I’ve seen plenty of people who think they could take hard, addictive drugs and not get addicted, or that the addiction would be a small price to pay for the highs of the drug. Plenty of people have far too much self confidence for their small understanding of the situation. It’s why drugs like heroin are still around; if everyone intrinsically understood that they’re not worth it, they’d have disappeared a long time ago.
Microsoft was screwing over consumers before Google was even founded.
Toxicity isn’t as simple as “toxic = toxic + toxic.” While some byproducts of plastic breakdown are toxic, the bacteria are further dissolving those as well, going until they get glucose, as they wouldn’t be able to eat it if that wasn’t the end product. There are probably still some toxic byproducts that get excreted rather than broken down, but plastic breakdown already releases toxins under normal conditions, so that’s already a problem we’re going to have to tackle. If these bacteria can get past the first issue of breaking it down in the first place, then that’s a net positive.
I mean, the bleak thing is that the world works through people making deals with murderers to not be murdered, instead allowing other people to be murdered. I don’t give a shit about her gender, I just want a story about a good person winning in spite of corruption, not a bad person winning because of it.
As bleak as it is, given the high amount of other political opponents that died, the fact that she didn’t is likely an indication of how nice she plays with the people doing the murdering. I’m hopeful that she’s just good at dodging assassins, though!
Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.
I’ve always felt that republicans were the ones to push pronouns mattering, to the point of obstinance; they frequently get worked up about people’s genders, and refuse to use pronouns that differ from what they believe to be the “correct” ones for a person. The lefter people understand that pronouns really only matter to the person who identifies with them, so we’re fine calling people whatever they want, since it’s their choice and we don’t really care what they choose in the end.
I was my parents’ dedicated cop watcher since I was 8, and this is definitely a big one that a lot of people overlook. It’s one of the easiest features of even an unmarked police vehicle to spot from behind if you know to look for the folded light’s mounting hardware. My wife is always surprised at how quickly I can spot a cop from long distance, and it’s often because I spot something strange sticking out of the drivers’ side mirror.
Yeah. Obviously if a candidate is a criminal that should invalidate them in the eyes of any sane voter, but really the bar should be a lot higher for anyone to be happy with their choice. The real motivation shouldn’t be to vote for the lesser of 2 evils and call it good enough, it should be to literally fight back against corruption until we have options we actually like. Obviously it’s too late for that in this election, but we should already be getting started in the fights to get someone worthwhile in the 2028 elections.
This looks really cool - I put in my beta tester registration!
Well, yes, but that’s kinda my point. If you don’t patent, you get exploited, like how the discoverers of insulin synthesis decided not to patent, so companies patented similar, but not exact methods, and now it’s incredibly expensive. But, as you said, if you do patent, there is still a risk of exploitation if the patent holder sells to an exploitative company. However, that exploitation is still less likely than when not patenting, so I support the practice so long as patenting is still possible.
I worked at a small nonprofit back when genes were still able to be patented; we mostly studied the condition Pseudoxanthoma Elasticum, and held the patents to a few of the genes associated with it. However, we still allowed people to research them freely - we only patented them to prevent a company like Myriad Genetics, who had been patenting genes so that they could sell expensive genetic tests, from patenting it instead. We celebrated when genes were no longer able to be patented; I imagine that the researchers working with golden rice will do the same if we’re ever lucky enough for GMO’s to no longer be able to be patented.
I wholeheartedly agree. I was working for a small genetics nonprofit when they removed the ability to patent genes, and the whole office had a party to celebrate. It was mostly a celebration about freedom to research and test, but we were also very excited to no longer have to deal with having a bunch of patents. Even though we let people research the genes freely, we still had a bunch of paperwork that needed to be done any time someone wanted to do so.
Selection technically isn’t modification, since the modification had to have already occurred for it to be selected for. However, modification certainly did occur, and all crops are genetically modified. Indeed, all living creatures are genetically modified, as without modification, evolution can’t occur.
The public fear of GMO’s is largely due to Monsanto, who aggressively protect their GMO crop patents to the point where farmers who just happened to have some seeds blow into their fields have been sued.
The issue with GMO’s isn’t the modification, it’s the lax patent laws that allow companies like Monsanto to exploit people for profit, giving a bad name to the field as a whole, in spite of the immense potential good it can do, for which Golden Rice is a prime example.
The huge difference is who holds the patent. The example you gave involves Monsanto, the patent holder for several GMO crops, and a terrible company that does everything in its power to make money by exploiting people. Golden Rice, however, is patented by the scientists who designed it, who likely only patented it so that a company like Monsanto couldn’t just make some similar GMO and patent it instead, using it to exploit people even more.
This same thing happened back when genes themselves were able to be patented; some companies like Myriad Genetics would patent genes like the BRCA gene, a common source of inherited breast cancer predisposition, so that they could charge an arm and a leg for testing. So, researchers and non-profits would patent genes that they found just ensure they could be fairly studied and tested for.
You’d think so, right?
Negative change worms it’s way in through small defeats. The first DLC’s were a small price for a lot of content, the first YouTube ads were only a single ad that was just a few seconds long, the first video game preorders came with amazing rewards, etc. When you allow for 2 seconds, then what’s 3 seconds? What’s 4, 5, 6? What’s 30 seconds? What’s 2 minutes? We’ve seen examples of this all throughout capitalism’s history; to ignore them is, well, ignorant.
Just get a shoebox of shoebox pills and you can just get a box of 10’s and 20’s whenever you need.
Yeah, that’s part of the reason why I just dealt with the pain whenever I was prescribed stuff like Vicodin. I don’t want to risk it at all.