Hacker News Reader

Comment by PythonicAlpha | Hacker News Reader

>The fact that Monsanto has made a significant improvement to one of the fundamental goods society is built around. They deserve a share of the value they created.

No, because I deny that they made any improvement. Only because it is shown in TV, it is not true!

Today's companies are great in creating "pseudo values". Of course, short term, there might be an improvement. But who checks for the long term effects? I also heard about countries where farmers wanted to go back to their old crop, since after paying the price for the crops (and the pesticides, that are sometimes additionally needed), the value was negative! But say what? They could not, because the old crops where swept from market!

View on HN

> But who checks for the long term effects?

I'm becoming more and more convinced that in aggregate as a species nobody ever checks for the long term, and nobody ever actually cares about the long term. Even today, any environmentally friendly actions come off to me as being more social than logical - it is great we got green to be somewhat "cool", but the fact that is the driving force in adoption (people usually buy Teslas and hybrids because they are "cool", not because it vastly reduces their carbon footprint) leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

And it always happens throughout history. Depressions, wars, and famines are caused by perpetual short term thinking coming back to bite you the long term that eventually catches up to you.

GM crops do improve yields in situations where they're called for:

>He also told me that the overall yield data on GM crops isn't as simple as "yes, it produces higher yields" or "no, it doesn't". For instance, he pointed to a paper published this February in Nature Biotechnology which shows that GM corn sometimes out-produces conventionally bred corn and sometimes under-produces in comparison. The key is in the environmental context. The years where GM corn was producing similar or lower yields than conventionally bred corn were average years, when it came to factors like the weather, disease, and pests. It was in bad years that you can see a significant, positive, difference for GM corn. When the situation was bad, GM corn had greater yields.

From http://boingboing.net/2013/03/29/do-gmos-yield-more-food-the...

Then there's of course Golden Rice which has an increased content of Vitamin A, which you can't measure in terms of yield.

> I deny that they made any improvement

The farmers buying Monsanto seeds over the competition and the customers buying the resulting cheaper/larger/less buggy produce get to make that decision, not you. They have spoken.

> I also heard about countries where farmers wanted to go back to their old crop, since after paying the price for the crops (and the pesticides, that are sometimes additionally needed), the value was negative!

Monsanto makes a point of A) not using terminator seeds, B) only going after farmers who are so guilty that they will possibly be a "PR win", and then donating the proceeds of the lawsuits to charity. Are they actually going after anyone in the 3rd world countries that don't ignore patents? I suspect that they would either be able to get away with saving seeds or are big enough that "the local seed dealer only sells Monsanto" isn't much of an excuse. But I could be wrong. Link to the specific stories you mention?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com