The one you are talking about (the one that looked like a K-car) did have a V-8 available: the same 5.0 that powered the Mustang. The next generation did away with the 8 completely, and it was a shame because the car actually looked good for its time. They fixed it within 2 years by offering the 5.0 again, but it was a weird decision.
Um, no, but it beats strip mining to get new metals.
And no batteries will be dumped
I could be way off here, but my understanding is that they are valuable enough to discourage dumping.
burn in crashes,
Who cares if that happens?
fall off ships into the sea
There is a large incentive not to have your valuable cargo fall into the sea.
Remember that the alternative to batteries is some other energy storage method or fossil fuels, which also have drawbacks. It is impossible for humans to have zero impact on the planet.
All those overhead wires are expensive to maintain. We have them in Philadelphia, too - but most buses are diesel (or diesel electric). They are also harder to manage - they can only go where you have lines installed, they can't be swapped with the bus pool for the rest of the city, they are custom-manufactured, they can't follow detours, etc.
But if you live in the neighborhood, they are really nice. They are quite and don't stink.
Diesels might be better than hybrids, but they suffer the same problems. To get equivalent-to-gasoline performance, you pay about a $5000 premium and get a significant weight penalty. That's a lot of gas! Though you get some of it back at resale. People are also under the misconception that MPG is meaningful when comparing gas and diesel, which is frustrating since diesel contains more energy (and carbon) and thus takes more crude oil to produce. You still end up with greater efficiency, but the payback period is very long and depends on your style of driving.
The original '53 Vette was a dog, and was panned as such. It had a two-speed automatic transmission, for goodness sakes. It sold so poorly that they only made a few 1955 models (with the V-8) to make sure that they could sell out of the '54s. The 1956 is the first one that most people would actually recognize as a Corvette, and it had an amazing amount of power for the time.
Sometimes people need to step back and answer the question: why do we need corporations? Followed by: what is the minimum amount of regulation we need to do to enable that? I think they are too powerful currently - either over or under regulated, depending on your frame of reference. From the perspective of a free market with no government regulation (and thus no corporations), there is too much power granted to the corporations - too much regulation or interference in the free market.
Well, it implies a certain amount of testing. It's not just "we threw something that looks like a battery into a person", and it probably won't "change your body chemistry" in any significant way.
fail to acknowledge that GMO is in fact distinct (or was at one time) AND genetically distinguishable from naturally occurring strains of wheat.
The same can be said of every mutation we have bred into all of our crops. Corn is so different from it's naturally occurring parent plant that we had trouble settling the matter scientifically until genetic testing became available. All of those vastly different heirloom tomatoes you are so fond of have the same parent plant as the flavorless globs of red that populate the store shelves - and you can identify them genetically.
The idea of 'scientific value' is in the eye of the scientist/beholder and you've hardly provided any concise definition of 'scientific value.'.
Science is not "in the eye of the beholder". Science is a method of discovery. By no scientific standard can you make a case for distinctly labeling GMOs. And I'd argue that if you could build such a case, you shouldn't be selling them at all. If Roundup-ready corn ever shows problems beyond a single rat study, yank that crap off the shelves. Or if it turns out to be the Roundup and not the GMO, stop letting them spray Roundup all over food crops.
You could, and people do, make the "abundance of caution" case, but it is impossible to prove with absolute certainty that any food is safe. I don't think 90 day rat studies are sufficient, so I agree with the anti-GMO crowd that regulation and standards need to increase. That said, GMO soybeans have been on the market for almost 20 years now and I've not seen a single study implicating them in any kind of health issue. Coffee, on the other hand, is the subject of many a questionable study and it has an active ingredient with known health implications. Why is your bar higher for GMO than for coffee?
until you consider that containment of GMO crops is not really possible, which is the thrust of the original article what we are all commenting on.
I agree that this is a serious development. They might need to completely overhaul the way they do testing of unapproved products. Then again, it might be a "Willy found a bag of seed in his truck" kind of thing. But it is very important that we find out what happened.
Strictly speaking, you cannot assert this.
Fair enough, but the same thing applies to your trying to pin it on GMOs. There is no evidence in that regard - and a cursory experiment would be simple and cheap.
more likely to completely fill an ecosystem than a strain that lacks such an advantage.
I don't think there are many (any?) food crops that will fill any ecosystem. We've bred them for traits that suit us, not their environments. Fallow fields quickly go to weeds and brush. I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to outdo billions of years of natural selection, no matter how good our genetic engineering is.
Monsanto has been bankrupting farmers who grow crops if they don't pay up their Monsanto license but happen to have Monsanto genes in their crops.
That statement is true but misleading. All of the court cases I'm aware of involve a farmer spraying his field with Roundup and then replanting the surviving plants - all the time aware of what he was doing. Now, I happen to be fairly anti-IP law, so I find the fact that this business model is encouraged by our laws to be somewhat infuriating. But I have to admit, these farmers were actively trying to find a loophole, not just innocent victims of Monsanto.
Perhaps more frighteningly, I'm imagining a scenario where we've been growing 'seedless' wheat for years that displaces the naturally-reproducing wheat. Aside from the dangers of a single company dominating supply to seeds, what happens when the seed supply gets interrupted? The Irish Potato Famine is a great case study for what happens when a stable crop fails.
Remember cigarettes? They went through the regulatory process.
They were regulated for the quality of the tobacco, but tobacco itself was not put through safety tests (obviously).
I find it ironic that you are placing your faith in 'the regulatory process' and then arbitrarily taking issue with another form of regulation.
I have to place my faith in the regulatory process. I cannot inspect the slaughterhouse that I buy my meat from by myself. I am not equipped to measure mold toxins in my juice. I have no way to check for harmful microbes in my fresh vegetables. I cannot tell whether a farmer used a dangerous insecticide. If the regulatory process is letting unsafe stuff make it to the grocery store, then I am 100% certain that I want the process fixed, because I depend on it.
arbitrarily taking issue with another form of regulation.
There is nothing arbitrary about it - I oppose requiring producers to affix labels that have no scientific value. It adds cost and accounting issues with no demonstrated value. It wastes regulatory time and money as the regulators make sure that this meaningless gesture is being followed properly. And for all that, there is already a "non-GMO" label: "organic".
As for 'demonstrable harm,' how about Colony Collapse Disorder (i.e., the mass bee die-offs). Seems to me that harm has been demonstrated [albeit only indirectly against humans] but the source of harm has not yet been found.
I fully support taking action to stop CCD once we know the cause. GMO stickers will not help bees.
The point of labels is to help a consumer make wise choices according to their own judgement and conscience, possibly to avoid or prevent such harm.
How can you call a choice based on zero scientific evidence "wise"? In any case, any consumer so inclined is likely already buying "organic".
Personally, I like knowing the nutritional content of things I eat and am grateful for that type of regulation.
You'll notice that those labels are only required for manufactured foods. I'm 100% in agreement with you on those labels - we have no natural ability to discern a good from a bad manufactured food, though they are pretty much all bad:)
And lastly, what about flavor.
Penn and Teller did a hilarious (but biased) episode of "Bullshit" on this. They quite obviously selected produce that would favor the conventionally grown product, but it was still funny and they made a solid point: organic can be just as flavorless as conventional. There's nothing inherent in a GMO regarding flavor.
Imagine a GMO tomato which has no "demonstrable" harmful effects on one's health but which, through natural forms of dispersion such as bees or even the wind, totally contaminates my delicious heirloom tomato crop with some kind of uber-dominant strain of tasteless MonSanTomato. Is this not "demonstrable harm?"
It certainly would be, but notice that you had to use the word "imagine". Tomatoes are probably a bad example since they self-pollinate, but your point is valid. The nice thing about demonstrated harm is that represents a valid lawsuit in civil court. Seed companies probably have a strong incentive to make their plants sterile in any case.
Excluded methods. A variety of methods used to genetically modify organisms or influence their growth and development by means that are not possible under natural conditions or processes and are not considered compatible with organic production. Such methods include cell fusion, microencapsulation and macroencapsulation, and recombinant DNA technology (including gene deletion, gene doubling, introducing a foreign gene, and changing the positions of genes when achieved by recombinant DNA technology). Such methods do not include the use of traditional breeding, conjugation, fermentation, hybridization, in vitro fertilization, or tissue culture.
NOBODY is properly testing this stuff,
If you believe that to be the case, then you should be demanding that the regulatory agencies do a better job. They are supposed to be insuring the safety of our food supply.
I'd like to know if it's the kind that's been shown to grow massive tumors in mice.
It was rats, in a single study. If everything that caused tumors in rats were labeled, the label would be almost meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, I think that paper was reason for concern, and it's not all that fantastic to think that eating an herbicide might have health effects. At the same time, if there is evidence that the product is unsafe in humans, it should be removed from market - not simply labeled. If you want to be prudent and avoid the product in the study, that is a simple matter of sticking with organic corn - non-GMO corn is probably close to non-existent in conventional products.
This pill uses magnesium (and copper as the cathode, which should stay intact), so no worries. You need around 400mg/day just to stay healthy. The pill is FDA and CE certified.
If people want to make a choice, then surely they should have the necessary information to make that choice?
It's up to them. They can be "safe" and buy organic right now without doing any research at all. If they want to buy conventional products, they'd need to do some research - but it's a good bet that anything containing soy, rapeseed (Canola), or corn is GMO. I do not think it is the government's job to make sure that everyone is educated about their pet cause.
Also, a product that prides itself in not using GMO plants should have the right to label it?
I think that is a fine idea. A voluntary "Contains no GMO" label is fine.
If companies like Monsanto are so afraid, why are they preventing other companies communicating something like this?
They are afraid that their product will have a stigma attached to it. That doesn't mean we need to let them have their way.
Fixing the regulatory process is hard, when the entities that are meant to be regulated are often in collusion.
Agreed. But the solution is not to slap meaningless labels all over stuff at the producer's expense. It's the same issue as the crazy San Francisco idea of labeling cell phones with their power output.
If farmers can't sell their wheat, then they will stop buying GMO seed.
This already happened. Monsanto had no market for GMO wheat, so they didn't bother getting it approved. Eventually, Europeans will see that we've been eating GMO soybeans and corn for decades without any kind of health effects, and they might allow it. Or, more likely, someone will crossbreed the same traits using traditional methods and it will no longer be "GMO" since they mutation occurred on God's schedule.
I feel strongly against additional labeling on something that has been through our regulatory process, especially when anyone who cares can just buy "organic" labeled products. If there is a real danger in these foods, we need to fix our regulatory process.
And if you are going to label something that has no demonstrable harm, don't you then need to label things that have some science behind it? There's a certain amount of irony in selling a steak with a label warning about the feed containing something that is probably harmless, only to take it home and grill it, which then makes it a mutagen. (Grilled veggies would suffer the same fate.) Mustard and coffee are known mutagens. Organic products can be treated with "naturally-derived" pesticides (how's that for an arbitrary distinction?), each of which are obviously bio-active. You would have a multi-page MSDS on every pear.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, diesels definitely last longer - though many now are turbo diesels which tend to die faster.
The one you are talking about (the one that looked like a K-car) did have a V-8 available: the same 5.0 that powered the Mustang. The next generation did away with the 8 completely, and it was a shame because the car actually looked good for its time. They fixed it within 2 years by offering the 5.0 again, but it was a weird decision.
And recycling is magically pollution free?
Um, no, but it beats strip mining to get new metals.
And no batteries will be dumped
I could be way off here, but my understanding is that they are valuable enough to discourage dumping.
burn in crashes,
Who cares if that happens?
fall off ships into the sea
There is a large incentive not to have your valuable cargo fall into the sea.
Remember that the alternative to batteries is some other energy storage method or fossil fuels, which also have drawbacks. It is impossible for humans to have zero impact on the planet.
That is an area fraught with subjectivity :)
All those overhead wires are expensive to maintain. We have them in Philadelphia, too - but most buses are diesel (or diesel electric). They are also harder to manage - they can only go where you have lines installed, they can't be swapped with the bus pool for the rest of the city, they are custom-manufactured, they can't follow detours, etc.
But if you live in the neighborhood, they are really nice. They are quite and don't stink.
Batteries - even the old lead acid kind - are recycled as a rule and not as an exception.
I agree with most of your post, but Tesla has only announced an intention to pay back the loan early - they have not actually done so.
Diesels might be better than hybrids, but they suffer the same problems. To get equivalent-to-gasoline performance, you pay about a $5000 premium and get a significant weight penalty. That's a lot of gas! Though you get some of it back at resale. People are also under the misconception that MPG is meaningful when comparing gas and diesel, which is frustrating since diesel contains more energy (and carbon) and thus takes more crude oil to produce. You still end up with greater efficiency, but the payback period is very long and depends on your style of driving.
You aren't kidding... those things can almost keep up with my minivan!
The original '53 Vette was a dog, and was panned as such. It had a two-speed automatic transmission, for goodness sakes. It sold so poorly that they only made a few 1955 models (with the V-8) to make sure that they could sell out of the '54s. The 1956 is the first one that most people would actually recognize as a Corvette, and it had an amazing amount of power for the time.
Sometimes people need to step back and answer the question: why do we need corporations? Followed by: what is the minimum amount of regulation we need to do to enable that? I think they are too powerful currently - either over or under regulated, depending on your frame of reference. From the perspective of a free market with no government regulation (and thus no corporations), there is too much power granted to the corporations - too much regulation or interference in the free market.
Well, it implies a certain amount of testing. It's not just "we threw something that looks like a battery into a person", and it probably won't "change your body chemistry" in any significant way.
fail to acknowledge that GMO is in fact distinct (or was at one time) AND genetically distinguishable from naturally occurring strains of wheat.
The same can be said of every mutation we have bred into all of our crops. Corn is so different from it's naturally occurring parent plant that we had trouble settling the matter scientifically until genetic testing became available. All of those vastly different heirloom tomatoes you are so fond of have the same parent plant as the flavorless globs of red that populate the store shelves - and you can identify them genetically.
The idea of 'scientific value' is in the eye of the scientist/beholder and you've hardly provided any concise definition of 'scientific value.'.
Science is not "in the eye of the beholder". Science is a method of discovery. By no scientific standard can you make a case for distinctly labeling GMOs. And I'd argue that if you could build such a case, you shouldn't be selling them at all. If Roundup-ready corn ever shows problems beyond a single rat study, yank that crap off the shelves. Or if it turns out to be the Roundup and not the GMO, stop letting them spray Roundup all over food crops.
You could, and people do, make the "abundance of caution" case, but it is impossible to prove with absolute certainty that any food is safe. I don't think 90 day rat studies are sufficient, so I agree with the anti-GMO crowd that regulation and standards need to increase. That said, GMO soybeans have been on the market for almost 20 years now and I've not seen a single study implicating them in any kind of health issue. Coffee, on the other hand, is the subject of many a questionable study and it has an active ingredient with known health implications. Why is your bar higher for GMO than for coffee?
until you consider that containment of GMO crops is not really possible, which is the thrust of the original article what we are all commenting on.
I agree that this is a serious development. They might need to completely overhaul the way they do testing of unapproved products. Then again, it might be a "Willy found a bag of seed in his truck" kind of thing. But it is very important that we find out what happened.
Strictly speaking, you cannot assert this.
Fair enough, but the same thing applies to your trying to pin it on GMOs. There is no evidence in that regard - and a cursory experiment would be simple and cheap.
more likely to completely fill an ecosystem than a strain that lacks such an advantage.
I don't think there are many (any?) food crops that will fill any ecosystem. We've bred them for traits that suit us, not their environments. Fallow fields quickly go to weeds and brush. I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to outdo billions of years of natural selection, no matter how good our genetic engineering is.
Monsanto has been bankrupting farmers who grow crops if they don't pay up their Monsanto license but happen to have Monsanto genes in their crops.
That statement is true but misleading. All of the court cases I'm aware of involve a farmer spraying his field with Roundup and then replanting the surviving plants - all the time aware of what he was doing. Now, I happen to be fairly anti-IP law, so I find the fact that this business model is encouraged by our laws to be somewhat infuriating. But I have to admit, these farmers were actively trying to find a loophole, not just innocent victims of Monsanto.
Perhaps more frighteningly, I'm imagining a scenario where we've been growing 'seedless' wheat for years that displaces the naturally-reproducing wheat. Aside from the dangers of a single company dominating supply to seeds, what happens when the seed supply gets interrupted? The Irish Potato Famine is a great case study for what happens when a stable crop fails.
Yes, we do have somethi
Remember cigarettes? They went through the regulatory process.
They were regulated for the quality of the tobacco, but tobacco itself was not put through safety tests (obviously).
I find it ironic that you are placing your faith in 'the regulatory process' and then arbitrarily taking issue with another form of regulation.
I have to place my faith in the regulatory process. I cannot inspect the slaughterhouse that I buy my meat from by myself. I am not equipped to measure mold toxins in my juice. I have no way to check for harmful microbes in my fresh vegetables. I cannot tell whether a farmer used a dangerous insecticide. If the regulatory process is letting unsafe stuff make it to the grocery store, then I am 100% certain that I want the process fixed, because I depend on it.
arbitrarily taking issue with another form of regulation.
There is nothing arbitrary about it - I oppose requiring producers to affix labels that have no scientific value. It adds cost and accounting issues with no demonstrated value. It wastes regulatory time and money as the regulators make sure that this meaningless gesture is being followed properly. And for all that, there is already a "non-GMO" label: "organic".
As for 'demonstrable harm,' how about Colony Collapse Disorder (i.e., the mass bee die-offs). Seems to me that harm has been demonstrated [albeit only indirectly against humans] but the source of harm has not yet been found.
I fully support taking action to stop CCD once we know the cause. GMO stickers will not help bees.
The point of labels is to help a consumer make wise choices according to their own judgement and conscience, possibly to avoid or prevent such harm.
How can you call a choice based on zero scientific evidence "wise"? In any case, any consumer so inclined is likely already buying "organic".
Personally, I like knowing the nutritional content of things I eat and am grateful for that type of regulation.
You'll notice that those labels are only required for manufactured foods. I'm 100% in agreement with you on those labels - we have no natural ability to discern a good from a bad manufactured food, though they are pretty much all bad :)
And lastly, what about flavor.
Penn and Teller did a hilarious (but biased) episode of "Bullshit" on this. They quite obviously selected produce that would favor the conventionally grown product, but it was still funny and they made a solid point: organic can be just as flavorless as conventional. There's nothing inherent in a GMO regarding flavor.
Imagine a GMO tomato which has no "demonstrable" harmful effects on one's health but which, through natural forms of dispersion such as bees or even the wind, totally contaminates my delicious heirloom tomato crop with some kind of uber-dominant strain of tasteless MonSanTomato. Is this not "demonstrable harm?"
It certainly would be, but notice that you had to use the word "imagine". Tomatoes are probably a bad example since they self-pollinate, but your point is valid. The nice thing about demonstrated harm is that represents a valid lawsuit in civil court. Seed companies probably have a strong incentive to make their plants sterile in any case.
Sorry, turns out it uses magnesium (with a copper cathode), which you need around 400mg of per day to stay healthy. The pill is FDA and CE certified.
That would be great if "organic" actually meant it did not contain any GMOs. That is not currently the case.
Where did you get your information? US and Canadian "Organic" labelled foods must not be GMO.
From USDA:
NOBODY is properly testing this stuff,
If you believe that to be the case, then you should be demanding that the regulatory agencies do a better job. They are supposed to be insuring the safety of our food supply.
I'd like to know if it's the kind that's been shown to grow massive tumors in mice.
It was rats, in a single study. If everything that caused tumors in rats were labeled, the label would be almost meaningless.
Don't get me wrong, I think that paper was reason for concern, and it's not all that fantastic to think that eating an herbicide might have health effects. At the same time, if there is evidence that the product is unsafe in humans, it should be removed from market - not simply labeled. If you want to be prudent and avoid the product in the study, that is a simple matter of sticking with organic corn - non-GMO corn is probably close to non-existent in conventional products.
This pill uses magnesium (and copper as the cathode, which should stay intact), so no worries. You need around 400mg/day just to stay healthy. The pill is FDA and CE certified.
If people want to make a choice, then surely they should have the necessary information to make that choice?
It's up to them. They can be "safe" and buy organic right now without doing any research at all. If they want to buy conventional products, they'd need to do some research - but it's a good bet that anything containing soy, rapeseed (Canola), or corn is GMO. I do not think it is the government's job to make sure that everyone is educated about their pet cause.
Also, a product that prides itself in not using GMO plants should have the right to label it?
I think that is a fine idea. A voluntary "Contains no GMO" label is fine.
If companies like Monsanto are so afraid, why are they preventing other companies communicating something like this?
They are afraid that their product will have a stigma attached to it. That doesn't mean we need to let them have their way.
Fixing the regulatory process is hard, when the entities that are meant to be regulated are often in collusion.
Agreed. But the solution is not to slap meaningless labels all over stuff at the producer's expense. It's the same issue as the crazy San Francisco idea of labeling cell phones with their power output.
A dollar? Hell, in Philly the bums only ask for a quarter when they hold the door open for you. You must have high alcohol prices.
If farmers can't sell their wheat, then they will stop buying GMO seed.
This already happened. Monsanto had no market for GMO wheat, so they didn't bother getting it approved. Eventually, Europeans will see that we've been eating GMO soybeans and corn for decades without any kind of health effects, and they might allow it. Or, more likely, someone will crossbreed the same traits using traditional methods and it will no longer be "GMO" since they mutation occurred on God's schedule.
It's another idiot who gets their news from Facebook:
Here's the hoax that was floating around.
It ain't French. It was founded in St. Louis over 100 years ago. It is as American as genetically-engineered apple pie.
I feel strongly against additional labeling on something that has been through our regulatory process, especially when anyone who cares can just buy "organic" labeled products. If there is a real danger in these foods, we need to fix our regulatory process.
And if you are going to label something that has no demonstrable harm, don't you then need to label things that have some science behind it? There's a certain amount of irony in selling a steak with a label warning about the feed containing something that is probably harmless, only to take it home and grill it, which then makes it a mutagen. (Grilled veggies would suffer the same fate.) Mustard and coffee are known mutagens. Organic products can be treated with "naturally-derived" pesticides (how's that for an arbitrary distinction?), each of which are obviously bio-active. You would have a multi-page MSDS on every pear.
So use zinc?
I change my body chemistry all the time, just for recreation. If this thing is powered by booze, I'm all for it.