"We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership."
Thrilled? I guess money is thrilling.
"The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions."
Key business decisions like which small farmer to sue into oblivion? Or what third world nation's crops to take financially hostage? Thrilling work guys. Really.
It's an unfortunate sign for HN when the top comment on a thread is such a content-free rant.
If the rule is, if x sells something to Monsanto, fuck x, then what you're saying is fuck the entire corporate world, because I'm sure Monsanto buys Apple computers and Chevrolets and Clorox too. It's sort of ridiculous to hold Cloudant to a standard that essentially zero other companies meet.
There are frequently inane comments of this type at the bottom of HN threads. What's alarming is to see them at the top.
I agree that the comment is content-free but honestly what did the company expect when they're boasting about their partnership with one of the world's most hated companies?
I'm not exactly alarmed to see this comment at the top because it's ridiculous that the company was dumb enough to issue this press release. We all need to pay our bills but to boast about working with a hated company is just a stupid PR move.
Apple, Facebook, Google, Chevorlet, Clorox, etc, are all not stupid enough to write a press release like this one. Whoever advised them to do so should immediately be fired b/c they clearly don't get PR.
You know what else is hilarious is that they're not only admitting to power one of the most hated aspects of the company (genetic manipulation of seeds), but they're actually touting it as a win for the company.
> they're not only admitting to power one of the most hated aspects of the company (genetic manipulation of seeds), but they're actually touting it as a win for the company.
It is a win for Cloudant. A huge win. They're a data company, not a biological warfare company. Their product will be used in an incredibly data-intensive application to do some really cool analysis. That's awesome for a data startup, and something to be proud of.
If I were a maker of a light-weight, high-strength alloy, should I be ashamed if Lockheed Martin wants to use it in their newest fighter jet? Of course not. I should be stoked that my product is getting such a high-profile endorsement, and excited about what it means for future development.
This announcement lends huge credibility to BigCouch, and will likely lead to future deals. They'd be idiots and incredibly poor businessmen if they didn't announce it with some fanfare.
I personally wouldn't partner with Lockheed Martin if my tech was going to be used for weaponry. We've refused lucrative contracts with certain companies because we don't respect their product or their past behavior. It completely depends on the relative weight of what you find important.
Partnership deals happen in the background without anyone knowing about it unless you are in the scene. Fact is that they could've done this deal without such an announcement and people/investors in the know within SV would've heard about it.
>I personally wouldn't partner with Lockheed Martin if my tech was going to be used for weaponry.
Say goodbye to the vast majority of technological, materials, and aerospace development of the 20th century.
>The fact is that Monsanto has a long history of harmful activities in the United States
So? Sequencing genes isn't one of them.
>Sure, Cloudant isn't a bio warfare company, but the fact is that they are proud to be associated with Monsanto
They're proud that their product has found such a demanding and high-profile customer. They should be. They aren't providing logistical support for Monsanto's campaign to crush independent farmers, they're providing the backbone for gene sequencing.
It doesn't matter what you think of Monsanto or some of their policies. Fact is, Cloudant has found a demanding and bleeding-edge customer for their product, which will lead to big advances both in its adoption and its underlying technology. That's a Good Thing.
"most hated aspects of the company (genetic manipulation of seeds)"
1. Genetic manipulation of seeds is going to feed the world. And at the rate our population is growing, we're going to need it.
2. They weren't talking about genetic insertions, instead they said "Genome Analysis". Genome analysis helps plant breeders find plants that already have advantageous genes and try to quantify their effect of these genes.
3. I don't particularly like Monsanto (I worked for a competitor) but I'm not sure Monsanto is "one of the world's most hated companies" outside hacker and hippie circles.
1. Genetic manipulation by Monsanto has relied on herbicides/pesticides and monocultures. This comes with averse effects and risks. The use of herbicides/pesticides must be reduced. We need pollinators, we need genetic diversity and biodiversity. We must look ahead more than 25 or so years. When it comes to soil fertility and contamination we should be looking ahead 100 years.
2. Is it possible for a group to select and breed their seeds over years, and eventually having a breed that is similar to a patented Monsanto seed?
> Genetic manipulation by Monsanto has relied on herbicides/pesticides and monocultures. This comes with averse effects and risks. The use of herbicides/pesticides must be reduced. We need pollinators, we need genetic diversity and biodiversity. We must look ahead more than 25 or so years. When it comes to soil fertility and contamination we should be looking ahead 100 years.
1. lowered levels of food production have their own averse effects and risks, notably, famine and starvation. herbicides, persticides and monocultures of high yield strains are widely believed to be responsible for saving a billion lives. if you eliminated those things from the planet right now, hundreds of millions of people would starve next year.
2. the things you're talking about aren't monsanto's fault. people are doing business with monsanto willingly. you don't have to buy gmo seeds (or any seeds) from them if you don't want to.
> Is it possible for a group to select and breed their seeds over years, and eventually having a breed that is similar to a patented Monsanto seed?
sure. if you have a breed similar to a monsanto seed, they'd win a lawsuit against you only if your breed had the same gene that they patented. you may think that that's not fair, but that's how things work. if i win a patent for a space engine for interstellar space travel, and you independently invent the same engine, i'd also win a lawsuit against you. also note that no one has actually bred a RoundUp resistant strain of plants independently of monsanto.
1. If we continue our use of herbicides/pesticides to the point of wide-spread colony collapse, spread of plant disease (perhaps canola, soy, or corn), significant reduction of nitrate fixation, increased human cancers we may also see hundreds of millions of people die or be without food.
Obviously, no one is suggesting we stop producing enough food for people to eat. But you need to look past the next 5, 10, 25 years. Those issues listed above are all real. And can all be linked to herbicides/pesticides and monocultures. We need to work on a new solution, a new system. The current situation is not a long-term answer.
2. This is more a theoretical morality issue. How much control/ownership should any one entity be allowed to have on life. What if they aren't just patenting seeds for RoundUp resistance? More so, say I live in a certain climate where I want a certain field tomato to grow. And under those circumstances I end up with a seed similar to a patented Monsanto seed. I lose in court. Other varieties of tomatoes don't grow will in my area. What do I do? I no longer have the freedom or right to grow successful tomatoes. This is not reality, but a possibility. One, that I do not believe in the slightest is worth risking. This could also lead to outrageous seed pricing.
Oh while I'm at it. Let's add climate change, land degradation (http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1214-unu.html). Basically, yes we need to feed billions, but we also need to do that 25-50 years from now. The practices used for high-yield crops are limiting our ability to produce food in the future.
FTR, Pioneer HiBred recently patented their own glyphosate (roundup) resistance gene (a different one than monsanto has), although I'm not sure if they have any varieties that have the gene incorporated yet. Obviously, they're excited about it because now they don't have to pay royalty fees to Monsanto anymore.
1. There is plenty of genetic diversity (aka hetrozygosity). The most credible evidence suggests that Colony Collapse Syndrome was caused by a disease, not GMO seed. Also, all of the seed companies take tremendous care to ensure that their patented biotech traits (BT) keep working in future, which is why they all have refuge requirements (meaning a farmer must plant at least X percent of their crop that isn't BT, which makes sure that various pests continue to breed with genes that will make their offspring susceptible to herbicide/pesticide treatment).
2. Corn has tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of genes and has roughly 22 million nucleotide base pairs. Having two breeders from two different companies come up with roughly the same plant interdependently is in the astronomical range.
As a follow-on, Paul, based on your standards, "everybody" accepts money from anybody even if they're evil. This is also a policy that YCombinator apparently supports?? I would have preferred to be voting up a post about "Why Cloudera turned down Monsanto's business" to illustrate the fact that they have ethical standards and believe that those are important in business.
There's a difference between company A purchasing some of your product and actively bidding to be the sole-source supplier to a major project. As they put it, "Cloudant’s BigCouch will be the core, for both storage and analysis of a new, company-wide platform powering a fundamental aspect of a Fortune 500 business: the analysis & identification of new traits & genomic combinations in agricultural crops."
You can bet that Apple's feet would be put to the fire in just the same way should they release a PR note suggesting they are impressed that Monsanto has decided to convert entirely to OSX/iOS.
The top comment might be a little low on direct substance, but it's high on feedback. It's actually perfect for HN, because it shows that to many people, ethics in business DO matter.
The large-scale computational analysis of genomes both animal and vegetable is going to create an epoch in which it will be possible to cure or make chronic cancer, HIV, and some genetic disorders. Whether or not Monsanto's the devil, that large companies are adopting this technology and providing financial succor to the companies creating the technologies used in this analysis is of benefit to everyone.
No, I'm saying fuck Monsanto, and by association, fuck anyone that celebrates doing business with them. This was one of those little cash cows that Cloudant should have kept to themselves. Any PR person probably could've saw this coming.
I'm sure there are many evil corporate dealings in the world that would warrant such a "content-free rant"; however, those companies are smart enough not to celebrate their evil doings on a site as popular as HN.
Perhaps YC should provide media training: Item 1; keep your skeletons in the closet.
EDIT: Furthermore, Cloudant isn't supplying Monsanto with something as simple as a car. They, as they themselves put it, are fundamentally helping shape the way Monsanto does business.
I also find it troubling that instead of addressing the issue at hand, or at least providing a defense for this company, you instead ridicule your own userbase for putting my "content-free" rant at the top of this thread. That seems infinitely more content-free than anything I've added/not added to the discussion.
The reason this comment thread is a worrying sign for HN is that you didn't use to have to think like a PR person here.
Don't you see that you're insulting yourself by saying that you need to have news spun/censored for you in the way PR firms do? I noticed this in the comments about the recent Airbnb and Dropbox controversies too. People did not seem to grasp the irony of complaining that Airbnb and Dropbox were bad at PR.
"The reason this comment thread is a worrying sign for HN is that you didn't use to have to think like a PR person here."
A couple of things.
Why are we talking about the "PR issue"? I offered Cloudant an alternative reality where, if they insisted on being evil, that their evil doings be kept in the closet. It makes wise business sense if you're going to accept money from anyone under the sun. That has nothing to do with thinking like a PR person, nor does it have anything to do with having this article spun or censored. You seem to think this deal is ok, so I tried to provide a solution that suited your own interests.
However, it is perhaps ironic that by spinning your own comments to focus on these PR irrelevancies, you have successfully avoided providing any significant contribution. Worse yet, was the "PR spin" of yours by comparing Cloudant's strategic and "fundamentally business shaping" partnership with Monsanto to someone selling a car or a computer... I guess though that's not PR talk, that's politician talk. Expert level diversion.
Monsanto is a disgusting, despicable, horrible company of the worst variety. Should we give Cloudant a pass for dealing with these people because you have a vested interest? I will happily leave HN forever if you think that is the case.
Google started their company with the motto "Do No Evil." Ethics have a substantial place in business practice, so I don't see why they shouldn't have a place on HN.
I think sometimes tone is important. Both jubilantly celebrating a massive association with an incredibly awful company, and condescending to users by calling them stupid, don't really seem to serve anyone.
The problem isn't that they aren't spinning right, the problem is that it's pretty obvious that Cloudant doesn't care about working with evil companies, and that you're feeling somewhat disdainful of a lot of your users.
Both are unbecoming, and I think that's all people are trying to reflect (even if they are somewhat confused in how they frame their statements). People want to believe that you all aren't just smart, that you're good guys, so to speak, ie. that all the talk about "being good" isn't opportunistic, or that you aren't mean and reactive. I don't think either of those things matter particularly, and maybe they aren't germane to the kinds of conversations you'd hoped to be having, but I understand the impulse.
> The reason this comment thread is a worrying sign for HN is that you didn't use to have to think like a PR person here.
So, companies shouldn't spin, but people commenting here should?
That's not what you mean, I'm sure. But I'm pretty sure you can see how it would be easy to say the same thing you just said with the roles of company and commenter reversed and it would make the same amount of sense.
I see. It would have been preferable for Cloudant to do business with Monsanto as long as they never talked about it.
What possible difference could that make in the moral calculus? They're a small company that has found financial security in their contract, that's why they are making it public it.
Monsanto unilaterally buying generally-available products is a different thing than getting into business partnership and sending happy press release about it.
You don't jail shoe salesman who happened to sell shoes to a criminal, but you jail people who planned the crime together.
If someone is actively, consciously supporting Monsanto at the core of their shady business, then they certainly deserve the hatred that Monsanto gets.
Such irony. Your comment seems much in the same style.
Tho oldstrangers vague logic was "by association" I don't think you should assume "if x sells to Monsanto." You can be much more specific in this case, as Cloudant clearly states, "We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now ..." Has Apple, Chevy, Clorox been "working with" Monsanto, or are their products just freely available for purchase?
I find it alarming that you think oldstrangers comment lacks sense. Food and water. That is the basis for human life. Monsanto threatens the freedom and right to access for those necessary things.
It's an unfortunate sign for everyone that you (and/or Cloudant) wouldn't anticipate this reaction from going into business with Monsanto.
As to the "content-free" claim, sometimes a rant is an appropriate reaction. If some YC company partnered with Al Qaida, would we really need to spell out all the heinous things AQ has done before writing, "F- that!"?!?
EDIT: And to your "If the rule is, if x sells something to Monsanto, fuck x, then what you're saying is fuck the entire corporate world, because I'm sure Monsanto buys Apple computers and Chevrolets and Clorox too. It's sort of ridiculous to hold Cloudant to a standard that essentially zero other companies meet."
-- It's one thing if Monsanto buys iPhones and Macs from Apple; that would represent ~.0001% of Apple's overall business. It's another thing if Monsanto is responsible for a significant % of your revenue.
(Of course, Cloudant's deal with Monsanto could represent only 2% of Cloudant's total revenue; but since it's a startup, the initial reaction people will have is that it's significantly higher than that.)
Yes, because Hacker News is for civilized, rational discussion. Not '+1 !'s, not analogies to the Nazi regime, not a litany of profanity to a hard-working young startup, and not more hivemind think from Reddit. The kind of hivemind that downvotes any contrary opinion and upvotes the tasteless, content-free posts you see at the top. We can discourse in more substantial words than "F- that!". Multiple '?!?' becoming more common aren't a good sign.
I was about to take your dismissal of my '+1' seriously until I noticed the vast majority your comments on HN are all contrarian and basically content free. Except of course when you're blasting others as 'hivemind'ed, or to complain about one of the seven words you can't say on HN. For the record I'm an Orange County Republican so I came to my opposition of Monsanto by my own volition.
There's a place in civilized, rational discussion for ranting.
Let's say you're out with two friends discussing the war on drugs, with all kinds of rational, civilized debate on the science, politics, economics, sociology, etc. Suddenly, one friend declares, "Ok, I understand the risks and potential rewards, and I've decided to start dealing coke." Sure, you can try to calmly talk them out of it, and/or you could do some "ranting." Both would be appropriate.
If we can quit the absurd analogies all over this thread for a minute, can you point me to why Monsanto is so evil in your eyes? Other than a Vanity piece, it seems everyone has come to a preconcluded fact that Monsanto is "evil" somehow.
Cloudant is a business, and this is great for their financials, as well as for furthering the research in their tech stack. From reading it, I'm sure many on Hacker News use similar tools that will benefit from the research done by Cloudant.
The documentary "Food Inc" describes Monsanto's behavior with respect to genetically modified seeds.
Example from my admittedly poor memory: A farmer's neighbor bought Monsanto's genetically modified seeds and some of the seeds blew into the farmers flield. Monsanto sued him and made him destroy all his seeds. When the farmer complained to the government he discover that the official responsible for representing his interests was on the board of Monsanto.
As far as "feeding the hungry". Monsantos seeds are genetically modified produce plants that don't have replantable seeds i.e. every year you have to buy your seeds from Monsanto. The 3rd world can't afford to use Monsanto's seeds and our subsidies of the corn industry make is hard for 3rd world farmers to make a living.
I read this years ago, but Monsanto's genetically modified corn seeds had something they referred to as a "terminator" gene, which is what made the genetically modified plants single generation. However, when natural plants were pollinated with pollen from genetically modified plants (my biology is probably wrong here), seeds the natural plants produced retained the terminator gene.
Extrapolate this out to the worst-case scenario and you've got the entire world buying corn seed from Monsanto because natural corn is extinct, through decades of unintentional pollination.
Really, Monsanto is evil, it has been proven way beyond any doubt. In cloudants position I'm not sure I would have taken the money but I would have never ever sent out this press release.
the difference is that right now, you or anyone else in the thread can convincingly list a bunch of bad things they have done.
so far, there is not a single convincing (and barely any substantive) comments about the bad things monsanto has done. if you disagree, please, let's discuss why monsanto is, as many here claim, "evil"
I don't have time to get into that discussion, but if you google "the most evil company in the world" you'll see they're fighting it out with De Beers and one or two others for the top spot. There's also plenty on Wikipedia:
They're basically 80s/90s Microsoft at its worst, but in agriculture of both the developed and developing world (the latter being particularly heinous).
You don't think you're maybe proving the wrong point when, after being asked to provide evidence for the argument that Monsanto is evil, you respond "just Google for most evil company in the world"?
If you really want to pursue that point, maybe you want to start by reconciling it with the fact that by that scale, Monsanto is competing with Activision, Ford Motor, and Coca Cola (all of which appear alongside it on the top half of the first Google SERP for "most evil company in the world").
i'm seeing literally dozens of comments saying that it monsanto is the most evil company that exists, and literally, not one comment giving a single concrete reason why it is.
why is hitler evil? i can tell you in 8 words. he ordered the deaths of millions of people.
why is monsanto evil? seriously, name ONE thing that makes them evil.
what are these activities? producing GMOs? high yield crops have enabled the feeding of hundreds of millions if not billions of people who would otherwise died of starvation.
I am -so- glad you said it. I've been resisting the urge for weeks to point out the /r/politics-ization of hacker news for fear of being "that guy" (you know, the one complaining about the good ol' days).
Just to be clear about what that means, to me, is that not so much politics is involved, but completely uncritical and tribalist politics, where we just unthinkingly upvote anyone advocating any position in support of the "good guys" and downvote anyone that defends the "bad guys".
You won't see Apple, GM or Clorox touting a partnership with Monsanto, as they are aware of the negative impact it would have on their own brand. I think there is a good lesson in this for other companies.
The problem with aggregators like Digg/Reddit/HN is that anger will unite a mob quicker than discussion. Eventually you end up with an angry echo chamber populated with the worst sort of content.
HN opened my eyes to a group of problem solving people who could generate a discussion that was better than any linked article. Originally the commenter attitude was "HN vs the problem presented". This slowly gravitated towards "My solution to the problem vs. your solution" with the associated rudeness, arrogance, and appeals to authority. Now it's headed towards an "Us vs. Them" kind of attitude similar to r/politics. Where you're wrong just for your identity or associations.
Oh boo-hoo. You're not exactly an impartial observer here.
Besides, it's one thing for Apple to manufacture a computer that gets bought by a Monsanto employee somewhere, and another for a YC startup to decide to work with Monsanto and help them with whatever pure evil they're up to next.
Here is a potential reason why some are upset. Its obvious that large corporations like Chevy, Clorox, Apple sell to Monstanto [and other corporations some could consider "bad" or whatever you want to label it]. But when startups do it [especially YC startups who I generally believe have smarter people involved relative to large corporations] it is felt because people generally hold them to higher standards [not just in situations like this, it applies for operational, financial and strategic measures as well]. I worked at a YC startup for a while, and saw some pretty generous things done by YC founders for society.
Another way to look at it (if it helps you understand the other perspective): You frequently see YC funded companies help each other out. Why do they do it? Is it just to accumulate more wealth/raise a valuation? Or is it because they've developed meaningful relationships and care for each other? I use this example to show how empathy and relationships can impact business decisions in a general sense, and that this same logic could be used to apply to a YC company NOT being proud of serving a large corporation known to use tactics that harm farmers in underdeveloped nations.
The fact that you use the term 'hold to a standard' at least implies that some could perceive the action as 'slimy'.
Finally, as someone wise once said, "be the change you want to see in the world" -- of course we hold YC companies to a higher standard :), many are made up of brilliant and compassionate individuals whose products make the world a better place. /cheese
> You frequently see YC funded companies help each other out. Why do they do it? Is it just to accumulate more wealth/raise a valuation? Or is it because they've developed meaningful relationships and care for each other?
Those two scenarios are not mutually exclusive.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but people generally act out of self-interest. There are plenty of YC (and non-YC) companies who help each other out, yet whose founders have never met.
I love the idea that ethics should be a hobby one does after their day job. We get angry about things like that because if a small group of really smart people strike out on their own to change the world and do good and yet put out a press release saying how "excited" they are to be working with such an amoral company, it just vacates our idealistic world view.
We can't stop Apple selling MacBooks to Monstanto. Apple makes tools and doesn't ask how they get used (nor should it have to). But a small cloud startup, different picture. One is active and one is passive.
pg, I understand your frustration. The OP starts off in a tone that is way over the top, and the language is completely unnecessary. However, wouldn't you appreciate the distinction of a “partner” (a conscious relationship) from a “consumer” (unconscious)? They might be consumers of Apple/Chevy/Clorox products, but this seems more like a partnership.
Paul, while I do see your point, you aren't looking deep enough here. Please let me explain.
Yes, this comment is missing some crucial content, yet, it is not a contentless comment as proven by the up votes. It is a war cry against those who seek to end this world in a fit of greed. It seems contentless to you because you are unaware of the game Monsanto is playing. I'm not just talking about giving a few kids Asthma by pumping chemicals into the air, I'm talking about risking the collapse of our life support systems for the sake of profit. Please read up on Monsanto, our survival depends on us to do the right thing. http://www.right2knowmarch.org/about-2/educational-links/
I disagree. The rant contained at least as much content as a press release announcing one new customer. And I think the disappointment has to do more with the boasting than the simple customer relationship.
I'm not alarmed because there seems to be two very distinct crowds of people who hang out on hacker news. "Startup people", like yourself, who are across the political spectrum, with probably a disproportionate number of libertarians (as compared to the broader population) and the /r/politics crowd which are very anti-capitalist, anti-innovation, pro-taxes, etc.
Some threads attract one crowd and the comments go one way, other threads attract the other crowd and the comments go the other way.
I really wish Hacker News was about startups, and if there was any debate, we were all capitalists debating it. I'm tired of the seemingly endless stream of leftist propaganda that gets promoted to the front page (e.g.: anything by Krugman, for example.) I'd hate this just as much if it were all rightest propaganda. IF it was balanced, I wouldn't like it, but it wouldn't be irritating.
When almost all the discussions are of one mindset, and posting something outside that mindset gets you down voted to oblivion, I feel like intellectual discussion is much more difficult. This isn't always the case here, obviously, but sometimes it is.
I don't really care for Amazon, but at least when Amazon is on the front page its because they did something relevant to the site. I can just ignore those threads. Amazon' announcing that they've got a new finger service in AWS doesn't add anything for me, but it doesn't detract like the political topics do.
Cloudant, a company that takes CouchDB and turns it into a dynamo style ring, has produced something significant in their platform. We should be talking about this.
Cloudant provides a very useful tool that should be very highly relevant to people who are doing startups.
The thing is, I suspect a major population of HN commenters aren't really doing startups or planning to.
Monsanto is an extreme case, and therefore inspires a lot of passion. I'd say the vast majority of people on HN are pro-capitalism and pro-innovation, but have disparate views on business ethics and the efficacy of various regulations. In the eyes of many, Monsanto crosses the line between "good honest competition" and "dangerous and malevolent would-be monopolist."
Also: Way to paint people you disagree with on this issue as "very anti-capitalist, anti-innovation, pro-taxes..."
I don't think there are two separate crowds. I think HN's initial population of smart, mostly apolitical nerds has been diluted by the arrival of a lot of new users who are not as smart, and are thus more excited by shallow controversies.
Politics happens to be a big source of shallow controversies. But I don't think most people who upvote comments saying "Fuck Monsanto" do it because they have a deep interest in politics, any more than most people who rail against "Obamacare" do it because they have a deep interest in politics. They do it because they're dumb. It's the shape of this sort of idea that excites them, not its content.
> I think HN's initial population of smart, mostly apolitical nerds has been diluted by the arrival of a lot of new users who are not as smart, and are thus more excited by shallow controversies.
Or: I disagree with you, therefore you are dumb.
Outstanding.
I up-voted the parent comment. I have been here for years. I consider myself to be a free market supporting, fiscally conservative and independent thinker.
I have major issues with the methods Monsanto uses to conduct itself in the marketplace. In everything from the products they produce, their influence of the legal and regulatory systems, their seeming inability to factor in a basic responsibility to those that consume their products and even the way they distribute the surpluses in their pension funds (i.e. they steal them, when allowed).
I believe they act this way mainly due to a void of ethical behaviour at their highest levels, and because of this, I will look at them, and individuals that fail to recognize these actions as being a problem with a certain level of suspicion.
If you think I am not as smart as you because of this so be it.
You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody said that taking a particular side of a debate makes you dumb. This isn't about what side you take, it's about how you choose to debate.
HN used to be a place that cared deeply about conversing in a civil, responsible, and educational manner. Whether or not you agree with the sentiments expressed in the parent comment, the fact is that it doesn't meet those standards. Even if the logic wasn't childish ("fuck X by association", really?), the comment does little to substantiate its opinions, or to educate those who aren't aware of the issue. In other words, it's a populist comment expressly made to pander to those who are already in agreement.
Upvoting said comment means either (a) you haven't even considered the importance of having a quality discussion, (b) you've considered it but in this case you don't care, or (c) you actually think it's a high quality comment. The fact that the comment is sitting pretty at the top of the page means that people have, en masse, fallen into one of these categories. Like it or not, A and C are simply dumber than the HN of old, and B is more confrontational.
"Even if the logic wasn't childish ("fuck X by association", really?)" <-- I am failing to grasp how this logic is childish? Have thousands of corporations not apologized and often paid money for partnering with organizations with dubious pasts? An extreme case example to highlight my point: do you think Hugo Boss apologizing for being a partner of the Nazi party in WW2 Germany was just a PR move?
My point is, aiding x in its mission makes you an accomplice. You can argue that x is not bad or as bad is it is being made out to be, but being a partner makes you exactly that, a partner.
> My point is, aiding x in its mission makes you an accomplice. You can argue that x is not bad or as bad is it is being made out to be, but being a partner makes you exactly that, a partner.
This is an overly-idealistic way to look at a complex world, and taking such a stance would surely make you a hypocrite. As I asked another commenter: Do you not use a bank? Pay taxes to a government? Buy food, shelter, and other products? Well then, you've undoubtedly patronized at least a few entities who have committed horrible atrocities. So, by your own logic, fuck you.
First off, I never swore, I was referring to the logic part, so please don't swear at me (not cool).
Secondly, you're calling me overly idealistic and simple minded, the world a complex place, yet make your case by comparing an individual citizen bound by legal obligations they can't escape without jail time or leaving the country to a corporate partnership made out of free will? Think of comparing the two then think about the names you called me. I'll let you be the judge.
> First off, I never swore, I was referring to the logic part, so please don't swear at me (not cool).
Whether you swore or not, you're defending the comment "fuck Cloudant by association". Don't you think it's hypocritical to back up that type of language when it's directed at others, but criticize it when it's directed at you? You can't have it both ways. Either it's an immature way to conduct a discussion or it's not.
> yet make your case by comparing an individual citizen bound by legal obligations they can't escape without jail time or leaving the country to a corporate partnership made out of free will? Think of comparing the two then think about the names you called me. I'll let you be the judge.
I gave you a short list of offenses you've committed, and you've only attempted to defend yourself against one of them (paying income taxes). Furthermore, your defense is pretty poor: "leaving the country" would be inconvenient. And you don't think it would be inconvenient for companies to refuse to do business with others who have at some point committed an ethics violation?
I'm sorry but your entire position is full of double standards that you can't justify. When you bend over backwards and make the countless sacrifices necessary to live your life without supporting questionable organizations, then you can come back and criticize others for not doing the same.
You're essentially arguing that the expression of passion/emotion via a comment is below the standards of HN. It's an interesting viewpoint, but one I don't completely support.
The problem with your stance is that preventing the expression of emotion is often a cover for elitism. Rather than being a strawman, this is exactly what Paul is doing in his comment. i.e. "I am above being emotionally attached to this argument because it isn't very important. If you think it's important, you simply aren't at my level."
All of us - being that we are all subject to emotion - will allow emotional responses to topics that we feel matter. What it all boils down to is a disagreement on what level of importance you place on a topic. This of course has nothing to do with intelligence at all in most cases.
The continued association of intelligence to apathy is a bit of a fallacy, to be honest.
> The problem with your stance is that preventing the expression of emotion is often a cover for elitism.
Elitism is a good thing. HN is an elitist forum. Youtube is a forum for the mob.
There is a reason that Idiocracy portrayed stupid people as those who mindlessly cursed and raved in every sentence. Profanity has its place, but especially in comment threads it's a limbic reaction rather than an intellectual one. "F* you" adds no value, can be said by anyone, and can be heard anywhere. The more "f* you", the fewer posts by startup founders, technologists, and people who know what they are doing.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. The nature of Company x and y is irrelevant, the issue is interchangeable.
Hacker News used to be a community devoid of emotional outbursts and when they occurred they were thought out, thought provoking and well articulated. Smart comments. Only smart comments were up-voted.
This wasn't and it was at the top. It's indicative of the direction HN is going.
(For intensive purposes x in this case is Monsanto and y is Cloudant.)
Mr. Graham, wow, this is rather disappointing to hear. You wish to frame a discussion through ad hominem instead of on the merits. For what it's worth I am apolitical, and have little interest in provoking controversy, but that doesn't mean I wish to see the promotion of a company which pushes injustice across the world.
Previously, I had looked up to you as a bit of a hero, now my opinion of you has dived quite low. I would not have minded if you disagreed with the merits of what Monsanto and Monsanto's customers choose to do. However, referring to people as dumb, for upvoting what is essentially a very well held and defensible position is a very weak thing to do. There are lots of arguments to be made against Monsanto, not the least of which is its Superfund environmental disaster sites.
The point is, I am informed, I know exactly what I am against, and have every reason to be outraged at the injustice perpetrated by Monsanto. This is furthered by needing to make the same arguments against Monsanto at my own company. If we've gotten to the point where we can't be outraged against injustice, then we may as well be heartless automatons.
To summarily dismiss them in this way and at the same time attack the intelligence of your readers is, well, reprehensible. Call me dumb if you will, I won't make arguments to the level of my own intelligence, but know that you have invalidated every reason to see you as a role model.
If you were apolitical, you wouldn't see monsanto as "a company which pushes injustice across the world".
Notice that this thread is full of such disparaging assertions, but no actual details, no citations, and the closest anyone gets is to pointing to people who have a very clear political agenda who make accusations against monsanto.
"what is essentially a very well held and defensible position"
I think this is what he's referring to as "dumb". This is not a "defensible" position because it isn't a fact, it is merely a dislike. As for "very well held" its unclear what you mean, except maybe you mean "widely held". I think it is dumb to assume that just because a lot of people say the same thing about something, that means they are right, especially when they cannot go into details, and what they are saying is just broad political assertions.
"The point is, I am informed, I know exactly what I am against, and have every reason to be outraged at the injustice perpetrated by Monsanto."
If you're informed, why aren't you specific? Even when describing what you're outraged, the best you can say is "injustice". Such a weak word, and what does it really mean anyway? They did something you don't like?
Wendy's screwed up my order the other day, giving me someone else's food, and they didn't give me a coupon to compensate. Oh, the injustice! Sure, that's silly, but at least I described specifically what they did wrong!
You're "outraged" at something you can't even describe. Yet you're "apolitical". Really?
Personally, I'm so tired of people going around repeating things they heard from other people, without doing any investigation or applying a legitimate moral compass to the issue.
This leads to "heartless automatons"... people who are easily controlled by media outlets. "Hate walmart!" (but don't hate Target, they're just the same, only they're unionized, and therefore they're not evil.) "Blame Wall Street!" (But ignore the government that, via regulation, forced banks to make loans to people who couldn't repaying them, claiming that to do otherwise was "racist".) etc. etc. etc.
I would have agreed with you except you ignored that I did indicate a specific incidence, the fact they hold a Superfund site. I didn't want to get back and forth on points, as I knew pg would not wish to debate them.
I did a full research study on Monsanto as part of TA'ing for a Professor who taught "International Political Economy" of Food & Hunger. I'm about as informed on the subject as I'm going to get short of doing a graduate thesis.
Regardless of how you count the numbers, Monsanto has at least one super fund site, a public externality that we have to deal with. See here for a discussion of reasons you can count many more to be under their guise: http://projects.publicintegrity.org/superfund/report.aspx?ai...
Actually, if you don't mind spending a few minutes to go on a bit further, I think it would be useful to have it all archived here for future reference.
one of my favorites, can you see the parallels between Monsanto and the RIAA? You could point this one in favor of Monsanto, but if you are like me and think that pushing terminator seeds to small farmers is a terrible thing then you will see it a different light. Often times they give out the seeds free the first year then have you stuck on them, comparisons could be made to drug pushers: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/knowledge_goods/monsanto.h...
Excerpt:
"Monsanto entered India in 2002 with some very compelling advertising. They claimed their engineered seeds would produce yields up to five times that of conventional cotton – 20 quintals per acre (equivalent to approximately 4.5 bales) compared to the 4 quintals (less than 1 bale) farmers were struggling to pull from their fields at the time. At the time, Monsanto admitted that their seeds costed more but insisted that investment would pay dividends.
Unfortunately the average yield of Monsanto’s GE cotton turned out to be nowhere near the advertised 20 quintals per acre. In reality the average output of the crop turned out to be 1.2 quintals per acre. Nowhere in India did it exceed 4 quintals per acre at the end of the harvest. To add insult to injury, farmers soon found out that the fibers produced by the Monsanto GE cotton plants were of lower quality. Instead of getting the usual $86 per quintal, they were only able to sell their crops for around $36 per quintal.
On average since 2002, of the farmers in India, many of whom fell into the Monsanto trap, one is committing suicide every 30 minutes. Many end their lives by drinking RoundUp."
The list goes on, if you've read this far and want more, I'll be glad to dig up some more of the material.
I have a deep interest in politics. I've watched and read much on Monsanto. I upvoted because I like to think if given the chance I would refuse to partner with a Monsanto no matter how much $$$. I'm comfortable with you thinking I'm dumb based on an upvote.
This statement is much worse than Cloudant having Monsanto as a client which I support.
And I'm a big critic of Monsanto but to suggest being socially aware is "politically shallow" is insulting and stupid. You should be encouraging us to be socially and politically engaged and fighting for responsible corporate governance.
They're selling them data analysis. I cannot find in that a great moral question or hazard. I'm sure when Monsanto employees go about their daily lives they also are sold food, clothes, computers, cell phones...
Nick O'Niell's analysis of Paul Graham's comment is nonsensical:
"He’s actively suggesting the idea that because other people are doing it (people with big brand names), it’s ok for a YCombinator company to do it as well."
Putting aside the rape of the English language going on in that sentence --'actively suggesting'? --, it is false in its claims. Paul pointed out that if the moral standard is that companies who sell things to nasty companies are committing a moral offense, then we need to apply this standard massively, to essentially every company that exists. Targeting Cloudant specifically is unfair and seems arbitrary.
That's rather disingenuous. Let's let them explain it:
"Monsanto has chosen Cloudant to be the core of their new genome analysis platform.
Cloudant’s BigCouch will be the core, for both storage and analysis of a new, company-wide platform powering a fundamental aspect of a Fortune 500 business: the analysis & identification of new traits & genomic combinations in agricultural crops. The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions."
"We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership."
Cloudant has placed themselves at the very heart of the Monsanto empire. They are the foundation and core of Monsanto's most essential operations. That goes above and beyond simply selling someone something. They are partners.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can break this down for you. I figured my previous comment was pretty clear.
Asserting that Cloudant is only selling Monsanto a simple data analysis is disingenuous, as clearly proven by Cloudant's own press release where they state how significant their partnership with Monsanto is. Partnership is a key word here.
Selling someone a service like Google Analytics (random example) is a lot different than partnering with a company for multiple weeks and shaping the entire core functionality of a company around your collaborative efforts. Even more so is saying that this partnership will help shape the way the company fundamentally does business.
Like I said, its disingenuous to downplay Cloudant's role, considering how highly they emphasized said role.
If that's the case, why didn't you address the issue with the kind of gravity and seriousness that such an issue demands instead of resting on such a vapid comment as the one which our fellow readers have so lavished with approbation? Would anybody have been worse off if you had?
> They [upvote] because they're dumb. It's the shape of this sort of idea that excites them, not its content.
The first part is a fundamental attribution error. The second part definitely plays a role, but don't think it's the primary cause. You can probably do the analysis on the votes, but I'd be surprised if the majority of the votes come from young accounts. I think it's much more likely that political topics are popular because the political climate changed so much in the US, especially for young people.
Regarding your second sentence, it's interesting that the exact same thing happened to reddit in 2005.
I wonder how the population sizes compare.
In their case, blind upvoting of empty politically-charged headlines turned off mainstream visitors (or just people who were looking for actual content in their political links) and attracted ever more such voters in a vicious cycle. Fortunately, the creation of /r/politics helped, but the site to this day struggles to keep /r/politics from overflowing into the rest of the site.
Can't speak for PG, but I'd say you lost him by #2. I never understood this kind of lump-everything-together thinking. It's overly idealistic, totally illogical, and almost always hypocritical.
Yes, boycotting a business is a common way to demonstrate your disapproval with some of their practices. However, it doesn't follow that doing business with a company implies condoning of all of their actions. I'm sorry, but there's no logic that supports such a conclusion.
And even if the logic existed, anyone who invoked it would be a glaring hypocrite. I assume you use a bank? Pay taxes to your government? Buy food, and shelter, and other products? Well you're undoubtedly a patron to at least a few entities who've committed atrocities. By your own logic, you condone each and every one of these attrocities. And by the op's eloquent logic, fuck you.
When I attended the Startup School in 2007, I had to apply. I was sure I wasn't going to get in, but I did, and when I got there I understood that the application wasn't elitist, it was because the venue was pretty fixed in size... and the quality of the event was much different due to this (relatively light) filter you'd applied.
I think hacker news would be much different if you applied a similar filter.
If everyone here were someone sincerely interested in doing a startup, who believed that it was moral to make money by improving people's lives, and believed that technological innovation was a good way to do it, then I think the site would be much different.
The early quality has turned HN into a popular source for a certain segment of news. But that has diluted it as an effective community.
Occasionally there's been talk of doing another site along these lines, but the right kind of filter wasn't obvious.
I think that it is clear what the right kind of filter is-- an application form like the Startup School one.
I don't know what your intentions are for HN going forward, if you have any interest in making significant changes or not. After Nirvana (my open source web platform project) is released, and my startups MVP is done, I intend to write software for a community of startup founders and see if we can make a go of it.
But you have a much bigger following. I think if you liked this idea, picking a hundred or so of the commenters you liked the best from the site would enable rapid evaluation of such applications (especially if the applications were relatively short). However, it might be too easy to game such a system.
But that's where my thoughts are. I always like to try and propose a solution when I see a problem, even if I am not sure my solution will work.
Of course you're on the side of this, you stand to make money from it so anyone that can't see that is "dumb". Hooray for chucking your morals chasing the almighty dollar, eh?
> I'm not alarmed because there seems to be two very distinct crowds of people who hang out on hacker news. "Startup people", like yourself, who are across the political spectrum, with probably a disproportionate number of libertarians (as compared to the broader population) and the /r/politics crowd which are very anti-capitalist, anti-innovation, pro-taxes, etc.
You're just creating two stereotypes and shoving people in them without having any clue about the actual distribution. People on HN are thinkers. Sure there are clusters of opinion, but these aren't disjoint sets across the spectrum. We have a variety of nuanced opinion because we all think a lot.
Case in point: me. I guess you could say I lean a bit liberal, but fiscally I'm conservative because I think on balance the government doesn't do a good job spending money. I believe in capitalism, but I also believe that regulation is necessary (despite its blunt nature) to protect the public good.
The Monsanto issue an important one. They are profiting at the expense of the quality of the world food supply, and they use a lot of strong-arm methods to maintain their profits. Reasonable people can disagree about various corporations' practices, but to pigeon-hole people who complain about Monsanto rather than going and educating yourself about what they do does yourself and the whole world a disservice. The quality of the food supply is a life or death issue for everyone.
A) I disagree, non-wackos can have extremely strong opinions B) The post I was responding to pigeon-holed the OP not just as a liberal but several Fox-worthy aspersions.
> It's an unfortunate sign for HN when the top comment on a thread is such a content-free rant.
To the contrary, the tenor of the majority of comments makes it clear that the context is well-understood already, and this is encouraging.
Users evidencing a strong moral compass is a reason to rejoice, not despair.
If you want some context, try Wikipedia.
Monsanto is responsible for more than 50 United States Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites, attempts to clean up Monsanto Chemical's formerly uncontrolled hazardous waste sites.[27]
The Center for Food Safety[108] listed 112 lawsuits by Monsanto against farmers for claims of seed patent violations.[27] The Center for Food Safety's analyst stated that many innocent farmers settle with Monsanto because they cannot afford a time consuming lawsuit. Monsanto is frequently described by farmers as "Gestapo" and "Mafia" both because of these lawsuits and because of the questionable means they use to collect evidence of patent infringement.[27]
It's a combination of a major environmental polluter and a patent troll.
Dumping of toxic waste in the UK
Between 1965 and 1972, Monsanto paid contractors to illegally dump thousands of tons of highly toxic waste in UK landfill sites, knowing that their chemicals were liable to contaminate wildlife and people. The Environment Agency said the chemicals were found to be polluting groundwater and the atmosphere 30 years after they were dumped.[71]
The Brofiscin quarry, near Cardiff, erupted in 2003, spilling fumes over the surrounding area, but the local community was unaware that the quarry housed toxic waste.
A UK government report shows that 67 chemicals, including Agent Orange derivatives, dioxins and PCBs exclusively made by Monsanto, are leaking from one unlined porous quarry that was not authorized to take chemical wastes. It emerged that the groundwater has been polluted since the 1970s.[72] The government was criticised for failing to publish information about the scale and exact nature of this contamination. According to the Environment Agency it could cost £100m to clean up the site in south Wales, called "one of the most contaminated" in the UK.[73]
One thing to remember is that patents are fundamentally at odds with food availability. You can either have Big Pharma-like profits, or cheap food that feeds billions.
As it is, countries with functional governments already overproduce food. Zimbabwe used to be called the "Breadbasket of Africa" before Mugabe.
It is one of those companies, that is pretty well documented. From what I've read, Monsanto makes Walmart (and some others) look like angels. Just google for farmers committing suicide in India (especially from Andhra Pradesh). I also read an article about them threatening American farmers, can't remember where. I don't have any experience with them, but from what I've read about them, they seem very very very scary.
I think if I wanted to round out the mix I would add in
BP
Halliburton
Xe Services (Blackwater Worldwide)
The creation of roundup resistent crops is possibly the worst mistakes that the human race has ever made. It took what 3-5 years to make roundup impervious parasites?
Terminator seeds that can't actually create a viable organism? You have to go back to the source (Monsanto) every year.
Mono-cultures and engineered genetic pollution. Monsanto shouldn't exist.
Missing the RIAA: Same scenario, different product. Though the key difference is Monsanto's evils are !@#$ing with our food supply / chain / system that's happily evolved over thousands of years as they sue farmers into oblivion.
The RIAA is merely making 'big music' less important to the majority of us & shooting themselves in the foot in the process while suing their potential clientbase.
Both very much similar, and I'd happily support neither given the opportunity.
RIAA isn't even in the same universe. You can certainly debate how many innocent lives Monsanto's,BP,Halliburton and Xe Services have on their concision, but I think it's safe to say that everybody agrees it's greater than zero. I doubt even the most rabid RIAA hater would try to argue that the RIAA had actual blood on their hands. RIAA fucks some bands out of money and use lawsuits to shake down people on dubious legal grounds, that's a far far cry from actually letting people die.
Devil's advocate for a moment, but every way that I'm aware of Monsanto letting people die is essentially an economical one: They ruin people's ability to buy or labor for food...which makes the comparison to the RIAA just one of a different scale. If the RIAA were even better at taking money from people, people would starve.
Of course, it makes no sense for the RIAA to starve its working musicians, but the ones who have stopped selling above margin?
Except that if the RIAA could/would actually put a musician
out of bussiness, that musician could do another line of
work to earn enough money to eat.
What Monsanto is doing, basically, is redisigning crops to
work on their behalf. Whenever a crop can develop properly due to the proliferation of roundup resistant weeds, you
have to buy the newest crop from them again, wether you like it or not.
Also there is the (theoretical) risk that someday they
won't be able to keep up with resistance, which could
curtail food supply, and won't make a difference wether you
can purchase it or not.
+1! If you want to learn more about this watch Food Inc. available on NetFlix streaming. If you have high blood pressure you may want to skip the part where an Indiana man explains how he was sued by Monsanto for inducing farmers to violate patents by seed cleaning - a practice utilized by farmers for thousands of years.
from what i understand, seed cleaning is part of a process to extract seeds from a harvested crop.
monsanto did not sue that man for cleaning seeds, they sued that guy because he marketed his services to farmers using monsanto seeds, claiming that those farmers could extract seeds from their harvest to avoid buying more monsanto seeds.
however, when you buy seeds from monsanto, you sign an explicit agreement saying that you won't do exactly that. the result of the case was that the court barred the indiana man from cleaning monsanto seeds, not all seeds in general. from what i undestand, they didn't even collect any damages from him, conditioned on him not cleaning monsanto seeds in the future.
Interestingly, this ties in with the music industry. Just as Monsanto "licenses" their seeds, and puts a prohibitive contract with what they can do with it or not, the music industry, DRM, etc.
I hate Monsanto, although I don't know if I would blame Cloudant for attracting such a large business.
For those not in the know, part of Monsanto's business plan includes creating patented seeds that are genetically altered and "Roundup-ready" so they can be doused with their other business, pesticides.
They also aggressively enforce their seed patents by suing local farmers that have their land contaminated, by no fault of their own, by other farms that may use these "Round-Up ready" seeds. I believe Monsanto has also now developed crops that do not create seeds and/or create seeds DOA.
Smarter and cheaper robots. If the cost of labor for growing food organically on a large scale could be reduced, it would have a disruptive impact on conventional agriculture.
But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement.
Not saying that undercutting Monsanto is impossible, but any startup will have an uphill battle to win over "organic" supporters.
> But heavy usage of robots and large-scale food growing are exactly what conventional agriculture is about, and small-scale, local, human labor-based growing is the goal of the organic movement.
This is incorrect. There is nothing in the charter of any organic farming organization I've seen regulating the use of automation and machinery in agriculture, nor the scale of the operation. Organic farming is strictly about eliminating the use of chemical and genetic additives (herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, chemically-treated fence posts, direct genetic modification, etc.) in our farmed food and textile products. A huge factor limiting the spread of organic farming practices over conventional is the increased production cost and decreased yields due to the difficulty of managing pests and weeds.
As an example, an organic farmer in many cases must employ workers at great expense to go through the crops once a week or two with a hoe and manually clear out weeds, rather than being able to drive through with a tractor and spray herbicide every couple months. This adds substantially to the cost and difficulty of growing organically. If robots could be leased or purchased to do this work instead, the viability of organic growing would be significantly improved. In many areas, there is no labor infrastructure allowing farmers to find workers to do such work, and so growing certain crops organically is not even a realistic option for them.
I have, though not any large-scale intensive farming operations. I'm talking about robots with the dexterity and intelligence to replace human labor all but completely, to allow a large or small farm operator to manage pests and weeds without the use of hazardous chemicals.
I don't think this article is as damning as many of the commenters seem to think.
- The section addressing the lawsuits includes a lot of "farmers say this" type statements. It's not very long on facts. It even admits that some farmers simply aren't aware of their obligations in many cases. The only case that was actually litigated that I'm aware of is Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser -- a case in which the farmer almost certainly was saving seeds in violation of his contract with Monsanto.
- The section on past environmental violations can be mostly ignored in the context of this deal. It might be an interesting historical conversation, but Monsanto is no longer a chemical company. Cloudant has not struck a deal with the company described in that section.
- I'm sympathetic to the opposition on the labeling debate, but it's a labeling debate! It should take more than a labeling debate to generate comparisons to Nazi Germany (as more than one commenter has done below).
Feel free to correct me on this, as I'm likely to be wrong.
Loosely, the way Monsanto's GMO crop system works is, their crops are designed to resist a specific herbicide, which Monsanto also sells. Farmers pay a per-acre licensing fee to use the system, meaning they plant the GMO crops and then bomb their fields with the herbicide to kill everything but the crop, which improves yield.
The fact pattern in these Monsanto lawsuits seems to be that farmers are doing three things: (1) planting Monsanto's GMO crops (intentionally or not), (2) using Monsanto's herbicide to take advantage of the improved yield made possible with the crop, and (3) not paying Monsanto.
It is obviously possible for Monsanto GMO crops to end up in an unsuspecting farmer's field. But it's not possible for a farmer to accidentally use Roundup as an herbicide in that field. If they do that without paying Monsanto, they are trying to get something for nothing. That, to my understanding, is what's motivating the lawsuits.
1) Their seeds spread contaminating other farmer's fields. Once GMO is out in the wild, nothing can be pristine anymore. I wouldn't be surprised to find Monsanto genetics having made its way into humans in 20 years.
2) By "bombing their fields" with herbicide (biocide, you can't make something that only poisons one class of organism like this) AND genetically modifying the crops to be resistent to the biocide you are creating a perfect storm to quickly develop resistent parasites. Now everyone has to use your system, because there is no other way to have a crop survive due to super-bugs.
This is a direct parallel of the SUV insanity. Vast numbers of people drive SUVs because they don't want to be in a car hit by an SUV.
I'm well aware of horizontal gene transfer, but thanks for linking it anyways for the people who don't know.
Edit: My response was lacking, apologies. AFAIK, there's never been a horizontal gene transfer from a prokaryote/eukaryote/any other kingdom to a mammal or animal. The last time may be when we got mitocondria.
Isn't that because it's sometimes useful to kill everything?
I'm no expert, but my understanding of the problem is that if you attempt to kill everything, you'll end up with a few super-resistant [things] (organisms, bacteria etc.) who'll only increase the problem:
Going off on a slight tangent, my personal worry is where we'll be after another 10 years of antibac hand wash use. I'm open to being corrected, but my current understanding is that we should be very, very worried.
I was being pretty imprecise there; the point is that Roundup is (again, imprecisely) potent and broad-spectrum. You couldn't just spray it over a normal crop; it would kill the crop along with the weeds.
It is obviously possible for Monsanto GMO crops to end up in an unsuspecting farmer's field. But it's not possible for a farmer to accidentally use Roundup as an herbicide in that field. If they do that without paying Monsanto, they are trying to get something for nothing. That, to my understanding, is what's motivating the lawsuits.
It's not necessary that the farmer derive any benefit from mis-use of Monsanto's IP for them to be in violation of their contract with the company. They buy the seeds on the condition that they will not reuse them. Full stop. However, it's the case that Monsanto modifies crops in other ways, too (to be resistant to drought, for example [0]), so Roundup use is definitely not the only motivating factor.
Nationwide review found that Monsanto has filed 90 lawsuits targeting 147 farmers & 39 small businesses since '97. Article from '05, assuming research was done up until then.
Probably the sole one to go to trial & get significant bouts of attention.
You're not replying to my comment so much as you're using it as a coat rack to hang more random news stories about Monsanto on.
Obviously, the practice of suing farmers for (ostensibly) abusing licensed seed is controversial. Obviously you're going to find a lot of stories with a lot of angry farmers and angry farmers' advocates.
But you're not actually making a point with those citations, unless I'm missing it. Help me understand what this has to do with whether Monsanto is right or not?
Schmeisser, by the way, is a uniquely bad example: he didn't just make unauthorized copies (accidentally or not) of Roundup-ready seeds; he also used Roundup to control weeds on the Roundup-ready crops.
"The ruling did increase the protection available to biotechnology companies in Canada, a situation which had been left open with the Harvard mouse decision, where it was determined that a "higher lifeform", such as an animal, or by extension a plant, cannot be patented. This put Canada at odds with the other G8 countries where the patent had been granted. In Monsanto vs. Schmeiser, it was determined that protection of a patented gene or cell extends to its presence in a whole plant, even while the plant itself, as a higher lifeform, cannot be patented. This majority view, based on the precedent of mechanical devices, was central to the Supreme Court's decision, and put the onus on the Canadian Parliament to make distinctions between machines and lifeforms as it saw fit."
Sure sounds like a win in comparison to the alternative.
"Schmeiser won a partial victory, where the court held that he did not have to pay Monsanto his profits from his 1998 crop, since the presence of the gene in his crops had not afforded him any advantage and he had made no profits on the crop that were attributable to the invention. The amount of profits at stake was relatively small, C$19,832, however by not having to pay damages, Schmeiser was also saved from having to pay Monsanto's legal bills, which amounted to several hundred thousand dollars and exceeded his own."
That's more or less true, but irrelevant. From the Wikipedia article linked elsewhere in this conversation:
Schmeiser's principal defense at trial was that as he had not applied Roundup herbicide to his canola he had not used the invention. This argument was rejected; the court said that the patent granted for the invention did not specify the use of Roundup as part of the invention, and thus there was no basis for introducing the requirement that Roundup had to be used in order for the invention to be used. That is, a patent prohibits unauthorized use of an invention in any manner, not merely unauthorized use for its intended purpose.
Wait a minute. I just read the Canadian court opinion from which this tiny snippet was extracted. The context you've discarded includes:
* Schmeiser was a former Roundup-ready licensee
* Schmeiser admittedly used Roundup (the herbicide) in numerous circumstances after ceasing to pay licensing fees, which is part of the pattern of circumstances that led Monsanto to sue him
* Schmeiser actually verified, with Roundup, that his "volunteer" Roundup-ready crop was Roundup-ready, and then saved the seeds anyways
* Monsanto had at the time been removing volunteer Roundup-ready canola plants at their own expense from fields where farmers noticed it growing
The context of this specific paragraph also concerns Schmeiser's argument that Monsanto's patent did not apply except in cases where the unauthorized user sprayed crops with Roundup; he wasn't merely trying to exculpate himself, but was also attempting to overturn part of the patent.
Wholeheartedly agree. Monsanto's tactics in this situation are the greater evil, imho. The approach is the issue. I'm not under the assumption that every farmer is innocent, but Monsanto's actions against him/her lead my heart to plead on behalf of the farmer nonetheless.
The tactics of Monsanto show me where their heart is, $2mm a day or not in research expenditures.
I just read a bunch of your old comments so I could understand who I'm talking to. You're clearly a pretty smart person. And you've been here for a little while now, so you're presumably somewhat invested in the community on HN.
With that in mind, help me understand what you hoped to communicate with this comment. Did you feel like you were maybe pointing out something I hadn't considered? Did you expect a comment like this might change anyone's mind? Or cause someone to say, "you know what, I hadn't thought of Monsanto this way before"?
I was railing against the idea that business is one thing, and that as long as behavior is not illegal that it is ok. I feel like we are infected with a more virulent form of 1905. Ethics exist everywhere for all time, they don't belong in a free speech zone.
The idea that, business is business. Of course it is, that is a tautology. We both did the snarky comment dance.
I am going to outline an analogous skit, imagine you are at a cocktail party with a bunch of friends and this dude is there and he is funny and charming, but his barbs dig too deep he drinks too much wine and he tries to sow the seeds of discontent between you and your girl friend. You exclaim to your friends that his guy is total narcissistic ass and you want him out. Ahhh they tell you, tptacek, that guy isn't a person, he is a business. He doesn't have to follow the same social norms we do.
But what does that have to do with the question of whether Monsanto is right or wrong to be suing farmers? Because that's the question at the top of this thread.
I said, in effect, farmers are sympathetic, and Monsanto is not, but that doesn't necessarily make Monsanto wrong. You responded --- from what I can tell --- by saying Monsanto is unsympathetic. Why are you telling me that?
You are being over pedantic. This isn't a debate, which btw. Debates aren't about arriving at the truth, they are about winning arguments by whatever means necessary.
For another side of Monsanto's story, see Norman Bourlag's speech commemorating Monsanto's committment to rice and wheat breeding[1].
Norman Bourlag's life work was to develop and distribute high-yield crops. He's a Nobel peace prize winner and is often credited with saving over a billion lives. Monsanto is carrying on his work at a scale he always strived for.
People in this field is deeply passionate and morally involved in their work. Read the responses from this Monsanto employee at IAMA[2] -- his earnest attempts to explain his morals and his rationale speak for themselves. These people aren't even naked capitalists (not that I have any problem with that) -- they're empirical environmentalists and humanists.
I'm kind of disappointed to hear Monsanto shrilly decried here. Modern ag is a deeply interesting and controversial topic, but that Vanity Fair piece is just rhetoric and linkbait.
> Norman Bourlag's life work was to develop and distribute high-yield crops.
Borlaug's work was via selective breeding. He helped countries produce unpatented food at massive scale in order to feed a billion people.
These crops also were productive because they were planted in areas that had not yet been subject to intensive farming methods. The major obstacle with modern farming is NOT the crops, but the soil quality, and depletion of topsoil is a major problem which is only exacerbated by more productive crops.
There's no free lunch -- in order to have a more productive crop, i.e. more output, it has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the agricultural inputs.
Monsanto's attempts to control and patent food, were an IP regime put in place to actually enforce that, would simply instigate a food crisis.
You can't have Big Pharma profits without severe controls on availability.
"Feeding the poor" is a complete smokescreen that is fundamentally incompatible with their business model.
Congratulations to Cloudant for signing a big deal. Why work with a company as...ethically ambiguous as Monsanto? I would love to hear how your team decided to accept this deal, and I hope more than dollar signs crossed your minds.
Personally, I would start a startup (if I ever have the guts) for freedom. How could dealing with Monsanto differ from wearing golden handcuffs?
There's nothing ethically ambiguous about Monsanto. You'd be hard-pressed to name an organization of any ilk that's actively perpetrating more devastating evil.
Actually, I think Monsanto is quintessentially ethically ambiguous. Their cutthroat business tactics (including excessive litigation and political lobbying) must be weighed against their technological achievements that have had an enormous role in the "green revolution" increases in agricultural productivity allowing the human population to grow while malnourishment rates shrank. They are also partially responsible for the advent of LED lighting and they have financed the research of a future Nobel laureate.
"Their technological achievements that have had an enormous role in the 'green revolution' increases in agricultural productivity allowing the human population to grow while malnourishment rates shrank."
The problem is we now have a food system that is:
- reliant on genetic monocultures
- quickly depleting our non-renewable water supplies
- heavily reliant on oil
- causing massive algal blooms and hypoxic zones
- destroying the thickness of the soil
- depleting the soil of micronutrients
- killing the mycorrhizae
The way we're going there is a very real possibility of 1 billion plus people dying in the next fifty years as part of a massive human dieback because of our current Monsanto-style food production.
Not to mention the fact that even today our food is largely devoid of any taste or real nutritional content, and is causing epidemic levels of obesity, diabetes, cancer, etc.
I'm sympathetic to this critique, although I think you've overstated it -- the risk of a 1 billion plus die-off is unlikely, and the distribution of tasty and nutritional food is likely better today than ever before. I would add, as well, the myriad of problems relating to rampant antibiotic use in food production. The fact is, however, that engaging with technology has risks and benefits, and disengagement often carries very serious tolls. This is true of a number of aspects of modern life and food is perhaps the most visibly ugly. None of this should preclude specific criticisms of Monsanto and its behavior, but it is nonetheless overly simplistic to portray the company as being singularly evil.
That's some high quality propaganda you are spewing out there.
Tell me, since you obviously know so much about the worlds current problem with food.
Why is it that food production has gone up, yet the number of starving and hungry individuals throughout the world hasn't changed significantly?
The answer is there isn't a food abundance problem, there is a food availability problem. People don't grow crops and just give them away to the poor; the fact that monsanto has created genetically engineered foods that do things such as resist pesticides, so that large quantities of pesticides can be dumped onto crops without killing them, thus creating, "more food" because less is lost to pests, doesn't get any more food into the belly of starving people around the world.
In fact, the abundance of things like cheap corn around the world is one of the very reasons continents like africa can't ever seem to get on their feet; why would someone buy local african corn that's more expensive than cheaply grown american corn? Undercutting local economies with cheap food has not "feed the world" and does more damage than good.
Monsanto hasn't done a damn thing to allow, "the human population to grow while malnourishment shrinks", that's total absolute garbage.
I'd recommend you ask for more money from your monsanto employers, and if you don't work for them, maybe do some actual research into the company you are defending instead of spewing bullshit that looks like it's been copy pasted from a monsanto PR brochure.
Patenting genetics is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of, and you call this ambiguous? You are a fool.
> Why is it that food production has gone up, yet the number of starving and hungry individuals throughout the world hasn't changed significantly?
Care to back that up with evidence?
The Global hunger index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Hunger_Index), indicates that hunger has decreased over the past 20 years. Out of the 30 countries with the most hunger, only 3 have more hunger now than 20 years ago. Every country on that list has had hunger decrease of stay still, with the majority of them seeing less hunger.
That may be true but I also do not believe that the improvements in the last 20 years have had anything to do with food production. As Sen argued way back in 1981 the cause of hunger and famine is political, not due to a lack of ability to grow food. Somalia this year is case and point.
The green revolution (as led by Norman Borlaug not Monsanto) may be able to take credit for some of the advances during the 60s and 70s but any advances due to Monsanto in recent years cannot be made up for by their completely unjust business practices as others have mentioned.
I am also disappointed in hearing that a YC company is going this direction.
> advances due to Monsanto in recent years cannot be made up for by their completely unjust business practices as others have mentioned.
people deal with monsanto voluntarily. nobody is making you buy their seeds. the fact that so many do suggest that their advances in gmos are indeed worth the cost.
Actually, Monsanto also sells most "conventional"(non-GMO) seeds. It's very difficult not to deal with them, as they have a near-monopoly. If you're going to look for evil, look there.
no one is making you buy seeds at all. non-GMO seeds don't come with "no save" agreements. if you are a farmer, just do what farmers have done for thousands of years: get your seeds from this year's harvest.
Monsanto has received terribly negative press, this is true. Part of that negative press is due to public dislike of GMO foods in Europe. Part of that is due to their DRM-like technology that stops farmers from replanting seeds after one generation.
If you invented a new kind of seed which was significantly more productive but cost billions in R&D to develop, what business model would you use instead?
Put in other words, is the objection to agricultural biotechnology in general (like the Green Revolution) or to Monsanto's specific implementation, and if so what are the top flaws in their approach in your view?
No, those aren't really the major problems that people have with Monsanto. We should start by discussing their lawsuits against farmers because Monsanto grain blew onto their fields and move up from there.
The most famous such case (and probably the one you're thinking of) is Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser in which the farmer who was sued almost certainly saved and re-used seed, then lied about the accidental nature of the crop's presence on his farm.
To be fair: farmers weren't simply getting sued for having Roundup-ready crops; they were finding their fields populated with Roundup-ready plants, and then using Roundup on the field. There was an element of getting-something-for-nothing on the farmer's side, too.
I agree with your and dionidium's characterizations. My intent wasn't to paint a one-sided anti-Monsanto picture (although I think I ended up doing that, and alas can't edit my original post at this point), but rather to offer an alternative to temphn's characterization of the public's issues with Monsanto.
> The herbicide isn't what's interesting or valuable.
Headpalm.
You DO realize that the point of the gene is to SELL ROUNDUP, right? Not using RoundUp on "RoundUp Ready!" crops kind of defeats the entire purpose.
"Sales for Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides peaked at about $4 billion in 2008 when the product line generated record gross profit of nearly $2 billion.
Roundup-branded glyphosate, commercialized by Monsanto in 1976, is one of the few blockbuster molecules developed by industry since the early 1970s. Methyl-tert butyl ether (MTBE), invented by Arco Chemical in the 1960s and commercialized in 1979, is the only other molecule developed by industry since the 1970s to generate sales of more than $1 billion/year."
The licensing fees we're talking about farmers getting sued over are for the Roundup-ready crops, not the herbicide. The point of the Roundup-ready system is that it allows you to plant crops that aren't killed by Roundup. As someone else noted, you can buy Roundup itself at Wal-mart.
I think even a cursory read of the thread would have indicated to a good-faith commenter that I know the basics of the difference between Roundup and the Roundup-ready GMO product.
You're right about the seed currently being a bigger source of revenue and profit than RoundUp, because it's currently protected by patents whereas the herbicide patent expired in 2000, and now Monsanto is being undersold on generic glyphosate (without its special additives) by Chinese chemical producers who have been incentivized and subsidized by their government.
However, RoundUp seed patents begin expiring with soybeans first in 2014, and it looks like canola will follow a year or three later.
RoundUp (the herbicide) apparently accounts for 10% of Monsanto's revenue, but the corresponding seed will soon account for zero.
Monsanto's primary business model is essentially peddling genetic DRM, and their secondary business model involves suing people who weren't particularly interested in associating with them in the first place. They've also been involved in bribery and coercion scandals on multiple levels, and (speaking as a GMO advocate here) they're incredibly irresponsible with their technology. It's no surprise they're unpopular.
It's true that Monsanto has put a lot of money into R&D, and that they're occasionally misrepresented by extremists and farmers who want to give the appearance of being small businesses, but that hardly justifies most of what they've done. And if they're really in such a precarious position, attempting to achieve a "food monopoly" is even more irresponsible than it would be otherwise.
> If you invented a new kind of seed which was significantly more productive but cost billions in R&D to develop, what business model would you use instead?
If the new crop is more expensive because of IP regulations, it is NOT an improvement.
There's just no way to reconcile feeding the poor with making massive profits on patents.
It's also misleading to focus on the crop itself; soil management is a far bigger issue. If your crop produces more, it means it depletes the soil more. Topsoil depletion is a huge issue wherever there is intensive modern farming.
The goal with patents is to control the food supply, not increase it.
I know socialists hate it, because they hate capitalism. I don't think libertarians hate it, because they don't hate capitalism.
However, as libertarianism has become popular, more and more there are socialists (leftists, "democrats" and "liberals") who are deciding they are "libertarians" without understanding what libertarianism is.
Libertairans -- and this is what defines the movement-- are people who agree with the Non Aggression Principle. (aka NAP) In fact, to be a Libertarian Party Member, and get your card, you had to sign a pledge that you subscribed to the NAP.
Show us how Monsanto is violating the NAP, and a libertarian will agree that Monsanto should be held accountable for the crime.
Libertarianism isn't really so much about hating, or loving various companies. It is really about enforcing the NAP against anyone who would violate another's rights using violence.
Sometimes this includes companies as well, but we're pretty resistant to the piling on that a lot of people do. (e.g.: "I hate monsanto, therefore cloudand is evil").
Monsanto is one of the biggest pushers for and beneficiaries of corn subsidies, and corn subsidies are one of the biggest examples of corporate welfare in existence.
However, I'm a bit surprised at the sentiment expressed here. Monsanto may be a pretty shitty company, but they are not satan. More so, I'm not convinced that Monsanto's actions are so exceptionally egregious compared to so many others.
What about Cisco getting into bed with China and other oppressive regimes in helping to track down dissidents? What about companies filtering and censoring content (twitter's hash-tag policing, for example)? Or ISPs and hosting companies rolling over with zero effort when presented with take-down notices or requests for customer information (even without a subpoena)?
I am going to sound callous here, the human race can make more people. The level of shit-getting-fucked up by Monsanto could make it really hard to make new people.
It's a weird feeling when a company that's coming from an environment you admire (YC) makes a move like this. Makes you wonder would you do the same, and where would your priorities lie.
That's why you need a cofounder; when you start wondering about things like this, you need someone to slap some sense back into you.
I really like BigCouch - a great open source project. Awesome, really.
That said, I think that Cloudant should have kept a low profile as far as bragging about a big deal with Monsanto, a company that I personally dislike more than any other corporation on this planet. Awful company!!
That said, I don't blame Cloudant for accepting the business, but they should have just put it in their Edgar SEC filings, and not done any press releases. I hope that they did not actively market Monsanto, and that Monsanto liked BigCouch and approached them. That would make it more palatable for me.
Hey Cloudant! Remember that time you first read about IBM supplying the database system that the Nazi regime used to effectively carry out genocide? Yeah, that's you now.
When I read the headline I imagined that Cloudant was going to be pretty upset to see this on the front page of HN - but it looks like it was submitted by Cloudant themselves and links to their own press release!
If it must be done, this is the type of deal that you sweep under the rug and never talk about again, much less publicize on a site like HN.
Independent of how you may feel about Monsanto (and industrial agriculture in general), this is good news for Cloudant -- both an endorsement of their technology by a technically-competent buyer, and a bunch of contributions to their open source codebase.
(I dislike Monsanto's heavy-handed IP enforcement, but the data scientists are pretty far away from that; it's like criticizing Microsoft Research for the Windows OEM bundling concerns. I prefer organic food, but I'm happy that industrial agriculture/the green revolution keeps billions of people from starving.)
It's great news for anybody who wants to use CouchDB, because this means that they're going to run into the problems of big deployments, and that they'll have the money and the motivation to fix it.
Better that Monsanto pays for the big-fixing than me.
Supporting Monsanto is supporting the end of our organic food supply. It saddens me to see any YC company supporting such an evil organization. Money just isn't worth it.
Supporting Ford is supporting the end of our organic transportation industry. I'm kidding, but it is worth remembering that the word "organic" doesn't contain in it some magical counterargument that requires no further elaboration.
Agreed, but I didn't feel like writing out a novel on why Monsanto is quite possibly the most evil organization in existence. Creating sterile, engineered food, while suing local farmers who didn't want Monsanto's seed on their farms anyways. Not to mention the patents they have an all sorts of food products in order to control the food supply. Remember, Monsanto's main mission is to control the entire world's food supply... aka, all seed would be purchased from them... If that isn't evil, I don't know what is.
Most people would take "organic" in this context to mean "natural", as in if you plant one seed, you can grow a crop, save some of the harvest and replant the seeds for next year, like we've been doing since we started farming.
This is amazingly naive to think that we human have practiced anything close to what you state. From advent of agriculture, the practice has been to mix and match various plant species to get the best produce at lowest cost. We have destroyed huge amount of bio-diversity in the process. For example, of hundreds of banana species that existed, there is now only few, and all bananas are essentially clone of each other.
We have far left behind the days when agriculture was "natural", what ever that word means. The only difference that GM food bring to table is that we can now actively modify genes without taking a guess of what to mix with what.
Hating Monsanto might be understandable, but it only shows how patent system is broken, rather than a group of innovator being evil.
Don't like Monsanto, stop using them. Let them die without profit as no one would buy their stuff. But I guess great motive of money is stopping the "small" farmers from doing that.
If I have to choose between "plant one seed, save some of the harvest, and replant the seeds for next year" and saving the lives of a billion(10^9) people from starvation, I'm picking the latter.
In theory, it is, but in practice, the Green Revolution hybrid(very carefully cross-bred) seeds required you to get new seeds every year, because the seeds you'd get from your harvest would be cross-pollinated improperly. GMO could possibly bridge this gap, but you don't want GM crops cross-pollinating with everyone else's, if only because if it cross-pollinates with an organic farmer's crops, the latter can lose their organic certification. The solution to this is the terminator gene, that makes it impossible for such a situation to happen.
I'm not going to support Monsanto's IP actions here, but they aren't pure evil the way, say, De Beers is.
The reason for the terminator gene is not to support the Green Revolution however. The practice was successfully carried out in North America long before GURT was even conceived.
The reason for the gene is to ensure Monsanto's share price continues to rise, by ensuring a recurring stream of income from a product that was never previously purchased beyond initial implementation.
This is like during apartheid claiming that you are delighted to have partnership with government of South Africa. Or like now partnership with Ministry of Morals of Saudi Arabia.
All customers are good, but but you don't parade all of them during triumph.
This raises a real dilemma: at what point does a company or organization cross the line from "not my cup of tea" to "ethically ambiguous" to "pure evil"?
What if Cloudant were to power analytics for Trader Joe's?
I don't know anything for sure, but it appears that cloudant themselves posted the link to the press release on Hacker News, which seems like a pretty good indication that they are the ones trying to publicize this, which then points to the latter of your two choices being likely.
Whether this is due to lack of realizing how poorly Monsanto is viewed by most, or whether they thought the somewhat Rand-ian slant of HN' would offset that, I don't know.
I'll offer the first unqualified congratulations. I don't think it's at all obvious that Monsanto is a perpetrator of "devastating evil" (as one of the comments says below) and I'd love it if one or more of the critics would do more than merely state that as fact.
But seriously, if even the politically correct & good natured commenters on HN are unanimous in their hatred for Monsanto, you can be pretty sure it's a pretty despicable company.
So yes, fuck Monsanto, and fuck Cloudant too. Supporting Monsanto in any way is disgusting. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
But seriously, if even the politically correct & good natured commenters on HN are unanimous in their hatred for Monsanto, you can be pretty sure it's a pretty despicable company.
Do I really need to point out that this is a logical fallacy?
But if people all around the world and from every angle of the ideological spectrum universally vilifies a corporation,
I think it would merit to look into their affairs with
suspicion.
I am completely with Dionidium here. I've read a number of the books (Michael Pollen, etc.), seen the documentaries, read the science. There are bad effects from agriculture and livestock. Monsanto is not especially bad in this regard - unless you want to not associate with anyone in the food industry who's not organic, it is stupid to place so much hate on them.
Congratulations Cloudant and good luck, you'll need it! A lifetime knowing you're directly contributing to the future destruction of the worlds agricultural biodiversity cannot be worth all that dirty money.
I don't know the details, but whatever sequencing queries Monsanto is running against cloudant, would be nice to replicate and open source to universities and researchers.
I'm kinda hurt to see this on here, to be honest. Might advise getting out before you plant the self-terminating PR seed.
Dramatically illuminating movies you can watch to learn about why everyone on YC thinks this is an absurd move: FUEL, Food Inc.
Preface: I would like to take the liberty of starting a thread of discussion about the technical merits of the press release. Any non technical concerns can be posted under someone else's comment please.
What does this mean for a me as a hacker?
Someone brought up the huge benefit of large scale deployment. I think that's a very interesting point. If Cloudant can get their system to scale to meet their large customer's needs, the overall experience for all clients should be streamlined.
How would such a big client affect their pricing? Would they be able to price the lower tiers more aggressively?
What other side effects does this press release have for their customers?
Heh. I didn't know what to expect when I came here, but frankly I was a bit surprised to see the ethical implications of this deal weighed so heavily here. Not that I view the HN community as cut throat necessarily, but certainly often business oriented. Granted this was only posted an hour ago, but I will try to less judgementally provoke a discussion regarding ethics and startups...
Is it wrong to even associate with a company like Monsanto? What if they're providing some tangential support infrastructure that doesn't relate to the actual business practices that people are so ethically opposed to?
Agreed, I don't think I've ever seen so many 'fucks' and similar words used on an HN thread before. For some reason all these new posters are tying every company which they have a grudge against with Monsanto, and by association, with Cloudant. Amusing to read all the pent up angered comments, with any dissenting ones heavily downvoted. Did /r/politics arrive to stay? What happened here?
Cloudant is providing an amazing infrastructure to power a large client, and with that, they grow as a business and innovate in technology. I don't see anything wrong with congratulating them for their securing of this great partnership, and I find the response here from the mainly younger accounts very disappointing.
edit: We've hit Godwin's law pretty quickly already I see.
I've been very curious about the persistence of anti-capitalists attitudes on Hacker News.
For me, one of the things that changed me from a liberal into a libertarian was starting businesses. Getting out there, trying to grow, dealing with government, and recognizing that I needed to learn finance, etc, caused me to get experience with how the business world works, and to also learn economics, and that was pretty much all she wrote.
Maybe Hacker News has a lot of overlap with the /r/politics demographic due to commonality in ages?
I don't see how decrying a partnership with Monsanto equates with anti-capitalism. Monsanto is seen by many as an enterprise with particularly questionable business practices, but more revelatory than that, one with deep ties to our political system, from which they might be said to derive great benefit from our government's support through subsidies, research grants, political pressure on other countries, abuse of the justice system in going after often innocent farmers, and the list goes on. If anything, it is Monsanto which is seen as anti-capitalist, for their reliance on government power in order to succeed in the marketplace, rather than the inherent merits of their products.
Beyond that, the fact that their genetic modifications to our basic food staples are not contained, that they are allowed to contaminate our seed stocks as a whole, with often poorly understood long-term consequences, touches a nerve for a large portion of the population, since we are talking about a consequential and irreversible effect on the basic food upon which we all rely to stay alive and healthy. It is not hard for me to see why this would be controversial.
I think this is a more recent development actually, that started in the last year particularly. Hacker News had a much more business and startup friendly environment, but the anti-capitalist attitude is a sentiment that was found mostly at the bottom, downvoted for their mostly incoherent rants. It's unfortunate that their numbers have gained.
I think one of the biggest signs to always look for is how many comments a story has. You'll find the older, better commenters tend to be more conservative with their comments and only joining the discussion when they have something worthwhile to contribute.
Hacker News has grown a lot in the last year, and obviously many of the new users are people who don't actually run their own businesses. They view making money as somehow abhorrent. The same kind of mindset you see in these new occupy wall street protests.
But lest I take us off on a too political tangent, I'll end it here. Politics does not belong on Hacker News.
Says the guy whose account is under four months old... while responding to one whose account is slightly over two months old. The ironing is delicious.
This is just a throwaway account and not the one under my real name. I've been reading Hacker News since before it was even called that. My "real name" account is over 4 years old.
> Is it wrong to even associate with a company like Monsanto?
Yes. Associating your name with the likes of Monsanto, especially as an entrant to the market, is PR suicide. You would be hard-pressed to come up with a more universally reviled entity than Monsanto... maybe the Church of Scientology, though even that is probably not enough.
It is a huge negative publicity, to be associated with a company like Monsanto. Not sure if that would affect Cloudant's future business prospects though. We all know of the sweatshops run by companies like Walmart and Nike, lots of people even complain loudly, but those companies seem to be doing very well, year after year.
On the other hand, given the size of Monsanto, there is no doubt that Cloudant could effectively demonstrate their expertise, and use them as a case study for landing big customers in future. Plus, the money must be pretty good.
I guess it isn't our job to judge Cloudant, they are running a business - their business, their choice (moral or not). HN crowd (me included) just can't digest associating with an entity as Monsanto, hence the extreme reaction.
Nike hasn't been an ethically questioned company since 2000. In fact, they're pretty universally acclaimed as one of the most ethical companies in the world now (google Nike Most Ethical). Most of the Monsanto data in this thread is decades old, as well.
Hmmm. May be I haven't kept up, but I definitely remember reading about the labor practices of Nike (vietnam, I think). May be they changed, if they did, kudos to them.
"Is it wrong to even associate with a company like Monsanto? What if they're providing some tangential support infrastructure that doesn't relate to the actual business practices that people are so ethically opposed to?"
Certainly. Ethics should trump finance in every scenario. There are very few companies as evil as Monsanto, and helping them further their cause is akin to direct involvement.
I see the nazi / ibm situation being tossed out in the thread, but in this case I think it's more like the RIAA.
"We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership."
Thrilled? I guess money is thrilling.
"The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions."
Key business decisions like which small farmer to sue into oblivion? Or what third world nation's crops to take financially hostage? Thrilling work guys. Really.