61–70 of 144 posts
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Oh, and there is a special place in hell reserved for anyone involved in designing food crops that can’t reproduce.
Essentially all commercial apple trees are grafted and don't reproduce true to seed. Been this way for almost a century now.
Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food. Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is. Any government functionar…
In general, invention of new things is something humanity's been tackling for quite awhile. Why would this apply specifically to food versus, well, everything?
Living beings are not inanimate objects that are manually made out of raw materials. They are not human-made. They reproduce and humans only create the environment for this to happen. You cannot invent a living being. You can invent a modification in the genome and thereby create a new breed, but that should not grant you the right to have a monopoly on the reproduction of those living beings.
Reminds me of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath .
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This is so simplistic. They made a new varietal. Nobody is saying he can't plant any of the standard heirloom Nectarines. The patent will expire in a while, and then anyone can do it. Honestly, how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? This is how it has worked for half a century and mild gripes aside, the quality of the produce in stores is WAY WAY…
> how are you proposing incentivizing developing new varietals if nobody can have patents on any breeds at all? How do academics make scientific discoveries if the results are public? Government, industry, and private patronage. People want better crops, they’ll fund and make contests for them
Patents are used to enforce the rules so that competitors don't cheat.
Selective breeding requires sometimes _decades_ of commitment and a lot of very boring work. This is not a good fit for academia and even worse fit for government programs.
Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food. Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is. Any government functionar…
Just a general thought on your comment style. Summarily declaring something "evil" means that you're not really interested in hearing any other comments on the topic, and that additional data or analysis of the issue will have no effect on your opinion. Which, in and of itself, may be fine for you, but I find it to be the absolute least useful comments on HN.
I'd say it is in the end an ethics issue. Sure, the tone may be offputting, but... I think there is value in having people around who actually hold beliefs and aren't as quickly willing to put their beliefs aside. Society as a whole benefits from a corrective to ultra-progressives - even if what the progressives want is a good thing (which, to be clear, it almost always is!), move too fast and you end up losing the masses along the way.
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In general, invention of new things is something humanity's been tackling for quite awhile. Why would this apply specifically to food versus, well, everything?
I can go for a month, probably longer, without, say, the internet. I could also go a month without food, maybe, but there are people who can't. Food is different because it is essential to life.
There are certainly tons of cases where modern developments might be actually essentially to life or extend life like with medication, medical devices, temperature control, moves to modern electric technologies versus combustion to reduce pollution, etc. How do we incentivize new medication development, something way more lifesaving than nectarine varietals, without some period of exclusivity? At least there, twenty years from now, the solutions will be more accessible versus never developed.
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Oh, and there is a special place in hell reserved for anyone involved in designing food crops that can’t reproduce.
isn't this just a by-product of seed hybridization which has enabled pretty much all of modern agriculture? A lot of testing goes into finding the two strains that combine together to create high-yield seeds, but the next generations of those seeds won't produce well.
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> their wild propagation In general, crop plants don't propagate well in the wild. The whole point of breeding a crop plant is to remove their chemical defenses (to make them edible) and to make them produce lots of edible parts. This is usually the direct opposite of what plants need to survive in the wild.
The wind carries pollen from the crops long distances, where it cross-pollinates with other crops, some of which are grown from seed. This is a real thing that happens. There have been major court cases about it, like this one from Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil. ALL our staple food crops and most non staples are genetically engineered by millennia of cultivation and selective breeding; CRISPR is just a fancy mechanism for what we’ve always done to food. Regulations that prevent farmers from selling food that is safe, are evil. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned the regulation is. Any government functionar…
> Patents on food crops, even genetically engineered ones, are evil Eh, I'd say it's fair to give them a short window of patent protection. Say 20 years, akin to pharmaceuticals. The only exception should be if the protected variety has a monopoly. Then it immediately loses patent protection.
Also, all patents are monopoly. That is actually what a patent provides, it provides a limited government sanctioned monopoly over the invention.
regardless of how the contract is structured, no contract should allow or force a producer to throw products away. this is similar to a law in the EU that forbids producers or distributors of clothing to destroy products they don't want to sell. once you plant a tree to grow fruit you should be allowed to keep harvesting that tree until its natural end. if there is an exclusive contract then the contract must not be…