> There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
I don't think the case law supports this argument that farmers got roped into subscription crops. Farmers use this system because it has value, and is economically superior to the systems that preceded it (or they don't use it).
There is a problem though. If you opt out of it and just use seeds without any IP and your neighbor uses IP seeds and some of the seeds are blowing into your field from your neighbour you risk trouble.
Source that it is legal to keep the profits and the plants from a patented crop that can’t be prove you have intentionally planted it there? As far as I understand Montosanto claims it would always belong to them no matter how the seed ended up there.
Feel free to cite the case they've brought where they claim that!
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
There is absolutely no case law suggesting it is illegal to harvest and keep accidentally cross contaminated seed. Seeing as farming seeds is default legal there would need to be precedent otherwise for such an act to be illegal.
> Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
Cigarettes exist solely to keep people smoking, they’re an insidious product. It’s a corporation weaponizing addiction to profit while causing cancer and COPD. You’re either addicted, or you aren’t. There are no pleasurable psychoactive effects, only relief from nicotine withdrawal. Humans are better off without tobacco, or cigarettes at least.
This solution at least lets the current addicts maintain their addiction, but there are much safer ways to get nicotine these days if you want it, lozenges, vapes, pouches.
I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.
At least in parts of Eastern Europe (especially the former GDR) district heating systems were introduced as a response to the oil crises of the 70s, resulting price shocks and the transport of coal to households being very labor and resource incentive [1].
It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy, and also the US is special case since we have dirt cheap natural gas that is used for heating.
Digging up streets to run distribution lines, running service drops to every existing house, installing a heat exchanger and valves in every house is astronomically expensive given the amount of energy used by a single residence.
If you’re building out a new neighborhood on a greenspace plot, installing the district heating/cooling piping is much cheaper since you’re already laying electric, water, sewer, and mane gas lines.
Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat. We have been able to do this for a very long time. So if people aren't really doing it much, its not economical. If it was now becoming economical, the article would describe some new way of doing it that makes it economical. The article doesn't, so you "know" it isn't.
PS This has been tried many time, it only works in very specific situations, usually places where building a full PP doesn't make sense or where you are making a lot of electricity for some other purpose (mining usually).
Sometimes district heating and electricity generation does combine though:
> Wärtsilä’s combined power generation and heat recovery plant offering comprises solutions for combined heat and power (CHP) including dynamic district heating (DDH), district cooling and power (DCAP) and trigeneration for applications that require both heating and cooling.
Not always, but as the sibling noted, there are plenty of combined heat and power plants. They recover as much of the energy as possible from the exhaust gas streams and run pretty efficiently.
I have plenty of chemical dependency medical records, it has had zero impact on me at all (the records, not the chemical dependency). Heroin and alcohol.
Your medical records can only be viewed if you approve access, and employers are not allowed to ask for medical records. Foreign countries can’t see your medical records when you apply for a visa.
Possibly it could impact life insurance if you need to turn over medical records, but my life insurance policy was written after my drug abuse days so I don’t think it would matter.
> Prime example is Mercedes. The RRP for post-tariff Mercedes vehicles was identical to the pre-tariff RRP.
If your prime example is a luxury car with a ton of margin built in, you need a better example. Tariffed commodities absolutely had the costs passed on, and far more of those are sold than high margin luxury products where manufacturers had the option to compress margins vs passing on the cost.
Also, there are lots of products that go through multiple middle men, the tariffs were included and marked up at every stage. Very few things go from manufacturer to retailer with no middlemen.
I’d guess about 1/4 to 1/3rd of tariff costs were absorbed and the rest passed along to the eventual end consumer.
I suspect you work nowhere near the money at work, the closer you get to the money, the more you realize exactly what is built into a price.
Substitution with lower cost items happens when prices go up and that is factored into CPI data. I’m not sure how the basket of goods has changed over the past year, but substitution of goods does happen when prices go up.
Corporate profits grew throughout the tariffs, if they were absorbing the majority of the tariff cost instead of passing it on, it would’ve affected publicly traded company earnings, but it hasn’t.
I initially thought the same thing, but there is a human listed as the photographer, Mark Abramson. The photo has been processed, but it’s not AI generated.
You can’t conjure up a bottle of vodka or a pack of cigarettes out of thin air in your bedroom with a cheap Wi-Fi only Android phone, but you can use that cheap Android phone to access social media.
That’s why I said it depends on the enforcement mechanism. If they require an ID or a credit card then it’s roughly analogous to getting someone to by beer for you.
The only people with a relatively healthy outlook on modern socia media (by this I mean not using it) and ability to detect bullshit are a slice of Millenials that grew up on the pseudonymous internet that transitioned into the real name public internet, birth years from early 80s to early 90s mostly. Before or after that, Gen X were already adults and Gen Z grew up (became teens) with Snapchat/Instagram already existing.
Outside of this group (which happens to be my peer group) I see a noticeable drop in media literacy and ability to detect bullshit, but that may just be a blind spot for me since I’m part of the aforementioned Millenial group.
> We wanted to stabilize the region, so we greenlit Israel's rampage in Lebanon
Consider this hypothetical situation. Iran funds a terrorist group operating in Tijuana to fire rockets across the border into San Diego. Assume the Mexican government is not organized enough to stop the terrorists from firing rockets.
What do you think the response of the US Government would be? Please recall what we did after 9/11 before answering.
Israel isn’t invading Egypt and Jordan, I wonder if it’s because there’s no Iran-funded terrorist groups firing rockets from those countries or if there’s some other reason.
Israel definitely has blood on their hands, but how do you suggest they deal with terrorist groups funded by Iran operating in lawless areas of neighboring countries that are firing rockets at civilians in Israel?
Israel has been invaded by all of its neighbors simultaneously more than once, it’s a pretty complex situation that spans over a hundred years. Europeans and Arab nations (aside from the Ottomans) treated Jews like shit for centuries, pogroms and holocausts and expulsions and forced migrations. No wonder they want to keep the nation of Israel around, everyone else has tried exterminating them. Just try not to be so reductionist and polarizing about it, it’s a complex historical situation with many shades of gray.
I know my opinion is probably unpopular around here, but it’s how I see it. Israel has done some horrible shit, but they aren’t just rampaging against any non Jew in sight, there were Hezbollah operatives constantly firing rockets into northern Israel for years. What’s happening in Lebanon (and Syria and may other places) sucks, and that massive pier explosion certainly didn’t help.
> Israel definitely has blood on their hands, but how do you suggest they deal with terrorist groups funded by Iran operating in lawless areas of neighboring countries that are firing rockets at civilians in Israel?
What they do is stop raping and murdering people, settling on their land and then acting shocked that the country they are taking over is reacting in a violent way in response.
Israel are the terrorists who invaded Palestine and have committed crimes against humanity all across the Middle East. Your hypothetical situation is nothing at all like what's going on in reality. Iran is our ally against Zionist occupation of our own government.
Controlling language changes the way people think, and therefore act. Both of the things you mentioned are bad, glossing over real problems and the attempt to control language, they are not mutually exclusive.
Just (re)read 1984 and focus on Newspeak, controlling language controls the way people think and act.
The body of water that borders Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and other states along with Mexico is the Gulf of Mexico. The US cabinet-level department responsible for the military is the Department of Defense.
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Crossbreeding plants is genetic modification.
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