My Energy Is Alternative

[General Patton]

http://scc.lexum.org/decisia-scc-csc/sc ... 7/index.do

Monsanto Canada Inc. v. Schmeiser
...
Schmeiser never purchased Roundup Ready Canola nor did he obtain a licence to plant it. Yet, in 1998, tests revealed that 95 to 98 percent of his 1,000 acres of canola crop was made up of Roundup Ready plants. The origin of the plants is unclear. They may have been derived from Roundup Ready seed that blew onto or near Schmeiser’s land, and was then collected from plants that survived after Schmeiser sprayed Roundup herbicide around the power poles and in the ditches along the roadway bordering four of his fields. The fact that these plants survived the spraying indicated that they contained the patented gene and cell. The trial judge found that “none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality” ultimately present in Schmeiser’s crop ((2001), 202 F.T.R. 78, at para. 118).
...
59 The trial judge’s findings of fact are based, essentially, on the following uncontested history.



60 Mr. Schmeiser is a conventional, non-organic farmer. For years, he had a practice of saving and developing his own seed. The seed which is the subject of Monsanto’s complaint can be traced to a 370-acre field, called field number 1, on which Mr. Schmeiser grew canola in 1996. In 1996 five other canola growers in Mr. Schmeiser’s area planted Roundup Ready Canola.



61 In the spring of 1997, Mr. Schmeiser planted the seeds saved on field number 1. The crop grew. He sprayed a three-acre patch near the road with Roundup and found that approximately 60 percent of the plants survived. This indicates that the plants contained Monsanto’s patented gene and cell.



62 In the fall of 1997, Mr. Schmeiser harvested the Roundup Ready Canola from the three-acre patch he had sprayed with Roundup. He did not sell it. He instead kept it separate, and stored it over the winter in the back of a pick-up truck covered with a tarp.
63 A Monsanto investigator took samples of canola from the public road allowances bordering on two of Mr. Schmeiser’s fields in 1997, all of which were confirmed to contain Roundup Ready Canola. In March 1998, Monsanto visited Mr. Schmeiser and put him on notice of its belief that he had grown Roundup Ready Canola without a licence. Mr. Schmeiser nevertheless took the harvest he had saved in the pick-up truck to a seed treatment plant and had it treated for use as seed. Once treated, it could be put to no other use. Mr. Schmeiser planted the treated seed in nine fields, covering approximately 1,000 acres in all.



64 Numerous samples were taken, some under court order and some not, from the canola plants grown from this seed. Moreover, the seed treatment plant, unbeknownst to Mr. Schmeiser, kept some of the seed he had brought there for treatment in the spring of 1998, and turned it over to Monsanto. A series of independent tests by different experts confirmed that the canola Mr. Schmeiser planted and grew in 1998 was 95 to 98 percent Roundup resistant. Only a grow-out test by Mr. Schmeiser in his yard in 1999 and by Mr. Freisen on samples supplied by Mr. Schmeiser did not support this result.



65 Dr. Downey testified that the high rate of post-Roundup spraying survival in the 1997 samples was “consistent only with the presence in field number 2 of canola grown from commercial Roundup tolerant seed” (trial judgment, at para. 112). According to Dr. Dixon, responsible for the testing by Monsanto US at St. Louis, the “defendants’ samples contain[ed] the DNA sequences claimed in claims 1, 2, 5, and 6 of the patent and the plant cell claimed in claims 22, 23, 27, 28 and 45 of the patent” (trial judgment, at para. 113). As the trial judge noted, this opinion was uncontested.

Monsanto v. Bowman
http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/sto ... 0-1068.pdf
In 1999, Bowman also purchased commodity seed from a local grain elevator, Huey Soil Service, for a late-season planting, or “second-crop.” Because Bowman considered the second-crop to be a riskier planting, he purchased the commodity seed to avoid paying the signifi-cantly higher price for Pioneer’s Roundup Ready® seed. That same year, Bowman applied glyphosate-based herbicide to the fields in which he had planted the com-modity seeds to control weeds and to determine whether the plants would exhibit glyphosate resistance. He con-firmed that many of the plants were, indeed, resistant. In each subsequent year, from 2000 through 2007, Bowman treated his second-crop with glyphosate-based herbicide. Unlike his first-crop, Bowman saved the seed harvested from his second-crop for replanting additional second-crops in later years. He also supplemented his second-crop planting supply with periodic additional purchases of commodity seed from the grain elevator. Bowman did not attempt to hide his activities, and he candidly explained his practices with respect to his second-crop soybeans in various correspondence with Monsanto’s representatives.

So in both of those cases the farmers knew they were planting Monsanto seeds, otherwise they wouldn't be using the herbicide on them. A simpler situation than I had expected.

Anyway, Monsanto's patent on the RR1 will expire in 2014, Monsanto is preparing a new and improved version. Patents take 20 years to expire, so that is an extremely long time considering how much progress and variation can occur over 20 years. If we can lower the price of approving new GMOs without compromising safety we'll see a lot more variation.

Meh.

One of the failings of capitalism is that it assumes value creators will be able to find ways of capturing their value, and that anyone who is capturing value is capturing value that "belongs to them". It also assumes that value creators care about capturing that value.

[JackRiddler]

I don't think that's simple at all. There's no indication, at least in what you're quoting, that the farmers bought, stole or otherwise acquired "Monsanto seeds" that they then replanted without authorization (speaking for the moment as if this is a legitimate business model for Monsanto and worthy of legal protection). It sounds more like the farmers' fields were pollinated with "Monsanto" genes from neighboring fields, without any action by them. Whether or not they figured this out and then used Roundup on their fields is not relevant. Relevant is only whether they ever decided to have "Monsanto seeds."

Some general points:

1) Again, I don't want to debate GMO as a technology for good or bad with you. Always primary and central in my view is a) that this technology is coming out of a system that already produces food in vast abundance, even enough to support the ethanol car-fuel scam on an epic scale; and to feed grain rather than grass to livestock in producing more daily meat for hundreds of millions; and yet sees starvations in many regions of the world, mainly for economic and political reasons inherent to the system. This is systemic in the political economy and there is no reason to expect a change because of a new technology. And b) that this technology, contrary to the idea that it brings further abundance and prosperity for more people than before, is in practice used so far as the pretext for claiming ownership of biological species down to the genes - so that historically recent megacorps assert some kind of natural right to extract annual rentier income from farmers and the practice of keeping seeds and replanting them, as farmers have done since the beginnings of agriculture, is criminalized if tribute is not paid to those claiming the ownership. And this even when we're talking about subsistence-level peasants: Fuck'em, let'em die, Monsanto's bottom line counts, our lives do not.

2) I don't necessarily want to debate the good or bad of any given technology with you (although sooner or later we're going to have it out on the nuclear question). I think the questions of politics, system and power distribution (even as systems may develop and evolve into new configurations) remain inescapable and usually primary, and I don't see you taking these on as though they mattered very much. Who decides and for what reason? What are the consequences and what is the "collateral damage"? An analogy: I love railways. I'm all for building them. That does not, however, render irrelevant (or less than primary) issues of whether the building of the railways entails (or is said to must entail) an extermination policy on the Indians; whether it means the expropriation and impoverishment of small landholders and the hyper-exploitation of slaves, or wage slaves; or whether it leads to the creation of private monopolies and the rise of billionaires who then use their high-leverage position, money and power to set up rentier income situations, gobble up more resources and income streams, and, most importantly, capture the government and the politicians and bend policy to their will - also including policy not directly related to the railroads. As all informed people should know, the Luddites didn't break machines because they were anti-technology; by the best accounts available they were pro-technology. Rather, they fought against being forced to lose their own humanity to the needs of the machinery as defined by the owners, for the owners' profits.

3) Peter Thiel is a very smart man and a fascinating analyst to read who as a person nevertheless has some dirty history (see Team Themis involvement, and no doubt some mostly hidden CIA rat's tail) and a very self-serving ideological mission, at least as far as his interventions in present politics are concerned. As for his vision of a longer term and very long term future of the world, he is among those in a new tradition (which is usefully called transhumanist, though transhumanism in the broadest sense is not of a monolith and includes different and contradictory currents) that has already decided, on behalf of everyone, that the self-sovereignty of humans, or of some humans among the rest, as piss-poor as it has been historically, will inevitably one day be replaced by the sovereignty of human-created but autonomous AI machines whose form and personalities we cannot yet even imagine but who will at some as-yet unguessable point become incomprehensibly more intelligent and powerful than we, and who will either supplant us altogether or otherwise run our show for us; possibly to our benefit, possibly not, this will be in the stars, so to speak, and no longer for us to determine. I care to question the inevitability of this scenario and certainly its desirability from a human perspective, as well as the legitimacy to decide of those who have already determined that they have decided on it (or divined its inevitability), such as Thiel, Daniel Hillis, Dennett, et al. On this question I may well be among the future Luddites.

More) Coming shortly?

[General Patton]

It was the farmers saving and replanting the seeds after tests indicated that they were using round-up ready seeds that started this. The Schmeiser case had a concentration of 95-98% round-up ready seeds for the 1998 harvest. In the Bowman case, somehow the Monsanto seeds had gotten mixed into a commodity grain seed elevator. He discovered their resistance and then saved and replanted the seeds while buying more seeds from the elevator for 7 years, while maintaining communication with Monsanto about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_C ... _Schmeiser
The case drew worldwide attention and is widely misunderstood to concern what happens when farmers' fields are accidentally contaminated with patented seed. However by the time the case went to trial, all claims had been dropped that related to patented seed in the field that was contaminated in 1997; the court only considered the GM canola in Schmeiser's 1998 fields, which Schmeiser had intentionally concentrated and planted from his 1997 harvest. Regarding his 1998 crop, Schmeiser did not put forward any defence of accidental contamination

http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/sto ... 0-1068.pdf
Bowman argues that Monsanto cannot recover pre-Complaint damages because it did not provide actual notice and did not mark or require growers to mark second-generation seeds in compliance with 35 U.S.C. § 287(a).
...
This court holds that Bowman did not waive his lack of notice argument under § 287(a) because he argued before the district court that Monsanto failed to put any growers or grain elevators on notice of its patent rights with respect to commodity grain. For example, Bowman argued that “Monsanto did not take the necessary steps to keep their patented grain from being mixed with non-patented grain at the grain elevators.” Def.’s Resp. to Pls.’ Mot. Summ. J. at 2, Bowman, No. 07-cv-0283 (Nov. 18, 2008), ECF No. 73. He contended that “if Monsanto is going to complain about farmers using the age old prac-tice of buying commodity grain for seed; they could have . . . had their Technology Agreements require farmers to sell their patented grain to pre-approved grain dealers who would keep Monsanto’s patented traits separate . . . .” Id. at 3. While Bowman did not cite § 287(a) as the legal basis for this “lack of notice” contention, this court holds that, as a pro se litigant, he alleged facts and proffered argument sufficient to preserve the issue for appeal.

[JackRiddler]

It was the farmers saving and replanting the seeds after tests indicated that they were using round-up ready seeds that started this. The Schmeiser case had a concentration of 95-98% round-up ready seeds for the 1998 harvest. In the Bowman case, somehow the Monsanto seeds had gotten mixed into a commodity grain seed elevator. He discovered their resistance and then saved and replanted the seeds while buying more seeds from the elevator for 7 years, while maintaining communication with Monsanto about it.

Again, evading a more relevant question: Did they ever choose to have "Monsanto" seeds in their possession before these inadvertantly came into their possession? It appears not:

However by the time the case went to trial, all claims had been dropped that related to patented seed in the field that was contaminated in 1997; the court only considered the GM canola in Schmeiser's 1998 fields, which Schmeiser had intentionally concentrated and planted from his 1997 harvest. Regarding his 1998 crop, Schmeiser did not put forward any defence of accidental contamination

Sounds like a bad move to drop the claims related to the contamination of 1997; or one forced by the course of the case and its rulings. If someone painted his fence without asking him and he decided to keep the color, they could not claim they were owed for the paint job - in perpetuity - or that they owned the pickets, if he decided to use them in an artwork.

More fundamentally, the court may not but I do contest the far-ranging and for thousands of years nearly completely unprecedented property rights* and rights to rentier income claimed by Monsanto on the basis of their having manipulated the genetic make-up of a biological organism through the rearrangement of existing biological genetic elements. (A variant, as you argue above, of traditional breeding practices.)

And what of the more general questions of sovereignty and power?

* Hedged b/c dunno if French vinyards ever prompted an invasion to burn vines lifted from Champagne, or some such.

.

[General Patton]

Some general points:

1) Again, I don't want to debate GMO as a technology for good or bad with you. Always primary and central in my view is a) that this technology is coming out of a system that already produces food in vast abundance, even enough to support the ethanol car-fuel scam on an epic scale; and yet sees starvations in many regions of the world, mainly for economic and political reasons inherent to the system. There is no reason to expect a change in that because of a new technology. And b) that this technology, contrary to the idea that it brings further abundance and prosperity for more people than before, is in practice used so far as the pretext for claiming ownership of biological species down to the genes - so that historically recent megacorps assert some kind of natural right to extract annual rentier income from farmers who, by keeping seeds and replanting them, are acting as farmers have acted since the beginnings of agriculture. And this even if they're subsistence-level peasants: fuck'em, let'em die, Monsanto's bottom line counts, our lives do not.

We can write off maybe 1/7 of the world's populations poverty to roads, if you'll allow me to be lazy and take the Matternet claim at face value.

Regardless of how farmers have acted since the beginnings of agriculture, times are changing. Machines are moving in and automating or at least decreasing the labor that traditional farmers had to do. Patent laws or no patent laws, many things are going to change.

Traditional food aid programs to countries like Africa are filled with graft, oftentimes it will be dropped off at a port location with little thought given to how it should be distributed afterwards. I agree that better infrastructure is the answer over the long term.

Kenya
http://www.odihpn.org/humanitarian-exch ... programmes
In the 2011 drought response in-kind food aid was considered to be most vulnerable to corruption and diversion, largely because of its scale and scattered dispersion and weaknesses in transparency and accountability mechanisms. It was diverted physically through transport and storage, and indirectly through manipulation of targeting and registration. Two food pipelines were run, one by the government and the other by the World Food Programme (WFP). The rationale for running two pipelines was partly to ensure coverage, but there were also wider political factors at work. Having its own pipeline gave the Kenyan government visibility and demonstrated its capacity to support its own people in times of need. These political pressures meant that the government had to be seen to be providing food aid, even though most stakeholders agreed that one pipeline would have been preferable, that WFP was better able to run it than the government, and that the government should have focused on more sustainable interventions. As one interviewee in the TI Kenya study noted: ‘there’s a double language in Kenya: the broad public message is that sustainable programming is most important but at the district level, MPs with a shorter political life want to be seen to be giving food’.

Partly due to these political drivers, the government struggled to ensure an accountable and transparent response. There was no official reporting in the public realm on how government funds were spent, or how food assistance was allocated. According to interviewees, monitoring of government food aid was almost non-existent, and the information channels between different line ministries and the district-level administration were very unclear. At district level, there is little understanding of the criteria used by the government in food allocation, specifically how much could be expected, how it compared between districts and how it should be prioritised. This was due to poor information management as well as considerable inconsistency in the pipeline, which meant that tonnages varied from month to month without warning.

African's cultivate a bitter poisonous plant that requires heavy processing to become edible because it is theft proof:

http://web.archive.org/web/201007052036 ... ipt_en.asp
Mother: The first crop I discussed with my daughter was cassava. I told her that she must always have cassava growing in the garden. Cassava is a ‘complete' crop. When you pull the plant from the ground, what do you see? You see the top, the middle, and the bottom. These three parts give you everything you need. The leaves on the top can be used to make relish. The middle is the planting material – the seed. And the bottom, the root, provides you with your staple dish.

Daughter: My mother explained to me the difference between bitter and sweet cassava. I was surprised when she told me that she preferred to grow bitter cassava. At first, I didn't understand why.

Mother: It's true that bitter cassava takes longer to process. But my bitter cassava always provides me with food; it is a sure thing. The rats and insects won't eat it, so they leave it alone. And no thief will steal that bitter cassava from your field!!

Daughter: My mother showed me how to process bitter cassava so that it is safe to eat. There are many steps including soaking, fermenting and drying the roots. She also showed me how to select the stems to use as planting material for the next crop. The stems must be the right length and the right thickness...so you will get a healthy crop next season. My mother taught me many things about cassava...and then she took me to the bush...

As an amusing sidenote, Monsanto profits indirectly from ethanol because they are taking over the corn seed supply:

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-201 ... 06089.html
Monsanto Co.'s (MON) fiscal first-quarter profit soared on increased sales of corn seed to South America and climbing herbicide prices.

The world's largest seed company has traditionally reported a quiet first quarter, as most U.S. customers are inactive, but Monsanto's growth in South America is now making it a year-round business. Monsanto said corn seed sales jumped 27% in the quarter versus a year ago, due largely to South America.

But the company also said that U.S. sales were ahead of last year's pace, and it boosted its 2013 earnings guidance. The St. Louis-based company now sees earnings of $4.30 to $4.40 a share, up from its previous view of $4.18 to $4.32.

2) I don't necessarily want to debate the good or bad of any given technology with you (although sooner or later we're going to have it out on the nuclear question); I think the questions of politics, system and power distribution (even as systems may develop and evolve into new configurations) remain inescapable and usually primary, and I don't see you taking these on as though they mattered very much. Who decides and for what reason? What are the consequences and what is the "collateral damage"? An analogy: I love railways. I'm all for building them. That does not, however, render irrelevant (or less than primary) issues of whether the building of the railways entails (or is said to must entail) an extermination policy on the Indians; whether it means the expropriation and impoverishment of small landholders and the hyper-exploitation of slaves, or wage slaves; or whether it leads to the creation of private monopolies and the rise of billionaires who then use their high-leverage position, money and power to set up rentier income situations, gobble up more resources and income streams, and, most importantly, capture the government and the politicians and bend policy to their will - also including policy not directly related to the railroads. As all informed people should know, the Luddites didn't break machines because they were anti-technology; by the best accounts available they were pro-technology. Rather, they fought against being forced to lose their own humanity to the needs of the machinery as defined by the owners, for the owners' profits.

One day we will have Geiger counters built into our cellphones. I am surprised that nuclear weapons have not seen further use. The manufacturing and deployment of them has been complex enough to stop would-be terrorists thus far, through blind luck more than anything.

Most of those wage slaves will no longer be economically relevant in less than 20 years. What happens to them?



The next step in resource harvesting is to mine asteroids. Our current global metals market is worth about $850 billion or so. A small asteroid has about $10 trillion dollars worth of material in it. With added value of sub-orbital refueling or construction it's value could be unquantifiable.

The reason I don't spend much time asking "Who decides what" is because I have very little practical control over that. We don't have an international governmental body that can coordinate and enforce regulations, so gaps and loopholes are the norm. I can't figure out the incentives that drives the totality of the system in every place in the world except in abstract and therefore cannot redirect it.

3) Peter Thiel is a very smart man and a fascinating analyst to read who as a person nevertheless has some dirty history (see Team Themis involvement, and no doubt some mostly hidden CIA rat's tail) and a very self-serving ideological mission, at least as far as his interventions in present politics are concerned. As for his vision of a longer term and very long term future of the world, he is among those in a new tradition (which is usefully called transhumanist, though transhumanism in the broadest sense is not of a monolith and includes different and contradictory currents) that has already decided, on behalf of everyone, that the self-sovereignty of humans, or of some humans among the rest, as piss-poor as it has been historically, will inevitably one day be replaced by the sovereignty of human-created but autonomous AI machines whose form and personalities we cannot yet even imagine but who will at some as-yet unguessable point become incomprehensibly more intelligent and powerful than we, and who will either supplant us altogether or otherwise run our show for us; possibly to our benefit, possibly not, this will be in the stars, so to speak, and no longer for us to determine. I care to question the inevitability of this scenario and certainly its desirability from a human perspective, as well as the legitimacy to decide of those who have already determined that they have decided on it (or divined its inevitability), such as Thiel, Daniel Hillis, Dennett, et al. On this question I may well be among the future Luddites.

Clean gloves hide dirty hands. No hedge fund manager can claim to be clean by anyone's standard.

If you want to make the Luddites and the Transhumanists uncomfortable, ask what happens when we build a psychic computer. The line between human and machine will keep on melting.

[General Patton]

Sounds like a bad move to drop the claims related to the contamination of 1997; or one forced by the course of the case and its rulings. If someone painted his fence without asking him and he decided to keep the color, they could not claim they were owed for the paint job - in perpetuity - or that they owned the pickets, if he decided to use them in an artwork.

More fundamentally, the court may not but I do contest the far-ranging and for thousands of years nearly completely unprecedented property rights* and rights to rentier income claimed by Monsanto on the basis of their having manipulated the genetic make-up of a biological organism through the rearrangement of existing biological genetic elements. (A variant, as you argue above, of traditional breeding practices.)

And what of the more general questions of sovereignty and power?

* Hedged b/c dunno if French vinyards ever prompted an invasion to burn vines lifted from Champagne, or some such.

.

What's much more interesting to me is the fact that enough of Monsanto's seeds got into a bargain bin grain elevator in the first place. If that is true then it's unrealistic to expect them to keep full control over the patent. The round-up seeds are somewhere around 90% of the soybean seed total at this point. It's also interesting that cross-pollination has been a problem here, given that the plants are self-pollinating except for bees and a few other insects that spread it.

For sovereignty and power? In this case the underdog, our farmer, had more control over the terms of engagement than Monsanto. Bowman chose to take this issue to the courts and keep pressing the issue. One farmer v. a multi billion dollar company is a pretty large mismatch, but he's managed to get it into the Supreme Court. That's a lot more than someone could do in most centuries, though he is almost certain to be shot down.

The bigger question is how do we deal with the royalties on self-replicating items, the same thing the legal system has had trouble with in file sharing.

The legal system is comically arbitrary, there is no winning move. My answer is more technology, the disruption still has a long way to go.

Edited:

Though the farmer does add value by growing and tending to the soybeans, it's still a replicating system.

Edit 2:
The global metals market had a revenue of about 2.9 trillion in 2011 according to MarketLine:
http://www.reportlinker.com/p0168848-su ... ining.html

[General Patton]

will inevitably one day be replaced by the sovereignty of human-created but autonomous AI machines whose form and personalities we cannot yet even imagine but who will at some as-yet unguessable point become incomprehensibly more intelligent and powerful than we

Current guesses for human equal or greater intelligence is 2040-2045. Varying predictions exist of course.



I'm curious, how would you stop it? I suspect pure AI's won't have any rights for some time, but humans who exist with varying degrees of augmentation will.

I think the questions of politics, system and power distribution (even as systems may develop and evolve into new configurations) remain inescapable and usually primary, and I don't see you taking these on as though they mattered very much. Who decides and for what reason? What are the consequences and what is the "collateral damage"?

To clarify: I focus on technology and ignore the power distributions because technology upsets the equilibrium of power if given enough time. I see that the steam engine wrought changes so deep that we still feel them today, it caused more changes than any man in history could hope to on his own.

I focus more on the technology because I think it has more effect on the incentive system that forms power structures. It affects the returns on violence to favor the attacker or defender. It affects whether the scale should be large or small.

File sharing protocols and the internet itself brought about changes that are conducive to the "Academic Spring", the revolt against large journals that force people to buy bundled packages and keep scientific information that is funded with tax dollars but still restricted by subscription (though there are many unofficial channels for getting just about any article you want for free already).

The LifeStraw allows people who can't depend on their government for clean water to get it on their own. This calls into question the need for their current government, as health should typically be near the top of a government's priority list. It will reduce many preventable deaths and give many people a chance at life.

Encrypted digital currency like Bitcoin that does not require a centralized server to validate it is a hub for money laundering and illegal activity. That means gambling and drugs for now. Over time more companies may embrace it, collecting taxes is already quite difficult given technological and legal jurisdiction issues.

The US pushed a 6 strikes internet law(which is significantly less severe than in other countries) through about 3 years after most of the torrent sites switched to using magnet style links that don't carry as much identifying information. The file sharing companies have to buy data from private individuals/companies that run honeypots to gather information on who downloads torrents, they are too technically inept to do it on their own. The RIAA told the world who should decide what, no one listened. The only recourse they have is to sue random people who weren't competent enough to avoid their traps.

I focus on technology because it is the force multiplier for power. It molds the incentives of the system. I limit my focus on collateral damage simply because so much of it is beyond my control and the control of most of the players in the game.

[JackRiddler]

I'm glad about your answers and I think we've gone far in clarifying our different positions. I do think you're techno-blinded but there's no doubting the value of your insights and contributions to the discussion here. I learn a lot from you. But I believe human sovereignty and more generally agency are significant and can and often do shape and determine the choices and course of technological development, including which disasters we collectively prefer to risk. We get the technosocieties we deserve, even if not everyone deserves the disasters that appear like "black swans," at least to the inveterately optimistic. On your coming technotimelines, where's the entry for hydrocarbon depletion and the related biospheric disasters as the PTB blindly turn not to seeking consumption limits and sustainable alternatives but to frakkin' it all to hell, figuratively and literally?

Anyway, from here I may be less systematic for a while. Some further notes:

On food, the failures in delivering aid (once disasters are underway) are terrible and worth condemning, but less of a factor than the "monoculture for markets" model, especially when adopted or imposed on regions and nations in precarity relative to the big rich agricultural producers (which contributes to causing the disasters in the first place). These African corruption reports are telling only one part of the story, but it's the part that Western news readers prefer to consume. Another example, technology didn't screw a few million Mexican farmers out of their subsistence positions on the land and into shantytowns and maquiladoras and over the border, but NAFTA exposing them to direct competition with plentiful subsidized US corn dumped on their markets did.

As for Monsanto, closest thing to pure theological evil there is. Defend or decry the Green Revolution, Normal Borlaug didn't expect a billion Indian and Chinese farmers to pony up royalties. Providing a solution to a problem as he saw it was incentive enough for him, as it is for real scientists whether their work is for good or bad.

Oh, and first I heard of it, so it may turn out to be a dud that I only like because it fits my preferred lens, but look at this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-develo ... tion/print

India's rice revolution

In a village in India's poorest state, Bihar, farmers are growing world record amounts of rice – with no GM, and no herbicide. Is this one solution to world food shortages?

• India's rice revolution – audio slideshow


Sumant Kumar photographed in Darveshpura, Bihar, India. Photograph: Chiara Goia for Observer Food Monthly


Sumant Kumar was overjoyed when he harvested his rice last year. There had been good rains in his village of Darveshpura in north-east India and he knew he could improve on the four or five tonnes per hectare that he usually managed. But every stalk he cut on his paddy field near the bank of the Sakri river seemed to weigh heavier than usual, every grain of rice was bigger and when his crop was weighed on the old village scales, even Kumar was shocked.

This was not six or even 10 or 20 tonnes. Kumar, a shy young farmer in Nalanda district of India's poorest state Bihar, had – using only farmyard manure and without any herbicides – grown an astonishing 22.4 tonnes of rice on one hectare of land. This was a world record and with rice the staple food of more than half the world's population of seven billion, big news.

Link to video: Rice farming in India: 'Now I produce enough food for my family'

It beat not just the 19.4 tonnes achieved by the "father of rice", the Chinese agricultural scientist Yuan Longping, but the World Bank-funded scientists at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, and anything achieved by the biggest European and American seed and GM companies. And it was not just Sumant Kumar. Krishna, Nitish, Sanjay and Bijay, his friends and rivals in Darveshpura, all recorded over 17 tonnes, and many others in the villages around claimed to have more than doubled their usual yields.

The villagers, at the mercy of erratic weather and used to going without food in bad years, celebrated. But the Bihar state agricultural universities didn't believe them at first, while India's leading rice scientists muttered about freak results. The Nalanda farmers were accused of cheating. Only when the state's head of agriculture, a rice farmer himself, came to the village with his own men and personally verified Sumant's crop, was the record confirmed.


A tool used to harvest rice. Photograph: Chiara Goia

The rhythm of Nalanda village life was shattered. Here bullocks still pull ploughs as they have always done, their dung is still dried on the walls of houses and used to cook food. Electricity has still not reached most people. Sumant became a local hero, mentioned in the Indian parliament and asked to attend conferences. The state's chief minister came to Darveshpura to congratulate him, and the village was rewarded with electric power, a bank and a new concrete bridge.

That might have been the end of the story had Sumant's friend Nitish not smashed the world record for growing potatoes six months later. Shortly after Ravindra Kumar, a small farmer from a nearby Bihari village, broke the Indian record for growing wheat. Darveshpura became known as India's "miracle village", Nalanda became famous and teams of scientists, development groups, farmers, civil servants and politicians all descended to discover its secret.

When I meet the young farmers, all in their early 30s, they still seem slightly dazed by their fame. They've become unlikely heroes in a state where nearly half the families live below the Indian poverty line and 93% of the 100 million population depend on growing rice and potatoes. Nitish Kumar speaks quietly of his success and says he is determined to improve on the record. "In previous years, farming has not been very profitable," he says. "Now I realise that it can be. My whole life has changed. I can send my children to school and spend more on health. My income has increased a lot."

What happened in Darveshpura has divided scientists and is exciting governments and development experts. Tests on the soil show it is particularly rich in silicon but the reason for the "super yields" is entirely down to a method of growing crops called System of Rice (or root) Intensification (SRI). It has dramatically increased yields with wheat, potatoes, sugar cane, yams, tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and many other crops and is being hailed as one of the most significant developments of the past 50 years for the world's 500 million small-scale farmers and the two billion people who depend on them.


People work on a rice field in Bihar People work on a rice field in Bihar. Photograph: Chiara Goia

Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, as rice farmers around the world traditionally do, the Darveshpura farmers carefully nurture only half as many seeds, and then transplant the young plants into fields, one by one, when much younger. Additionally, they space them at 25cm intervals in a grid pattern, keep the soil much drier and carefully weed around the plants to allow air to their roots. The premise that "less is more" was taught by Rajiv Kumar, a young Bihar state government extension worker who had been trained in turn by Anil Verma of a small Indian NGO called Pran (Preservation and Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature), which has introduced the SRI method to hundreds of villages in the past three years.

While the "green revolution" that averted Indian famine in the 1970s relied on improved crop varieties, expensive pesticides and chemical fertilisers, SRI appears to offer a long-term, sustainable future for no extra cost. With more than one in seven of the global population going hungry and demand for rice expected to outstrip supply within 20 years, it appears to offer real hope. Even a 30% increase in the yields of the world's small farmers would go a long way to alleviating poverty.

"Farmers use less seeds, less water and less chemicals but they get more without having to invest more. This is revolutionary," said Dr Surendra Chaurassa from Bihar's agriculture ministry. "I did not believe it to start with, but now I think it can potentially change the way everyone farms. I would want every state to promote it. If we get 30-40% increase in yields, that is more than enough to recommend it."

The results in Bihar have exceeded Chaurassa's hopes. Sudama Mahto, an agriculture officer in Nalanda, says a small investment in training a few hundred people to teach SRI methods has resulted in a 45% increase in the region's yields. Veerapandi Arumugam, the former agriculture minister of Tamil Nadu state, hailed the system as "revolutionising" farming.

SRI's origins go back to the 1980s in Madagascar where Henri de Laulanie, a French Jesuit priest and agronomist, observed how villagers grew rice in the uplands. He developed the method but it was an American, professor Norman Uphoff, director of the International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development at Cornell University, who was largely responsible for spreading the word about De Laulanie's work.

Given $15m by an anonymous billionaire to research sustainable development, Uphoff went to Madagascar in 1983 and saw the success of SRI for himself: farmers whose previous yields averaged two tonnes per hectare were harvesting eight tonnes. In 1997 he started to actively promote SRI in Asia, where more than 600 million people are malnourished.

"It is a set of ideas, the absolute opposite to the first green revolution [of the 60s] which said that you had to change the genes and the soil nutrients to improve yields. That came at a tremendous ecological cost," says Uphoff. "Agriculture in the 21st century must be practised differently. Land and water resources are becoming scarcer, of poorer quality, or less reliable. Climatic conditions are in many places more adverse. SRI offers millions of disadvantaged households far better opportunities. Nobody is benefiting from this except the farmers; there are no patents, royalties or licensing fees."
Rice seeds Rice seeds. Photograph: Chiara Goia

For 40 years now, says Uphoff, science has been obsessed with improving seeds and using artificial fertilisers: "It's been genes, genes, genes. There has never been talk of managing crops. Corporations say 'we will breed you a better plant' and breeders work hard to get 5-10% increase in yields. We have tried to make agriculture an industrial enterprise and have forgotten its biological roots."

Not everyone agrees. Some scientists complain there is not enough peer-reviewed evidence around SRI and that it is impossible to get such returns. "SRI is a set of management practices and nothing else, many of which have been known for a long time and are best recommended practice," says Achim Dobermann, deputy director for research at the International Rice Research Institute.

Ahem, way to miss the point, Dobermann.

"Scientifically speaking I don't believe there is any miracle. When people independently have evaluated SRI principles then the result has usually been quite different from what has been reported on farm evaluations conducted by NGOs and others who are promoting it. Most scientists have had difficulty replicating the observations."

Dominic Glover, a British researcher working with Wageningen University in the Netherlands, has spent years analysing the introduction of GM crops in developing countries. He is now following how SRI is being adopted in India and believes there has been a "turf war".

"There are experts in their fields defending their knowledge," he says. "But in many areas, growers have tried SRI methods and abandoned them. People are unwilling to investigate this. SRI is good for small farmers who rely on their own families for labour, but not necessarily for larger operations. Rather than any magical theory, it is good husbandry, skill and attention which results in the super yields. Clearly in certain circumstances, it is an efficient resource for farmers. But it is labour intensive and nobody has come up with the technology to transplant single seedlings yet."

But some larger farmers in Bihar say it is not labour intensive and can actually reduce time spent in fields. "When a farmer does SRI the first time, yes it is more labour intensive," says Santosh Kumar, who grows 15 hectares of rice and vegetables in Nalanda. "Then it gets easier and new innovations are taking place now."

In its early days, SRI was dismissed or vilified by donors and scientists but in the past few years it has gained credibility. Uphoff estimates there are now 4-5 million farmers using SRI worldwide, with governments in China, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam promoting it.

Sumant, Nitish and as many as 100,000 other SRI farmers in Bihar are now preparing their next rice crop. It's back-breaking work transplanting the young rice shoots from the nursery beds to the paddy fields but buoyed by recognition and results, their confidence and optimism in the future is sky high.

Last month Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz visited Nalanda district and recognised the potential of this kind of organic farming, telling the villagers they were "better than scientists". "It was amazing to see their success in organic farming," said Stiglitz, who called for more research. "Agriculture scientists from across the world should visit and learn and be inspired by them."


A man winnows rice in Satgharwa village. Photograph: Chiara Goia

Bihar, from being India's poorest state, is now at the centre of what is being called a "new green grassroots revolution" with farming villages, research groups and NGOs all beginning to experiment with different crops using SRI. The state will invest $50m in SRI next year but western governments and foundations are holding back, preferring to invest in hi-tech research. The agronomist Anil Verma does not understand why: "The farmers know SRI works, but help is needed to train them. We know it works differently in different soils but the principles are solid," he says. "The biggest problem we have is that people want to do it but we do not have enough trainers.

"If any scientist or a company came up with a technology that almost guaranteed a 50% increase in yields at no extra cost they would get a Nobel prize. But when young Biharian farmers do that they get nothing. I only want to see the poor farmers have enough to eat."

[General Patton]

There are a few climate predictions in the above timeline. Automatic Earth has some others:
http://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/th ... guide.html

Things more than 5 years out are too shaky to give any kind of prediction on how we can engineer it and expect it to be "reliable". There have been so many times humanity has been caught with it's pants down when new technology dramatically changed the way we do things, I want to minimize that surprise. Humanity has been dealing with hard problems since we first started walking.

On the subject of hard problems, I posted this some time ago and it only got a few replies (prototypes exist for all of them now):

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35677&p=483039#p483039
Most of these problems are older than the 20th century. Prototypes exist to fix at least half of them, but the economy of scale may or may not work out.

What problems do you think were missed?

http://www.networkworld.com/community/b ... st-century
In fact, X Prize last year it declared a top eight list of key challenges that could end up being public competitions in the coming months or years. The eight concepts or challenges included:

1. Water (“Super ‘Brita’ Water Prize”) – Develop a technology to solve the world’s number one cause of death: Lack of safe drinking water:

2. Personal Health Monitoring System (“OnStar for the Body Prize”) – Develop and demonstrate a system which continuously monitors an individual’s personal health-related data leading to early detection of disease or illness.

3. Energy & Water from Waste – Create and demonstrate a technology that generates off-grid water and energy for a small village derived from human and organic waste.

4. Around the World Ocean Survey – Create an autonomous underwater vehicle that can circumnavigate the world’s oceans, gathering data each step of the way.

5. Transforming Parentless Youth – Dramatically and positively change the outcome for significantly at risk foster children, reducing the number of incarcerations and unemployment rate by fifty-percent or more.

6. Brain-Computer Interface (“Mind over Matter”) – Enable high function, minimally invasive brain to computer interfaces that can turn thought into action.

7. Wireless Power Transmission – Wireless transmission of electricity over distances greater than 200 miles while losing less than two percent of the electricity during the transmission.

8. Ultra-Fast Point-To-Point Travel – Design and fly the world’s fastest point-to-point passenger travel system

From the National Research Council report, the five challenges are:

1. How can the U.S. optics and photonics community invent technologies for the next factor of-100 cost-effective capacity increases in optical networks?

2. How can the U.S. optics and photonics community develop a seamless integration of photonics and electronics components as a mainstream platform for low-cost fabrication and packaging of systems on a chip for communications, sensing, medical, energy, and defense applications?

3. How can the U.S. military develop the required optical technologies to support platforms capable of wide-area surveillance, object identification and improved image resolution, high-bandwidth free-space communication, laser strike, and defense against missiles?

4. How can U.S. energy stakeholders achieve cost parity across the nation’s electric grid for solar power versus new fossil-fuel-powered electric plants by the year 2020?

5. How can the U.S. optics and photonics community develop optical sources and imaging tools to support an order of magnitude or more of increased resolution in manufacturing?