This is already happening. There’s a company who copyrighted a breed of pineapple. They charge $400 for said pineapple and the company intentionally chops the top completely off, so that it cannot be propagated. Normally, you can take the green part of a pineapple, put it in the ground, and a few years later you’ll have a new pineapple. It’s ridiculous.
Woot! I’ve been poor all my life, so I have experience gardening and foraging. I know the difference between poison hemlock and wild carrot, I can identify herbs that can heal, I know how to choose the best trees for food from syrup to bark bread, and I know which fruits and veggies grow best in which area
I’m also a mortician, so went through 4 years of INTENSE medical education, fighting against the students trying to become doctors. (I hate bell curves) I can cleanly dissect a body, know about ailments/diseases/biohazards, I’m not afraid of blood or wounds, can stitch up lacerations, and know which parts of the body to hit and bring an enemy down… probably should have led with that
We took a trip to Chicago and decided to go to Navy Pier. Traffic was basically gridlocked and the car behind us was not happy that my friend didn’t break the law and block an intersection. After the light turned green, the idiot took his massive, shiny, brand new, white pickup truck onto the SIDEWALK to cut in front of us.
When we got to the parking garage, there was a HUGE sign saying the clearance was 6ft 3in and tall vehicles needed to go to a different garage. The idiot didn’t read it and, even with the windows shut, we heard the screeching and scraping of his roof on the top of the structure.
The best part was watching him back out, hearing more scraping, seeing his surprised pikachu face, and the disappointment on the face of the woman in the passenger seat.
Tech is better, but content is worse. I have a smart TV from 2014 that I’m gonna use until it’s dead. When a new technology comes out, it’s all about gaining market trust, so the product is built to last and has cool features (generally) without the ads and data theft. My TV doesn’t play ads, but still has all the tech I need. Anything it can’t do, my PS4 can.
Most are specially bred to produce specific styles of fresh produce, like bananas, but this was the first company I’d heard of that removed the ability to propagate. (Aside from seedless stuff like watermelon/grapes) You can go to Japan and get one of the hundred dollar strawberries and you could technically keep the seeds. Lettuce, onion, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, berries, bananas, ginger, potatoes, corn; almost everything can grow from leftover cooking scraps. Plants are resilient.
Chopping the top off, is capitalism at its worst. I can understand not allowing another company to sell the genetically modified produce, but cutting off the top lowers the shelf life and makes it impossible to re-grow. It’s pure greed… especially when it can take 3+ years for a pineapple to produce more fruit.