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No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

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Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#41

Post by maaku »

mitchty wrote: post #35
notdang wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't taste good.

What doesn't "taste good"? Almost all modern food is Genetically Modified at some level, all meat has hormones as well so not sure specifically what constitues tasting good with that. Are you saying hormones make things taste bad? Have you blind A-B tested that assumption? Same for "GM" food? Also what exactly is constituted as GM? Is Corn a GM food or still "natural" because we just used selective pressure and chose…

This is a pure anecdotal data point, but as someone who travels a lot: American meat is bland. I don't know if it is hormones, climate, food stock, herding conditions, or what, but it's definitely true in my experience.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#42

Post by pvnick »

wazoox wrote: post #6

Frankly, I can't see a single good reason for this trade agreement, and a lot of good reasons against, starting with that I (and all other Europeans) don't want GM food, hormone beef and chlorinated chicken in my plate any day soon.

I don't normally downvote comments I read here, but c'mon man. First of all, your comment was off-topic. Second of all, at least with the GM food, yours is a knee-jerk reaction unsupported by science. GM food has the potential to save billions (with a B) of lives, starting with Golden Rice.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#43

Post by JumpCrisscross »

wazoox wrote: post #6

Frankly, I can't see a single good reason for this trade agreement, and a lot of good reasons against, starting with that I (and all other Europeans) don't want GM food, hormone beef and chlorinated chicken in my plate any day soon.

Trade openness is one of the strongest predictor of peace [1] (also see: Better Angels of our Nature [2]).

Free trade would also be an economic boon to Europe and the U.S. A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation together with the Munich-based Center for Economic Studies found that "if the United States and the European Union are able to come together on a far-reaching free trade agreement, Germany would be one of the greatest beneficiaries. Fully 181,000 new jobs could be expected and per-capita income would spike by 4.68 percent." GDP/capita could rise "by 13.4 percent in the US and by 9.7 percent in the UK. More than a million new jobs would result in America. That number would be 400,000 in Britain." [3]

The benefits of free trade are one of the points economists have found consensus on.

[1] http://www.yale.edu/leitner/resources/docs/HORJune09.pdf "Trade Does Promote Peace: New Simultaneous Estimates of the Reciprocal Effects of Trade and Conflict" (Hegre, O'Neal, & Russett, 2009)

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312... The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

[3] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/study-on-trans-...

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#44

Post by ajuc »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #4
mtgx wrote: post #2

Maybe, just maybe, this might get the US government to stop, or at least drastically limit its spying operations.

Criminals that go to jail aren't rehabilitated, they just learn to be better criminals. Governments that get busted doing shady shit don't rehabilitate themselves, they just learn to hide it better.

You mean the next government will be more careful at hiding shaddy deals. The previous won't be reelected ever again.

So better analogy will be a criminal jailed for life, and other criminals perfecting their crimes because of fear.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#45

Post by darseex »

bogger wrote: post #22
kintamanimatt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with any of those things? None of those things are harmful.

Expecting downvotes for this: I strongly suspect that hormones in meat make Americans bigger. I am from Europe. I have met many Americans both of whose parents were born in my country. They don't look like us. My perception is that on average they are significantly bigger, and are both taller and broader than is normal in my country. I don't know if this has health implications, but I would rather not eat meat which…

Americans have been 'larger' for some time. We had trouble with AK47s after WW2, for example, because they were too small for the comparatively larger American soldiers to wield comfortably.

I don't think it's any more complicated than the fact that we eat more food for all of our lives.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#46

Post by jussij »

pvnick wrote: post #42
wazoox wrote: post #6

Frankly, I can't see a single good reason for this trade agreement, and a lot of good reasons against, starting with that I (and all other Europeans) don't want GM food, hormone beef and chlorinated chicken in my plate any day soon.

I don't normally downvote comments I read here, but c'mon man. First of all, your comment was off-topic. Second of all, at least with the GM food, yours is a knee-jerk reaction unsupported by science. GM food has the potential to save billions (with a B) of lives, starting with Golden Rice.

The biggest problem with GM is it puts the world's food production into the hands of a select few multinational companies.

Companies like Monsanto have already shown they are prepared to fight hard to keep control their GM monopolies:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/on/monsanto-gmo-roundup-ready-se...

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#47

Post by tokenizer »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #24

I'm going to freely speculate here, but this seems obvious enough to any observer of international relations just to come out with it. Let's just call this story the way it is. EU governments have been in bed with the US for decades with spying. Yes, they've postured and done a bunch of things to make themselves look good -- Google had better watch their step -- but at the end of the day the EU is as guilty as any ot…

> It's a question of limits, and of degrees of intrusion.

Great point. Honestly, my biggest issue with this is the secret nature of the FISA court and the near 100% approval for warrants.

You NEED to have watchdogs for the watchers. You can't simply have massive ABC orgs having all of this information unchecked like it is now.

The cat is out of the bag however. We can't simply stop using our technology, the question is like what you said: regulation and discussion of how to use this technology.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#48

Post by jussij »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #37
jbcurtin2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not serious, are you? Cows are fed corn feed to bulk them for slaughter weight sooner. If the cow ended up not being slaughtered it would end up dying due to disease. Antibiotics keep it alive in order to get it to our plates. The whole american food industry is ...ked. I dread the day we start producing GMO'd rice. - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115/

All cows that aren't slaughtered end up dying from disease or old age. Antibiotics prevent the spread of disease and aren't harmful in and of themselves, but their overuse can lead to resistant bacteria. And I'm not sure why you'd have a problem with genetically modified rice if it would increase the food supply safely. ll of these things have been relatively well studied and there appears to be no evidence to suppor…

> no evidence to support any indication that this these practices are harmful to human

You haven't heard of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease)?

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/bse/

The likely cause of that disease was farmers feeding cows other cows (in the form of meal).

Lots of strange stuff happens in the name of making a profit.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#49

Post by kintamanimatt »

ajuc wrote: post #44
kintamanimatt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals that go to jail aren't rehabilitated, they just learn to be better criminals. Governments that get busted doing shady shit don't rehabilitate themselves, they just learn to hide it better.

You mean the next government will be more careful at hiding shaddy deals. The previous won't be reelected ever again. So better analogy will be a criminal jailed for life, and other criminals perfecting their crimes because of fear.

You just exposed a cynical assumption I tend to make, that government continues more or less unchanged over long periods of time no matter who is elected. Much like a human replaces most of their cells every x years and is essentially the same organism, government just replaces most of the old faces with fresh faces that do much the same as the previous generation.

Re: No free trade agreement if charges of espionage are true, warns EU Commissioner

#50

Post by [deleted] »

justin66 wrote: post #28
oleganza wrote: post #7

Actual translation: because of the behavior of U.S. government, E.U. government(s) will make it hard for E.U. citizens to trade with U.S. citizens. So normal people get spied on and bullied by one government, then because of that their life is made even more complicated by some other government. Great outcome! When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any p…

> When people will realize that the problem is always in the governments themselves as a concept, not in any particular issues? It's totally okay to be an atheist today, but we need just one extra little step to be anarchists and it's so, so, so complicated. While belief in a magical all-powerful and caring government is no different than a belief in deity. People "believe in" government not because they love it or t…

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