191–200 of 371 posts
I’d love to see breweries become more conscientious about this and make a point of promoting only “open” varieties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The general public does not understand agriculture well, and I've noticed that this misunderstanding is stronger among those that have huge huge concerns about seeds and GMOs. This is Monsanto's most frequent talking point. They're very emphatic that GMO foods designed to survive being doused in massive amounts of roundup are completely safe (true) before they are sprayed with massive amounts of the (carcinogenic*)…
I don't understand, is the talking point what you quotes from me, or their taking point about GMOs? Because I don't think what you quoted, or my comment in general, is a Monsanto taking point, and I don't understand the connection to Monsanto that you are trying to make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wouldn't need to get rid of the current limits, just expire the patent sooner. If a company generates $10 Billion dollars in the first 5 years of their 20 year patent the reminding 15 years isn't necessary to incentivize innovation. Rewarding innovation has been archived, just skip ahead to the part where the public at large benefits.
So a cap on patent revenues, with ensuing expiration
Most people support patents because they have this romanticized notion of some little guy in his garage inventing the next light bulb. That’s not representative of the mass offensive and defensive patterns of use by modern corporations. We should just end patents, period.
The problem with ending patents is the alternative is medieval guilds that jealously guard their knowledge, sometimes using lethal force. The great thing about patents is that they force people to publish the knowledge so it won't be lost to the sands of time when they close up shop. That said, our current patent system is problematic for sure. The bar for getting a patent has become far too low as systems have becom…
That works when the patents is some simple thing anyone can understand. Nothing is like that anymore. Every interesting line of research requires a specialist to understand it, and every specialist represents a high opportunity cost. In practice only a few people could hope to benefit from the publication.
Throw into that the fact that it's actually lawyers who write patents, and thus they are written in legalese.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patents are still being used to protect smaller companies from much larger corporations. Allowing these large corporations to legally ignore patents will only make things worse for the rest of us. If we need to reform patents, maybe it should be based on revenue generated. Once a company has been successfully "incentivized" for their "innovation" the patent expires sooner.
In theory, yes. In practice, the big companies usually have a ton of vague questionable defensive patents that cover a huge space of "inventions", so even if the smaller companies try to sue, they will get avalanched by an array of patent suits that could potentially bankrupt the company.
1. With inadequate penalties for filing frivolous lawsuits, filing frivolous lawsuits becomes a strategy. I've unfortunately had a close friend be a victim of this strategy. I won't name my friend, but I will name that Jared Kushner's companies were the (repeated) plaintiff. If we close the loopholes around patents (and we should) it will only make the filing of frivolous lawsuits slightly less efficient, because the lawsuits will get thrown out quicker. Note that even if the lawsuits get thrown out, they still cost the defendants money to get them thrown out, so patent reform wouldn't even necessarily mean they can't file patent lawsuits, it just means the lawsuits might get thrown out slightly faster.
2. Justice isn't possible in civil suits where the plaintiff and defendant have disparate resources to pay for counsel.
I remember, there was a case where a farmer grew patented plants on his field. They spread to his neighbours field who then got sued by the patent holding company for not licensing that plant. My memory is a bit fuzzy here but you get the idea. Now, how about reversing that? Think of a GPL-like licensed plant that makes all derived plants also inheriting that license. Legally poisoning the binary distribution format…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The farmers were not trying to grow the patented seeds. They shouldn't be liable for their neighbor's trash blowing on their fields. The use of Roundup is another travesty.
The farmer may have claimed they weren't trying to. The fact they used Roundup, which would have killed their crop if it weren't the GM seeds, indicates otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
God forbid the farmers benefit for free in some way from the unpredictable and uncontrollable pollination of a plant genetically engineered to be a highly successful cultivar. I'm not attacking you here, but the logic decided by the courts may be lawful but it is not moral (in my opinion). It's as if a noisy neighbour hosts a late night party and you happen to enjoy the music. The neighbour notices and decides to cha…
This argument is completely orthogonal to the narrative originally presented, which is that farmers who weren't trying to benefit from the patents at all were tangled up in Monsanto lawsuits. That narrative is false, and that's all I'm here to correct. There's a Motte and Bailey thing that happens with these discussions, the bailey being "Monsanto will sue you even if their seeds just happen to blow onto your propert…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Specialization and different roles is helping improve productivity immensely, which means less land is used by farming, and more land can be maintained, or returned from ag use for ecological restoration. There are three problems: - the most obvious, concentration of market power. Just look at the stranglehold large corporations have over politics - Walmart is for example famous for getting away with underpaying th…
> the most obvious, concentration of market power. The solution to concentrated market power is not to abandon the productivity gains, but to use law and regulate to de-concentrate market power. We could instead ban specialization and the productivity it brings, but that's dealing with the wrong thing. > concentration of genomics Again, solved not by banning specialization, but rather through diversification of the m…
Or by restructuring how land is used. When you have miles upon miles of corn fields, it's a fucking buffet for corn pests. In contrast, land that has a great variety of usages - corn, wheat, grass for making hay, marijuana, rice, potatoes, berries, tomatoes - makes it difficult for pests to explosively sweep over entire swaths of land and leaving nothing but total destruction in its wake. Our ancestors knew this and changed sequentially what seeds they sowed, they even let land sit idle for a season or two so it could recuperate nutrients. All of this is extensively documented, a lot of it has actual scientific backing, it just takes a bit more effort so it isn't worth it under capitalism.
Also, California should stop growing fucking alfalfa only for the Saudis to feed cows with it. That is a waste of water and land that could both be used for something more productive than blood money from oil returning home. And they're not the only ones doing atrocious wastes of all kind of valuable resources.
> Also, if you have some magical way of doing this, I'm all ears, it would be great, but wishful thinking is no substitute for actual on the ground solutions that are working.
Well... France for example forces supermarkets to provide leftover food instead of trashing it. That led to a massive increase in food that ended up in people's mouths via food banks, over 10.000 tonnes a year in fact[1], additionally it creates a negative incentive against overstocking.
Restaurants can be forced to limit portion sizes (which might also have side effects to improve public health, aka obesity epidemic).
Stores could be forced to do regular maintenance on their cooler systems to reduce the amount of food lost there.
Students could get education on how to cook, how to check if food is still edible and other food aspects. It's not like their parents are teaching them...
tl;dr: stopping food waste can be tackled on so many levels and, given 50% food waste ratios, even slashing half of that is equal to provide 25% more food to the world's population.
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/lebensmittel-verschwe...