sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
The four leaked ones I was referring to were Gimbal (included in the FOIA release of the briefing), Flir/Tic-tac (included), GoFast (not included) and a fourth one that hasn't been declassified. However checking the Wikipedia page footage of the Pyramid one was actually recorded and leaked by Navy personnel as well, though I think that footage was different from the official footage of the same incident that was later officially released. So it turns out all 3 that are uncensored in that PDF were leaked and then later declassified years later.
My point, even before knowing that all 3 of those were leaked, was that internal pressures like people wanting to declassify the more compelling footage or people outright leaking it makes it pretty difficult for the government to deliberately only declassify unconvincing footage if they have anything dramatically better. So I think the declassified stuff is probably pretty representative, if not the cream of the crop that there was more pressure to declassify and more reason to leak.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
Okay, the images on page 9 of the briefing are from the declassified Tic Tac video, the ones on page 12 are from the declassified Gimbal video, and the one on page 13 is from the declassified Pyramid video released in 2021. So they censored every image that hasn't been specifically declassified and released previously. Note that 4 videos including Gimbal were leaked before being declassified, so it doesn't seem like they're cherrypicking the least convincing videos to release.
If you follow those links there's plausible non-alien explanations for each of those videos. For example, in the Pyramid one (the only one I hadn't seen before), the shapes are because of the bokeh effect on an out-of-focus light combined with the triangular shape of the aperture (which the Navy already knew when they talked about it in the Congressional hearing). However only one of the triangles was an actual plane/drone, the rest were clearly stars belonging to the constellation Sagitta. The flashing of the non-star also matches the timing of a plane's collision lights, and the USS Russell was directly under a flight path at the time. Which seems like a good reminder for anyone who puts a lot of weight on evidence just because the government is taking it seriously. Their job is to fight wars, not figure out all the weird-looking things that might seem alien-like, and classified information is going to be viewed by a lot less people than information released to the public. Naval Intelligence isn't nessesarily going to be very good at things like "checking if the UFO drone swarm happens to be the exact shape of a constellation plus one actual plane".
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
So my question is... why? If they're not hiding anything then why not just let us see for ourselves?
I don't know the specific briefing or photos you're referring to, but I'd assume it's because footage taken by military aircraft/etc. can reveal military capabilities or activity and is thus classified by default. You don't want to give away information about the capabilities of your cameras, for example. Meanwhile the footage which has been declassified is consistent with alternative explanations such as glare from a distant jet.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
instead of leave this funding open
Because most of the time the Disaster Relief Fund doesn't need that much money and Congress can just pass a bill giving them more funding if they actually need it, like they did in 2017 and last month. Would you prefer if they were deliberately given excess money and it was up to FEMA officials to decide how to save or spend it? Because that doesn't seem like a good idea to me. If the Disaster Relief Fund got an extra $20 billion every year they could probably find a way to spend it during mild hurricane seasons to increase preparedness or something, but that doesn't mean that would actually be better than spending the money on some other part of government or lower taxes.
Why did Congress earmark these funds for non-citizen migrants
If you're going to allow non-citizen migrants in the first place, such as allowing refugees under humanitarian justifications, the same humanitarian justification can be used to argue for helping them in other ways so they aren't left homeless on the street. More to the point, this is fundamentally a policy question that doesn't relate to the Disaster Relief Fund any more than any other government program. Regardless of whether it's a good idea to have the Shelter and Services program, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea to provide the Disaster Relief Fund with additional funds on an as-needed basis.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
It was specifically the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund that was down to only $1 billion dollars on hand until they asked Congress for more money and so Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. The FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that, and no amount of money provided to something that isn't to FEMA Disaster Relief is going to overflow and provide money to FEMA Disaster Relief. Both are under FEMA but there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA.
There's "FEMA disaster relief is about to run out of money!" headlines whenever there's a bad hurricane year, because Congress provides it additional funds as needed rather than providing that much funding every year. Here's an article from 2017:
Bloomberg: FEMA Is Almost Out of Money and Hurricane Irma Is Approaching
With Texas still reeling from Hurricane Harvey and another storm barreling toward Florida, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected to run out of money by Friday, according to a Senate aide, putting pressure on Congress to provide more funding this week.
As of 10 a.m. Tuesday morning, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund, which pays for the agency’s disaster response and recovery activity, had just $1.01 billion on hand.
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
It's a basic observation of cause-and-effect: they spent money on illegals and now are out of money for Americans.
But those are separate earmarked categories of funds. The FEMA Disaster Relief Fund was down to $1 billion dollars on hand and moved to "Immediate Needs Funding" until Congress passed a bill providing an additional $20 billion at the end of last month. But the FEMA Shelter and Services program spending money on migrants ($650 million in 2024) was never part of that. Both are under FEMA but my understanding is that there's not some unified pool of FEMA funds, you might as well blame NASA. And obviously "FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund is about to run out of money" stories are generally overblown in the first place, since Congress is going to provide it additional funds as needed.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
You have it almost exactly backwards. The whole point of the "Rationalists should win" blog post you linked is that in some circumstances it can be rational to act in ways that are 100% guaranteed to have worse consequences, such as by cooperating in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma (cooperating has a worse result both if the other prisoner has cooperated and if the other prisoner has defected) or paying in Parfit's Hitchhiker. This is because, while the action itself has purely worse consequences, being the sort of agent who will take that action has good consequences. "Rationalists should win" is not at all "the whole idea behind learning to be rational", it is a contrast with the mainstream view among decision theorists in regards to Newcomb's Problem that one-boxers get better results, and they could easily choose to one-box if they wanted, but that the "rational" course of action is to two-box and then complain that the "irrational" choice was the one that won.
When applied to morality this will most obviously apply to situations where agents have a choice between abiding with a general principle and choosing the action that is better in the moment, where in some circumstances being the sort of agent that will abide by the general principle has good results even if the action itself doesn't. This is more likely to be relevant when the agent is a country, as discussed in my other comment, since countries are worse at deception. And obviously in iterated games, at which point you don't need any exotic decision-theory to justify it. (Of course, another way it relates to morality is that it's probably part of how we evolved moral instincts in the first place.)
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
I think he's talking about stuff like acting in accordance with game-theory precommitments (even without the actual precommitment), which isn't irrational according to LessWrong people (depending on the specific circumstance) but might be called that by some subsets of groups like decision-theorists.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/superrationality
Superrationality is a concept invented by Douglas Hofstadter. He thought that agents should cooperate in Prisoner's Dilemma, but the primary notion of "rationality" which had been deeply developed by economists, decision-theorists, and game-theorists disagreed. Rather than fighting over the definition of rational, Douglas Hofstadter coined the term superrational for the kind of rationality he was interested in.
Eliezer Yudkowsky shared the same core intuition with Douglas Hofstadter, but took the path of trying to reclaim the word rational for what he meant, in Functional Decision Theory. As a result, LessWrong does not consistently use superrational/superrationality.
I think the relevance to morality he's implying is that some moral commitments are to do things that actually just make the world worse for everyone (at least in terms of immediate impact), but that are nonetheless moral. Not because you've abandoned consequentialism, but because being the sort of agent willing to make the world worse for everyone can have better outcomes than not being that sort of agent. E.g. for countries, lets say peace with another country is 0 utils, that country seizing a small amount of your territory without a major war is -1000 utils, and actually having a drawn-out war is -100,000 utils. A shortsighted version of consequentialist morality might say it's better to give up territory in exchange for peace, but if you're the sort of country that would do that it actually greatly increases the risk of war. And it's hard to convince other countries that you're willing to go to war without actually being the sort of country willing to go to war. For one, because foreign relations is an iterated game. For another, because the whole nature of countries makes it very hard for them to be systematically deceptive about something like this, the enemy is listening to your politician's speeches and public debates and potentially even spying on your secret plans. The more reliably they can predict how you'll act, the more the situation potentially resembles Parfit's Hitchhiker or Newcomb's Problem where it can be better to choose the "worse" option because being the sort of agent that will choose that option has better results. Of course it's usually also an iterated decision, making it fully compatible with even causal decision theory.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I don't think that particular case is proof of anything, I would interpret it as Wu being snarky while making a containment thread. I think the intended meaning was "I'm telling GG to restrict personal criticism to this thread without flooding the rest of the forum". And then I think the other accounts that made the same thread after that one was deleted were people trolling, rather than even the original copy being a Wu sockpuppet.
I do think Wu engaged in false-flagging, particularly in the incident I described, but fundamentally it's based on circumstantial evidence. Certainly it's incredibly unlikely that anyone sincerely pro-GG did it, both because GG condemned dox and considered it firmly counterproductive and because nobody cared about Wu. The previous discussion about Wu consisted of a small thread about a fucking Memegenerator template, an amusingly shitty-looking game, and a tweet playing the victim over GG people using the memegenerator template. What's harder to confidently rule out is that it was a third-party troll trying to stir up trouble. But stuff like the fact that Wu was actively reading the 8chan thread at the time and posted about it within minutes, how quickly Wu took advantage to get media attention, and Wu's other lies (like the webcam interview about "I've had to flee my home again due to GG threats" that, based on background details, was conducted from within the home in question) I am inclined to think Wu made the post and the Twitter account, even if I can't be sure. At the end of the day making a 8chan post and a Twitter account is easy and there's every incentive to do it if you want to play the victim.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies.
There wasn't really any investigation or outing needed, Wu was on MSNBC very early on and people watching recognized Wu was transgender immediately. You can actually go back and read an archive of the GG thread at the time:
Damn, Briana's avatar had me fooled.
I would never guessed that she was a transsexual person.
Incidentally while looking up that thread I also found the original /gg/ thread regarding Wu. It shows most of the ultra-compressed process of how Wu became a media-recognized "Gamergate harassment victim", in case you're curious about the details of how that sort of thing went down from the perspective of those involved.
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September 18, Wu creates a "sock puppet" parody pro-GG twitter account named brololz. There is a small KIA thread about it but it doesn't attract much attention.
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October 9th, Wu creates the "Oppressed Gamergater" image macro on MemeGenerator.net and tweets about it. GG notices the image macro and makes a lot of meme/shitpost ones, flooding the memegenerator page in the process.
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October 10th, Wu cherrypicks a few of the more hostile ones (assuming Wu didn't create them) and tweets that "8chan/#gamergate generated 60 pages of this today attacking me. I'm going on a Twitter break until I feel more safe."
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Someone makes the aforementioned /gg/ thread about the above tweet, the first GG thread about Wu other than the KIA thread about brololz. Some people mock the tweet, and someone finds Wu's game Revolution 60 and people mock it as well.
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Someone posts Wu's phone number and address to the /gg/ thread. Every single response condemns it, with most assuming it is a false-flag, especially because of nobody in GG giving a shit about Wu. (It is deleted when a mod comes online 45 minutes later.)
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14 minutes after the post, Wu tweets that "8chan/gamergate just doxxed me".
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7 minutes after that, a new twitter account named chatterwhiteman tweets the same address and begins tweeting threats at Wu.
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45 minutes after chatterwhiteman begins tweeting, Wu posts a screencap of it and tweets "The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women."
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40 minutes later, an article on Gameranx by Ian Miles Cheong reports that "Game Developer Brianna Wu Driven From Home After Death Threats and Doxxing". (This is before Cheong flipped from anti-GG to pro-GG and from left-wing to right-wing.) Other coverage from game journalists follows.
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October 13th, 3 days later, Wu appears on MSNBC to talk about being a gamergate harassment victim.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I haven't been browsing it myself but I know of therpgsite.com.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
You reversed it. First the text goes inside the square brackets, then the link goes inside the round brackets.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
CNN on forensic analysis showing reports from 3 weapons
CBS news on the USSS saying their counter-snipers fired a single shot.
After shootings there's confusion about details like this all the time, including from official sources, it's very weak evidence of anything.
If there was an organized effort involving multiple assassins, let alone any sort of infiltration of the Secret Service, how is Trump alive? It's not that hard to kill people, Crooks came incredibly close, but we're to believe that another assassin who unlike Crooks apparently wasn't immediately shot couldn't manage it? This incident should if anything illustrate that no competent organized force is trying to kill him, because if they did he would be dead. The main thing that protects U.S. presidents and candidates isn't the Secret Service, it's that politicians in democracies are replaceable so neither foreign adversaries nor political opponents have sufficiently strong incentive to risk it.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
It's makeup, and while more associated with old or non-western forms of makeup (often containing lead) a quick search finds some modern eyeliner using it as a label as well. It was one of the few I recognized on the female side when I first saw it (along with taffeta and jacquard) due to its use in fantasy fiction. I think more would recognize it from makeup or the history of makeup rather than from the name of the department store.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Yes
Why would morality track technological development in this way? You could already make an embryo survive by sticking it in a woman, that might even be cheaper than the hypothetical artificial womb even in the future where such technology exists, but for some reason its existence the moral relevancy of embryos?
No. No living organisms of the species homo sapiens were harmed
This is based entirely on the definition of "organism", why would such a distinction have any moral relevance? Both are equally unthinking/unfeeling and both are similarly capable of developing into a human if given extensive support. (And braindead humans are organisms too, are they included?)
species homo sapiens
Why is species what matters? An embryo with a dozen cells has moral relevance in a post-artificial-womb world but a sapient alien or a member of Homo Erectus pleading for his life wouldn't?
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
If baby-killing is based on whether it can be kept alive outside the mother using current technology, does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing? For that matter, would it turn the death of sperm or eggs into baby-killing, since theoretically each sperm can survive if you can stick it into an artificial womb with an egg and have it become a child? Is it baby-killing to shed skin cells if the latest technology can turn them into embryos and then develop them outside a human body?
Liveblog of the podcast with the details from someone skeptical about the allegations (she's only done the part with the first accuser so far):
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808514093323587854.html
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808604076650660238.html
The highlights would be the Whatsapp messages. Like this one after the day when Neil Gaiman allegedly sexually assaulted her on her first day as a nanny:
She sends Neil some what's-app messages about childcare and then adds, "Thank you for a lovely, lovely night. Wow. Kiss."
And this one a few days later after the weekend when he allegedly "anally penetrates her, she says, without asking and without using a condom and she says he uses butter as a lubricant.":
Hello darling. I've had a crazy weekend. To getting bitten by a spider, to ridiculously crazy and rough and kind of amazing sex.
Or these messages to Neil, also from shortly after the alleged anal rape:
Now they're telling us her What's App message the next day: "Do you feel like a rain bath? smiley emoji"
The next day: "I am consumed by thoughts of you, the things you will do to me, I'm so hungry. What a terrible creature you've turned me into. I think you need to give me a huge spanking very soon. I'm fucking desperate for my master." That's from Scarlett to Neil.
If I've got it right, they met on Friday, and she sent that to him on Monday. He says she was into "mild BDSM," I guess describing that kind of message. She says he groomed her (over a weekend?)
Or these after he messaged her about her supposedly telling people he raped her and she planned to MeToo him:
I feel like bawling my eyes out. I would never Me Too you. I don't where that came from, and I have told Amanda that even though it began questionably, eventually it was undoubtedly consensual and I enjoyed it. Heart is pounding too.
Or the general description of the year of messages following her meeting Neil, a relationship that supposedly started with him sexually assaulting her on the first day they met and anally raping her the second day:
The journalists say that the What's App message they have from Scarlett's phone cover her entire relationship with Neil Gaiman and go back and forth for an entire year afterwards. ?!?!!?!
"The messages are friendly, often affectionate or supportive."
Journalist: "It feels like a very different story, not so black and white, like we're viewing the offense from the other end of the telescope." They're presuming there is an offense to view.
Journalist: "It really throws me, because when I read the What's App, Scarlett comes over to me as besotted."
Other journalist: "Messages like these appear to be evidence of consent in black and white."
In summary:
The journalists ask experts "How can we reconcile her What's Apps to Neil Gaiman with her account to us of what happened?" That is not the right question to ask. The right question to ask is, "Is she telling the truth?"
They seem to be working from the assumption that her account is truthful and then trying to justify why the evidence doesn't fit it.
EDIT: Liveblog of episodes 3 and 4:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808683675984302279.html
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808707805915889918.html
They are talking to a woman in Atlanta, in the US. She's the second accuser, they call her K.
The first quote they have from her says "I never wanted any of the stuff he did to me, including the violent stuff, but I did consent to it."
Neil says they had a two-year consensual relationship and exchanged hundreds of emails for years afterwards, and none of the emails indicate a problem.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
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ASML is Dutch, not Chinese. Though I guess if TSMC higher-ups were sufficiently dedicated to protecting the machinery in case of invasion (contrary to their public statements) they might decide to cut them off from the internet before ASML decides to trigger the remote killswitch.
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If a minority of people are capable of doing something, "generally" isn't good enough to ensure it doesn't happen. We're talking equipment so delicate that 1 TSMC employee with physical access could do hundreds of millions of dollars of damages in a matter of seconds, and many billions in a matter of minutes. If one or more employees flip out and the reason the others don't is because of "pragmatism", are they willing to get hit by a fire-extinguisher for the sake of limiting the damage? There's presumably also plenty of stuff they could do more covertly by messing with configurations.
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Even without anyone deciding to do it organically, given the known geopolitical importance the U.S. could easily be paying a couple TSMC employees in case of such an eventuality. Or some random guys who live in the area and have guns stashed away. I remember when the invasion of Ukraine started Russia had people planting devices that shot green lasers at the sky to help with targeting. It doesn't seem like a stretch that even if the U.S. was completely unwilling to confront China openly, it could easily destroy the fabs covertly and blame Taiwanese patriots deciding to do it on their own. The Nord Stream pipelines weren't even being used and they still got sabotaged.
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Even completely intact equipment is reliant on a complicated supply chain scattered across western countries that would be near-impossible to replicate in case of sanctions. The machines themselves and their spare parts from the Netherlands, ultra-pure quartz that is nearly all from Spruce Pine, North Carolina, etc.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Bloomberg: ASML and TSMC Can Disable Chip Machines If China Invades Taiwan
About the size of a city bus, an EUV requires regular servicing and updates. As part of that, the company can remotely force a shut-off which would act as a kill switch, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Veldhoven-based company is the world’s only manufacturer of these machines, which sell for more than €200 million ($217 million) apiece.
It's unclear how irreversably they can remotely disable the machines, but they are by all accounts extremely delicate (as expected for something operating on a nanometer scale) so it's possible they would be difficult or impossible to repair. Spare parts for the machines, like the machines themselves, are only manufactured in the Netherlands.
EUVs require such frequent upkeep that without ASML’s spare parts they quickly stop working, the people said. On-site maintenance of the EUVs poses a challenge because they’re housed in clean rooms that require engineers to wear special suits to avoid contamination.
ASML offers certain customers joint service contracts where they do some of the routine maintenance themselves, allowing clients like TSMC to access their own machines’ system. ASML says it can’t access its customers’ proprietary data.
TSMC Chairman Mark Liu hinted in a September interview with CNN that any invader of Taiwan would find his company’s chipmaking machines out of order.
“Nobody can control TSMC by force,” Liu said. “If there is a military invasion you will render TSMC factory non-operable.”
They would also be trivial to destroy for those on-site of course - I saw a suggestion that spraying them with a powder fire-extinguisher would do it, as would a bit of smashing stuff with a heavy object. Even if Taiwan gives up without a fight, and TSMC doesn't decide to destroy them, and ASML in the Netherlands can't or won't do it remotely, and the U.S. decides not to do it openly, and none of the TSMC employees decide to do it on their own, U.S. intelligence might have at least one TSMC employee ready with a plan on how best to destroy them before fleeing. And even undamaged they require the expertise of TSMC employees who might flee the country, and a whole supply chain reliant on various western countries.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Network effects leading to strong winner-take-all dynamics, same as every other social media site. If you want people to see your video you upload it to Youtube because that's where people are looking, and if you want to watch a video chances are it's on Youtube because that's where people upload videos.
Compare to Amazon Web Services - sure AWS is expensive to run and benefits from economies of scale and so on, but there's still plenty of alternatives, especially if you're just planning to host a website. That's because of the far lesser network effects, users don't need to use a new browser or even a new URL if you switch hosting providers. At no point are they having to choose between the Amazon internet and the DigitalOcean internet, HTTP works the same regardless. In a world where discovering and watching videos was site-agnostic it wouldn't matter (perhaps where the dominant way to watch internet videos was a third-party application or a search engine which searched and suggested videos in the same way that Youtube does via some standardized protocol), but in the real world the network effects for a video site are strong. That's why all the big social media sites offer different things, overcoming network effects requires strong differentiation otherwise you're just like the biggest site in your niche but worse because of less content and less audience. Even on the rare occasion where an incumbent is overcome by a newcomer in the same niche (which was probably easier when the sheer number of users was less) they don't evenly divide the market between them, rather the newcomer reaches a tipping point where it benefits from the network effect instead and takes over, like Reddit and Digg or Facebook and MySpace.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
It's impossible not to Notice that the battlelines between HBD and race denial in the 20th century largely broke between Protestant Darwinists (Madison Grant, E.O Wilson, Charles Murray, Samuel Morton, James Watson, etc.) and Immigrant Jews (Franz Boas, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Eric Turkeimer, etc.).
Steve Sailer literally invented and popularized the term "human biodiversity" in 1999. He wasn't the first to independently invent the term, Jonathan Marks did in 1995 and wrote a book with it in the title, but the current meaning associated with HBD is from Sailer. If you're going to claim he's secretly jewish, that's at least one name for you to add to the pro-HBD side.
Last week, after some token Holocaust worship and virtue signaling against anti-semitism on Twitter
Why doesn't this part contain a link? Is it because it actually refers to Nick Fuentes trying to start some sort of internet slapfight with Steve Sailer and his fans compiling tweets from years ago where he does stuff like mentioning Ashkenazi jews having a higher IQ or incidentally refers to the Holocaust being bad? But you didn't want to talk about your post in the context of the campaign by the Fuentes "groypers", and "isn't it shocking that if you search through Steve Sailer's tweets it turns out he's anti-Hitler" would be a weird thing to post, so you try to present it as if he recently started tweeting about anti-semitism apropos of nothing? This sort of thing, where people summarizing something carefully elide most of the story to fit a pre-selected narrative, is pretty annoying.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
I haven't verified it myself, but looking through the Reddit threads apparently it was the classic loaded survey technique of offering a range of responses and coding all of them except one extreme the same way.
https://old.reddit.com/r/askgaybros/comments/1d47y07/less_than_half_of_amsterdam_youth_accept/
I took the questionnaire from the GGD Amsterdam that was used for this research. Of the 122 questions, exactly one is about this topic. The question is, “What do you think if two girls/females or two boys/men are in love with each other?” The answers are:
- Normal
- A bit weird
- Very weird
- Wrong
They interpreted every single answer that was not "Normal" as a lack of acceptance. Many people chose options 2 and 3, with a minority actually picking "wrong".
It also has whatever ambiguities accompany the words for "normal" and "weird" in Dutch. Now, that doesn't explain the rapid shift on its own but it might help. Maybe young people have recently had less exposure to discourse regarding homosexuality so they don't know that in this case the "correct" answer is that a rare condition is completely normal?
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
The steelman of the Greenpeace argument would be that allowing patent-encumbered GMOs will be a foot in the door for pushing more GMOs on rural farmers which will eventually result with Monsanto owning the small farmers. The situation for GMOs is not unlike the situation for software: expensive to develop, but cheap to copy. As a free-software advocate, I very much would prefer outcomes where the companies who develop the software/GMOs do not end up with a stranglehold on the end users due to copyright or (even worse) patent laws.
GMOs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. or anywhere else I know of. They can be patented, but the length of a patent term in most countries is 20 years. Golden Rice 2 was developed in 2005, so unless there's a newer version that Wikipedia doesn't mention, any possible patents will expire next year at the latest. Also, if a country considered patents a big concern it seems like the solution would be to not respect GMO patents or to specifically ban patented GMOs, rather than not allowing GMOs in general, which would reduce the incentive for companies to develop GMOs but still allow you to free-ride and to use GMOs with expired patents like golden rice will soon be.
sodiummuffin
6mo ago
Yes, I've heard about examples like that as well where the characters aren't even underage and there isn't even any real justification for calling them underage, and obviously they are a particularly telling example of the censor's mindset. (I'm reminded of how Patreon will periodically go after anime-style porn, like this pornographic animation of Hex Maniac, based on criteria that would include anything in an anime art style.) But I wouldn't call those cases the vast majority, a lot of censored visual novels are high-school romances and the like. It's just that standard is unjustifiable as well.
So CEO decisions are so consequential that they can ruin a company worth tens of billions of dollars. That makes it seem very sensible to pay a couple hundred million if it increases the chances those decisions are good. Sometimes CEOs are paid those hundreds of millions and make bad decisions anyway, but generally people believe that being willing to pay more improves those odds, that's why they do it.
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