The Kickstarter Culture Wars

If you want to hear scientists un-affiliated with industry talk about genetic engineering in a thoughtful way, it's happening over at http://www.biofortified.org/

Worst case is probably accidentally creating a GMO plant that does something vary useful and also produces a novel toxin which Bio-accumulates and is not discovered. Under the right circumstances you could probably kill something like 10-100,000 people that way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioaccumulation

Beyond the "the seeds are sterile" and "if our genes wind up in your plants, we sue your hindquarters off" arguments, the worse-case (not necessarily "worst") scenarios I've heard involve things like Bt genes[1] potentially affecting non-pest insects and induced resistance in pest insects.

On the other hand, there's the whole "glow-in-the-dark pets as this month's fashion accessory" bit, but even that is not wildly different than typical pet breeding shenanigans.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_thuringiensis#Use_of_B...

GMO opponents often react reflixively without looking at specifics, but I think their fears are rooted in something real. Setting aside bad behavior from Monsanto specifically (suing farmers, patents, sterile seeds), there is both promise and peril to GMOs, even in the simple act of selective breeding that comprises most of the activity in that space.

My primary concern is the lack of long-term thinking in the drive for high production yield, and accompanying side effects to health and ecosystems. For instance, some claim that the high-yield "dwarf wheat" pioneered in the 60s is responsible for exacerbating gluten sensitivity: http://marksdailyapple.com/the-problems-with-modern-wheat/

There is also an overlapping concern with the broken patent system, and whether it is acceptable to "own" the genetic results of evolution, whether human-guided or otherwise. It's not hard to conceive of some scary slippery slopes there.

Each individual advancement is probably, on average, not a big deal, and probably a win for both providers and consumers. But if you aggregrate the accelerating advances over decades and centuries, I think there are real consequences for human health and the biosphere. I'm not advocating the elimination of GMOs (as if we could), but at minimum they deserve scrutiny, honest labeling, and long-term follow-up studies.

A major complaint about produce from mega farms is that they aren't grown for taste but pest-resistance or size or color. Since humans have tastebuds, taste is a pretty important factor and isn't considered.

So I used to buy tomatoes at the grocery store. They were okay, I guess.

Then I started going to the local farmer's market. During spring and summer, there's a stand from a tomato farm. They have something like two dozen different varieties of heirloom tomatoes. Lots of different colors and sizes, and all of them have wonderfully intense tastes. They don't all taste the same, either. My mouth is a lot happier after eating one of those than a generic tomato from the grocery store. It's the difference between having a hamburger at McDonald's and a nicely-prepared cut of steak.

I'll still buy grocery store tomatoes in the winter, but the place with two dozen varieties of heirloom tomatoes gets my money when they've got tomatoes to sell.

Get yourself to a local farmer's market, find a stand selling lots of varieties of something you like, and do some experimenting. You won't want to go back to industrially-farmed stuff selected for disease resistance any more.

Amazon Payments now works in some countries outside the US. I don't know since when though.

As the article points out, the main driver of all the big kickstarter campaigns is a reward. So in large part this decision prevents GMO work from being funded.

That number is a bit disingenuous, since some of the individual bullet points are pretty catch-all. For instance,

No bath, beauty, and cosmetic products; electronic surveillance equipment; eyewear (sunglasses, prescription glasses, and others); firearms, weapons, knives, weapon accessories, and replicas of weapons; medical, health, safety, and personal care products; or infomercial-type products.

That's a lot of mostly unrelated things.

Ya my girlfriend who is in neuroscience would tell me everyday about dumb people in her lab ruining her gels, which means having to wait hours more for the next one.

She says she's never working in a lab again, even though she was very good at it. Her supervisor/superiors want to take her results. Her peers won't share or collaborate with her. And there are barely any online resources to really optimize/enhance her work and make her life easier.

That's a good point. While the analogy isn't 100% correct, this seems similar to giving DMCA immunity to file sharing sites. They are just the enablers or pass-through agents, not the ones who commit the crimes. I'd be curious to know what laws actually could apply to this situation. Regardless, you can't innovate by not taking risks and having a cover your a attitude. If you don't take the risks, your competitor will, and if those risks pan out for your competitor, you'll go out of business anyway.

Technically still not allowed:

>Projects cannot resell items or offer rewards not produced by the project or its creator

So kill the plant and that's ok, but the living plant isn't?

christ. how many apologies can you make for the company in one thread?

can't you give voodoomagicman a small fraction of the tolerance and respect you seem to have for kickstarter? for kickstarter, doing what they want is "their choice", but for anyone who decides to boycott in response it's "a bit extreme"? in your world do only commercial entities have free will?