I wonder if the actual issues with this rice are similar to the miracle rice programs of the '70s where western aid programs introduced commercial strains of rice to traditional farmers in Indonesia and other SE Asian countries. These strains promised higher yield but at the cost of buying in commercial fertilisers and herbicides. The side effect of higher rice yield was disappearance of fish and companion/accidental crops that would typically grow in the rice paddies, along with poisoning of rivers downstream due to excess nutrients from fertilised rice paddies.
..The Government of India signed an agreement with the Rockefeller Foundation to carry out research to achieve higher food production. The program started with research for the development of suitable hybrids of maize followed by hybrids of sorghum and pearl millet.
The dwarf wheat bred by Dr. Borlaug in Mexico, named Sonaro 4 and Larmarojo, were introduced. These efforts created an agricultural revolution.
I consider myself a farmer and used to grow wheat on 80 acres. I was very happy to harvest about 500 quintals every year – about six quintals (600 kg) for every acre. The planting of Sonaro 64, with the agronomic practices recommended, led to a harvest of 20 quintals (2000 kg) an acre, which was more than three times the previous yield.
I remember three to four years after the introduction of those seeds, India’s wheat production expanded significantly, and quite rapidly India became self-sufficient in food.
> "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only. Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the "Population Monster"...Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth..."
Finding out the author of this quote is left as an exercise to the reader...
The green revolution of India was primarily because of newer strain of crops and mechanisation to some degree. Chemical industry simply was not mature enough in 50s to have been a major factor.
I can corroborate this. My family was involved in a chemical manufacturing business in India from the 60s onwards. My understanding from what my family tells me is that the 80s and early 90s is when a lot of these base manufacturing inputs became readily available.
interesting (!) good to put details on the general trends. crop type, latitude and elevation, proximity to rail and other industrial infrastructure, market economics with demographics.. more? all would inform this crucial and interdependent topic
Well, the article does not mentioned anything about second order effects of the use of fertilisers and herbicides that happened 50 years ago in another country so I am going with: No.
Buying seed and fertilizer and pesticides from another country is almost the same as importing the food directly. You have a poor country that is struggling to export products and then you tell it to import even more? Recipe for disaster.
You raise a good point regardless. The trust in science and technology is gone. We’ve been bamboozled so many times that we first see new developments with mistrust instead of wonder.
A device that can bring surveillance and social media and its accompanying society-breaking stressors to him at any place and time in an unceasing torrent of shit...
I understand that the deal is that "golden rice" is a low-maintenance GMO crop whose purpose is to get a foot in the door for other GMO crops, with all the issues that you mentioned.
- Patreon if what you're doing lends itself to regular updates
- PayPal or other payment processor if your project could use donations
- Subscription based Server As A Service for things that need data syncing between multiple platforms (eg: the public/client parts can be Free Software, the server part just exposes an API, and you make it clear what data is transmitted to the server remaining solely on the user's device)
- Consultancy to assist with installation/training if your product is complex
Ha ha yeah. Let me just remove all that childhood trauma and PTSD, then we'll get this train of thought right back on track. Why didn't I think of that sooner?
The attacker could pretend to be the service the user is trying to authenticate to, issue a bogus challenge signed with the user's public key. That will allow intercepting the user's interactions but by this time the attacker has control over the target system so why not just take what is inside rather than go to the effort of interacting with the user?
There's no reason to believe that commercial entities would be any less likely to spy on you than a government entity. The government can just pass security regulations that require access to infrastructure with gag orders in place so the infrastructure owner isn't allowed to talk about government access requests or actions.
The trick is simply to ensure you pick a government that isn't going to pass that kind of invasive legislation, or will remove it and retrospectively revoke all access granted under the legislation that they're repealing.
As for Great Firewall of USA, what makes you think it doesn't exist already?
The Snowden leaks proved otherwise. That was over a decade ago, it's wild that everyone just forgot it all and then went back to framing the same fears as hypothetical.
A lot of moderators hide the moderator list because they get far too much abuse for decisions they make. It's dead simple: make a moderation decision based on the rules of the subreddit -> person affected by decision whines to the moderator and clogs up their inbox. Need to make more decisions per day -> inbox filled with more and more whining.
But a lot of the moderator decisions on reddit are personal in nature, not because of the rules. That has been one of the biggest issue with the reddit mods, they sit on these fiefdoms and punish anyone they disagree with. That makes for a bad, bad community. It's like if dang and YC rate limited your account because they personally disagreed with your point of view. This kind of behavior is routine on Reddit.
> If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses.
Not at all. The chances are that if it was a lab leak the people involved had no idea the leak happened at all. That's how lab leaks work: people make mistakes and inadvertently leak stuff from the lab. eg: Karen Wetterhahn vs lead
What you're talking about is a deliberate release from a lab, which would have eyewitnesses because they know what is happening and see it happening and can corroborate the reports of other witnesses. eg: Thomas Midgley Jr vs lead
In Dr. Wetterhahn's case, it wasn't a leak and it wasn't lead. It was a spill that was contained properly and she followed all known procedures at the time. But it wasn't known at the time that dimethylmercury could penetrate through the gloves in less than 15 seconds. The estimated amount she absorbed through her gloves was roughly 0.089 teaspoons or 0.44ml (less than a drop) of dimethylmercury.
That was enough to kill her. No one else was exposed.
If she had prioritized herself over cleaning up, she may have survived.
Dunbar's number is 150, which seems about right for the number of people to be involved for the group to end up devolving into two macro communities. The micro-communities still hover round the 2 to 5 mark where everyone gets to feel like they're participating and appreciated.
