Even if you were to extend the definition to "Eurasia", as he no doubt does, it ignores something critical. The aboriginal Americans were masters of biotechnology. We have found the antecedents of maize, tomatoes, and potatoes, and they vary from utterly inedible to kinda poisonous. Over time, they transformed these noxious weeds into the crops that today keep billions of people alive. Imagine Italian cuisine without tomatoes. I would argue that maize was the Mezoamerican cathedral, a visible sign of their supremacy over the natural world.

Sure, the car might not be flash and maybe you have to wait longer to get a ride and you can't book one in advance (at least, not in my experience), but at the very least you can expect to get to where you paid to be taken to.

They're still operating as a taxi and should be subject to the same regulations. McDonalds might not be fine dining, but I still expect the food to be edible and not poison me.

I think we agree on most of this, tbh

Your video, QI - Why Would You Swallow A Poisonous Metalloid?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Even if this had microwave parts it would not be able to cause any sort of radiation poisoning because microwaves are also non-ionising.

Optical lasers produce non-ionising radiation, and do not use any radioactive materials to produce the laser light, so he cannot get "radiation poisoning." Only burns from direct contact with the beam or eye damage from direct or reflected light are possible. Also as I think he mentions, at these power levels, even diffuse reflections are likely to cause eye damage, in other words it doesn't take a mirror, almost any surface will do.

Ignorant question of the day - Is it likely one could expose themselves to radiation poisoning or get cancer from these activities? I ask, because the radiation generated by these devices is actually ionizing; but that's about the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

http://earlpostsaboutwhatever.tumblr.com/post/146199902504/scatterdarknessscattersilence-killerville

"Might cause symptoms of cyanide poisoning when eaten in excess... "

Yeah, it might cause symptoms of cyanide poisoning because it causes cyanide poisoning.

Twice what my family eats...but yes, a small subsistence farm could also be called a garden, just as my orchard of 30+ apple trees could be called a back yard. That doesn't make it produce any less.

Not true. Some, (very few) still grow grain using old school methods, some even using old school grains (thank goodness, we will have them to thank for still having grains when/if the Monsanto grains fail). It's not even 99%, but it is 'most'.

Industrial farming describes a methodology, not a size, not an incorporation. The fact that a single person or two might farm thousands of acres means they are using the same industrial methods, because non industrial farming takes more people.

Clearly, natural farming takes more effort, and costs the consumer more, but does not require major ecological mitigation, so if you count ALL costs involved, it's not that much more expensive. You act like it's impossible, but it's how ALL farms operated prior to the mid century. If it wouldn't scale, please explain how it worked for thousands of years before industrial agriculture started, or how it continues to work in other countries.

It may not work for WEAK shallow root grain crops that can't compete for water and nutrients, like the one's Monsanto sells. It worked fine for thousands of years with more natural, long root crops that also held the soil together.

I didn't hear that in the video, but fine. Don't just repeat known BS and lies then. Roundup is only a pesticide in that it allows GMO crops that have modified genes to be pesticides themselves to grow without competition....and that doesn't count, and I think you know it.

No, I'm not trying to say the video is perfectly honest, it's clearly highly biased...I didn't say that. They do HINT that Monsanto's actions are "evil", but extrapolating and exaggerating from their already somewhat overboard, clearly biased but careful statements to make them insanely more overboard and biased is not helpful to anyone.

You mean this characterization..."You know, on account of them being evil and wanting to see millions of people dead because it gives their corporate heads joy. Just like it wanted to invent pesticides as a means of convincing the public to poison each other for giggles, and getting the state department to experiment on people."
Um...yeah....that's completely insane. I already explained why it's wrong in so many ways, and defy you to show where they said anything resembling that. You have to listen with quite a biased ear to hear that in between the lines of what they actually said, and one must be incredibly, clinically paranoid to believe any public company does things just to be evil rather than purely for profit. The evil they do is an accepted result of their business methods, not the intent of their business, and I think the video was fairly clear about that.

You may stand by that, as I stand by my summation of your comment...that it's insane and exaggerated hyperbole that ridicules an extreme paranoid stance no one actually took.

This propaganda ignores much more than that. Roundup is one of the absolutely least toxic to human chemicals that agriculture can use. The alternatives are chemicals a lot more harmful than roundup or abandoning the use of pesticides. Worse chemicals or the collapse of modern agriculture don't look appealing as alternatives so the ignorant roundup fear mongers protest too much in my opinion.

And then there's things like claiming neither Einstein or Openheimer or others were behind the Manhattan project, it was Monsanto all along that plotted to destroy Japanese cities with nuclear weapons. You know, on account of them being evil and wanting to see millions of people dead because it gives their corporate heads joy. Just like it wanted to invent pesticides as a means of convincing the public to poison each other for giggles, and getting the state department to experiment on people. None of this had any other motive than the thrill of inflicting cruelty on people, and none of it would have happened but for Monsanto's hard drive to push for these things to be done...

Just wow, a more deliberately misleading video would be hard to create.

Wow. That's unlucky. I get those all the time, I probably pull down 15-20 nests a year around my house and garage, and I've never been stung by them.....yet. Granted, I do it at night or early in the morning so they're asleep/cold and can't react, and often just use a hose to spray them down from the overhangs, but they have seemed to be far less aggressive than even my bees, and almost domesticated compared to hornets.

PS: Is it possible your hippy neighbor gets upset not because of what you're poisoning, but because you're poisoning, period? Maybe he would be happy if you just squashed them or hosed the nests down? Many people are hyper sensitive to poisons, some for medical reasons, some for philosophical or ecological reasons. I grow a lot of my own produce at home, so I would be pretty upset if my neighbor started spraying poison on the fence line, because it would get all over my crops, and most insect poisons that cause instant death are not designed to wash off or be human safe. Just a thought.

"Throw the ring into the fire!"

I hope she held her breath as she passed through that poisonous plume.

For any non-Australian viewers, the poisonous insect is our minister for border protection, who's ultimately in charge of the offshore Gulags mentioned.

Isn't it illegal to intentionally poison a river, even if it LOOKS like it's already in bad shape? I think that guy's looking at a hefty fine at the very least. Dumbass for doing this in the first place, doubly so for putting his face on camera.

Considering how poisonous it is, I bet it was discovered by an Australian.

I agree with the general idea -- we should continue to spend, and spend MORE, on getting lead out of the environment (especially in homes and public utilities like water, etc.).

But I do have a semi-minor nit to pick. Oliver mocked the lead industry shill guy from the '70s for suggesting that better general health across the population at the time was because "we must (have been) doing something right", and therefore lead paint must not be dangerous. Yet one of his own major argument points comes from referencing a "study" that shows that every dollar invested in lead abatement ends up returning 17+ times that much in societal gain due to lower crime rates, lower medical bills, etc.

That's a problem because BOTH of those arguments are making a correlation equals causation error. The lead industry shill was wrong -- general population health was higher in the '70s than ever before because of advances in medicine. Lead was holding it back -- but to be fair, only to a tiny degree compared to the gains made in general health care.

I'd argue Oliver's cited study is equally wrong (or at least misleading) -- OK, crime may be lower, but I seriously doubt that spending more on removing lead contributes to that much at all. And total costs of health care spent on caring for people with lead poisoning are almost certainly lower now than they have been previously, but the lion's share of that (legitimate) financial gain undoubtedly came from banning lead paint and then leaded gasoline -- as seen in Oliver's graph of "average blood lead levels of children aged 1 to 5" which dropped incredibly fast between 1980 and 1990, and then much more slowly since then.

So any financial return on further investment in getting rid of lead is very very unlikely to live up to the same rate that it did in the 80s. I doubt that the study accounted for that, if it is also including tenuous things like crime rate to trump up its numbers...

Oliver is right to later suggest that "not poisoning children" is a better argument for getting rid of lead than "17 times financial return on money invested into lead removal". Just stick with the poisoning argument instead of the dubious correlation vs causation study.