Same! Mine’s smart, entertaining, manages my social life, probably contributes more to society than I ever will and on top of that, for reasons that still escape explanation, actually wants to have sex with me which is probably the only reason I never turned into an incel. She is easily the best thing in this house, myself included.

If we’re talking strictly flavor, I guess I prefer pizza hut. Almost never order them though because if I’m looking for that style, Domino’s is noticably cheaper for pretty similar quality. If I’m in the mood to spend money on a good pizza, I’m going to a local place so pizza hut is just at a quality/price intersection that I don’t find myself looking for.

Right? The town I live in has a couple pretty good (for the area anyway) places that seem like they struggle. Meanwhile, everyone here raves about another local chain that makes what is IMHO easily the worst pizza in the city. Maybe even the state. That’s even counting the chains.

I used to be a believer that pizza is like sex, even when it’s bad it’s still good but, this place proved me wrong. Soggy crust, unseasoned toppings and, way too many of them (hence the soggy ass crust).

So, I work in a maintenance position that really isn’t possible to do remotely but we have a fair amount of desk work too. We’re in the process of setting up a workstation to program and new head ends for our systems. The first thing on everyone’s list when we were deciding on a location was “as far from everyone else as possible” because we all know that other people being around to make small talk is a distraction that will easily double the time it takes to get this shit done.

In every maintenance position I’ve had, every one of us has had our own secret workspaces where most other guys didn’t know to look for us just so that we could get some desk work done in peace. Co-workers are a distraction more often than they are a help and I think we’ve all known this for years.

The thing is, you don’t even need to manufacture a good story. You could tell the true story of how companies have slashed overhead by reducing the amount of office space needed or how employees working from home turn out to be just as if not more productive than those working in the offices and happier with their jobs besides.

There were companies planning to move more jobs to work from home even before the pandemic because it’s a model that just makes more sense for a lot of positions. The return to office crowd could be beaten simply by pointing out the for most positions, working on-site is a needless expense. The problem is, the media isn’t willing to tell that story.

So, while in think there are certainly fair criticisms to be made of allowing patents on plants, the paper you linked is kind of just low quality fear mongering. It’s heavy one scare tactics and light on facts. I wouldn’t let anything in this paper keep you up at night without verifying it through a more reputable source.

To try to answer your questions though;

1. I really don’t understand why you think it wouldn’t be. There are some sources recommending that boliological waste made up of the GMOs themselves be sterilized before leaving lab conditions but if you eat a GMO and it passes through your digestive track there will be few if any living GMO cells remaining. Particularly in the case of peppers, mammals’ digestive tracts will destroy pepper seeds. That’s why they’re spicy, it’s ironically a defense mechanism to keep us mammals from eating them.

2. At any rate, 1is kind of a moot point because the paper you linked clearly states that wild peppers were cross bred with commercial peppers. That’s very traditional plant breeding, no mention of GMOs. Given the blatant fear mongering in the rest of the paper, I’d be floored if they missed a chance to scare people about GMOs in these peppers. So unless the peppers you’re asking about are different from the ones in the paper, I’d say they’re definitely not GMOs. Also, I don’t believe there are any GMO peppers on the market at present.

3. The short version is this. A company, let’s say Pioneer seed, patents a breed of corn that has, let’s say increased stalk strength for windstorm prone areas. A farmer buys and plants those seeds, sells the resulting crop. The only difference from heirloom seeds is that the farmer is legally prohibited from using that crop as seed corn and selling that crop.

4. So in principle, there isn’t really an impact on society from patented seeds. In practice, some of the patent holders have been overly aggressive with there enforcement. IMHO, this is a patent enforcement issue not an issue with the parents themselves. I don’t know about Europe but I know that here in the US there is a problem with dubious patents being approved and enforced but again, that’s patents as a whole not just seed patents. At this point I’d be more worried about what happens without seed patents. Nobody is going develop seeds except universitys which (at least here in the US) are criminally underfunded. Effectively, our crop technology would stagnant without serious increases in public University funding which I’m a huge supporter of but sadly, can’t imagine happening in my lifetime.

I hope I’m not coming off as an asshole here. Just trying to answer your questions honestly.

If your business relies of billions in VC money every year to stay afloat, then you don’t have a sustainable business and probably shouldn’t keep doing what you’re doing.

This right here. We need to see unprofitable “disruptors” close before they wreck existing systems and drive up the cost of living and/or drive down the quality of life for everyone. How many previously profitable businesses who provided decent jobs closed because they couldn’t complete with Amazon while Amazon wasn’t even technically making a profit? How much of the current housing crisis is driven by AirBNB and such? They drove up housing prices in the name of cheap weekend rentals and now the weekend rentals aren’t even cheap anymore.

There used to be lots of delivery models that were profitable while paying people fairly. Door dash and others just convinced us all to cut each other’s throats for a brief window of savings.

Ooof. Current job has a big problem with that.

I’m in facilities for a company with 2 dozen buildings. We’re big enough that we have a drafting department who needs to sign off on all of our drawings and documentation. For reasons that are always changing, they never want to convert the contractors’ schematics for remodels into something that can be shared. If we’re lucky, the contractors are willing to share prints with us directly more offen, we just have to hope the labels are still there when it breaks and/or ring out individual wires. Huge waste of man hours on our end but every time we suggest fixing it, the drafting department insists that it can’t be done for whatever reason. Our department has offered to handle these schematics several times but, “that’s not in our scope”.

They will switch jobs before things come crashing down. All they want to show is a slight uptick in sales or revenue to take credit.

I used to work in field service for a machine tool company. One of the machine brands I serviced had a couple years in the late nineties that hated to work on. The machines were always cheap but those years were egregious. Corners cut everywhere and the original parts were so shitty we’d usually have to retrofit shit from a different year. Eventually bumped into a guy who’d worked on them at the time who explained the history. The owners of the company at the time were about to sell out to another manufacturer and they wanted to jack up the profits before the sale so they cut every corner they that they didn’t think would be noticable before the sale.

The brand stayed afloat for another ten years but everyone I know who was in the industry at the time said their was never any coming back from the damage two years of shit machines did to their image.

Worst part about was, because the machines didn’t start having issues until after the company sold, the new owners got all the blame and got stuck with bill for all the warranty work. Literally no incentive for anyone else to not do exactly the same as the original owners.

Yeah, I was a field service tech at a machine tool distributor for 15 years. One day about 7 years ago I realized that more of our customers than not were involved in some kind of arms manufacturing. Everything from components to military armaments to places making parts for AR-15s. Didn’t start that way but the business drifted into that market over time.

I decided to move on and it took me all of 5 years to find a position that; a) I was qualified for, b) paid enough that I wouldn’t lose my house and, c) was relatively safe from drifting into the customer base as the last company.

I don’t even have kids and this whole process was absolutely terrifying. I can easily see how someone with a family to support or less stability in their life wouldn’t feel like leaving was a possibility.

Last month I picked up a grab bag at a used bookstore store in my old home town. I plan to grab one at random until I get through them all. So I don’t know what I’m reading this month but I know it’s something from this bag.

I’ve finished “Dance if the Hag” and “Pennterra” so far. Just started “northern stars” today.