The End of The world

i've always argue that to be the case - but you can't stop technology

millions of kids dying/suffering from malnutrition globally would say otherwise


http://www.goldenrice.org/Content3-Why/why.html

golden rice may be good but that's not the point.. it will only take one mistake and we could all be screwed, including the kids you mention. And the main reasons for malnutrition are not that the rice varieties we have at the moment are no good. It's that we are suffering an epidemic of obesity whilst they starve.

It's in your face irony.

Arguments about music formats will actually cause mass suicides sometime within the next... 2 to 3 days. That's my prediction at least.

so what do you prepose be done instead to solve the global malnutrition problem?

the rice varieties we have now clearly are not good enough to provide a suitable diet for people where rice is the only crop they can afford and the environment will allow them to grow otherwise they wouldn't be malnourished

now let me see........

well we could start by spending the 500 billion we have so far spent in trashing Iraq on feeding the malnourished

or how about the fact that UN’s entire budget is just a tiny fraction of the world’s military expenditure, approximately 2%..........

or maybe we could try to change the fact that the wealthiest 20% of the world accounted for 80% of all consumption. The poorest 20% only 1.5%......

or what about the $33 billion spent in the US alone on overweight people trying to slim

the list is endless. Is the answer REALLY to tamper with the fundamental building blocks of life in ways that could create unintended disasters?

we could easily feed everyone on the planet with today's technology and resources. we choose not to.

....also as bill hicks said "You know all that money we spend on nuclear weapons and defence each year? Trillions of dollars. Instead that money could be spent feeding and clothing the poor of the world,which it would pay for many times over,not one human being excluded..."

but that's all ideal world scenario stuff, we could've done all that for years so why haven't we?

gm foodstuffs such as golden rice are a real sollution that can be used and stop the problem today, wholesale genetic modifying is bad but in extreme cases where nothing else is getting done I don't see many real workable alternatives

bill hicks etc is very right on yeah but they aren't solving the problem

don't get me wrong i'd love to see the ideas you mention put in to practice but in the real world it just isn't happening otherwise it already would be, the question you have to ask is "why isn't it" being idealistic is great but doesn't solve the issue and whilst people in the west try and be right on and do the right thing millions of people mostly childen are dying in the third world, gm food properly regulated could be saving lives right now

you talk about practicalities. How do you 'properly regulate' GM? The consequences of releasing something never before seen in nature into the environment are unknowable and irreversible. 99.99% of all interventions could be beneficial but it would only take 1 fuck up and we could create something truly disastrous.
biological releases into the wild can't be controlled once they are out there.

And is it practical to think world poverty can be solved with a few quick technological fixes?

id drive home,eat the 16 space cakes i have in the fridge then roll i fuckin huge 1 and toke away till the end...i supose u n melt would be dressed in skywalker outfits awaiting your empire on the other side

I AM THE MASTER NOW - i have my own troopers

i'll meet u there richie mate :chill:

makes the end of the world sound great

i'd like to think you were being sincere there

Knocking in or knocking out a gene here or there is nothing new - nature's been at it for 3 billion years, and we've been artificially selecting mutants with mutations we like for thousands of year - it gave us the domestic dog, the cauliflower, the dairy cow etc.

The difference here is that we choose the gene to go in or out, rather than waiting for it to appear by chance, then breeding the animal with it.

Of course they have to be properly tested for safety and as a well fed westerner like me (or Prince Charles) it's easy to say that we shouldn't be meddling to make crops grow in the desert or whatever. To a malnourished child in africa though, it's easy to see our failure to take every opportunity to develop foods that can grow in farming conditions that are worsening because of our western lifestyle as deeply wrong.

yes I talk of practicalities because when trying to solve real world issues you have to deal with real world practicalities, not just cry about how bad everything is and that in a perfect world this would happen and that would happen

you 'properly regulate' GM like everything else in science, peer reviewing, proper evaluation of the technology by independent boards all fairly standard stuff in the scientific community, yes there is a risk but there is always a risk if your approach was adopted we'd still be living in caves, Chernobyl didn't stop us building nuclear power plants and that was a disaster on far larger scale than a genetic escape would pose

I think you're the textbook person who is anti genetic modification you look at the wild absolute worst case scenario extremes and take them as the standard and write the whole process off, it's good to have people like you so science doesn't run wild

however you still haven't suggested how you recomend the problem be solved you've mentioned changing the economics of the situation but not highlighted what you'd do with the money