FDA Set To Approve Products from Cloned Cows 480
phantomlord writes "The FDA is currently set to allow beef and milk from cloned animals onto the market. Further, the products will likely not be branded as such and there is no way to know if we're currently consuming products from cloned animals." From the article: "Farmers and companies that have been growing cloned barnyard animals from single cells in anticipation of a lucrative market say cloning will bring consumers a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional breeding, making perfectly marbled beef and reliably lean and tasty pork the norm on grocery shelves. But groups opposed to the new technology, including a coalition of powerful food companies concerned that the public will reject Dolly-the-Lamb chops and clonal cream in their coffee, have not given up."
I'm excited. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure there are some health concerns (my wife prefers organic, I prefer mass produced for my daily consumption), but I'm not sure that the concerns are valid. I travel the globe and specifically like to visit previously poor countries (Ethiopia, Uganda, India, etc) and what I see is people who have better lives because of the ability to purchase their needs cheaper. If the health concern is a higher rate of disease that might knock 5 years off your life expectancy, but being able to eat or clothe yourself or keep your body mass consistant will add 20 years, this sounds like a net benefit. Beyond the health concerns, though, we also can see that cheaper dairy might mean more business opportunities in the previously poor areas -- and this also increases the standard of living and life expectancy of the person willing to get involved in the new marketplace.
I absolutely, positively do NOT want government requirements for labeling. If I am concerned with labeling, I will call the manufacturer of the product and ASK. I already do it because I don't consume trans fats (except for naturally occuring ones in beef). The government was "supposed" to regulate trans fat labels, but they haven't. Many items say 0 trans fats but contain a significant amount below 1 gram, and your government allows it to be labeled 0 grams. Nice. That's government at its finest. When I see 0 grams of trans fats, I will call the manufacturer and ask them to confirm the fact that there are zero, and most of the time they'll say "there's a negligible amount" which is the equivalent of saying "yeah, they're in there." No thanks.
Forcing companies to label properly does NOT work. "Organic" means nothing, "0 trans fats" means nothing, "low sugar" means nothing, "whole grains" means nothing. If you're worried, contact the company directly and figure it out on your own.
Cloned animals seems good to me -- if I can get marbled beef at a discount, I'll be happy. If beef jerky comes down even 20% in price, I'll be happy. If creams and cheeses can be made at the same quality for a lower price, I'll be happy. All of these items keep me healthy, slim and energized, and the cost savings means I can eat more -- making myself even healthier.
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These anamals are not GMOs they are clones. Big differance.
-nB
Re:I'm excited. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know how in IT, we say "good, fast, cheap: choose any two"? Much the same applies to meat. In this case, it's a trade off between lean meat, tasty, tender, length of time needed to prepare and cost.
There are a number of things which affect what comes out when the cow is shot, skinned, cut up and put onto little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays. Sure, one of them is the breed, but two very big factors are how the animal lived and how long the meat was hung after slaughter. Neither of which is affected in the slightest by whether your cow was made by a boy and a girl cow who loved each other very much, by a man with a syringe full of bull sperm or by a farmer wearing a flat cap and an old tweed jacket working in a lab.
Re:I'm excited. (Score:4, Interesting)
If I was good and cheap, my competitor would try to mimic me and try to do it faster. Eventually, they would. Over time, good gets better, cheap gets cheaper, and fast gets faster. It is ridiculous to think of competition as a closed system. Actually, a State-licensed market IS a closed system only because no one has to worry about good, cheap OR fast. State-licensing makes things worse, more expensive and slower. See DMV for proof.
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No, but I know that little soundbite was used in reference to car mechanics long before any of us was likely born.
this is the opposite of GM (Score:3, Interesting)
Cloning means NO changes.
But as you say, there are other issues: grass-fed (yummy) or corn-fed (gaaa... all my food tastes like corn, from salmon to soda!), free-range (lean) or feedlot (greasy), etc. BTW, you can buy nice beef and unusual meat over the net. It's shipped in dry ice.
We need to go beyond cloning. The solution is a matter replicator.
Re:I'm excited. (Score:5, Insightful)
Without regulation, your hair dye would contain toxic amounts of lead. Oh, wait a minute -- it currently does! Sure, you have a point, the regulations are highly flawed. But without them, it is clear that corporations would try and succeed in getting away with murder.
To fix the regulations so that they actually work, vote your bum of a corporate lackey representative out of office and tell him or her why.
|>oug
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Voting with your dollars works every day -- look at items that have fallen in price even though your voted government destroys the value of the dol
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There is literally no limit to what sludge food manufacturers will shoehorn into your daily diet if they are given free reign. We have a great local,
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That's not how wallstreet works. Nobody cares about anything but next quarter's numbers. So if prematurely terminating your customers will help you meet this quarter's earning's forecast, that's exactly what corporate america will do.
Re:I'm excited. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to introduce you to this little thing we have called the Tobacco Industry...
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It's generally in a company's best interests to maximize its profits. If some fraction of a company's customers happen to die due to a badly designed gas tank, get sick from lead poisoning in their hair dye, or what have you, then that's just a cost of doing business. Your life means absolutely nothing to the typical corporation, other than how it affects its bottom line. I.e., kill
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If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. No, you can't see it. Trust me, it's really nice.
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The free flow of information
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That seems a different issue than the labelings in question.
In a capitalistic society, I may not know what your real costs are, but I definitely want to know what the product IS.
I see the labeling regulations, at best, as a way for government to protect itself against widespread fraud and the costs of dealing with it
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Your rant makes me think you probably have lots of arguments with your wife about this...
Re:Really REALLY excited. (Score:4, Informative)
You mistakenly believe that the market for cattle operates efficiently. There is no reason to believe that the market for cattle would operate any differently than, say the market for desktop computer operating systems. It's exposed to the same amount of legislative influence, graft and corruption required to remain in a market that any other market for goods or services. Another example was the de-regulated power industry that California used for a while. Where was the greater supply of energy at lower prices promised?
Like most barriers to entry, they are legislated to address two needs:
1. Public perception that "something must be done!"
This is why your food supply is one of the safest in the world. Do you want more e-coli in your food supply or less?
2. Protection from competition.
This is why quickie-mart capitalism exists. It fulfills the rhetorical need to justify absurd policies.
I doubt there is any opportunity to look at the issue objectively because like most quickie-mart economic believers, it's a belief that has it's own self-satisfying logic to it. No amount of objective analysis of how a market actually works versus your imagined and largely academic concept of how it -should- work will change your postion.
Re:I'm excited. (Score:4, Funny)
MMMMMMOOOOOOOO!!!!!
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They should come up with a new word for these professionals who work for corporate farms to distinguish them from farmers
I prefer to purchase the majority of my food from a farmer who I can look in the eye... i.e. who lives nearby. I got on this kick a while back and I'm surprised how easy it is to get a majority of my family's food from within a 85 kilometer radius. (including most of my alcohol)
I here you on the la
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I'm not sure it matters -- within 60 miles of my house we have a number of natural food grocers (and some co-ops of grocers) who take the time to investigate what they're buying. I prefer to pay 30% for their labor in doing this. The State still sets requirements on these companies that prevents them from doing everything I'd want them to do.
I prefer to purchase the majority of my food
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Why not? If we're about letting the market sort this stuff out, don't we need to at least make sure people are able to make informed decisions?
Cheers.
Pissed his pants from excitement, eh? (Score:2)
"Abbreviated Telomeres, it's what's for dinner!" (Score:2)
Right. Even more, 'cause I'm sure as hell not buying that stuff. Honestly, the idea of a big mouthful of meat containing cells with fragile DNA strands is less than appetizing.
Look, if a farmer can't accomplish a fairly simple task such as getting his cows to occasionally fuck and make more, then he probably shouldn't be playing with genetic engineering. Just sayin'
Re:I'm excited. (Score:5, Insightful)
Shady processors adulterated fertilizers, deodorized rotten eggs, revived rancid butter, substituted glucose for honey. Farmers began to learn about such deceptions from a new breed of agriculture chemists, often trained in Germany, located in State officialdom and helped by Federal funds. These chemists could apply their scientific skills to expose the work of chemists employed by industry to depreciate food products, as the Senate Report put it, in "a greed for gain." [fda.gov]
Anyone who is interested in the mundane world of fact, rather than fanciful flights of political ideology, knows that prior to regulation and inspection, the quality of food was much lower than it is today. The quote above describes the situation in the mid-1800's, prior the the first national pure food act in the U.S. in 1906.
The law is a powerful instrument, and it has proven to be more effective than anything else in forcing people who are selling things to not lie about what they are selling.
The issue with food labelling has nothing to do with any rational concerns about food quality, however. The only issue is that consumers have a right to know what they are buying. In practice, the only way of ensuring that right is honoured is to have legal sanctions against lieing about what is being sold, and uniform labelling standards are by far the most efficient way of doing this.
Personally, I'm not at all keen on supporting an even more uniform agricultural monoculture than we have now, so if meat from cloned animals was labelled I would tend to avoid it.
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That's how competition works -- some of us will pay more for a grocer who checks their suppliers. Others won't. ALDI versus Whole Foods Market.
I liv
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The bar standard of the State labeling is a one-size-fits-all standar
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Enough Already (Score:2)
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- A new way of purifying water was invented
- The resulting liquid was analyzed by mass-spectrometry, NMR, IR and all other tools in the disposal of modern science. The study determined that the liquid that comes out of the machine is absolutely pure H2O, completely identical to all other water, and containing no additives
- You propose that we have to conduct a long-term study comparing the effects of drinking water to drinking water.
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Remember the Married with Children episode where Peg kills the TV Exercise show host when she wins a week of in-home consultation? Without resistence, a person is helpless today.
There was a time when I was in that state where I could quickly sense what was bad.
Re:I'm excited. (Score:4, Informative)
I do not really know how labelling works in the US, but it works fine over here in Old Europe.
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Re:I'm excited. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think removing the laws would give us more or better labels. 90% of people don't read labels, so the companies would stop to save costs. But where would that leave people which obscure allegies, like whey? Not everyone with obscure allergies lives near a health food store that would continue labeling.
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A great example for this is the practicing Jewish market for Kosher foods. Labelling laws are inadequate for Kosher standards. It is impossible to discover if a product is Kosher from the required labelling alone. So there's a private, competitive market for Kosher certification and labelling, one which to my knowledge is regulated only the anarcho-capitalist way: by a free market. There have been instances where a product changed and a certification became incorrect, and in these cases the market took
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Any unsaturated fatty acid produced naturally in a foodstuff has all cis double bonds. We have enzymes that deal perfectly well with these unsaturated fats. When polyunsaturated fats are partially hydrogenated through chemical means, so
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I'm having a really hard time not rolling my eyes here. Your idea of the epitomy of consumer safety is to try something and see how it makes you feel??? Do you actually know anything about science? There are plenty of things that will make you feel great today and k
Explain this to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Labeling laws are skirted by industry and made worthless. The solution, by you, is to get rid of labeling laws, instead of strengthening them or closing the loopholes.
"What do you know? These antipsychotic meds only make me a little less crazy. I guess I'd better just stop taking them at all."
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And MacDonald's announces (Score:5, Funny)
Another joke (Score:2)
I'll admit it (Score:4, Funny)
Clowns (Score:2, Funny)
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(Sorry... I just told this joke on
As long as... (Score:2)
Personally I'm fairly comfortable with GM products, but realise that many people have well founded fears (new food alergies, genie out of the bottle etc). Unfortunately many uninformed people will treat clones the same and make an issue due to FUD.
Bring on the clones I say, this can only be a win for quality and value.
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My position on GMO has changed, very much, in the past 2 years. I suggest you get past the thought-experiment phase and look at the actual data.
Meh. (Score:2)
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Food (Score:2)
That said, since there will be those who don't want t
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This is the statement I take issue with. I'm not exactly sure how far we've come since then but dolly died young of progressive lung disease, and the articles I can find suggest that other cloned animals since are not particularly healthy, and that the process is far, far less efficient than simply breeding animals. By which I mean it often takes dozens of attempts to produce a single viable embryo.
Given th
Re: Labels (Score:2, Funny)
"This beef is NOT CLONED. It contains 20% more fats than the cloned one next to it... doesn't taste as good... and costs 3X as much... please enjoy."
Yea there out there. (Score:3, Interesting)
There's many issues mixed together here. (Score:2)
With an issues like this, it's all about keeping the issues straight. It's nice to see that people in this thread so far mostly don't see the problem with clones. After all, naturally formed human clones, identical twins, are around us all the time so who cares if cows are cloned for food. Indeed, you'd think cloning opponents would be happy to hear that all the cloned co
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Microwaves have been cooking food for decades. Still not major evidence of harm from them, and the evidence that does exist comes from the fact that it cooks the meat to fast, the same things happends if you put it the oven at to high of a tempature, not from vibrating molcules (which is heat). As well any harm of lack of nuteriance is made up from the extra s
Consistency (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess it will also give pathogens a level of consistency and infectability impossible to attain with conventional monoculture.
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Coming on the heels of the closing of (Score:2)
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Cloning good milk producers would be a bit slow, but over time that would change. Remember that clones can have offspring (calves/sperm) too!
Against cloned foods, you say? (Score:2)
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go organic (Score:2, Insightful)
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One on one, and given the right information, most people can make an informed choice that blends the facts and their own moral compass. Unfortunately if you leave it up to "the public", a large number of people will be swayed by advertising (both true and false, both positive and negative).
Personally I'd rather leave this debate in a controlled forum rather than release it onto the supermarket floor. T
The most critical issue... (Score:4, Interesting)
The real danger here is a homogenized feed stock. If every cow in the world (or greater market region) is a clone of the same cow, they will all have the same strengths and weaknesses. A virus that may have previously only effected 5% of the feedstock population could suddenly effect 100% of the feedstock population.
I can see using cloning in two situations. 1) Immediate needs over ride the risk of losing the entire stock, and 2) as a small % of existing live breading facilities. As in a beef farmer may have a few hundred head of cattle, of those, 90% are 'normal' bread cows, the other 10% are clones. The clones would likely have a higher resale rate as you would be almost guaranteed the perfect cow. This way, even if something effects the clowned cow, you won't be out the entire food source, just a portion of "cash cow" income.
-Rick
Lean == Tasteless (Score:2, Insightful)
Everybody has health concerns (Score:4, Interesting)
I recently found I have diabetes type 2. Thats the one where you have to watch your diet and take some metformin and other drugs (maybe), and exercise. (BLAH). Boo hoo for me, my Dad has it, my Grandfather on my mom's side, I'd be a little stupid if I wasn't expecting it. In any case, I went to these "Diabetes seminars" put on by the local hospital. There is a nurse, and she talks about how to take care of yourself. Lots of fliers, and basically, she says, don't eat this don't eat that, all the stuff I like. 3 days of seminars, and I have to go visit the nurse and do this and that and the other.
Eventually I figure out that this is just go generate easy money for the hospital. They are billing the province a huge amount for each seminar and visits, so I said screw it. Now I just do it myself and everything is fine.
Where am I going with this tho? Thanks for asking. Everybody is saying this is bad for you, that is bad for you. Oh, don't drink milk, it causes cancer. Don't eat peanut butter at school, people have allergy's. Freakin peanut butter, I grew up on that. Something is always bad for you. You have to eat something. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life eating rabbit food. Screw that.
So they are cloning my steaks now. Sometimes I find a really good tbone at the butcher, sometimes it's not so good. I would love to find one that I like, and clone that over and over again. Give me another a1j447L2K please. Perfect every time. Whew hew.
Let's not forget that every time somebody says something is bad for you, there is an agenda behind it. Pepsi says Coke is bad for you. Coke says Pepsi is bad for you. Milk marketers say juice is bad for you. The government wants you to know smoking is bad for you because it is a huge burdon on the health industry. (Well, it is bad for you, duh!).
It drives me crazy everybody telling me what to eat and what to drink. I'll do what I want.
re: Don't eat this, don't eat that! (Score:2)
Just yesterday, Yahoo News had some piece about 4 things you could do to reduce your risk of cancer, and at least 3 of the 4 were pure speculation and questionable at best! (For example, one "tip" was to use spices like cinnamon, because of it's supposed cancer-inhibiting properties
Re:Everybody has health concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
Everybody is saying this is bad for you, that is bad for you. Oh, don't drink milk, it causes cancer. Don't eat peanut butter at school, people have allergy's. Freakin peanut butter, I grew up on that. Something is always bad for you. You have to eat something. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my life eating rabbit food. Screw that.
Stop listening to just anyone and everybody, and start getting information from actual scientists and not dumb journalists out to sell eyeballs. Educate yourself about your disease and how foods affect your blood sugar. Don't just simply rely on someone to tell you what to eat, find out the reasons for it.
There seems to be a belief out there that all science is just whooey because it's all influenced by politics and self interest. That's largely not true. The self interest comes from the people reporting the science. Some of them are just reporters looking to sell eyeballs. Some are people with an agenda against meat, GM food, corporations, etc. These kind of people will ignore evidence, miss-report and miss-interpret evidence, listen to pseudo-scientists as if they were real scientists, etc.
If you want to eat candy bars all day and advance yourself to insulin dependent diabetes, go blind at 50, or worse, go right ahead. But don't bundle all claims about food together in one category as if they're all equally bad (or good for that matter).
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Perhaps it is the occasional bad steak that makes the good ones taste better. Eliminate the occasional, or even regular, bad steak and the good ones will normalize out so that they wont be "really good" anymore and will end up being normal.
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Your little tantrum will take you right to the grave, and it might take
RecklessWanderer: please read (Score:3, Informative)
Then I suggest you avoid doing things likely to cause diabetes, or make it worse [bupa.co.uk], which unfortunately means being careful what you eat.
BTW I think my second link answers why they didn't say what you were examining your feet for.
Big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Putting the Frankenstein in Frankenfurter (Score:3, Interesting)
Since consumers will expect their irradatiated meat to glow in the dark, they'll create glowing cattle just like the glowing pigs [bbc.co.uk].
Read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma [michaelpollan.com] if you want to or watch Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms talk about the real future of raising meat [berkeley.edu] (long) and how to turn vegetarians back into meat eaters and why it's important to have promiscuous healthy earthworms.
Deja-moo (Score:5, Funny)
What about cloning the organs? (Score:2)
Stamped cows. (Score:2)
Mc D's hamburgers have a level of consistency and quality impossible to attain with conventional cooking. Every damned one of them the same. They have people specializing in making sure they are of the highest quality that can be attained *reliably*, which means they kind of tast a little like dog shit and pickles (or what I suppose pickles and dog shit might tast like).
They have a certain quality, and its always consistent.
Cloning (Score:5, Insightful)
Next time you see some one protesting cloning, ask if they would like a good joint of Dro to puff on. Good Hydro weed is all clone. This gives a uniform response and eliminates the need to locate the males. Cloning beef is bad! Cloning Weed it good? hmmm.
Can't "vote with your dollars," then, can you? (Score:4, Insightful)
Right. The "it's a free-market, vote-with-your-dollars" folks never explain how you can vote with your dollars if you can't tell what you're buying.
The current administration talks a good line about a "free market," but their application of the principle is very selective.
If you don't want to eat cloned food... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you don't want to eat cloned food... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know why, but I do actually have a strong psychological distinction between grafting in flora and cloning in fauna. Maybe it's the hundreds of years of history the former technique has behind it. So you may scoff at my distinction, and well, that's fine.
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Yes, by all means do: [blogspot.com] "The common banana found at breakfast tables all over the developed world is in peril. Both pests and disease are threatening to make it extinct. The banana most familiar to us, and most in danger, is the Nanica variety of the Cavendish cultivar group. All Nanica banana plants are more or less genetically identical. Since the cultivar is sterile and seedless, it is spread by clippings, creating clones instea
Monopoly On Beef Production (Score:2)
Like ADM and Cargill in the corn production world, it's only a matter of time before whoever runs the largest beef production factory abuses what's left of smaller production factories.
What happens to the gene pool of cows once cloning starts? I predict you'll narrow it a great deal thereby creating another monoculture. It's easy to argue why monocultures are bad.
In the current p
Why labelling is better than hiding (Score:2)
right, tastier food (Score:2)
Why would the food industry sacrifice profit for taste? What is different about beef and pork that would make them produce us high-quality products? Technology is used to provide us lower-quality fruits and vegetables. The quality of produce available in the US is appalling compared to other countries. (althoug it often looks nice!)
Re:Eh. (Score:5, Funny)
It's the culinary equivalent of marriage.
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True. And false. We've lost MOST of the variety through breeding anyway. Also natural mutation doesn't provide ideal creatures, only different ones. And selection - well now WE are the ones doing the selecting, according to what WE need and not what random climactic or geological events dictate. Why should we put up with the inefficient cow nature provided -one that was well adapted to its rol
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