The woman may have her reproductive capability destroyed and so may only have this option to reproduce. However, the guy may not want to be a daddy with this woman.
Personally, I'd try to make some sort of deal to settle the issue, like if she raises any of these embryos over his objection, he bears no responsibility, ever, for the progeny. But if you RTFA, that's already the case, and he still objects to being a father to kids he won't be involved with.
It seems (from TFA) that every state is coming up with its own solution, like following the contract, or "balance of interests".
And what happens if some couple no longer has means to pay for embryo storage, but they assert a right to force the embryo-maintainer to keep their embryo's anyway? Just how much is reproduction a right?
Males in USA have to register for the draft. They can be made to fight and die to defend this country whether they want to or not, often at great risk of life and limb.
Yet I'm supposed to get upset because, to defend this country against disease, people have to get very low risk shots? What's your position on military service?
While I'm in favor of compulsory vaccination for everyone except medical exceptions, I'm not so sure we can lay whooping cough epidemics at the door of the anti-vaxxers. It seems that the vaccine is not completely effective against currently circulating strains of whooping cough.
I'm in favor of research dollars being dedicated forthwith to improve the vaccine. I have a friend whose child, too young to be vaccinated, was killed by whooping cough.
If I, and other males, can be made to go fight and die at high risk, against my wishes, why can't EVERYONE be made to take a low risk shot?
The benefit of the shots to society is arguably FAR higher and the risk FAR lower than military service.
And by the way, I'm in favor of compulsory military service, for myself and everyone else. Just as I'm in favor of compulsory vaccination, for myself and everyone else (medical exceptions allowed for both.)
Being stuck on any planet is a bad idea. Down at the bottom of a gravity well. We need to engineer ourselves to better tolerate space conditions and live in orbital habitats. And by the time we're engineered in such a way, we'd probably be better described as "hardware".
I mean, tolerance of cold temperatures, high radiation, vacuum, lack of oxygen, gravity, liquid water.... Everything you'd need to be at home in space. And then you're hardware. And interchangeable parts would be cool. If your eye offends you, you pluck it out. (And put in a new one.)
Yes, and that helps keep babies alive. However, that doesn't change the fact that the baby is now being assaulted/presented with all the microbes outside the womb and must develop immunity to those thousands of microbes that s/he never saw before.
This is in comparison to the 7 or so that are in shots.
In the US, with proper care and diet, measles is about.5% fatal or less to someone who was not vaccinated. Even if you don't die you've got a significant (~1%) chance of having some sort of brain damage (I'm including deafness/blindness in "brain damage".)
If you have a vitamin A deficiency, though, measles can be up to 25% (or so) fatal.
Measles isn't a joke and like polio, we should eradicate it if we can.
Think of it this way. You're living in your mom's womb, then you get born. Your mom's womb is pretty darn sterile. Suddenly, you're born and you're literally being assaulted by every germ around you, with probably thousands of them being encountered by your immune system every day.
How are a *few* shots (7 may seem like a lot to you) going to compare against thousands of things all hitting the naive immune system of an infant all at once, starting from birth, every day?
Or is it the fact that the particular antigen is injected into a muscle supposed to make it more scary?
It just seems to me that the amount of antigens presented to someone during a shot is just completely dwarfed by the natural exposure. It's just that the select few antigens in the shots just happen to be particularly helpful in helping you resist *actual serious disease*.
Also, I can't find your "varicella vaccine mortality rate of 1 in 30,000" information on the CDC website, Please provide source. What I found was this: "Other serious problems, including severe brain reactions and low blood count, have been reported after chickenpox vaccination. These happen so rarely experts cannot tell whether they are caused by the vaccine or not. If they are, it is extremely rare." I think we would hear about it if thousands of people died from the chickenpox vaccine.
Furthermore, they also say that only the FIRST dose has such an extreme reaction. So the "much higher than 1/30,000" claim you make is extremely dubious.
And $30B will get you 30 desal plants like Carlsbad's, which cost $1B, and which will provide 7% of what San Diego area residents need.
But the $30B won't get you the power it takes to run them (new power plants?) Or the energy required to power the power plants.
Also, CA's agriculture depends upon cheap water, not expensive desalinated water.
That said, would a $30B pipeline bring in the same amount of water as desal plants? Or more? Operating expenses are sure to be lower, but there'd need to be a detailed economic and engineering case made for one solution over the other.
I can bang my head against a brick wall all I want, but all I will ever get out of it is a broken head.
The trick is to pick a battle you can win, and then buckle down and win it.
I've climbed high in my own life, but that is because my goals were achievable and I had the tools (both born with and the opportunities I needed) to succeed.
There are many who work hard in life but don't get much of anywhere.
That said, working hard is the only way to MAXIMIZE your opportunities and inborn potential. Praise your kids for their hard work, not their brains.
Some ten or fifteen years ago, Scientific American published an article about the positive correlation of "general intelligence" with virtually every measure of success in life.
Like earning enough money to be comfortable, having the emotional intelligence to have a successful marriage, etc.
They showed that "general intelligence" which is correlated with but not directly measured by things like SAT scores, was basically a ticket to (or highly correlated with) a good life, and even good health.
I think nuclear power CAN be safe, and CAN be a net environmental benefit (meaning it causes far less environmental damage than equivalent gas or coal operations), however, I'm not sure that it can be those two things AND be economical at the same time.
It's hard for a fission plant to pay for the interest on the capital used to build it selling electricity at rates competitive with alternatives. The way fusion is looking, if it EVER works, it might be in the same boat as fission, economically, except worse.
If a really good battery comes along that makes storing solar/wind energy cheap enough, the economic case for fission/fusion power will be completely wiped out.
A research university like Stanford has dual goals, educate the students and perform world-class research. What is the 405% professional/non-teaching staff for? Are they doing research? Are they doing it on grants that the professors/staff have won?
If so, then it's not fair to hold that against Stanford--the staff they have hired is to do research not teach students, and they are not using tuition to fund this staff.
I've seen cases like this at other universities: non-teaching "Research professors" are hired to help do grant research, and have no role in teaching.
I don't know what the situation at Stanford is, but just on the face of it I am not sure that firing the staff and administrators will help the educational mission--those people may be executing grant work on grant resources.
Because without good encryption, commerce will be WIDE OPEN to fraud as criminals acquire information required to steal money from people, like bank account numbers, passwords, locations of money, etc.
If we can't use encryption to protect our information from criminals itching to use it for fraud, then fraud will explode and we'll need LOTS of cops to track down all the criminals.
We should tell them to take a hike, because: 1) Cops will never catch fraud before it happens 2) Cops will never recover all the money stolen 3) Trust in banking will falter 4) Trust in using the internet for commerce will falter
Also, "key escrow" won't work. I'm sorry, but if the US Government couldn't keep the HYDROGEN BOMB secret, how am I to trust ANY government to keep secrets WORTH TRILLIONS? (I.e., their escrowed keys secret from the criminal element?)
EVERYONE has mental health issues. It is only a matter of degree.
There is no black and white line that you can draw between someone who is SAFE and UNSAFE. And someone who is SAFE is not necessarily always going to be so, and neither, necessarily, is someone who is UNSAFE now.
And the simple fact of the matter is, ANYONE who isn't locked up is trusted with other human lives, in proportion to the power they can command.
It's always going to come down to the opinion of the person himself, and hopefully competent medical professionals in the case of airplane pilots, that a person is going to be capable of responsibly handling power until his next examination.
In particular, it's perfectly possible for someone to recover from major depression and be capable of doing as good a job as anyone as a pilot.
Would you rather that depressed people seek treatment from professionals or avoid treatment like the plague for fear of the loss of their livelihood?
Personally, I'd rather that depressed people, even if they hold the lives of others in their hands, be free to seek treatment with no fear that they'll lose their livelihoods or otherwise be stigmatized. I'd draw the line at ACTUALLY SUICIDAL. A possible compromise is a TEMPORARY leave WITH PAY until they've got their issues sorted out.
Because the fact is that ANY human is potentially mentally unreliable. All it takes is one little burst blood vessel in the wrong place and the person who was very sane literally one second ago can do insane things the next second.
You realize that the sun/moon size thing is just a temporary condition, right? The moon's been receding from Earth and will continue to do so, so in a few hundred million years it'll be noticeably smaller than the sun and we will have no more total solar eclipses.
And the dinosaurs probably got to enjoy more eclipses because the moon was closer then.
Given that, it's hard for me to read anything into the sun/moon size thing other than that it's a coincidence.
Because you got it completely backward. Finland's education is one of the most egalitarian in the world.
Everyone gets the same educational opportunity in Finland and it is *all* state run. And in fact it is aimed very much at the working class, starting with free daycare starting at 8months. Finland's teachers are FULLY UNIONIZED.
Finland's education system is a system of LEVELLING UPWARD, and has lifted their entire nation. US education is screwed up,but it is NOT because the left got what they wanted.
See, a real person is created and has to LIVE WITH and SUFFER FROM the changes you've inflicted upon them.
Think about it. Standard reproduction, you have no control over the result except what you can do with nutrition and environment. So your liability is also limited. However, if as a result of your DIRECTED genetic change, someone lives a life of suffering, well, your liability is enormous. You controlled it and caused it, therefore, you are responsible.
And it's a mind-blowing responsibility. If in my hands, I'd restrict myself to JUST trying to help with the very worst of genetic defects until I was VERY sure things would work out well for the modified people.
Should we really eradicate all heritable disease, or post-edit the afflicted to mitigate effects?
Like for example, the often cited benefit of being heterozygous in the sickle-cell anaemia gene. You are more resistant to malaria, a definite survival trait.
My point is that if you reduce genetic variability by always using the 'best' gene variant, your species becomes more vulnerable to extinction due to a sudden environmental change.
If you come up with a lot of gene variants as a patch for a broken one, all of them far more workable than the broken one, then gene editing could result in MORE genetic variability and a more resilient species overall, however, I doubt investment would be done to come up with multiple good solutions.
Frankly, I'd rather have tougher, more resistant bees.
Monocultures aren't that great an idea, but they're unfortunately common. A big almond orchard wouldn't provide year-round food for the amount of honey bees required to pollinate it. Better to have mobile hives that can be taken where the bees can forage, and pollinate the crops.
Yes, that's tough on bees. But its less disruptive to breed better bees than to rework all the orchards to provide year-round food for stationary hives.
Slashdot Mirror
The woman may have her reproductive capability destroyed and so may only have this option to reproduce. However, the guy may not want to be a daddy with this woman.
Personally, I'd try to make some sort of deal to settle the issue, like if she raises any of these embryos over his objection, he bears no responsibility, ever, for the progeny. But if you RTFA, that's already the case, and he still objects to being a father to kids he won't be involved with.
It seems (from TFA) that every state is coming up with its own solution, like following the contract, or "balance of interests".
And what happens if some couple no longer has means to pay for embryo storage, but they assert a right to force the embryo-maintainer to keep their embryo's anyway? Just how much is reproduction a right?
--PM
Males in USA have to register for the draft. They can be made to fight and die to defend this country whether they want to or not, often at great risk of life and limb.
Yet I'm supposed to get upset because, to defend this country against disease, people have to get very low risk shots? What's your position on military service?
--PM
Hello,
While I'm in favor of compulsory vaccination for everyone except medical exceptions, I'm not so sure we can lay whooping cough epidemics at the door of the anti-vaxxers. It seems that the vaccine is not completely effective against currently circulating strains of whooping cough.
I'm in favor of research dollars being dedicated forthwith to improve the vaccine. I have a friend whose child, too young to be vaccinated, was killed by whooping cough.
--PeterM
If I, and other males, can be made to go fight and die at high risk, against my wishes, why can't EVERYONE be made to take a low risk shot?
The benefit of the shots to society is arguably FAR higher and the risk FAR lower than military service.
And by the way, I'm in favor of compulsory military service, for myself and everyone else. Just as I'm in favor of compulsory vaccination, for myself and everyone else (medical exceptions allowed for both.)
--PM
Being stuck on any planet is a bad idea. Down at the bottom of a gravity well. We need to engineer ourselves to better tolerate space conditions and live in orbital habitats. And by the time we're engineered in such a way, we'd probably be better described as "hardware".
I mean, tolerance of cold temperatures, high radiation, vacuum, lack of oxygen, gravity, liquid water.... Everything you'd need to be at home in space. And then you're hardware. And interchangeable parts would be cool. If your eye offends you, you pluck it out. (And put in a new one.)
--PM
Yes, and that helps keep babies alive. However, that doesn't change the fact that the baby is now being assaulted/presented with all the microbes outside the womb and must develop immunity to those thousands of microbes that s/he never saw before.
This is in comparison to the 7 or so that are in shots.
--PM
In the US, with proper care and diet, measles is about .5% fatal or less to someone who was not vaccinated. Even if you don't die you've got a significant (~1%) chance of having some sort of brain damage (I'm including deafness/blindness in "brain damage".)
If you have a vitamin A deficiency, though, measles can be up to 25% (or so) fatal.
Measles isn't a joke and like polio, we should eradicate it if we can.
--PM
Think of it this way. You're living in your mom's womb, then you get born. Your mom's womb is pretty darn sterile. Suddenly, you're born and you're literally being assaulted by every germ around you, with probably thousands of them being encountered by your immune system every day.
How are a *few* shots (7 may seem like a lot to you) going to compare against thousands of things all hitting the naive immune system of an infant all at once, starting from birth, every day?
Or is it the fact that the particular antigen is injected into a muscle supposed to make it more scary?
It just seems to me that the amount of antigens presented to someone during a shot is just completely dwarfed by the natural exposure. It's just that the select few antigens in the shots just happen to be particularly helpful in helping you resist *actual serious disease*.
Also, I can't find your "varicella vaccine mortality rate of 1 in 30,000" information on the CDC website, Please provide source. What I found was this: "Other serious problems, including severe brain
reactions and low blood count, have been reported after
chickenpox vaccination. These happen so rarely experts
cannot tell whether they are caused by the vaccine or
not. If they are, it is extremely rare." I think we would hear about it if thousands of people died from the chickenpox vaccine.
Furthermore, they also say that only the FIRST dose has such an extreme reaction. So the "much higher than 1/30,000" claim you make is extremely dubious.
--PM
--PM
And $30B will get you 30 desal plants like Carlsbad's, which cost $1B, and which will provide 7% of what San Diego area residents need.
But the $30B won't get you the power it takes to run them (new power plants?) Or the energy required to power the power plants.
Also, CA's agriculture depends upon cheap water, not expensive desalinated water.
That said, would a $30B pipeline bring in the same amount of water as desal plants? Or more? Operating expenses are sure to be lower, but there'd need to be a detailed economic and engineering case made for one solution over the other.
--PM
I can bang my head against a brick wall all I want, but all I will ever get out of it is a broken head.
The trick is to pick a battle you can win, and then buckle down and win it.
I've climbed high in my own life, but that is because my goals were achievable and I had the tools (both born with and the opportunities I needed) to succeed.
There are many who work hard in life but don't get much of anywhere.
That said, working hard is the only way to MAXIMIZE your opportunities and inborn potential. Praise your kids for their hard work, not their brains.
--PM
Some ten or fifteen years ago, Scientific American published an article about the positive correlation of "general intelligence" with virtually every measure of success in life.
Like earning enough money to be comfortable, having the emotional intelligence to have a successful marriage, etc.
They showed that "general intelligence" which is correlated with but not directly measured by things like SAT scores, was basically a ticket to (or highly correlated with) a good life, and even good health.
And the article was mighty persuasive.
--PeterM
Turns out the biological lens of your eye blocks UV light, but if you get an artificial lens, your retinas can register UV light.
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
--PM
I think nuclear power CAN be safe, and CAN be a net environmental benefit (meaning it causes far less environmental damage than equivalent gas or coal operations), however, I'm not sure that it can be those two things AND be economical at the same time.
It's hard for a fission plant to pay for the interest on the capital used to build it selling electricity at rates competitive with alternatives. The way fusion is looking, if it EVER works, it might be in the same boat as fission, economically, except worse.
If a really good battery comes along that makes storing solar/wind energy cheap enough, the economic case for fission/fusion power will be completely wiped out.
--PM
I'm not sure you're correct about the cost, can you cite a source?
Flexibility is often more important to withstanding a quake than strength.
https://www.engineeringforchan...
I recall an example, using different nails for construction in the South vastly increases a house's resistance to tornados and hurricanes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
These can increase the wind resistance of a house 2x over standard nails, and don't cost all that much more.
--PM
A research university like Stanford has dual goals, educate the students and perform world-class research. What is the 405% professional/non-teaching staff for? Are they doing research? Are they doing it on grants that the professors/staff have won?
If so, then it's not fair to hold that against Stanford--the staff they have hired is to do research not teach students, and they are not using tuition to fund this staff.
I've seen cases like this at other universities: non-teaching "Research professors" are hired to help do grant research, and have no role in teaching.
I don't know what the situation at Stanford is, but just on the face of it I am not sure that firing the staff and administrators will help the educational mission--those people may be executing grant work on grant resources.
--PM
Because without good encryption, commerce will be WIDE OPEN to fraud as criminals acquire information required to steal money from people, like bank account numbers, passwords, locations of money, etc.
If we can't use encryption to protect our information from criminals itching to use it for fraud, then fraud will explode and we'll need LOTS of cops to track down all the criminals.
We should tell them to take a hike, because:
1) Cops will never catch fraud before it happens
2) Cops will never recover all the money stolen
3) Trust in banking will falter
4) Trust in using the internet for commerce will falter
Also, "key escrow" won't work.
I'm sorry, but if the US Government couldn't keep the HYDROGEN BOMB secret, how am I to trust ANY government to keep secrets WORTH TRILLIONS? (I.e., their escrowed keys secret from the criminal element?)
--PeterM
EVERYONE has mental health issues. It is only a matter of degree.
There is no black and white line that you can draw between someone who is SAFE and UNSAFE. And someone who is SAFE is not necessarily always going to be so, and neither, necessarily, is someone who is UNSAFE now.
And the simple fact of the matter is, ANYONE who isn't locked up is trusted with other human lives, in proportion to the power they can command.
It's always going to come down to the opinion of the person himself, and hopefully competent medical professionals in the case of airplane pilots, that a person is going to be capable of responsibly handling power until his next examination.
In particular, it's perfectly possible for someone to recover from major depression and be capable of doing as good a job as anyone as a pilot.
--PM
Would you rather that depressed people seek treatment from professionals or avoid treatment like the plague for fear of the loss of their livelihood?
Personally, I'd rather that depressed people, even if they hold the lives of others in their hands, be free to seek treatment with no fear that they'll lose their livelihoods or otherwise be stigmatized. I'd draw the line at ACTUALLY SUICIDAL. A possible compromise is a TEMPORARY leave WITH PAY until they've got their issues sorted out.
Because the fact is that ANY human is potentially mentally unreliable. All it takes is one little burst blood vessel in the wrong place and the person who was very sane literally one second ago can do insane things the next second.
--PM
You realize that the sun/moon size thing is just a temporary condition, right? The moon's been receding from Earth and will continue to do so, so in a few hundred million years it'll be noticeably smaller than the sun and we will have no more total solar eclipses.
And the dinosaurs probably got to enjoy more eclipses because the moon was closer then.
Given that, it's hard for me to read anything into the sun/moon size thing other than that it's a coincidence.
--PM
Because you got it completely backward. Finland's education is one of the most egalitarian in the world.
Everyone gets the same educational opportunity in Finland and it is *all* state run. And in fact it is aimed very much at the working class, starting with free daycare starting at 8months. Finland's teachers are FULLY UNIONIZED.
Finland's education system is a system of LEVELLING UPWARD, and has lifted their entire nation. US education is screwed up,but it is NOT because the left got what they wanted.
--PM
Something like 60% of the US's commercial honeybee hives end up going to pollinate the California almond crop.
Maybe they honeybees will do better if they're not made to take that trip, one less commute, maybe fewer colony collapses.
Too bad about California's produce. Food's going to get more expensive, especially almonds.
--PM
See, a real person is created and has to LIVE WITH and SUFFER FROM the changes you've inflicted upon them.
Think about it. Standard reproduction, you have no control over the result except what you can do with nutrition and environment. So your liability is also limited. However, if as a result of your DIRECTED genetic change, someone lives a life of suffering, well, your liability is enormous. You controlled it and caused it, therefore, you are responsible.
And it's a mind-blowing responsibility. If in my hands, I'd restrict myself to JUST trying to help with the very worst of genetic defects until I was VERY sure things would work out well for the modified people.
--PM
Should we really eradicate all heritable disease, or post-edit the afflicted to mitigate effects?
Like for example, the often cited benefit of being heterozygous in the sickle-cell anaemia gene. You are more resistant to malaria, a definite survival trait.
My point is that if you reduce genetic variability by always using the 'best' gene variant, your species becomes more vulnerable to extinction due to a sudden environmental change.
If you come up with a lot of gene variants as a patch for a broken one, all of them far more workable than the broken one, then gene editing could result in MORE genetic variability and a more resilient species overall, however, I doubt investment would be done to come up with multiple good solutions.
--PM
Maybe have a slashdot-like karma system, where bad comments on the forums are modded down, and you build up good karma.
Seems like bad people would soon ensure the community would "fire" them.
--PM
Frankly, I'd rather have tougher, more resistant bees.
Monocultures aren't that great an idea, but they're unfortunately common. A big almond orchard wouldn't provide year-round food for the amount of honey bees required to pollinate it. Better to have mobile hives that can be taken where the bees can forage, and pollinate the crops.
Yes, that's tough on bees. But its less disruptive to breed better bees than to rework all the orchards to provide year-round food for stationary hives.
--PM