I think you got that exactly right. It's a massive reduction in workforce without anyone actually getting handed a pink slip, and all the "death knell" comments that's likely to generate. Since these are "resignations" and not severances, there is no need for the traditional severance package, which saves further money. Plus, I bet that the remote workers really were less productive than their salary could justify. I mean, come on, if you worked for Yahoo, in your slippers and bathrobe, would you be highly motivated in how you do your job?
But isn't that par for the course? I mean, whenever the frame rate exceeds the refresh rate of the monitor, you're using resources to render literally invisible frames. Yet it's my impressions that games/drivers will still render those frames. Isn't that right? I would appreciate games that save me energy, or used those resources to make better AI decisions, etc.
So we live in an age when there is no privacy. That sucks. But I don't very much mind living in an age without real governmental secrecy. I think that all the major governments can basically see each other's underpants, and I think that makes everyone feel safer. Also, it very much disincentivises massive villainous plots, because by default, you should expect them to be discovered. I think it's actually making us safer.
Sure, your genes have a lot to do with how you look. That's why identical twins look so similar. However, we are absurdly far from being able deduce facial features from genes. Even in the linked article, most of the information in the Neandrathal reconstruction came from discovered bone shapes. What did we learn from the genes? Maybe something about skin pigment and possibly hair color. That's it. Nothing about the facial structure came from the genetic information. So any fantasies about pouring genetic material into a box and then finding a corresponding picture of a face on a monitor... that will probably be a fantasy forever.
The Presto rendering engine had some pretty decent performance, and was often the fastest among the graphical browsers. If it's being abandoned, wouldn't it be nice if it were made available as open source? Webkit isn't the right tool for every occasion. I hate to see something so good just die.
If you had a professor who went through 3+ rewrite iterations with you with that short of a turnaround time, he's a hero. I wish that all college students had this kind of class. Alas, that's a very labor-intensive thing to do. I don't think that technology would improve the turnaround time, since the bottleneck is clearly the human element. If a writing assignment with detailed comments has a turnaround time of less than a week, you can bet that the professor did little on those days, except drink coffee, write comments and curse the sloppy sentences of his students.
I know that HURD has been the butt of our jokes for a while. Even if you get it to run, it's painfully slow. However, these problems are not inherent to the microkernel architecture, since QNX is lightning fast and is very much microkernel-based. The downfall of HURD was that the processes kept the CPU occupied with message passing rather than actually running programs. QNX figured out how to minimize these overheards. I can be done. RIM (now "Blackberry") bought QNX and closed the source code, which is sad, but it hasn't destroyed the sound rationalle for microkernels.
I thought the same thing, and then I thought: Not Niven, he wouldn't write something so dumb. So I googled and found this:
In Larry Niven's World Out of Time, somebody built one very big fusion ramscoop and dropped it into Uranus' atmosphere. It grabbed compressed hydrogen on the way down, then "bounced" back up to the upper atmosphere where it fired it all off in a directed fusion blast, which pushed it back down into the lower atmosphere where the whole process was repeated. Uranus was thus turned into a planetary gravity tug which was used to move Earth and Mars around (sun was heating up, I think -- it's been a few years).
(source) I don't think that would pass proper physics audit, but... there have been stupider ideas in scifi books.
You drop the temperature and all that atmosphere will come raining/snowing down. Probably the best way to drop the temperature is to unfurl a very large, semi-permiable membrane at the liberation point between Venus and the sun, to reduce the amount of solar flux reaching the surface. Eventually, we could do all that shading with a gigantic array of solar panels at L2 - just large enough so that the solar flux hitting the surface of Venus is the same amount as what hits the Earth (this requires 50% coverage). Yes, the long days and nights would be annoying, but I'm sure we'd adapt to it quickly.
Maybe. But there will also be much less investment in further density improvements. Every dying technology reaches a price minimum, after which point the price actually increases. Even though memory is cheap, a new stick of DDR costs more now than the same stick would have cost five years ago, even though the demand was much higher then. That's simply because manufacturers lost all incentive to produce DDR because of the low demand. The same thing could happen to hard drives. You'll know we're in trouble when factories start scaling back production, closing or retooling for the manufacture of something else. We're not there yet, but we soon might be.
I had a similar idea - not one involving jail, but a conditional vow of lifetime poverty and lifetime probation. It would work something like this: Anyone in a "position of large scale responsibility" would be required to sign a personal pledge of accountability. If you don't sign it, you can't serve in that position - find another job! Signing it releases the government to seize all of your domestic and foreign assets (from yachts to ranches to ipods) and all future earnings, minus an allowance equal to the current level of welfare + food stamps, in case of a "breach of trust" - which would be written up by lawyers to be triggered by all and only willful acts of corruption. The government would also pay for a comfortable, section-8-type apartment. The condition of the probation would be: Permanent GPS tracking of whereabouts, and a ban on all travel outside the country. This would all be in addition to criminal sanctions, if any apply. The toughest thing about this would be writing up the trigger clause so that it's fair, which is to say: not easy to trigger by a politically-motivated witch-hunt, but automatically triggered by criminal abuse of the responsibility that comes with the position.
Once these things got ironed out, the idea would be that every high-ranking elected would also be required by law to sign the pledge of accountability in order to serve in their position. Anyone deterred from public office by this is not someone we want as a mayor or a senator anyway. Bankers in banks that are FDIC-insured would also sign the pledge as a condition of insurance. Just imagine how much better we would feel about the people who run our country if we knew that if they fail us, they get knocked off their high horse? And the point is, signing the pledge would be voluntary. Most jobs wouldn't require it, only jobs where you have the potential of doing great harm. Somehow I feel like it would be at least a partial filter against the worst of the scum.
That's a pretty brave test to run. It's like smearing blood on plastic fish, and holding it in front of a shark to see if it bites down on it.
I mean, your innocence is obvious and should be trivially easy to prove. My first reaction - "I'd never try that with the sort of prosecutors and dirty legal practices of today" - maybe indicates that I've lost a lot of faith in our justice system, and adopted the policy of keeping my head down to avoid trouble. But we all know that a population with this sort of attitude is most susceptible to tyranny, so kudos to you, for waving that bloody fish in front of the hungry shark!
But all this outsourcing has a strong political component. You see, Boeing gets a lot of government money, even for their commercial operations. But the money only keeps coming from the feds if you get them something in return! They will vote to fund your plane, but only if they can bring pork back to their deserving district. So 100 congressmen can go home and say they are responsible for bringing high-paying jobs into their district. That's why Boeing parts are made in so many places. It makes no sense in terms of project management or engineering. It only makes sense politically.
I wonder what would happen if we account for all the other goods the urbanite consumes, the emissions for their transportation, etc.
I suppose you're free to wonder, but this is actually pretty easy to measure, and it has been measured my many different studies. All of them have the same result: If a person moves to a city, all of the harmful pollution for which they are responsible decreases dramatically: They use less energy for heating/air conditioning, they use far less for transportation, it takes less energy to ship goods to them, they recycle more, they are far more economically and culturally productive per unit of consumed energy.
Since you're worried about dangers posed by population: people in cities make fewer babies. This effect is quite dramatic. They also have higher IQs. On basically every measure of personal environmental impact, it's the rural people that are the assholes and urban people that are the saints.
How do those Europeans do it - managing to lower Europe's temperatures with their waste heat? Why can't we do that?
On a more serious note, we all know that man-made stuff affects weather patters, but every large natural thing affects weather patterns as well. The weather is easy to affect, but what we should care about is not whether we affect the weather, but whether we do harm. Too many people run these together.
What happened to the spirit of "shut up and build it"? Google is offering him resources, support, and data to mine. We have to just admit that we don't know enough to predict exactly what this kind of thing will be able to do. I can bet it will disappoint us in some ways and impress us in others. If it works according to Kurzweil's expectations, it will be a huge win for Google. If not, they will allocate all that computing power to other uses and call it a lesson learned. They have enough wisdom to allocate resources to projects with a high chance of failure. This might be one of them, but that's a good sign for Google.
I wonder if the people who were writing KDE back in the 90's ever suspected that their code would make it so far! If they heard 15 years ago that some Microsoft MVP would be talking about replacing the rendering engine of IE with the rendering engine from Konqueror, they would have shit themselves.
When I read that rant, I thought - with relief - that Linus has still got it. After all these years, he still cares about the quality of the code that carries his name. If he had become old and kindly, you know that will be the end of Linux as the racehorse OS of modern computing. I'm also glad that Linus doesn't take time out to reformulate his thoughts into boardroom talk, beginning with "Dear Mauro, you know that I am grateful for the many contributions you have made to the kernel project over the years. However, I can't help but think that you did not choose the best way of handling the latest matter of the userspace bug, blah blah blah..."
Linus was - rightfully - seething. Why mask that under politeness? Don't people realize that it's actually a great benefit to have a boss that can clearly display a wide range of sincere attitudes with his language? If he uses the same tone to call out simple mistakes and inexcusable, irresponsible behavior, how are his subordinates supposed to feel comfortable with the knowledge of where they stand? Might they not take his future calm words and read into them a seething attitude, carefully masked? That is far from an improvement.
I can't help but think that people who object to Linus's behavior would in general prefer to let quality suffer rather than to see feathers ruffled. I'm glad that Linus sees matters differently.
Re:It's just training for future geekery
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
·
· Score: 1
LEGO are big-time shooting themselves in the foot by this behavior. Some plastic-injection company in China should just start making 5-gallon buckets of LEGO-compatible standard bricks for rock-bottom prices. That would make a much better present, imho, than a Lord of the Rings LEGO set, and it would probably be about the same price.
"[I]s it really feasible, desirable or even affordable for the majority of Earth's population?"
Clearly, no. But this is beside the point. Maybe it will be one day. And in the much nearer future, it will be just the thing we will turn to because we start having ethical problems with renting the wombs of poor women in India who presently serve as surrogates for fertility-challenged rich couples.
But for me, the real sci-fi potential of this technology is in interstellar colonization. The idea is that frozen genetic material can survive a long trip much better than any living organism, especially if we're talking about slow trips that might take centuries. However, with proper shielding and error control, a lab that can produce artificial wombs and gestate babies should be much easier, technologically. I'm guessing that by the end of this century, all the pieces will be in place: An artificial womb, an AI that can operate it, correct preservation techniques, and an AI parenting program that does a more ethical job of parenting that many human parents who are still allowed to keep their kids. That, together with AI school, basically makes for a highly portable civilization reproduction package. Only the first generation would need to be raised by pure technology, although I'm sure that since they have the technology, they would want to keep using it to grow the size of the colony and add to their genetic diversity.
Hey, sometimes I'm asked to teach ethics at a largish public university. I wouldn't call myself an ethicist, but can smell the bullshit on this from a mile away. First of all, every ethicist, along with every moderately educated person, should be aware of the genetic fallacy - which is that the origin or original purpose of something is irrelevant to what ought to be done with it. So what if these drugs were made to treat impairments? What relevance does that have to what should be done with them? Second, they act like pharmaceuticals should only be given to people "in need" - but what does this mean? Just in what sense do men "need" Viagra and women need birth control? I strongly support giving access to everyone who wants these drugs, but let's not pretend that they're being distributed on the basis of need. Their role is to enable lifestyle choices, not to remedy a need. And that's what makes them good things. We on Slashdot know very well that you don't need to fuck, ever.
I definitely have an ethical problem with sports doping, but that's because it's an unsafe practice that should be contained for the sake of the health of the athletes. If Adderall turns out to be similarly dangerous, I say that the ethical argument is over. But the interesting case would be if it (or its better successors) turn out to be acceptably safe - like caffeine is - and also measurably effective. Then the question of fairness comes up: Undrugged people will be at a disadvantage. Then again, uneducated people are very much at a disadvantage. Education is the most important personal enhancement you can obtain, and it's not cheap, nor accessible to all. Yet this would be a strange reason to ban it. Some people might complain that they are in an unfair competition because their competitors have Ph.D's in science - a sort of juicing. But that would be very silly. I certainly think that the Adderall gap is much easier and cheaper to close than the education gap, so this "unfair advantage" argument also smells like crap to me. If I had a worry about this drug scenario, it would be that unscrupulous companies would demand that their employees are doped up with enhancers when they're on the clock. That would be unfortunate. But then again, I don't think that many people would take such a job, and those that do would be entitled to a higher compensation. We already have the concept of hazard pay, and this kind of an office job would still be less dangerous than, say, underwater welding. In general, it seems like these so-called ethicists are just fishing for reasons to be luddites, and their fishing skills are are rather poor.
Insofar as realistic-scale research on any geoengineering processes are never going to be allowed, maybe this kinds of illegal stuff is the only way to find out what works and what won't. As the writeup correctly said, we just don't know what kind of effect this will have on oceanic oxygen levels. And for another thing, we don't really know what effect this will have on the salmon either. One thing that I'm happy about: Now we're at least about to find out! Since somebody did this, I hope that a flock of oceanologists flock to the site and measure the shit out of it. Yeah, it's not an experiment we wanted or approve of, but we might as well make a bit of lemonade out of these lemons!
If you're right - and it sounds plausible - then tilapia is the most guilt-free fish that you can get in the supermarket. Not only does it consume resources that would otherwise be wasted; it actually provides an environmental service as well. Now also feeding them pig shit, that's disgusting. However, all the dangers mentioned sound merely potential. Can salmonella, for example, be transmitted through frozen tilapia to humans? Has anyone been actually harmed by pigshit tilapia? If the tilapia is a wonderous creature that can transform dangerous shit into delicious, healthy, protein-rich meat, maybe we should call that a giant win for both people and the environment!
Slashdot Mirror
I think you got that exactly right. It's a massive reduction in workforce without anyone actually getting handed a pink slip, and all the "death knell" comments that's likely to generate. Since these are "resignations" and not severances, there is no need for the traditional severance package, which saves further money. Plus, I bet that the remote workers really were less productive than their salary could justify. I mean, come on, if you worked for Yahoo, in your slippers and bathrobe, would you be highly motivated in how you do your job?
But isn't that par for the course? I mean, whenever the frame rate exceeds the refresh rate of the monitor, you're using resources to render literally invisible frames. Yet it's my impressions that games/drivers will still render those frames. Isn't that right? I would appreciate games that save me energy, or used those resources to make better AI decisions, etc.
So we live in an age when there is no privacy. That sucks. But I don't very much mind living in an age without real governmental secrecy. I think that all the major governments can basically see each other's underpants, and I think that makes everyone feel safer. Also, it very much disincentivises massive villainous plots, because by default, you should expect them to be discovered. I think it's actually making us safer.
Sure, your genes have a lot to do with how you look. That's why identical twins look so similar. However, we are absurdly far from being able deduce facial features from genes. Even in the linked article, most of the information in the Neandrathal reconstruction came from discovered bone shapes. What did we learn from the genes? Maybe something about skin pigment and possibly hair color. That's it. Nothing about the facial structure came from the genetic information. So any fantasies about pouring genetic material into a box and then finding a corresponding picture of a face on a monitor... that will probably be a fantasy forever.
The Presto rendering engine had some pretty decent performance, and was often the fastest among the graphical browsers. If it's being abandoned, wouldn't it be nice if it were made available as open source? Webkit isn't the right tool for every occasion. I hate to see something so good just die.
If you had a professor who went through 3+ rewrite iterations with you with that short of a turnaround time, he's a hero. I wish that all college students had this kind of class. Alas, that's a very labor-intensive thing to do. I don't think that technology would improve the turnaround time, since the bottleneck is clearly the human element. If a writing assignment with detailed comments has a turnaround time of less than a week, you can bet that the professor did little on those days, except drink coffee, write comments and curse the sloppy sentences of his students.
I know that HURD has been the butt of our jokes for a while. Even if you get it to run, it's painfully slow. However, these problems are not inherent to the microkernel architecture, since QNX is lightning fast and is very much microkernel-based. The downfall of HURD was that the processes kept the CPU occupied with message passing rather than actually running programs. QNX figured out how to minimize these overheards. I can be done. RIM (now "Blackberry") bought QNX and closed the source code, which is sad, but it hasn't destroyed the sound rationalle for microkernels.
I thought the same thing, and then I thought: Not Niven, he wouldn't write something so dumb. So I googled and found this:
In Larry Niven's World Out of Time, somebody built one very big fusion ramscoop and dropped it into Uranus' atmosphere. It grabbed compressed hydrogen on the way down, then "bounced" back up to the upper atmosphere where it fired it all off in a directed fusion blast, which pushed it back down into the lower atmosphere where the whole process was repeated. Uranus was thus turned into a planetary gravity tug which was used to move Earth and Mars around (sun was heating up, I think -- it's been a few years).(source) I don't think that would pass proper physics audit, but... there have been stupider ideas in scifi books.
You drop the temperature and all that atmosphere will come raining/snowing down. Probably the best way to drop the temperature is to unfurl a very large, semi-permiable membrane at the liberation point between Venus and the sun, to reduce the amount of solar flux reaching the surface. Eventually, we could do all that shading with a gigantic array of solar panels at L2 - just large enough so that the solar flux hitting the surface of Venus is the same amount as what hits the Earth (this requires 50% coverage). Yes, the long days and nights would be annoying, but I'm sure we'd adapt to it quickly.
Maybe. But there will also be much less investment in further density improvements. Every dying technology reaches a price minimum, after which point the price actually increases. Even though memory is cheap, a new stick of DDR costs more now than the same stick would have cost five years ago, even though the demand was much higher then. That's simply because manufacturers lost all incentive to produce DDR because of the low demand. The same thing could happen to hard drives. You'll know we're in trouble when factories start scaling back production, closing or retooling for the manufacture of something else. We're not there yet, but we soon might be.
I had a similar idea - not one involving jail, but a conditional vow of lifetime poverty and lifetime probation. It would work something like this: Anyone in a "position of large scale responsibility" would be required to sign a personal pledge of accountability. If you don't sign it, you can't serve in that position - find another job! Signing it releases the government to seize all of your domestic and foreign assets (from yachts to ranches to ipods) and all future earnings, minus an allowance equal to the current level of welfare + food stamps, in case of a "breach of trust" - which would be written up by lawyers to be triggered by all and only willful acts of corruption. The government would also pay for a comfortable, section-8-type apartment. The condition of the probation would be: Permanent GPS tracking of whereabouts, and a ban on all travel outside the country. This would all be in addition to criminal sanctions, if any apply. The toughest thing about this would be writing up the trigger clause so that it's fair, which is to say: not easy to trigger by a politically-motivated witch-hunt, but automatically triggered by criminal abuse of the responsibility that comes with the position.
Once these things got ironed out, the idea would be that every high-ranking elected would also be required by law to sign the pledge of accountability in order to serve in their position. Anyone deterred from public office by this is not someone we want as a mayor or a senator anyway. Bankers in banks that are FDIC-insured would also sign the pledge as a condition of insurance. Just imagine how much better we would feel about the people who run our country if we knew that if they fail us, they get knocked off their high horse? And the point is, signing the pledge would be voluntary. Most jobs wouldn't require it, only jobs where you have the potential of doing great harm. Somehow I feel like it would be at least a partial filter against the worst of the scum.
What exactly is the philosophical mistake in the statement? It could have easily been made by Wittgenstein, for example.
I mean, your innocence is obvious and should be trivially easy to prove. My first reaction - "I'd never try that with the sort of prosecutors and dirty legal practices of today" - maybe indicates that I've lost a lot of faith in our justice system, and adopted the policy of keeping my head down to avoid trouble. But we all know that a population with this sort of attitude is most susceptible to tyranny, so kudos to you, for waving that bloody fish in front of the hungry shark!
At least in Skyrim. But I play that a lot, so I think it counts.
But all this outsourcing has a strong political component. You see, Boeing gets a lot of government money, even for their commercial operations. But the money only keeps coming from the feds if you get them something in return! They will vote to fund your plane, but only if they can bring pork back to their deserving district. So 100 congressmen can go home and say they are responsible for bringing high-paying jobs into their district. That's why Boeing parts are made in so many places. It makes no sense in terms of project management or engineering. It only makes sense politically.
I wonder what would happen if we account for all the other goods the urbanite consumes, the emissions for their transportation, etc.
I suppose you're free to wonder, but this is actually pretty easy to measure, and it has been measured my many different studies. All of them have the same result: If a person moves to a city, all of the harmful pollution for which they are responsible decreases dramatically: They use less energy for heating/air conditioning, they use far less for transportation, it takes less energy to ship goods to them, they recycle more, they are far more economically and culturally productive per unit of consumed energy.
Since you're worried about dangers posed by population: people in cities make fewer babies. This effect is quite dramatic. They also have higher IQs. On basically every measure of personal environmental impact, it's the rural people that are the assholes and urban people that are the saints.
On a more serious note, we all know that man-made stuff affects weather patters, but every large natural thing affects weather patterns as well. The weather is easy to affect, but what we should care about is not whether we affect the weather, but whether we do harm. Too many people run these together.
What happened to the spirit of "shut up and build it"? Google is offering him resources, support, and data to mine. We have to just admit that we don't know enough to predict exactly what this kind of thing will be able to do. I can bet it will disappoint us in some ways and impress us in others. If it works according to Kurzweil's expectations, it will be a huge win for Google. If not, they will allocate all that computing power to other uses and call it a lesson learned. They have enough wisdom to allocate resources to projects with a high chance of failure. This might be one of them, but that's a good sign for Google.
I wonder if the people who were writing KDE back in the 90's ever suspected that their code would make it so far! If they heard 15 years ago that some Microsoft MVP would be talking about replacing the rendering engine of IE with the rendering engine from Konqueror, they would have shit themselves.
When I read that rant, I thought - with relief - that Linus has still got it. After all these years, he still cares about the quality of the code that carries his name. If he had become old and kindly, you know that will be the end of Linux as the racehorse OS of modern computing. I'm also glad that Linus doesn't take time out to reformulate his thoughts into boardroom talk, beginning with "Dear Mauro, you know that I am grateful for the many contributions you have made to the kernel project over the years. However, I can't help but think that you did not choose the best way of handling the latest matter of the userspace bug, blah blah blah..."
Linus was - rightfully - seething. Why mask that under politeness? Don't people realize that it's actually a great benefit to have a boss that can clearly display a wide range of sincere attitudes with his language? If he uses the same tone to call out simple mistakes and inexcusable, irresponsible behavior, how are his subordinates supposed to feel comfortable with the knowledge of where they stand? Might they not take his future calm words and read into them a seething attitude, carefully masked? That is far from an improvement.
I can't help but think that people who object to Linus's behavior would in general prefer to let quality suffer rather than to see feathers ruffled. I'm glad that Linus sees matters differently.
LEGO are big-time shooting themselves in the foot by this behavior. Some plastic-injection company in China should just start making 5-gallon buckets of LEGO-compatible standard bricks for rock-bottom prices. That would make a much better present, imho, than a Lord of the Rings LEGO set, and it would probably be about the same price.
LEGO's last patent expired in 1989, and apparently, European judges said that they can't do anything against knockoffs.
Clearly, no. But this is beside the point. Maybe it will be one day. And in the much nearer future, it will be just the thing we will turn to because we start having ethical problems with renting the wombs of poor women in India who presently serve as surrogates for fertility-challenged rich couples.
But for me, the real sci-fi potential of this technology is in interstellar colonization. The idea is that frozen genetic material can survive a long trip much better than any living organism, especially if we're talking about slow trips that might take centuries. However, with proper shielding and error control, a lab that can produce artificial wombs and gestate babies should be much easier, technologically. I'm guessing that by the end of this century, all the pieces will be in place: An artificial womb, an AI that can operate it, correct preservation techniques, and an AI parenting program that does a more ethical job of parenting that many human parents who are still allowed to keep their kids. That, together with AI school, basically makes for a highly portable civilization reproduction package. Only the first generation would need to be raised by pure technology, although I'm sure that since they have the technology, they would want to keep using it to grow the size of the colony and add to their genetic diversity.
Hey, sometimes I'm asked to teach ethics at a largish public university. I wouldn't call myself an ethicist, but can smell the bullshit on this from a mile away. First of all, every ethicist, along with every moderately educated person, should be aware of the genetic fallacy - which is that the origin or original purpose of something is irrelevant to what ought to be done with it. So what if these drugs were made to treat impairments? What relevance does that have to what should be done with them? Second, they act like pharmaceuticals should only be given to people "in need" - but what does this mean? Just in what sense do men "need" Viagra and women need birth control? I strongly support giving access to everyone who wants these drugs, but let's not pretend that they're being distributed on the basis of need. Their role is to enable lifestyle choices, not to remedy a need. And that's what makes them good things. We on Slashdot know very well that you don't need to fuck, ever.
I definitely have an ethical problem with sports doping, but that's because it's an unsafe practice that should be contained for the sake of the health of the athletes. If Adderall turns out to be similarly dangerous, I say that the ethical argument is over. But the interesting case would be if it (or its better successors) turn out to be acceptably safe - like caffeine is - and also measurably effective. Then the question of fairness comes up: Undrugged people will be at a disadvantage. Then again, uneducated people are very much at a disadvantage. Education is the most important personal enhancement you can obtain, and it's not cheap, nor accessible to all. Yet this would be a strange reason to ban it. Some people might complain that they are in an unfair competition because their competitors have Ph.D's in science - a sort of juicing. But that would be very silly. I certainly think that the Adderall gap is much easier and cheaper to close than the education gap, so this "unfair advantage" argument also smells like crap to me. If I had a worry about this drug scenario, it would be that unscrupulous companies would demand that their employees are doped up with enhancers when they're on the clock. That would be unfortunate. But then again, I don't think that many people would take such a job, and those that do would be entitled to a higher compensation. We already have the concept of hazard pay, and this kind of an office job would still be less dangerous than, say, underwater welding. In general, it seems like these so-called ethicists are just fishing for reasons to be luddites, and their fishing skills are are rather poor.
Insofar as realistic-scale research on any geoengineering processes are never going to be allowed, maybe this kinds of illegal stuff is the only way to find out what works and what won't. As the writeup correctly said, we just don't know what kind of effect this will have on oceanic oxygen levels. And for another thing, we don't really know what effect this will have on the salmon either. One thing that I'm happy about: Now we're at least about to find out! Since somebody did this, I hope that a flock of oceanologists flock to the site and measure the shit out of it. Yeah, it's not an experiment we wanted or approve of, but we might as well make a bit of lemonade out of these lemons!
If you're right - and it sounds plausible - then tilapia is the most guilt-free fish that you can get in the supermarket. Not only does it consume resources that would otherwise be wasted; it actually provides an environmental service as well. Now also feeding them pig shit, that's disgusting. However, all the dangers mentioned sound merely potential. Can salmonella, for example, be transmitted through frozen tilapia to humans? Has anyone been actually harmed by pigshit tilapia? If the tilapia is a wonderous creature that can transform dangerous shit into delicious, healthy, protein-rich meat, maybe we should call that a giant win for both people and the environment!