primroot

I believe that if there were a way to measure agricultural productivity besides profits, arguing in favor of less environmentally damaging agriculture would be much easier. I had to endure Atrazine polluted tap water (Panama) for my birthday last year for the first time, (officially) due to negligence of a sugarcane producing corporation. Suddenly we are faced with the difficult dilemma of having less gin and sugar or polluting the drinking water of 5% of the country.

I completely agree. My point is that this is part of a bigger pattern of "power dynamics." For example the urban middle class engages in a kind of self-congratulatory mode by observing such rituals as Earth Hour, while at the same time condemning the intransigence of poor communities who refuse to be displaced for the sake of the country, the planet, etc. No one dare even suggest that the economic rewards of cheaper energy be allocated in further promotion of environmental protection measures, or God forbid, compensation for the displaced, instead of fueling an imminent manifestation of Jevons Paradox, which would obliterate the thinly argued benefits of e.g. a hydropower project. As we say in Spanish "la cadena se rompe por el eslabón más débil." [1] The case of environmental problems is filled with nasty expressions of this saying [2]. David Graeber is one who has written about this pattern beyond this case.

[1] The chain breaks on the weakest link.

[2] Take the case of the WWF http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/wwf-helps-industry... . Or this case of a hydropower project in my country Panama https://intercontinentalcry.org/un-registered-barro-blanco-h... which our local breed of "pragmatic environmentalists" dared not to object.

> The damage caused by hydro-electrical plants is always blown out of proportion.

Blanket statement. Which hydro-electrical plant? Very important point. That's a point the "let's reduce carbon emission with hydro-power" camp misses all too often.

> Many times, people wanna save the environment at the cost of the poorest. Not quite, they want to keep/increase "their" wealth at the expense of the poorest. So old story here.

Well everyone has to make sacrifices, some have to visit the mall less often, others have to endure their communities literally sink into oblivion [1]. It's all for the planet, even the methane [2][3].

Of course some dams are not so "good" and some are not so "bad," so you have to be specific. Being able to export electricity (think Plan Puebla Panamá) adds very positively into the math, so all the "indios" and bad environmentalists shut up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Diqu%C3%ADs_Hydroelectric_Pr... [2] http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewa... [3] http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/sdissues/energy/op/hydro_tremb...

EDIT: Just found this in another comment http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/30/truth-b...

Forget about the rights of indigenous people, agricultural productivity, water evaporation, environmental impact, the subsidies, the malls, Jevons paradox, Plan Puebla Panamá, etc. Let's talk about greenhouse gases.

http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/sdissues/energy/op/hydro_tremb...

... or potentially pay for their own negative externalities.

Richard Muller and John Baez? Or is more that one face too many?

What is it that amounts to effective prohibition? I did not find it.

Easy. Just privatize all drinkable water so that people have to buy it. That way drinking water will provide the same economic benefits of drinking soda.

I know it's just utterly besides the point to cite the opinion of the locals regarding a foreign country bombing them in the name of their own country's well-being. Hence I'll choose to cite a Nobel Peace Laureate. "A drone attack may kill two or three terrorists but it will not kill terrorism. If the drones continue terrorism will spread." [1] There you have the better plan.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthasharf/2014/10/21/nobel-p...

Isn't this a sort of generalization of the military-industrial complex?

In practice importing diminishes options, both for the locations that find their market flooded with the standard supermarket-optimized foods, and the for the poor countries that are compelled to make their land produce the "best" for the sake of profits. In the last century 75% of crop diversity was lost, and in the decades after the Green Revolution poor countries became net importers of food. Simplistic logic that looks at effects completely abstracted from the system, would make such outcome look impossible.

I'm not familiar enough with all the arguments and the studies the author cites as to come up with a careful rebuttal of "isn't necessarily better for the environment." I acknowledge the fact that local food consumption cannot scale as it is (or rather as it is in wealthy countries) to the point where it replaces the current system. The reasons are not simply farmers not investing fuel efficiency, or "[not having] the infrastructure in place like the big guys do." There are cultural aspects arising from the current food supply system that need to be overcome. I'm in a country (Panama) where most of the population resides in warm (24-32 C all year) areas. Still, except for grains and fruits, the food consumed by the not so rural population primarily comes from the temperate mountains. Sweet potatoes (widely consumed a couple generations ago) can be easily grown anywhere, they are instead mostly imported and not remotely as common as potatoes. The original article does a good job of emphasizing the cultural aspects of local food consumption. That culture still has to develop to the point where consumers expectations are not constrained by the dominant system. As long as local food has to adapt to those expectations, it will be to a considerable extent just an imitation, and indeed an inefficient one.

"Society should also consider the economic and social costs of local food systems, which could hold back the growth of developing nations." That's a statement I find particularly puzzling, and that shows the article's tendency to base its argument on effects that are not analyzed well enough within the system. The globalized food supply system, has since the Green Revolution, made poor countries become net importers of food. The "successes" have come at great social and environmental costs (ever heard of "Banana Republics").

Regarding your first paragraph, that is as likely to be a justification, as people's concern for nutrition and the environment in food exporting countries. Poor countries' net food consumption has been losing its locality since the Green Revolution. It is not hard to imagine that farmers in such countries would benefit from a (local) move towards eating local.

This may sound somewhat intolerant, but I knew I would not be able to withstand reading an article that starts with a quote of Zizek. He is IMO a very prolific source of BS, and this I say as someone who has a decent amount of respect for the works of Marx. Actually from personal experience, I am very inclined to think that the author fits the stereotype of a hipster, as do some of my friends, for whom I've endured the pain of learning about Lacan. Hipsters fit a very broad classification, but they do seem to have a common sense of discomfort at the thought of being imitated by the wrong crowd.

That description seems very accurate to me. My grandmother (in Panama) raises her own chickens, and I even find the taste of the eggs they produce to be somewhat more intense. The eggs are also slightly smaller so they take less time to cook. I think this could also be due to the breed of the chickens. Incidentally the issue of breeds is one I think is too often overlooked. Here if one wants to raise one's own chickens, one usually buys them from a store no more than two weeks after they're born. It's very apparent that these tend to be of a breed that is more suited for large scale chicken meat production, which means they are more expensive to raise. There's a similar and better documented case http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_pig , which IMO exemplifies one of the many reasons why food diversity is so important.

"In its ruling Monday, the appellate court said the organic growers must rely on Monsanto assurances on the company's website that it will not sue them so long as the mix is very slight."

"In its ruling Monday, the court noted that records indicate a large majority of conventional seed samples have become contaminated by Monsanto's Roundup resistance trait"

Lenin called the new system State Capitalism and talked about "control, supervision, and accounting" as being the solution to the country's problems [1]. Even Marxists warned about the totalitarian nature of Lenin's project. These essays by Chomsky explore the topic: The Soviet Union Versus Socialism [2], Objectivity and Liberal Scholarchip [3]. Chomsky gives Luxembourg and Pannekoek as examples.

[1] http://marxistsfr.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/02.htm...

[2] http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm

[3] http://www.ditext.com/chomsky/1968.html

This post provides relevant background http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/05/a-few-though...

"GSM phones support an 'export weakened' variant called A5/2, which is so weak you can break it in real time."

This book may be a good start http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missionary_Position

Bakunin used the term in "Statism and Anarchy" (a literal translation from Russian). If the left doesn't talk about statism, I think it is a testimony to either their pragmatism or their shortsightedness. If one sees the state as the wielder of the monopoly on "legitimate" violence, then conceding to its existence makes it rational to expect that such violence will be used in the interest of one's self within the vaguely agreed constraints of moral conventions. Thus the poor can expect the taxing of some real estate as a way to keep housing affordable, while the rich can expect the police to keep the homeless off their property. True anarchists see a compromise in both instances, and a form of short-term progress in the first one.

I find the "8000 years" claim in the parent comment to be interesting. My understanding is that it is false, and that metallic money is a way, in which armies impose themselves over populations. This talk by anthropologist David Graeber illustrates my point http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZIINXhGDcs

There are few comments without links that are worth reading. I think this is definitely one of them.

Most interesting paragraph:

"It would include anti-circumvention provisions such as those that make it illegal to break "digital locks" on software, such as jailbreaking mobile phones. It also aims to extend the minimum copyright and patent terms and ensure the adoption of criminal sanctions for copyright infringement that is carried out without commercial motivation."

"In her witness statement submitted to the British court on Friday, Detective Superintendent Caroline Goode, who said she was in charge of Scotland Yard's Snowden-related investigation, said that among materials officials had seized from Miranda while detaining him was an "external hard drive" containing data encrypted by a system called "True Crypt," which Goode said "renders the material extremely difficult to access."

Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data, "of which only 20 have been accessed to date." She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains "approximately 58,000 UK documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level."

Isn't this supposed to be very unlikely to happen when using TrueCrypt? Can someone explain what could have gone wrong in the process of storing this data?