blockross
That's the first thing I thought about after the initial laugh and I'm surprised it's not talked about more. Not saying it's the main reason but I can't believe it was not mentioned during the decision-making process.
GMO is a very vague term, we can engineer plants to make them toxic in which case no, eating GMO would not be OK. We are also most probably able to engineer interesting new kinds of crop that would have a very positive impact on humanity and our natural resource consumption.
There are several issues here that are not addressed by these Nobel Laureates which makes their letter dangerous and irresponsible:
- as of now, Monsanto and co. are engineering their seeds so that it's impossible to keep part of the harvest and use it to grow the next one (as peoples have done for thousands of years), essentially forcing farmers to come back next year and buy new seeds. This is a very efficient way to keep farmers poor and under control. It is also very unethical, but of course the optimal choice economically speaking...
- Monsanto is also engineering seeds to resist RoundUp in order to shove said RoundUp down the throats of farmers. At this point I don't think I need to debate the negative impact of roundup on human beings and nature, it's known well enough. The main point though is that it's important to remember that the goal of these companies is to maximize profit, not benefit the world. Pushing RoundUp like this is a good example: there is no incentive for them to improve the resistance of seeds to diseases as it would bring down sales of their main product.
- GMO is not all good or all bad, but it is complex and a powerful tool, thus requiring caution and thorough TESTING. Testing that GMO lobbies are not exactly diligent to run.
- Speaking of lobbying, most of the problems mentioned in this thread could be solved with a better regulation as they're due to bad actors. they're not intrinsic to GMO. But Monsanto being a very powerful lobby, I'm personally not too confident about the outcome.
Clinton: http://time.com/4150694/hillary-clinton-calls-for-more-surve...
Trump (not that it's really necessary): http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/26167...
Sourcing every component for a manufacturing company's supply chain in a responsible way is hard. Especially because tracking these components is made hard by shady providers who know or - for those higher in the chain - suspect that the components they provide are produced/extracted by children and/or exploited workers. But it's basically a "don't ask don't tell" situation where investigating what happens further down the chain can only cost you money or stir up shit, so as long as consumers don't complain there's no business incentive to do that.
Obviously Apple is not the only company involved in this, but contrarily to their claim they don't lead the industry at all on this matter. If we had to elect a leader I'd argue it would rather be Intel, see this entry from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874850
Also closing 5 panels before opening a new one feels like a huge waste of time.