Remember this the next time you want to complain about GMO’s, we may not have done it in a lab but they still are that.
Bananas looked like lemons wtf
Isn’t this more of a combination of selective breeding and GMOs? Not just GMOs?
Yes. But people talk about how GMO’s are “unnatural”, yet for centuries humanity has been exploiting mutations in animals and plants to produce food for themselves.
GMO’s are simply the process of inducing these mutations reliably.
People hear “Lettuce being modified with scorpion DNA” and think that we’re now eating scorpions. But, in reality, they’re taking a tiny bit of scorpion DNA and splicing it into the plant. Why? So the plant will produce poison that is not harmful to humans but will deter insects, reducing the use of pesticide, which CAN be harmful to humans and the environment.
GMOs are producing rice that can survive flooding, which makes rice more reliable yields and will prevent food shortages in poor nations that rely on said crops for staple food.
GMOs are also creating spider-goat hybrids. Why? So we can splice web production into the goat’s udders. We’ll be able to spin huge quantities of spider silk, enough to reliably create spider silk cables and ropes, which have more tensile strength than steel.
I for one am glad I live in a time where watermelons aren’t giant tomato abominations
The issue with GMOs is that corporations like Monsanto are patenting GMOs and arresting indigenous farmers for cross pollinating with they seeds. But there is nothing dangerous about the science.
^This.
The problem isn’t the science, it’s what capitalism does with that science.
this should be in the largest letters we’ve got, plastered everywhere until it gets through people’s heads:
The problem isn’t the science, it’s what capitalism does with that science.
So I’m reading “Medieval and Renaissance Medicine” by Benjamin L. Gordon and I just note that for the vast stretch of human history, it was considered a doctor’s duty to treat the poor for free, to the point where royal decrees were issued saying that doctors had to treat the poor free of charge.
(Fredrick II of Sicily, in particular, set the following forth as the code of physicians and surgeons, along with some bits on how a doctor must have attended lectures in logic for 3 years and lectures in medicine and surgery for 5 years, and spent a year practicing under the direction of an experienced doctor.)
“Fees of the Physician According to the Code
A. The poor must be treated without charge.”
Also, unrelated but I found it interesting; a doctor was ordered by law to do house calls, and could charge half a tarenus in travel fees for patients in his city.
I imagine this has something to do with the church’s beliefs about chariety? They used to believe a lot should be done for the poor
Partly, but it goes back further than that.
The Greeks would often have doctors paid by the city who were ‘public doctors’; they earned an annual wage and then would treat anyone who came to them. If a rich man wished to retain a private doctor, he of course could, but the poor had access to doctors for free. This was considered a basic service.
Later on, of course, Christian ideas of charity towards the poor entered into it as well, but the idea that poor people should be treated without cost is very, very old. The idea that poor people should be charged tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatment is very, very new, and runs counter to basic human morality going back a couple thousand years.
Given how hard western culture sucks the dick of Classical Greece, it’s amazing that having the gov. fund health care for the common citizens, something the Greeks were doing 2,000 years ago, is considered so controversial in the USA.
I would like sources on this to share with a conservative I know who will otherwise doubt this.
…the source is “Medieval and Renaissance Medicine”, by Benjamin L Gordon.
This is apparently just a New Jersey thing, and it’s done specifically to appease Wall Street investors who buy up New Jersey student loan debt. Federal student loans are pretty terrible but at least they’re forgiven if you die or are disabled.
“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.”
Hey. LIVING COSTS MONEY! How about giving more money to the companies that employ me and MAYBE I MIGHT BE OK
This is such a funny thing to me because in Thai culture, it’s completely normal to live with your parents when you’re an adult. In fact, most people live in their family home until they’re married ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Saaaame in Pakistan dude and being abroad for grad school is really fucking me up I am not built to be even slightly independent 😂
In Western culture (including America!) it was completely normal for people to live with their parents in adulthood–sometimes until they married, sometimes longer. In America, that changed (for men) in the 1940s and 50s, when it was really really easy for an 18 year old to get a good job that paid more than enough to live a comfortable life on, or to afford college which would then practically guarantee you an even better-paying job. Women joined the trend of moving out at 18 in the 1960s and 70s.
And now those jobs don’t exist, or are few and far between, and guess what! People are living with their parents again. But that 70-year span was just long enough that it fell out of common memory, and now people are seen as “failures” because the economics have changed.
A very great deal of Western culture, ESPECIALLY America, is actually still based on a memory of the 40′s and 50′s as the baseline of normalcy despite them being a total fluke at the time.
World War II and McCarthyism created a massive shift towards rabid patriotism, Christian fundamentalism and the ideal of the “nuclear family” that resembled nothing before it and we’re still recovering from as the majority of our most powerful politicians are old enough that this period of sudden fanaticism is their “nostalgic good old days” and the way they think things are “supposed to be.”
I love when these posts randomly become tiny history lessons, it soothes me
My absolute favourite thing about watching comedians tear the shit out of Monopoly is that it was designed to be an over the top hellhole that exemplifies the worst parts of capitalism, intended to incite rage in people and help them recognize how fundamentally unfair this system is. And it did they by going to the maximum extremes that the creator could think of at the time.
And those maximum extremes she came up with?
Fucking nuked into extrasolar orbit by whatever the fuck is going on in actual real life right now, to the extent that monopoly just looks like…… a reflection of the actual world, rather than an exaggeration of anything.
Anyway, destroy capitalism, but until then if you make a consequence deck I would probably buy it just to see what’s in there.
People like Elon Musk are frightening to me, not because they have wealth or influence, but because they have a completely rabid personality cult dedicated not to Elon Musk the human – but to that eccentric nerd underdog millionaire that people believe he represents.
His cult does not look at him as an actual person – but as an archetype. They want to see him live out some Tony Stark esque lifestyle, even though the man himself has done virtually nothing of scientific note. A real-life superhero for nerds who are desperate to live vicariously through him.
On a related note – Nikola Tesla died in poverty partially because he had worked on providing early solar, and hydroelectric energy to the masses . Attempting to usurp his scientific legacy through establishing a corporation which panders to the wealthy is a cultural crime and I refuse to believe Elon has the slightest shred of respect for the man as he was.
california anti-drought measures are always like “take shorter showers! consider brushing your teeth with the sink turned off” and never mention the fact that nestle is bottling all of our fucking water and selling it to people who live in areas with plenty of water
It’s like the Irish potato “famine” I stg
In California, residential use only accounts for 4% of total water use. Industrial use is 80%.
This is true of any resource. Yes turning your lights off will save you a but of money. But industry wastes far more electricity than you. Yes recycling your garbage is good. But companies, like the retail chain i work at produce far more garbage than you ever could and do not recycle it at all.
Turning natural resource and environmental crises into individual responsibility is form of class warfare so fucking insidious
Honestly just burn every company to the ground or cut them off from electricity and water systems
Tax them heavily for their usage Make recycling mandatory or theyre fined Oh im sorry am i stepping all over your precious free market I hope to choke it out
Word
“Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet?
Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans….People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.” – Derrick Jensen (author & environmentalist)
The problem with the idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of recreation as a structure for a day is that it simply can’t work that way. If I’m expected to be at work at 9, then my work day must begin at 7. Allowing myself a rushed experience to wake up and get to work. And I live close to work. So either my recreation or my sleep needs to take a hit, but for some people it could be more. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week as a basis for full time work is honestly unreasonable at that point. Because it isn’t actually 40 hours a week, it’s 50 hours a week lost to a job, of which 10 is unpaid.
some of my coworkers have 2h of transit to get to work, which takes 4-5h off their free time. working full time is a bad idea and shouldve never been a thing
And let’s not forget that maintaining a clean home and providing food for yourself takes over 20 hours a week (appx 20 hours in-house, and varying hours spent running outside errands) if you are completely abled.
wupacing 