The only reason Java still exists is because it created a generation of professionals who only know Java, only do Java, and won't learn anything else. That group is still large enough to maintain critical mass and create new greenfield Java projects despite the fact that Java is a shit-poor choice of language for those projects today.

Language-wise C# overtook Java quickly, but SUN was all about openness and about not being big bad Microsoft, and that resonated with the majority of idealistic developers.

Also that whole "Android" thing happened.

Yeah, and Google made their opinion of Java quite clear by adding first-party support for Kotlin.

As for Java being popular because it has mindshare, you are agreeing with my original point. It doesn't continue to exist because it's a good language. It continues to exist because of inertia.

Which is good for Android developers as they crave that syntactic sugar. Unfortunately, businesses have different priorities.

>As for Java being popular because it has mindshare, you are agreeing with my original point. It doesn't continue to exist because it's a good language. It continues to exist because of inertia.

It may not have all of the syntactic sugar that other languages have at the moment, but given its new release cadence its only a matter of time before it reaches feature parity.

Somewhat nicer syntax and some functional features isn’t going to fix the wider problem Microsoft has, which is the reason for .NET core existing, I suppose.

True, .Net Core exists because Microsoft eventually realized its mistake of tieing its programming framework too closely to its operating system. But... that mistake is now in the past, for some years now.

>all the interesting things in cloud happen outside of Redmond.

We're getting a bit off-topic from OP with this, but can you please give an example of some other cloud provider's service for which there is no Azure equivalent?

I'm not referring to Azure feature line items, but rather that in the industry, Microsoft is usually an afterthought.

The innovation happens elsewhere, and then Microsoft has to themselves try and port it to Windows. If you're running on Azure, eventually you're running on Windows (yes yes, it can do Linux VMs).

We did .NET forever, and always had to try and make do with half baked adapters and integrations when wanting to use things like Hadoop or Spark back in the day, not to mention containers took forever to come to Windows.

Got tired of waiting for Microsoft or the community to port things over, just switched to the platforms and languages where this was all native. I'm sure you'll say it's better now, I've been hearing that for quite some time now, but every time I look, it's still confusing, muddled and in beta.

Kubernetes, JVM & Node.js works great for us now, and GCP is absolutely rock solid and performant.

And we don't have to wait for Microsoft to bless us with the only implementation we're ever going to get, the OSS community is much, much, more active outside of the Microsoft bubble.

Our ancestors recognised this a long time ago, and recognised that there's an intrinsic balance between individual freedoms and the degree to which laws are enforced. We are shifting hard and fast to the extreme authoritarian end of that scale.

That's called science fiction. :)

You might be able to punish 100% though.

Of course it is. I could be perfectly normal and ok, you invite me to dinner, we sit down, I don't like the way you prepared the potatoes, take my fork and stab you without any warning at all. Even if you survive a crime has been committed.

... Not everything is an absolute. There is a reason why the court of law was generally depicted as an old ... balance (noun)

http://road.cc/content/news/5046-danish-call-helmet-law-thro...

Forced helmets are a great example of lawmaking being driven by ignorance and opinion rather than facts and stats.

Its like system designers who are afraid to get theire hands "dirty" and base there whole product on interview-questions and available documentation. Also- remember its most important that he/she who designed the rules has no trace of responsibility left.

The problem is, these kind of failure-designers have on paper tryied to make the world better and can shift all blame towards the victims of theire bad solutions.

He/She did not wear the trousers of doom and had a chainsaw accident- insurence claim denied. No wonder policy designers are among the most hated people in the world- but that sort of rightous widespread anger leads to them having even less reality contact and even more reality diverging safety-dance-rules.

So always try to be friendly, no matter how insane, out of this world and damaging the rules coming from bureaucratic centralia are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHdgztQGmmQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBEUYs6I6vU?t=1m29s

There is alternative protection gear by now with better properties (knee/shin guards made from plastic, and plastic guards with passive cooling mechanisms).

TL,DR; Im not generically claiming that protection is the root of all evil. Im claiming that the most used safety gear at the moment is lousy- and that domagtic safety procedures are creating the accidents they prevent. Because people will wear them to exaustion, and then strip them off with no replacement.

Analogy to several existing computer safety solutions intended.

It gets worser still- alot of these laws are used as hooks for a state-driven mafia- aka selling unneeded goods to people who would have never bought them in the first place without the laws.

Take the splitting up of the germans driver licenses for various small scale vehicle classes or various other safety laws, which are basically buisness generation for safety measures and consultant services. There is something particular perverse if police is forced to enact and enforce mafia created laws.

http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1052.html

See: pesticides and bees, fossil fuels and climate change, food packaging plastics and cancer, pain treatment meds and addiction.

The answer in all those cases is the harmful effects eventually became known, but the jury was out long enough for the vested interests to make a ton of profit and cause a ton of damage which they'll never pay for repairing. All made possible with a series of comparatively small investments to buy scientific research to keep the jury out. The Wikipedia section that the parent post links to straight up says that the only research that found no links was sponsored by Monsanto.

Edit: to be really clear, 'jury being out' refers to scientific consensus. We are not talking about issues where public opinion is uncertain despite scientific consensus, such as vaccines+autism. We are talking about issues where scientific evaluation of some phenomenon is actively prolonged or hindered by vested interests to delay regulatory action.

Blind opposition to industrial progress -- which is what you are suggesting -- carried by the rising tide of public opinion will cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid.

EDIT: oh, and there's a National Toxicology Program study -- "cell phones cause cancer" would be the sensationalized headline -- working its way through the bureaucratic pipes at the moment with another round of "review" landing in a few months. Somehow it got through the first draft and review process while completely ignoring the first law of toxicology, so I suspect it will pass the second round as well, and while I trust the official document will contain sufficiently reserved wording the media circus that spins up around it will become a second excellent example of bullshit from the "little guys."

The OP is clearly NOT suggesting "blind opposition" to industrial progress - in fact, what is wanted, is absolutely transparent, non-blinded research.

But, this is not what is on the table. You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts: companies such as Monsanto WANT BLIND FAITH in their products, and work very avidly to ensure that the public - and their representatives - do not get to see all the facts.

So, what exactly is your intention here?

Yes they are.

> "Every time the jury is out on a topic where one side has a vested interest and a billion dollar budget to protect it, you can be reasonably sure what the outcome will be."

OP is literally saying that from the moment the waters become slightly murky you can reasonably assume that the big vested interest is in the wrong. FUD stirring past this threshold is inevitable, so this amounts to blind opposition to >billion dollar vested interests, which are a reasonable proxy for industrial progress.

As for the inevitably of FUD-stirring, I'll again hold up Greenpeace as my example. Monsanto does many evil things, but instead of focusing on those, Greenpeace decided to engage in Fox-news level truth wrangling so that they could milk the juicy "terminator gene" soundbite. They did it again as the Seralini scandal developed -- but since I had my own "ground truth" opinion (which agrees with the scientific consensus supporting retraction) I saw their claims of suppression/censorship in a very different light. From that day forward I stopped assuming good intentions from environmental groups and adopted a "read both sides" policy. It was eye-opening.

> You've skilfully managed to turn the argument away from the facts

Right back atcha.

> So, what exactly is your intention here?

Self-styled environmentalists turned back the clock on clean energy by fifty years when they sank nuclear power. I don't want them to do the same to my food supply, but they're half way there. I don't want them to do the same to my cell phone, but I hear war drums beating in the distance.

This reminds me of the Long Now Foundation [0]. At least there is hope, that there are people aware of the need for long-term sustainable thinking, and are actively promoting it.

"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries." Stewart Brand

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation

What damage will be caused by people using their phones less for fear of getting cancer?

What about GMOs? What is the harm in not using them? The EU has mostly banned them and it doesn't look to be suffering any damage.

[1] See discussion below about relative importance of engineering disease resistant varieties vs fertilizers and pesticides. I only have a vague familiarity with the green revolution and could be mistaken.

This argument is moot, industrialisation saved those lives, not GMO, GMO only provides a 5% increase to crops in the developed world. Tractors, fertilizers and proper agricultural techniques saved the developed world (just like it did in the current developed one) not GMO.

We have the food. It's just "unevenly distributed."

Furthermore, my sense is, the argument for the world needing GMOs is based on the animal protein heavy diet. Such animals are resource / feed intensive. Shift the diet to less meats and more plants and the fact is you feed more.

I'm not here to make a case for zero meat. Only the the pro GMO argument is based on a myth, a myth that I've seen plenty of reasonable people buy into.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution#Environmental...

This includes an ominous note about reliance on non-renewable resources:

Dependence on non-renewable resources

Most high intensity agricultural production is highly reliant on non-renewable resources. Agricultural machinery and transport, as well as the production of pesticides and nitrates all depend on fossil fuels.[73] Moreover, the essential mineral nutrient phosphorus is often a limiting factor in crop cultivation, while phosphorus mines are rapidly being depleted worldwide.[74] The failure to depart from these non-sustainable agricultural production methods could potentially lead to a large scale collapse of the current system of intensive food production within this century.

In other words, the Green Revolution may not be much more sustainable than the Industrial Revolution and may prove to be just as harmful further down the line, exactly because it allowed us to feed an additional 5 billion mouths or so. I guess the argument is that it doesn't really scale that well.

It's not quite that simple—in many places increasing yields means using less land. In particular, leaving marginal land fallow.

But the factors are pretty complicated, in the US especially dominated by policy: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691921...

On the other hand, how much land was exhausted and then left fallow? How much was taken over for other uses (such as urbanization)?

And if we hadn't had yield increases, would we be using more land now? Or just eat less meat?

Edit:

While worldwide agricultural land has increased, in the US it decreased from 63% to 51% of the total 1949-2007 according to this survey, which draws from USDA data:

https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2012/march/data-feature...

https://newfoodeconomy.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodi...

In that 110 years ago was "earlier", that's true. But why not say that, unless the purpose is to mislead?

While GMOs are not harmful and banning them is overall bad, they don't have nearly the same magnitude of impact on agricultural productivity as herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.

You also have things like Golden Rice, which help people who have vitamin A deficiencies and don't have access to vitamin A sources to be able to get vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiencies kill almost a million children under 5 each year especially in South-East Asia. It is only practical to solve this problem through GMOs. (Greenpeace also protested Golden Rice, meaning they protested against programs that can save tens of millions of children. Whether or not you hold that against them is up to you, but if they want to play the "blood on your hands" game I don't see why I shouldn't.)

To be clear; pesticides, herbicides, and fertilisers are very important to agriculture and many more people would be starving without them. But the same is true of GMOs -- they are more than just "not harmful"; they are necessary.

It is a different technique, but the purpose is the same. [1] gives a good overview over why discriminating between the "more natural" genetic modification techniques and the "less natural" ones is not a reasonable middle-ground. Healthy skepticism around particular GMOs (meaning particular plants) is completely fine (and should be encouraged -- like all skepticism), but skepticism around all plants produced by a given group of techniques doesn't make much sense imo.

Regarding proprietary pesticides, there is a legitimate issue there (as there is with the patenting of biotech -- or patents in general) but it has been hijacked by anti-GMO protests making claims that farmers were sued because of cross-contamination from other farms and similarly false statements.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcbTVEr3_X4

As I understand it, a big part of the green revolution, especially initially, was Borlaug developing a strand of wheat that was resistant to many common diseases and had higher yields. This seems born out by a quick skim of his [wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug), although I'm sure nitrogen fertilizer, etc, also played large roles.

I don't have the time to do a deep dive right now, so I've just updated my previous comment to be uncertain.

But my point is actually that modern GMO plants, the Monsanto ones that people are currently freaking out about, don't revolutionize yields. They improve them on the margin, but it's not another green revolution, at least so far.

My understanding is that, at this point in time, the harms are primarily financial. For instance, when the EU imposed a moratorium on GMO crops, the reaction was primarily for countries that, until then, sold GMO crops to EU countries, to complain to the WTO about trade agreement violations- in other words, their financial interests were damaged.

As to issues of food security and feeding the people of developed nations, as I understand it, there is an ongoing debate on whether GMO crops are really needed to achieve this, or whether better management of existing agricultural resources, or better distribution of current food production, can do the job. In other words- GMOs may be beneficial, so not necessary, therefore not using them would not lead to harm.

Note that I work for John Deere. We sell to farmers who are both for and against GMO so I'm not supposed to have a bias, but I still need to make this connection clear.

It has to be said, it has to be acknowledged, the 'progress' of man has come at an extraordinary cost to every other living thing.

People can behave and make drastically different choices based solely on motivation. People will often pick and choose what information they choose to share or choose to hide based largely on the motivations that are driving their project.

Motivation can drastically alter the way an idea is presented to the audience in which it is being presented.

Obviously we would prefer to have one hundred percent accurate information to base all of our decisions on but sadly, we don’t —- considering the motives of those who are selling us whatever they’re selling is wise.

On a less extreme end, companies sure want crops with improved resistance to pathogens and insects for profit reasons, but this is the case where their incentives somewhat align with public good.

Absolutely. I was simply responding to the above poster’s implication that we should never consider motives when someone is selling the entire world a product.

And I agree with you completely that it’s reasonable to expect there was some altruism in producing golden rice. It’s also reasonable to expect companies who have billions of dollars tied up in their patents on the world’s food supply might selectivity choose which information they share in order to make their product appear in the best light possible. In some ways it would be unreasonable to assume they would share their negative info with us, they have an incredible amount to lose if we don’t buy into their products.

And look, I’m certainly not suggesting that GMOs are evil, I am incredibly excited by some of the advancements we’re seeing. I’m just saying there is nothing wrong with considering motives when different data streams seems to be in tension with one another. Simply considering motives as one small piece in the puzzle is rational.

I believe to make informed decisions, we need as much information as possible. And understanding motivations is just more information to help us parse. Again, I’m incredibly pro-gmo, but I’m also willing to consider there may be consequences to some products and some policies - particularly when these policies are mixing intellectual property and patents on something as important as the worlds food supply.

>companies sure want crops with improved resistance to pathogens and insects for profit reasons, but this is the case where their incentives somewhat align with public good //

If we ignore all other aspects of the public good. Yes we want cheaper food, but not at the cost of poisoning of farmworkers or consumers, eutrophication, destruction of bio-diversity, destruction of soil structure that aids long-term fertility and reduces erosion, etc.. These are all externalised [potential] costs.

>It's also entirely reasonable to expect companies to support development and deployment of it because it's profitable for them. //

Every day this becomes less reasonable to me. Why should we allow the financial profit motive of a small number of capitalists be the primary driver as opposed to the general good of the demos; it seems so perverse to reduce the decisions on managing of economic aspects such as food production to "what makes the owners of Monsanto et al. the most money without producing a provable and immediately catastrophic harm". Bof.

A 2011 analysis by Diels et al., reviewed 94 peer-reviewed studies pertaining to GMO safety to assess whether conflicts of interest correlated with outcomes that cast GMOs in a favorable light. They found that financial conflict of interest was not associated with study outcome (p = 0.631) while author affiliation to industry (i.e., a professional conflict of interest) was strongly associated with study outcome (p < 0.001).[129] Of the 94 studies that were analyzed, 52% did not declare funding. 10% of the studies were categorized as "undetermined" with regard to professional conflict of interest. Of the 43 studies with financial or professional conflicts of interest, 28 studies were compositional studies. According to Marc Brazeau, an association between professional conflict of interest and positive study outcomes can be skewed because companies typically contract with independent researchers to perform follow-up studies only after in-house research uncovers favorable results. In-house research that uncovers negative or unfavorable results for a novel GMO is generally not further pursued.[130]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont...

This is one very good reason why the motivation of industry should be examined carefully. If their motivation is profit and they are allowed to optimise for that alone without any oversight or regulation AND on top of that they are the keepers and dispensers of information about their product, what chance does the general public have to make an accurate assessment of their product's safety?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

It's also the region of the world least susceptible to food shortages.

Telcos will earn less money. Phone manufacturers will earn less money.

On the other hand, maybe app creators will finally learn to create apps that work perfectly fine offline (i.e. in the airplane mode).

lower crop yields, more starvation, more malnutrition

I find the argument 'if you don't support the food megacorporation that means you are killing billions of people' to be impossible, disingenuous, evil hyperbole.

To equate GMO tech with the megacorps that profit from them is a strawman argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_maize#Res...

Unlike athermal levels of non-ionizing radiation, bullshit is never truly harmless.

Black and white opposition to everything with cherry-picked arguments is becoming more and more prevalent, and it doesn't help us solve (or even rationally discuss) any problems or even understand them better.

A: The jury is out on [topic].

B: Whenever a jury is out, with one side having massive funding you know what the outcome will be [implying the massively funded camp is wrong and trying to hide it].

C: Here is a counter-example where the side with funding was correct. So maybe your over-generalisation is wrong.

You: You're throwing out a to-quoque fallacy, blind opposition is bad.

GP was opposing blind opposition, and you're arguing that they are blindly opposing skepticism. I'm not sure you read the conversation completely before you replied.

Meanwhile, in reality: the exact opposite

They are compelled to be this because if they don't the next guy will do it and beat them, and there's an ocean of evidence demonstrating that 'good people' will go along with all of it if seeming authority demands it.

History's littered with this. To be like 'oh, but THIS time we have to give the corporation the benefit of all possible doubt, because their PR statement says if you don't then billions of people will die and all will be lost'…?

No way. No way. The fundamental truth of society is that the powerful will take advantage. Acknowledging that goes back to the Magna Carta. This is no time to ditch that and turn over unquestioned power to gods, kings and corporations.

Even in cases where this is possible, like pesticide residue in vegetables, You might have to run the experiments for a large number of samples for some amount of time to get a real picture. Which might be feasible, but way out of the comfort zone of a concerned person, who has a normal life and the associated hassles to deal with...

When scientists have problems figuring out whether or how much something is harmful, it's because it's so harmless it's hard to measure. If e.g. artificial sweeteners caused cancers the way many believe, you'd see people dropping dead left and right, with cancers clearly linkable to the use of sweeteners.

Those studies are obviously important, on a population scale. For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause.

Wait a min. I don't remember smokers dropping dead left and right in all those times when almost everyone smoked..

Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered...

I think these kinds of apologetic behavior is vastly more dangerous than any hindrance to "progress" that might be caused by being more cautious...

>For individuals, obsessing about those things too much puts you in more danger to your health than those things could ever cause...

Not sure. How does producing vegetables myself, or making sure the vegitables I buy are free of residue, or limiting my exposure to air pollution put in me more danger than those things could ever cause...

If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.

[1] http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Thiruvananthapuram/No-en...

Because the effect isn't very much pronounced. It's somewhat in the middle between eating rotten meat and using artificial sweeteners, in the sense that it really does damage health over long periods of time, which will result in worse life quality and quicker death of some fraction of smokers. Accordingly, scientists figured that out relatively quickly.

My whole point is that the difficulty for science to tie a cause to an effect is proportional to how strong impact that cause has. Saying that artificial sweeteners, or glyphosate, are clear carcinogens literally means the effect is strong and pronounced, which directly implies it's easy to find.

> Another one is the effects on lead in automobile fuels. Again people were not dropping dead. Despite the issues about it that we have since discovered

That was more subtle, but again, found relatively quickly.

> If you think pesticide residue cannot do much damage, take a look at Endosulfan tragedy in India.

I'm not saying that. We know Endosulfan is toxic. And it is being banned worldwide; the story you linked is about politics, not science.

Again, my point is only this heuristic: the health danger of a substance in mass use is roughly proportional to how easy it is to verify it. When you get to the point that the only indication of danger is that some mice might have had bad reaction to a substance, except the other studies show they didn't - when you have no sensible mechanism explaining the danger and only weak statistical correlation - at that point, costs of alternatives should outweigh any worry you should have. For example, the alternative to artificial sweetener is sugar, which is known to be much more dangerous to health. The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.

Wait. What? How do you measure "relatively quickly"? As far as I know, we have been using it even after the problems were known.......

>The alternative to roundup is pesticides known to be much more toxic. Etc.

Any source for this claim that there are no, absolutely no safer alternatives? Also, is there any proof that a safer alternative is fundamentally impossible to make? Also, have we thought about using safer alternatives, and the hit in production that it might cause. Can we live with that?

The EU is implementing a total ban on neonicotinoid pesticides by the end of 2018.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agree...

(On the latter two, the studies mostly have the correct outcome. What is difficult is convincing half of the American population that that matters.)

https://www.pinterest.com/braytonpurcell/vintage-asbestos-ad...

This article is worth reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581056/

https://www.mesothelioma.com/blog/authors/staff/smoking-asbe...

Cigarettes come to mind, too.

I agree with 99.9% of what you said, except this bit. I hate to mince words __but it's essential to this tactic__. Simply put:

This is __not__ - and never should be considered - scientific research.

It's fiction.

It's a perversion.

It's the kind of nonsense Orwell warned us about.

There is only one thing more unconscionable: "Real" Science and its ilk remains silent. In addition, certainly, the FDA isn't the only lab capable of making making these test.

But this is contemporary / modern science. Again. Is it any wonder so many have so much doubt?

By my count the section lists 7 studies, 3 show no links and 4 show links.

I'm not sure you notice the grave strangeness of your comment. There's no jury out there on climate change. The basics are pretty clear. I also think the relation of some pesticides and bees dying is hardly controversial (though it gets muddy when you get into the details and ask which pesticides). For plastic packaging and cancer I'm not sure what the evidence says, but I guess it's complicated. I don't think any scientist seriously doubts that pain medication can be addictive (again, details may be more complicated and uncertain).

So you have 3 examples where the science is contrary to the interest of a billion dollar vested interest. What do you make of that?

(Of course having settled science doesn't mean political action follows, which is most evident when it comes to climate change. But that's a different question.)

Especially with climate change, there is no doubt the industry has done all it can to cloud the issue in the past, and still continues it. You could add other things (e.g. smoking) to the list.

Also, Asbestos, DDT, Thalidomide, etc.

I find that in discussions like this people often automatically adopt a defensive stance For Science, Technology and Progress, but they're missing the point that it is not science (i.e. scientists, or the scientific method) that is responsible for disasters like that- it's corporations. And they care not one jot about science, technology or progress, let alone feeding the poor or curing the ailing, or anything humantiarian and compassionate like that. It's the industry that destroys the environment and causes public health disasters, then tries its best to keep it all under wraps while people die.

Bottom line- defending big financial interests is not defending science. It's just defending someone else's money.

Some things we don't know yet. Others have effect sizes so small distinguishing them from zero is a true and deep challenge, even with tremendous study done. Some things actually do have effect sizes of zero, and no amount of evidence will stop people from demanding more study.

often, the real evidence is extremely clear, but there is enough obfuscation created by those with an agenda to make things look inconclusive.

yet another example is polygraph tests and similar more modern devices.

all of the independent evidence says they're trash. but "the jury is still out" because there are a slew of very low quality studies performed by people hired by the companies who make the devices.

anyhow, we've known that monsanto was lying about this for quite some time, and we have also known that they have corrupted the parts of the US government responsible for regulating their behavior for quite some time.

it isn't okay for pesticides to be in our food.

All functioning economies have vested interests in things good and bad. The only thing a vested interest means is that scrutiny is needed on the actions of the vested parties.

You are falsely conflating scientific consensus with public opinion.

Doctors don't make vaccines. Pharmaceutical researchers do. And pharmaceutical manufacturers wouldn't blink twice before selling you drugs that they know are harmful, there's plenty of well covered precedent for that. It's not that the medical field is more or less moral, it's just that in the case of vaccines, they actually perform well with no significant side effects so there's no reason to engage in morally questionable business practices to sell them

I don't believe there is research (at least verified/mainstream) that has determined widespread harmful effects of vaccines. I.e. the risk of issue from vaccines is lower than the risk of disease being caught (sorry don't have exact odds here to verify this). There are also no (that I'm aware of) long term generational studies of the effects of vaccines other than obvious observation that disease incidence has reduced.

Interested does not always have to be financial. It is hard for a community to go back on its beliefs. So in all probability, it is possible that a doctor can ignore the negative effects of a vaccine they are seeing due to this and huge perceived peer pressure in talking against the current medical consensus (Which is, as stupid as it sounds, All vaccines are completely safe)

(as usual, article headline is clickbait, not chosen by writer, please do not judge the content based on the title)

Have you done research on any of these yourself? Also, I don't think you can put all those things in the same basket. For example, the last two. Doing the research on those might require huge resources that are way above the head of a single individual or small organization...

And in similar manner, every such issue might have different aspects that it might be stupid to generalize all of them into one category.

Human beings have a natural tendency to do this, which is why we are so easy to fool. May be, don't try to do that...

Then if it's harming European honeybees, which are livestock as you say, do you not think it might be plausible that native pollinators and others insects might also be affected?

The "livestock" line is just a talking point, and the pesticide industry is pleased as punch every time we repeat it for them.

No one pays for "pollinator services".

I suppose there's a business opportunity for someone to capture all the rainfall, dam the rivers, and sell it back to me as well.

Herbicides and pesticides aren't necessary for agriculture. They are necessary for a very specific type of agriculture that has been lobbied for and subsidized, starting with the Nixon administration's "get big or get out out" message to farmers. It's been successful by metrics like 'food produced per man-hour of human labor', and appears cheap because we are all forced to partially pre-pay under threat of violence (overly dramatic way of saying its subsidized through taxes), and ignoring massive externalities of ecosystem destruction.

Not to move the goalposts, just to share some food for thought. Making a distinction between native and invasive species implies there is some particular snapshot in time when things were "right", when evolution was "done", when new species stopped being introduced into ecosystem by various means and competing with each other.

I think we're concerned with different points. You're saying the pollinator services business is fine and profitable despite the use of insecticides.

I'm saying it's sad that a diverse ecosystem consisting of many pollinators which allowed trees and bushes to bear fruits and berries without paying for a company to truck in a bunch of bees has been replaced by something more profitable, but less resilient and healthy.

In fact:

* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species.

* there is strong evidence that no threat exists to commercial pollinators and that standard bee husbandry practices are working just fine. That evidence includes the price of commercial pollination, which would (obviously) rise if collapsing bee populations were making commercial pollinating hives scarce, but which are in fact possibly not even keeping up with inflation, along with the price of new queens (nuc prices have grown over the last 5 years, or at least seemed to be last time I checked, but beekeping has grown immensely in popularity over the last few years as well --- but queen prices haven't really budged at all; granted: my research method here is "find companies that sell queens, follow their prices on archive.org", so I'm ready to be rebutted).

* the honey bees that tend to dominate this conversation are a non-native invasive species. There's a pretty widespread and well-documented belief that the US "feral" honey bee population was wiped out in (IIRC) the mid-80s --- not by pesticides but by another invasive species, the Varroa mite --- and that subsequent to that event, every honey bee you've seen "in the wild" since then is technically somebody's property. That may be changing? There may now be a significant number of feral colonies? Nobody's crop depends on them.

* the entire reason honey bees exist at all in the US is to support at-scale agriculture. They're livestock.

* it is entirely legitimate to worry about things we're doing to threaten native insect species! My objection to the conversation about native pollinators is twofold. First: I think it's disingenuous to imply that threats to native pollinators are the existential threat to our food supply that people claimed CCD was. Second, and much more importantly: neonicotinoid pesticides are not the major threat to native pollinators; they're just a cosmetically appealing villain we insert into this narrative to reassure ourselves that there's a "big pesticide" bad guy we need to organize against. The reality of species loss in the US is that it's a consequence of habitat loss, which implicates all of us, not just some shadowy faceless corporation.

So the orchards that cultivate a healthy ecosystem through a diversity of species, and care given to soil health, which grow, produce, and sell fruit for only slightly above factory farming rates aren't part of the food supply?

If you only define food supply = factory farming monoculture, then absolutely the "least bad herbicides and pesticides" are the best thing possible.

Eating almost entirely locally costs far less per year than the difference between and entry level vs top of the line laptop. Eating from nearby food producers who take care of the land is not very expensive relative to other luxuries people invest in. Habitat loss may be inevitable, but factory scale, chemical based monoculture does not implicate all of us, and personal action is quite reasonable.

It's probably less effort than changing your diet for other reasons, but people seem to be more motivated to change their diet for body image reasons, or the soylent-esque lifestyle optimization, etc.

It baffles me that more people aren't raging environmentalist lunatics as I am.

FYI if you think this is bullshit, here's a public demonstration of an alternative to factory farming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3riW_yiCN5E There's a free hour long video that's more in depth but I realize even expecting 10 more minutes of anyone's attention is asking a lot.

There are other reasons too (resilience, independence, better economics for small communities) and the common response of "bigger must be better because thats what the free market has produced" is invalid when there has been so much government intervention that has given and continues to give much advantage to the existing system.

So basically I implore you to entertain the idea of restructuring agriculture even though you implied you aren't inclined to :)

What I'm not fine with are people pretending that a bee-pocalypse threatens commercial agriculture as it exists today as a stalking horse argument. I'm not saying that's what you were doing.

I enjoyed the discussion and learned something new about the honey bee.

In fact, what I'm saying is that the bees are pretty much fine, and not an issue at all.

You have stated this opinion many times, I think we are all clear on that.

Do we have more than your authority to go on in evaluating your claim?

I think HN would become a very uninteresting place to debate if every discussion devolved into unsupported arguments from authority, which seems to be the logical fallacy you are relying on in your 'argument.'

How fine is 'pretty much?' How not-fine should we let it get before we show concern?

This seems to be general sentiment in that we are not overly concerned about the impact to wildlife until it becomes 'endangered,' at which point we need to act...

It does take away a bit of the emotional appeal of pristine, natural, innocent public resources that need protection from greedy farmers when the bees are owned by and grown for a different group of greedy farmers instead of being championed by people with purely altruistic motivation. But that they're declining when there are people with expertise and financial incentives trying to make more of them means there's a pretty serious problem.

Second, the number of commercial bee colonies for pollination services is not declining because beekeepers can choose to focus on making more when they need to. A reliably-consistent number of colonies can exist whether 5% die out every year or 50% (although at different cost). Having said that, what IS declining is the annual survival rate of colonies, which is linked to many factors, of which pesticides likely play a part. This is a not-so-subtle difference. Just because it doesn't immediately threaten commercial pollination doesn't mean there is no issue.

If neither commercial pollination nor wild populations are threatened, why is this a top-of-mind issue? My contention: for the same reason glyphosate is. These are cosmetic problems that are easy for us to talk about and assign blame for, without confronting the thorny systemic issues that really implicate out way of live.

† Presumably you either mean invasive feral honey bee colonies, since honey bees don't belong here, or native bee species like the Bombus bees, which aren't exploited at scale in agriculture.

check out this study. Science is a reputable journal. sure, it's just one study. but there are thousands more.

looks like there is ample evidence of bees being harmed by pesticides.

I think robot bees are a more plausible explanation.

Specifically, this is the passage I am referring to in, again, the article you yourself provided as evidence for your claims:

> The price of some of that extra work will get passed on to the consumer. The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006, for instance. And Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, points out that pollination fees -- the amount beekeepers charge to cart their bees around to farms and pollinate fruit and nut trees -- has approximately doubled over the same period.

> "It's not the honey bees that are in danger of going extinct," Kaplan wrote in an email, "it is the beekeepers providing pollination services because of the growing economic and management pressures. The alternative is that pollination contracts per colony have to continue to climb to make it economically sustainable for beekeepers to stay in business and provide pollination to the country’s fruit, vegetable, nut and berry crops." We have also been importing more honey from overseas lately.

The purpose of environmental groups is to protect the environment.

Who would be the most likely to act benevolently?

Are the environmentalists perfect? No. They are human. They make mistakes. Sometimes they do things that are counterproductive or totally ineffective. But their goal is to protect the environment. I'd call that benevolence.

On the whole, it's also far more likely for the environmentalists to get hurt or killed than the other way around. In 2017, four environmentalists were killed every week by the "vested interests". Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/02/almost-f...

To summarize, your argument seems to be something like "Hey, look, the environmentalists are not perfect, we can't trust anyone, so we must stop attacking the polluters, they must be totally innocent!".

And that's just FUD.

I think you're grossly underestimating how spread out truck destinations are. You would have to have a very extensive rail network to get cargo anywhere near all the destinations where it's currently trucked. And if the rail network doesn't fall within X average distance of every destination, the value proposition of this idea rapidly becomes negative.

Mostly, it's because mirrorless lenses were garbage compared to Canon/Nikon until recently. This is the biggest reason. Sony in in particular has been very aggressive in addressing this issue by releasing native lenses which compete with Canon/Nikon in terms of price and performance at the high end. This wasn't an innovation problem, this was just a matter of Sony catching up to the leading players. When they did this, 3rd party players like Tamron and Sigma responded by producing more mirrorless lenses as the market size grew.

Next was brand value and inertia. Despite those, Sony has gone from a prosumer toy to a serious consideration in the pro space over just a few years. I don't think this shift could have happened much sooner.

Finally, and this only applies to Canon, it's the firmware. Through a series of happy accidents, Cannon cameras ended up with a completely open sourced firmware package called Magic Lantern which unlocks functionality not found in any other cameras - functionality that enables some types of photography that simply weren't accessible without 6 figure budgets before. This hasn't happened in the mirrorless space, so there's a segment of Canon users who are ready to make the jump to Sony but are held back by its comparatively limited stock firmware.

Also, there is one limiting factor on mirrorless cameras that takes away their main advantage at the high end. Professional grade lenses are big and heavy, and mirrorless cameras do nothing to remedy that. It's just a physical limitation of optical systems, the performance of the lens is ultimately dictated by the diameter of the elements. So if you're a pro photographer with his 85mm/f1.4 or 70-200/f2.8 lens, the size of that lens isn't going to change, and it completely dominates the size of the camera body. This takes away one of the main advantages of mirrorless technology in the pro space.

In fact, I added a battery grip to my APS-C body for long days shooting with my 400/f4 to add grip surface & balance the weight. I was getting carpel tunnel before I added the grip.

It would be having a perfect recollection of every single moment of your life.

It would be knowing the entire contents of wikipedia off by heart.

It would be understanding and speaking every language on the planet.

It would be looking out the window and seeing exactly where a friend living 1000km is in your field of view.

It would be sharing thoughts and feelings with other people in the literal sense.

It would be the ability to suppress short term urges by being constantly aware of your long term goals and your progress towards them.

It would be the ability to open an enterprise project you're working on, and instantly know the layout of their codebase.

If you're imagining the neural lace interface to be sensory, you're way off the mark. Sensory interconnect is just the beginning. The real revolution is giving your brain a low level IO bus that allows a computer to transparently extend it beyond the physical limits of whatever number of neurons are in your head.

To be fair, pharmacology, in its application to mental issues, is at about the same level, but it is also struggling to demonstrate unambiguous successes. As research tools, these devices are great, but it is premature to suggest that we have a technology that is going to change the way we think.

Minds are things that function in a physical universe. At some point in the future there will be a description of function, followed by a plan for modification or augmentation of existing minds, as well as bottom up design of new minds.

All minds are matter performing some computation. Molecules move around and change in time. In concert with this physical process, subjective experience takes place. There will come a time when physical systems are designed with the goal of creating a particular form of subjective experience.

The point is that you need some way of interfacing. A fast bus doesn't do me any good if I don't have drivers and then interfaces to interact with the thing on the other end of that bus.

I mean, yes, ideally we'd have some kind of thought-based interface... but you've gotta design that, too.

I see no evidence that we're going to get anything like machine consciousness in the near future. Moore's law was going to get it for us, but... that isn't looking so clear anymore. Sure, machines can do more and more tasks that used to be human-only... but there's not a clear path from that to consciousness.

On the other hand, speculative brain surgery is super dangerous, and shouldn't be done to people who are too young to give informed consent.

All that said, I'd personally be willing to take some significant risk myself, if it gave me a credible chance at a useful neural interface. But I'm an adult; I think it would be ridiculously unethical to make that decision for an infant. Even as an adult, I would personally need a lot more education than I currently have to decide what was 'credible' at this point.

How would you record a memory? how would you replay that memory? how would you index the memory?

I mean, sure, the idea is to emulate how the brain works now... but how does the brain work now? I don't think we really have a very clear idea on that level.

I think the short-term idea is to use the extreme adaptability of the human brain to reprogram itself to send and receive data from external machines. There are already prototypes of robotic arms that are not only controlled via a brain interface, but also give sensory feedback via it.

Rather then trying to remember where your keys are you just load the last few snapshots until suddenly it's fresh in your mind that you want to remember where your keys are.

This is a national budget problem. If you're in the tech world long enough, it becomes pretty clear that the only way to get Big funding is through military affiliation.

This puts a huge selective bias on what kind of technology projects actually get big funding, and further it prevents the benefits of those projects from reaching the community for years, because the military overlords demand secrecy sole use of the technology until it gets superceded.

We need to cut a huge chunk out of the military budget and give it directly to the tech sector, so that big innovative projects are actually possible without having to be military.

Lookup "the secret history of silicon valley". There was no tech world in the bay and massive funding for radar research post-WW2 bootstrapped what is now silicon valley.

It's not a national budget problem, it's just the history of why things happened in SV.

That’s why it’s wrong to just compare the absolute amounts invested — it’s when it’s invested.

Bypassing censorship is a criminal activity in a number of countries. Pick censorship or pick an internet with illegal content. You can't have a world with neither.