• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle



  • I like this sentiment, but giving the US intelligence apparatus what amounts to a veto for elected/appointed officials feels like a recipe for disaster.

    The only way I see that being workable is if the clearance grantors are transparently beholden to elected officials or the people directly. Which are essentially what elections and the congressional confirmation process are supposed to be. But both of those processes feel like they’ve been subverted. (Elections by the two-party system and the fact that half the population seems intent on electing a dictator, and the other by the senators/representatives that come out of that electoral system).












  • Seedless grapes already exist, but I suppose you could now insert the gene into other plants/varieties to make those seedless as well.

    I’m thinking more about how big ag companies could use this to prevent farmers from saving seeds/propagating a copyrighted variety (though I don’t know if that’s common with any crops where the seed itself isn’t the end product) or maybe more charitably, preventing their copyrighted plants from cross pollinating neighboring fields of the same species (e.g. ruining that neighbor’s non-gmo status).

    Finally, this could be useful if it can be “switched on” i.e. by deliberately polluting an invasive plant’s gene pool with this gene and then switching it on to stall the invasive’s population growth. But I think most invasives are perennials, so would still need to be removed some other way.