Why can't I buy "Made in USA" for many things, even if I am willing to pay extra?
Because it's gone too far; sometimes, the US manufacturing capacity for an item just simply does not exist any more - it's atrophied due to all it's customers going off-shore. You could buy the item made in the USA if you're willing to pay extra - but "extra" in these cases would be the cost of re-establishing and constructing the entire factory. You'd have to find an awful lot of people who were willing to do likewise in order to distribute the cost enough to get it down to a reasonable margin.
If you don't understand this analogy, it's not because it's a meaningless analogy, it's because you're ignorant. Analogies are always above analysis; there's no such thing as a false analogy.
So, what you're advocating is firing all the Chinese workers, right?
Sorry, I'm trying hard to find a parallel between people who are employed by their own choice, and people who have been explicitly denied that choice. As far as I can see, they're diametrically opposed categories.
The west built it's industry through the industrial revolution - machines increasing productivity.
You might want to check the history of the industrial revolution a bit more carefully. Worker conditions in Foxconn factories look like paradise in comparison to conditions in England back then.
How are these two things contradictory? Yes, the west built it's industry through the industrial revolution. Yes, worker's conditions sucked - although they were still better that subsistence farming, which is why people worked there to begin with, and why Chinese factories can always find workers.
When the supply of workers equalized, the shoe was on the other foot, and the workers parleyed their experience and control of the labour force into higher wages, and better working conditions. There is some evidence that this may be happening in China already.
At least a part of the problem is that Adobe US will not willingly sell to an Australian. Actually, I don't know about Adobe, but that's the general problem they're trying to address. Companies are getting their US distributors to agree not to sell to Australians as part of their distribution agreement, specifically to stop Australians from getting them from overseas.
There's this thing, it's called the internet. It teleports stuff there by magic. At least a part of this investigation is into price discrimination on software.
It's not so much about high prices - it's about price discrimination. Yes, companies can charge whatever they damn well want for their software. And if they sell it for half the price in the US as compared to Australia, then customer's can damn well buy it wherever they want. And if companies introduce artificial barriers to stop the customers doing just that, that's when the government needs to smack them down.
No matter how much of a hurry they're in, they should be getting FDA approval (in the US). If the FDA is in too big a hurry than to actually do their job, then that's your problem right there.
That is not correct. You cannot unknowingly/unwittingly make a toxic hybrid, it is biologically impossible. In order to hybridize, the plants must already be of the same Genus.
I'm not sure what you're point is exactly. Solanum dulcamara and Solanum lycopersicum are the same genus as well. I agree that you're only going to get a toxic hybrid if one of the parents is toxic,
However, you can make a toxic hybrid by doing it intentionally.
But the initial post wasn't making any distinction. It was a broad "cross-polination good, genetic manipulation bad". I'd say we understand the mechanism behind cross-polination better than we do the ramifications of genetic insertion, but that's not quite as broad a brush as you were using in your original post. And although toxicity itself would be fairly easy to avoid in hybridization, it's fairly easy to make something that is "worse" for humans (whether you'd classify it as "dangerous" or not would be up to you) accidentally just by changing the nutrient balance in the plant - increasing sugar or fat content, say, or decreasing the level of a certain vitamin. You can also make the plant more susceptible to disease, more vulnerable to certain environmental conditions, etc.
I'm fairly sure that toxicity would be fairly easy to detect in GM food; any potential problems are likely to be a lot more subtle - along the lines of those traits that you could accidentally get from cross-polination.
Daubing pollen on plants is good. Daubing jellyfish on plants doesn't work. Splicing jellyfish into plants is a Bad Thing.
And yet, daubing pollen on plants can result in an otherwise-edible plant being turned into a toxic hybrid. In other words, hybridisation is not guaranteed to be non-harmful. So you can't really say that "daubing pollen on plants is good". Daubing may be good. It may be harmful. So we don't rely on the fact that the hybrid was created the "natural" way; we test the result. Other methods of GE are the same; they may be good, they may be harmful. Our conclusions should be based on testing the result of the process, not some ideological "natural is always better" creed.
Usually if an improved trait appears, you can cross it among other varieties to spread that trait, while not necessarily limiting the diversity of the crop as a whole. For instance, when we found crabapples were resistant to apple scab, we crossed them with full apples. Now many varieties of apple have some degree of apple scab resistance, but we still have a huge (and growing) variety of apples. Not so with Monsanto products, because growers are forbidden from breeding from them, so you cannot propagate their traits across varieties.
Do you think the geneticists developing the lines never heard of the Irish Potato Famine, or the TMSC corn failure of the 70's, or the fall of the Gros Michael banana?
Do you think they care? Or, more precisely, do you think the ethical geneticists are in charge of deciding whether to go to market with the products they develop? That's precisely what the OP was saying about short term vs. long term outlook. By the time the monoculture gets wiped out, the executive officer who instituted the policy will have made all his money, left with a golden handshake, and somebody else will be left holding the bag.
I did not know that was the reason behind the.docx thing.
Microsoft's file format switching actually originates from their wars with Lotus. Both sides were trying to obfuscate their file formats, and decode their competitors, so that only they would have a fully interoperable product. It may not have been intended to force users to upgrade, but it was definitely end-user hostile, and only done to benefit Microsoft. The.docx thing was actually because some countries were beginning to mandate open standard file formats, so MS whipped up a new one, paid people to show up and vote for it, and rammed it through the standardisation process.
So, pick randomly. I don't think people use internet dating for their super-awesome match-making heuristics, they use them so they can get exposure to a lot of maybe-interested people, without having to do things they are just not interested in, or intimidated by - like going to a club.
No. It's more like "Guy thinks he can forsee a sea-change in the way an industry works, buys up some of the industry, and then makes announcements about how the industry will change, possible encouraging the very change he's speculating on by virtue of his reputation."
If an electric bill is late does the entire city block lose power? GoDaddy's response makes no sense
Well, it sorta does. GoDaddy probably just suspended her account, and she had all her websites managed by the one account. Yeah, if your electricity bill is late, the entire block doesn't lose power, but it's not unreasonable to expect that your other properties might be declined service until you pay up (except for the fact that power companies are under special restrictions regarding disconnection, which makes it a sort of oranges-apples comparison).
I agree that suspending her account, when all they were required to do was block a single image, was more than they were required to do. However, knowing the excessively broad ToS hosting companies will usually put together, I imagine they have the right to terminate or suspend your account at any time. And suspending an account is probably a fairly simple action, whereas filtering a particular URL, or deleting a file and making sure it isn't re-uploaded, is likely more complex, unless they've already incorporated that sort of thing into their management software.
The spinoffs from Apollo did end up making it worthwhile but its not really clear you would get anything close to the same spinoffs going back. Apollo had to actually invent a lot of things to pull it off. If you go back to the moon you would mostly be revisiting technologies that have already been developed so the spinoffs would almost certainly be much less.
Yeah, but you wouldn't just be "going back". Building a long-term habitat on the moon is likely to bring about just as many - if not more - useful spinoffs. In fact, since the challenges that need to be met are largely centred around making a limited-resource environment friendly and liveable, I'd think their application would be even more direct, since we're all into the whole sustainable living/climate change/peak oil thing these days.
Right now it is possible to create software that can dip into content and swap out product placements and replace them with competitors products
Really, really badly. I watched a Region 4 DVD copy of Demolition Man recently, and almost fell out of my chair laughing. Apparently, Pizza Hut had managed to pony up more cash, or maybe it was just because Taco Bell doesn't have franchises here in Australia, but apparently the Italians beat the Mexicans in the franchise war in this edition. They'd digitally replaced all the signage, and, in true spaghetti-western fashion, had over-dubbed the change in voice without adjusting the lip-sync. It's a good thing Demolition Man already didn't take itself too seriously, or it would have totally broken the feel of the movie.
And therefore, we shouldn't complain about it when people with guns and money come after people who upset them? After all, if you upset them, you deserve it. They have more guns and money than you do, therefore they are right, and you are wrong.
It was the standard "I hate microsoft , but....(opposite argument)" troll
I believe what you call a troll, most rational people call "an argument". If you want to debunk his points, then actually debunk them, don't just try and smear the poster with ad hominem. Just to help you out, his arguments were:
1) MS-DOS wasn't that bad
2) Windows XP is viable
3) SCO is more evil that Microsoft Incidentally, the argument he was countering was that everything Microsoft has ever done is evil, and it is the most evil software company ever. If you've got time once you've demolished the above points, you can prove that argument for extra credit.
Such a decision would absolutely have to be appealed up to SCOTUS, and if necessary, reversed by an emergency act of Congress. It simply cannot be allowed to stand, as it would essentially end Western civilization as we know it. Imagine 90% of the world's servers becoming illegal overnight. Imagine the machines that run 75% of the world's stock markets becoming illegal overnight.
No, it wouldn't. Oh, it would if it were enforced uniformly and fairly, but nobody involved is interested in killing the goose. Among other things, that would show how divorced from reality the stupid decision would be, and, as you say would lead to it's revocation. If it does come to pass, the result would be a slow, but continuously growing, increase in the costs of everything technological, as parasites attach and start rent-seeking. It's really not different to the current patent situation in anything but scale. It may lead to the end faster, but in my opinion, the current state of "intellectual property" in the US is going to lead to the end anyway - where "the end" is the migration of anything innovative or productive out of the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't I buy "Made in USA" for many things, even if I am willing to pay extra?
Because it's gone too far; sometimes, the US manufacturing capacity for an item just simply does not exist any more - it's atrophied due to all it's customers going off-shore. You could buy the item made in the USA if you're willing to pay extra - but "extra" in these cases would be the cost of re-establishing and constructing the entire factory. You'd have to find an awful lot of people who were willing to do likewise in order to distribute the cost enough to get it down to a reasonable margin.
Your post is analogous to a German sausage.
If you don't understand this analogy, it's not because it's a meaningless analogy, it's because you're ignorant. Analogies are always above analysis; there's no such thing as a false analogy.
So, what you're advocating is firing all the Chinese workers, right?
Sorry, I'm trying hard to find a parallel between people who are employed by their own choice, and people who have been explicitly denied that choice. As far as I can see, they're diametrically opposed categories.
And by the way there is no "trickle down theory of economics".
There is - it's just not held by any economists. It was invented and held by politicians as a tool to help them sell the policies they wanted to make.
The west built it's industry through the industrial revolution - machines increasing productivity.
You might want to check the history of the industrial revolution a bit more carefully. Worker conditions in Foxconn factories look like paradise in comparison to conditions in England back then.
How are these two things contradictory? Yes, the west built it's industry through the industrial revolution. Yes, worker's conditions sucked - although they were still better that subsistence farming, which is why people worked there to begin with, and why Chinese factories can always find workers.
When the supply of workers equalized, the shoe was on the other foot, and the workers parleyed their experience and control of the labour force into higher wages, and better working conditions. There is some evidence that this may be happening in China already.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. Try again, troll.
At least a part of the problem is that Adobe US will not willingly sell to an Australian. Actually, I don't know about Adobe, but that's the general problem they're trying to address. Companies are getting their US distributors to agree not to sell to Australians as part of their distribution agreement, specifically to stop Australians from getting them from overseas.
shit doesn't just teleport there by magic
There's this thing, it's called the internet. It teleports stuff there by magic. At least a part of this investigation is into price discrimination on software.
It's not so much about high prices - it's about price discrimination. Yes, companies can charge whatever they damn well want for their software. And if they sell it for half the price in the US as compared to Australia, then customer's can damn well buy it wherever they want. And if companies introduce artificial barriers to stop the customers doing just that, that's when the government needs to smack them down.
No matter how much of a hurry they're in, they should be getting FDA approval (in the US). If the FDA is in too big a hurry than to actually do their job, then that's your problem right there.
That is not correct. You cannot unknowingly/unwittingly make a toxic hybrid, it is biologically impossible. In order to hybridize, the plants must already be of the same Genus.
I'm not sure what you're point is exactly. Solanum dulcamara and Solanum lycopersicum are the same genus as well. I agree that you're only going to get a toxic hybrid if one of the parents is toxic,
However, you can make a toxic hybrid by doing it intentionally.
But the initial post wasn't making any distinction. It was a broad "cross-polination good, genetic manipulation bad". I'd say we understand the mechanism behind cross-polination better than we do the ramifications of genetic insertion, but that's not quite as broad a brush as you were using in your original post. And although toxicity itself would be fairly easy to avoid in hybridization, it's fairly easy to make something that is "worse" for humans (whether you'd classify it as "dangerous" or not would be up to you) accidentally just by changing the nutrient balance in the plant - increasing sugar or fat content, say, or decreasing the level of a certain vitamin. You can also make the plant more susceptible to disease, more vulnerable to certain environmental conditions, etc.
I'm fairly sure that toxicity would be fairly easy to detect in GM food; any potential problems are likely to be a lot more subtle - along the lines of those traits that you could accidentally get from cross-polination.
Daubing pollen on plants is good. Daubing jellyfish on plants doesn't work. Splicing jellyfish into plants is a Bad Thing.
And yet, daubing pollen on plants can result in an otherwise-edible plant being turned into a toxic hybrid. In other words, hybridisation is not guaranteed to be non-harmful. So you can't really say that "daubing pollen on plants is good". Daubing may be good. It may be harmful. So we don't rely on the fact that the hybrid was created the "natural" way; we test the result. Other methods of GE are the same; they may be good, they may be harmful. Our conclusions should be based on testing the result of the process, not some ideological "natural is always better" creed.
Usually if an improved trait appears, you can cross it among other varieties to spread that trait, while not necessarily limiting the diversity of the crop as a whole. For instance, when we found crabapples were resistant to apple scab, we crossed them with full apples. Now many varieties of apple have some degree of apple scab resistance, but we still have a huge (and growing) variety of apples. Not so with Monsanto products, because growers are forbidden from breeding from them, so you cannot propagate their traits across varieties.
Do you think the geneticists developing the lines never heard of the Irish Potato Famine, or the TMSC corn failure of the 70's, or the fall of the Gros Michael banana?
Do you think they care? Or, more precisely, do you think the ethical geneticists are in charge of deciding whether to go to market with the products they develop? That's precisely what the OP was saying about short term vs. long term outlook. By the time the monoculture gets wiped out, the executive officer who instituted the policy will have made all his money, left with a golden handshake, and somebody else will be left holding the bag.
I did not know that was the reason behind the .docx thing.
Microsoft's file format switching actually originates from their wars with Lotus. Both sides were trying to obfuscate their file formats, and decode their competitors, so that only they would have a fully interoperable product. It may not have been intended to force users to upgrade, but it was definitely end-user hostile, and only done to benefit Microsoft. The .docx thing was actually because some countries were beginning to mandate open standard file formats, so MS whipped up a new one, paid people to show up and vote for it, and rammed it through the standardisation process.
Capitalism defeated Communism, you know.
Cool, then lets operate on capitalistic principles. You know, the ones that assume an informed consumer
So, pick randomly. I don't think people use internet dating for their super-awesome match-making heuristics, they use them so they can get exposure to a lot of maybe-interested people, without having to do things they are just not interested in, or intimidated by - like going to a club.
No. It's more like "Guy thinks he can forsee a sea-change in the way an industry works, buys up some of the industry, and then makes announcements about how the industry will change, possible encouraging the very change he's speculating on by virtue of his reputation."
If an electric bill is late does the entire city block lose power? GoDaddy's response makes no sense
Well, it sorta does. GoDaddy probably just suspended her account, and she had all her websites managed by the one account. Yeah, if your electricity bill is late, the entire block doesn't lose power, but it's not unreasonable to expect that your other properties might be declined service until you pay up (except for the fact that power companies are under special restrictions regarding disconnection, which makes it a sort of oranges-apples comparison).
I agree that suspending her account, when all they were required to do was block a single image, was more than they were required to do. However, knowing the excessively broad ToS hosting companies will usually put together, I imagine they have the right to terminate or suspend your account at any time. And suspending an account is probably a fairly simple action, whereas filtering a particular URL, or deleting a file and making sure it isn't re-uploaded, is likely more complex, unless they've already incorporated that sort of thing into their management software.
The spinoffs from Apollo did end up making it worthwhile but its not really clear you would get anything close to the same spinoffs going back. Apollo had to actually invent a lot of things to pull it off. If you go back to the moon you would mostly be revisiting technologies that have already been developed so the spinoffs would almost certainly be much less.
Yeah, but you wouldn't just be "going back". Building a long-term habitat on the moon is likely to bring about just as many - if not more - useful spinoffs. In fact, since the challenges that need to be met are largely centred around making a limited-resource environment friendly and liveable, I'd think their application would be even more direct, since we're all into the whole sustainable living/climate change/peak oil thing these days.
Right now it is possible to create software that can dip into content and swap out product placements and replace them with competitors products
Really, really badly. I watched a Region 4 DVD copy of Demolition Man recently, and almost fell out of my chair laughing. Apparently, Pizza Hut had managed to pony up more cash, or maybe it was just because Taco Bell doesn't have franchises here in Australia, but apparently the Italians beat the Mexicans in the franchise war in this edition. They'd digitally replaced all the signage, and, in true spaghetti-western fashion, had over-dubbed the change in voice without adjusting the lip-sync. It's a good thing Demolition Man already didn't take itself too seriously, or it would have totally broken the feel of the movie.
And by those who don't equate practical authority with moral authority!
Either you really do have the morality of a particularly sociopathic cockroach, or you're shilling for the mafia.
I was wondering how long it would take some troll to raise the utterly irrelevant controversy over embryonic stem cells.
And therefore, we shouldn't complain about it when people with guns and money come after people who upset them? After all, if you upset them, you deserve it. They have more guns and money than you do, therefore they are right, and you are wrong.
It was the standard "I hate microsoft , but....(opposite argument)" troll
I believe what you call a troll, most rational people call "an argument". If you want to debunk his points, then actually debunk them, don't just try and smear the poster with ad hominem. Just to help you out, his arguments were:
1) MS-DOS wasn't that bad
2) Windows XP is viable
3) SCO is more evil that Microsoft
Incidentally, the argument he was countering was that everything Microsoft has ever done is evil, and it is the most evil software company ever. If you've got time once you've demolished the above points, you can prove that argument for extra credit.
Go to it!
Such a decision would absolutely have to be appealed up to SCOTUS, and if necessary, reversed by an emergency act of Congress. It simply cannot be allowed to stand, as it would essentially end Western civilization as we know it. Imagine 90% of the world's servers becoming illegal overnight. Imagine the machines that run 75% of the world's stock markets becoming illegal overnight.
No, it wouldn't. Oh, it would if it were enforced uniformly and fairly, but nobody involved is interested in killing the goose. Among other things, that would show how divorced from reality the stupid decision would be, and, as you say would lead to it's revocation. If it does come to pass, the result would be a slow, but continuously growing, increase in the costs of everything technological, as parasites attach and start rent-seeking. It's really not different to the current patent situation in anything but scale. It may lead to the end faster, but in my opinion, the current state of "intellectual property" in the US is going to lead to the end anyway - where "the end" is the migration of anything innovative or productive out of the US.