I frequently hear tales of GMOs saving the world and whatnot. But when I ask for a scientific measurement of their effect, all I get is studies - often sponsored by GMO proposers themselves - showing that, in developed countries (as Europe is), they can lead to modest increments in yeld (in the order of magnitude of 10% over ten years), and sometimes they don't (e.g. in Australia).

I can't talk about what happens in the vasty plains of Germany, but here on the terraced slopes of southern Europe tons of fruits are left to rot on the branches because picking them up would cost more than you'd earn by selling them (also because of the european subsidies which transfer money to latifondists no matter what they do with their land), and still no hungry mobs are plundering those fields. We can't compete with China on growing cheaper rice, no matter what seeds we use. What we can do is to promote our centuries-old cultivars, and the traditional foods based on them, and sell them for a premium because they don't taste like shit.

You'll forgive my diffidence, but in the latest years, every single time we've been told to drop a time-honoured habit of us in order to copy some other country's recipe for success, it ended up in grief and hunger (this one scientifically measured) for us. Timeo multinationals et dona ferentes.

Do you mean that AAPL is really worth more than Belgium?

Then, as I said, none of the reasons you exposed are technical. You've just described the state of the things as it is now, because of disinterest, laziness or intention to control: for example, Google forking stuff instead of working with upstream, manufacturers likewise maintaining their own buggy kernels with secret sauce and leaving them to bitrot as soon as their new SOCs are out, carriers ignoring patches already provided by Google and the manufactureres because they couldn't care less, or delaying them for years just to apply their customizations to the new firmware.

Carriers are public concessionaries. Ask them to provide the customers with secure phones or, if they're not able to, to leave the public spectrum to someone else who claims to be, and see how the supposedly technical reasons vanish quickly all over the chain from carriers up to Google.

By the way, Linux on ARM has flattened device tree support. Discovering devices is the last of the problems now.

However, I wouldn't know exactly what the practical terms of such regulation could be. They certainly can't force manufacturers to support obsolete hardware forever. Perhaps they could prescribe a minimum timespan of guaranteed security fixes.

I do believe that competition is good and that its absence leads to disaster. However, after competition has done its thing, people must be able to find a job allowing them to live with dignity: if that doesn't happen, then something's wrong. In the case of skilled workers, “dignity” includes getting back what they've spent to build their competences.

What I wanted to deprecate with my post is the attitude of people who happen to be more or less shielded from the ugly head of competition and then shrug, or even pontificate, in front of the misfortune of those who don't share the same privilege.

But when it's turn for the invisible hand to slap the kind of people who usually post here, the comments have a much different tone and the proposals push in another direction.

How did that Google guy say? Perhaps we'd better start running, for the robots have already started.