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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 25th, 2026

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  • Company’s that own a patent can release spores causing cross contamination, then sue a farmer at harvest for their crop containing copyrighted genes.

    No they cannot. This little bit of common knowledge is bullshit on several levels.

    1. nitpicky, but plants reproduce by pollen and seeds, not by spores. okay, since i’m being nitpicky potatoes and sugarcane don’t reproduce with seeds. potatoes are tubers and sugarcane uses cuttings. some plants reproduce with rhizomes but we usually don’t eat those. point is spores are for mushrooms and ferns and whatnot.
    2. the big seed producers pledge not to sue for trace contamination
    3. monsanto was preemptively sued by farmers in 2013 because the farmers were afraid of the windblown lawsuits and wanted to get monsanto’s patents on genetics struck down. court said no, because Monsanto could not be sued over a threat that did not exist. That is, Monsanto had never actually sued anyone for windblown genetics. But given the above point the court also said monsanto is legally not allowed to sue for windblown genetics. because they promised not to.
    4. copyright and patent law are two different things. seeds and their genetics are covered under patents. that’s either better, worse, or sideways depending on your perspective but it is different.

    big ag is evil and they fuck farmers over constantly but you don’t have to bullshit to make them look bad







  • I wanted to make a cheap joke about getting the ghosts out by boiling the hell out of it but I wound up in a rabbithole about supercritical water. It turns out you can boil the hell into water. With a lot of heat and pressure water can dissolve rock, oil and gas dissolve into the water easily, and if you put organic waste into really angry water that shit will burn. Underwater! It even destroys PFAS and prions!





  • I am in my mid thirties. Someday age will catch up to me on this front, but it doesn’t seem to have noticed me yet. I can still out drink most 25 year olds (which does not make me cool). Some of us are just Built Different, and by that I mean that through a combination of genetics, tolerance, and being, ahem, “big boned,” my body is fantastic at absorbing, buffering, and metabolizing ethanol. A blessing and a curse in equal parts. Other people will stop at two drinks because their body tells them to and they have the willpower to listen to that signal. My body never sends the signal. Unless I’m in a situation where I have to drive home, my internal “probably shouldn’t do that” doesn’t overcome the disinhibition. So on a Friday night at home with nothing to do I can easily knock back enough to still be drunk the next day and still not get hung over. Sounds awesome, except that the ability to process alcohol efficiently doesn’t protect me from alcohol being a carcinogen or neurotoxic.

    The simple antidote to all this, of course, is to not have the first drink. Which pains me, because alcohol rules.







  • Addicts often commit other crimes, but the addiction is a function of the exposure to (and therefore trafficking of by other people) addictive substances. Cops actually love to hassle addicts, so long as they’re homeless addicts. It hasn’t solved any problems. But tackling drug trafficking is scary and dangerous because it turns out drugs are profitable and traffickers have loads of money and power.




  • flow as in menstrual flow, the literal volume of blood and mucosal lining from the uterus during a woman’s period

    flow also as in lyrical flow, the use of rhythm and articulation in a rapper’s delivery

    bar as in a measure of time in music, typically a four beat bar

    spitting referring to the rapid and rhythmic delivery of words to a beat

    If your [lyrical] flow is so heavy, why aren’t you [rapping]?