It's the dodgy GMO that should be targeted and shunned, none of this Roundup Ready type garbage so we can drench acres in toxic chemicals bullshit. Focus on less inputs (fertilizers and control chemicals) and maximize yield would be an ideal direction IMO.
[...]
Blanket labeling GMO may not be the right direction, we could in theory make a GMO "organic" plant that requires no inputs. Would this wonder plant have to be binned next to the pesticide soaked produce at the grocery store because it's GMO?
This doesn't seem to be a scientific viewpoint. Fertilizers and pesticides (herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, etc.) are demonstrably effective at increasing harvest yield. Organic farming that doesn't use glyphosate-resistant crops just use other herbicide chemicals like rotenone and copper instead, which occur naturally. And the produce themselves are naturally filled with toxic pesticides as an evolutionary deterrent. Herbivores and us large omnivores can usually handle it, but say, an onion is deadly toxic to a carnivorous cat.
Or how about modifying pest weeds to make them spread less and grow smaller or not reproduce at all?
Evolution will not allow it. These shitty weeds would be out-competed by natural weeds due to natural selection.
You're making it into a bit of a false dichotomy. My guest Wi-Fi is generally only used when sharing pictures/video or troubleshooting my family members' devices.
Completely agree about guest networks, but I still despise randomized alphanumeric passwords as a general policy. Comparing passwords using the zxcvbn library via https://www.bennish.net/passwo..., I note that "DHDukBDL04Pt2ZT" is about as secure as "my flemish glassblower costume", but only one of them allows me to go into another room and enter it into a new device.
This password strategy works even better for Germanic languages which can construct a near-infinite amount of nonsensical compound words, which inconveniences dictionary attacks.
Form geosynchronous orbits the relative speed differences is quite low, given that the whole point is to make the satellites all stay in one place in the sky. This stacks up a lot of hardware in a very small space though so collisions would be more slow motion train wrecks that won't create a lot of debris than quick obliteration events that generate a lot of fast moving objects.
Only until an evil scientist sends a box of nails going in the opposite direction.
Low Earth orbit satellites such as Iridium (781 km above sea level) seem to be left to decay back to Earth within a few decades. Galileo satellites at 23222 km that are to be decommissioned boost themselves 300 km further into a graveyard orbit.
You never defined "wrongly" though. You just threw that out there to let others do your research. In that court case, Bowman lost in the District, Federal and Supreme Court. What makes them all "wrong" to you?
You also shouldn't assume that anyone criticizing your arguments are astroturfers. It's an ad hominem that borders on conspiratorial thinking, and isn't conducive to a constructive debate.
In the future I can see it now. You can only buy seeds from monsato if you want to grow anything.
This doesn't seem to relate to GMO technology anymore, it's just your opinions on market economy. Monsanto hasn't held the patent to glyphosate for nearly two decades, nor it's resistant seeds. They're also far from the only biotech and seed-producing company. Even if they somehow started approaching a monopoly, regulatory agencies in every market should prevent them from anti-competitive practices.
As for the farmers being wrongfully sued.
That was true. Google it. Farmers who weren't even using Monsanto seeds got sued because neighboring crops had their seeds spread to neighboring lands.
It's a mess. You shouldn't need anything special from a corporation to grow things. The fact that if I buy seeds from monsato then I have to also buy their fertilizer or my seeds won't grow. That's bullshit. You should not be able to patent food.
You are far from the first Monsanto opponent I've come across, and almost like clockwork do these really old debunked myths pop up about suing farmers for wind-blown contamination. See this NPR article, Myth 2: https://www.npr.org/sections/t...
Also, do you have any source that Monsanto requires a specific fertilizer to grow their crops? You're not confusing fertilizer with pesticide, are you? Because it sounds to me like you're just making it up.
My intention by bringing up apples was that Granny Smith is a household-name hybrid that can't be grown from its own seeds. Whether it was re-hybridized from the same parents or continuously grafted into new trees is beside the point, though I can see how it adds unnecessary complexity to my point.
The majority of corn are hybrids that come from inbred parents, according to this seed grower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (2:30 min video -- How Are Corn Hybrids Created). This will of course vary between countries and type of crop. Do you have any source that specifically corn seed are typically re-grown from the current crop?
Also, I don't think Monsanto has sold any sterile seeds. They're all probably hybrids though -- meaning that their seeds won't be anything like their parent (again, see my Granny Smith comparison), but hybridization is much older than modern GMO techniques and Monsanto. If you don't like sterile seeds though, you should avoid commercial bananas. In spite of how phallic they look, they're incapable of naturally breeding.
You need to be more skeptical of your source (organicconsumers.org) as the author has a clear bias to promote woo, being a osteopath, which is the non-science based art of bone-cracking and mixing in homeopathy instead of medicine. Why this self-proclaimed doctor is talking about agriculture and ecology is anyone's guess.
Before glyphosate-resistant crops farmers still generally bought seeds each season. Since about a century back, crops meant for commercial consumption have come from hybrid seeds. Hybrid seeds produce undesirable offspring. If you took, say, a Granny Smith apple and planted its seeds, the resulting trees would all produce different kinds of apples, none of which would taste or look like a Granny Smith.
It depends on the definition of GMO. Pretty much every organism grown since agriculture became a thing has been substantially artificially modified genetically by humans. However, the typical meaning of GMO is reserved for the more accurate gene editing techniques that became popular a few decades ago.
That's what makes the labeling arbitrary. Labeling mutation breeding or hybridization is never brought up, which is arguably less predictable and safe, presumably because people would realize that everything they eat, including their favorite brands, has been substantially mutated from their "natural" state.
Unjustifiably labeling GMO can sway uninformed people into incorrect assumptions, such as equating it to dangerous products and ingredients that are also labeled in many countries, like tobacco, alcohol and allergens.
Real strawberry taste is the result of hundreds of complex chemicals, spread out over even more genes, as is the taste of broccoli that has to be removed. Though it may eventually be possible to achieve, the taste of strawberries would probably clash with the texture of broccoli.
GMO changes tend to focus on inserting or tweaking a few specific genes, typically to produce more of some protein related to disease resistance, drought tolerance, vitamin production, etc.
The labels are arbitrary and misleading though. Every fruit, vegetable and grain in your grocery store is a mutant compared to their pre-agriculture counterparts from 12,000 years ago. Random mutations and artificial selection from the farmers drove their evolution, where positive and neutral traits were retained, and negative ones were generally discarded.
Then about a century ago, scientists began with mutation breeding by applying mutation-inducing radiation and chemicals to speed up the process significantly.
Shortly thereafter, seed hybridization began where two generically distinct parents are bred to produce a useful seed (similar to how a donkey and horse can produce a mule). The seeds produced by these hybrids are terrible for planting (again, similar to mules), so the parents are kept "alive" by inbreeding or cloning to ensure that they can keep re-producing the same hybrid seeds.
Then about 25 years ago, direct ways to add and edit specific genes into food-producing plants began to be used. This allows for the intentional production of specific traits. The random mutations from food production is taken out. It's the safest way yet to create food, but it's being shamed into being labeled a freak in store shelves, even though our earlier non-GMO processes are much riskier and random.
Actually, "normal climate variability" or "a heat wave" explains it nicely.
That's very unspecific, and goes against climate scientists' overwhelming consensus, specifically that recent calculations concludes that the Earth is warming orders of magnitude faster than from natural forces. Neither "normal climate variability" nor "heat waves" seems to account for past data, nor is able to predict future trends better than AGW.
High daytime temps are NOT part of the catastrophic AGW prediction set, you know. The theory is that NIGHTTIME temps will increase, not daytime, so the overall average goes up.
And when they talk about "consistently higher" temps, they're literally talking about fractions of a degree in most cases.
I couldn't find a source that only night temperatures will increase -- what's yours? The closest I could find was this article explaining why night-time temperatures are warming faster than day-time temperatures. They're both still warming though.
By the way - there have been a few surveys of weather stations, and the vast majority of them have problems, mostly caused by either encroaching cities (the Urban Heat Island effect) or bad instrument siting. Very, very few stations have consistent records, with relatively untouched siting. The ones that do? Well, they don't show the AGW trend that the others do... and the response by AGW scientists is to adjust the ones that aren't showing the increase (AKA "throwing out the good data so the bad data looks better").
Try this site, for a bit of data that will shock you...
http://www.surfacestations.org/
You do not take into account how that data is used and verified. A quick search presents convincing skeptical arguments that these measurements are still reliable as a whole, as they show the same corroborating trends whether they're urban or rural, or lumped into random groups (which would emphasize any inaccuracies from placement of stations): https://skepticalscience.com/s... https://skepticalscience.com/B... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (5 min video -- UQx DENIAL101x 2.4.1.1v2 Building a robust temperature record)
Hi, thanks for the interesting press release. I was however asking GP for a source on the claim that bad data was behind most of the heat records. In hindsight I should have made myself more clear on that.
Rogue ice cream truck engines next to measurement stations doesn't convincingly explain the sudden two weeks of consistently higher-than-average temperature all across the UK, nor the deluge of heat records specifically during May in Fennoscandia (in Swedish, but you can still get the gist from the pretty pictures).
You can't dismiss all ground weather stations' data because of a few anomalies when that data is still corroborated by other sources, such as satellite measurements -- It's not intellectually honest. Find an alternative theory that can explain all the previous data and predict future trends better than anthropogenic climate change.
I've heard of single incidents such as the ones you mentioned, but to say that they represent most of the record measurements seems hyperbole. What is your source?
Palm oil production uses a lot of land though. This typically means deforestation. As most of the world's arable land is already used up, I'd prefer it if electricity and fuel production could be compact facilities that don't use up land that's needed for farming and indigenous animals' habitat.
The first 30 minutes is spent on a bizarrely roundabout plan to rescue Han, and ultimately serves no purpose as Han has nothing to do for the entire movie besides standing outside of a door during the third act
Lando gathered intelligence. Plan A was Leia. Plan B was Luke. Plan C was fight their way out. Fits perfectly with the strategy used so far. The purpose was primarily adventure. Entertainment. The purpose of Han was a friend and a temporary mcguffin, something to adventure for. The sequence showed the barbarity of the outer-rim and really is a standout piece with the cantina scene in the first, and ice planet in the second to present to the audience an alien setting.
I agree with you that the whole rescue sequence by itself does great world-building, and it's entertaining to watch plans go wrong, and seeing a Jedi solve problems without a light saber. But the ensuing "plan C" relied on so much contrived convenience that it seemed like it was meant to be "plan A." Did the gang ever expect to get their droids back from the exchange? What if R2D2's drink tray would have blocked the light saber dispenser, or not all of Luke's friends were there to help him on the barge, or if the trained bounty hunter opted for long-range weaponry against the Jedi? And while I'm at it, why couldn't the Rebel's armada of warships take Han back by force, or exchange him for space gold?
Storm troopers are useless buffoons, loosing all dramatic tension compared to the previous films where they were intimidating and mostly competent
They were never very menacing. Han, afraid of the empire, chased down a squad of them alone in a new hope.
Okay I'll grant you that. That scene was weird. Generally though, storm troopers were always pushing the gang back, making them have to escape or find alternate routes. The gang could only temporarily hold them back with blasters. In Return of the Jedi they were beaten by sticks, rocks and running headfirst into childishly simple traps en masse.
The Emperor had nothing to really entice Luke with for turning to the dark side, making his plan kind of dumb
Power. He was offering power. A common trope for one side to present the other with something only the presenter values.
But to use an example... in Episode 3 the evil senator enticed Anakin with the power to bring back Padme. That's a strong motivation for turning to the dark side. If Luke was given a similar proposal and managed to turn it down, the moral of the story would have been more powerful. But alas Luke is only offered something vague, so there's no moral quarrel. The movie is not allowed to have a bitter-sweet ending like in, say, Empire.
A lot of exposition is filmed in the lazy "shot reverse shot" technique, or delivered with people sitting down -- this is foreboding to the abysmally lazy and flat filming in Phantom Menace
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A rule of thumb violation that does not amount to much. Complaints that only people with some but not a great deal of filming technique knowledge care about. Many, many award winning movies do the same. Would you say the Schindler's list scenes with dialog delivered by people sitting to be abysmally lazy?
Hmm, I tried to be specific in saying that Phantom Menace had abysmally lazy and flat cinematography. I recall it generally having three types of ways to deliver dialogue: People sitting down, filmed in shot-reverse-shot; people walking slowly, filmed in shot-reverse-shot; and people walking from one side of the screen to the other, stopping, then switching to shot-reverse-shot. It felt like a stage play. Rarely did scenes work with physical depth, because they filmed in front of bluescreens.
Skimming through my copy of Schindler's List now, I only found a few long-ish scenes where they filmed it in sh
Ehh, the kamikaze scene sure is impressive in visuals and audio, but the scene is ruined within minutes(!) as Rose prevents a main character from doing it again, even though the kamikaze was the single most helpful act in the film.
Plot woes also arise because X-wings are faster-than-light capable, making jihad a tactically obvious option for the Rebels. I prefer it when the universe's physics demands 16th century battleship tactics to be the optimal solution.
I disagree, but I am curious why you think that as it's a somewhat rare opinion that's seldom expanded upon. A New Hope and Empire together were acclaimed for both their technical and storytelling work in the fantasy and science fiction genre.
Return of the Jedi though I find to have some serious issues:
* The first 30 minutes is spent on a bizarrely roundabout plan to rescue Han, and ultimately serves no purpose as Han has nothing to do for the entire movie besides standing outside of a door during the third act
* Storm troopers are useless buffoons, loosing all dramatic tension compared to the previous films where they were intimidating and mostly competent
* The Emperor had nothing to really entice Luke with for turning to the dark side, making his plan kind of dumb
* A lot of exposition is filmed in the lazy "shot reverse shot" technique, or delivered with people sitting down -- this is foreboding to the abysmally lazy and flat filming in Phantom Menace
Slashdot Mirror
It's the dodgy GMO that should be targeted and shunned, none of this Roundup Ready type garbage so we can drench acres in toxic chemicals bullshit. Focus on less inputs (fertilizers and control chemicals) and maximize yield would be an ideal direction IMO.
[...]
Blanket labeling GMO may not be the right direction, we could in theory make a GMO "organic" plant that requires no inputs. Would this wonder plant have to be binned next to the pesticide soaked produce at the grocery store because it's GMO?
This doesn't seem to be a scientific viewpoint. Fertilizers and pesticides (herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, etc.) are demonstrably effective at increasing harvest yield. Organic farming that doesn't use glyphosate-resistant crops just use other herbicide chemicals like rotenone and copper instead, which occur naturally. And the produce themselves are naturally filled with toxic pesticides as an evolutionary deterrent. Herbivores and us large omnivores can usually handle it, but say, an onion is deadly toxic to a carnivorous cat.
Or how about modifying pest weeds to make them spread less and grow smaller or not reproduce at all?
Evolution will not allow it. These shitty weeds would be out-competed by natural weeds due to natural selection.
You're making it into a bit of a false dichotomy. My guest Wi-Fi is generally only used when sharing pictures/video or troubleshooting my family members' devices.
Completely agree about guest networks, but I still despise randomized alphanumeric passwords as a general policy. Comparing passwords using the zxcvbn library via https://www.bennish.net/passwo..., I note that "DHDukBDL04Pt2ZT" is about as secure as "my flemish glassblower costume", but only one of them allows me to go into another room and enter it into a new device.
This password strategy works even better for Germanic languages which can construct a near-infinite amount of nonsensical compound words, which inconveniences dictionary attacks.
You clearly never have guests over.
Form geosynchronous orbits the relative speed differences is quite low, given that the whole point is to make the satellites all stay in one place in the sky. This stacks up a lot of hardware in a very small space though so collisions would be more slow motion train wrecks that won't create a lot of debris than quick obliteration events that generate a lot of fast moving objects.
Only until an evil scientist sends a box of nails going in the opposite direction.
Low Earth orbit satellites such as Iridium (781 km above sea level) seem to be left to decay back to Earth within a few decades. Galileo satellites at 23222 km that are to be decommissioned boost themselves 300 km further into a graveyard orbit.
It's like the programming equivalent of an automatic shotgun, where someone thought that shotguns needed to fire faster and less accurately.
You never defined "wrongly" though. You just threw that out there to let others do your research. In that court case, Bowman lost in the District, Federal and Supreme Court. What makes them all "wrong" to you?
You also shouldn't assume that anyone criticizing your arguments are astroturfers. It's an ad hominem that borders on conspiratorial thinking, and isn't conducive to a constructive debate.
And this is the problem.
In the future I can see it now. You can only buy seeds from monsato if you want to grow anything.
This doesn't seem to relate to GMO technology anymore, it's just your opinions on market economy. Monsanto hasn't held the patent to glyphosate for nearly two decades, nor it's resistant seeds. They're also far from the only biotech and seed-producing company. Even if they somehow started approaching a monopoly, regulatory agencies in every market should prevent them from anti-competitive practices.
As for the farmers being wrongfully sued. That was true. Google it. Farmers who weren't even using Monsanto seeds got sued because neighboring crops had their seeds spread to neighboring lands.
It's a mess. You shouldn't need anything special from a corporation to grow things. The fact that if I buy seeds from monsato then I have to also buy their fertilizer or my seeds won't grow. That's bullshit. You should not be able to patent food.
You are far from the first Monsanto opponent I've come across, and almost like clockwork do these really old debunked myths pop up about suing farmers for wind-blown contamination. See this NPR article, Myth 2: https://www.npr.org/sections/t...
Also, do you have any source that Monsanto requires a specific fertilizer to grow their crops? You're not confusing fertilizer with pesticide, are you? Because it sounds to me like you're just making it up.
My intention by bringing up apples was that Granny Smith is a household-name hybrid that can't be grown from its own seeds. Whether it was re-hybridized from the same parents or continuously grafted into new trees is beside the point, though I can see how it adds unnecessary complexity to my point.
The majority of corn are hybrids that come from inbred parents, according to this seed grower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (2:30 min video -- How Are Corn Hybrids Created). This will of course vary between countries and type of crop. Do you have any source that specifically corn seed are typically re-grown from the current crop?
Also, I don't think Monsanto has sold any sterile seeds. They're all probably hybrids though -- meaning that their seeds won't be anything like their parent (again, see my Granny Smith comparison), but hybridization is much older than modern GMO techniques and Monsanto. If you don't like sterile seeds though, you should avoid commercial bananas. In spite of how phallic they look, they're incapable of naturally breeding.
You need to be more skeptical of your source (organicconsumers.org) as the author has a clear bias to promote woo, being a osteopath, which is the non-science based art of bone-cracking and mixing in homeopathy instead of medicine. Why this self-proclaimed doctor is talking about agriculture and ecology is anyone's guess.
Before glyphosate-resistant crops farmers still generally bought seeds each season. Since about a century back, crops meant for commercial consumption have come from hybrid seeds. Hybrid seeds produce undesirable offspring. If you took, say, a Granny Smith apple and planted its seeds, the resulting trees would all produce different kinds of apples, none of which would taste or look like a Granny Smith.
It depends on the definition of GMO. Pretty much every organism grown since agriculture became a thing has been substantially artificially modified genetically by humans. However, the typical meaning of GMO is reserved for the more accurate gene editing techniques that became popular a few decades ago.
Thank you for helping debunk these persistent myths about Monsanto suing and exploiting farmers. I'm so tired of those uninformed arguments.
That's what makes the labeling arbitrary. Labeling mutation breeding or hybridization is never brought up, which is arguably less predictable and safe, presumably because people would realize that everything they eat, including their favorite brands, has been substantially mutated from their "natural" state.
Unjustifiably labeling GMO can sway uninformed people into incorrect assumptions, such as equating it to dangerous products and ingredients that are also labeled in many countries, like tobacco, alcohol and allergens.
Real strawberry taste is the result of hundreds of complex chemicals, spread out over even more genes, as is the taste of broccoli that has to be removed. Though it may eventually be possible to achieve, the taste of strawberries would probably clash with the texture of broccoli.
GMO changes tend to focus on inserting or tweaking a few specific genes, typically to produce more of some protein related to disease resistance, drought tolerance, vitamin production, etc.
The labels are arbitrary and misleading though. Every fruit, vegetable and grain in your grocery store is a mutant compared to their pre-agriculture counterparts from 12,000 years ago. Random mutations and artificial selection from the farmers drove their evolution, where positive and neutral traits were retained, and negative ones were generally discarded.
Then about a century ago, scientists began with mutation breeding by applying mutation-inducing radiation and chemicals to speed up the process significantly.
Shortly thereafter, seed hybridization began where two generically distinct parents are bred to produce a useful seed (similar to how a donkey and horse can produce a mule). The seeds produced by these hybrids are terrible for planting (again, similar to mules), so the parents are kept "alive" by inbreeding or cloning to ensure that they can keep re-producing the same hybrid seeds.
Then about 25 years ago, direct ways to add and edit specific genes into food-producing plants began to be used. This allows for the intentional production of specific traits. The random mutations from food production is taken out. It's the safest way yet to create food, but it's being shamed into being labeled a freak in store shelves, even though our earlier non-GMO processes are much riskier and random.
Oh, uh... So was I. Yes.
Actually, "normal climate variability" or "a heat wave" explains it nicely.
That's very unspecific, and goes against climate scientists' overwhelming consensus, specifically that recent calculations concludes that the Earth is warming orders of magnitude faster than from natural forces. Neither "normal climate variability" nor "heat waves" seems to account for past data, nor is able to predict future trends better than AGW.
High daytime temps are NOT part of the catastrophic AGW prediction set, you know. The theory is that NIGHTTIME temps will increase, not daytime, so the overall average goes up.
And when they talk about "consistently higher" temps, they're literally talking about fractions of a degree in most cases.
I couldn't find a source that only night temperatures will increase -- what's yours? The closest I could find was this article explaining why night-time temperatures are warming faster than day-time temperatures. They're both still warming though.
By the way - there have been a few surveys of weather stations, and the vast majority of them have problems, mostly caused by either encroaching cities (the Urban Heat Island effect) or bad instrument siting. Very, very few stations have consistent records, with relatively untouched siting. The ones that do? Well, they don't show the AGW trend that the others do... and the response by AGW scientists is to adjust the ones that aren't showing the increase (AKA "throwing out the good data so the bad data looks better").
Try this site, for a bit of data that will shock you...
http://www.surfacestations.org/
You do not take into account how that data is used and verified. A quick search presents convincing skeptical arguments that these measurements are still reliable as a whole, as they show the same corroborating trends whether they're urban or rural, or lumped into random groups (which would emphasize any inaccuracies from placement of stations):
https://skepticalscience.com/s...
https://skepticalscience.com/B...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (5 min video -- UQx DENIAL101x 2.4.1.1v2 Building a robust temperature record)
Hi, thanks for the interesting press release. I was however asking GP for a source on the claim that bad data was behind most of the heat records. In hindsight I should have made myself more clear on that.
Rogue ice cream truck engines next to measurement stations doesn't convincingly explain the sudden two weeks of consistently higher-than-average temperature all across the UK, nor the deluge of heat records specifically during May in Fennoscandia (in Swedish, but you can still get the gist from the pretty pictures).
You can't dismiss all ground weather stations' data because of a few anomalies when that data is still corroborated by other sources, such as satellite measurements -- It's not intellectually honest. Find an alternative theory that can explain all the previous data and predict future trends better than anthropogenic climate change.
I've heard of single incidents such as the ones you mentioned, but to say that they represent most of the record measurements seems hyperbole. What is your source?
Palm oil production uses a lot of land though. This typically means deforestation. As most of the world's arable land is already used up, I'd prefer it if electricity and fuel production could be compact facilities that don't use up land that's needed for farming and indigenous animals' habitat.
The first 30 minutes is spent on a bizarrely roundabout plan to rescue Han, and ultimately serves no purpose as Han has nothing to do for the entire movie besides standing outside of a door during the third act
Lando gathered intelligence. Plan A was Leia. Plan B was Luke. Plan C was fight their way out. Fits perfectly with the strategy used so far. The purpose was primarily adventure. Entertainment. The purpose of Han was a friend and a temporary mcguffin, something to adventure for. The sequence showed the barbarity of the outer-rim and really is a standout piece with the cantina scene in the first, and ice planet in the second to present to the audience an alien setting.
I agree with you that the whole rescue sequence by itself does great world-building, and it's entertaining to watch plans go wrong, and seeing a Jedi solve problems without a light saber. But the ensuing "plan C" relied on so much contrived convenience that it seemed like it was meant to be "plan A." Did the gang ever expect to get their droids back from the exchange? What if R2D2's drink tray would have blocked the light saber dispenser, or not all of Luke's friends were there to help him on the barge, or if the trained bounty hunter opted for long-range weaponry against the Jedi? And while I'm at it, why couldn't the Rebel's armada of warships take Han back by force, or exchange him for space gold?
Storm troopers are useless buffoons, loosing all dramatic tension compared to the previous films where they were intimidating and mostly competent
They were never very menacing. Han, afraid of the empire, chased down a squad of them alone in a new hope.
Okay I'll grant you that. That scene was weird. Generally though, storm troopers were always pushing the gang back, making them have to escape or find alternate routes. The gang could only temporarily hold them back with blasters. In Return of the Jedi they were beaten by sticks, rocks and running headfirst into childishly simple traps en masse.
The Emperor had nothing to really entice Luke with for turning to the dark side, making his plan kind of dumb
Power. He was offering power. A common trope for one side to present the other with something only the presenter values.
But to use an example... in Episode 3 the evil senator enticed Anakin with the power to bring back Padme. That's a strong motivation for turning to the dark side. If Luke was given a similar proposal and managed to turn it down, the moral of the story would have been more powerful. But alas Luke is only offered something vague, so there's no moral quarrel. The movie is not allowed to have a bitter-sweet ending like in, say, Empire.
A lot of exposition is filmed in the lazy "shot reverse shot" technique, or delivered with people sitting down -- this is foreboding to the abysmally lazy and flat filming in Phantom Menace
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. A rule of thumb violation that does not amount to much. Complaints that only people with some but not a great deal of filming technique knowledge care about. Many, many award winning movies do the same. Would you say the Schindler's list scenes with dialog delivered by people sitting to be abysmally lazy?
Hmm, I tried to be specific in saying that Phantom Menace had abysmally lazy and flat cinematography. I recall it generally having three types of ways to deliver dialogue: People sitting down, filmed in shot-reverse-shot; people walking slowly, filmed in shot-reverse-shot; and people walking from one side of the screen to the other, stopping, then switching to shot-reverse-shot. It felt like a stage play. Rarely did scenes work with physical depth, because they filmed in front of bluescreens.
Skimming through my copy of Schindler's List now, I only found a few long-ish scenes where they filmed it in sh
Ehh, the kamikaze scene sure is impressive in visuals and audio, but the scene is ruined within minutes(!) as Rose prevents a main character from doing it again, even though the kamikaze was the single most helpful act in the film.
Plot woes also arise because X-wings are faster-than-light capable, making jihad a tactically obvious option for the Rebels. I prefer it when the universe's physics demands 16th century battleship tactics to be the optimal solution.
I disagree, but I am curious why you think that as it's a somewhat rare opinion that's seldom expanded upon. A New Hope and Empire together were acclaimed for both their technical and storytelling work in the fantasy and science fiction genre.
Return of the Jedi though I find to have some serious issues:
* The first 30 minutes is spent on a bizarrely roundabout plan to rescue Han, and ultimately serves no purpose as Han has nothing to do for the entire movie besides standing outside of a door during the third act
* Storm troopers are useless buffoons, loosing all dramatic tension compared to the previous films where they were intimidating and mostly competent
* The Emperor had nothing to really entice Luke with for turning to the dark side, making his plan kind of dumb
* A lot of exposition is filmed in the lazy "shot reverse shot" technique, or delivered with people sitting down -- this is foreboding to the abysmally lazy and flat filming in Phantom Menace
By the way, the line was "No, I am your father."