General Discussion Thread

[Róisín]

Ah, I understand now. Sounds like a fun game.

[Sc0ut]

Well... a story with minnions in all the roles? So like, it might start out with Róisín leaving her house to go to the farmer's market but instead she meets Black Mage Lenny and Paladin Eich who are on an important mission to save thorny who has been captured by Sc0ut for important experiments and Róisín decides that a Healer would be a good addition on their quest.
(I mean I'd ask you all about what roles youd want to play before starting it but something like that.)

Sure, throw me right in there

[Noodles]

Sounds like fun, count me in!

[Windfighter]

haha, okay, thanks people I'll probably make a thread for it in June, just wanted to see if there was any interest! Sorry for hijacking the thread a little

On another note my cat has gotten a weird fascination of scratching at my television, do we have any cat-experts with suggestions on how to stop it? (it's cute, but very frustrating when I'm doing stuff on the computer!)
(or when I'm trying to sleep)

[Ragnarok]

Well... a story with minnions in all the roles? So like, it might start out with Róisín leaving her house to go to the farmer's market but instead she meets Black Mage Lenny and Paladin Eich who are on an important mission to save thorny who has been captured by Sc0ut for important experiments and Róisín decides that a Healer would be a good addition on their quest.
(I mean I'd ask you all about what roles youd want to play before starting it but something like that.)

This sounds amazing, if you want me I'll be there.

[thorny]

I may in practice be mostly captured by the actual farmers' markets and the growing therefore, but that does sound interesting. I'll keep an eye out for the thread.

[Antillanka]

Well... a story with minnions in all the roles? So like, it might start out with Róisín leaving her house to go to the farmer's market but instead she meets Black Mage Lenny and Paladin Eich who are on an important mission to save thorny who has been captured by Sc0ut for important experiments and Róisín decides that a Healer would be a good addition on their quest.
(I mean I'd ask you all about what roles youd want to play before starting it but something like that.)

Haha, sounds awesome!! And Róisín as a healer is so spot on that it's actually canon!

[wavewright62]

I'm up for Windy's game.

I'm also on the record as pro-GE, both as a person who is dependent on a GE medicine (human insulin) to live, and married to a man who trained as a traditional plant breeder but then helped develop GE crops.

[Lenny]

I'm up for being part of that game fanfic, too!<3 It sounds really fun

sorry, got confused

[Iceea]

Thorny, precisely that. The whole narrowing of genetic diversity is scary. If only a few varieties of, say, corn or rice are resistant to the next fungal infection, and we have let those varieties drop out of the gene pool because they are not the highest yielding or the most attractive, we are in trouble. Wasn't there a recent problem in America with a new strain of corn smut, with one of the old varieties turning out to be resistant?

And while I am all for science, I think more caution needs to be applied to the rush for profits, and more responsibility needs to be taken for unintended consequences. 'We didn't mean for that to happen' is not much consolation to the folk who have lost their livelihood, and often their farms.

Plant Breeders' Rights is also an issue here. For something that started out last century with the benign intention of protecting the French rose breeding industry, it has become a monster, with most of the profit going to lawyers and big corporations - funny how often that happens. It is getting harder for gardeners and small farmers to save their own seed, and many heritage varieties and cultivars are extinct or dying out. There are a few success stories, like the 'Painted Lady' bean and the 'Moon and Stars' watermelon, but those are unfortunately exceptions to the general trend.

Then there is the business of seed patenting. Fair enough if the company or individual has actually bred or otherwise created the seed in question, but far too often these proceedings are intended to take a food plant or medicinal plant out of the hands of traditional users, or out of the Commons of mankind. I've helped to do the background research for several of the court cases opposing the attempts of pharmaceutical companies to patent traditional-use plants, and its a helluva slog, trying to document centuries of traditional use among people who may not be literate or have written records, and only know that their tribe has grown or wild-harvested this plant 'forever'. Because the problem is that once such a patent is in place, often without the traditional users or growers even being aware that this has happened, they are supposed to pay money when the plant is grown or used. If you want a case in point, look up 'Hoodia gordonii', an African medicinal plant that had the misfortune to be noticed by the American fatness industry (I won't dignify it with the name of 'weight-loss industry').

This is probably far too much serious stuff to inflict on you all - sorry!

I'll add one bit to this topic on GMO plants and organisms. What I see is that by putting food made from or with these engineered plants and products in our stores is that we're all being asked/forced to participate in a largely uncontrolled experiment. The companies say they test these things and they are safe. But our history is littered with products and services of engineered "new-improved" things that at the time of their introduction were said to beneficial or benign, and latter proved to be not so. Many being shown to be out and out unhealthful and some being causes of death. The real crime or injustice is that in many cases the manufacturers of these products was aware of the problems well before there was any public outcry or move to regulate their product. And the companies often did everything within their lobbying power to prevent the free flow of information, finding authoritative sources to back their stance, and more to preserve their profits or corporate position. Given the diversity of the human genome there will no doubt be individuals or groups of individuals who will possibly suffer effects from mildly deleterious to perhaps life threatening from these products. Which brings us to product labeling. There has been a big fight going on for several years about how to label products made with GMO ingredients. Without good labeling it makes it very hard for those who would like to opt out of this grand experiment to do so in an intelligent manner.
When I was in university I read a lot of Utopian literature for a major paper on "The Technology of Utopia". Thinking about what I read 30 yrs ago, and looking at our world situation today, it's hard not to be a bit pessimistic. I'm definitely on the downhill side of life and I wonder what kind of a world my son and all you other young people will be living in.

[JoB]

-- this time of year I have a table set up just outside the kitchen door (and also just outside my office window) for hardening off transplants as preliminary to moving them from the light shelves in kitchen to the greenhouse; right now there are no transplants on it, but there is a white and yellow cat taking shelter underneath it. Time to go let him in, probably

... I have to say that that was a much more fascinating read before I realized that you're referring to plant transplants ...

I do see a major difference between conventional breeding over time and directly engineered organisms. At least conventional breeding gives the general ecology more time to adapt to changes.

I'ld even go so far as to say that the really decisive difference is that with the industrial farming of today, the speed of "rolling out" new genetics, from an experiment deemed concluded successfully to huge monocultures mostly replacing the predecessors, has picked up. (That means that any shortcoming you didn't find out before threatens to catch your attention by affecting a sizeable part of the world(wide agriculture). A hypothetical "going on a others'-genetics-override extinction rampage as soon as it hits the wild" scenario wouldn't care much about the size of the initial release, short of introduction being done on a continent-by-continent-and-wait-for-dropping-shoes-in-between manner.) Needless to say, making it the SOP to buy seeds from one central source every year promises to make future roll-outs still faster and opens up the possibility of "little updates" being done without anyone but the supplier knowing.

(Yes, I had another "minor" maintenance window last Friday eve whose unexpected side effects will keep me busy for quite a while, how'd you know ... ?)

On the other hand, once both the fields and the combined "patented seeds and protective agents therefor" markets have been monopolized enough, wannabe competitor's best bet to overcome the market entry barriers changes from "make a better product" to "secretly make and release plant diseases targeting the monopoly's uniform products". Let's see whether that's enough to make monocultures go out of fashion again ...

[thorny]

... I have to say that that was a much more fascinating read before I realized that you're referring to plant transplants ...

No, I don't have a batch of stolen kidneys hanging around!   

On the other hand, once both the fields and the combined "patented seeds and protective agents therefor" markets have been monopolized enough, wannabe competitor's best bet to overcome the market entry barriers changes from "make a better product" to "secretly make and release plant diseases targeting the monopoly's uniform products". Let's see whether that's enough to make monocultures go out of fashion again ...

What's going on right now is at least as nasty.

There's an herbicide called dicamba that doesn't stay where it's applied. Even if "properly" applied so as to land only on the intended field, if the weather warms up it volatilizes, moves up into the air, drifts in the air, and eventually lands on other fields some distance away.

Again, this is an herbicide. When it lands on other fields, if those fields are growing crops that are also susceptible to the herbicide, those crops are damaged or killed.

Monsanto has engineered cotton and soybeans to be resistant to the dicamba. They claim that it can be applied so it won't drift; but there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. Farmers who buy the seed with the resistant trait will use the herbicide. Some of their neighbors who don't want to buy either the dicamba or the resistant seed are feeling forced into buying the resistant strain anyway -- because they're afraid their neighbors' dicamba use will otherwise kill their crops.

(And, of course, anyone trying to grow produce, or organic anything, within range of the drift is screwed. There are many crops for which there are no resistant strains; and drift would decertify otherwise organic fields.)

Some of this is tangled up in the courts right now.

https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/04/20/arkansas-battle-over-dicamba-farmers-dont-have-to-obey-state-ban-on-spraying-herbicide-local-courts-say/

(link chosen deliberately as from a basically pro-gmo site, counter to my own inclinations. Here's the story they edited it from -- they left out the bit about farmers buying the GMO seed out of fear of their neighbors' use of dicamba:  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/18/603529602/local-courts-lift-arkansas-weedkiller-ban-creating-chaos)

[Sc0ut]

Just a brief note that I really enjoyed today's Google Doodle (the one with Jane Goodall)

[midwestmutt]

I'm on my 2nd course of prednisone to treat inflammation after first throwing my back out and then the next week getting what the doc called "a patch of pneumonia on one lobe" after spending my last three days at work with the flu. That damn steroid works but always makes me feel all twitchy.

[fija]

Oh my gosh, the thread for me (since I can’t bring any intellectual or clever observations regarding the comic due to lack of both of those traits)!
My mom threw away my embroidery needle and I have to wait the entire weekend to get myself new ones *deep sigh* my fingers are twitching! I’ve already bought a few moulins for SSSS-themed embroidery. We’ll see how it works out (IF it does).