Well, another fine mess you've got us into, anti-bearded-terrorist mass hysteria. Surely no one could have anticipated a suicidal or ill pilot locking the other pilot out of the cockpit. A german pilot, so not a terrorist, of course. Need a beard for that.
Don't bother modding me down, Fox News enthusiasts, I can post again, and yet again.
Well, another fine mess you've got us into, anti-bearded-terrorist mass hysteria. Surely no one could have anticipated a suicidal or ill pilot locking the other pilot out of the cockpit. A german pilot, so not a terrorist, of course. Need a beard for that.
Don't bother modding me down, Fox News enthusiasts, I can post again.
Moral being religious, as that is the only argument against being paid for sex. And if you think all sex for pay is exploitation, there are a few thousand sex workers on Twitter who'd like a chat with you. And we can only say: any of Donald Trump's wives would fall under that definition.
If women could be legally paid for sex, young pretty women would be rich, even if they started out poor. Always would have been rich, if it were legal. Being illegal, then men can hide them off the radar of the police and explot them.
Keeping the practice underground CREATES a subservient secret prostitution class owned by criminal men. Also prevents women from having the power to monetize their bodies, if that were their wish, which has been utterly forbidden by men for thousands of years. Not for moral purposes - the trade exists anyway - but to KEEP THE WOMEN FROM BECOMING WEALTHY and instead diverting the profits to thuggish men who keep the women prisoner, away from the police. Women are not meant to be independently wealthy, esp if that money naturally belongs to men, as it should, and women should be subservient to men.
And ya get the bonus of treating the women like rapeable scum when you arrest them and put them in prison. Win-win for men.
If it were legal, women would become wealthy quite young and retire early or fund any life they'd like. Gadz, can't have that.
Aging IS an inherited collection of diseases and disorders we haven't needed to select out of the pool because we only need to be alive about 25-30 years to pass on our genes. And it is a horrible thing to inflict on a human being. You may think it a natural process, but that is because you haven't experienced it on the sharp end yet. I'd rather die on a timer, healthy and whole at the end, then to die of thousands of breakdowns over the same period.
You are young and healthy, naturally, about thirty years. About ten of those is you as an adult. The other fifty years you will die slowly, and in the end, horribly, disfigured and crippled by autoimmune attacks on your joints and breakdowns in your brain and organs. All naturally, because *you are supposed to have died at the age of 37*, because Genes Said So.
And cancer is a natural cause of death as well. Accept that nature wants you dead and skip all that sciencey treatment!:)
We can't design wings that work, and physically we couldn't lift off anyway. Birds are shaped as birds because that shape works. Ditto nightvision, all the other stuff. Can't do it.
We could get rid of acne, arthritis, bad teeth alignment, breast cancer tendencies, baldness (that's not hard), all the diseases that are transmitted by parents who dearly wish they didn't and pretend hard they don't.
Cosmetically, tall beautiful men with sharp jaws do have better lives on the whole than those who don't. Women who are smart, athletic, shapely, and have faces which sculptors long to carve do better in life as well. It would be a sad thing indeed if people used GM to edit out the stuff that doesn't help you socially and include things which do. But...
We do that anyway. Successful men, of whatever appearance, tend to have children with beautiful intelligent successful women. Beautiful intelligent successful women overwhelmingly mate and produce offspring with beautiful men who match their capabilities; let's not bother arguing it doesn't happen that way all the time. It does, and it shows in the makeup of wealthy corporations, wealthy suburbs, and top-flight universities and political life as well. Beautiful people marry beautiful people, make beautiful babies, and those babies go on to mate with people mostly like themselves. Those people are segregating into their own communities, both physically and virtually. It IS genetic engineering - we're not selecting for the best hunter or the best baby-maker, but for social success and physical appearance. CEOs don't marry homely janitors, etc. It's so intrinsic we've developed adaptive language to cover up what we're doing- dorks and poor losers versus cool, pretty and almost inevitably successful. Eh maybe letting people choose their kid's appearance is yet another selection process - the intelligent not-purty people will use the opportunity to prettify their kids vs just letting nature take its course, and so their kids will become more wealthy and powerful, and the cycle goes on, as it always has.
Embryo. Fetus. Baby. Three different things. The first has no brain. The second has yet not brain, but is usually illegal to terminate in later stages because of the fuzziness of the definition unless the mother is in danger (unlesss you live in Ireland, so, dead mother is fine, praise God). We don't experiment on any of those three. And the idea of the "unborn" is a cute trigger - but a zygote ain't an embryo ain't a fetus ain't a baby. But you are now including in your "unborn" category the not-yet-conceived! Well done. A fourth category, those not yet even a zygote, perhaps not even a spermatazoan or an ovum waiting in their respective chutes. Which logically renders your concept of the unborn = that-which-was-willed-by-God-to-be, doesn't it? The entire concept of anti-birth control is a religious one, a belief that man is getting in the way of God's will that a certain person be born at a certain time. And one must note, not a concept that was ever mentioned in your holy book. Ancient fertile crescent and mediterranean women used birth control, and God never found time to proscribe the practice. And abortion was usually done by stoning the baby's parents to death by mob (along with that sacred Unborn), or stabbing the mother and sacred Unborn to death with a pointy piece of metal, praise Yahweh, his will be done. And God commanded the heads of the babies of the current inhabitants of land the Israelites were passing by be dashed upon the rocks, if future Abrahamic real estate was at stake. Yet again, praise Yahweh. Thanks for playing.
We already subsidize the genetically modified offspring of people who are experimenting with reproduction by randomly mixing genes together. Those people are called "parents", and the results are pretty horrible. And we don't penalize people who have known genetic problems who insist on reproducting anyway. So. And idiots are making a lot of babies; in fact, they seem to make most of them, as idiots don't believe in limiting their numbers.
Leaving bad New Wave science fiction of the 50's-70's aside, we can go for this: limit the mods to removing dieases and disorders. Blue eyes isn't a disorder, but muscular distrophy is.
Yes it will, because of the law of unintended consequences. So then we would have to reiterate, and fix the new problem. There is no turning back, and the price for refusal to move is the continuation of horrific diseases that we could easily remove or cure.
The discovery of germs and infection directly created the human population boom that is currently destroying the ecosphere as we know it. If we still didn't wash our hands when we deliver a baby, women would still die from birthbed infections whil quite young, or suffer uterine damage sufficient to prevent future impregnation. When we started cleanliness regimes, we pretty much destroyed the natural world as we've known it for the last million years or so.
Fear of future consequences must be informed by rational risk analysis - math. The question must be answered properly - what is the risk -the actual numbers- of things that do go wrong, measured against the actual numbers -people who live in misery, costs paid, family life ruined- of people who have genetic defects. Right now, we've no data and cannot have data about the first set of numbers, which is what you are demanding to know. We do know the numbers of the second question.
As for genetic modification of crops. A few points. Almost all the food we eat was genetically modified, the old fashioned way, by humans. Curious fact: corn does not exist in nature any more. Corn cannot self-fertilize - humans have to do it. We modified the genome so much that the original is lost and the artificial is all that's left. That may seem bad, esp with the misunderstanding that fructose is somehow different and more deadly than sucrose, but the GM corn we grow, along with the GM wheat we developed the old fashioned way in the 1960's, bought enough breathing room that the population bomb didn't go off in a big enough way to kill off billions of people, as would have happened if we hadn't created those strains. The bomb is STILL ticking, and the population growth is accelerating again. We cannot have survived without the corn and wheat mods, and will not survive another generation- speaking worldwide, not just the western cultures- without more GM plants that can survive the upheavals to come. To stop iterating is to kill billions. It's that simple. We are no longer under nature's control. We are under our own.
Or EDS. Or diabetes. Or spinal bifida. Or congentital blindness. So many, many things can go away. So much agony, so many lives saved, both that of the victims and their families. And the resources we spend to research "treatment" to be sold at ruinous profit. The miracle fairy has arrived, and they want to shoot it in the head, or at least make themselves a lucrative profession of judging, for us, what we can and cannot cure, because Jesus or whatever. There ain't no discussion we can have. We either do it or we don't. "Discussion" is just a delaying tactic, as those who oppose GM will never let go of their delusions. Like abortion or birth control, those who believe it shouldn't happen will never back down, and will do anything up to and including shooting doctors in the head to stop it.
Ask people who try to download movies how effective American law can be. Doors are being kicked down all over the world - and after the new secretly negotiated treaty is slammed up our collective Terran ani, watching Dobie Gillis illegally will subject you prison time all over the planet. When Americans get Jesus about their notions, armored goons move in all over the world. Genetic modification will be no exception (except in cases of corporate profit, of course).
I once thought Bob Heinlein was a bit too cynical in "Friday", a world of the near future where designed humans - optimized for health, etc. - were considered subhuman ungodly creatures that were trained from birth to be subordinate to the point where Friday was trained to be a prostitute from birth. And once again, Grandfather knew his fellow Missourans well - and I must move my needle downwards again. A baby made in a back seat by two morons who can't find a condom is superior, "ethically" speaking, to a baby with maladapted genes removed. I'm old enough to recall the moment where the "Genetic Ethics" profession was born. I believe it was when Dolly the sheep was born, the first mammalian clone that made it out of the chute alive. The "ethics" chair was created that week, and self-appointed experts at once popped up on TV to tell us what was right and what was wrong. The nature of journalists embraces the idea of the professional expert, so these carpetbaggers hopped up to take charge. Most of the "ethicsists" are fundamental christian types or outright clergy, I'd guess from my Heinlein-trained cynical mind, as most media censors are. I do not take orders from them.
We perform a human genome modification every time we make a baby. The results are not spectacularly successful; we've an enormous number of genetic defects.
Time to kick the dice bag away, and let humans sort it out instead of god. Modify away. No more diabetes. No more lupus. No more EDS. Let it end. Human evolution is now in our own hands.
Some people won't identify as either man or woman, some are in transition, whatever. Whatever word one uses, a correction will follow."guys" was a gender neutral term when I was growing up, mostly because one-syllable tends to win the usage game.
That and it doesn't exist. If it existed, and this goes for thorium reactors too, I'd be fine with it. Better than setting all the buried forests of the ancient world on fire.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, another fine mess you've got us into, anti-bearded-terrorist mass hysteria. Surely no one could have anticipated a suicidal or ill pilot locking the other pilot out of the cockpit. A german pilot, so not a terrorist, of course. Need a beard for that.
Don't bother modding me down, Fox News enthusiasts, I can post again, and yet again.
Well, another fine mess you've got us into, anti-bearded-terrorist mass hysteria. Surely no one could have anticipated a suicidal or ill pilot locking the other pilot out of the cockpit. A german pilot, so not a terrorist, of course. Need a beard for that.
Don't bother modding me down, Fox News enthusiasts, I can post again.
Discard the broken embryo? Yes.
Frank Herbert's "The White Plague". Damned scary and plausible, not TV sci-fi. There are many others. Ignore Hollywood - aint no science in that SF.
Terry Pratchett certainly would have volunteered. But now he's dead.
Moral being religious, as that is the only argument against being paid for sex. And if you think all sex for pay is exploitation, there are a few thousand sex workers on Twitter who'd like a chat with you. And we can only say: any of Donald Trump's wives would fall under that definition.
If women could be legally paid for sex, young pretty women would be rich, even if they started out poor. Always would have been rich, if it were legal. Being illegal, then men can hide them off the radar of the police and explot them.
Keeping the practice underground CREATES a subservient secret prostitution class owned by criminal men. Also prevents women from having the power to monetize their bodies, if that were their wish, which has been utterly forbidden by men for thousands of years. Not for moral purposes - the trade exists anyway - but to KEEP THE WOMEN FROM BECOMING WEALTHY and instead diverting the profits to thuggish men who keep the women prisoner, away from the police. Women are not meant to be independently wealthy, esp if that money naturally belongs to men, as it should, and women should be subservient to men.
And ya get the bonus of treating the women like rapeable scum when you arrest them and put them in prison. Win-win for men.
If it were legal, women would become wealthy quite young and retire early or fund any life they'd like. Gadz, can't have that.
If everyone is pretty, then no one is. Which would be kind of refreshing.
Aging IS an inherited collection of diseases and disorders we haven't needed to select out of the pool because we only need to be alive about 25-30 years to pass on our genes. And it is a horrible thing to inflict on a human being. You may think it a natural process, but that is because you haven't experienced it on the sharp end yet. I'd rather die on a timer, healthy and whole at the end, then to die of thousands of breakdowns over the same period.
You are young and healthy, naturally, about thirty years. About ten of those is you as an adult. The other fifty years you will die slowly, and in the end, horribly, disfigured and crippled by autoimmune attacks on your joints and breakdowns in your brain and organs. All naturally, because *you are supposed to have died at the age of 37*, because Genes Said So.
And cancer is a natural cause of death as well. Accept that nature wants you dead and skip all that sciencey treatment! :)
We can't design wings that work, and physically we couldn't lift off anyway. Birds are shaped as birds because that shape works. Ditto nightvision, all the other stuff. Can't do it.
We could get rid of acne, arthritis, bad teeth alignment, breast cancer tendencies, baldness (that's not hard), all the diseases that are transmitted by parents who dearly wish they didn't and pretend hard they don't.
Cosmetically, tall beautiful men with sharp jaws do have better lives on the whole than those who don't. Women who are smart, athletic, shapely, and have faces which sculptors long to carve do better in life as well. It would be a sad thing indeed if people used GM to edit out the stuff that doesn't help you socially and include things which do. But...
We do that anyway. Successful men, of whatever appearance, tend to have children with beautiful intelligent successful women. Beautiful intelligent successful women overwhelmingly mate and produce offspring with beautiful men who match their capabilities; let's not bother arguing it doesn't happen that way all the time. It does, and it shows in the makeup of wealthy corporations, wealthy suburbs, and top-flight universities and political life as well. Beautiful people marry beautiful people, make beautiful babies, and those babies go on to mate with people mostly like themselves. Those people are segregating into their own communities, both physically and virtually. It IS genetic engineering - we're not selecting for the best hunter or the best baby-maker, but for social success and physical appearance. CEOs don't marry homely janitors, etc. It's so intrinsic we've developed adaptive language to cover up what we're doing- dorks and poor losers versus cool, pretty and almost inevitably successful. Eh maybe letting people choose their kid's appearance is yet another selection process - the intelligent not-purty people will use the opportunity to prettify their kids vs just letting nature take its course, and so their kids will become more wealthy and powerful, and the cycle goes on, as it always has.
Embryo. Fetus. Baby. Three different things. The first has no brain. The second has yet not brain, but is usually illegal to terminate in later stages because of the fuzziness of the definition unless the mother is in danger (unlesss you live in Ireland, so, dead mother is fine, praise God). We don't experiment on any of those three. And the idea of the "unborn" is a cute trigger - but a zygote ain't an embryo ain't a fetus ain't a baby. But you are now including in your "unborn" category the not-yet-conceived! Well done. A fourth category, those not yet even a zygote, perhaps not even a spermatazoan or an ovum waiting in their respective chutes. Which logically renders your concept of the unborn = that-which-was-willed-by-God-to-be, doesn't it? The entire concept of anti-birth control is a religious one, a belief that man is getting in the way of God's will that a certain person be born at a certain time. And one must note, not a concept that was ever mentioned in your holy book. Ancient fertile crescent and mediterranean women used birth control, and God never found time to proscribe the practice. And abortion was usually done by stoning the baby's parents to death by mob (along with that sacred Unborn), or stabbing the mother and sacred Unborn to death with a pointy piece of metal, praise Yahweh, his will be done. And God commanded the heads of the babies of the current inhabitants of land the Israelites were passing by be dashed upon the rocks, if future Abrahamic real estate was at stake. Yet again, praise Yahweh.
Thanks for playing.
How then?
We already subsidize the genetically modified offspring of people who are experimenting with reproduction by randomly mixing genes together. Those people are called "parents", and the results are pretty horrible. And we don't penalize people who have known genetic problems who insist on reproducting anyway. So. And idiots are making a lot of babies; in fact, they seem to make most of them, as idiots don't believe in limiting their numbers.
Leaving bad New Wave science fiction of the 50's-70's aside, we can go for this: limit the mods to removing dieases and disorders. Blue eyes isn't a disorder, but muscular distrophy is.
You already had that responsiblity. The details are lawyerly nonsense.
We have been able to select gender for quite a while.
Why not? When I'm 80, no one will want me for anything else. Hack away, I'll be dead soon anyway.
Amen, brother Alec.
Yes it will, because of the law of unintended consequences. So then we would have to reiterate, and fix the new problem. There is no turning back, and the price for refusal to move is the continuation of horrific diseases that we could easily remove or cure.
The discovery of germs and infection directly created the human population boom that is currently destroying the ecosphere as we know it. If we still didn't wash our hands when we deliver a baby, women would still die from birthbed infections whil quite young, or suffer uterine damage sufficient to prevent future impregnation. When we started cleanliness regimes, we pretty much destroyed the natural world as we've known it for the last million years or so.
Fear of future consequences must be informed by rational risk analysis - math. The question must be answered properly - what is the risk -the actual numbers- of things that do go wrong, measured against the actual numbers -people who live in misery, costs paid, family life ruined- of people who have genetic defects. Right now, we've no data and cannot have data about the first set of numbers, which is what you are demanding to know. We do know the numbers of the second question.
As for genetic modification of crops. A few points. Almost all the food we eat was genetically modified, the old fashioned way, by humans. Curious fact: corn does not exist in nature any more. Corn cannot self-fertilize - humans have to do it. We modified the genome so much that the original is lost and the artificial is all that's left. That may seem bad, esp with the misunderstanding that fructose is somehow different and more deadly than sucrose, but the GM corn we grow, along with the GM wheat we developed the old fashioned way in the 1960's, bought enough breathing room that the population bomb didn't go off in a big enough way to kill off billions of people, as would have happened if we hadn't created those strains. The bomb is STILL ticking, and the population growth is accelerating again. We cannot have survived without the corn and wheat mods, and will not survive another generation- speaking worldwide, not just the western cultures- without more GM plants that can survive the upheavals to come. To stop iterating is to kill billions. It's that simple. We are no longer under nature's control. We are under our own.
Or EDS. Or diabetes. Or spinal bifida. Or congentital blindness. So many, many things can go away. So much agony, so many lives saved, both that of the victims and their families. And the resources we spend to research "treatment" to be sold at ruinous profit. The miracle fairy has arrived, and they want to shoot it in the head, or at least make themselves a lucrative profession of judging, for us, what we can and cannot cure, because Jesus or whatever.
There ain't no discussion we can have. We either do it or we don't. "Discussion" is just a delaying tactic, as those who oppose GM will never let go of their delusions. Like abortion or birth control, those who believe it shouldn't happen will never back down, and will do anything up to and including shooting doctors in the head to stop it.
Ask people who try to download movies how effective American law can be. Doors are being kicked down all over the world - and after the new secretly negotiated treaty is slammed up our collective Terran ani, watching Dobie Gillis illegally will subject you prison time all over the planet. When Americans get Jesus about their notions, armored goons move in all over the world. Genetic modification will be no exception (except in cases of corporate profit, of course).
I once thought Bob Heinlein was a bit too cynical in "Friday", a world of the near future where designed humans - optimized for health, etc. - were considered subhuman ungodly creatures that were trained from birth to be subordinate to the point where Friday was trained to be a prostitute from birth. And once again, Grandfather knew his fellow Missourans well - and I must move my needle downwards again. A baby made in a back seat by two morons who can't find a condom is superior, "ethically" speaking, to a baby with maladapted genes removed.
I'm old enough to recall the moment where the "Genetic Ethics" profession was born. I believe it was when Dolly the sheep was born, the first mammalian clone that made it out of the chute alive. The "ethics" chair was created that week, and self-appointed experts at once popped up on TV to tell us what was right and what was wrong. The nature of journalists embraces the idea of the professional expert, so these carpetbaggers hopped up to take charge.
Most of the "ethicsists" are fundamental christian types or outright clergy, I'd guess from my Heinlein-trained cynical mind, as most media censors are. I do not take orders from them.
We perform a human genome modification every time we make a baby. The results are not spectacularly successful; we've an enormous number of genetic defects.
Time to kick the dice bag away, and let humans sort it out instead of god. Modify away. No more diabetes. No more lupus. No more EDS. Let it end. Human evolution is now in our own hands.
Some people won't identify as either man or woman, some are in transition, whatever. Whatever word one uses, a correction will follow."guys" was a gender neutral term when I was growing up, mostly because one-syllable tends to win the usage game.
Germany is halfway converted to solar. It works. QED
That and it doesn't exist. If it existed, and this goes for thorium reactors too, I'd be fine with it. Better than setting all the buried forests of the ancient world on fire.
"smaller amounts of mass with far more velocity to counter the energy of the incoming rock", I meant to say. Edit went wrong.