“Not bad.” He burped, burped again. “Fizzy, though?”
“Because it’s fast acting. It was ditch water an hour ago. We sieved it, brought it up to room temp, dumped in the culture. It’s live, too—add some precursor, it’ll come back. Survives in your urine. Just save some, you want to make more.”
“Communist beer?” Hubert, Etc said. The best bon mot he could scrounge.
He was better when he had time to think.
“Nazdarovya.” She clicked her cup against his and drained it, loosing a bone rattling belch when she finished. She gave her chest a thump and scared out smaller burps, refilled the glass.
“If it comes out in pee,” Hubert, Etc said, “what happens if someone adds the precursor to the sewers? Will it turn to beer?”
She gave him a look of adolescent scorn. “That would be stupid. Once it’s diluted it can’t metabolize precursor. Flush and it’s just pee. The critters die in an hour or two, so a latrine won’t turn into a reservoir of long lived existential threats to the water supply. It’s just beer.” Burp. “Fizzy beer.”
Hubert, Etc sipped. It was really good. Didn’t taste like piss at all. “All beer is rented, right?” he said.
“Most beer is rented. This is free. You know: ‘free as in free beer.’” She drank half the cup, spilling into her beard. It beaded on the crinkly refugee stuff. “You don’t come to a lot of Communist parties.”
Excerpt from “Walkaway” - Cory Doctorow
Opisek@lemmy.world 6 days ago
People can sell, idk—example—strawberries but they don’t have a “copyright” to them (we will not delve into the discussion of copyright genome sequences here). Unfortunately, copyright not being applicable doesn’t make things free when we look at the existing market.
Magnum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Hello, I’m here to dive into the discussion of copyright genome sequences