Yeah uh, that's not what I was talking about. I'm talking about the headache of posting images without the ability to resize or "thumbnail" them.
People should stop acting like NPR (National Public Radio for non Americans) is unbiased or impartial. And this is coming from someone who listens to them, enjoys them, and even has an NPR shirt.
They use emotionally loaded language frequently, do very selective coverage of events and topics, and pick and choose speakers that they like. It really irks me when people get all high and mighty saying "oh well I listen to NRP so I get a completely factual and unbiased view of current events" all pompous and arrogant. Just because the hosts are soft spoken doesn't mean they aren't trying to push an agenda and just because they act nice doesn't mean you should stop thinking critically about what they present and how they present it. When you start to listen to them critically you see how sometimes they can be just as slimy as any other political radio station or TV news channel.
If you don't suck dick you are racist. Full stop.
Name checks out.
imagine being straight in 2018
But a woman sucking dick is a straight thing to do?
well... not necessarily...
This but only mostly ironically.
pandaren are the worst race; appearance wise, especially the females. They look like terrible fursuiters.
Mountain Dew Green Label was better than both Black and White labels and it's disappearance from production is travesty.
Considering the amount of damage that $1000 CAD worth of laptop can do, I can't help but think that the Steam machine initiative was a good idea in hindsight... Minus Valve's insistence on using Linux, of course. Even if you're talking about laptop graphics, you're still gonna get more value for money when you take the battery out of the equation.
The amount of right wing "curb your enthusiasm" memes on YouTube is fucking retarded
Sun sucks. I don't get why people want to go out when it's sunny. Rain is the best weather, every time it rains I want to (and do) go out on a little or big wilderness trip. It's the best weather for almost everything.
Same with hot weather. Hot weather sucks ass. Cold weather is far superior. It's easy to keep warm. It's difficult to keep cool. I really don't understand why most people don't get that.
Oldpunch's 2008-looking emoticons had more charm than this corporate-looking emoji we've got everywhere now. The borders on these things are too damn thick
I love 90s game graphics.
Placing "Non-GMO" on your food makes me think less of it, not more, tbh.
Meh. While I think advertising that your food is "Non-GMO" is petty, I wouldn't want to buy GMO stuff either. In their current format, they go against a more sustainable and efficient agricultural model, and are mainly pushed by immoral companies like Monsanto which I don't want to support, even by proxy.
How is GMO less sustainable and efficient? GMO foods require less pesticides.
It's much more complicated than that. GMO strains are costly to produce, and thus GMO companies want to create species that apply to as broad a variety of environment as possible, so as to increase their profits. They design them with a "one size fits all" mindset.
Except that's not how nature works: Your crop's defenses might work perfectly in a given field, but fail miserably in another 2km away, simply because there are completely different pests and weeds there which requires other, fundamentally different defenses.
So since designing a different crop for every field is out of the question, GMO manufacturers prefer to adapt the environment to their crops, rather than the opposite. This means potent herbicides, for instance, that kills everything but your crops, thus impoverishing the soil. To make up for that, you need to bring fertilizers from outside (by truck, thus increasing CO2 emissions). You also obviously need pesticides.
Now, the same criticisms could be levied at the standard farming industry as well. They also use pesticides and herbicides which damage the environment and are noxious to our health. There are a lot of improvements we could make to our current farming techniques that would render both of them obsolete, as well as increase our yield along with consuming much less natural resources. But to do that you need to be able to breed crops that are properly adapted to their environment. Which is not possible with GMOs. Even if it were technically possible, you'd get a lawsuit down the ass because you're using the companies' "intellectual property".
So encouraging the development of GMOs as they currently stands means closing the door to these alternatives, which is a surefire way to be caught with our pants down once the effects of climate change start getting serious and natural resources start dwindling, along with our environment drastically changing, severely cutting down on our yields. That's without even going into how much GMO companies are straight up abhorrent, inhumane cunts.
Eh, maybe once it gets cheap enough to be reliably done in one's garage. Until then, it's not going to be viable.
And even so, it'll probably be made illegal thanks to lobbyists anyway.
Monsanto is not a great company but frankly this sounds a bit too mutually exclusive for my tastes.
It's pretty irresponsible to grow anything other than GMO crops if the means are available. IMO the most important thing is that less rotten food = less water used per viable item of food produced. Water is already an enormous environmental problem so using as little as possible is important above all else.
Also: almonds should be banned.
I'm totally aware of that. I regard that issue as much less fixable without forcing Western society to redefine what it sees as "acceptable food", and not as pressing to fix because the population of Earth will never be large enough for mass starvation to be a thing any worse than it is now.
GMO crops can be engineered to be far more likely to be visually appealing, which is important in reducing food waste in the first world. We can fix the issues that cause misshapen apples. So on top of water consumption, that's another distinct advantage.
That said, I always try to buy the most misshapen produce I can, both out of a feeling of responsibility and my weird sense of humor that finds misshapen produce hilarious. Tastes the same, after all.
Your Name isn't that great
I mean yeah having a number at the end of it instead of picking something original is kind of tacky
What's too mutually exclusive about it?
As I already explained, there are several techniques which can reduce water consumption more than GMOs ever would, and which require your crops to be specialized and not generalists. So, no GMOs. As they currently stand GMOs are pretty much a dead end regarding the development of more sustainable farming. They will only start making a difference if they become cheap enough to design to modify them for local environments.
Either way, if you buy GMOs now, you support companies that would actively fight such an open source approach to GMOs. Thus I cannot in good conscience buy GMO products myself currently. Going as far as saying it's downright irresponsible not to use GMOs if it's possible is laughably ignorant, and speaks of a very superficial understanding of the issue.
Buying non-GMO on an individual level isn't going to accomplish anything aside from making you feel better and damaging the environment (less durable and out of season plants need shipped.) You're going to need to do what I mentioned pretty much, which is legislate against monopolistic behavior.
Also frankly I'd like some sources on your claims that GMOs are overly-specialized to be useless and a dead-end. Skimming the literature seems to yield pretty positive reports e.g. this and this. And pretty simply, if they didn't confer benefits, farmers wouldn't be using them, even if their potential is being limited.
Because contributing money to an already monopolistic monstrosity is any better? Good luck legislating against them. At least by not buying their shit that's less money that enters their coffers, voting people in to break their monopoly is unlikely to succeed and my vote ultimately won't matter if it doesn't, so it's not something I can rely on.
If you want to preserve the environment, even with our current classic industrial farming, there's a ton you can do that's much more efficient than buying GMO. Buying in-season, local stuff is a pretty good start.
Can't link the course itself, it's by a professor at AgroParisTech, Marc Dufumier. You seem to have misread though, I didn't say that GMOs are overly specialized, it's the opposite: They're too non-specific to be adequately adaptable to varied environments, that is adapt to the full extent of what they could do were they artificially selected.
My statement doesn't aim to contradict the studies you linked. I never said GMOs don't confer advantages in terms of yield, I said that it's a fool's errand to bet on them to solve our productivity and resource consumption issues, especially those we'll face in the near future. Genetic potential is a pretty limited avenue for progress, especially if you only apply it to a single, uniform crop. Actual, substantial progress in productivity will come from continuously using the entirety of the solar flux by rotating different crops every season, rather than just let those radiations heat the ground, from creating fertilizing cycles through use of legumes and trees instead of just importing it from a plant, organic water retention, etc.
Pretty weak argument TBH. That only means it's financially advantageous for them. It says nothing of resources consumption or localization (as opposed to transporting tons of fertilizers across the country) or even of whether it will remain financially advantageous once global warming really kicks off.
It also only compares GMO yield to standard farming practices, not alternative, more efficient ones that would require more flexible strains than your run-off-the-mill Monsanto crop.
I mean I do agree that GMOs aren't the silver bullet to sustainable agriculture, but not being sufficient doesn't mean useless. And true, my farmer example would hinge on finances, but the links I provided do mention environmental advantages beyond just yield.
What strains might you name in particular?
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.
Unpopular opinions V8 Flat IS NOTHING
