The civil war is a great example. The reason for doing it was to centralize federal power particularly for the Presidency both direct and financial. The justification was freeing slaves.
Third, people's current desired number of children is based on current conditions. If there were less people, there would be more room and more opportunity, and people would want more children.
You're ignoring that those children will require tons of care for about two decades before they can make use of that opportunity.
The effort of raising children is a major limiting factor. "This is about all I think we can handle" limits families way more of an effect than "this child will have a great career in 40 years".
Two-factor authentication does not require a mobile phone. And in fact, the services that text you are not nearly as secure as the ones that rely on hardware or software tokens.
How naive are you to believe any politicians words without investigating the truth behind them
It isn't naivete. It's desperation.
If you figure you've got a 10% shot of a deal such as this working if you vote one way, and a 0% shot of any deal if you vote the other, you take the 10%.
This is why the Clinton plan that amounted to "thoughts and prayers" for the rust belt did not play very well in the rust belt. Sure, there's plenty of racists and sexists and people eating up Russian propaganda. But those weren't reachable anyway. The 5% more that Clinton needed to win looked at 10% chance vs 0% chance and went with the 10%.
Doubtful. If the weapon traced back to North Korea, then it would be treated as a first strike by North Korea. And it's not feasible to export a nuclear weapon without someone else detecting it.
Kim wants nukes to keep himself alive. Exporting nukes does not accomplish this goal. Nor does shutting down his nuclear weapons facilities.
Personally I would like to see the federal government stop giving out state aid and only take the money required to operate the federal government and the armed services themselves, and leave the state level infrastructure and planning to the states. That way when a state fucks themselves up they have only themselves to blame, whether that state is California, New York, Florida or Wisconsin.
The flaw in this plan is the spending you are pushing to the states is strongly counter-cyclical. Such as more people get unemployment when the economy is bad. States can't run deficits, and the fact that the economy is bad means tax revenue is down.
Ideally, a state would save up a "rainy day fund" during a good economy to handle this, but as soon as a state starts running a surplus Republicans demand immediate tax cuts, so nowhere near enough money can be saved.
Enter the Federal government. It can run a deficit, so it can go ahead and spend the money to boost the economy during a downturn.
Now, we still have the same problem that Republicans demand immediate tax cuts, but at least it's possible to spend the money when needed.
Why did not a single top comment in this article, or the source article, or slashdot's commentary article mention this mechanism?
Because this isn't about a claim against a single video. It's about the way YouTube implemented their "three strikes" policy that would delete the channel before the single-video issue could be resolved.
Doesn't help that 8 days later your video was un-blocked when your channel was already deleted.
Still doesn't explain why the company assembling these things didn't go with a company that had the proper equipment to make the parts.
That would be the point of TFA: There wasn't another company that "had the proper equipment". Because bulk manufacturing had been outsourced for long enough that the US suppliers got out of that market.
Getting back into that market requires capital outlays that can not be justified just with Apple's order - the higher-speed machines would fill the annual order in a week and then have 51 idle weeks.
TFA says that the company used to have a machine that could mass-produce the desired screws. But sold it when the demand for mass-produced screws went to China and the US company shifted its operations to higher-precision screws. Which take longer to make because of the smaller tolerances.
No, but the overwhelmingly common use of the word does. Which you know. Stop pretending you don't.
I'm pretending something doesn't exist when I explicitly point it out.
You have an unusual definition of "pretend".
When a Hollywood celebrity says that you should change what you buy or how you medicate your family because of consensus, you know exactly what I mean.
No, actually I don't. Because you didn't supply sufficient context to indicate if that consensus was a scientific consensus or not.
If they're saying you should cut down on things that emit CO2 because of the consensus surrounding Climate Change, that's a scientific consensus.
If thy're saying you should not vaccinate your kids because of the consensus reached on a message board full of people who have no idea how vaccines work and are spouting nothing but bullshit, then that isn't a scientific consensus.
You made an unwarranted blanket assertion about the safety of outcomes
Ditto. Hence tossing your baseless and idiotic assertion back at you.
What suit? What are you talking about?
So, you decided to bring up a crop that "had to be removed from the EU!!!!!!!!!" and don't know anything about what actually was going on?
There was a lawsuit over Monsanto's declaration of MON863 as safe. The result so far is Monsanto has to disclose its research data to EU authorities instead of only disclosing the analysis of that data.
I'm under no obligation to demonstrate anything. I have made no claims.
You have made a claim, that GMOs are not safe until proven otherwise.
The point of the question is for you to explain what sort of regulatory system you believe is required for GMOs. Then we could discuss why you feel that should not be required for new, non-GMO crops.
For example, the lovely red grapefruit that was created by irradiating plants with hard gamma rays until one survived and produced a pretty fruit. Legally, it's not a GMO. So, we could discuss why that plant does not need any study before growing it as a crop, while a GMO does.
I personally do not believe in GMO vs non-GMO as even a valid line of argument.
Except for your continued insistence that GMOs require, at a minimum, additional scrutiny. Possibly even banned until proven "safe". No other new variety of food has to be proven "safe", it has to be proven "unsafe".
They don't want to ingest poisons sprayed willy nilly on crops because now they won't die when sprayed.
You do realize that all farming, including Organic farming, uses pesticides sprayed willy-nilly on crops, right? The point of the GMOs that produce bt internally is to avoid spraying bt on the field.
Btw, Glyphosate is fucking terrible and I'm thrilled that it is rapidly losing effectiveness. But GMO != "RoundUp Ready".
GMO = indistinguishable is a straw man industry shills persistently like to beat down because it avoids the real issue
What is that real issue then? 'Cause it keeps looking like the only issue is "GMO = bad", since you keep treating it very differently from non-GMO crops.
But it has everything to do with contemporary politics over which country should kill its economy while other countries are let off the hook
So when you change the subject to a non-scientific area, the definition of the word changes? Whoa.
even the "do it a bunch of times" science types are the same crowd that all too often end up retracting their bogus white papers or changing their tune as soon as the source of their grant money change
You'll find that generally a consensus was not reached on such a subject. Far, far, far, far, far, far more rarely, something radically different was discovered, upending the old consensus. Such as the Standard Model in physics.
"But this could be that super-rare case!!!!!" makes about as much sense as "We can all get rich if we buy lottery tickets!!!"
So if I were to sit in my evil lab and concoct a GMO that causes harm it won't really have caused harm because it was confirmed that GMOs don't cause harm?
So if I were to sit in my evil lab and use conventional methods to hybridize Tomatoes and Nightshade, thus creating a highly toxic fruit, that wouldn't have caused harm because it wasn't a GMO, right?
Even though there are specific documented cases of specific GMOs being withdrawn from markets (MON863 from Europe)
The suit over MON863 required Monsanto to release its research data. That's it, so far.
Not only is the lack of specificity alarming the lack of communicating terms and conditions (such as detection thresholds and sources of uncertainty) associated with such "confirmations" makes what you are asserting indistinguishable from unscientific gibberish worthy of being ignored on its face.
Ok, demonstrate that a non-GMO food is safe to the threshold you want to require for a GMO.
GMOs are generally considered indistinguishable when digested by the target animal from the non-GMO product. So, you eat GMO corn, and your body won't be able to tell it from non-GMO corn. There has yet to be any not-massively-flawed study demonstrating otherwise (for example, your experiment actually has to have controls if you want to determine anything, and only feeding GMO food means you have no controls)
First, there is not much doubt that in the far future humans will drastically modify species including their own
We started that 10,000 years ago when we started selectively breeding for farming.
For example, the ancestor of corn looks absolutely nothing like the plant we farm today. And the plant we farm today can not exist without human intervention (a cob that falls to the ground will produce a ton of offspring right next to each other, and none of them will be able to grow enough to produce another generation.)
So, your framing as "the distant future" is not accurate. The tools changed over the millennia, but that doesn't mean we were not doing it. And no, it is nothing like a "long-term qualitative shift". It utterly alters the plant/animal, to the point where it can not exist without us and its nutritional content is radically different.
And that's not even discussing chemically-driven or radiation-driven natural selection. (The products of which are not legally GMOs, despite "blasting it with gamma rays and see what happens" is modifying the fuck out of the genome)
Once GM food is ubiquitous, maybe animals will be modified next
Again, you're a few millennia too late. Dogs vs wolves/wild canids, Pigs vs boars, Cows vs whatever went extinct after we domesticated cows.
and then humans
We've been doing that too. There's a hell of a lot of human features that do not make sense and are not seen in the "natural world". Like boobs. Human females have them for their entire life after puberty. Chimps and other close relatives only have appreciable breast tissue while breast-feeding. Every other mammal is similar to chimps in this regard. And lifelong boobs are not better at feeding children. So they probably came from artificial selection.
If you combine all those points, especially the third and fifth, then it seems that not being too liberal about GM technology and thinking this through in a bit more detail could be advisable
Your evidence that this "thinking though" did not happen? You not hearing about it isn't evidence. There actually was a good amount of study with test plots and measuring hybridization with wild types before widespread planting.
This experimentation inherently requires participation of the producer of the GMO - they have the seeds. USDA and FDA reviewed the results (in the US).
They also are lobbying very intensively against labelling GM food
So, my problem with this particular piece of the argument is you leave out that "Big Food" is on both sides of the GMO debate. And the fight over labeling exposes that.
A "GMO Free" label is easy to apply. You aren't forcing someone to do what they do not want to do - they're already happily growing without GMOs anyway.
A "GMO Free" label could follow the path used to create the "Organic" label - industry sets up a trade group to come up with standards, growers started following those standards, and pretty quickly the industry standard became a legal standard. Because everyone who was already doing it wanted the label and the extra money that came from it.
So why not do that with a "GMO Free" label? Money. Consumers who are afraid of GMOs can only buy products labeled "Organic" to avoid GMOs. And the profit for Organic is higher than the profit for conventionally-farmed non-GMO crops, but only as long as you give consumers a reason to pay a big premium....like avoidance of GMOs.
Forcing a "Contains GMOs" label created a fight with GMO producers, because they didn't want it. That fight helped amplify fears over GMOs and drive those consumers towards Organic. This fight delayed putting on label on the products that would give the consumers the information the fighters claim to want. The lack of a "GMO Free" label tells you it has
What do the experts say? Well, in Europe (where the experts are actually expert and therefore worth listening to), GMO is banned by scientific advice.
Nope. Growing GMOs is banned, importing GMOs is legal.
Growing is banned due to fears of the GMO spreading into the wild population. Basically, they want to see what happens in the US and other places first.
I don't see any problem with this. Ask an expert about a specific generation of GMO, not about GMO in the abstract. [...] Should we put blind faith in GMO? [...] I'd say no.
So we shouldn't evaluate it in the abstract...and then you evaluate it in the abstract.
Pesticide-enhanced crops? No, that's stupid
There are GMOs that produce bt (a pesticide) in the parts of the plant pests eat, but we do not. The alternative to this, which is used in organic farming, is to spray the crop with lots of bt. Waaaaay more than the GMO produces, affecting the local environment way more than the GMO crop, and leading to far more resistance - insects are more likely to get a less-than-lethal dose when you've got a gradient of pesticide. If it's all in the plant, you're going to get a lethal dose when they eat it.
Also, you're "evaluating it in the abstract" again.
Reducing farmland to an absolute minimum and re-wilding the relinquished land would go a long way to improving health globally.
Only when you forget cheap food causes far more obesity. Doritos are cheap. Salad is expensive. If you reduce farmland, that increases the cost of food, and people eat more Doritos because that's what they can afford.
The validity of a theory is tested by demonstrating its predictive powers. Repeated results
And when you do that a bunch of times you reach....a consensus.
Consensus in science has nothing to do with popularity. It means we've tested a particular subject from multiple angles, confirmed those tests, thus believe it to be true.
Experiments around the Higgs boson created a consensus that the Higgs boson exists. And that has continued the consensus that the Standard Model is accurate....for now.
Popularity doesn't come into play, except that things repeatedly shown to be true tend to be popular. Consensus in other areas (like politics) is about popularity.
That's not "consensus", dammit! The scientific method is not dependent on whether an idea is popular.
Yes, it is consensus. But like many things in science, the commonly-used definition of a word does not necessarily apply.
Scientific consensus means that a similar result has been achieved from a variety of experiments, so we believe the matter to be true. It has nothing to do with popularity. Though things that have been repeatedly proven to be true tend to be popular.
Confirmation is what you do to a single experiment or hypothesis. Consensus is used when discussing a broader area of knowledge. Multiple confirmations of GMOs not causing harm have lead to the consensus that GMOs do not cause harm.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, if that is your "traditional role"
Oversight
where have you been? On vacation? Too busy?
In the minority. The Republicans ran the House for the last 8 years, and were not terribly interested in oversight of the FCC.
TIL accurately portraying someone's statement is "bias".
Well, people that live on reservations don't vote in our elections.
They vote in Federal elections. They may or may not vote in state and/or tribal elections, depending on the state and the tribe.
The civil war is a great example. The reason for doing it was to centralize federal power particularly for the Presidency both direct and financial. The justification was freeing slaves.
Ya kinda reversed the timeline there, buddy.
Third, people's current desired number of children is based on current conditions. If there were less people, there would be more room and more opportunity, and people would want more children.
You're ignoring that those children will require tons of care for about two decades before they can make use of that opportunity.
The effort of raising children is a major limiting factor. "This is about all I think we can handle" limits families way more of an effect than "this child will have a great career in 40 years".
Two-factor authentication does not require a mobile phone. And in fact, the services that text you are not nearly as secure as the ones that rely on hardware or software tokens.
He's yet to provide any evidence he is not rational when it comes to his personal survival.
They didn't forget. They understood 10% is infinitely larger than 0%.
How naive are you to believe any politicians words without investigating the truth behind them
It isn't naivete. It's desperation.
If you figure you've got a 10% shot of a deal such as this working if you vote one way, and a 0% shot of any deal if you vote the other, you take the 10%.
This is why the Clinton plan that amounted to "thoughts and prayers" for the rust belt did not play very well in the rust belt. Sure, there's plenty of racists and sexists and people eating up Russian propaganda. But those weren't reachable anyway. The 5% more that Clinton needed to win looked at 10% chance vs 0% chance and went with the 10%.
Doubtful. If the weapon traced back to North Korea, then it would be treated as a first strike by North Korea. And it's not feasible to export a nuclear weapon without someone else detecting it.
Kim wants nukes to keep himself alive. Exporting nukes does not accomplish this goal. Nor does shutting down his nuclear weapons facilities.
Personally I would like to see the federal government stop giving out state aid and only take the money required to operate the federal government and the armed services themselves, and leave the state level infrastructure and planning to the states. That way when a state fucks themselves up they have only themselves to blame, whether that state is California, New York, Florida or Wisconsin.
The flaw in this plan is the spending you are pushing to the states is strongly counter-cyclical. Such as more people get unemployment when the economy is bad. States can't run deficits, and the fact that the economy is bad means tax revenue is down.
Ideally, a state would save up a "rainy day fund" during a good economy to handle this, but as soon as a state starts running a surplus Republicans demand immediate tax cuts, so nowhere near enough money can be saved.
Enter the Federal government. It can run a deficit, so it can go ahead and spend the money to boost the economy during a downturn.
Now, we still have the same problem that Republicans demand immediate tax cuts, but at least it's possible to spend the money when needed.
Why did not a single top comment in this article, or the source article, or slashdot's commentary article mention this mechanism?
Because this isn't about a claim against a single video. It's about the way YouTube implemented their "three strikes" policy that would delete the channel before the single-video issue could be resolved.
Doesn't help that 8 days later your video was un-blocked when your channel was already deleted.
You don't have a right to a profitable YouTube channel. So no.
GDPR is not a US law, so it would be rather difficult to enforce in the case of a US person interacting with a US company from within the US.
I'm sorry, do you need a safe space so you can talk about it?
Still doesn't explain why the company assembling these things didn't go with a company that had the proper equipment to make the parts.
That would be the point of TFA: There wasn't another company that "had the proper equipment". Because bulk manufacturing had been outsourced for long enough that the US suppliers got out of that market.
Getting back into that market requires capital outlays that can not be justified just with Apple's order - the higher-speed machines would fill the annual order in a week and then have 51 idle weeks.
TFA says that the company used to have a machine that could mass-produce the desired screws. But sold it when the demand for mass-produced screws went to China and the US company shifted its operations to higher-precision screws. Which take longer to make because of the smaller tolerances.
No, but the overwhelmingly common use of the word does. Which you know. Stop pretending you don't.
I'm pretending something doesn't exist when I explicitly point it out.
You have an unusual definition of "pretend".
When a Hollywood celebrity says that you should change what you buy or how you medicate your family because of consensus, you know exactly what I mean.
No, actually I don't. Because you didn't supply sufficient context to indicate if that consensus was a scientific consensus or not.
If they're saying you should cut down on things that emit CO2 because of the consensus surrounding Climate Change, that's a scientific consensus.
If thy're saying you should not vaccinate your kids because of the consensus reached on a message board full of people who have no idea how vaccines work and are spouting nothing but bullshit, then that isn't a scientific consensus.
You made an unwarranted blanket assertion about the safety of outcomes
Ditto. Hence tossing your baseless and idiotic assertion back at you.
What suit? What are you talking about?
So, you decided to bring up a crop that "had to be removed from the EU!!!!!!!!!" and don't know anything about what actually was going on?
There was a lawsuit over Monsanto's declaration of MON863 as safe. The result so far is Monsanto has to disclose its research data to EU authorities instead of only disclosing the analysis of that data.
I'm under no obligation to demonstrate anything. I have made no claims.
You have made a claim, that GMOs are not safe until proven otherwise.
The point of the question is for you to explain what sort of regulatory system you believe is required for GMOs. Then we could discuss why you feel that should not be required for new, non-GMO crops.
For example, the lovely red grapefruit that was created by irradiating plants with hard gamma rays until one survived and produced a pretty fruit. Legally, it's not a GMO. So, we could discuss why that plant does not need any study before growing it as a crop, while a GMO does.
I personally do not believe in GMO vs non-GMO as even a valid line of argument.
Except for your continued insistence that GMOs require, at a minimum, additional scrutiny. Possibly even banned until proven "safe". No other new variety of food has to be proven "safe", it has to be proven "unsafe".
They don't want to ingest poisons sprayed willy nilly on crops because now they won't die when sprayed.
You do realize that all farming, including Organic farming, uses pesticides sprayed willy-nilly on crops, right? The point of the GMOs that produce bt internally is to avoid spraying bt on the field.
Btw, Glyphosate is fucking terrible and I'm thrilled that it is rapidly losing effectiveness. But GMO != "RoundUp Ready".
GMO = indistinguishable is a straw man industry shills persistently like to beat down because it avoids the real issue
What is that real issue then? 'Cause it keeps looking like the only issue is "GMO = bad", since you keep treating it very differently from non-GMO crops.
But it has everything to do with contemporary politics over which country should kill its economy while other countries are let off the hook
So when you change the subject to a non-scientific area, the definition of the word changes? Whoa.
even the "do it a bunch of times" science types are the same crowd that all too often end up retracting their bogus white papers or changing their tune as soon as the source of their grant money change
You'll find that generally a consensus was not reached on such a subject. Far, far, far, far, far, far more rarely, something radically different was discovered, upending the old consensus. Such as the Standard Model in physics.
"But this could be that super-rare case!!!!!" makes about as much sense as "We can all get rich if we buy lottery tickets!!!"
So if I were to sit in my evil lab and concoct a GMO that causes harm it won't really have caused harm because it was confirmed that GMOs don't cause harm?
So if I were to sit in my evil lab and use conventional methods to hybridize Tomatoes and Nightshade, thus creating a highly toxic fruit, that wouldn't have caused harm because it wasn't a GMO, right?
Even though there are specific documented cases of specific GMOs being withdrawn from markets (MON863 from Europe)
The suit over MON863 required Monsanto to release its research data. That's it, so far.
Not only is the lack of specificity alarming the lack of communicating terms and conditions (such as detection thresholds and sources of uncertainty) associated with such "confirmations" makes what you are asserting indistinguishable from unscientific gibberish worthy of being ignored on its face.
Ok, demonstrate that a non-GMO food is safe to the threshold you want to require for a GMO.
GMOs are generally considered indistinguishable when digested by the target animal from the non-GMO product. So, you eat GMO corn, and your body won't be able to tell it from non-GMO corn. There has yet to be any not-massively-flawed study demonstrating otherwise (for example, your experiment actually has to have controls if you want to determine anything, and only feeding GMO food means you have no controls)
First, there is not much doubt that in the far future humans will drastically modify species including their own
We started that 10,000 years ago when we started selectively breeding for farming.
For example, the ancestor of corn looks absolutely nothing like the plant we farm today. And the plant we farm today can not exist without human intervention (a cob that falls to the ground will produce a ton of offspring right next to each other, and none of them will be able to grow enough to produce another generation.)
So, your framing as "the distant future" is not accurate. The tools changed over the millennia, but that doesn't mean we were not doing it. And no, it is nothing like a "long-term qualitative shift". It utterly alters the plant/animal, to the point where it can not exist without us and its nutritional content is radically different.
And that's not even discussing chemically-driven or radiation-driven natural selection. (The products of which are not legally GMOs, despite "blasting it with gamma rays and see what happens" is modifying the fuck out of the genome)
Once GM food is ubiquitous, maybe animals will be modified next
Again, you're a few millennia too late. Dogs vs wolves/wild canids, Pigs vs boars, Cows vs whatever went extinct after we domesticated cows.
and then humans
We've been doing that too. There's a hell of a lot of human features that do not make sense and are not seen in the "natural world". Like boobs. Human females have them for their entire life after puberty. Chimps and other close relatives only have appreciable breast tissue while breast-feeding. Every other mammal is similar to chimps in this regard. And lifelong boobs are not better at feeding children. So they probably came from artificial selection.
If you combine all those points, especially the third and fifth, then it seems that not being too liberal about GM technology and thinking this through in a bit more detail could be advisable
Your evidence that this "thinking though" did not happen? You not hearing about it isn't evidence. There actually was a good amount of study with test plots and measuring hybridization with wild types before widespread planting.
This experimentation inherently requires participation of the producer of the GMO - they have the seeds. USDA and FDA reviewed the results (in the US).
They also are lobbying very intensively against labelling GM food
So, my problem with this particular piece of the argument is you leave out that "Big Food" is on both sides of the GMO debate. And the fight over labeling exposes that.
A "GMO Free" label is easy to apply. You aren't forcing someone to do what they do not want to do - they're already happily growing without GMOs anyway.
A "GMO Free" label could follow the path used to create the "Organic" label - industry sets up a trade group to come up with standards, growers started following those standards, and pretty quickly the industry standard became a legal standard. Because everyone who was already doing it wanted the label and the extra money that came from it.
So why not do that with a "GMO Free" label? Money. Consumers who are afraid of GMOs can only buy products labeled "Organic" to avoid GMOs. And the profit for Organic is higher than the profit for conventionally-farmed non-GMO crops, but only as long as you give consumers a reason to pay a big premium....like avoidance of GMOs.
Forcing a "Contains GMOs" label created a fight with GMO producers, because they didn't want it. That fight helped amplify fears over GMOs and drive those consumers towards Organic. This fight delayed putting on label on the products that would give the consumers the information the fighters claim to want. The lack of a "GMO Free" label tells you it has
What do the experts say? Well, in Europe (where the experts are actually expert and therefore worth listening to), GMO is banned by scientific advice.
Nope. Growing GMOs is banned, importing GMOs is legal.
Growing is banned due to fears of the GMO spreading into the wild population. Basically, they want to see what happens in the US and other places first.
I don't see any problem with this. Ask an expert about a specific generation of GMO, not about GMO in the abstract. [...] Should we put blind faith in GMO? [...] I'd say no.
So we shouldn't evaluate it in the abstract...and then you evaluate it in the abstract.
Pesticide-enhanced crops? No, that's stupid
There are GMOs that produce bt (a pesticide) in the parts of the plant pests eat, but we do not. The alternative to this, which is used in organic farming, is to spray the crop with lots of bt. Waaaaay more than the GMO produces, affecting the local environment way more than the GMO crop, and leading to far more resistance - insects are more likely to get a less-than-lethal dose when you've got a gradient of pesticide. If it's all in the plant, you're going to get a lethal dose when they eat it.
Also, you're "evaluating it in the abstract" again.
Reducing farmland to an absolute minimum and re-wilding the relinquished land would go a long way to improving health globally.
Only when you forget cheap food causes far more obesity. Doritos are cheap. Salad is expensive. If you reduce farmland, that increases the cost of food, and people eat more Doritos because that's what they can afford.
The validity of a theory is tested by demonstrating its predictive powers. Repeated results
And when you do that a bunch of times you reach....a consensus.
Consensus in science has nothing to do with popularity. It means we've tested a particular subject from multiple angles, confirmed those tests, thus believe it to be true.
Experiments around the Higgs boson created a consensus that the Higgs boson exists. And that has continued the consensus that the Standard Model is accurate....for now.
Popularity doesn't come into play, except that things repeatedly shown to be true tend to be popular. Consensus in other areas (like politics) is about popularity.
That's not "consensus", dammit! The scientific method is not dependent on whether an idea is popular.
Yes, it is consensus. But like many things in science, the commonly-used definition of a word does not necessarily apply.
Scientific consensus means that a similar result has been achieved from a variety of experiments, so we believe the matter to be true. It has nothing to do with popularity. Though things that have been repeatedly proven to be true tend to be popular.
Confirmation is what you do to a single experiment or hypothesis. Consensus is used when discussing a broader area of knowledge. Multiple confirmations of GMOs not causing harm have lead to the consensus that GMOs do not cause harm.