I fear the properties of roundup ready GMO crops are being leveraged to optimized labor costs during production increasing loads of roundup leeching into the food supply.

People say roundup is safe yet nobody has been able to square this with warning labels and handling instructions printed on bottles purchased from home depot. They also chose to ignore the fact Glyphosate has been labeled a group 2A carcinogen.

But more than anything I fear the ignorance of people engaged in some forms of genetic engineering. Worth keeping in mind it was difficult to see cancer signal attributable to atomic blasts during WWII. I have no confidence if there was a problem that did not present immediately or dramatically to a significant percentage of people the cause would have any prayer of being seen or traceable. A common trick is to say there is no statistically significant basis for an assumption... which in and of itself is fair until you begin to understand the range of problems that could possibly exist under that same banner. Given numerous classic historical examples of active industry successful efforts to increase uncertainty and downplay risks .. I am not predisposed to be trusting of corporations whose objective function is not aligned with my own best interests.

Age old story of outsourcing - you still need to retain enough people to watch the contractors so they can't cut corners on the expensive bits.
One blatant example I saw was with non destructive testing of welds in high pressure pipework leading to portions of a turbine in a coal fired power station. At those welds it was done by spraying on thing white paint, using a magnet and spraying on a fluid with suspended magnetic "dust" that would collect wherever defects disrupted the magnetic field. Access was a bit tight so the contractors tested the top of the pipes and they ran the magnet around the bottom of the pipe without looking at it so that some scratches would be left to show that the magnet had been used. The lazy pricks were caught doing that so we had to send someone along as an observer and make them do a couple of weeks worth of work over again, because with their scratch trick we had no way of knowing is any inspection had actually been done or not.
So MBA types - that person standing off to the side not doing anything during a concrete pour may be there solely to reduce fuckups due to dishonest contractors.

I stand against genetically modified crops because I don't want fucking multinationals to own the intellectual property rights over basic foodstuffs.

Then maybe we should change the GMO laws so that someone other than a multinational can afford to get a GMO plant certified as safe to eat. At the moment not even a university can afford it unless they are likely to see huge financial returns, so they don't even try. Thus monsanto stuff but no vaccines delivered via chunks of banana or even a tomato that can be transported but still tastes like great grandmas tomatoes (there's some very slow research happening along those lines that the researcher said is just the long way of approximating what he could have achieved with GMO ten years ago).

"Hate" is such an overused term.

But entirely descriptive of many of the posts about CLF here over the years.

As for the reduced life that's where "just good enough" starts to dominate a market that had been established via reliability.
It took me more than ten years of using CFL bulbs to find one that explained the hate that had been expressed on this page, and that's because fashionability had a greater role in it's design than function. If IoT devices can avoid that criteria there may be more hope, but I suspect you are correct that once they become a commodity there may be a race to the bottom.

Do I have to spell it out?

It's a toytown.

Reality is very different there to the rest of the country. The price of contracts is a thing that would be laughed at in other places. There are no homeless and few unemployed because who would be in Canberra if you don't have a job?

Sure thing. All it will cost him is his life savings plus whatever debt he incurs.

This is an oxymoron.

You'd want to look at a 5960X, if you can afford it. Particularly when overclocked (and they OC well with good cooling) they are the unquestioned champs for that kind of thing. They have plenty of power to be able to run a game well, plus have cores left over for good quality encoding.

as opposed to ... North Korea? Russia? China? African / Middle Eastern nations? France, where wearing the head scarf is a crime? Germany? Just where is this beacon of human rights if not the USA?

You need to think harder. Really.

Uh, yes, the act is as bad as it is... not as bad as you happen to THINK it should be.

Sorry to disappoint you, but a car is carbon neutral as well. It produces as much carbon as it consumes.

Come on, dude. Certainly you understand that the addition of a forest where previously there was not is a carbon sink, and even if that new sink is neutral, it still represents a net decrease of unsequestered carbon floating around in the fscking atmosphere?

Bingo. The primary problem isn't that we're producing too much CO2, it's that we're putting Carbon that has been out of the cycle for a very long time back into it. If we source our carbon from the cycle, we're not adding anything to it. Whether that can be done is anyone's guess, but we need to stop adding carbon back into the cycle, otherwise we will *never* find magical ways to sequester it. That coal comes from a time when the entire damn planet was covered in trees. It can't be that way again. One hole. Trees go in it. Plant more trees. Rinse and repeat until carbon cycle contains desired amount of carbon.

You're right, of course. However, forest mass is loosely correlated with forest area, and the latter is simpler for people to grok, lest the conversation devolve into people saying: "Ha! What happens when the tree you planted dies?! All that carbon back in the atmosphere!"

Problem absolutely solved. After tree dies, new tree grows. Atmosphere now has -1 trees worth of carbon in its atmosphere as the new forest attains carbon neutrality, minus the mass required to grow it. Adding more machinery to the cycle necessarily consumes more energy, where cycle is the life and death of trees in a forest, and the energy is CO2. Unless of course you believe in perpetual motion.