Really? Shit, that wasn't my understanding at all. I thought the environmental issue was ancillary and subordinate to the health issue. Thanks for setting me straight, but you have a LOT of comments to reply to in this thread, and countless others, correcting all the people who say it's about health. Good luck with that.
Yeah, labeling would be reasonable as an informational device for the next, say, forty or fifty years. It doesn't really matter if people avoid a certain kind of food for arbitrary meaningless reasons, just that people want to avoid them. After all, we label foods KOSHER for arbitrary religious reasons, not because the food is better or worse. If people want to have a religious-type non-evidence-based belief about GM foods, then as an American, I support the freedom of their religion, and I'm willing to suffer the clutter of food labels for their peace of mind. (So long as it doesn't cost too much, which I don't think it would.)
We have been running a long-term study of the effects of GM food on the human population for the last ten thousand years, since GM food was introduced with agriculture. So far, we're doing okay.
We claim that engineered food is safe because it comports with everything we understand about the natural world. To change that understanding would take credible evidence.
The fact that some of the concerns are irrational does not, as you correctly say, mean that all the concerns are irrational.
But, the fact that all the concerns are irrational does, by definition, mean that all the concerns are irrational.
And that does make them similar to the 9/11 woo-woo nutters: none of the arguments make any sense; they are all hollow and meaningless. When you get to the end of the list of grievances, there was no reality in there anywhere.
Sure, GM food COULD be bad, and 9/11 COULD have been perpetrated by the US government. But, having looked at all the claims, they are all wrong in both cases. And thus, the valid comparison between them.
Totally agreed. A person earlier in the thread summed it up perfectly: GM food is good for humanity; Monsanto is bad for humanity. Let's keep those points clear and make policy wisely with that as the basis.
Requiring labeling of GM foods is specifically not free market. Free markets, of course, mean unregulated markets and requiring labeling is a regulation -- a very good regulation that, as you point out, would benefit consumers.
Free markets are bad for consumers because they are opaque, non-competitive, and dysfunctional. Only by using regulation can we achieve a transparent, competitive, functional market.
So my point is that we all need to stop saying "free market" when what we really mean is exactly the opposite: "market". I make this point because the people who make policy listen to people like you who request "free markets", and actually deliver on what that actually means, by eliminating regulations that we all want. We all need to be very careful to reject the free market in favor of carefully, minimally regulated non-free markets.
Please don't read this as an attack. You make an important point with which I do not agree. I only want to correct a diction mistake which is common and also dangerous. Remember: markets are good, free markets are bad.
Interesting. My inference is that wealthy countries can both afford more cats, and also fund better soccer (cough football cough) teams. What little I know about toxo wouldn't support a direct A -> B causal relationship.
Well actually I don't know as much about public education in India and China as I do in the USA, Europe, South America, and Africa. Does India have a nationwide educational standard? Actually, I find that hard to believe because my understanding was that there are gigantic populations of low-class people who get no education at all. Is that wrong? I thought the same thing about China. Please fill me in on what you know, because I definitely wouldn't have thought that India or China would have those kinds of implemented standards. The country I wondered about when I wrote that post was Russia -- I don't know whether Russia has such standards, but I could imagine it might.
Right. That's why I said I'd support that effort if it were possible. I just don't think it's very possible, and the actual point was that comparisons between, say, the USA and France are meaningless, as France is more similar to, say, North Carolina or something.
I don't think we disagree about anything so let's not argue.
I doubt it. Internet won't replace TV any more than TV replaced radio, any more than radio replaced books, any more than books replaced talking to one another.
If I had to guess, I'd say one more, so long as he is no more successful that Reagan or Bush 2. I've been listening to the History of Rome podcast, and the centralization of power in the President/Emperor is making me scared.
Still, I really believe that we will be okay so long as the 22nd amendment is in full force both legally and practically. (So, no Shadow Presidency or anything like that.) If a man cannot grab power for life, then that is a very good check on absolute power.
Yeah that's what I thought. Isn't 65 feet sort of too close?
The article is headlined "Ban On Photographing Near Gulf Oil Booms", but I think that's misleading because to me "Near" implies a lot longer than 65 feet. Like you said, even 300 feet would be perfectly reasonable.
Luckily there is significant overlap between the amount of distance needed to safely operate these cleanup vessels, and the distance that a nice camera can take a photo. So, anywhere in that overlap range is okay with me.
He's right that MTV is lame and passe (and has been since I became old enough to watch it in the 1990s), but that's hardly a good simile for the Internet. If you want to say that something is passe the way MTV is passe, then you talk about a specific production object on the medium: a website, or a service.
So, perhaps Napster is over. Or perhaps Slashdot is over. Or perhaps Bittorrent is over. But saying the Internet is over is like saying Television is over. That's still a retarded thing to say, though, so maybe Prince would agree with that.
I don't know a heck of a lot about the law, or about this situation, but this isn't satire, it's wholesale reproduction of a website. Nevertheless, I would say that using political statements in a political context is clearly fair use.
And again, I ain't no lawyer, so that's just one guy's opinion.
Sweet. Okay. Reid it is! Thanks for breaking it down. Actually I don't live in Nevada but I'll vote for my local incumbent Democrat, that should be almost as good. I'll have to settle for donating a little money to the Reid campaign.
Golly, I wish it weren't a contest between a turd sandwich (Reid) and a batshit crazy woo-woo nonthinker (Angle). Maybe a third candidate would be best, but given those two choices Reid is, as you said, the "clear choice".
The crazy thing is that when he denied it he almost certainly wasn't "lying" in the sense that he probably absolutely believed he had never said it. Different people experience cognitive dissonance in different ways, to different levels, and with different results.
In the Bush 2 administration, the cognitive dissonance was obviously very strong, and the results were not contrition or learning, as we might hope, but rather anger, denial, and lashing out with violence.
It really was one of the very worst situations possible in democratic politics. It could have become a Nazi-like problem except for the strong system of checks and balances we have in America. The most important check in this case was the 22nd Amendment (Presidential term limits). The second most important was the 1st Amendment -- free speech -- which was certainly dampened during those dark years, but not nearly so much as it would take to squander free political thought.
So my thesis is that even though Bush 2 and his cohorts were bad people pushing terrible policies, our political system was strong enough to resist their attempts to push us into totalitarianism or world war. Three cheers for the imperfect but functional American democratic system!
I'm not a rabid Federalist, but I want to point out that "nearly every country in the world strived to achieve standards across their country", so has nearly every state in the US. States are the equivalent of countries in the rest of the world. It's a bit disingenuous to expect the entire US to have a standard educational program unless you expect all of Africa to do that, or all of the EU.
On the other hand, if the US were able to manage that herculean task, I would certainly support the effort and be glad for it.
The Pubs are absolutely positively way, way, way out of line with common current American sentiments. Their rejection of moderation and diverse political thought are abominable.
But remember that the Dems are also purging moderates. For Dems, I think it is more a result of a liberal base voting in primaries, whereas for the Pubs there is a concerted top-down effort to solidify ideological unity, combined with pressure from the conservative base. Still, the ideological gulf is widening in this country, to the detriment of us all.
I don't see how that problem will be fixed, but I'm confident that it will be, or else the country will cease to exist (literally). We probably have about forty or fifty years to get it right. If we can't fix stuff by mid-century, America is doomed.
I don't know. I think I would feel the same. As an Obama supporter, I remember the headlines about "whiplash" at how quickly he changed positions after the primaries were over. Do you remember that? He moved significantly to the center a mere hours after he defeated Clinton, not even days or a week. There were absolutely news stories about the text changes to his website that day and that week.
Even as a moderate myself, I would certainly not try to say that copyright law should allow him to have squelched those news stories.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the majority on this one. I'm siding with the independent investigators, the scientists.
I stand by the assertion that the leaked emails did not challenge the credibility of a scientist. It wasn't even making a mountain out of a mole hill -- there wasn't even a mole hill. The entire issue was vanishingly tiny snippets of the overall email dataset taken not only out of the context of the emails themselves, but out of the context of scientists doing science.
I don't know what you're talking about. The only way I can try to understand what you've said is to filter it through a fantasy-prone worldview of conspiracy theories, non-truths, pseudo-science, and science denial. It's possible you are a very reasonable guy with well-informed, logical, fact-based beliefs -- but if so I can't figure out what you are trying to say. It's okay, just blame it on my inability to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Shit, that wasn't my understanding at all. I thought the environmental issue was ancillary and subordinate to the health issue. Thanks for setting me straight, but you have a LOT of comments to reply to in this thread, and countless others, correcting all the people who say it's about health. Good luck with that.
Yeah, labeling would be reasonable as an informational device for the next, say, forty or fifty years. It doesn't really matter if people avoid a certain kind of food for arbitrary meaningless reasons, just that people want to avoid them. After all, we label foods KOSHER for arbitrary religious reasons, not because the food is better or worse. If people want to have a religious-type non-evidence-based belief about GM foods, then as an American, I support the freedom of their religion, and I'm willing to suffer the clutter of food labels for their peace of mind. (So long as it doesn't cost too much, which I don't think it would.)
We have been running a long-term study of the effects of GM food on the human population for the last ten thousand years, since GM food was introduced with agriculture. So far, we're doing okay.
We claim that engineered food is safe because it comports with everything we understand about the natural world. To change that understanding would take credible evidence.
The fact that some of the concerns are irrational does not, as you correctly say, mean that all the concerns are irrational.
But, the fact that all the concerns are irrational does, by definition, mean that all the concerns are irrational.
And that does make them similar to the 9/11 woo-woo nutters: none of the arguments make any sense; they are all hollow and meaningless. When you get to the end of the list of grievances, there was no reality in there anywhere.
Sure, GM food COULD be bad, and 9/11 COULD have been perpetrated by the US government. But, having looked at all the claims, they are all wrong in both cases. And thus, the valid comparison between them.
Totally agreed. A person earlier in the thread summed it up perfectly: GM food is good for humanity; Monsanto is bad for humanity. Let's keep those points clear and make policy wisely with that as the basis.
Requiring labeling of GM foods is specifically not free market. Free markets, of course, mean unregulated markets and requiring labeling is a regulation -- a very good regulation that, as you point out, would benefit consumers.
Free markets are bad for consumers because they are opaque, non-competitive, and dysfunctional. Only by using regulation can we achieve a transparent, competitive, functional market.
So my point is that we all need to stop saying "free market" when what we really mean is exactly the opposite: "market". I make this point because the people who make policy listen to people like you who request "free markets", and actually deliver on what that actually means, by eliminating regulations that we all want. We all need to be very careful to reject the free market in favor of carefully, minimally regulated non-free markets.
Please don't read this as an attack. You make an important point with which I do not agree. I only want to correct a diction mistake which is common and also dangerous. Remember: markets are good, free markets are bad.
Mmmm hmmm. Well I haven't run a regression on all the countries yet. Have you? Any valid data will have outliers.
Interesting. My inference is that wealthy countries can both afford more cats, and also fund better soccer (cough football cough) teams. What little I know about toxo wouldn't support a direct A -> B causal relationship.
Well actually I don't know as much about public education in India and China as I do in the USA, Europe, South America, and Africa. Does India have a nationwide educational standard? Actually, I find that hard to believe because my understanding was that there are gigantic populations of low-class people who get no education at all. Is that wrong? I thought the same thing about China. Please fill me in on what you know, because I definitely wouldn't have thought that India or China would have those kinds of implemented standards. The country I wondered about when I wrote that post was Russia -- I don't know whether Russia has such standards, but I could imagine it might.
Right. That's why I said I'd support that effort if it were possible. I just don't think it's very possible, and the actual point was that comparisons between, say, the USA and France are meaningless, as France is more similar to, say, North Carolina or something.
I don't think we disagree about anything so let's not argue.
I doubt it. Internet won't replace TV any more than TV replaced radio, any more than radio replaced books, any more than books replaced talking to one another.
If I had to guess, I'd say one more, so long as he is no more successful that Reagan or Bush 2. I've been listening to the History of Rome podcast, and the centralization of power in the President/Emperor is making me scared.
Still, I really believe that we will be okay so long as the 22nd amendment is in full force both legally and practically. (So, no Shadow Presidency or anything like that.) If a man cannot grab power for life, then that is a very good check on absolute power.
Yeah that's what I thought. Isn't 65 feet sort of too close?
The article is headlined "Ban On Photographing Near Gulf Oil Booms", but I think that's misleading because to me "Near" implies a lot longer than 65 feet. Like you said, even 300 feet would be perfectly reasonable.
Luckily there is significant overlap between the amount of distance needed to safely operate these cleanup vessels, and the distance that a nice camera can take a photo. So, anywhere in that overlap range is okay with me.
He's right that MTV is lame and passe (and has been since I became old enough to watch it in the 1990s), but that's hardly a good simile for the Internet. If you want to say that something is passe the way MTV is passe, then you talk about a specific production object on the medium: a website, or a service.
So, perhaps Napster is over. Or perhaps Slashdot is over. Or perhaps Bittorrent is over. But saying the Internet is over is like saying Television is over. That's still a retarded thing to say, though, so maybe Prince would agree with that.
I don't know a heck of a lot about the law, or about this situation, but this isn't satire, it's wholesale reproduction of a website. Nevertheless, I would say that using political statements in a political context is clearly fair use.
And again, I ain't no lawyer, so that's just one guy's opinion.
Sweet. Okay. Reid it is! Thanks for breaking it down. Actually I don't live in Nevada but I'll vote for my local incumbent Democrat, that should be almost as good. I'll have to settle for donating a little money to the Reid campaign.
Golly, I wish it weren't a contest between a turd sandwich (Reid) and a batshit crazy woo-woo nonthinker (Angle). Maybe a third candidate would be best, but given those two choices Reid is, as you said, the "clear choice".
Thanks for your analysis.
The crazy thing is that when he denied it he almost certainly wasn't "lying" in the sense that he probably absolutely believed he had never said it. Different people experience cognitive dissonance in different ways, to different levels, and with different results.
In the Bush 2 administration, the cognitive dissonance was obviously very strong, and the results were not contrition or learning, as we might hope, but rather anger, denial, and lashing out with violence.
It really was one of the very worst situations possible in democratic politics. It could have become a Nazi-like problem except for the strong system of checks and balances we have in America. The most important check in this case was the 22nd Amendment (Presidential term limits). The second most important was the 1st Amendment -- free speech -- which was certainly dampened during those dark years, but not nearly so much as it would take to squander free political thought.
So my thesis is that even though Bush 2 and his cohorts were bad people pushing terrible policies, our political system was strong enough to resist their attempts to push us into totalitarianism or world war. Three cheers for the imperfect but functional American democratic system!
Yeah. Except that's not really the issue at all.
I'm not a rabid Federalist, but I want to point out that "nearly every country in the world strived to achieve standards across their country", so has nearly every state in the US. States are the equivalent of countries in the rest of the world. It's a bit disingenuous to expect the entire US to have a standard educational program unless you expect all of Africa to do that, or all of the EU.
On the other hand, if the US were able to manage that herculean task, I would certainly support the effort and be glad for it.
Well, they're analogous, they're just not the same.
Obama could do more, but from what I understand he's a pretty busy guy.
The Pubs are absolutely positively way, way, way out of line with common current American sentiments. Their rejection of moderation and diverse political thought are abominable.
But remember that the Dems are also purging moderates. For Dems, I think it is more a result of a liberal base voting in primaries, whereas for the Pubs there is a concerted top-down effort to solidify ideological unity, combined with pressure from the conservative base. Still, the ideological gulf is widening in this country, to the detriment of us all.
I don't see how that problem will be fixed, but I'm confident that it will be, or else the country will cease to exist (literally). We probably have about forty or fifty years to get it right. If we can't fix stuff by mid-century, America is doomed.
Holy crap. It sounds like you and I have a lot in common politically. Let's have a beer sometime.
But I want to say that you shouldn't conflate Independent with Moderate. A person can be both, or only one, or neither.
I don't know. I think I would feel the same. As an Obama supporter, I remember the headlines about "whiplash" at how quickly he changed positions after the primaries were over. Do you remember that? He moved significantly to the center a mere hours after he defeated Clinton, not even days or a week. There were absolutely news stories about the text changes to his website that day and that week.
Even as a moderate myself, I would certainly not try to say that copyright law should allow him to have squelched those news stories.
We'll have to agree to disagree. I'm going with the majority on this one. I'm siding with the independent investigators, the scientists.
I stand by the assertion that the leaked emails did not challenge the credibility of a scientist. It wasn't even making a mountain out of a mole hill -- there wasn't even a mole hill. The entire issue was vanishingly tiny snippets of the overall email dataset taken not only out of the context of the emails themselves, but out of the context of scientists doing science.
I don't know what you're talking about. The only way I can try to understand what you've said is to filter it through a fantasy-prone worldview of conspiracy theories, non-truths, pseudo-science, and science denial. It's possible you are a very reasonable guy with well-informed, logical, fact-based beliefs -- but if so I can't figure out what you are trying to say. It's okay, just blame it on my inability to understand.