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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • This has been getting to me for a while. A couple of months ago I stumbled across the gemini protocol - the extension of gopher. I haven’t done much in that space as of yet, and I’m not suggesting it’s a salve for all the problems talked about in the article here, but I have found it is somewhat of a balm for the soul. A different attitude, to the internet and to a limited extent some of the software.

    Extending that mindset into even a small fraction of software development would be refreshing.






  • You don’t have to be a country to sell GMO free produce.

    By market, I meant the market for a product, not a physical place - the market for milk powder vs the market for premium ice cream for example.

    I wouldn’t say any day, but it will happen. Fonterra ignoring it demonstrates a lack of foresight - illustrating one of the reasons we’re bad at capitalism.

    Don’t know the percentage of the top of my head, but milk powder (or casein derived from milk powder) is used in paints, paper manufacturing, textiles, it’s used a an ingredient for a whole bunch of things in labs, packaging, an additive to some plastics, in some places an additive to concrete, it’s used in cosmetics. Whey is used to produce industrial alcohol (Fonterra used to make this, don’t know if they still do). It’s got a lot of non-food related uses.

    And even in the food industry, corporations like Nestle aren’t going to care where it comes from when they’re using it to adjust fat or protein content in the vast majority of their foods.



  • While Porsche might make a shit-tonne of money from a eye-watering markups to appeal to people with more money that taste, their costs are spectacularly high, and they employ large amounts of highly competent engineers (the car companies at least, I doubt Louis Vuitton does) and marketers to make a premium product. Advertising the production of our agricultural sector as non-GMO was never going to turn in into a premium product. My assumption is that our produce is looked up favorably in foreign markets, as good, but not necessarily premium. Some of it is marketed as premium, but trying to upscale our entire agricultural sector to that level would I suspect, fail magnificently. You can bring together the people needed to do something like that at a company level, but at a country level - I just don’t think there’s a sufficient number of highly competent people to be able to do that.

    And we wouldn’t have been the only ones appealing to that market. Gambling the entire agricultural sector on being able to dominate that tiny sector would be incredibly dangerous.

    I don’t disagree that we’re awful at capitalism though.

    My current pick for illustrating that would be Fonterra - it’s my understanding that the vast majority of Fonterra’s exports are milk powder bound for a spectacularly large range of industrial uses. Overseas, there are companies slowly ramping up the production of milk grown in vats using GE yeast. Produces milk powder with a fraction of the resources a dairy farm, with a fraction of the environmental costs. Companies who use milk powder as part of an industrial process don’t care whether it came from a vat full of yeast or a lovely open air dairy farm. And as best I can tell, Fonterra doesn’t think this is likely to cause any problems. Fonterra could try and move all of that production to premium produce for the consumer, but if that market existed, I would have thought they would have already done it. I don’t think the problem here is that they are selling to the wrong sector or not marketing their produce as well as they could - I think it’s that we produce too much milk. We pile all of our eggs in one basket and then insist that that’s not a potential problem.



  • A few years ago I sat in on a talk from a chap by the name of John Knight, who was at the time an economics prof down at Otago. He’d been doing some work with people in Europe, and they’d come to the conclusion that, people usually say they would prefer to buy non-GMO foods, but …

    • If all the prices were the same, people tend to buy non-GMO foods.
    • If GMO labeled foods were cheaper, and other customers were present, people would tend to buy non-GMO foods.
    • If GMO labeled foods were cheaper and no other customers were present, people tended to buy the GMO labelled foods.

    I think that was the rough summary. Not sure how much further that research went, but I thought it was interesting. I … think this was it - https://www.gefree.org.nz/assets/Clean-Green-Book-email-11.pdf

    I don’t know that I was ever entirely convinced that there was huge potential for charging a premium due to being a non-GMO country. For a whole bunch of other reasons though, fully on board with your summation: “We suck at Capitalism” :)