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thundara  ·  2775 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you think of Dr Jill Stein and The Green Party?

    Dr Jill Stein explains how to abolish student debt.

"We bailed out the guys on Wall Street" ... who paid us back. "QE will save us" ... well ...:

    This is wrong. Flat wrong. Quantitative easing was an unconventional monetary policy tool the Federal Reserve used to try and revive the economy after the financial crisis once it had emptied its normal bag of tricks. There have been vigorous debates about whether it was wise, or whether it worked. But it did not involve buying and canceling debt owed by the banks. Quite the opposite—it involved buying and holding onto debts owned by the banks (or other investors, for that matter), such as Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

    This might sound like a small distinction if you're not a monetary policy obsessive. But it's absolutely essential to understanding what the Fed was doing, and the rationale behind it. (Among other things, holding onto the debts, rather than canceling them, was a key part of how the Fed planned to contain inflation down the line.) Stein's description is so far off, it's as if someone asked Stein how to play basketball, and she answered that teams scored points by kicking the ball off the backboard.

I'm not going to pretend I'm an economic expert, but that entire interview seemed like a hand-wavy: "they got their's, why can't we get ours" without much attention to the risks and complications involved in these interventions.

    Europe has always had GM labelling and food didn't get more expensive.

Yeah, because GM food is effectively non-existent in the EU. Estimates that include only the cost of generating labels put the change at $2/year. Estimates that include the cost of restructuring the US's food processing pipeline to track GM crops from start to finish put the change at $800/year.

    Those studies are 90-110 days long. Is that long term?!

The animal studies go up to two years, which is quite long term in the field of toxicology. The trouble with doing multi-year nutritional studies in humans is that it's insanely expensive and challenging to run a controlled trial with a large group of people on that diet for that long. The sane solution is to examine animal and epidemiological data, and use prior knowledge to hone in on diseases or populations you may believe are at risk.

See... (Can't copy-paste, so pages 138, 143, 147, 154)

And on and on... All evidence points to glyphosate / RoundUp being safer than previously used herbicides, and Cry / Bt toxin being safer than other insectides.

    How about the revolving door I mentioned before, that doesn't bother you?

It's not ideal, but you'd be hard pressed to find people knowledgeable enough for those positions who haven't had some involvement with the industry during their career. Have you known anyone to go directly into the FDA right out of college and stay there for the rest of their life?

    How about patenting of living organisms?

RoundUp crop patents started expiring last year. I have no issue with a company patenting a genetically engineered organism or a process to make or use one. Farmers are free to choose what they see as advantageous, and patents open up trade secrets and encourage new developments.

    If you care so much about the farmers why make them buy the seed every year?

We've literally had this exact same conversation before. Check out hybrid vigor if you need a refresher.

    the last 2 decades of GMO consumption does not constitute as proof of their safety

(1) There's no such thing as proof in science, only evidence supporting or rejecting a hypothesis; (2) that's pretty decent evidence supporting their safety when combined with other methodology; (3) the entire point of your link is that GM is a category of technology, and as such each product should be evaluated individually, but in every one of these discussions that we have, you simply argue against GMOs as a whole.

Read up on Bt. Read up on RoundUp. Read up on PPO-less apples and PRSV-resistant papayas. Read up on the farming practices each and encourage and each replace. It might change your perspective. But my mini-essays sure don't feel they're doing anything. So I'm going to stop trying after this.