The same is true in the US, freedom is the presumption. That is, anything not specifically prohibited is allowed.
This extends to private property. Unless someone has posted their property 'no trespassing' or told you to leave/don't enter personally, you are free to cross their land without fear.
The point being that in the Nordic countries said someone couldn't post a sign or tell you to leave/don't enter as our right to take a path, camp etc is law.
That's not to say that you can behave any way you want to, and being reasonable people we normally don't. It's a tradition well over a thousand years old so we've had time to work out the kinks.
But it's safe to say that the Nordic idea of land ownership is different from the Anglo Saxon one. (Think stewardship, rather than ownership).
I run Bind. I run Sendmail. I'll always use both. I supplement Bind with rbldnsd. I have no need to supplement Sendmail. Both do what I want. Since I'm not an incompotent moron I don't have any trouble configuring either of them.
Yes, well, I knew how to fix my old 1971 SAAB with just a screwdriver and a wrench, and it always did what I wanted too, but that's not to say that I still drive it (went to the wrecking yard as a matter of fact). Because, quite frankly it was a piece of shit.
And that's my sentiment regarding sendmail to. Sure an expert can get it to do what he/she wants but it's still well past its prime. I switched to postfix and have never looked back.
Interesting and the first I've heard of it. As I said, in Sweden we're seeing the increases in cancer rate (in people that is, not rats). Do you have any references, links or anything like that?
Poor form follwing up to your own post, I know. I just did some searching and it seems that WHO and many others (e.g. the EPA) is on my side of the argument. TCDD is a known human carcinogen (with many Swedish studies confirming this).
As so often when discussing American environmental matters I did find something that could be the reason for the dissent; 2,4-D and 2,4,5-TD are still in use in the US, with heavy hitting lobby groups campaining for that to continue (it is of course very difficult and prohibitively expensive to manufacture these herbicides without any dioxin contamination). Here it was banned in 1977 and hence we can do research without the medeling from large multinationals (as has proven so problematic in research in the oil, tobacco and to a lesser extent the medical industry).
So to sum up, if you're going to change our opinion on the matter you're going to have to come up with some hefty citations. And research paid for by the same industry that manufactures the stuff is going to have lighter weight than governmentally funded studies (and note that the government was actually opposed to the ban of Hormoslyr in 1977 here in Sweden). They're not without impact, that's not what I'm saying, just that they are compromised to a fair degree. I don't know the US legal term, but it's got to do with not having to bite the hand that feeds you.
That's the point. They initially relied on animal models, which turned out to have no correspondance in humans.
Interesting and the first I've heard of it. As I said, in Sweden we're seeing the increases in cancer rate (in people that is, not rats). Do you have any references, links or anything like that?
A herbicide is different from a pesticide. Even if all of the herbicides stop working, we aren't going to starve; we'll just have to use other methods of reducing weed growth--such as weeding or mulching.
You do the weeding then.
Farmers in Sweden are currently having a problem with Wild Oat (Avena Fatua), to the point where there's actually a law in place that you have to pull all plants by the root and burn them. And you're not allowed to do anything that might risk increasing the spread.
For obvious reasons this isn't working as there isn't enough hands available to even contenplate such an undertaking, but with the addition of your labour I'm sure the problem will soon be over.
The only difference between unwanted plantlife and animal life, is that the latter usually spreads more rapidly, but even that's not a given.
And that's even ignoring the main problem, which isn't the agricultural product as such, but the damage done to the environment (from the sea floor to ground water) to produce it. That's enough to put you off cotton and bananas in and of itself.
The mismanagement of areable land between the Eufrat and the Tigris quite some time ago now, didn't bring about the end of mankind, but it did put quite an effective stop to their 'civilisation' as such.
The trait is already in the wild, through "natural" means, so such action wouldn't actually be "introducing" anything. Just as with antibiotics, you have to be choosy and vary your strategy with herbicides.
Exactly. Which is why one should be sceptic to the wholesale use of RoundUp in the first place. It's action is too similar to the common antibiotics, i.e. it's relatively easy to develop a resistance to it.
So, as with antibiotics you want to limit the oportunity of the oposition to develop the trait. As in limit its exposure to it.
And hence, in what will probably not be the final formulation (I've never seen so many nit pickers; you're worse than my PhD committee): It's still a really stupid traid (for want of a better word) to introduce on such a broad scale into the wild.
After all, all bacteria will eventually develop a resistance to all antibiotics known today. That doesn't make antibiotics any less useful until they do. Same here. It could be argued that RoundUp and the genes that make plants resistant to it are too important to leave in the hands of the likes of Monsanto.
What if this gene spreads? We might have to give up using herbicides! What a catastrophe! It will be like the old days before herbicides, when people were trapped in their houses because the grass was too high!!!
You mean before we (in the west) could produce more food than we knew what to do with?
Look, if the old more benign (if you can use that term) pesticides stop working, we'll resort to using new and improved pesticides (or old an all too known ones), that'll wreak even more havoc than the ones we use now. As an example, here in Sweden (as a result of EU) we've had to accept Paraquat again. A toxin that we banned decades ago. And that shows up in the ground water. And that's nasty.
Noone's particularly worried that the golf courses of Scotland will somehow overrun the forrests of Sweden.
Just to put the capper on this, there isn't any real evidence that dioxin harms people either.
What? If the animal models are to be belived (and they work fairly well in other cases), Dioxin (TCDD) is extremely toxic. As an example (snarfed from the web, LD50 in mg/kg in rat) Ethanol, 7 000; Sodium chloride, 3 000; Cupric sulphate, 1 500; DDT, 100; Nicotine, 60; Tetrodotoxin, 0.02; Dioxin (TCDD), 0.02.
There's usually no such thing as a poison that kills you at a certain dosage and have no effect below that. Several Swedish studies have determined there's a definitely increased cancer risk in those that were exposed to Hormoslyr. Or rather the dioxins in the Hormoslyr. Indeed the CEO of BT Chemicals, who in as a PR stunt actually drank the stuff on TV back in the seventies subsequently died from cancer himself. A bit of poetic irony that. (Though, for the nitpickers of which Slashdot seems to be full to the brim these days; there's of course no way to tell if that was a direct result of the drinking.)
So I'd say there's evidence. Enough not to want to gather more empiciral whole population data on the subject, that's for certain.
Monsanto didn't insert a gene that resists glyphosate (RoundUp), because their plant is a loss-of-function mutant. They did it through insertional mutation, using either forward (sequence not known) or reverse (sequence known) genetics methods. They isolated a mutant that was resistant to glyphosate and clapped their hands and cheered.
RoundUp Ready beans have a mutation in the gene, making the resulting enzyme product non-active. In other words, they changed that part of the enzyme to be a NOP, halting the metabolism of glyphosate into something that is lethal to the plant.
Are you saying that in this particular case the Scots didn't have Monsanto participate, and that makes it fine and dandy? (I wouldn't know, I didn't read the article, this is Slashdot after all).
Or are you saying that Monstanto didn't use hybrid dna techniques, aka 'genetic engineering' when producing their various RoundUp resistant plants? (You're guessing yourself as you admitt, when it comes to the exact method). In either case, you couldn't possibly know anything about my knowledge on the matter given my very brief posting on the subject.
And in either case how does any of the above have any-fucking-thing to do with what I posted? In what way was anything of what I said invalidated by not quting chapter and verse from Monsanto publications on the matter?
Look, even if they had done it the 'old fashioned' way (which by the way they typically don't, they mention two specific named genesites), i.e. increasing the rate of natural mutations (typically by irradiation or the use of mutagene chemicals) and growing it to see what comes up (well it's still one step of the method), doesn't really matter. It's still a really stupid trait to introduce into the wild. About as stupid as putting antibiotics in regular household cleaners. (For I should add for your nit picking benefit, different technical reasons).
You can be mindful of what corporations are currently doing, but your complete lack of background knowledge makes your beliefs dangerous.
You should be mindful that just because you may have a better grounding in biochemistry than most, that doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
You may give my post so many monkeys. I give your reply four "Head stuck up my arse so far that I couldn't see the bigger picture if it slapped me on the neck." Let's call them Ostriches for short.
Then why bring them up? Or are you just trying to capitalize on the visceral emotional reaction that people have been conditioned to have when they hear the words "Agent Orange". Fnord.
Look, I already said that I got the two mixed up, what more do you want? The reason I mentioned the dioxins was precisely that people get all worked up when hearing "Agent Orange" despite the fact that we could produce the same substance today without the dioxins, as they are an unfortunate biproduct of the methods then in use.
P.S. And the "similar in usage (in forrestry)" note was to point to why/how I managed to mix them up in the first place, but we're not really doing this to argue the point any longer are we?
Doesn't anyone find it a little odd that this this is supposed to have happened in some small-scale test done ten years ago --- and it hasn't been shown to have happened since, even though millions of acres of roundup-ready oilseed rape have been planted and harvested over the last several years?
It has happened, several times. Do the Google. If your objection really was we haven't seen a problem yet, it's because you have to give it time. The hybridisation rate isn't that great. Look at any problematic species, such the jelly fish that migrated from the Red Sea to the Mediteranean, it took 30-40 years for that to have established itself to be a problem.
Repeat after me: Agent Orange is in no way related to RoundUp.
Agent Orange is a mixture of 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid and 2,4 dichlorophenoxyacetic acid
My bad. I got it mixed up with hormoslyr (a Swedish herbicide which was all the rage in forrestry in the seventies, and caused an environmental scandal) which was a mixture of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. (Anyway, they aren't the problem, it's the dioxins that are). RoundUp is similar in usage though.
In all seriousness, sounds like those afraid of controlling it are just spreading FUD.
Well, the real reason to be sceptical to Monsanto inserting genes that resist 2,4-TD (RoundUp, aka Agent Orange) is that it has a habit of spreading to closely related plants. In tests in Italy (more than ten years ago now) this gene successfully transferred from Rape to Wild Turnip, which is a mother of a weed to get rid of. There are several grasses that we wouldn't want to aquire this gene. (Google e.g. "wild turnip gene resistance")
As a gene resisting herbicides is a very desirable gene to have (if you happen to be a weed), you can bet your sweet ass that's it's only a matter of time before you've created the mother of all weeds. And no, burning/barriers/diging won't fix the problem.
In this case an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Unfree market. If Mikoyan and Gureyvich decided "hey, we don't want to design airplanes anymore, we want to build a bicycle factory," could they have?
By the same token. If the researchers the US Army paid to develop fermentation techniques to mass produce penicillin decided they didn't want to after having signed the contract could they? If the US Army decided they wanted to go do something else (you just put them in the same category with all other free agents) could they? Of course the individuals could, but they could that in the Soviet Union as well.
Look what you're arguing is the necessity of the state, i.e. that the state has to sometimes jump in and regulate the market, either by producing necessities (when the free entepreneurs wont) or by consuming when there isn't sufficient demand for anyone else to.
That's all good and dandy, I'm Swedish after all, and believe in the mixed economy model. But it's decidedly not what's meant by a free market economy. And to argue that the US Army acts as a free agent when they're spending nothing but tax money is quite frankly absurd.
Right. The United States Army was the consumer in the free-market system. They said "hey, this product exists, and we want it". Some parts of industry disregarded this and preferred to focus on their own corners of the market. So the Army changed from pure consumer to producer, exactly as has happened in free markets since the dawn of time. Then, once other players in the market saw "hey, there's money to be made here!", they jumped on the bandwagon and penicillin became widely available.
Classic story of the free market. Just because the government had a major role in it doesn't mean it's not free
I really shouldn't have quoted so much, but I just had to let it stand on it's own. By your token then the Soviet Union was a "classicy story of the free market". I mean, it's not as if Migkoyan-Gurewitch and Suchoi didn't compete for the different government contracts. As in taxes paid for them.
If you want to call that 'free market' then you should at least be aware that that's not what other people mean by the term.
In point of fact, war is my bet for the biggest force of medical advances in the 20th century. However, I believe the Jacquard loom is the biggest medical advance in the last millennium.
That's a period that covers everything from the plague to sars via the Spannish flu, and the discovery of germs, vaccination and antibiotics. I think you would have a hard time arguing that the introduction of cheaper fabrics (the cause of which; industrialisation, moved hordes of people into the cities, to live under unsanitary conditions, with widespread disease following) did much on the whole. Not that it didn't help of course, but washing clothes more often is a 20:th century affair, it didn't have much to do with the introduction of the Jaquard loom.
If you want to name one thing and one thing alone, it must be the discovery of the mechanisms behind disease, and the subsequent focus on sanitation. Whether you have one set of clothes or twenty doesn't matter much if you know to keep clean. And people in general (at least in Europe, and by extension the US) didn't know that before the 20:th century. Long after industrialisation had begun.
Right. Just like the rich wanted better medicine, and in the early 20th century capitalist industry invented penicillin and sulfa drugs and the rich benefitted.
That's not even half right. While penicillin was almost usable earlier (it certainly wasn't invented by capitalists) the very first patient was almost saved by penicillin until it ran out, it wasn't until the US Army decided to invest heavily into the research into how to produce penicillin efficiently that it became plentifull enough that it could actually be used.
The US Army of course---being decidedly not free market entreprenours---wanted a drug to treat wound infections effectively, being the principal killer in any armed conflict of the time.
It wasn't until after that fact that research into antibiotics took off. A classic case of commercialism stepping in when publicly funded research into esoterica had already proved to pay off. Certainly not a poster child for industry R&D though, quite the opposite.
If you want to name a deciding factor of the development 20:th century medicine, war would be a much better bet. Blood transfusions, penicillin (as a drug), reconstructive surgery, using plaster of paris to set broken bones, treating orthostatic shock, marrow spikes, the list goes on. Not much commerciallism there.
OK, so you've just described Sweden (or another of the Nordic countries). We call the system "mixed economy", as in basically capitalist but with a relatively strong state, and not insubstantial taxes to pay for it all (except for the Norwegians who have oil).
It's not perfect, but it still works well enough. For how much longer we'll see. My fingers are crossed.
Sorry, but I'm utterly shocked at the cavalier attitude displayed here. I work doing a very similar job to the one described (writing tools to control rates pricing), and I tell you now that wandering in to our profit-producing users and saying that their rules are a load of 'blah blah blah' would, quite correctly, get me booted out of the City forever.
You know what, I work in security and when I go to management I hear the same thing: "We're trying to meet a deadline here, we're making money, it's inconvenient" etc, etc. Well, that's all fine and dandy, I say. But just remember that there will be no complaining whatsoever when the whole house of cards come falling down.
Now, security is a second level requirement (or rather third) I'm not denying that. But it's still a necessary requirement, as in 'cannot do without.'
The same is probably true here. Spreadsheets are probably horrible for this application. No auditing, the slightest glitch could make the traders lose lots of money etc, etc. Granted, the deliver is key here; not "you're stupid", but rather "Have you ever thought what would happen if this scenario came true?" But to say that if you didn't tell them that their way of operating was indeed a load of 'blah blah blah' (putting a very fine point on it) ought to be what gets you booted out of the City forever. Otherwise, if you don't bring your expertise to the table pointing out that they're in fact running around like headless chicken in afternoon traffic, what's the point of having you there?
Hrm, Finland is between Sweden and Russia. It came here first. We noticed and reported.
Interesting, that's the first I've heard of this. Do you have any sources? Google turns up nothing. The official history is that the staff of Forsmark detected and reported the incident. We (I'm Swedish) didn't learn about it from you that's for certain.
And while Finland certainly is 'on the way' it's the precipication that really brought the radioactive particles to the ground. And precipication started more or less at the same time, many hours after the clouds had travelled to Sweden (and over Finland). Again, if you have any sources I'd be interested.
The UK also has a radiation detection system called RIMNET that was built in 1988 and is currently in the process of being upgraded. There are lots of detectors all over the country that feed data back.
Well you ( having associated a Scotsman with the English) have Windscale, which is such a disaster it had to be renamed Sellafield for PR reasons, so of course you need a radiation detection system.:-) We sort of counted on you guys telling us the next time though, no one thought of the scenario with an easterly wind and a Russian disaster. (I'm only a bit surprised that they waited till after Chernobyl, maybe you also counted on Sellafield to give you a ring the next time.:-)
Scotland was hit by the chernobyl radioactive cloud - I remember all the sheep being taken away from the fields to be culled!!!
Yes, I could have been clearer. Most of western Europe was eventually hit. But it hit Sweden first. Actually it passed over Finland and the baltic but with no precipitation so it wasn't detectable there.
The rest of the world (ie., us) found out about the accident when Swedish scientists reported a radioactive cloud passing overhead.
And it should be noted that it was actually the staff of the westernmost, northernmost nuclear power plant (Forsmark) that noticed the increased radiation levels. As in: "We have a leak!". The whole emergency plan for evacuation/containment was put into motion before the operators could figure out that something was 'funny'; "If we have a leak, then why is the radiation levels higher outside the plant than inside?"
It was more or less only bad luck that we got any fallout at all. There was a weather system that moved west during the day and settled over the norther parts where it started to precipicate. The prevaling winds are westerly so chances are we otherwise wouldn't have learned about this incident at all save for several days later when the satellite photos could have provided confirmation.
Sweden now has a nation wide radiation detection system integrated with the weather station network. We never thought we'd have to have one before...
The second is stripping a former Nazi guard from Treblinka (a concentration camp)
It should perhaps be pointed out that Treblinka wasn't a concentration camp but a death camp. No one was kept alive for any appreciable amount of time in Treblinka, it had only one purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
The point being that in the Nordic countries said someone couldn't post a sign or tell you to leave/don't enter as our right to take a path, camp etc is law.
That's not to say that you can behave any way you want to, and being reasonable people we normally don't. It's a tradition well over a thousand years old so we've had time to work out the kinks.
But it's safe to say that the Nordic idea of land ownership is different from the Anglo Saxon one. (Think stewardship, rather than ownership).
...And Northern Ireland. I've never heard the English, Scotish or Welsh refer to themselves as "Greatbritanniansandnorthernirelanders". :-)
Yes, well, I knew how to fix my old 1971 SAAB with just a screwdriver and a wrench, and it always did what I wanted too, but that's not to say that I still drive it (went to the wrecking yard as a matter of fact). Because, quite frankly it was a piece of shit.
And that's my sentiment regarding sendmail to. Sure an expert can get it to do what he/she wants but it's still well past its prime. I switched to postfix and have never looked back.
Thanks, I'll have a look.
Poor form follwing up to your own post, I know. I just did some searching and it seems that WHO and many others (e.g. the EPA) is on my side of the argument. TCDD is a known human carcinogen (with many Swedish studies confirming this).
As so often when discussing American environmental matters I did find something that could be the reason for the dissent; 2,4-D and 2,4,5-TD are still in use in the US, with heavy hitting lobby groups campaining for that to continue (it is of course very difficult and prohibitively expensive to manufacture these herbicides without any dioxin contamination). Here it was banned in 1977 and hence we can do research without the medeling from large multinationals (as has proven so problematic in research in the oil, tobacco and to a lesser extent the medical industry).
So to sum up, if you're going to change our opinion on the matter you're going to have to come up with some hefty citations. And research paid for by the same industry that manufactures the stuff is going to have lighter weight than governmentally funded studies (and note that the government was actually opposed to the ban of Hormoslyr in 1977 here in Sweden). They're not without impact, that's not what I'm saying, just that they are compromised to a fair degree. I don't know the US legal term, but it's got to do with not having to bite the hand that feeds you.
Interesting and the first I've heard of it. As I said, in Sweden we're seeing the increases in cancer rate (in people that is, not rats). Do you have any references, links or anything like that?
You do the weeding then.
Farmers in Sweden are currently having a problem with Wild Oat (Avena Fatua), to the point where there's actually a law in place that you have to pull all plants by the root and burn them. And you're not allowed to do anything that might risk increasing the spread.
For obvious reasons this isn't working as there isn't enough hands available to even contenplate such an undertaking, but with the addition of your labour I'm sure the problem will soon be over.
The only difference between unwanted plantlife and animal life, is that the latter usually spreads more rapidly, but even that's not a given.
And that's even ignoring the main problem, which isn't the agricultural product as such, but the damage done to the environment (from the sea floor to ground water) to produce it. That's enough to put you off cotton and bananas in and of itself.
The mismanagement of areable land between the Eufrat and the Tigris quite some time ago now, didn't bring about the end of mankind, but it did put quite an effective stop to their 'civilisation' as such.
Exactly. Which is why one should be sceptic to the wholesale use of RoundUp in the first place. It's action is too similar to the common antibiotics, i.e. it's relatively easy to develop a resistance to it.
So, as with antibiotics you want to limit the oportunity of the oposition to develop the trait. As in limit its exposure to it.
And hence, in what will probably not be the final formulation (I've never seen so many nit pickers; you're worse than my PhD committee): It's still a really stupid traid (for want of a better word) to introduce on such a broad scale into the wild.
After all, all bacteria will eventually develop a resistance to all antibiotics known today. That doesn't make antibiotics any less useful until they do. Same here. It could be argued that RoundUp and the genes that make plants resistant to it are too important to leave in the hands of the likes of Monsanto.
You mean before we (in the west) could produce more food than we knew what to do with?
Look, if the old more benign (if you can use that term) pesticides stop working, we'll resort to using new and improved pesticides (or old an all too known ones), that'll wreak even more havoc than the ones we use now. As an example, here in Sweden (as a result of EU) we've had to accept Paraquat again. A toxin that we banned decades ago. And that shows up in the ground water. And that's nasty.
Noone's particularly worried that the golf courses of Scotland will somehow overrun the forrests of Sweden.
What? If the animal models are to be belived (and they work fairly well in other cases), Dioxin (TCDD) is extremely toxic. As an example (snarfed from the web, LD50 in mg/kg in rat) Ethanol, 7 000; Sodium chloride, 3 000; Cupric sulphate, 1 500; DDT, 100; Nicotine, 60; Tetrodotoxin, 0.02; Dioxin (TCDD), 0.02.
There's usually no such thing as a poison that kills you at a certain dosage and have no effect below that. Several Swedish studies have determined there's a definitely increased cancer risk in those that were exposed to Hormoslyr. Or rather the dioxins in the Hormoslyr. Indeed the CEO of BT Chemicals, who in as a PR stunt actually drank the stuff on TV back in the seventies subsequently died from cancer himself. A bit of poetic irony that. (Though, for the nitpickers of which Slashdot seems to be full to the brim these days; there's of course no way to tell if that was a direct result of the drinking.)
So I'd say there's evidence. Enough not to want to gather more empiciral whole population data on the subject, that's for certain.
Are you saying that in this particular case the Scots didn't have Monsanto participate, and that makes it fine and dandy? (I wouldn't know, I didn't read the article, this is Slashdot after all).
Or are you saying that Monstanto didn't use hybrid dna techniques, aka 'genetic engineering' when producing their various RoundUp resistant plants? (You're guessing yourself as you admitt, when it comes to the exact method). In either case, you couldn't possibly know anything about my knowledge on the matter given my very brief posting on the subject.
And in either case how does any of the above have any-fucking-thing to do with what I posted? In what way was anything of what I said invalidated by not quting chapter and verse from Monsanto publications on the matter?
Look, even if they had done it the 'old fashioned' way (which by the way they typically don't, they mention two specific named genesites), i.e. increasing the rate of natural mutations (typically by irradiation or the use of mutagene chemicals) and growing it to see what comes up (well it's still one step of the method), doesn't really matter. It's still a really stupid trait to introduce into the wild. About as stupid as putting antibiotics in regular household cleaners. (For I should add for your nit picking benefit, different technical reasons).
You should be mindful that just because you may have a better grounding in biochemistry than most, that doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't know what the hell they're talking about.
You may give my post so many monkeys. I give your reply four "Head stuck up my arse so far that I couldn't see the bigger picture if it slapped me on the neck." Let's call them Ostriches for short.
Look, I already said that I got the two mixed up, what more do you want? The reason I mentioned the dioxins was precisely that people get all worked up when hearing "Agent Orange" despite the fact that we could produce the same substance today without the dioxins, as they are an unfortunate biproduct of the methods then in use.
P.S. And the "similar in usage (in forrestry)" note was to point to why/how I managed to mix them up in the first place, but we're not really doing this to argue the point any longer are we?
It has happened, several times. Do the Google. If your objection really was we haven't seen a problem yet, it's because you have to give it time. The hybridisation rate isn't that great. Look at any problematic species, such the jelly fish that migrated from the Red Sea to the Mediteranean, it took 30-40 years for that to have established itself to be a problem.
My bad. I got it mixed up with hormoslyr (a Swedish herbicide which was all the rage in forrestry in the seventies, and caused an environmental scandal) which was a mixture of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. (Anyway, they aren't the problem, it's the dioxins that are). RoundUp is similar in usage though.
Well, the real reason to be sceptical to Monsanto inserting genes that resist 2,4-TD (RoundUp, aka Agent Orange) is that it has a habit of spreading to closely related plants. In tests in Italy (more than ten years ago now) this gene successfully transferred from Rape to Wild Turnip, which is a mother of a weed to get rid of. There are several grasses that we wouldn't want to aquire this gene. (Google e.g. "wild turnip gene resistance")
As a gene resisting herbicides is a very desirable gene to have (if you happen to be a weed), you can bet your sweet ass that's it's only a matter of time before you've created the mother of all weeds. And no, burning/barriers/diging won't fix the problem.
In this case an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
By the same token. If the researchers the US Army paid to develop fermentation techniques to mass produce penicillin decided they didn't want to after having signed the contract could they? If the US Army decided they wanted to go do something else (you just put them in the same category with all other free agents) could they? Of course the individuals could, but they could that in the Soviet Union as well.
Look what you're arguing is the necessity of the state, i.e. that the state has to sometimes jump in and regulate the market, either by producing necessities (when the free entepreneurs wont) or by consuming when there isn't sufficient demand for anyone else to.
That's all good and dandy, I'm Swedish after all, and believe in the mixed economy model. But it's decidedly not what's meant by a free market economy. And to argue that the US Army acts as a free agent when they're spending nothing but tax money is quite frankly absurd.
I really shouldn't have quoted so much, but I just had to let it stand on it's own. By your token then the Soviet Union was a "classicy story of the free market". I mean, it's not as if Migkoyan-Gurewitch and Suchoi didn't compete for the different government contracts. As in taxes paid for them.
If you want to call that 'free market' then you should at least be aware that that's not what other people mean by the term.
That's a period that covers everything from the plague to sars via the Spannish flu, and the discovery of germs, vaccination and antibiotics. I think you would have a hard time arguing that the introduction of cheaper fabrics (the cause of which; industrialisation, moved hordes of people into the cities, to live under unsanitary conditions, with widespread disease following) did much on the whole. Not that it didn't help of course, but washing clothes more often is a 20:th century affair, it didn't have much to do with the introduction of the Jaquard loom.
If you want to name one thing and one thing alone, it must be the discovery of the mechanisms behind disease, and the subsequent focus on sanitation. Whether you have one set of clothes or twenty doesn't matter much if you know to keep clean. And people in general (at least in Europe, and by extension the US) didn't know that before the 20:th century. Long after industrialisation had begun.
That's not even half right. While penicillin was almost usable earlier (it certainly wasn't invented by capitalists) the very first patient was almost saved by penicillin until it ran out, it wasn't until the US Army decided to invest heavily into the research into how to produce penicillin efficiently that it became plentifull enough that it could actually be used.
The US Army of course---being decidedly not free market entreprenours---wanted a drug to treat wound infections effectively, being the principal killer in any armed conflict of the time.
It wasn't until after that fact that research into antibiotics took off. A classic case of commercialism stepping in when publicly funded research into esoterica had already proved to pay off. Certainly not a poster child for industry R&D though, quite the opposite.
If you want to name a deciding factor of the development 20:th century medicine, war would be a much better bet. Blood transfusions, penicillin (as a drug), reconstructive surgery, using plaster of paris to set broken bones, treating orthostatic shock, marrow spikes, the list goes on. Not much commerciallism there.
OK, so you've just described Sweden (or another of the Nordic countries). We call the system "mixed economy", as in basically capitalist but with a relatively strong state, and not insubstantial taxes to pay for it all (except for the Norwegians who have oil).
It's not perfect, but it still works well enough. For how much longer we'll see. My fingers are crossed.
Or perhaps they're against Boeing using bicycle parts for the construction of their aircraft also.
You know what, I work in security and when I go to management I hear the same thing: "We're trying to meet a deadline here, we're making money, it's inconvenient" etc, etc. Well, that's all fine and dandy, I say. But just remember that there will be no complaining whatsoever when the whole house of cards come falling down.
Now, security is a second level requirement (or rather third) I'm not denying that. But it's still a necessary requirement, as in 'cannot do without.'
The same is probably true here. Spreadsheets are probably horrible for this application. No auditing, the slightest glitch could make the traders lose lots of money etc, etc. Granted, the deliver is key here; not "you're stupid", but rather "Have you ever thought what would happen if this scenario came true?" But to say that if you didn't tell them that their way of operating was indeed a load of 'blah blah blah' (putting a very fine point on it) ought to be what gets you booted out of the City forever. Otherwise, if you don't bring your expertise to the table pointing out that they're in fact running around like headless chicken in afternoon traffic, what's the point of having you there?
Interesting, that's the first I've heard of this. Do you have any sources? Google turns up nothing. The official history is that the staff of Forsmark detected and reported the incident. We (I'm Swedish) didn't learn about it from you that's for certain.
And while Finland certainly is 'on the way' it's the precipication that really brought the radioactive particles to the ground. And precipication started more or less at the same time, many hours after the clouds had travelled to Sweden (and over Finland). Again, if you have any sources I'd be interested.
Well you ( having associated a Scotsman with the English) have Windscale, which is such a disaster it had to be renamed Sellafield for PR reasons, so of course you need a radiation detection system. :-) We sort of counted on you guys telling us the next time though, no one thought of the scenario with an easterly wind and a Russian disaster. (I'm only a bit surprised that they waited till after Chernobyl, maybe you also counted on Sellafield to give you a ring the next time. :-)
Yes, I could have been clearer. Most of western Europe was eventually hit. But it hit Sweden first. Actually it passed over Finland and the baltic but with no precipitation so it wasn't detectable there.
And it should be noted that it was actually the staff of the westernmost, northernmost nuclear power plant (Forsmark) that noticed the increased radiation levels. As in: "We have a leak!". The whole emergency plan for evacuation/containment was put into motion before the operators could figure out that something was 'funny'; "If we have a leak, then why is the radiation levels higher outside the plant than inside?"
It was more or less only bad luck that we got any fallout at all. There was a weather system that moved west during the day and settled over the norther parts where it started to precipicate. The prevaling winds are westerly so chances are we otherwise wouldn't have learned about this incident at all save for several days later when the satellite photos could have provided confirmation.
Sweden now has a nation wide radiation detection system integrated with the weather station network. We never thought we'd have to have one before...
It should perhaps be pointed out that Treblinka wasn't a concentration camp but a death camp. No one was kept alive for any appreciable amount of time in Treblinka, it had only one purpose.