Remember this the next time you want to complain about GMO’s, we may not have done it in a lab but they still are that.
Bananas looked like lemons wtf
Isn’t this more of a combination of selective breeding and GMOs? Not just GMOs?
Yes. But people talk about how GMO’s are “unnatural”, yet for centuries humanity has been exploiting mutations in animals and plants to produce food for themselves.
GMO’s are simply the process of inducing these mutations reliably.
People hear “Lettuce being modified with scorpion DNA” and think that we’re now eating scorpions. But, in reality, they’re taking a tiny bit of scorpion DNA and splicing it into the plant. Why? So the plant will produce poison that is not harmful to humans but will deter insects, reducing the use of pesticide, which CAN be harmful to humans and the environment.
GMOs are producing rice that can survive flooding, which makes rice more reliable yields and will prevent food shortages in poor nations that rely on said crops for staple food.
GMOs are also creating spider-goat hybrids. Why? So we can splice web production into the goat’s udders. We’ll be able to spin huge quantities of spider silk, enough to reliably create spider silk cables and ropes, which have more tensile strength than steel.
I for one am glad I live in a time where watermelons aren’t giant tomato abominations
The issue with GMOs is that corporations like Monsanto are patenting GMOs and arresting indigenous farmers for cross pollinating with they seeds. But there is nothing dangerous about the science.
^This.
The problem isn’t the science, it’s what capitalism does with that science.
And now I’m mad that nobody told us we were given cows. Cause that’s really f*cking nice and nobody mentioned it at all.
American media tends to disregard that anyone donates to the US. And then Amurricans complain about money going abroad because “nobody helped the US in our disasters.”
>.>
Also, do you know how much a cow costs? O.O
It isn’t just a matter of how much a cow costs, its a matter of considering that Masai life is based around their cattle. Its their wealth, their food, and a significant part of their religion. Here’s a quote from Wikipedia:
“Traditional Maasai lifestyle centres around their cattle which constitute their primary source of food. The measure of a man’s wealth is in terms of cattle and children. A herd of 50 cattle is respectable, and the more children the better. A man who has plenty of one but not the other is considered to be poor.[37] A Maasai religious belief relates that God gave them all the cattle on earth, leading to the belief that rustling cattle from other tribes is a matter of taking back what is rightfully theirs, a practice that has become much less common.[38]”
So its not just “they gave us 14 cows”, its that they gave us something that is very important and significant to them, it is more than just a kind gesture that definitely deserves to be known and its a genuine shame that more people don’t know about it.
Wait, you guys DON’T KNOW that we offer help to the US when you have disasters???????
Shit, down here in Brazil we not only offered to send tracking units and doctors to help in 9/11 but we wanted to send a whole lot of donations to help with Katrina (we have experience with floods down here so we knew what kind of medicine to send to prevent outbreaks).
We alone had like 2 army airplanes full of medicine and non-perishables like baby formula, diapers, bottled water, mosquito nets and other stuff that’s needed to fight opportunistic diseases that hit flooded areas, enough to assist a good few thousand people at least, ready to go the day after it hit, but your government refused the donations.
The same thing happened to the Canadians and Europeans who offered help, the US embassies around the world told us all to give money to Red Cross.
And so we did, we all gave hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and then this happened:
So please, don’t you go spreading misinformation and prejudice against the rest of the world, WE DID OFFER HELP AND ORGANIZED IT EVEN FASTER THAN BUSH DID, BUT Y’ALL REFUSED IT.
Oh wow I had no idea this happened it’s really not talked about in media at all wow this is something good to know about wow
I’m so angry.
I didn’t know that other countries tried to help after 9/11 or Katrina. Like, that’s something we, the people, should hear about and we don’t.
Please don’t blame us for the shitty decisions our government makes. We don’t have as much control over our government as we would like to think and they keep a lot from us.
Spread this shit.
After Katrina, Cuba donated several hundred blankets. Think about that. A country that is suffering economically due directly to the US embargo offered to help us when we needed it by sending what they could. And once again, it was refused. We have a government that is so self-righteous that we refuse to accept disaster aid in order to maintain this facade that we are the most generous nation on earth.
Okay, Katrina thing.
Only Texans really knows this? and even then it’s not wide spread. Mexico sent their army. They sent their army for relief efforts. Didn’t call ahead, they drove all the way to San Antonio with doctors and food and all sorts of supplies.
When people actually got a call from them saying “Hey, we’re sending people up.” The people who answered said “What? We can’t…” “Too late, already there.” This was while the government was turning down help.
So yeah, other countries send relief.
Forest fires up in Washington last year? Firefighters from Australia came up to assist.
Like… we don’t hear about this shit. At all.
I can second the above with the fires.
Most the time, when people say “oh FEMA or something sent people right?” re: fires, its actually people from other countries showing up and kinda ignoring the government telling them to fuck off and staying on behalf of local departments because we REALLY need them.
If there’s a huge ass disaster, and the government is sitting there with a thumb up it’s ass, help is offered and most the time– shit, it gets there! But then the feds do something really fucking dirty. They insist they were the help, if it’s talked about at all.
They insist those people putting out fires were federal people, because to most people a fireman’s a fireman. The people handing out water and food, a relief worker is a relief worker. So on and so forth.
We had people come up when the fires were so bad a while ago– not the Australians, but i think there was like a German group of like 3 guys that flew themselves over? They came out of sheer “this is horrible and we’re helping” and my dad [local fire chief] had them working with our guys and the feds lost no time telling every news outlet that it was THEIR people doing all the fire knockdowns and structure work when these guys were running into buildings and grabbing people, pets, and people’s important documents because they knew papers were a pain in the ass to replace.
What you gotta understand is that our government is very intent on selling us and the rest of the world [as much as possible] the idea of a powerful and self reliant country. All our reporting on disasters, starts with the scaremongering and then moves to “but our people can handle it because we’re the best at handling things” and then they move on before the idea it’s out of control comes to mind. The average person outside of the disaster has no idea, if they have never been around such an event or met someone who regularly deals with these things, they will kinda probably nod along with that. Because we have no real scope on the scale and impact– by design. Our media intake is very controlled to slant everything to the “eh, we can handle it and everyone else out there– they need our help because they’re not so good at handling disasters like we are.” People who know better, reading international news, interacting with international social groups, looking outside their sphere of community– we know better but that kinda slant is really hard to break from because of that grip American media has on information. So, taking that knowledge, we further have restricted reporting on certain disasters because they’re considered unimportant. Hurricanes are considered important, earthquakes are only considered important if it wrecks something the government cares about or somewhere a couple million people live that they’ll upset the national money flow/they can throw money at someone to make the news care, floods are only important if it’s in a similar manner to earthquakes but since they occur annually they’re rarely reported on nationally, mudslides that kill people or leave hundreds homeless aren’t important to the government even through they happen constantly, wildfires that consume most of the nation/continent each year generally are unimportant until they consume a town or threaten a government interest/money flow location. Terrorist attacks are always important because people will talk about them.
So, when we do get help for any of the above, it’s possible that most people may have no idea about what’s happened, let alone that help’s been sent. Or if people know something happened, the details are vague– the news don’t care to give the nitty gritty. You’ll know something happened and people are suffering and “gee, isn’t it good you’re not them” and then now the weather.
So, yeah, basically no one really knows we get help.
The ‘information is free, distrust authority, truth and justice at any cost, respect my identity and right to communicate’ attitude generally attributed to millennials? Has always been a strong part of scientific culture. Scientists find the truth and argue about it for a living. Scientists share their practices and out-truth each other for a living. Scientists market that truth to other people for a living.
The open source movement was built and pioneered by scientists. The concept of the internet as a freely available and accessible worldwide tool was an extension of scientific culture. Before that, other media and communication efforts went through the same process. There are so many cool underground stories of small groups of scientists using their limited power and a bit of secrecy to create open source cultures and free information under the noses of political and business interests trying to restrict such things for personal gain.
Scientists consider themselves above everything – politicians, business, the law if the law restricts truth, other scientists. A nervous grad student who thinks they’ve found a flaw in the work of a Nobel laureate would be *expected* to challenge that work publically; respect for seniority is for business decisions, not for ideas. Scientists never grew out of their rebellious teenage phase after discovering that the world was unfair. Scientists are punks who channelled their energy into learning as much about the laws of the universe as they can. Scientists are basically the punk community if it were interested in information rather than music, and they do not ever grow out of it, and they do not ever stop. We had staff at our university who were frequently driven to tears because they couldn’t find ways to convince the senior scientists to take their vacation days for over a decade and it was causing serious administrative problems. They had to bribe the scientists to work from home for a month and pretend to be on holiday, and then everyone pretended not to notice when the scientists showed up to work to advise us poor grad students in person anyway. Scientists do what they want, and the first thing they are taught is how to see bullshit – the second thing they are taught is that it’s their fundamental duty to call out bullshit in anyone they see using it, no matter how prestigious or powerful.
They do not rest, they do not stop, they fear no death or ridicule or government sanction.
It is right to fear them.
The popular stereotype of the researcher is that of a skeptic and a
pessimist. Nothing could be further from the truth! Scientists must be
optimists at heart, in order to block out the incessant chorus of those
who say “It cannot be done.”
– Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri
Honestly if you email the author of an academic article explaining why you need it and that you’re too poor to pay the fucking absurd $45 or whatever to get it online, they’ll totally email it to you for free. Scientists love people reading their work. Just like any author, tbh. Why shouldn’t they want to share their research? Information is power and it should be available to anyone who’s interested.
Another thing that explains why scientists will usually totally e-mail you their published work for free if you ask is that we don’t get paid for journal publications. In fact, some of the less prestigious (i.e. higher acceptance rate) journals ask you (or your department/university) to pay to submit. We’re not seeing any of that $45 or whatever and we believe in freedom of information, so why the fuck not?
You can also e-mail scientists to ask questions about their publications even if you’re Joe Rando the Plumber and they don’t know you exist, and as long as you try your best to read and understand it first and they’re not completely swamped with other duties, they’ll probably give you a thoughtful answer. We want people to read and understand our shit.
Today at work I spent two hours doing inventory adjustments for my department. The process is essentially, count the number of a product on the shelf and see if it matches the number the computer says we have, then change the computer number to the correct amount. One or two items missing is normal. Stuff gets miscounted or the wrong barcode gets scanned or maybe the tags fell off and we ring it up as something else. That’s just par for the course. 200+ items is not.
Today alone in just ONE department there was over $1200 of merchandise missing.
I’m going to get my butt chewed out because $1200 is missing from my department and I don’t know where it went. That’s $1200 that my store will have to cover. That’s $1200 that comes out of payroll budget, which is already way too thin. $1200 is almost exactly one months pay for one employee, meaning we will probably have to let someone go, because we are losing this amount on an almost daily basis.
Fuck you and your lame excuses. When you shoplift, it isn’t hurting the corporation. It’s hurting the employees.
When you shoplift it means that one of my coworkers won’t be able to pay her bills this month. It means she won’t be able to afford to eat every day. It means that my coworkers and I will have to find a way to sneak gas money into her purse so that she can get home.
It means that corporate is going to make us tighten security. We will have to purchase more cameras and more alarms and more tags, with money we don’t have, which means hours will get cut even more. It means we will have to participate in shrink prevention programs, like consenting to having our belongings searched before we leave because corporate still insists that most of our shrink is internal.
I can understand if you are stealing food because you’re hungry, or medicine because you’re sick. it’s still wrong, but I understand that and if I saw you stealing food or medicine, I would probably look the other way and pay for it myself.
But you can’t eat cosmetics, ok? You won’t die without lipstick. You won’t suffer because you don’t have Levi jeans. You won’t get sick because you don’t have a wallet & penknife gift set, you’re just being a shitty person.
Enjoy your $12.00 compacts you crudnuggets. I hope it’s worth our jobs.
Sex tip: If he’s pressuring you to do anal, buy a dildo the same size as his dick, and ask him to do it first. If he’s scared of the pain- case closed. There’s absolutely no reason that he should expect it to feel any differently for you. If he says that it would be emasculating, belittling or ‘gay’, then that man is a misogynistic homophobe, and you better run for the hills as fast as your legs can take you.
Is this what you guys think it means when GMO comes up in conversation?
Do you know what else is a GMO?
Dogs. Literally ALL dogs have had their genetics modified to make them more docile, loyal, trusting, energetic, obedient ect.
Ears of corn used to be the size of your thumb. Through selective ‘breeding’ we chose the strains of corn that were the biggest, fastest growing, most resilient ect. Ect.
THAT is a GMO. I don’t know where the idea that genetic modification meant they’re injecting your food stuffs with chemicals to change its DNA. That’s not how it works.
However, they ARE spraying your veggies with pesticides and that is something you should be worried about.
Companies like Monsanto are evil. But not because they are breeding crops to feed more people. But because they’re monopolizing the farming market, sueing farmers who share a geographic area and have some of the same strains of crops in their fields because of unavoidable cross pollination and lying about their business practices.
This is Normal Borlaug. In 1942 he received his Ph. D in plant pathology and genetics. In Mexico, he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease resistant varieties of wheat. A genetically modified food. He introduced these to Mexico, Pakistan and India, resulting in double the wheat yields in a 5 year span. In 1970, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for saving one billion lives from starvation, and contributing to world peace through increasing the world food supply.
Genetically modified food is great.
This, a thousand fucking times this. Privilege is spouting and spreading pseudo-science bullshit you saw on your Facebook feed or on Twitter because unlike people in drought and famine prone areas of the world, you have the option to do just that. Those other parts of the world that don’t have the benefit of a food surplus and can’t pick and choose what they eat depend on GMOs to not die of starvation or watch their children waste away.
I despise Monsanto as much as the next person and if they ever go out of business, I’ll be the first to dance a jig, but condemning GMOs just because one megacorp is a pile of shitbags is beyond idiotic. If scientists can create new strains of seeds that can withstand disease, pests, all while yielding more foodstuff, then we should be throwing our support behind them.
Also, “They are feeding us chemicals!” is a fundamentally ridiculous statement.
Why?
As a chemist, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret:
“The front lines don’t necessarily have to be in North Dakota,” she explained. “The front lines can be wherever you are. You can create a protest in New York City, because protests are about awareness and about people coming together.” She also had some comments about the one thing she wished she’d known when she was taking her now-famous mug shot.
lav3nderwolftumblr 
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