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Urgh, this is what I hate about PD.com, it is the only site in existence where a perfectly good spam thread can be misused for high quality discussions.  I hate you all.

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Messages - Kai

#32
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 31, 2013, 10:24:16 PM
Quote from: Kai on October 31, 2013, 10:22:54 PM
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 31, 2013, 09:57:45 PM
Quote from: Demolition Squid on October 31, 2013, 09:56:20 PM
Whoa. What happened?  :eek:

Back then?  Coyotes.  Certainly wasn't me.

Ian caved the driver's side door in.

Keelin more or less wrecked the front axle.

The huge dent in the roof is still there, but that wasn't my fault.

Like Father, like children. Blood of your blood, for sure.  :lol:

They are careless and they are bad people.  I had accidents.  THEY are willfully reckless.

I seem to remember a certain police cruiser you damaged while riding around reading PD...  :lulz:
#33
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 31, 2013, 09:57:45 PM
Quote from: Demolition Squid on October 31, 2013, 09:56:20 PM
Whoa. What happened?  :eek:

Back then?  Coyotes.  Certainly wasn't me.

Ian caved the driver's side door in.

Keelin more or less wrecked the front axle.

The huge dent in the roof is still there, but that wasn't my fault.

Like Father, like children. Blood of your blood, for sure.  :lol:
#34
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on October 31, 2013, 02:49:12 AM
Quote from: Kai on October 31, 2013, 12:49:39 AM
Thought: maybe what we need is some old fashioned free market. Monsanto has a virtual monopoly right now. But what happens when these first gen lines go out of style and other companies step in to compete? On one hand we'll have even more GMOs on the market. On the other hand, Monsanto won't be able to hold court anymore.

What's stopping others from entering the market?

That's a good question and I don't know the answer.
#35
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on October 31, 2013, 02:52:29 AM
Quote from: Kai on October 31, 2013, 02:12:08 AM
Quote from: Q. G. Pennyworth on October 31, 2013, 12:56:00 AM
The history of cultivars is one of those "dull until you spend three days researching it on wikipedia and suddenly best thing ever" things. I was always confused why the wax fruit in my grandparents' basement had these weird looking bananas until I found out that cultivar ("Big Mikes") got wiped out in the 50s and has been replaced with the ones you see now (Cavendishes). Also, oranges. The whole thing.

I, personally, am fascinated by potatoes. There are hundreds of cultivars in South America, all suited for different conditions. What do we get up here? Pretty much just Russett Burbank. THANKS MCDONALD'S!

Over four THOUSAND registered edible cultivars at the International Potato Center in Lima!



So beautiful.  :fap:
#36
Quote from: Q. G. Pennyworth on October 31, 2013, 12:56:00 AM
The history of cultivars is one of those "dull until you spend three days researching it on wikipedia and suddenly best thing ever" things. I was always confused why the wax fruit in my grandparents' basement had these weird looking bananas until I found out that cultivar ("Big Mikes") got wiped out in the 50s and has been replaced with the ones you see now (Cavendishes). Also, oranges. The whole thing.

I, personally, am fascinated by potatoes. There are hundreds of cultivars in South America, all suited for different conditions. What do we get up here? Pretty much just Russett Burbank. THANKS MCDONALD'S!
#37
Thought: maybe what we need is some old fashioned free market. Monsanto has a virtual monopoly right now. But what happens when these first gen lines go out of style and other companies step in to compete? On one hand we'll have even more GMOs on the market. On the other hand, Monsanto won't be able to hold court anymore.
#38
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on October 31, 2013, 12:43:40 AM
Quote from: Kai on October 31, 2013, 12:41:37 AM
Well, you can try to sell it, but if people won't eat it, the idea is kind of moot.

Another entirely separate issue to food security that I would love to talk about is the rapid loss of cultivars in pretty much every kind of crop.

That is incredibly distressing, and oddly we just don't seem to learn from the various blights and famines that it's a bad idea to lose diversity.

That actually is a good argument against GMOs and hybrids in general, that it homogenizes the genetic diversity within a species by crossing everything together. There's also the problem of cultivar sale, that the number of kinds of cultivars out there has decreased dramatically. Even apples and tomatoes, which retain a relatively higher average number of cultivars for sale, are tiny in comparison to 100 years ago.
#39
Well, you can try to sell it, but if people won't eat it, the idea is kind of moot.

Another entirely separate issue to food security that I would love to talk about is the rapid loss of cultivars in pretty much every kind of crop.
#40
Okay, hirley0, I am sufficiently terrified.  :eek:
#41
I think polyculture is a great idea, and wish it became the standard. I don't think it should stop the research on GMOs though.
#42
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on October 31, 2013, 12:30:06 AM
Quote from: Kai on October 31, 2013, 12:11:17 AM
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 31, 2013, 12:08:48 AM
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on October 31, 2013, 12:06:13 AM
I'm not saying it's not potentially useful, just that it will be of dubious benefit on its own.

My problem with a lot of GMO food is that it puts more of the control over food into the hands of the people who are largely to blame for much of the situation.

My other problem is with single-generation seeds.  There's a horror story in there.  We've had 3 dark ages, and we have never lost the knowledge gained from the agricultural revolution.  Making seeds that don't make more seeds makes that hideous possibility more likely in the next dark ages.  And there will be a next dark ages, sooner or later.

That has nothing to do with GMOs though. Pretty much every crop plant is a sterile hybrid now.

Do you have a citation for this? Because my understanding is that while some are sterile hybrids, most are fertile hybrids that will revert.

You know what? I pulled that out of my ass from recollection. I can't find anything supporting that statement, which means it's probably bullshit.

It does call into question Roger's fear about single generation seeds, though.
#43
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 31, 2013, 12:11:51 AM
Quote from: Kai on October 31, 2013, 12:08:40 AM

Let's put it this way. Pests: The heart of the problem is that pests are eating the plants. You can kill the pests with broad spectrum insecticides, which is a hugely harmful process. Or you can insert a gene which kills a much more limited number, which is still not the best solution. The best solution is to make it so the insects don't even recognize the plants as tasty, so they get left alone.


We already know pesticides are a losing strategy.  We should be, as you say, taking an entirely different approach, like sacrificial plants that attract insects away from the plants we want.  Making that plant LESS resistant to pests and MORE attractive.  That way you don't lose the crop and you don't lose the bugs.

Or something.  When you approach A doesn't work, you don't do it MORE, you walk around to the other side of the problem and attempt approach B.

Or that just creates a source-sink dynamic. You still have to lower the attractiveness of the main crop in correspondence to raising attractiveness of the decoy. The other thing is, crop pests are often generalists, so they have other choices in the landscape. These other choices often act as a sink when the crop isn't available. Brown marmorated stink bugs don't go away if they have no soybeans to feed upon. They just find less attractive food sources.
#44
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 31, 2013, 12:08:48 AM
Quote from: Mrs. Nigelson on October 31, 2013, 12:06:13 AM
I'm not saying it's not potentially useful, just that it will be of dubious benefit on its own.

My problem with a lot of GMO food is that it puts more of the control over food into the hands of the people who are largely to blame for much of the situation.

My other problem is with single-generation seeds.  There's a horror story in there.  We've had 3 dark ages, and we have never lost the knowledge gained from the agricultural revolution.  Making seeds that don't make more seeds makes that hideous possibility more likely in the next dark ages.  And there will be a next dark ages, sooner or later.

That has nothing to do with GMOs though. Pretty much every crop plant is a sterile hybrid now.
#45
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 30, 2013, 11:48:58 PM
Quote from: Kai on October 30, 2013, 11:46:03 PM
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 30, 2013, 11:42:12 PM
Quote from: Kai on October 30, 2013, 11:37:09 PM
Quote from: Dirty Old Uncle Roger on October 30, 2013, 11:33:35 PM
Quote from: Kai on October 30, 2013, 11:26:06 PM
And since the patent holders are going to give it out freely, it's like the Polio vaccine all over again.

False equivalence.

You're going to have to elaborate.

Polio vaccination does not spread from the person vaccinated.  Plants introduced into an environment can.

While I am reluctantly on board with golden rice, that is because the situation calling for it is DIRE, and the regular plant life in the target regions (ie, equatorial Africa, etc) is already more or less gone.

But just deciding that there can't be unintended consequences in the biological sciences because you WANT a particular result is no fucking different than the Luddites denying any science that disagrees with their values and/or religious beliefs.  IT ISN'T SCIENCE.

Did I fucking say that? NO, I DIDN'T FUCKING SAY THAT. In fact, I admitted that Bt crops and Roundup Ready crops were a shitty solution.

But you are comparing plant and insect life with things that do not reproduce.  Like computers and vaccines.

This situation's risks have more in common with jackrabbits in Australia.  Once you let 'em into the wild, the situation is more or less out of your control.  You can live with the results, or you can go find a spider to swallow to catch the fly.

1. The more complicated the changes you make, the less likely the plants can hybridize.

2. The metaphor was for technology. The creation of transgenic plants is technology. Right now it's in first generation. The solutions are makeshift and shitty.


Let's put it this way. Pests: The heart of the problem is that pests are eating the plants. You can kill the pests with broad spectrum insecticides, which is a hugely harmful process. Or you can insert a gene which kills a much more limited number, which is still not the best solution. The best solution is to make it so the insects don't even recognize the plants as tasty, so they get left alone.

Weeds: These are always a problem, as they steal both nutrients and space from the crops. You can weed, or spray herbicides, or spray herbicides while using a crop plant that is resistant to them, but in the latter two cases you're still spraying shit on the landscape. But plants have found ways to deal with this. Walnut, and many other plants, have created allelopathic compounds which deter plant growth in their vicinity. Same with Eucalyptus. Give your crops a system like this, no more herbicide spraying.

Water/Fertilizer use: Already gone over this. C4 system on rice is in progress.

The point is, the future is weird. These solutions we are agonizing over are new, short term, and likely to be a failure within the next ten years. Why? Because resistance is easy. But more complicated systems make that more difficult.