chicob

That argument is not very cogent because the idea of owning a person is too outrageous.

But if you change it sligthly to owning copyright over some dog breed, that emotional objection would dissipate in my opinion.

So if someone were to cross two or three breeds of dogs and make a stable, new breed, can that someone patent it and own it?

What about every single pup that is eventually born? Can the breeder claim intellectual property rights over it?

Of course this is nonsense, but some companies will try and are trying their luck.

It was a seed multiplication contract. I'm pretty sure I cannot name the company or plant, or any other specifics.

NDA's are useful for signing contracts with neighbouring farmers so that they cannot argue against differential treatment regarding prices. Of course everybody knows who is being paid what, but no one can officially complain.

Simply put, no one has the right to simply take your onions. They must pay you a fair price.

But what they do with it afterwards is not your business.

Emphasis on poor, as in "poor enough not to stand a chance in court".

This is the kind of bullshit that infuriates me as a farmer and the only reason for me not to use GMOs and whichever patented cultivars. The rights of farmers to resow has (and must have!) precedence over intellectual or property rights.

These strategies have taken place in the past with GMOs, and I suspect will happen again.

Branded seed sowing can be subject to some restrictions for a single contract and crop for the purpose of the destination of the produce, but the extent of those restrictions should stop there and should not apply to 2nd generation seeds or their crops.

I've had my share of shady contracts with 10 year long confidentiality agreements. Never again.

Indian farmers have all my sympathy and support.

I use it regularly for both personal and professional use. I now use the pm.me domain for my professional account, since it is easier to share (e.g. phone calls, SMS).

I guess that to the average users, every single incremental step seems innocuous. The complete picture, however, is not foreseeable to them.

If the full scheme of Facebook's business strategy (and other companies' as well, for that matter) were clear enough, a mass exodus would take place.

I'm still hoping a mass exodus takes place some day, or at least, like Roger McNamee has suggested, log and data deletion is enforced in some way.

This has to stop. Even if there is some temporary outrage, these companies remain unaccountable and get away with whatever they want.

From now on, I think I'll stop replying to emails provided by companies whose trust I've long lost and use only Protonmail's encrypted link feature.

I suspect that plastic degrading microbes would result in more CO2 being released into the atmosphere. Unless there is some sort of carbon sink in the process, I believe carbon in plastic form is less damaging than CO2.

Why is the European Commission doing this? When I recognized Carlos Moedas I immediately skipped to what mattered. The reason why he was ever appointed as Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation is, to me, more remote than the black hole about which he knows absolutely nothing.

Some grease nipples on my Kubota are really hard to reach, but other than that most maintenance is pretty straigtforward. At any rate, I'm not expecting to see them last as long as my late grandfathers' Fiat 640, that still works. I'm glad that it is still possible to find spare parts online.

What about Conrad?

Fibromyalgia has been reported to affect twice as much women than men.[1] Now I wonder whether this has to do with pain tolerance during diagnosis or some biological difference affecting epidemiology.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1001%2Fjama.2014.3266

That always seems a good idea for those not living in the interior.

It is an urban myth to imagine one can easily move to the interior and then, by means of instantaneous willpower, cope with the most ruthless solitude. I've heard my share of stories about city people moving to the countryside to start living off their organic orchard. But when we stop dreaming and look around, people who were born there are going away or dying of old age in ever smaller villages. Alentejo still has the highest suicide rate.

I work in Alentejo as a farmer, and I recently moved from Lisbon to Beja. Beja is the capital of Portugal's largest district. Before I came here, I knew beforehand the kind of obstacles my family would face.

Close to where I work, less than 10 miles from Beja, the local school was converted to a multi-purpose building, because there are not enough children living there.

Infrastructure is still bad: on the farm, on windy days I have poor to no reception on the best available operator, and the Internet connection quality drops considerably around 5 pm; power shortages are frequent, which is a major problem for those with irrigation needs; the roads are in miserable condition; fuel is also more expensive; the central hospital still does not have an MRI machine.

And I say this having in mind all of those that, each day, fight for bringing to south Alentejo the investment it desperately needs. I fight for that too. In terms of agriculture there have been major changes, but there is still a lot to do.

Meanwhile, across the country, postal services, banks and public schools are shutting down.

In the past, several ideas have been put forth to combat abandonment, but I don't think any of those ideas are working. The abandonment of old villages is not fought by artificially populating them with people coming from large urban areas. Until proven wrong, I still believe that investment in fundamental infrastructure is what attracts people: energy, water, transportation and communications.

Selling whole villages to the rich as a solution for this problem is a gimmick, and an insult in my opinion.

What strikes me as odd is the objective of making the interface more human-like in some dimensions but less in others. Like you say, no one's talking to a human, but a thing. Users should be aware of that whichever the case.

And I should add that the onus of not perpetuating vicious stereotypes should fall on the shoulders of the users, not the designers. It seems to me that the idea of ever needing a genderless voice assumes that people are the passive victims of some evil ether that permeates their demeanour.

This is not to say that the project is not interesting - trying to capture the essences of human speech is quite a noble endeavour in itself, and it makes us more in touch with who we are.

I vote for Jeeves.

I was expecting something sounding like whispering, or Wookie, or maybe a child. It sounds a lot like a woman to me. Perhaps in the lower frequencies it sounds like an older male teenager.

To be quite frank, I think the goal is quite dehumanizing and I don't see how this helps, really.

If fighting racist stereotypes and prejudice is not achieved by means of avoiding the issue, why would it be any different with gender? Aren't simple respect for the other and fostering a culture of dignity the true goals?

Our brain's lock-in heuristics will always find a way to reinforce contrasts so that we can navigate the social world. If not gender, something else. What is needed is conscientiousness.

MSc in Physics (Plasma Physics diagnostics). I am currently a farmer, but I hope someday I can get back to developing electronics, hopefully something related to farming and/or meteorology.

I also wonder how drugstores manage all the patients' data. For my part, I pay in cash, and never give personally identifiable information unless strictly necessary.

This is really neat. But for me, if typing on a keyboard becomes just as functional as writing, I would still choose paper and pencil for two reasons: no power is required and it effortlessly autosaves.

You're right, I misread that.

I agree this is smart, because it's a win-win for Warren: either the ad remains online and it does its work, or it gets taken down and that's a forced Streisand.

But I don't think this is an overreaction, specially because this isn't solely about Facebook: if Google removed or downgraded search results for Warren - a US senator and presidential candidate - that would be a worldwide scandal.

Antitrust issues have been risen when Amazon promoted some products over others.

The main questions, at least for me, are: what kind of action is acceptable for these companies? Have they grown beyond their own governance?

And this applies to other companies as well. If Twitter were to shut down the POTUS account for violating TOU, people would also wonder the state of limbo of some platforms: should everyone be treated in equal terms? Does it bear some responsibility as an intermediary for public officials? Should it be subject to some standard verification protocol other than the one put in place by its engineers?

It also raises questions for the user cases: should governments and public officials use social media indiscriminately? Traditional media has a certain democratic access to government: should governments give a specific social media platform preferential treatment? Should there be a call for bids when choosing a social media platform over others?

I didn't mean people should pay attention to flat-earthers and such, but that I know people who do actually believe that.

It feels great when I read something that, somehow, I always believed but could not exactly articulate.

I know people that believe that, most of the time, the best way to respond to unreasonable or irrational petitions is to do it by means of answering the actual points made, even if completely unwarranted and time consuming.

For instance, claims of some random paranormal effect should be put to the test with proper scientific investigation, like that would satisfy the claimant and not take us in a never-ending endeavour...

Sometimes, the best way to answer the problem is to make use of well tested heuristics that, instead of going into the specific details, just make the elephant in room more evident: some problems are simply not well put, or some answers miss the point (e.g. the paranormal claim is pseudo-scientific therefore will never accept a negative result, whichever it may be; to feed the troll will not satiate the troll, etc).

That is certainly a part of the problem. It amplifies the apparent relevance of erroneous perspectives and furthers the idea that expertise is at hand's reach for laypeople.

This is exactly the kind of excellent initiative that can save lives and benefit lots of patients, that could also, in principle, be completely obliterated by ISDS rulings.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDS

> The erosion of trust is _because_ of the poor quality of scientific findings produced by Science the institution (particularly in select fields).

So it would seem, if we considered Nutrition Science alone. But that does not explain the process of increasing distrust in vaccination, global warming and climate change, or even evolution, where the scientific practice has a quite solid record and community consensus.

The erosion of authority reaches outside of Science, which to me suggests that there might be a broader explanation beyond the specificities of each field. In my opinion, and like you say, organized religion was one of the first victims of this process in the past and today.

I do believe that many of the findings of nutrition science are half baked, provably contradictory, and ignore a plethora of factors that play a role in the interaction between food and health.

But there's another bazooka in the room: the contemporary erosion of trust in authority, in this case scientific authority. Ionannidis' remarks are for the best, I think, but will add to the confusion of not only what knowledge can the public trust but who is more apt to produce that knowledge.

Before things get better, this will inevitably widen the door not only for old bad science in new clothes, or in the form of professional, corporation funded research that resorts to p-hacking and such methods, but also to the further discredit of science in general in the general population.

Having said this, I do not believe Ioannidis' work (or Ben Goldacre's for that matter) is a tool of such agents.

Edit: After reading some comments in this thread, I have to say in all honesty that I suspect that the ACSH's interest in Ioannidis work is disingenuous, without putting into question the validity of his work.

This article raises a lot of suspicion, and it has many of the hallmarks of bad reporting.

- The Vice piece is shallow and didn't investigate the claims and arguments of the cited article (And what's with the authors photo? Is Zing Tsjeng really serious about this?);

- The author of the paper, Jem Bendell, is not an academic in climate science nor in sustainability, but in "Sustainability Leadership", a field in Management;

- The paper reads like an opinion piece.

- The paper, as provided in the author's website, makes reference to the journal to which it was intended in the past tense, which raises the question of whether it is the original or an edited version;

- Many of the references cited in the paper are from news websites, and only a few are proper scientific articles: I was expecting a lot, lot more;

And the worst red flag of them all:

- After being rejected by a not exactly relevant yet serious journal, the author made it public nonetheless, hinting at some form of censorship of an inconvenient opinion.

But in that case it still looks like an effective way of fighting that business model.

Let's just call it raisinance.