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It is a gray zone. Some national regulatory agencies has said ”pay or consent” is compatible with GDPR and some have said it is not. It hasn’t yet been tested by the EU court.

No, not regardless of magnitude. But anything that have a large impact on food prices will decrease the ability of poor people to pay for it. It’s not rocket science.

Then it's a discussion about magnitude and jumping to starvation is unfounded.

Price increases due to disruption of Ukrainian grain shipments from the war substantially threatened African food stability.

Despite their being plenty of capacity elsewhere because the smaller redirects of trucking into the European markets crashed prices enough that it led to protests in Poland and discontent elsewhere (though probably with significant Russian psyops involvement).


There is a problem though. If you opt out of it and just use seeds without any IP and your neighbor uses IP seeds and some of the seeds are blowing into your field from your neighbour you risk trouble.

No in fact you do not. This is an Internet/activist myth.

Source that it is legal to keep the profits and the plants from a patented crop that can’t be prove you have intentionally planted it there? As far as I understand Montosanto claims it would always belong to them no matter how the seed ended up there.

Feel free to cite the case they've brought where they claim that!

They have sued farmers for innocently acquiring their seeds (through the wind or whatever) and then spraying their crops with Roundup (ie: using the whole system).


There is absolutely no case law suggesting it is illegal to harvest and keep accidentally cross contaminated seed. Seeing as farming seeds is default legal there would need to be precedent otherwise for such an act to be illegal.

There is patent law. Patent law says you can't do the patented thing without the license. Growing the seeds is patented. So you can't grow them without license. This may be so obvious that it never needed to become a notable precedent-setting case.

Nice of you to axiomatically rederive patent law for us, but this is false. You cannot be sued simply for allowing seeds that blew onto your land grow.

There are IP protections for non-GMO seeds as well.

They literally said that Roundup is bad because of the OTHER chemicals that it contains in addition to Glyphosate which is not dangerous. Then it makes total sense to use pure Glyphosate instead of Roundup.

Of course you can claim that they are wrong about their claim. But that is another point.


> Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.

That makes no sense. If you accept that Glyphosate is 100% harmless. Why on earth would you drop it?

> Why on earth would you drop [Glyphosate]?

You wouldn't. You'd drop the conversation regarding whether it was safe.


100% it says in their terms that they can change the service during the agreement.

That kind of clause would be void in many places around the world.

For example, the German Civil Code states:

    Section 308 - Prohibited clauses with the possibility of valuation
    In standard business terms, the following in particular are ineffective:
    [...]
    4.  (Reservation of the right to modify) the agreement of a right of the user [TL note: this means beneficiary of the terms, eg. party or other subject of the contract] to modify the performance promised or deviate from it, unless the agreement of the modification or deviation reasonably can be expected of the other party to the contract when the interests of the user are taken into account;

Let’s see if German users can enforce it or not.

Nobody is paying for Elons xAI so he used SpaceX to buy xAI to fund it.

Under the pretense that SpaceX will be used to launch material into space to build space data centers.

There are plenty of things that are less strong effects that can still trick your mind to believe something that you know is not really true. Such as when you do the fake arm test. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1395356/ It feels real for the brain, even if you know that it's not your arm. I did a test and my brain believed that it's my arm, even if I of course, logically know my arm is not a rubber arm.

> There are plenty of things that are less strong effects that can still trick your mind to believe something that you know is not really true.

You mean like, religion?


It's such a strawman to claim that you cannot be sad if something disappears where you have not financially or you work contributed. Someone can say that they are sad that the Notre Dame burned down even if they haven't personally contributed to Notre Dame.

That comparison is fallacious too, I think.

Something burning down is a tragedy, beyond anyone's control. It's also possible to love something for its beauty, and be sad that a globally historic monument suffered such an act of god that the irreplaceable art and craftsmanship is gone forever.

Something closing down, perhaps because there was not enough money to sustain its continued operation, when tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people were using it? That's a perfectly appropriate time to remind folks, "if you like free software, consider donating to help sustain the almost full-time effort it takes to keep packages like this alive."

Op said, "this is sad [because] I've been using this," and the implication is, "I want to keep using this but now I can't because it's gone" and making the connection that "one way to prevent this from happening to other packages you like is to contribute financially."


Alright, take a park closing then. Can you be sad about that if you haven't personally raised money to finance the park?

I pay taxes. I pay for every park in my city. I pay for state and national parks too. I rarely/never use them. I have no choice. That makes me sad. I wish I could direct where my personal tax dollars were spent, but that kind of defeats the point of taxes, which are to fund the things that nobody wants to pay for (or are impractical to pay for, individually).

There are parks that are not owned by the govt.

Ah the "I would pay for firefox but" fallacy

At what point did OP say, "you're only allowed to be sad if you contributed"?

OP pointed out that many people stated they were sad. OP also pointed out it's likely few of those who were sad also contributed money. For a project whose maintainer said, essentially, "I can't keep doing this for free," the connection for most is obvious: "we (individuals and corporations) need to keep paying for the things we use and love if we want to keep the things we use and love."

OP did not say, "don't complain to me if you didn't personally try to save it."


Yes, I can't finance every park. I can feel sad about people suffering throughout the world without personally supporting them all.

I am an active open source contributor.


I can’t finance every single open source project in the world either (I am also an open source contributor but with very small libs).

Well said, accurate framing.

oh, yes, Trump famous for being held accountable.

He is politically accountable. The majority of the voting populace voted him back in and also voted for a majority of legislators whose central policy was worshipping the ground on which he stands. America is getting exactly what its people voted for, if you have a problem with that you have a problem with democracy itself.

In what way? What will happen to him? As far as I know, he is not standing for a re-election anyway, so exactly zero consequences for him.

To be clear, political accountability doesn't mean "you, one person out of over 300 million, get your desired outcome". It means the over 300 million people collectively decide what he is accountable for and what happens to him.

He can be removed from office by Congress after the midterms if the population shows up to vote for that happening. They won't, of course, because the American people as a whole do not want him removed from office, but the mechanism is there.

He will also probably stand for re-election, and if he does he probably will win despite it being in violation of the constitution, because by all accounts the American people collectively prefer the concept of Supreme Leader Trump to the scrap of toilet paper that is their constitution. That is the nature of democracy. It gives the people what they want, even if what they want is very stupid and harmful to themselves.


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