Comment Re: Good tactic calling your paying customers thie (Score 1) 467
And if everybody played the game without paying for it, Sony wouldn't have lost anything at all. Everybody's happy and Sony starts working hard on its next game.
Do people actually do this? Pick up the phone if they don't know who is calling them?
Young people don't. But old people? They love that shit. Not answering the phone is inconceivable to them. The great news for scammers is that young people aren't all that great to scam anyway. They don't usually have much cash, and they don't have grandchildren who might need to be "bailed out" of jail in Mexico or so many magazine subscriptions that they don't remember who's been paid. Old people have money, and a juicy subset of them are losing their mental faculties and are easily duped.
If you're too smart to answer the phone and talk to a robocaller, they don't want to talk to you anyway.
And none of those specialties makes a person qualified to make such a statement.
I'm going to guess that you don't think anybody is qualified to make such a statement. I suppose technically, that's true. It's not possible to prove that something is "safe" so demands to prove GMOs "safe" are really just setting up goalposts with wheels. All you can do is test for specific dangers, and those tests have come out negative. So I suppose the best thing to say is that we've tested for the dangers we can reasonably think of and the relevant experts pretty much agree that those dangers aren't there.
They're not anymore qualified than Jenny McCarthy's idiot brigade except for the fact that you're appealing to expertise that doesn't even exist.
So if you're going to summarize the general conclusions from a large body of research across a lot of different disciplines and I offered you the opinion of a random Nobel Prize winner in a scientific field and the opinion of Jenny McCarthy, you'd be willing to toss a coin as to which one was more likely to be correct? Given that Jenny McCarthy has pretty much demonstrated that she doesn't basic statistical inference, I'd throw in with any random scientist or engineer on the topic. But I suppose that if your view of the world is, "Doesn't know everything == Knows absolutely nothing," it could be hard to distinguish.
That's not a solution. It has to be mandatory or companies aren't going to bother putting the label on unless it's cheap to go without the GMO technology.
It "has to be mandatory" if your goal is to push people away from GMO products, not if your goal is provide a supply of verifiable non-GMO food for people who want them. Your point about there being a "well defined market" for Kosher foods gives the game away. Your goal is not to find non-GMO foods to buy. You can already get that by buying Organic or "Non-GMO Project" labels. You want to create a larger market by putting a scary looking label on perfectly safe food and making "non-GMO" something people look for as a mark of safety or quality.
But, the biggest issue is that non-Kosher foods do not destroy the Kosher versions. GMOs can and do destroy non-GMOs that are grown in close proximity.
This is a very interesting comparison because the definition of "destroy" is pretty strange. We could likewise say that non-GMO plants in the proximity of GMO plants "destroys" the GMO plants through cross-pollination. It's a weird religious insistence on purity that's at stake, just like in the case of Kosher. Imagine this: I have a requirement that none of my food be grown near power lines and I refuse to eat any plant that has any power line plants in is family history. Now we have a problem: Nobody will create "non power line plant" labeled food for me, so I need a mandate. Fortunately, one I get the mandate, I can build a constituency of people who share my hangup. Unfortunately, we need to drive the power line plants out of existence, because their very presence can ruin entire fields of my non power line produce! Ruined, I tell you!
Actually I think most of the problem with GMOs has to do with them being modified such that they don't produced replantable seed. That scares the hell out of me. If for some reason the company that produces it goes away then you can't continue using it. Become dependent enough on it and you are entirely dependent on that company and they can pretty much charge whatever the hell they want.
1) This isn't a real thing. It was an idea that never got into marketed products. It would actually probably be a good thing because people would shit their pants less about GMOs "getting out" and ruining the world if they were sterile. But they're not. You can absolutely harvest seeds from and replant the GMO seeds that you buy. You'll just be violating the agreement you signed with the provider.
2) Farmers buying seeds every year isn't a new thing. In many industries, farmers never save their seeds. Often, it's because they're using a special hybrid that doesn't breed true (the second generation gets a whole variety of unpredictable traits instead of the traits you want). Sometimes its because the seed saving process for that plant is not worth the effort and is better left to the professionals. The idea of farmers saving their seeds closed-loop as the norm is a myth believed mostly by non-farmers.
Additionally these companies have a tendency to sue the crap out of farmers that don't use their product if they find any evidence of their product on that farm.
1) This is also false. Look through the actual legal cases in question. There are relatively few of them, and they don't involve "accidents" at all.
2) How do you square this with your belief that GM seeds aren't replantable? It's not surprising that scary myths get around, but it's kind of amazing that people can hold two mutually exclusive myths in their heads at once.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
