Taxes are high in my state, which is how my state is able to provide services for its residents. Wages are also approximately 50% higher on the MN side of the border in the Twin Cities metro area vs just across the river in western Wisconsin, despite drawing from the same labor pool.
Disposable income is Gross Income minus Taxes. A 2 parent family with 2 kids making the same as a DINK couple would have a lower tax burden and more disposable income, but the DINK couple almost certainly has more discretionary income, which money left after paying for necessities like housing, food, and medical care.
> There's a weird backstory to public opposition to glyphosate which has very little to do with glyphosate itself (as someone else on this thread pointed out, glyphosate is relatively benign and relatively inert compared other common crop and landscape treatments), but rather with the idea that glyphosate is part of the technology stack of GM crops.
I still don’t understand why people seem to care about genetically modified glyphosate tolerant soybeans and corn, they’re mostly fed to animals anyways.
Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
Essentially turning
> You wouldn't download a car
into
> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.
Which is obviously absurd.
So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.
I don't think the case law supports this argument that farmers got roped into subscription crops. Farmers use this system because it has value, and is economically superior to the systems that preceded it (or they don't use it).
There is a problem though. If you opt out of it and just use seeds without any IP and your neighbor uses IP seeds and some of the seeds are blowing into your field from your neighbour you risk trouble.
Source that it is legal to keep the profits and the plants from a patented crop that can’t be prove you have intentionally planted it there? As far as I understand Montosanto claims it would always belong to them no matter how the seed ended up there.
Feel free to cite the case they've brought where they claim that!
They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).
There is absolutely no case law suggesting it is illegal to harvest and keep accidentally cross contaminated seed. Seeing as farming seeds is default legal there would need to be precedent otherwise for such an act to be illegal.
There is patent law. Patent law says you can't do the patented thing without the license. Growing the seeds is patented. So you can't grow them without license. This may be so obvious that it never needed to become a notable precedent-setting case.
Nice of you to axiomatically rederive patent law for us, but this is false. You cannot be sued simply for allowing seeds that blew onto your land grow.
I worded it so carefully to not have an argument, just for illustration, but...
Yes, you are correct, and you are not contradicting me: This is a system that makes sense on the surface.
It's economically superior to pay some more money to a seed supplier to get a better yield on my fields.
But this economic advantage is captured by the seed supplier after all farmers moved to this new system where you are no longer able to rely on the previous' harvest seeds. Once everyone is on the economically superior system, the seed supplier can start capturing more of the value that is created by farming.
The point here is that Monsanto creates a superior yield in a crop. All your farmer peers move to use it, and now you have to too or get priced out of the market.
hence:
> skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life.
> skew
The word "farmers" is doing some heavy lifting here - might be some multinational, might be a small family making a living.
The point is not that the market is pricing out inefficient farms, the point is that it turns a millennia old practice on it's head and using government force to enable monopolies to remove competition.
Farmers use it because their time horizon is 1-5 years, but the government monopoly on seeds is more like 20 years.
It's skewed.
Easy to disagree and argue with these points, but the original question was why there are people opposed to GMOs and while GMOs are not the only patented organisms they are the most obvious for people to have concerns over the economics
I find the objection to patents on GMO plants to be completely indefensible.
If there was ever an area where patents are justified and necessary, this is it. This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Objection to patents on GMO plants is just a way to object to GMO plants themselves without coming out and saying so directly.
> This is a product that in normal operation manufactures itself. Without patent protection, the farmer would buy at most one batch to seed his fields, and then never again.
Isn't that a massive societal benefit vs rent seeking though?
Yes, yes, let's imagine automated turbo communism where all inventions can be made outside the free market.
Here in the real world, private firms are the source of things like this. Roundup Ready soybeans involved cooperation from multiple private firms that contributed various elements.
>Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
The thing is, that existed for like 100 years before GMOs were a thing. Basically no one saves seeds to reuse and didn't even prior to GMOs. The whole "poor farmers can't save their seeds" thing is propaganda from the organics industry that gets repeated by people who don't understand modern (or even semi-modern) works.
> Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.
They don't get roped into anything. They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost. Further, at least part of the reasoning for not allowing replanting is to avoid genetic deviation in future generations of crop.
> They elect to do that because the crop yields are significantly better and justify the cost.
That is correct. They are so much better ( and I am in awe of that technology) that outside of some niches (depending on the crop) as a farmer you cannot afford not to use them. But now your farmer-timeframe of a few years is up against a 20 year artificial monopoly in the form of a patent. And all your peers are facing the same situation. This isn't a situation where you can just decide to do whatever you want.
You suddenly find yourself dependent on a third party that knows your situation exactly and will try to extract the most amount of value from you - trying to capture your profit while keeping you healthy enough to keep being a customer.
The major important gmo patents are expiring close to it. If that is your argument it isn't relevant. There are new patents but they are not hard to work around.
> Right up until someone else makes a better product.
Yes. A different seed supplier. My point isn't that it's morally wrong to make a better product. My point is that the way it's set up is that those who are in the position to make a better patented-product are in an unbalancedly better position towards the people who use the product to create something as fundamentally important as food.
It's some combination of ideological opposition to GMOs and a way to get trade barriers against import of cheap grain and soybeans from the US to the EU. The latter is less important now that Trump has blown up free trade.
Cigarettes exist solely to keep people smoking, they’re an insidious product. It’s a corporation weaponizing addiction to profit while causing cancer and COPD. You’re either addicted, or you aren’t. There are no pleasurable psychoactive effects, only relief from nicotine withdrawal. Humans are better off without tobacco, or cigarettes at least.
This solution at least lets the current addicts maintain their addiction, but there are much safer ways to get nicotine these days if you want it, lozenges, vapes, pouches.
I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.
At least in parts of Eastern Europe (especially the former GDR) district heating systems were introduced as a response to the oil crises of the 70s, resulting price shocks and the transport of coal to households being very labor and resource incentive [1].
It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy, and also the US is special case since we have dirt cheap natural gas that is used for heating.
Digging up streets to run distribution lines, running service drops to every existing house, installing a heat exchanger and valves in every house is astronomically expensive given the amount of energy used by a single residence.
If you’re building out a new neighborhood on a greenspace plot, installing the district heating/cooling piping is much cheaper since you’re already laying electric, water, sewer, and mane gas lines.
Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat. We have been able to do this for a very long time. So if people aren't really doing it much, its not economical. If it was now becoming economical, the article would describe some new way of doing it that makes it economical. The article doesn't, so you "know" it isn't.
PS This has been tried many time, it only works in very specific situations, usually places where building a full PP doesn't make sense or where you are making a lot of electricity for some other purpose (mining usually).
Sometimes district heating and electricity generation does combine though:
> Wärtsilä’s combined power generation and heat recovery plant offering comprises solutions for combined heat and power (CHP) including dynamic district heating (DDH), district cooling and power (DCAP) and trigeneration for applications that require both heating and cooling.
Not always, but as the sibling noted, there are plenty of combined heat and power plants. They recover as much of the energy as possible from the exhaust gas streams and run pretty efficiently.
I have plenty of chemical dependency medical records, it has had zero impact on me at all (the records, not the chemical dependency). Heroin and alcohol.
Your medical records can only be viewed if you approve access, and employers are not allowed to ask for medical records. Foreign countries can’t see your medical records when you apply for a visa.
Possibly it could impact life insurance if you need to turn over medical records, but my life insurance policy was written after my drug abuse days so I don’t think it would matter.
> Prime example is Mercedes. The RRP for post-tariff Mercedes vehicles was identical to the pre-tariff RRP.
If your prime example is a luxury car with a ton of margin built in, you need a better example. Tariffed commodities absolutely had the costs passed on, and far more of those are sold than high margin luxury products where manufacturers had the option to compress margins vs passing on the cost.
Also, there are lots of products that go through multiple middle men, the tariffs were included and marked up at every stage. Very few things go from manufacturer to retailer with no middlemen.
I’d guess about 1/4 to 1/3rd of tariff costs were absorbed and the rest passed along to the eventual end consumer.
I suspect you work nowhere near the money at work, the closer you get to the money, the more you realize exactly what is built into a price.
Substitution with lower cost items happens when prices go up and that is factored into CPI data. I’m not sure how the basket of goods has changed over the past year, but substitution of goods does happen when prices go up.
Corporate profits grew throughout the tariffs, if they were absorbing the majority of the tariff cost instead of passing it on, it would’ve affected publicly traded company earnings, but it hasn’t.
I initially thought the same thing, but there is a human listed as the photographer, Mark Abramson. The photo has been processed, but it’s not AI generated.
You can’t conjure up a bottle of vodka or a pack of cigarettes out of thin air in your bedroom with a cheap Wi-Fi only Android phone, but you can use that cheap Android phone to access social media.
That’s why I said it depends on the enforcement mechanism. If they require an ID or a credit card then it’s roughly analogous to getting someone to by beer for you.
The only people with a relatively healthy outlook on modern socia media (by this I mean not using it) and ability to detect bullshit are a slice of Millenials that grew up on the pseudonymous internet that transitioned into the real name public internet, birth years from early 80s to early 90s mostly. Before or after that, Gen X were already adults and Gen Z grew up (became teens) with Snapchat/Instagram already existing.
Outside of this group (which happens to be my peer group) I see a noticeable drop in media literacy and ability to detect bullshit, but that may just be a blind spot for me since I’m part of the aforementioned Millenial group.
Taxes are high in my state, which is how my state is able to provide services for its residents. Wages are also approximately 50% higher on the MN side of the border in the Twin Cities metro area vs just across the river in western Wisconsin, despite drawing from the same labor pool.
reply