could change, but I don't think we're there yet.
I'm really sympathetic to the problems people have with the patent system. In a lot of fields, it seems like it has outlived its usefulness. But in this one, it seems to me like we still have some mileage left.
Roundup persists for a very long time in the soil, so trials which show it not harming soil diversity over one or two seasons only tell part of the story.
I don't think that's completely true. It looks like safe "middle of the road" estimates in practical is on the order of 47 days. In the worst case of 197 days, that could work out to some noticeable accumulation, but that seems like an outlier estimate. The chemical has also been in use for 40 years, so it seems like we should see some serious data if it had serious effects. That's not to count out the possibility of really subtle second and third order problems, but that's true for anything.
The other thing we should remember is that it's not the first herbicide to be used in farming, and using less of it may well mean using more of a more toxic herbicide. I mean, it's easy to make an herbicide. Just put a really toxic liquid in a bottle. It's harder to make an herbicide that just kills plants and is pretty neutral on other stuff we don't want to kill. Glyphosate is a pretty big win on that front.
And, again, *Monsanto* admits to cross-contamination so any claim that they have not wrongfully sued needs to be examined on a case by case basis. Just offering one case (there are 144 mentioned in the article) does nothing to support Monsanto's claims to not wrongfully sue.
I'd think that the burden would be on people who want to prove that Monsanto is doing terrible things to come up with specific examples of terrible things. The examples that actually do come out with enough information for scrutiny don't usually support the idea that the farmers were innocent victims.
Slashdot Mirror
That's assuming it's real evidence. The problem with parallel construction (aside from the obvious fact that it allows the circumvention of our 4th Amendment rights) is that without the ability to know where the hell the evidence against you came from, there's no way to investigate it or question its validity. If the police or prosecution are just allowed to make up a story about where evidence came from, what's to prevent them from fabricating evidence in the first place?
I don't think that Coke is just pushing back against the idea that, say, corn syrup is particularly bad. They seem to be pushing back agains the idea that calorie intake is a big deal at all. Their groundbreaking scientific theory appears to be, "Sure, excess calories make you fat, but that doesn't mean it's your diet. Maybe you should just run a few extra miles a day so you can keep drinking your daily 3 liters of Coke!"
The thing about being a shareholder is that you get rewarded with money if your executives make good decisions and you lose money if they make bad decisions. That's pretty much the entire shareholder experience. The idea that shareholders exist to reap the rewards of good corporate governance but should be insulated from the pain of bad governance makes no sense. They already enjoy complete access to the upside with only limited liability. That's a pretty good deal as it is.
As for jailing, it seems like we should be jailing the people directly involved, not the shareholders or the board (unless the board knew about it). I'd be OK with reducing the fines to the corporation provided the corporation is very helpful in building criminal cases against everybody who was actually involved.
Not being allowed to start a career there is just an annoyance, but taking damage to (or ending) a career you've already built there over years is a bit more of a kick in the balls.
Apparently you don't. You just assert that they are liars and move on. Seems to have worked for them so far.
I think there's a good argument to be made that a lot of buyers were defrauded. The product they're driving doesn't have the performance characteristics they thought it did, and that's due to deliberate deception. I would not be a happy car owner if I had one of those models right now.
What makes it ridiculously high? The fact that it might put them under doesn't really say anything about whether it's the wrong number.
If I get a parking ticket three times a day every day for a few years, that number would probably end up being eye poppingly huge, but it's not like I didn't know what the consequences were when I started misbehaving, and it certainly doesn't mean that the fine for an individual violation is somehow unjust. If anything, it implies that the fine was not high enough to deter me.
In any case, I'd be happy to see that fine reduced as an incentive for the company to be very forthcoming with information needed for criminal prosecutions. Of course, that would require criminal prosecutions.
Having predicted 300 out of the past 2 crashes is not something to be proud of. Especially if the follow on prediction of prices spiraling out of control completely failed to materialize.
The proportions aren't assumed to be the same over time.
So no arguments then? None at all?
I know this is probably a waste of time, but in case there are people who are interested in something more than bald assertions:
It's pretty easy to make an herbicide. Just make something that's ridiculously toxic and kills stuff. Making a *good* herbicide that just kills plants is a lot harder. Roundup works by preventing a chemical process that happens only in plants and bacteria, which is pretty damned specific. Its toxicity to mammals is incredibly low, especially relative to the quantities it's used in as an herbicide. It's *possible* that it may have a chronic affect by damaging your gut flora, but in terms of what it actually does to you, it's pretty damned inert. Find me an example of a reasonably useful herbicide that's less toxic to humans.
Of course, it's made by MONSANTO, so it must be a super-duper-double-secret conspiracy to give us autism or something. Anybody who points to the actual toxicity data is just a shill, and anonymous trolls who toss off one-liners have the real truth.
I think that most cows that we farm for meat eat corn products. If I understand correctly, alfalfa is for dairy cows. There's also no good reason why we couldn't ship alfalfa in from elsewhere.
Letting the water price float out here wouldn't be primarily about residential users. Even at the lowest tier price, residential users pay far more for water than the average price across all uses. Letting the price float in California would mainly bite the agricultural users, who currently consume most of the water and pay a tiny fraction of the residential rate for it. Letting that rate to go a market price would solve our water problem, very likely without any more real changes to residential usage one way or another. There just aren't that many rich people with lawns to make a difference one way or another when you compare it to the cost of running big farms in the desert.
I'm sorry, who are you? Did I miss you making an actual argument addressing anything I said somewhere? If so, I'm sorry.
I don't know, your posting "Nuh uh!" after all of my posts could skew the numbers a little bit. If we keep it up we'll asymptotically approach 50% each.
I'm not even in the biotech or agriculture industry. I just find pseudoscience fascinating, so I end up in threads about young earth creationism, anti vaccine nonsense, hilarious audiophile products, etc. The GMO debate has proved to be a rich source of all sorts of interesting half-truths, passionate ignorance, and general nutbaggery.
/. come up with fascinating and engaging rationalizations in the face of overwhelming evidence, the anti-GMO people here seem to mostly just shout "Shill!" while arguments bounce right off them. It's like doing a card trick for an audience of housecats.
Unfortunately, while the creationists on
Start making actual arguments, or just go away, troll.
Errr... you do know that there are other GM crops beyond herbicide tolerant ones, right? Like Bt corn, golden rice, and ringspot virus tolerant papaya? And a whole litany of other products coming down the pipeline that have nothing to do with herbicide one way or another? "You have to use chemicals" isn't true in any meaningful sense. It's peripherally related to some part of the subject, but for God's sake, it's not even technically correct enough to be called "true but misleading."
Where do people get this shit?
Joy.
Well, if people watching the debate see factual points made on one side and "Keep shillin', dipshit" on the other, I suppose that's pretty good. I guess "shill" is the grown up hackey sack circle equivalent of "poopyhead" and they just don't realize it's not seen as a devastating comeback outside their own clique.
That's right. And simple selective breeding and hybridization just means mashing together entire genomes (often across species) to get the one trait you want. Surely there's no chance of any unexpected traits that way. Totally under control, right?
I keep hearing this "insect-resistant crops mean less insecticide" argument.
And yet pesticide use in North America has risen exponentially over the past two decades, as GM crops have taken off. (Source: EPA.) So I put that argument firmly in the "pro-IP propaganda" bucket.
Well, your data source doesn't seem to cover two decades. Two years is what I see.
But your problem here is that you started with "insecticide" (which is what insect resistant crops would reduce) and jumped to "pesticides" which is a superset that includes herbicides and fungicides (which insect resistant crops would not affect at all). If you look just at the insecticide field in your own data set, you'll notice that it dropped from 2006 to 2007. If you want to grab 20 years' worth of data, we can look over it, but I'm guessing that the majority of the general pesticide use growth is in herbicides, just like it is for the two year window in that document.
Now to be fair, the increased herbicide use is almost certainly glyphosate used in concert with Roundup Ready crops. Those crops definitely increase herbicide use. But it's a pretty benign herbicide
1) Not every place has so much food that they can afford to let it go to waste the way we can.
2) Food waste is not the only problem GM crops can solve. Disease resistance (e.g. the papayas in Hawaii) helps make more efficient use of resources and prevent catastrophic collapse of farms or even full industries. Vitamin foritifcation (e.g. golden rice) can help prevent disease in areas where food variety is limited. Pest resistance can reduce the use of insecticide. Lowering water usage is another possible benefit. There are a bunch of others that are potentially out there as well (e.g. a peanut that doesn't trigger peanut allergies).
3) Even if you don't need more food, a 40% increase in yield would potentially mean a substantial decrease in land, labor, or other resources required to produce the same amount of food.
This is one of those sentences that doesn't inspire confidence in the technical accuracy of what's to follow. Kind of like talking about sending your kid "an internet."
You mean they've classified it in a class of carcinogens that includes "emissions from high temperature frying" and not quite in the class that includes "sawdust." Lots of things are probably carcinogenic. The question is how seriously carcinogenic they are and whether they're toxic in other ways. And all of that is assuming that you want to take this one agency's conclusions over the conclusions of a bunch of other agencies that reached a different one.
It's not a question of "no one" doing it. It's simply a question of how many. There will always be public research and non-profit funds for doing this type of work. Just not as much. Doing away with patent protection won't halt biotech. It will just slow it down. If that's a price we're willing to pay, then so be it. But in this particular industry, the cost/benefit analysis seems to me to go the other way.
Software development requires investment, but not nearly as much investment as biotech. Add in regulations and what it takes to get those GM lines into production (you'll note that there are lots of interesting new GM plants on the drawing board or in the lab, but very very few actually in the market for regulatory reasons) and you have huge startup costs when compared to most software or music projects. You note this, but I think it's important to really take in the scale. It's also worth noting that musicians generally make more money performing than they do on album sales, and that open source software companies still make money selling support and services. I don't think biotech companies really have much in the way of alternative ways to monetize GM crops beyond selling them.
On the other side of it, there's a difference in what the IP rules cost us in different industries. Software lifecycles are ridiculously fast. A 20 year patent might as well be 100 years. The costs to the industry of a 20 year patent are substantial. On the biotech side, planting cycles are annual and development timelines are generally measured in years, so a 20 year patent isn't all that long when compared to the time it takes for new ideas to become widely adopted products. Second, there's the bullshit factor. In software at least, the bullshit factor is high. I'd guess that most patents these days are given for bullshit rather than real innovation. On the GM crop side, the signal to noise ratio is still high. That could change, but I don't think we're there yet.
I'm really sympathetic to the problems people have with the patent system. In a lot of fields, it seems like it has outlived its usefulness. But in this one, it seems to me like we still have some mileage left.
I don't think that's completely true. It looks like safe "middle of the road" estimates in practical is on the order of 47 days. In the worst case of 197 days, that could work out to some noticeable accumulation, but that seems like an outlier estimate. The chemical has also been in use for 40 years, so it seems like we should see some serious data if it had serious effects. That's not to count out the possibility of really subtle second and third order problems, but that's true for anything.
The other thing we should remember is that it's not the first herbicide to be used in farming, and using less of it may well mean using more of a more toxic herbicide. I mean, it's easy to make an herbicide. Just put a really toxic liquid in a bottle. It's harder to make an herbicide that just kills plants and is pretty neutral on other stuff we don't want to kill. Glyphosate is a pretty big win on that front.
I'd think that the burden would be on people who want to prove that Monsanto is doing terrible things to come up with specific examples of terrible things. The examples that actually do come out with enough information for scrutiny don't usually support the idea that the farmers were innocent victims.