Bay 12 Games Forum

I just saw a Amish kid with light-up up roller skates zipping down the side of the highway.

Quote from: redwallzyl on May 26, 2018, 11:26:51 pm

Basically the opposite of the scientific method. If you find yourself adding assumptions to an argument stop and throw out your argument, it's pseudo science.

Or stop, identify which assumptions are falsifiable, test those, and carry on.

Scientific theories tend to react to contrary evidence by getting smaller in scope; conspiracy theories get bigger instead.

I'll take the easy route here and say that obviously the Egyptian pyramids were grain silos.

I don't think schools' main problem is a lack of proper funding. I think it's a lack of discipline on how to spend the available funding. Or maybe that's what you meant?

The most effective spending is actually on parental involvement programs.  I'd much rather see that, and a reversal of the recent trend for pay-to-play extracurricular activities, than more computer programs or administrative overhead stuff.

Quote from: Reelya on May 26, 2018, 06:30:20 am

If that's the case then why the fuck would anyone even buy those seeds in the first place? e.g. they talk about Monsanto prosecuting those who keep their seed for replanting, but ... if the seed suck so bad apparently then who would even bother? If traditional seeds are just an all-round better deal, then it wouldn't be hard to make a farm that just specializes in producing the traditional seeds to sell them to other farms, for less money than the inferior Monsanto seeds. If everything costs more with the Monsanto seeds, and there's no benefit, and they're way more disease-prone, and you need to label them GMO, why would you even? In fact, anyone who touched such seeds should immediately go out of business since they couldn't compete.

Farmers don't really need to buy traditional seeds from other farmers, since they can just reuse them. People have to continually buy seeds from Monsanto because they sell terminator seeds, which won't yield fertile seeds (if all goes right at least - means bad business for Monsanto and a high likelihood of GMO crops propagating in the wild, affecting natural biodiversity). The business models aren't really comparable. The ostensible advantage that Monsanto's GMO crops provide is not increased yield per plant (I'm being very specific here, as other biotech companies are explicitly pursuing increased yield), but resistance to roundup herbicide. You can spray a field of Monsanto's GMO cotton with roundup and it'll wipe out every plant that's competing with it, increasing overall yield.

Quote from: Reelya on May 26, 2018, 08:32:59 am

Which kind of makes sense. A farmer's specialty is farming, it's not to be genetics specialists and run a seed-lab / seed processing/drying and storage operation on each and every farm. It just makes more sense that there's one big farm somewhere which specializes in mass-producing seeds, and each other farm buys the seed from them, in convenient bags, and specializes in just producing the food crop. Which also gives you much more flexibility: since you can decide what you're planting every year.

Doesn't make sense to me at all, especially when it comes to European farmers who are highly educated agronomists, not uneducated subsistence farmers; nor does it make sense when understanding how farmers started the green revolution with selective breeding and infrastructure alone. The move from farmers saving their own seed and sharing it with their neighbours to a world where this basic practice we've been doing since the dawn of agrarian civilization is illegal or liable to incur government taxation which renders the very cheapness of it pointless, to a world where seed supplies are dominated by three corporations who sell infertile seed where the fragility of an entire global farming system is measured in the time it takes for one disease to eliminate the sole dominant industrial variety in lieu of the innumerable local varieties - strikes me as senseless obedience to a harmful trend. I am enthusiastic about biotech firms seeking to increase yields of useful shit like cotton, but the manner of mass adoption renders desired benefits... Problematic. Much like how the mass adoption of Monsanto's GMO cotton in India got fucked when all the various local varieties were replaced by one industrial variety, seeing an initial rise in yield followed by a crisis after it emerged that the cotton adopted by millions of farmers had no resistance to white fly.

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In developing countries, saving food plant seed - a traditional practice for which farmers and growers have been criminalised - is tied to the politics of globalisation through issues such as food sovereignty and intellectual property rights: whoever controls seeds controls a people's ability to feed themselves. In Europe and America, vegetable seed conservation is more about the custodianship of genetic and cultural heritage.
"Seed conservation is important, but if we keep growing these old varieties - many of which have adapted to very local conditions - we will understand more about their adaptability to changes in climate, pests and diseases," Slack says. "For example, peas prefer cooler conditions, and if you're growing them in the north of England and the climate is warming, you might find that varieties such as Glorious Devon or Kent Blue will do better in the future than Lancashire Lad. We are losing older and tougher varieties before we understand their adaptation to climate change.

Seems that everyday we go backwards, poisoning our environment with roundup just to get a comparable yield from crops better adapted to the locality. Also doesn't help that the one advantage of plants immune to roundup disappears when weeds develop immunity to it

To that end this kinda stuff will pose a big problem for biotech seed companies, and is a very interesting read, highly recommend

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“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.

Pretty much the whole debate in a nutshell.

There's also a rather painful note of how many European nations had their own public services dedicated to the impartial breeding and testing of crop varieties - conducted with total transparency, they earned public trust by serving public interest, with no conflicts of interest requiring the greasing of palms or lining the pockets of politicians, it's easy to see why they were popular. This makes more sense to me too, not to leave such a vital strategic sector of the nation in the hands of the private sector; rather pitifully, the UK had arguably the world's best public institute in Cambridge for the study, development and experimentation of plant breeds. Margaret Thatcher privatized the Cambridge Plant Breeding Institute, selling it to Unilever on the argument that this would provide greater funds and the magic of market efficiency in developing new strains - the PBI was then sold from Unilever to Monsanto, who had the PBI demolished.

Basically bring back integrated public biotech, deregulate farm saved seed oversight & taxation, seize the means of seed production

The talks need to go ahead, otherwise the sales of the commemorative Trump-Kim conference coins will tank. Sure, they're the most ghastly-looking things since whenever, but that only adds to the charm.