I recently had an experience while doing a simple Google search that was so profoundly weird that it stopped me in my tracks.
Understanding this Google se...
The distinction is that everything you listed is “intellectual property”, aka “thoughts”.
All of those are tools that are used to do the same shit we used to do without those tools, and if it all went away overnight, we could just go back to doing things the older way (the way we used to do things before they homogenized food in order to maximize profits, despite the reduction in nutritional value).
You are operating from the premise that profits are more important than anything else. That is flawed logic, and it’s based entirely on this specific current status quo. Outputs are not equal to profits, some farmers are paid by the government to specifically not grow things.
Your idea that the disappearance of Monsanto would cause widespread famine ignores the fact that none of Monsanto’s knowledge would die with the company. They have records, and there are living humans who know how to do everything on your list.
The existence of a corporation is not what allows agriculture to function. It functioned for thousands of years before Monsanto existed, and has functioned for less than 100 since (1945 is the year they first had anything to do with agriculture)
(the way we used to do things before they homogenized food in order to maximize profits, despite the reduction in nutritional value).
Unfortunately, even though I wholeheartedly agree that the nutritional value of the foods reaching our stores has declined, if you pull all that IP, total nutritional output available to reach the stores in the first place will be significantly reduced, more costly (labor and energy intensive) to produce, and more subject to unpredictable lean years.
Profits be damned, unless you just plan to somehow take over Monsanto’s operations and start giving away their products, farmers will be going back to the things they didn’t choose to use, for significant reasons.
Could we rebuild the corporate operations from the scraps of knowledge scattered outside their control? Sure. Then what would we have? The same corporations with new names.
Maybe think of it this way: Strip mines are evil, nasty, ecologically disasterous exploitations of the land. They have no place in Florida. Except: if we stopped all strip mining in Florida, that would take about 10 million tons of phosphate off the market, annually - roughly 75% of the phosphate used by US farmers. Loss of that fertilizer input would result in approximately 40% reduction in crop yields. Yeah, we’ve got CRP lands where the owners are paid not to farm, but those are generally less productive / fertile lands, difficult or impossible to irrigate, and even if all the CRP lands were put back into production, that might result in a +3% total harvest yield.
Modern science makes a difference, if you want to go back to farming like it’s 1930, look up the dust bowl.
We’ll just nationalize them? Sounds like we need them after all. What’s the difference between the government running Monsanto, or Monsanto running the government like we have today?
To be clear, I’m not saying we need them, I’m saying that if we did need them, we have methods of preserving their machinations without allowing them to have complete regulatory capture.
Also, to your earlier point, you could assume that we need Monsanto now that they play such a large role in the system (I personally disagree, but you can make that argument), there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”, which is essentially your argument. There is nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have, they’re just the only company that’s currently and legally allowed to do so. Other people already know exactly how to do what they do, but they don’t because they can’t legally profit from it.
I can’t believe I’ve let you sidetrack me this far tho, we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks? Because I think it’s more likely that the internet would begin to slowly revert to a “marketplace of ideas”, rather than remaining in it’s current form, a wall of corporate propaganda.
there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”
No, but you need to be clear: is it Monsanto that never existed, or the whole branch of industrial-scientific pursuit they embody, becasue if Monsanto’s tech and similar didn’t exist, we’d have significantly lower crop yields, higher food prices, arguably better food, but if population grew to the same levels we have today, we’d all be eating significantly less food - which, arguably, might not be a bad thing - but at some point it becomes uncomfortable, and without Monsanto-like tech we’d be near or over that uncomfortable line here at 8.3B population and climbing.
which is essentially your argument.
In your head. In my head: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them is flawed. Which slice of the 8.3 billion global population do you wish were never born - can we start with your mom?
nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have
Well, we can start with that uncomfortable subject you brought up of regulatory capture. If not for Monsanto, Bayer AG and others like them operating with their extensive regulatory capture - other players would have a difficult if not impossible time getting permission to market their products, or even develop them at industrial scale. There’s a huge difference between some PhD at a farm-university splicing glow-genes into brussel sprouts and rolling out genetically engineered seed stock at global scale.
When you say: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them, are you actually saying: we’ll just replace them with nearly identical corporations that do nearly identical things? Separating the useful things that the corporations do from the evil isn’t a simple whack with a machete, the two sides are deeply entwined.
we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks?
I don’t think it’s all that different, whether it’s Monsanto or Google, they’ve been an essential part of the last generation, they have significantly shaped the world we live in, whether you think that’s for better or for worse is moot. Chucking them out and starting over without the things that they currently provide is going to do more immediate harm than good. Yeah, they’ve run amok and they need curtailing, but if you gank Google and their products out of existence, lots of people are going to suffer, and not just the ones that work directly for Google or their trading partners.
What’s your “Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them” morning after plan? To build back Google, but this time we really mean they won’t be evil? You got a clever approach that will stop their replacements from becoming as bad or worse than what we’ve already got? U.S. Federal regulations seem like a bad bet lately.
Trev: One day you’re a big old whale, next minute, fun food.
Mumble: Someone’s gotta stop them.
Barry: Oh, yeah? What’s gonna be your approach?
Mumble: If l could just talk to them. Appeal to their better nature.
Barry: Beauty. When that crafty little trick pays off, you be sure to let us know, won’t you?
Well we already waste 1/3rd of all food manufactured, so we could theoretically grow 1/3rd less and still feed everyone the same amount.
You’re explicitly saying that people would need to die in order to get rid of Monsanto, which is just simply not true, and a massive logical leap. I’m not going to play “which people should go” with you, because I don’t accept your premise that anyone would need to go.
I’m not saying to replace them with identical corporations, and I’m not saying that whoever replaces them should operate the exact same way. I’m saying that Monsanto disappearing would not in and of itself prevent anyone from doing the things that they do.
My morning after plan for after Google is gone? I don’t need one, they’re already gone from my life, and have been replaced by better options (mostly FOSS stuff, so no “replacement corporations” like you seem to think would be necessary).
If Google disappeared right now, the only thing that would change for me is I would no longer have to listen to dumbassess tell me what “Google said” and that they themselves now wholly believe and accept about any given topic
You do understand that the internet is just a network of many different computers right? And that one computer can have many different IP addresses?
The Internet is designed to be decentralized, the only reason that it has become so centralized in recent history is because corporations can afford more infrastructure than regular people, allowing them to host a larger portion of the network.
If Google went away, any of those websites that are not actually a part of Google could just go be hosted elsewhere.
Did the phone networks stop working when the government broke up Ma Bell in 1983? Or did shit get way cheaper and better, and evolve into the internet (before devolving into the modern internet)? When did you first have an answering machine? Was it before or after 1983?
Edit to add some thought on the article itself - It’s heavily anecdotal, but an interesting read regardless. The only point she makes that would actually effect me would be the Lyft thing, but I rarely use that application anyway.
They briefly mention Apple Maps, but don’t expand on that later in the article, which would have been warranted. Apple Maps is leagues ahead of Google Maps for navigational purposes. I don’t think it has streetview, but I also don’t care about streetview.
Apple Maps always understands an address I enter correctly (Google Maps does not, sometimes you need to put imaginary spaces in between address characters to make it work eg: “27w 702” instead of “27w702” (the actual address)
Apple Maps can find an address that begins with a 0 (Google cannot do this, sometimes it can’t even do an address that brings with 1, and you have to omit that from the address to make it work eg: “n131” instead of “1n131 (the actual address)
Apple Maps has never taken me to the wrong location (Google Maps had done this to me several times before I deleted it. Often this results in you going to the wrong address on the correct street, and only finding out it changed the address when the occupants answer their door confused.) The last time I tried to use it, I put in an address I know, and it dropped the pin on the opposite side of the city, not even on the same road as I had entered. I zoomed in on the pin, and it wasn’t even somewhere that a building exists, but it was labeled with the address I had entered.
Everyone should stop using Google Maps out of convenience, and switch to a better option. I’ve heard of FOSS maps as well but haven’t tried them out yet.
The search engine I use is already better than Google, it’s like how Google used to be. No ads, no AI, just relevant links. It can show results from Google if I ask it to, but I don’t need it to.
The distinction is that everything you listed is “intellectual property”, aka “thoughts”.
All of those are tools that are used to do the same shit we used to do without those tools, and if it all went away overnight, we could just go back to doing things the older way (the way we used to do things before they homogenized food in order to maximize profits, despite the reduction in nutritional value).
You are operating from the premise that profits are more important than anything else. That is flawed logic, and it’s based entirely on this specific current status quo. Outputs are not equal to profits, some farmers are paid by the government to specifically not grow things.
Your idea that the disappearance of Monsanto would cause widespread famine ignores the fact that none of Monsanto’s knowledge would die with the company. They have records, and there are living humans who know how to do everything on your list.
The existence of a corporation is not what allows agriculture to function. It functioned for thousands of years before Monsanto existed, and has functioned for less than 100 since (1945 is the year they first had anything to do with agriculture)
Unfortunately, even though I wholeheartedly agree that the nutritional value of the foods reaching our stores has declined, if you pull all that IP, total nutritional output available to reach the stores in the first place will be significantly reduced, more costly (labor and energy intensive) to produce, and more subject to unpredictable lean years.
Profits be damned, unless you just plan to somehow take over Monsanto’s operations and start giving away their products, farmers will be going back to the things they didn’t choose to use, for significant reasons.
Could we rebuild the corporate operations from the scraps of knowledge scattered outside their control? Sure. Then what would we have? The same corporations with new names.
Maybe think of it this way: Strip mines are evil, nasty, ecologically disasterous exploitations of the land. They have no place in Florida. Except: if we stopped all strip mining in Florida, that would take about 10 million tons of phosphate off the market, annually - roughly 75% of the phosphate used by US farmers. Loss of that fertilizer input would result in approximately 40% reduction in crop yields. Yeah, we’ve got CRP lands where the owners are paid not to farm, but those are generally less productive / fertile lands, difficult or impossible to irrigate, and even if all the CRP lands were put back into production, that might result in a +3% total harvest yield.
Modern science makes a difference, if you want to go back to farming like it’s 1930, look up the dust bowl.
I mean, in this hypothetical scenario the government could just nationalize Monsanto
We’ll just nationalize them? Sounds like we need them after all. What’s the difference between the government running Monsanto, or Monsanto running the government like we have today?
To be clear, I’m not saying we need them, I’m saying that if we did need them, we have methods of preserving their machinations without allowing them to have complete regulatory capture.
Also, to your earlier point, you could assume that we need Monsanto now that they play such a large role in the system (I personally disagree, but you can make that argument), there is no argument to say “we’d all be dead already if Monsanto never existed”, which is essentially your argument. There is nothing special about Monsanto that gives them abilities others don’t have, they’re just the only company that’s currently and legally allowed to do so. Other people already know exactly how to do what they do, but they don’t because they can’t legally profit from it.
I can’t believe I’ve let you sidetrack me this far tho, we were talking about Google. You think the world would end without those chucklefucks? Because I think it’s more likely that the internet would begin to slowly revert to a “marketplace of ideas”, rather than remaining in it’s current form, a wall of corporate propaganda.
No, but you need to be clear: is it Monsanto that never existed, or the whole branch of industrial-scientific pursuit they embody, becasue if Monsanto’s tech and similar didn’t exist, we’d have significantly lower crop yields, higher food prices, arguably better food, but if population grew to the same levels we have today, we’d all be eating significantly less food - which, arguably, might not be a bad thing - but at some point it becomes uncomfortable, and without Monsanto-like tech we’d be near or over that uncomfortable line here at 8.3B population and climbing.
In your head. In my head: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them is flawed. Which slice of the 8.3 billion global population do you wish were never born - can we start with your mom?
Well, we can start with that uncomfortable subject you brought up of regulatory capture. If not for Monsanto, Bayer AG and others like them operating with their extensive regulatory capture - other players would have a difficult if not impossible time getting permission to market their products, or even develop them at industrial scale. There’s a huge difference between some PhD at a farm-university splicing glow-genes into brussel sprouts and rolling out genetically engineered seed stock at global scale.
When you say: Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them, are you actually saying: we’ll just replace them with nearly identical corporations that do nearly identical things? Separating the useful things that the corporations do from the evil isn’t a simple whack with a machete, the two sides are deeply entwined.
I don’t think it’s all that different, whether it’s Monsanto or Google, they’ve been an essential part of the last generation, they have significantly shaped the world we live in, whether you think that’s for better or for worse is moot. Chucking them out and starting over without the things that they currently provide is going to do more immediate harm than good. Yeah, they’ve run amok and they need curtailing, but if you gank Google and their products out of existence, lots of people are going to suffer, and not just the ones that work directly for Google or their trading partners.
What’s your “Fuck these corporations, we don’t need them” morning after plan? To build back Google, but this time we really mean they won’t be evil? You got a clever approach that will stop their replacements from becoming as bad or worse than what we’ve already got? U.S. Federal regulations seem like a bad bet lately.
Trev: One day you’re a big old whale, next minute, fun food.
Mumble: Someone’s gotta stop them.
Barry: Oh, yeah? What’s gonna be your approach?
Mumble: If l could just talk to them. Appeal to their better nature.
Barry: Beauty. When that crafty little trick pays off, you be sure to let us know, won’t you?
Well we already waste 1/3rd of all food manufactured, so we could theoretically grow 1/3rd less and still feed everyone the same amount.
You’re explicitly saying that people would need to die in order to get rid of Monsanto, which is just simply not true, and a massive logical leap. I’m not going to play “which people should go” with you, because I don’t accept your premise that anyone would need to go.
I’m not saying to replace them with identical corporations, and I’m not saying that whoever replaces them should operate the exact same way. I’m saying that Monsanto disappearing would not in and of itself prevent anyone from doing the things that they do.
My morning after plan for after Google is gone? I don’t need one, they’re already gone from my life, and have been replaced by better options (mostly FOSS stuff, so no “replacement corporations” like you seem to think would be necessary).
If Google disappeared right now, the only thing that would change for me is I would no longer have to listen to dumbassess tell me what “Google said” and that they themselves now wholly believe and accept about any given topic
Good for you, that is what you personally control. It is very different from “ending Google.”
Now, try blocking all Google domains and IP addresses from your routing tables and see how you’re loving life. https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-google-out-of-my-life-it-screwed-up-everything-1830565500
You do understand that the internet is just a network of many different computers right? And that one computer can have many different IP addresses?
The Internet is designed to be decentralized, the only reason that it has become so centralized in recent history is because corporations can afford more infrastructure than regular people, allowing them to host a larger portion of the network.
If Google went away, any of those websites that are not actually a part of Google could just go be hosted elsewhere.
Did the phone networks stop working when the government broke up Ma Bell in 1983? Or did shit get way cheaper and better, and evolve into the internet (before devolving into the modern internet)? When did you first have an answering machine? Was it before or after 1983?
Edit to add some thought on the article itself - It’s heavily anecdotal, but an interesting read regardless. The only point she makes that would actually effect me would be the Lyft thing, but I rarely use that application anyway.
They briefly mention Apple Maps, but don’t expand on that later in the article, which would have been warranted. Apple Maps is leagues ahead of Google Maps for navigational purposes. I don’t think it has streetview, but I also don’t care about streetview.
Everyone should stop using Google Maps out of convenience, and switch to a better option. I’ve heard of FOSS maps as well but haven’t tried them out yet.
The search engine I use is already better than Google, it’s like how Google used to be. No ads, no AI, just relevant links. It can show results from Google if I ask it to, but I don’t need it to.