Hard News: Clover It
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Matthew, the way Bart told it, the plants were not cuttings. They were from blown seeds and/or pollens, which germinated on the other farmer's land. Clearly this happens with canola a lot, and I highly doubt that it is considered theft if an adjacent canola farm has a number of plants around the edges whose genetic ancestors came from next door.
What the farmer using the Roundup did was to ride this line quite hard. They were clearly exploiting the resistance to the Roundup to get hold of these plants specifically, with the intention of using them to start his own population. He was clearly taking the hard work of the GM canola developers quite deliberately - the question is whether it was done illegally. The courts ruled which makes it case law, at the very least.
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IMO this is not the action of a poor organic farmer struggling with a contamination. To portray this as a poor farmer versus big business story is disingenuous.
I'm no fan of Monsanto, but I came to that conclusion some years ago. Schmeiser has travelled the world telling his story, but parts of it simply don't add up -- most notably that his plants tested up with 93-98% Monsanto DNA. Basically, he bagged up the seed and reused it on a large scale.
He also wasn't an organic farmer. He used Roundup, for one thing.
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It does. And the difference with other forms of IP theft ought to be obvious. Download my Cd, I can still make more music. Plant a hybrid I've invested a ton of money in, you can make as many as you want, and there's my investment gone.
It actually doesn't seem that obvious to me. It can be a massive investment of the time of the artist to make a CD that is meant to earn them a living. The copying of it does possibly deny them money and damage their investment, just the same as the seeds. The only real difference is the means of copying and distribution.
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The law doesn't say that downloading music or movies is theft, no matter how often opponents of the practice may use the word, but it does say that plant cuttings are real property and can be stolen in the same way that a car or book can be stolen.
In Henry Fielding's 1742 satirical novel Joseph Andrews, the hero picks a hazel twig which he presents to his lover, and is vexatiously charged with theft:
'Jesu!' said the squire. 'would you commit two persons to Bridewell for a twig?'
'Yes,' said the lawyer, 'and with great lenity too; for if we had called it a young tree, they would have been both hanged.' -
It can be a massive investment of the time of the artist to make a CD that is meant to earn them a living. The copying of it does possibly deny them money and damage their investment, just the same as the seeds. The only real difference is the means of copying and distribution.
What's the seed equivalent of concerts and merchandise?
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Who isn't a fan of Zespri gold? I go to all of their gigs.
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We need a PSA equivalent of Godwin's law to describe the point at which all PSA threads become copyright threads.
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It can be a massive investment of the time of the artist to make a CD that is meant to earn them a living.
You might recall I was a pretty strong proponent of that point of view in the copyright thread of death. But they're just radically different industries, there is no way for the hybrid manufacturers to make any money except by selling the plants, and you have to start big - can't make a new cultivar in your garage and distribute it free to get your name out.
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Also, if you take a cutting of a plant your theft is surely: the bit of the plant you took.
It's not like you're making an exact copy of the plant without damaging it, which is what happens in the music industry.
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Well, that's pretty minimal. Plants get pruned, really there's not much of an argument there.
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We need a PSA equivalent of Godwin's law
Eternal vigilance, my son. And when did the trade unions become involved?
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Would people have bought and grown the plant anyway, without the cutting being made? Or would they perhaps have bought another plant later by the same gene-splicer?
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You don't really buy those plants, you lease them. Well, it's complicated. You could also say that it's the hybrid manufacturers that lease the land of the grower.
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ruthless chlorophyllistines...
...You don't really buy those plants, you lease them... Plants get pruned, really there's not much of an argument there...
our li'l green slave leaves...
in the grip of evil salad tongsand Autumn...
ask those leaves
they'll all tell ya,
"I didn't fall,
I wus pushed!"...
making organic plant versions
is wetware - making life (choices)
self powering (solar energy sources & husbandry)taking seed/cuttings
is shareware - making meals
fuel (chemystery energy)making digital versions
is software - making code (instructions)
write & retrieve (consume proprietary
device & power)taking dodgy copies
is wolfware - making money
take, take - (parasitic, karma-draining)
...follow the positive energy transfer...
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I'm no fan of Monsanto, but I came to that conclusion some years ago. Schmeiser has travelled the world telling his story, but parts of it simply don't add up..
As the Green Party member once said, "whenever I hear the words GE, I reach for my Schmeisser."
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We need a PSA equivalent of Godwin's law to describe the point at which all PSA threads become copyright threads.
As I understand it, one of the objections to GE/GM of crops is that we are potentially limiting the full spectrum of variety that nature, uh...naturally provides. And that could be dangerous for things like immunity, etc.
On that basis, the danger is clearly very, very real. Just talking about it has reduced PAS from a lush garden of lively, varied discussion, to a bland, tasteless, single-variety death-spiral.
Somebody should be thinking of the children.
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As I understand it, one of the objections to GE/GM of crops is that we are potentially limiting the full spectrum of variety that nature, uh...naturally provides. And that could be dangerous for things like immunity, etc.
This was expressed very eloquently by the late Barry Barclay a full 25 years ago. Nothing has essentially changed. Despite Bart's assurances, I'm unconvinced that we're any smarter now. Potentially better informed certainly, but the generally supine acceptance of Monsanto's business model doesn't give the impression that those who have the practical expertise are looking beyond their immediate interests.
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Fair enough Joe, smarter is the wrong word. More knowledgeable is better. We know why previous mistakes were made and we know enough to avoid those. That doesn't prevent us making new mistakes.
But one of the most important things we know is to expect unexpected things as we make transitions to larger scale trials. As a result we (the scientists in this field) now ensure we do things in stages. Lab bench to greenhouse to small field plots to large field plots and finally to wide release - and even then we don't stop studying what happens.
supine acceptance of Monsanto's business
Please, please if you take anything from this (assuming anyone is still reading after the copyright bomb) take that GM does not not equal Monsanto. This is a myth and has been pushed very hard by opponents of GM because they can then argue because Monsanto is bad that GM is bad.
Monsanto started the commercialization of GM. But now they are just another player. Far far more GM research is being done outside Monsanto than inside. Monsanto is the major commercial business in this field mostly because they started first. Probably the biggest player is GM research now is China and has nothing to do with Monsanto or the multinational big business model.
Even if you believed all the GM research in the world was being done by the Monsanto monster, then surely the logical thing to do is to fund trusted researchers in your own government research institutes to do competing work so that Monsanto isn't the only (immoral) research entity studying GM.
one of the objections to GE/GM of crops is that we are potentially limiting the full spectrum of variety that nature, uh...naturally provides
Huh? Wow really people think that? Ok my best understanding is that GM is much more likely to result in vastly more diversity in crop plants than exists now. Modern crops are the tiny fraction of edible plants that can be grown and are selected because you can manage them large scale, million of hectares scale. GM is very likely, er no make that absolutely certain to allow crops we can't grow large scale now to become part of the diet as we use the technology to overcome limitations that prevent small scale food crops from becoming large scale.
Simply GM will increase diversity in our food supply.
I bet someone will say that's a bad thing now because it will expose us to new food we aren't adapted to ... sigh.
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Rich & Bart, diversity of species is an issue.
The more variety of types and species gives more resilience againgst blights. GE & Big Farming may increase yeild, but reduce variety and so increase food security risks, such as the Irish Potatoe Blight.Then we get "Market" Forces to buy/sell the lowest priced food, usurping our own countries sustainability (we currently can not feed ourselves or our live stock). Shit this sounds like the export of potatoes during the potatoe blight.
GE in farming is just the extention of industrial farming.
GE has a place in hospitals, but not farms.
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He also wasn't an organic farmer. He used Roundup, for one thing.
You're kidding, right? Because, you know, WRONG.
Bla bla. Insecticidal pollen doesn't hurt bees, as CCD is still possibly a coincidence. Monsanto owns the benefit of it's stray pollen, but not the costs, of course (pollen flies a good distance from every road along which the headed crop is carried). And hey, the unrelated species of weeds and grasses developing resistance to Roundup are a pure coincidence, and I too trust Monsanto on that issue.Last year's seed? Duh, people, when you head a crop some of that seed stays in the soil and comes up again next year. Meaning the whole crop is the property of Monsanto. Same again next year. Just ask DOC how long unwanted seeds can keep coming back up.
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Monsanto started the commercialization of GM.
Not strictly true. The first genetically engineered commercial crop variety approved by the US FDA was Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato. While Monsanto eventually acquired Calgene, they had no involvement with the tomato venture.
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The more variety of types and species gives more resilience againgst blights. GE & Big Farming may increase yeild, but reduce variety and so increase food security risks, such as the Irish Potatoe Blight.
All agriculture reduces variety. A region would not be full of corn if humans had not made it so. Every human interference whatsoever changes nature. Using a tool to hoe the ground fundamentally changes the ecology. This has been going on for thousands and thousands of years, and the exact opposite of what you are saying has been the trend - food for humans has become steadily more secure. The only major source of insecurity in food supply for humans is other humans, who either prevent the distribution of it, or block the ability of other humans to improve the supply. And that ability is phenomenal compared to what nature grudgingly provides itself.
I spent quite a lot of time over the last 5 years writing genetic optimization algorithms, which are loosely modeled around the concepts of evolution. On one hand they do provide a very interesting corroboration of the theory of evolution, in that the algorithm does provide a poly-time convergence on optimality, simply via the mechanisms of cross-breeding and random mutation. But I also very rapidly discovered that non-random mutation led to convergence that was orders of magnitude faster. If you discover heuristics for how to adjust values within the solutions, that's WAAAAY faster than just waiting thousands of generations for randomness to find those values. I went from "pure evolution" algorithms that would converge on solutions over a number of days on a dedicated machine to ones that did it in minutes, and eventually was able to provide a solution that did it in the background in real time as new data came in (which in the case of spam is millions of data points per day for many customers). And there are better algorithms still, which aren't modeled around evolution at all, that just exploit the mathematics of the problem spaces. All of that makes me feel, from a distance, that shackles around GM are basically cutting our ability to optimize crop development enormously.
Yes, I did occasionally encounter issues that super-survivors would create monocultures that were suboptimal, and trapped the algorithm in local optima. This happened every bit as often with random mutation as it did with heuristic versions. But I also found that I could program my way out of them with the heuristics, whereas with relying on randomness alone, I just had to wait. Looooong waits. It made me appreciate just how long this planet must have taken to generate what it has now. Most mutation leads to less optimal solutions, because optimality is converged upon so rapidly. Squeezing out more, or escaping local optima usually took the equivalent of massive environmental upset, basically changing the problem definition (and therefore altering the nature of what was now the optimal population). This was far more devastating to convergence than just altering the way the algorithm works to do something that doesn't have a real biological analogy. Fortunately for me no one got upset by my playing God with the chromosomes in an optimization algorithm.
End of the day, my conclusion here is that nature is, indeed, an amazing and awesome thing, for discovering such an efficient optimization algorithm. But humans can improve on it enormously.
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Ben, thanks I really appreciate your input.
Did you quantify the cooresponding loss of life when your numbers went into a death spiral?
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Well, the analogy is loose. The population was always stable, a constant number of individuals - that's how the algorithm was designed. The analogy to mass extinction would be when individuals who were diverse ended up becoming all very similar, because the supersurvivors bred the rest out. But this happened by whatever means the genetic changes happened - random or otherwise. Any change that conferred a big difference in the optimality of the candidate solution led to it crushing out the diversity of the rest of the population. I guess it's like they discovered guns or something. Very quickly they all had to have guns or they were finished. There's no going back, no way that not having guns can keep you ahead of the rest of the competitors.
The danger is that the lucky individuals who found the guns first end up owning the gene pool no matter how weak their rest of their structure might be. But, and I have to keep reiterating this, this is how it worked with random mutation too, indeed more so than the other ways. "Survival of the fittest" is a selfish method, the advantages aren't handed around fairly. And that is what nature, left to its own devices, will do. A cornfield, left to nature, will revert to a forest pretty fast, because trees can grab all the light. Which is wonderfully diverse but it can't support very many humans compared to a cornfield.
In answer to your quantification question, the answer can't just be given as a number, it depended on numerous variables, the aggressiveness of the selection algorithm, the range over which you would let the values mutate, the number of individuals in the population, and just exactly what the change (random or guided mutation, or as a result of crossbreeding) led to vis-a-vis the search space. But I think I can fairly safely say it was "polynomial time", which is what computer scientists usually mean by "fast", when they are solving problems that have exponential search spaces. In the end, using settings that seemed to provide the best convergence, if I ever saw a big jump in the optimality of the best candidate individual, I could be pretty sure that within 10 or 20 generations, if I examined the population, it would all be pretty similar to the individual. It took sophisticated tricks to keep the diversity in there, and doing so was not really worth it in terms my my objective, which was finding optimality in the search space. Mostly the suboptimal individuals I insisted on keeping alive were a waste of resources. I mean like 99.99% of the time.
Now I'm not saying this is all perfectly analogous to nature and GM. The algorithm was not identical, and it certainly did not operate on such an enormous scale, with hundreds of billions of individuals, across millions of years. Also, the "environment" was the objective function I was optimizing, and this remained stable during a run of the algorithm. Most importantly, the objective function itself was decided by me, whereas with real biology, we aren't in control of that to the same extent. We know we want the bigger yields, but we don't want our entire populations to have some weakness that was unknown by us at the start. And we can't just "rerun the algorithm", wiping out the entire population of the world, and expect to get back from microorganisms in tidal pools in only a few days or minutes.
It's "suggestive" at best. I don't really know too much about evolutionary biology. In the end, it was not that relevant.
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Catching up.... but here's a little thing,
Is that why new jeans these days are really not very sturdy and much more ill-fitting
No ,jeans are washed by different proesses which, can shorten their lifespan ( think back to stonewash, yes they are washed in pumice and bleached jeans)
or is it just that my butt looks big in them now?
Yes ;)
There's also a reduction in the number of different cuts, which reduces your choice of sizes/fits.
Not at all, purely fashion dictates. There is probably more sizes/ fits.
Go back 10 years and you really didn't have that choice
There was plenty to choose from. Again it was whatever was the fashion in that year.I could have plucked 100 pairs of jeans for men alone and that was a smaller market than womens.
You can still get very sturdy jeans from Levis
Levis have their own cotton thread and denim, zips etc.
nearly-as-good jeans
Interestingly, a lot of those jeans are 14oz sturdy denim. Perception is, they must be inferior because they are cheap, Once again, it's a fashion thing.
Disclaimer:I worked with jeans for many many years, and I still wear only levis.
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