More anti-GMO baloney. Of course they have to be tested. In fact the testing is quite extensive.
As far as a gene destroying ecosystems, what utter hooey. There is no basis whatsoever to believe any such thing can happen. All you are doing is displaying complete ignorance with such a statement.
There is only one known case where genes have spread to wild plants, and that was contained.
As far as GMO contamination of organic farms, that is a legal and political issue. My understanding is that this is quite rare and only affects corn in the US anyway.
As far as organic farms not being competitive economically, we had all sorts of claims that in fact organic farms were more economical? If in fact they are not they probably deserve to fail as a waste of resources.
This is total nonsense. Genes NATURALLY spread widely in a unpredictable and random manner. New genes are produced all the time by mutation. Species NATURALLY become extinct all the time.
The potential for anything going horribly wrong is zero.
The idea that old school bananas are going extinct is pure BULLSHIT circulated on internet scare sites.
The anit-GMO crowd has completely and 100% certifiably gone off the deep end. There is no none zero scientific basis for what they are doing whatsoever.
Physically attacking a scientific experiment in the guise of a protest against commercialization of a technology that you may have political issues with is nothing than a form of terrorism and should be treated extremely harshly.
I care because YOU are proposing to force me to pay for your completely IRRATIONAL phobias.
That is why.
As far as Kosher goes I DON'T pay for that. I don't buy Kosher food. We are not forcing manufacturers of NON-Kosher foods to engage in any labeling or analysis or tracking of the kosher status of the ingredients!! It is the people who engage in that particular set of beliefs that have to foot the bill for it.
As far as your political objections to Monsanto, that is your problem, not mine and I don't see why I should have to pay for your desire to boycott a particular company (not that GMO labeling would help you in any way in that regard - there are several other companies and even non-profits involved in that business so GMO labeling would NOT be sufficient information).
but that isn't proof that ALL GMO is fine, or that all future products will also be fine.
Another ludicrous concept. You want something labeled because there isn't proof that it is safe, and there isn't proof that there won't be variations of it in the future that will not be safe?
Do you realize that NOTHING is proven safe? It is impossible to prove something to be safe. You CANNOT prove a negative! It's a logical fallacy.
And to prove that something will be safe in the future? We can't even prove whether or not it will rain tomorrow.
By this twisted logic EVERYTHING should be labeled with all the possible imaginary warnings anyone can dream up.
If this sort of logic existed in the neolithic man would have decided that fire could not be proven safe, nor could all it's future dangers be predicted and we would STILL be eating our meat raw and living in dark caves!
I am for labeling foods when the labels provide useful information like the basic nutritional content of the food.
However there is NO NONE ZERO scientific basis for labeling food as GMO or non-GMO. This is purely a politically driven idea. As such there is no reason to cram the costs for doing this down consumer's throats, so to speak.
If you want to pay for it, fine. But I strongly object.
I agree with you regarding the effect of raising animals for food on the ecology. Eventually we will do much less of it from the simple economics of the proposition. However what you are proposing goes WAY beyond that.
As far as finite resources, I am well aware of the issues associated with that. It has nothing to do with economic efficiency and profitability. Finite resources is an economic factor as these resources are part of the cost of production. The lower the amount of resources you waste, the more efficient and profitable you will be.
That's fine, so long as you personally pay for that on every package of food sold in the US. I have no interest in seeing my food bill go up even $0.01 per year to fund that sort of wacko agenda.
For me it is easy to see, that if you take a completely healthy to eat plant, start modifying it so it withstands all kinds of things it should not do,
You are a complete wacko. What you just wrote covers all forms of agriculture as practiced over the past 5000 years. Implementing your ideas would leave the world with a food supply capable of supporting less than a few million.
I am in favor of labeling however I think you will be shocked to find most food produced in the US now has GMO content so it is pretty much moot at this point in time
As far as efficiency, how the heck do you think you get increased profit? It is by increasing efficiency. Economics 101. I can see you have never grasped basic principles of economics.
As far as not using animals as a resource, good luck with that. Every society on this planet does this. Even other animals do it. You are adhering to a concept that has no chance of being adopted.
What you are thinking about is obviousness, and the hurdle for that is much lower. The definition is that it is not obvious to someone with ordinary skill. Not experts.
What you write is true enough. And since China only owns about $1T in US debt it is unlikely that it would have that huge an effect if we printed the money to pay it off.
BUT you missed the idea China could dump their US debt onto the world market all at once. This would cause a large jump in interest rates and really do a lot of damage to the US economy.
BUT that damage would recycle to China pretty quickly because their economy depends on US consumerism in large part.
So ultimately the current situation is that the US and Chinese economies are quite interdependent. If you damage one the other will suffer a lot.
People going into STEM degree programs should have a strong interest and aptitude in the subject material, and have already done significant coursework in the area in secondary school. AP courses, lots of math, investigations and reading on their own time. Weed out courses like introductory college physics, thermo and organic chem are their to filter out those whose who would be wasting both their and their professor's time.
If all this didn't happen the degrees granted would be meaningless.
It is not necessarily the rules and regulations the corporation has in place that drives these policies.
Corporations operate in a complex legal environment that imposes a lot of external rules on the corporation. Needs for record keeping for various regulatory agencies is a huge one. Liability for dissemination of information covered by NDAs with other corporations. Requirements to maintain confidentiality of information to maintain trade secret status. Basic due diligence in protecting corporate confidential information such as current sales rates that may affect stock prices and trigger shareholder lawsuits if it is released in an uncontrolled manner. Data aging needed to purge information once it has passed retention requirements.
And all of this gets ratcheted up several notches if the corporation is involved with law enforcement or military work.
None of these many restrictions are going away any time soon.
Then of course there is the corporation's own basic operational requirements to prevent it's network from being infiltrated by various forms of malware. And finally of course the bottom line - if you allow unfettered attachment of any kind of device possible to the corporate network all sorts of training, support and development costs increase.
A few of these things can be addressed internally to the corporation. Mostly though they are outside the control of the corporation and thus are intractable problems.
The company will supply the CEO with a properly secured iPhone, just like Obama was supplied with a properly secured Blackberry.
It won't be his personal device. There are too many legal issues associated with having a CEO carrying around a device that doesn't adhere to the variety of requirements of a corporate officer.
I agree with a lot of what you say - but I don't think funding issues have anything to do with the problems in our schools.
Teachers are generally paid more than people in their community are, and with much better benefits.
School funding in most places is pretty good. In the state I live in we fund schools to the tune of $13,200 per pupil. That should be enough.
We do have great inefficiencies in the schools. The administrative loads are ridiculous. These eat up a lot of the funds that should be spent on actually educating the students.
Ant-intellectualism is not a recent part of American culture. It has been a long term issue in our society. It is very different in Europe. Travel there as a university professor and you are treated with great deference and respect. Here, no big deal.
Look at the faces on European currency. Philosophers, scientists and mathematicians are common. We just do not celebrate our leading intellects.
I think it will take another Sputnik to wake people up again. Perhaps a permanent Chinese moon base would do it.
Overall equity valuations are reasonably close to their historical P/E ratios, and company profits have been growing fairly well over the past couple of years. It is very unlikely that there is an equity bubble right now.
Housing prices are have tremendous local variation. Some areas have probably already bottomed, others are still on the way down.
Wall Street firms holding US Government debt are insane. There is a real bubble in US Treasuries which will soon drive the value of these bonds down. Bond experts like Bill Gross at PIMCO have pretty much completely gotten out of US Debt.
In this, they are responding to actual concerns from the public at large, however misguided. And thus it's not bizarre nor overreaching, it's politics as usual.
Unfortunately modern politics as usual is mostly bizarre and overreaching from a common sense point of view.
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More anti-GMO baloney. Of course they have to be tested. In fact the testing is quite extensive.
As far as a gene destroying ecosystems, what utter hooey. There is no basis whatsoever to believe any such thing can happen. All you are doing is displaying complete ignorance with such a statement.
There is only one known case where genes have spread to wild plants, and that was contained.
As far as GMO contamination of organic farms, that is a legal and political issue. My understanding is that this is quite rare and only affects corn in the US anyway.
As far as organic farms not being competitive economically, we had all sorts of claims that in fact organic farms were more economical? If in fact they are not they probably deserve to fail as a waste of resources.
This is total nonsense. Genes NATURALLY spread widely in a unpredictable and random manner. New genes are produced all the time by mutation. Species NATURALLY become extinct all the time.
The potential for anything going horribly wrong is zero.
The idea that old school bananas are going extinct is pure BULLSHIT circulated on internet scare sites.
http://www.snopes.com/food/warnings/bananas.asp
The anit-GMO crowd has completely and 100% certifiably gone off the deep end. There is no none zero scientific basis for what they are doing whatsoever.
Terrorism isn't going to stop the commercialization of GMOs. Mostly it will just expose the anti-GMO people as the nut cases they truly are.
Please cite a case where a farmer was made responsible for pollen from a Monsanto product getting into his area.
No it doesn't. This issue is very simple here.
Physically attacking a scientific experiment in the guise of a protest against commercialization of a technology that you may have political issues with is nothing than a form of terrorism and should be treated extremely harshly.
FAIL.
Gene splicing is actually one of the mechanisms by which evolution occurs in some organisms.
There has never been a case of an accidentally cross contaminated crop owner having to pay royalties. It is utter and complete fiction.
I care because YOU are proposing to force me to pay for your completely IRRATIONAL phobias.
That is why.
As far as Kosher goes I DON'T pay for that. I don't buy Kosher food. We are not forcing manufacturers of NON-Kosher foods to engage in any labeling or analysis or tracking of the kosher status of the ingredients!! It is the people who engage in that particular set of beliefs that have to foot the bill for it.
As far as your political objections to Monsanto, that is your problem, not mine and I don't see why I should have to pay for your desire to boycott a particular company (not that GMO labeling would help you in any way in that regard - there are several other companies and even non-profits involved in that business so GMO labeling would NOT be sufficient information).
but that isn't proof that ALL GMO is fine, or that all future products will also be fine.
Another ludicrous concept. You want something labeled because there isn't proof that it is safe, and there isn't proof that there won't be variations of it in the future that will not be safe?
Do you realize that NOTHING is proven safe? It is impossible to prove something to be safe. You CANNOT prove a negative! It's a logical fallacy.
And to prove that something will be safe in the future? We can't even prove whether or not it will rain tomorrow.
By this twisted logic EVERYTHING should be labeled with all the possible imaginary warnings anyone can dream up.
If this sort of logic existed in the neolithic man would have decided that fire could not be proven safe, nor could all it's future dangers be predicted and we would STILL be eating our meat raw and living in dark caves!
I am for labeling foods when the labels provide useful information like the basic nutritional content of the food.
However there is NO NONE ZERO scientific basis for labeling food as GMO or non-GMO. This is purely a politically driven idea. As such there is no reason to cram the costs for doing this down consumer's throats, so to speak.
If you want to pay for it, fine. But I strongly object.
I agree with you regarding the effect of raising animals for food on the ecology. Eventually we will do much less of it from the simple economics of the proposition. However what you are proposing goes WAY beyond that.
As far as finite resources, I am well aware of the issues associated with that. It has nothing to do with economic efficiency and profitability. Finite resources is an economic factor as these resources are part of the cost of production. The lower the amount of resources you waste, the more efficient and profitable you will be.
More and bigger is unstoppable. Get used to it.
What makes you so sure that this resistant strain didn't pick up it's resistance from human antibiotic abuse?
That's fine, so long as you personally pay for that on every package of food sold in the US. I have no interest in seeing my food bill go up even $0.01 per year to fund that sort of wacko agenda.
For me it is easy to see, that if you take a completely healthy to eat plant, start modifying it so it withstands all kinds of things it should not do,
You are a complete wacko. What you just wrote covers all forms of agriculture as practiced over the past 5000 years. Implementing your ideas would leave the world with a food supply capable of supporting less than a few million.
I am in favor of labeling however I think you will be shocked to find most food produced in the US now has GMO content so it is pretty much moot at this point in time
As far as efficiency, how the heck do you think you get increased profit? It is by increasing efficiency. Economics 101. I can see you have never grasped basic principles of economics.
As far as not using animals as a resource, good luck with that. Every society on this planet does this. Even other animals do it. You are adhering to a concept that has no chance of being adopted.
One has to wonder if this will have any effect even if the lawsuit is successful because of abuse in the human population.
No. You are completely wrong in every detail.
Novelty means no prior art.
What you are thinking about is obviousness, and the hurdle for that is much lower. The definition is that it is not obvious to someone with ordinary skill. Not experts.
What you write is true enough. And since China only owns about $1T in US debt it is unlikely that it would have that huge an effect if we printed the money to pay it off.
BUT you missed the idea China could dump their US debt onto the world market all at once. This would cause a large jump in interest rates and really do a lot of damage to the US economy.
BUT that damage would recycle to China pretty quickly because their economy depends on US consumerism in large part.
So ultimately the current situation is that the US and Chinese economies are quite interdependent. If you damage one the other will suffer a lot.
People going into STEM degree programs should have a strong interest and aptitude in the subject material, and have already done significant coursework in the area in secondary school. AP courses, lots of math, investigations and reading on their own time. Weed out courses like introductory college physics, thermo and organic chem are their to filter out those whose who would be wasting both their and their professor's time.
If all this didn't happen the degrees granted would be meaningless.
It is not necessarily the rules and regulations the corporation has in place that drives these policies.
Corporations operate in a complex legal environment that imposes a lot of external rules on the corporation. Needs for record keeping for various regulatory agencies is a huge one. Liability for dissemination of information covered by NDAs with other corporations. Requirements to maintain confidentiality of information to maintain trade secret status. Basic due diligence in protecting corporate confidential information such as current sales rates that may affect stock prices and trigger shareholder lawsuits if it is released in an uncontrolled manner. Data aging needed to purge information once it has passed retention requirements.
And all of this gets ratcheted up several notches if the corporation is involved with law enforcement or military work.
None of these many restrictions are going away any time soon.
Then of course there is the corporation's own basic operational requirements to prevent it's network from being infiltrated by various forms of malware. And finally of course the bottom line - if you allow unfettered attachment of any kind of device possible to the corporate network all sorts of training, support and development costs increase.
A few of these things can be addressed internally to the corporation. Mostly though they are outside the control of the corporation and thus are intractable problems.
The company will supply the CEO with a properly secured iPhone, just like Obama was supplied with a properly secured Blackberry.
It won't be his personal device. There are too many legal issues associated with having a CEO carrying around a device that doesn't adhere to the variety of requirements of a corporate officer.
I agree with a lot of what you say - but I don't think funding issues have anything to do with the problems in our schools.
Teachers are generally paid more than people in their community are, and with much better benefits.
School funding in most places is pretty good. In the state I live in we fund schools to the tune of $13,200 per pupil. That should be enough.
We do have great inefficiencies in the schools. The administrative loads are ridiculous. These eat up a lot of the funds that should be spent on actually educating the students.
Ant-intellectualism is not a recent part of American culture. It has been a long term issue in our society. It is very different in Europe. Travel there as a university professor and you are treated with great deference and respect. Here, no big deal.
Look at the faces on European currency. Philosophers, scientists and mathematicians are common. We just do not celebrate our leading intellects.
I think it will take another Sputnik to wake people up again. Perhaps a permanent Chinese moon base would do it.
Games are attractive because they train you with positive reinforcement quickly delivered.
More complex theories are superfluous.
Overall equity valuations are reasonably close to their historical P/E ratios, and company profits have been growing fairly well over the past couple of years. It is very unlikely that there is an equity bubble right now.
Housing prices are have tremendous local variation. Some areas have probably already bottomed, others are still on the way down.
Wall Street firms holding US Government debt are insane. There is a real bubble in US Treasuries which will soon drive the value of these bonds down. Bond experts like Bill Gross at PIMCO have pretty much completely gotten out of US Debt.
In this, they are responding to actual concerns from the public at large, however misguided. And thus it's not bizarre nor overreaching, it's politics as usual.
Unfortunately modern politics as usual is mostly bizarre and overreaching from a common sense point of view.