"popular support" != "not totalitarian"

Several studies have showed already that monsanto has lied about for example how the herbicides are not taken up by our intenstines.

Why am I not surprised that this comes from an AC, with no links whatsoever to provide proof?

current GMO is not at all aimed at diversity.

No, it is not, THAT IS MY POINT. It cannot be when everyone is so afraid of GMO that they pile regulation on top of regulation.

In reality right now, each and every farmer could be exploring GMO in their own crops, bringing about a variety and diversity of food products the like of which the world has never seen.

The reason most farms do not avail themselves of this diversity is short-term thinking

No, it's because grafting is an incredibly slow and time consuming process that is done one plant at a time.

And for some crops there is very little diversity in natural crops to graft with, GMO opens up a far vaster range of possibilities.

Real competition, ending farm subsidies to millionaires/billionares

That is so hilarious when the regulations making GMO so hard are the reason the large companies own farming now! Only they can afford the tremendous costs to make GMO hybrids that work best in the field.

You (and the rest of the GMO alarmists) are the ones supporting Monsanto.

Been there. Did that.

Surrender of Detroit

Yaz>

Sorry to seem pedantic, but science works by creating hypothesis and testing them, not theories.

Theories need to be supported by a vast body of evidence, and should provide both an explanation and the ability to make falsifiable predictions. They start out as hypothesis, however once experimentation and observation bear out the hypothesis, and sufficient data is accrued to show that all the expected data fits the hypothesis, and that predictions made by the hypothesis continue to be valid, then the framework derived from the hypothesis can be called a theory.

The point being, once something in science is considered a theory, you're long past the creation and testing stages (although there is nothing wrong with continuing to validate new data against existing theories; and obviously once new data is available some theories become either no longer valid, or only valid for certain systems of constraints). What you were talking about above are hypothesis, and the difference is critical to make in this world of vast scientific illiteracy.

Yaz

Yes, and they also have a vested interest in lying.

But the other companies don't have even that. Even if Apple is misleading in some respect, they are at least giving you SOMETHING. Other companies remain totally silent on worker care issues. They provide no documentation as to conditions. They impose no restrictions on companies they contract with for Assembly. Apple Does.

So even if Apple isn't doing some of it quite right, they are still vastly far ahead of other companies in trying to improve working conditions in China. Which is why if you actually cared about the Chinese, you'd be supporting Apple instead of attacking them.

Instead, you'll continue to use your non-Apple laptop and your non-Apple smartphone because you like them, totally ignoring the fact that the conditions they were made under are far worse than anything reported for Apple.

Myself, I have taken to buying some things like wireless routers from Apple that I used to purchase cheaper versions of before, because at least I have some idea of the conditions they are being manufactured under. Either you actually care or you don't, you can't just claim to care and then act as if the issue doesn't matter.

The hypocrisy here is just sickening.

Of course, those same condition would be illegal in the US

No they wouldn't. Hours worked, conditions worked in, all would be legal in the U.S. and in fact some workers here have it worse (farm workers for example).

They are still terrible condiions in china, report or no report.

But they are worse for all of the other companies except for Apple. because other companies are not even checking. That is my point. No matter how bad conditions of people working on Apple products are, they are X times worse for products from any other company.

Therefore if you actually care about chinese workers, you would buy either Apple products or no modern electronics at all (since pretty much nothing is assembled in the U.S.).

Obviously you and the original poster are not buying Apple products; therefore you do not ACTUALLY care about workers in China at all. You just hate Apple. Which is fine, but you really should admit that you actually don't care if Chinese workers live or die.

That's regulation not totalitarianism

That's a distinction without a difference. What it is, is government telling you what to do in an arbitrary and unreasonable fashion under circumstances where such restriction is often completely inappropriate. There are many totalitarian regulations in this area, from the erection of antennas and flagpoles to restrictions on homebuilding and property management where such actions by the citizen have no effect upon any neighboring property or structure. It's classic government out of control, just writ small, as opposed to the wars for profit, the care and feeding of the oil and military industries at the expense of everything else, the pervasive (and illegal by definition) surveillance, etc.

(re shooting family pets) No idea what you are talking about here.

Oh. Not paying attention again, then. Let me Google that for you.

You need to stop with the overbearing rhetoric like "shooting family".

Oh, do I?

A totalitarian government that objected to soda would just ban soda you wouldn't have light regulation in a few cities.

Oh. You mean the way they ban pot and various other recreational drugs. The way they tell you how many windows your home has to have (and where.) The way they monitor your bank account, your communications, your travel. The way they shoot your family pets. And your family. The way they lie about the government's goals. The way they step all over the document that gives them the right to exist -- our constitution. Yep, I agree. It's not the soda bans in a few cities that made this land into the corporate oligarchy is it today; it's a whole bunch of other things. All of which are well in play.

We just don't flex our muscles as much.

You think not? (and remember, those are just the raids known to be "botched")

What the world needs to realize is that no pun intended, Apple is rotten to the core

Why?

Apple is the only technical company to actually provide reports on factory conditions, and impose worker limits on factories assembling for them.

If you think Apple is rotten, why are you not out complaining about EVERY other technical compan, which is far worse?

Whatever you are typing on was produced under worse conditions than Apple assembly workers face. The same is true of whatever display you are looking at, and the computer processing your words.

If you really meant what you said you would throw out everything and crawl into a forest. But you don't, you apply one standard to Apple and a far, far lower standard to every other company on earth.

Did you every stop to think that by demonizing the only company that is trying to improve worker conditions that you are actually screwing over the Chinese workers? If Apple went into a bug decline Chinese factories could go back to horrendous overtime and lower worker conditions as they pleased, because they would be back to working only for companies that did not care about how things were assembled...

"All the false reporting" was one nutjob who was confusing journalism with stage performance.

No it's not. It's tons of reports about factories in China that are talking generally about everything a factory works on, without distinguishing the parts that are actually having Apple products produced - because Apple has standards about worker treatment that few other companies have.

At Pegatron, over 10,000 underage and student workers (interns), from 16 to 20 years of age, work in crowded production rooms

Note they never claim those are places where Apple products are being worked on. It's easy to imaging that a factory would meet Apple's factory conditions in one facility but not in a building assembling products for other companies that don't impose standards for workers.

Just like with Daisy or Greenpeace or the other people that have made allegations about factories in China, they all attach the Apple name to get attention even if Apple is not involved. Daisy was not a "nutjob", he was just less careful than others doing the same thing.

From the very article in question, Apple says:

"However, Apple disputed those claims, saying that it had closely tracked working hours at all of these facilities."

Apple is in far better position to know what actual hours worked are than a third party group.

Abundance of Silicon: Earth's Crust/p.p.m.: 277100

replace monocrop orchards with polyculture farms

The ironic thing if scare-mongerers like you were not drumming up fear of GMO foods, every orchard would probably have many different varieties of even a single crop, each with a different GMO variant to test out some new flavor or ability.

GMO fears are what is leading to monoculture, because you are blocking scientific progress on any possible changes that can be made to food crops.