As bleak as it is, given the high amount of other political opponents that died, the fact that she didn’t is likely an indication of how nice she plays with the people doing the murdering. I’m hopeful that she’s just good at dodging assassins, though!
Makes sense. I’ve always been disappointed that instead of using better processing power to make bigger, more complex games, we used it to make the same games with more complex animations and details. I don’t want a game that only differs from its predecessors through use of graphical upgrades like individual blades of grass swaying in the wind, or the character starting to sweat in relation to their exertion; I want games with PS1-PS2 graphics and animation quality, but with complex gameplay that the consoles of that era could only dream of being able to handle.
Well, yes, but that’s kinda my point. If you don’t patent, you get exploited, like how the discoverers of insulin synthesis decided not to patent, so companies patented similar, but not exact methods, and now it’s incredibly expensive. But, as you said, if you do patent, there is still a risk of exploitation if the patent holder sells to an exploitative company. However, that exploitation is still less likely than when not patenting, so I support the practice so long as patenting is still possible.
I worked at a small nonprofit back when genes were still able to be patented; we mostly studied the condition Pseudoxanthoma Elasticum, and held the patents to a few of the genes associated with it. However, we still allowed people to research them freely - we only patented them to prevent a company like Myriad Genetics, who had been patenting genes so that they could sell expensive genetic tests, from patenting it instead. We celebrated when genes were no longer able to be patented; I imagine that the researchers working with golden rice will do the same if we’re ever lucky enough for GMO’s to no longer be able to be patented.
I wholeheartedly agree. I was working for a small genetics nonprofit when they removed the ability to patent genes, and the whole office had a party to celebrate. It was mostly a celebration about freedom to research and test, but we were also very excited to no longer have to deal with having a bunch of patents. Even though we let people research the genes freely, we still had a bunch of paperwork that needed to be done any time someone wanted to do so.
Selection technically isn’t modification, since the modification had to have already occurred for it to be selected for. However, modification certainly did occur, and all crops are genetically modified. Indeed, all living creatures are genetically modified, as without modification, evolution can’t occur.
The public fear of GMO’s is largely due to Monsanto, who aggressively protect their GMO crop patents to the point where farmers who just happened to have some seeds blow into their fields have been sued.
The issue with GMO’s isn’t the modification, it’s the lax patent laws that allow companies like Monsanto to exploit people for profit, giving a bad name to the field as a whole, in spite of the immense potential good it can do, for which Golden Rice is a prime example.
The huge difference is who holds the patent. The example you gave involves Monsanto, the patent holder for several GMO crops, and a terrible company that does everything in its power to make money by exploiting people. Golden Rice, however, is patented by the scientists who designed it, who likely only patented it so that a company like Monsanto couldn’t just make some similar GMO and patent it instead, using it to exploit people even more.
This same thing happened back when genes themselves were able to be patented; some companies like Myriad Genetics would patent genes like the BRCA gene, a common source of inherited breast cancer predisposition, so that they could charge an arm and a leg for testing. So, researchers and non-profits would patent genes that they found just ensure they could be fairly studied and tested for.
I remember being very confused about Ohio being part of the Midwest when I was learning geography in school. It’s literally one state away from the east coast.
Of course, the concept of “Midwest” as a whole is pretty confusing. I get that it’s meant to be about halfway to the western part of the US, since we started on the east coast, but it’s a bit of an antiquated term at this point.
If anything, we should call it the Middle-North or Midnorth for short, since that’s a more objective description of it’s placement in the country, without the old east-coast-centric viewpoint featured in “Midwest.”
I hope this goes as well as it’s being marketed to be, but I’ve long since stopped trusting people who have enough money to make a news-worthy purchase. Time will tell on this one for me.
I want to tell people this sometimes, but I figure they’ll just think I’m mansplaining mansplaining.
To be fair, as a democrat, I generally view conservative voters as easily-misled people - essentially “dumb,” I view conservative leaders as thugs trying to overthrow America, and I view conservative corporate heads as ruling class elites. When you’re using such an overarching term as “Conservative” or “Left” it comes with the unsaid caveat that there are many subgroups that can differ greatly from one another.
Nobody’s ever heard of it; I’ve been singing its praises since 2006, and I’ve never met another person in real life who’s heard of it. It’s an amazing game set in a slightly-steampunk world where cars have only recently been invented, but giant steam-powered mechs were invented around the same time as well. The story’s interesting, but the real fun comes from how much freedom the game gives in how you want to play it:
You can customize your character’s clothes, you can be a good guy, you can be a jerk who charges his friends for every little favor, you can just straight-up be a villain, you can hustle pool, you can play in a band with a bunch of different instruments, each with their own mini game associated with playing them, you can extort or save an orphanage, you can buy and decorate an apartment, then play a dating sim with some of the characters, and that’s all before you factor in the giant mech, which you can customize with a bunch of different pieces and use to fight in a colosseum, explore ruins for treasure, excavate fossils to save a museum, fight giant bosses, transport goods and passengers, and even turn it into an airplane to fly around in.
And that’s all in a PS2 game! Sure, all of the features are limited by both the hardware and the inclusion of so many other features, but they’re all fun, and the graphics look great. I rarely play any game more than once, and I’ve played this game well over a dozen times. It’s helped by the different endings depending on how you play your character, but even the parts that are the same between playthroughs are still fun every time. It’s my favorite game of all time by a huge margin.
Best game of all time. I play it every year.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: when a company does something that shows it doesn’t have its customers’ best interests in mind, it’s imperative that it be immediately and wholly abandoned.
Companies have long since learned that we’ll ignore major red flags for the sake of convenience, and at this point they’re not even trying to hide the flags - they’re proudly flying them and laughing as we continue to give them business.
Ah, the enshittification of enshittification.
This is bad news all around. Self-pollination pretty much eliminates genetic variation from one generation to the next. Any species where organisms reproduce with themselves is at a significantly higher risk to succumb to a disease or parasite that is able to infect and wipe out the entire species.
I happily described a nice coffee shop as “kitschy” to the guy behind the counter and quickly learned from his reaction that it isn’t the synonym for “artsy” that I thought it was.
I don’t have a dog in the fight either, but what difference does that make? I’m a human with compassion for other humans - I care as much about their issues as I care about my own, and I don’t want them to be tied down by prohibitions that don’t make sense. A change can always be undone if found to be problematic; the apathy toward change is what really needs to be overcome.
Every generation looks at the next one and thinks it’s weird and inferior - humans as a whole tend to believe their own experiences are the best, most logical way of doing things, which is something we need to keep in mind; the status quo is almost certainly not currently optimal, and we should be looking for ways to change it even as our own preferences nag at us to keep it the same.
You’re saying we don’t know what such a change will cause - that’s called a narrative. Not a good or a bad thing - just the opinion you’ve chosen to defend. The bad thing is when the arguments you use to defend it don’t hold up to scrutiny.
I mean, the bleak thing is that the world works through people making deals with murderers to not be murdered, instead allowing other people to be murdered. I don’t give a shit about her gender, I just want a story about a good person winning in spite of corruption, not a bad person winning because of it.