I think Milkman's angle on things is relevant in a different way.

We don't need to form our morality to coddle, consider or otherwise care in the least about cultural or other reasons for doing stuff. However, when it comes to affecting change in a groups behaviour, those cultural traditions are a factor, whether we agree with it or like it or not. Bull fighting is really pretty small in that picture. Women's rights in a country like Saudi Arabia is a much bigger deal.

When we want to help out those we believe are negatively affected by what we see as immoral, we can't ignore the weight of cultural momentum holding it in place. We can easily say women should have equality and that it is morally the right position. When it comes to lobbying for changes or protections for human rights in those places though, identifying how to be least disruptive to existing culture is helpful. No, it's not our job to adapt their culture for them. However, if we want to see the change, we might have put in some of that work anyway when those we see as behaving immorally show no interest in doing it.

Its called lobbying or legalised corruption. It's a very cost effective business strategy.

How are these rules created, and why are people always surprised by them? I imagine there's an argument made around margin of error, and then where the line should be is lobbied for. Is the "under five equals zero" rule reasonable or shady?

I feel like I'm arguing for the five second rule.

**EDIT**
I'm finding other sources that say that sterile "terminator seeds" are a patented technique, but that Monsanto has promised not to use it. Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/terminator-seeds.aspx

So it appears that my info below is wrong. I will try to talk with my family and get the full story. That being said, I'll leave my original comment and the followup below unaltered.
*********


My firsthand knowledge of this stuff was from more than 10 years ago, and also when I was pretty young (early 20's). So I did some web searching to try to get updated since your question is a very interesting one:

http://web.mit.edu/demoscience/Monsanto/about.html

According to that, Monsanto is the company behind "Roundup Ready", and their corn (and other crops in the line) do use sterile "terminator seeds". It also mentions that farmers "must purchase the most recent strain of seed from Monsanto" each year.

I was never in the decision-making structure of my family farm, but I did remember that we couldn't just buy the Roundup Ready seed *once* and then hold a small amount back as seed for the next year and continue to get the benefits.

I'm not 100% sure exactly how the modification for sterility works -- I don't know if the plant will sprout if you plant the sterile seeds and just fail to produce any ears / fruit, or if it just won't germinate at all. I do remember that we had to be quite careful to fully clean out the corn grown from the GM seeds from our storage bins, and better yet to store our non-GM corn to be used for future seed in entirely different bins. That was done to make sure that we didn't end up planting any of the sterile stuff.

I'm sure that the seed dealers that sell the GM stuff really push farmers to buy and plant it every year, as hinted to in that link. But you certainly don't *have* to. On the other hand, if you go back to non-GM seed for a year or two or more, you can't use a strong herbicide like Roundup if you have an unexpected outbreak of weeds or other pest plants -- the Roundup would kill the non-GM crop along with everything else.

Basically, I don't specifically begrudge companies like Monsanto for their practices concerning these GM crops. The "terminator seeds" are controversial, but don't seem like a big deal to me. If you could buy GM seeds once and then just hold back some of your harvest for next season's seed, they'd only get your money once AND we'd probably lose the original strains. So I see that as kinda win-win, especially if you don't 100% buy into their sales department urging you to use GM seed every single year.

I don't want to sound like a shill for Monsanto -- some of their other practices are pretty shady, particularly political lobbying. But from the perspective of my family farm, the GM corn that we use was/is a real beneficial thing. Significantly less pesticide/herbicide use over time, and it allows for expanded low/no till farming. Before herbicides, tilling was one of the only ways to kill off pest plants. But, it also makes the fields lose some moisture and nutrients. Expanded farming and ubiquitous tilling was largely the cause of the "dust bowl" dirty 30's. Anyway, I'd say that a lot of good has come out of modernized techniques and technology like GM crops.

The vegetable lobby found that people weren't throwing out produce they could readily see.

This whole diatribe is exactly what pushed middle spectrum voters to actually vote against Clinton. More aggressive division and partisan line drawing is the problem, not the solution.

Anybody not 100% committed to a pro-choice stance was sick and tired of the far left calling them evil for it.

Anybody that had any thoughts that your choices regarding how to have sex and who to have it with were in fact choices were tired of being called slurs like homophibic.

Anybody who didn't believe carbon taxes or cap and trade markets were the answer to climate change was sick of being charged with hating the children and 'denying' fundamental science.

Anybody watching angry calls for safe spaces re-implementing segregation as though it was a good thing was tired of it.

Like it or not, a large part of America disagreed on the extremity of the establishment's direction on these and other areas. Trump was the one candidate nobody wanted, not the media, not the Democratic party, not even the Republican party.

I believe the divisive winner takes all approach to complex and sensitive social issues drove a lot of voters to pick Trump as the none of the above option.

For the record, I didn't vote Trump. I'm Canadian and couldn't vote at all, but if I could I'd have voted Clinton. I would have voted Clinton in spite of disliking her as a clone of her husband that actively fought to prevent action on the Rwandan genocide. Which is to say, in any other election I'd have lobbied for a vote anyone but Clinton campaign. Awful that the Republicans managed to find someone worse in Trump...

The idea that Trump will change anything in Washington, because he's an outsider, is so far beyond absurd that I have to wonder how people come to the idea. Let's ignore for the fact that the President doesn't have much power, certainly not as much as Trump seems to think it does (and it's clear from the last debate he doesn't understand the power one Senator has) and that he'd have to deal with a Congress that is mostly insiders... let's look at the idea that the next President is likely to appoint up to 3 Supreme Court justices, and keep in mind cases like Hobby Lobby and especially Citizens United, both of which give big corporations, the rich, and powerful elite, huge advantages over regular people. Those cases were decided by a court that was fairly to the right already, now imagine losing two of the three liberal voices in the court to very far right justices, moving the court very far to the right for decades to come. Cases like Citizens United would just be the start of the move to give the powerful elite even more control of Washington and moving it further from the people. In the end a vote for Trump isn't a vote for an outsider, but a vote to put even more power into the hands of insiders and disenfranchise the American public even more...

I agree it's fair to argue there is an incentive in science, fudge statistical methods so your findings are more significant and warrant publishing in a scientific journal. But this is an incentive across science, and it hasn't stopped scientific progress as by nature, the process is self correcting when contradictory studies come out especially in a busy area such as climate science. The cost of falsifying studies or having your study contradicted is also significant however.

If you want to talk incentives though, consider the benefits to spreading doubt about climate change by the fossil fuel industry. 7 out of 10 of the largest revenue generating companies in the world are in oil. The industry stands to lose some $30 trillion from climate change in the next 25 years. Paying a PR firm to promote an agenda, paying researchers to dummy up research with a pre-determined anti-climate change conclusion is chump change to them. The cost to them are negligible if they disguise the source of funding sufficiently (e.g. funnel it through a business lobby).

Meanwhile any impropriety on the part of some climate scientists has not shaken the 97% consensus on climate change.

http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/

I'll bet there's also a fair amount of lobbying against rail development by the auto and airline industries.

I agree that 'writing off' a huge, near majority of the population is disastrous....but it's pretty damn close as it stands, with neither party doing much to improve things. It's already not a great time to be Mexican, black, or a woman in America today.

I, also, am at a loss on what to do. Southpark said, and I agreed, that 1/4 of Americans are mentally defective. I'm seeing now that that number is probably closer to 3/4, making meaningful, helpful change impossible. (Trump will be 'meaningful' change, but there's a >99% chance it won't be helpful to anyone not named Trump.)
A constitutional amendment declaring politics off limits for businesses and/or large groups, and making lobbying completely illegal, and funding elections rather than making them 'pay for play' would be a great start...but since the people who benefit from the current system are the same one's charged with making those changes, it's a non starter with no legal solution beyond voting every incumbent out of office...and that's not a good solution either.

Trump is likely not the answer if America is to continue as a united country.

It depends on the level of rot. If every load bearing beam in your home is infested with termites and rotten to the core....burning it down just might be the only way to save your neighbors homes, yours is already gone. We are at best on that knife edge where it's a toss up which is better, repair or replacement...but we aren't doing either, which is making the decision for us as the rot gets worse and less repairable. Perhaps a new structure is needed, one built to eliminate the rot from the get go. Of course....I see that leaves us all homeless in the interim, and many won't survive that, and in that circumstance it will be MUCH worse before it's better....most people advocating the dismantling of the government don't see that. I'm not advocating it, but I am considering it as a possibility.

Coal is massively dirty, but even if you do run it through clean burning plants, the main danger is not the smoke.

Coal contains trace amounts of radioactive materials. Depending on the 'dirtiness' of the coal, the true problem is that by mining it or burning it, you separate those trace amounts. Larger amounts of coal ash or coal tailing(s) from even your average coal will give a geiger counter fits.

Do you want to know the fun part? The coal industry has buried studies and lobbied for legislation that makes TENORMS (technologically enhanced naturally occurring radioactive material) unable to be regulated the same as any other radioactive waste. So if you live in a coal producing or burning area that creates ash or tailing ponds, you can be sucking up the same amount of alpha particle radiation as if you were in the vicinity of a nice large pool of nuclear waste.

Ain't coal grand?

As an aside, I've often thought the US Power Grid is overly unstable and an overly easy target for terrorist groups. Knock out a few sub stations (okay, more than a few, one or two in major cities) with a small blast, and no need to lose lives with said blast, and the grid would fall apart from there in a chain reaction. Things would be hampered further by the fact we don't have a good number of backups of transformers and other equipment to replace many of them that would be damaged directly and via cascade failure. That's why I never understood Republican calls for the Keystone XL, aside from oil lobby money, when fixing the grid would create far more jobs, both short term and long term, and increase our safety as well. A major outage would cause far more panic and damage than the 9/11 attacks thanks to how much we rely on electricity, and if enough damage was done to the system, it could take weeks to months for the system to be patched back up. The electrical grid NEEDS fixed, and soon.

I can't understand the "assault rifle" thing. It's already illegal to have a fully automatic without a special license, and any semi-auto gun fires one bullet per trigger pull. What difference does it make what the gun looks like if they all work the same?

Gee, there's a surprise...mo guns=mo gun problems. Who knew?

The "they protect us from our government" argument has been ridiculous since the advent of mechanized warfare. Your rifle can't stop their F-16. Just ask the Syrians.

It's not the cash that the NRA spends lobbying that their power comes from, it's the willingness of their members to jump when they say "jump". Their political power comes from the ability to push politicians out of power through voting, not cash.

The AR-15 is a red herring. My Ruger .22 can shoot well over 45 rounds per minute, as can almost any semi-auto rifle. It's the clip size that makes a difference. If you have to reload after every 10 shots, you simply can't shoot 45 rounds in a minute. I just don't get the outrage over guns that OPERATE exactly the same as nearly all other guns. Either these people simply don't understand guns at all, or they're total liars and they're trying to 'trick' us into banning all semi-auto firearms.

Nice.
To me he's essentially saying 'We know you're "values" and "strongly held beliefs" are for sale. Is 10% over the current rate (set by the NRA and accepted by congress) enough for the people to buy them back?'
I actually think this is a MUCH better plan than using the money for adds or other often ignored lobbying....just hand it to them and tell them what we want for it. It could actually work. *quality idea

Can we call out Christianity's violent hatred towards gays first, please?
In this country, they've attacked far more homosexuals than Muslims, and have furthered violent hatred of gays in other countries, lobbying to make it illegal anywhere they can.

Really?!? So he thinks religious hatred for homosexuals is only held by Muslims? What utter bullshit.

Ask the exact same questions in a Southern Baptist church, you'll get the same 100% hands raised....and not a single one would say they're 'extremists' either.
Pat Robertson just went on TV and said Christians should stand back and let the Muslims kill the homosexuals....he has tens of millions of followers.....that are "Christians".

If you REALLY think what this guy spouts, you MUST be against ALL religion, or you're simply dishonest or totally naïve...or both.

This was some insane bullshit hyperbole. Downvote.