So... more food means more starvation? Gee, do you also think that war is peace and servitude is freedom?
More seriously - some research you must be unaware of: The world's human population does not depend on the size of the food supply. That's true for rats and rabbits, but not us. Human fertility depends largely on the degree of education of women and their degree of economic opportunities. (Of course, other factors are important too, but none are more important. The food supply does not figure at all. If you want to stabilize the human population - and all environmentalists should want this - you have to eliminate global poverty and educate as many girls as possible. I think that's good policy in any case.)
I read the article too and took away exactly the same conclusions. I also thought it was interesting that they can't isolate the effects of the corn itself from the effects of whatever the corn was treated with. (They mentioned that the signs of toxicity are reminiscent of something that could be a reaction to a pesticide.) That might be worth doing in a future study, and wouldn't be hard: You just grow the corn in a test field and don't spray it at all, and compare its effects to the corn that was grown the conventional way.
So come on, people. This shit is important, and lab rats aren't that expensive. Let's go already!
I think you overestimate the Europeans who object to GMO. I'm all for hawk-like oversight, but how many anti-GM people do you know who will say: "OK, now the oversight is in line with other industries I support, so now I'm cool with GM"? I know none.
Those people (for example many Germans) really are Luddites and their irrationality will destroy this planet. (The same people tend to fear nuclear power, so produce most of their electricity with earth-destroying coal. The world thanks you, fuckers!)
Your comment comes closest to what I also think about this issue. I am a rabid environmentalist and I have great hopes for genetic engineering. I'd be sad if we screwed it up as we did with nuclear fission - where a couple of greedy institutions didn't take universally understood precautions, and thus ruined a good thing for everyone.
And while I have great hope for GM crops, I have zero faith in the moral integrity of Monsanto. They very well could be what ruins the promise of GM for two generations.
The reason why, as an environmentalist, I support GM research is because it allows for a given area of land to feed more people. It's that simple: The more productive are our crops, the more of the Earth we can keep as wilderness. If we insist on using low-yield crops, we simply have to suck it up that more of the planet will be covered with agriculture. Because I want to keep as much wilderness as possible, while still keeping our population fed, the land we do cultivate should produce at its maximum. Many fellow environmentalists fail to understand that their insistence on low-yield agricultural species amounts to a demand to plow under huge swaths of what is now nature.
Having said that, I of course want the GM crops to be certifiably safe for consumers and for the environment. Businesses that rely on GM should want the same, because if they get caught with their pants down like the nuclear industry did, they're fucked. Sadly, I have no faith that Monsanto understands this. If they really have been selling a toxic product and knew this, no amount of government connections will save their asses. I wouldn't mind seeing them go down. But with them would go the whole GM industry, because people don't make distinctions like the ones you made. For example, many people still think that all nuclear plants are functionally copies of Chernobyl. If GM gets taken out, we would lose one of our most important tools for the prevention of environmental destruction.
We should realize that Monsanto GM crops are really the first products of an industry in its infancy. They are the equivalent of Netscape 1.0. We didn't give up on the internet just because the early browsers had serious defects. We fixed the defects and kept going. That's what we need to do with GM. But first and foremost, we need scientific openness in quickly discovering the defects, before they hurt people and cause a backlash.
The fact that a routine error can cause major institution like an airport to grind to a halt is a sign that its operating procedure needs to be revised. It's stupid to just live with it when there are alternatives
For example, there's been a lot of recent talk about updating our airport screening to look more like Israel's, where they've been thinking about terrorism a bit harder and longer than we have. I'm sure there are other alternatives too. However, remember that the point of terrorism is to cause fear and economic loss to industrialized countries, and to bait us into a self-destructive overreaction. By that standard, they guy who walked through the wrong gate pulled off a pretty impressive piece of terrorism, at basically no real risk to himself. You don't want to enshrine a system where this sort of exploit is possible, or else every group with a quibble can hold an airport hostage.
Well yeah, with the completely unsustainable use of fossil fuels for chemical fertilizer, we can definitely produce lots of food now. Now, if we asked whether we can feed everyone while farming sustainably, the answer would be less clear. To put the point in terms you used, the reason why so many people in the world don't go hungry is because of a practice that we won't be able to keep up for long.
Just to make clear, this article does not say that China will not export Neodynium. They will, as ingots - lots of ingots. It's just that until now, they've been exporting the metal at much earlier stages of the refining process, so Western companies have been buying it up, processing it and selling it at a big markup. Now China is saying that they want to be the people to do that processing and collect the markup.
Likewise, Canada wouldn't create a wood shortage if they announced that they will no longer sell logs but instead sell only kiln-dried boards.
Yeah, which brings up another important point: The Thorium does not need to be enriched - you just throw natural Thorium into the reactor and it works. This means fewer dual-use enrichment plants (the kind we want to bomb in Iran) so a much lower proliferation risk. But also: Much lower fuel cycle costs.
I'm not a nuclear physicist either, but I can tell that you don't understand much about this issue. The most obvious mistake you make is what you said about enrichment. Whaa?? A ten second search would reveal to you that the reactor-relevant Thorium is Th-232. So do we need to enrich natural Thorium to get Th-232? God damn it, look at Wikipedia!. What is the abundance of Th-232 in natural Thorium? You will find the answer is: 100%. So the comment about enriching is 100% bullshit. I suspect deliberate FUD, maybe not originating with you, but it's sad to see this kind of crap circulating in Norway. Is that like the Kansas of Europe?
Second, there have already been several research reactors, not 20 years in the future but over 50 years in the past. Guess what? It worked great. Yeah, we could build them better now. India is doing it.
Third, the debate in Norway is, I presume, not about whether you will use Thorium reactors domestically to produce power. You get almost all you need from hydro, which is a great, clean energy source. The debate is rather about whether you will export Thorium to countries that want to also produce clean power but don't have mountains and rivers like yours. That Norwegians are having a debate about this is a little sickening to me - as though you might have a moral problem with selling this clean fuel to the world, but you're perfectly happy being the third largest exporter of oil, behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia. I think the debate you should be having is about the morality of feeding the world's oil addiction. But instead of just contributing to this problem you are also deliberately putting the brakes on one of its most plausible solutions? If I were Norwegian, I'd be ashamed.
If you really care about people, you'll want them to live on a planet that's not headed for an environmental catastrophe. Don't you think? See where nuclear power might play a role in that?
Gee, if you're so easy to scare, try this out: Building industrial-scale photovoltaic installations might raise the albedo of the Earth so much that it will disrupt climate patterns and kill you with lightning. That's totally possible. I'm sure you can come up with your own nightmare scenarios for any reasonable technology.
But you know what scares me? The fossil-fuel-burning status quo, which is what your dumb fears are (perhaps unintentionally) perpetuating.
Sorry to break it to you, but there are only so many years that the sun will be burning and the wind will be blowing. So these aren't sustainable either, right? The truth is, there is a practical method for extracting Uranium and Thorium from sea water. Japanese research shows we could do this for about $120/kg of Uranium - which, if burned completely in a reactor produces a great deal of energy. Since Thorium is more abundant, it should be cheaper.
And the nice thing is that even if we used seawater Uranium to provide 100% of the world's energy (inc. transportation), the rivers of the world would still be adding more Uranium to the oceans each year than we could ever remove. So nuclear fission is not indefinitely sustainable. It's only sustainable as long as rivers keep running to the sea, which is on the same order of magnitude as the life cycle of sun-type stars.
Huh? You think if there is a famine we will use available farmland to grow shit that we press for oil to put into our gastank? Didn't it occur to you that this would be rather strange behavior in a famine?
LIthium is the second most common element in nature.
Um... your post makes me think that there's more stupidity in the universe than just about anything, inlcuding Hydrogen and Helium (and certainly Lithium).
As for me, I'd rather buy an imperfect game that I can count on being quickly patched, rather than a more perfect game whose defects are permanently unfixable.
You know, I've wondered about this. At $1000 per line, the price does indeed seem steep, but for software that's distributed very broadly (like the kernel of a major operating system), I don't think that's too high a price to pay. I expect that MS has paid far more than $1000 per line for what's now the NT kernel, and not because it was made right, but because it was made wrongly and needed extensive tweaks upon tweaks upon tweaks.
But this will never apply to games, because in addition to the high price per line, NASA's software development is (deliberately) slow. When making games, the most important thing is to put it on the shelf.
I just wanted to make a small, tangential point: Is there any evidence that stuff made in shops in "the West" is of higher quality? I know many people like to blame offshoring for the low quality of x, but we're starting to lose any sense of a comparison class, because so few things are actually made in "the West".
But I think that there is excellent evidence that high quality x's can be made in the third world - they just cost more to make than crappy x's. So I agree with your diagnosis that stingy management is at the root of the quality problem, but I don't think there's much evidence that the geography of production alone has much to do with quality.
Here in the US, for example, we still make cars. I'm patriotic or whatever, but I will never buy one, and quality is the only reason why not. If some Chinese or Indian car company starts exporting cars to North America, I will definitely consider those. Products from these countries are hit-or-miss, but at least sometimes they "hit"!
I don't think what you describe is by any stretch "piracy", but you're getting close to the real problem: If it became possible to return "broken" software for a refund (especially games), you can bet that countless people would just buy a game, win it and get a refund, claiming it was broken.
How is the underpaid person at the service counter supposed to verify their claim? Must the customer bring in his machine and reproduce a serious bug while others wait in line? Not likely. Failing this, they would just have a list of "buggy" games and take the word of any customer who is trying to return one.
This begs the question: Who would keep that list? What would be the standards by which a game gets put on the list? Won't EA and MS just make a deal with the list-makers that has them test and "certify" each release ahead of time? I have no reason to think that this would result in better software, but it certainly would be a big help for the rich, entrenched players: If any small competitor starts rising up, call his software "buggy", get it on the refund list, and cut off their air supply.
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So... more food means more starvation? Gee, do you also think that war is peace and servitude is freedom?
More seriously - some research you must be unaware of: The world's human population does not depend on the size of the food supply. That's true for rats and rabbits, but not us. Human fertility depends largely on the degree of education of women and their degree of economic opportunities. (Of course, other factors are important too, but none are more important. The food supply does not figure at all. If you want to stabilize the human population - and all environmentalists should want this - you have to eliminate global poverty and educate as many girls as possible. I think that's good policy in any case.)
I read the article too and took away exactly the same conclusions. I also thought it was interesting that they can't isolate the effects of the corn itself from the effects of whatever the corn was treated with. (They mentioned that the signs of toxicity are reminiscent of something that could be a reaction to a pesticide.) That might be worth doing in a future study, and wouldn't be hard: You just grow the corn in a test field and don't spray it at all, and compare its effects to the corn that was grown the conventional way.
So come on, people. This shit is important, and lab rats aren't that expensive. Let's go already!
I think you overestimate the Europeans who object to GMO. I'm all for hawk-like oversight, but how many anti-GM people do you know who will say: "OK, now the oversight is in line with other industries I support, so now I'm cool with GM"? I know none.
Those people (for example many Germans) really are Luddites and their irrationality will destroy this planet. (The same people tend to fear nuclear power, so produce most of their electricity with earth-destroying coal. The world thanks you, fuckers!)
Your comment comes closest to what I also think about this issue. I am a rabid environmentalist and I have great hopes for genetic engineering. I'd be sad if we screwed it up as we did with nuclear fission - where a couple of greedy institutions didn't take universally understood precautions, and thus ruined a good thing for everyone.
And while I have great hope for GM crops, I have zero faith in the moral integrity of Monsanto. They very well could be what ruins the promise of GM for two generations.
The reason why, as an environmentalist, I support GM research is because it allows for a given area of land to feed more people. It's that simple: The more productive are our crops, the more of the Earth we can keep as wilderness. If we insist on using low-yield crops, we simply have to suck it up that more of the planet will be covered with agriculture. Because I want to keep as much wilderness as possible, while still keeping our population fed, the land we do cultivate should produce at its maximum. Many fellow environmentalists fail to understand that their insistence on low-yield agricultural species amounts to a demand to plow under huge swaths of what is now nature.
Having said that, I of course want the GM crops to be certifiably safe for consumers and for the environment. Businesses that rely on GM should want the same, because if they get caught with their pants down like the nuclear industry did, they're fucked. Sadly, I have no faith that Monsanto understands this. If they really have been selling a toxic product and knew this, no amount of government connections will save their asses. I wouldn't mind seeing them go down. But with them would go the whole GM industry, because people don't make distinctions like the ones you made. For example, many people still think that all nuclear plants are functionally copies of Chernobyl. If GM gets taken out, we would lose one of our most important tools for the prevention of environmental destruction.
We should realize that Monsanto GM crops are really the first products of an industry in its infancy. They are the equivalent of Netscape 1.0. We didn't give up on the internet just because the early browsers had serious defects. We fixed the defects and kept going. That's what we need to do with GM. But first and foremost, we need scientific openness in quickly discovering the defects, before they hurt people and cause a backlash.
Seriously, this is the last and only comment that needs to be made on the matter.
I really wonder what American authorities would have done! This stunt is so crazy that I almost can't believe it's real.
No, in Soviet Russia the explosives plant you.
The fact that a routine error can cause major institution like an airport to grind to a halt is a sign that its operating procedure needs to be revised. It's stupid to just live with it when there are alternatives
For example, there's been a lot of recent talk about updating our airport screening to look more like Israel's, where they've been thinking about terrorism a bit harder and longer than we have. I'm sure there are other alternatives too. However, remember that the point of terrorism is to cause fear and economic loss to industrialized countries, and to bait us into a self-destructive overreaction. By that standard, they guy who walked through the wrong gate pulled off a pretty impressive piece of terrorism, at basically no real risk to himself. You don't want to enshrine a system where this sort of exploit is possible, or else every group with a quibble can hold an airport hostage.
Well yeah, with the completely unsustainable use of fossil fuels for chemical fertilizer, we can definitely produce lots of food now. Now, if we asked whether we can feed everyone while farming sustainably, the answer would be less clear. To put the point in terms you used, the reason why so many people in the world don't go hungry is because of a practice that we won't be able to keep up for long.
Likewise, Canada wouldn't create a wood shortage if they announced that they will no longer sell logs but instead sell only kiln-dried boards.
Yeah, which brings up another important point: The Thorium does not need to be enriched - you just throw natural Thorium into the reactor and it works. This means fewer dual-use enrichment plants (the kind we want to bomb in Iran) so a much lower proliferation risk. But also: Much lower fuel cycle costs.
I'm not a nuclear physicist either, but I can tell that you don't understand much about this issue. The most obvious mistake you make is what you said about enrichment. Whaa?? A ten second search would reveal to you that the reactor-relevant Thorium is Th-232. So do we need to enrich natural Thorium to get Th-232? God damn it, look at Wikipedia!. What is the abundance of Th-232 in natural Thorium? You will find the answer is: 100%. So the comment about enriching is 100% bullshit. I suspect deliberate FUD, maybe not originating with you, but it's sad to see this kind of crap circulating in Norway. Is that like the Kansas of Europe?
Second, there have already been several research reactors, not 20 years in the future but over 50 years in the past. Guess what? It worked great. Yeah, we could build them better now. India is doing it.
Third, the debate in Norway is, I presume, not about whether you will use Thorium reactors domestically to produce power. You get almost all you need from hydro, which is a great, clean energy source. The debate is rather about whether you will export Thorium to countries that want to also produce clean power but don't have mountains and rivers like yours. That Norwegians are having a debate about this is a little sickening to me - as though you might have a moral problem with selling this clean fuel to the world, but you're perfectly happy being the third largest exporter of oil, behind only Saudi Arabia and Russia. I think the debate you should be having is about the morality of feeding the world's oil addiction. But instead of just contributing to this problem you are also deliberately putting the brakes on one of its most plausible solutions? If I were Norwegian, I'd be ashamed.
great link, thx!
If you really care about people, you'll want them to live on a planet that's not headed for an environmental catastrophe. Don't you think? See where nuclear power might play a role in that?
Gee, if you're so easy to scare, try this out: Building industrial-scale photovoltaic installations might raise the albedo of the Earth so much that it will disrupt climate patterns and kill you with lightning. That's totally possible. I'm sure you can come up with your own nightmare scenarios for any reasonable technology.
But you know what scares me? The fossil-fuel-burning status quo, which is what your dumb fears are (perhaps unintentionally) perpetuating.
Sorry to break it to you, but there are only so many years that the sun will be burning and the wind will be blowing. So these aren't sustainable either, right? The truth is, there is a practical method for extracting Uranium and Thorium from sea water. Japanese research shows we could do this for about $120/kg of Uranium - which, if burned completely in a reactor produces a great deal of energy. Since Thorium is more abundant, it should be cheaper.
And the nice thing is that even if we used seawater Uranium to provide 100% of the world's energy (inc. transportation), the rivers of the world would still be adding more Uranium to the oceans each year than we could ever remove. So nuclear fission is not indefinitely sustainable. It's only sustainable as long as rivers keep running to the sea, which is on the same order of magnitude as the life cycle of sun-type stars.
Huh? You think if there is a famine we will use available farmland to grow shit that we press for oil to put into our gastank? Didn't it occur to you that this would be rather strange behavior in a famine?
Yeah, everyone is trying to get those deadly Thorium bombs! Right?
Gah, if you don't know basic stuff about science, I suggest you Google before posting! Or follow this link.
LIthium is the second most common element in nature.
Um... your post makes me think that there's more stupidity in the universe than just about anything, inlcuding Hydrogen and Helium (and certainly Lithium).
As for me, I'd rather buy an imperfect game that I can count on being quickly patched, rather than a more perfect game whose defects are permanently unfixable.
But this will never apply to games, because in addition to the high price per line, NASA's software development is (deliberately) slow. When making games, the most important thing is to put it on the shelf.
I just wanted to make a small, tangential point: Is there any evidence that stuff made in shops in "the West" is of higher quality? I know many people like to blame offshoring for the low quality of x, but we're starting to lose any sense of a comparison class, because so few things are actually made in "the West".
But I think that there is excellent evidence that high quality x's can be made in the third world - they just cost more to make than crappy x's. So I agree with your diagnosis that stingy management is at the root of the quality problem, but I don't think there's much evidence that the geography of production alone has much to do with quality.
Here in the US, for example, we still make cars. I'm patriotic or whatever, but I will never buy one, and quality is the only reason why not. If some Chinese or Indian car company starts exporting cars to North America, I will definitely consider those. Products from these countries are hit-or-miss, but at least sometimes they "hit"!
I don't think what you describe is by any stretch "piracy", but you're getting close to the real problem: If it became possible to return "broken" software for a refund (especially games), you can bet that countless people would just buy a game, win it and get a refund, claiming it was broken.
How is the underpaid person at the service counter supposed to verify their claim? Must the customer bring in his machine and reproduce a serious bug while others wait in line? Not likely. Failing this, they would just have a list of "buggy" games and take the word of any customer who is trying to return one.
This begs the question: Who would keep that list? What would be the standards by which a game gets put on the list? Won't EA and MS just make a deal with the list-makers that has them test and "certify" each release ahead of time? I have no reason to think that this would result in better software, but it certainly would be a big help for the rich, entrenched players: If any small competitor starts rising up, call his software "buggy", get it on the refund list, and cut off their air supply.
"We're gonna fight a few stupid wars in which thousands of people will die needlessly, and our country will go broke!" BOO!
"Also, we're gonna pass a law to make your commercials less loud!" YEEAAAHHH!!! WE LUVZ U CONGREZZ!!!11!! USA USA!