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Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#181

Post by nickbauman »

Kalium wrote: post #158
nickbauman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're going to learn that at best eating GMOs are going to be as safe as eating McDonalds fast food. Which is quite safe but not a terribly wise dietary choice. Because GMOs are made (at best) to maximize the profitability of what's being sold. And when you do that you sacrifice other things and you lose awareness of others. This is especially true considering how little we know about nutrition. We are at the…

Why do you think GMOs are inferior? How are they fundamentally different from plants that have been human-modified for many thousands of years? Let's get concrete. In what specific nutritional manner do you think Golden Rice is inferior to the varietal of white rice from which it was derived? And if the answer to this is that we don't know enough about nutrition to be sure, then what basis do you have for alleging it…

It's inferior because we aren't adapted to it. Our bodies are highly adapted for millions of years to thrive on the food that comes out of our biosphere more or less directly. This is why super-hybridized dwarf wheat (not even GMO!), for example, which was developed in the 1960s, has been linked to all kinds health problems, including obesity. Our bodies have not had time to adapt to it, but if we look at dwarf wheat purely through the lens of economics, it's a "great" product as it has twice the calories of ordinary einkorn wheat that we've been eating for more than 10,000 years.

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#182

Post by popinman322 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #116
natrius wrote: post #108

Blockchains. Distributed consensus is incredibly powerful. It will allow us to rebuild our society around individuals instead of corporations and governments that formed because economic transaction costs were so high that economies of scale (and sometimes the use of force) were required to coordinate our society. All economic activity will be blockchain-mediated. It will make us wealthier and freer.

The "low costs" of bitcoin are a myth. Bitcoin transactions are extremely expensive, both financially and ecologically, it's just that those costs are currently subsidized by block rewards to miners instead of paid by consumers/end-users. If bitcoin were ever to be widely adopted, the high fees would have to be passed on to users: http://www.coindesk.com/new-study-low-bitcoin-transaction-fe... At some level, this bas…

Just curious, what do you think of Stellar's consensus system?

https://medium.com/a-stellar-journey/on-worldwide-consensus-...

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#183

Post by Kalium »

nickbauman wrote: post #181
Kalium wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think GMOs are inferior? How are they fundamentally different from plants that have been human-modified for many thousands of years? Let's get concrete. In what specific nutritional manner do you think Golden Rice is inferior to the varietal of white rice from which it was derived? And if the answer to this is that we don't know enough about nutrition to be sure, then what basis do you have for alleging it…

It's inferior because we aren't adapted to it. Our bodies are highly adapted for millions of years to thrive on the food that comes out of our biosphere more or less directly. This is why super-hybridized dwarf wheat (not even GMO!), for example, which was developed in the 1960s, has been linked to all kinds health problems, including obesity. Our bodies have not had time to adapt to it, but if we look at dwarf wheat…

Would you care to address the specific question posed? Like, why Golden Rice is inferior to the rice varietal from which it is derived? Just because it doesn't come with a "100% Natural!" stamp doesn't make it bad. Neither, I should think, is the converse true. As you illustrate, there are plenty of problems with "natural" non-GMO plant breeding.

Is the position that you mean to stake out perhaps that it's possible for GMOs to be inferior, rather than that they are necessarily so?

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#184

Post by Kalium »

primroot wrote: post #172
Kalium wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racing to the bottom on price isn't good for you because you have access to lots of food at prices you can easily afford. For a great many people, more and cheaper food means they can actually afford to get enough to eat. Foods have been modified to stay fresher and be more nutritious. But you don't see them in stores.

I'd really be interested in knowing those that have been modified to be more nutritious, especially since a lot of nutritious food gets to stay out of the market due to its incapacity to stay fresh. I only know of Golden Rice, and I'm not even sure how fresh it stays.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/01/08/260782518/thi...

This is a case of GMOs to preserve freshness, rather than nutrition.

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#185

Post by beat »

prewett wrote: post #170
beat wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMO crops aren't invented for developing world conditions. They're invented for the developed world that can afford them. They're an extension of Green Revolution agriculture ideas. The core of Green Revolution is a focus on cash crops rather than subsistence farming - high intensity monocropping to create raw feedstock for junk food factories in the global market, rather than immediately edible food for local consum…

Could you give some links? I'd love to read about this but can't find anything on Google that talks about anything earlier than 2000.

I got this back in the 1990s from reading actual books. Don't know about links offhand... I was actually thinking about this myself.

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#186

Post by markdown »

DanBC wrote: post #178
Plough_Jogger wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big problem with GMOs is that they facilitate the use of massive amounts of pesticides.

In theory you use less. Roundup Ready is supposed to use lower quantities of weedkiller but do so earlier in the growing season when everything is more vulnerable to it (thus making a resistant crop useful). It's not a great sales slogan: "Roundup Ready - increases costs by increasing the amount of spraying you can do".

1995: Be very careful with weedicides... a few drops on our crops will kill them.

2015: Just spray the whole field... weeds, crops and all.

How roundup-ready crops are sold as a good thing, I really have no idea. Somehow the world has been convinced that dousing their food in weedicide isn't a bad idea.

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#187

Post by markdown »

discardorama wrote: post #127
brockers wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fear the graphene will fall by the wayside due to legal and social pressure. News sources have already pointed out that it is significantly more dangerous, if inhaled, than asbestos; another material this is insanely useful for a number of applications but is effectively blackballed as a engineer-able material. Another example is nuclear energy. Clean, abundant, and extremely safe. The fear of radiation exposer has…

> Another example is nuclear energy. Clean, abundant, and extremely safe. Yeah, but what do you do about the waste? The US has tons of waste sitting around. The grand plan of using Yucca Mountain to store the waste fizzled. We have just postponed the cost to a future generation who'll have to deal with the waste we're producing today.

> We have just postponed the cost to a future generation who'll have to deal with the waste we're producing today.

I wonder how they'll be able to tackle the problem while simultaneously dying from the lung and skin cancer they got from all that burned coal.

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#188

Post by andybak »

Nadya wrote: post #138
vinceguidry wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But productivity isn't the problem of our food chain. We can grow plenty of food, and cheaply. We can. The rest of the developing world has a lot of trouble keeping people fed. There's only so much aid can do, but if we can find ways for small-time farmers to produce more, and also to transport those goods, then the rest of the world could feed itself, something small-time agriculture has historically had a lot of…

We produce more than enough food to feed the entire world. The issue is distribution.

That's only a proximate cause. Beyond that is economics and therefore power structures.

Re: Ask HN: What are the greatest discoveries in the last few years?

#190

Post by sampo »

markdown wrote: post #186
DanBC wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory you use less. Roundup Ready is supposed to use lower quantities of weedkiller but do so earlier in the growing season when everything is more vulnerable to it (thus making a resistant crop useful). It's not a great sales slogan: "Roundup Ready - increases costs by increasing the amount of spraying you can do".

1995: Be very careful with weedicides... a few drops on our crops will kill them. 2015: Just spray the whole field... weeds, crops and all. How roundup-ready crops are sold as a good thing, I really have no idea. Somehow the world has been convinced that dousing their food in weedicide isn't a bad idea.

"Glyphosate and its degradation product, AMPA, residues are considered to be much more toxicologically and environmentally benign than most of the herbicides replaced by glyphosate."

(Roundup is made of glyphosate.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

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