May 27, 2016 at 04:02AM

Today I Learned: 1) I found myself, earlier today, on Monsanto's "Myths about Monsanto" webpage. This led me to look up some information about a rather famous case of Monsanto's, which I'd bet you've heard of but I'd also bet you don't know the full story about -- Monsanto vs. Percy Schmeiser. This is the farmer that Monsanto sued when some of Monsanto's GM strain drifted over into the farmer's field and contaminated his crop. At least, that's what happened according to anti-GMO activists and Fellows Posting On The Internet. It seems that's not quite what happened. The real story is more complicated, and a lot more interesting. Percy Schmeiser had a canola farm nearby to some farmers who grew Monsanto crops with resistance to glyphosate, better known as Roundup. One day, he noticed that some crops he'd sprayed with roundup to clear them out hadn't entirely died. Suspicious, Schmeiser cordoned off one of his fields and sprayed the whole thing with roundup. About half of it died. The other half was roundup-proof. So the first crazy thing about this incident is that fifty percent number. Schmeiser didn't just have a little contamination -- HALF OF HIS CROP was Monsanto-derived, through no fault of his own. This is kind of crazy, but to be perfectly clear, Monsanto *did not* sue him for having GM crops on his field without permission. They sued him for what he did next. What he did next was to harvest the remaining canola plants off of the Roundup-ed plot, which he now knew were Monsanto-strain canola plants. He stored the seeds from those crops, then planted them on a bunch of fields the next planting season. When Monsanto found out, they brought a suit against Schmeiser for knowingly and intentionally planting their strain without permission or lease. Schmeiser, in his defense, argued that since the seeds were on his property, through no illegal action of his own, they were his to use as he saw fit. Monsanto argued that since the seeds were Monsanto intellectual property and Schmeiser had willfully used them without permission, Schmeiser had violated Monsanto's intellectual property. The court ruled 5-4 in favor of Monsanto. The case has since been appealed multiple times, and Monsanto has won every time. So Monsanto isn't quite the ridiculously evil caricature that the usual story makes them out to be. They kind of have a point -- Schmeiser went through a fair amount of effort to isolate the GM strain in his fields (which he hadn't wanted in the first place, or at least not wanted to pay for) and then intentionally used them in his fields. Then again, it's really weird to me that Monsanto can say who does and doesn't use their seeds, even multiple generations after they were purchased. What do you think of this story? 2) While I'm on topic of Monsanto, today I learned that Monsanto does not sell, and has never sold, plants with a "terminator" gene of any kind that would make them sterile. They researched such a technology, and decided not to pursue it due to public outcry, despite the fact that it would a) probably make them a ton of money and b) prevent un-wanted spread of Monsanto's GMO strains. 3) It's been a while since I've read up what's going on in EVE Online*, so today I did that. The newest news in EVE Online is that there's been a massive turnover of the biggest player. A year ago, one of the bigger (player-controlled) factions was The Imperium, which apparently gained dominance through a combination of ruthlessness, sheer wealth, and cunning diplomacy. Not, however, through the actual ability to hold territory -- the leader of the Imperium, named "The Mittani" in-game, has plainly said that the Imperium was tremendously over-stretched for about half a year, but nobody dared challenge them because, fraknly, they *looked* unassailable. That changed about two months ago when a group of bankers calling themselves Moneybadger Coalition sent a war fleet into Imperium space. For the most part, the Imperium liquidated their considerable assets, pulled out with tons and tons of money, and left. There's still some fighting going on, but the Imperium is *definitely* not the dominant power in the Eve Online universe anymore. Moneybadger Coalition isn't just bold. They have a *lot* of in-universe money. One of the heads of Moneybadger Coalition has something like 11 trillion ISK in his in-game account, which is worth about $300,000 USD real-world. That's enough money to personally bankroll the largest battle EVE online has ever seen. How did he get so rich? Gambling. Specifically, he (and some other big EVE bankers) own a third-party website called "I Want ISK", in which players can gamble their EVE Online ISKs. The website, of course, skims off a profit. It's been an enormously successful venture, and frankly nobody in the game really knows how to counter that kind of cash flow. This also raises some ethical and legal issues... there's no age control on EVE online, or on I Want ISK, so the whole system might be subsidizing, for example, child gambling, or gambling in states where it would not normally be legal (and in fact, might not be). EVE Online continues to surprise me. *For the uninitiated, EVE Online is an MMORPG set in a spacefaring empire of the far future. It is most noted for its almost-completely-player-driven economy, the massively complex real-world, player-run organizations that run things, and the immense amounts of time required to play. It was created by Iclandic company CCP Games, partly to be a game and partly to be a controlled experimental setting for economics geeks. So far, it has done pretty well at both.