I'm perfectly willing to agree to such a system - as long as we're able to throw Ichijo in jail the *moment* one of these "rehabilitated" people commits another crime.
Because I believe that - for whatever reason - these individuals are fundamentally broken in a social sense, and I don't believe that they can EVER be made into unbroken people, although it's probably possible to teach them to 'fake it' well enough to get by (until they're motivated enough).
It's one thing to tolerate miscreants in a widely scattered society. It's another thing entirely to have 7 billion people jammed together cheek-by-jowl, and tolerate individuals amongst us who fundamentally don't understand the sanctity of other's property, person, or life.
I'd say that the reason crime is so rampant in the US is because it's obviously rewarding, even prison sentences are just a multi-semester term in "crime school". I don't think punishments are draconian enough.
Remember the douchebags that leave their bluetooth headphone thing in their ear all day long, ostensibly because it's more convenient, but more of a status declaration (because frankly, how much "work" is it to either lift up your cell phone when it rings, or put in the earpiece when it rings?) to all around them?
Yeah, Google Glass is like that, to the exponential power of "look how much more $ I have than you".
Personally, no, I don't believe I need to simply "accept" that someone's desperate need to stay connected to the interwebs" is so significant that he/she can't take the bloody thing off in a social situation.
If someone were to stand there filming me, I might object as well. If they were to start doing it without asking, I might firmly object.
Here's my tip, if you're going to assault someone with Google Glasses on, make sure you a) assault them from behind, preferably either with something over their head, or at least knock the glasses off, b) step on the glasses ASAP.
I'm not saying anyone should hurt anyone (I expect you'll get caught, anyway) but I'm reaching the point where ostentatious disregard for other people should treated with cavalier disregard for their social contract in turn.
While I might in some cases even agree with you in principle that a) sometimes deliberate theft is justifiable, and b) conceptually it's possible that Congress is doing something painful "for the right reason", the likelihood has far more to do with cowardly servicing their corporate masters on Wall Street and making sure THEY get the money to feather their nests. So (again, assuming it's the right thing to do in the first place) do they deserve any credit whatsoever?
Personally, I believe deflation (your "...if the economic wheel stops spinning...") has far more fundamental causes needing far more substantive approaches than the standard inflation-managing monetary policies deployed by the Fed. It's truly a case of "...if all they have is a hammer...".
Further, my view of the QE deployment in this case is akin to US forestry policies in pre-1970s: balking the 'failure' stage of the business cycle - even if it looks deep and dangerous - simply makes the next one that much more nasty and reduces the efficacy of those tools going forward just like addictive tolerance.
Honestly, the idea is *so* unoriginal, I have to wonder if it's not a government troll. I mean, by this time security and privacy is so totally compromised at every level (from the device in your hand to the routers it passes through) that the very concept of someone insisting "oh, really, but OURS will be secure" sounds like an NSA project.
Agreed. While I suspect that yes, food costs and shortages certainly make such uprisings more likely (hungry people tend to get a little crabby and short tempered) the causality of this is highly suspect.
I'd suspect that yes, at extreme values, hunger can drive civil issues. Otherwise it's more of an aggravating factor, as the uprisings around the world in 2013 were - at least as far as the news covered them - largely political and opportunistic. Note in particular the sort of 'infectious' pattern, where one populace sees another succeed, so they start dissenting themselves. Clearly, that's not hunger-driven.
A billion dollar slush fund in time for the elections that ALSO happens to salve the white-western-guilt of his voter base exactly where they've been programmed to be at for the past 10 years.
Definitions like this seem so black and white, not to mention terribly convenient because so much of how one defines "troll" (hereafter referred to as tro-x, to avoid the lameness filter) depends on where one stands.
I admit, I like arguing. Is that "being a tro-x" in our social-conformist society? This isn't just an internet thing; the friends that have known me the longest will probably say it's been forever; in fact, it's probably why we're friends - I love debating any subject from politics to religion to the power structures in the Holy Roman Empire. I good argument on anything is satisfying, and rewards broad knowledge, quick wits, and a healthy understanding of human psychology. (I don't use ad hominems because their a pointless waste of breath, not because social conventions require their avoidance; against someone reasonably intelligent, the use of an ad hominem is a signal that you're losing, you don't have any better thing to say. Might as well tip your king over right then and save your self-respect.)
Further, I enjoy attacking sacred cows. Unexamined beliefs that people hold sacrosanct for NO logical reason are practically my metier, although I admit that sometimes I weary of it as - with any zealot, political, religious, cultural, politically-correct - I deep-down know I'm not changing anyone's mind anyway. That's not right, actually: I *may* be changing someone's mind, it's just not my arguing partner but instead some 3rd party observing the debate who may be unresolved and find something in what I say that makes sense. So I'm not so much arguing against the person I'm talking to, as using them to posture for the (vague hand-waving) audience. Getting my opponent really wound up is part of the tactic - nobody argues rationally when they're enraged. It makes it easier to debunk them (and their points) as credible. As much as "tu quoque" is a logical fallacy and doesn't prove anything, it does seriously damage a person's credibility to have their naked hypocrisy exposed. Does that make me a "tro-x" in common parlance? I suspect to many people it would.
Finally, declarations of "tro-xish" behavior have so very much to do with whether you agree with the point being made or not. I'll give you an example of what many reading will (I suspect) say is a tro-xish question: "As I understand it, 5.6% of survey respondents admit to being trolls, and this is considered a 'deviant' thing, signifying serious core personality disorders (like narcissism, sadism, and psychopathy). Curiously, many surveys show that the actual population of homosexuals is also around 6%, and yet our culture seems to be insisting that they are just an 'alternative normal'. How is that logically consistent?"
This has all the hallmarks of (what I believe is) considered a tro-xish question: - a basis in fact - attacking a target normally protected from criticism - not really expecting an answer, just a host of flaming replies that essentially amount to "you stupidhead" - yet is still an ACTUAL question: why does some behavior, at a certain level of frequency, merit the label of "deviant" while other behavior at the same frequency of appearance, not? (which would be the non-tro-xish way to pose the question, of course, as long as we stayed away from specifics)
1) If you're poor in America, you've already made some pretty shitty life-choices from the start. Ultimately, bad choices may catch up with you, and life's not Candyland, you can't just start over.
2) 60h week at minimum wage is ~$24,000 year*. You pay nothing in taxes, and in fact get "back" $000's in tax credits that you never paid in. Now, if you have a cellphone, and cable, kids, and you smoke, and own a house...that $24,000 starts to get pretty thin. But then, you're already living better than 2/3rds of the people on the planet, not bad for "being poor"?
*I'd argue that if you have exploited to the fullest the "free education" you get in the US to age 18, never done drugs nor become addicted to alcohol, etc, and neither fathered/mothered a child until you had a stable job and income post-highschool, then there's no way you're working minimum-wage jobs for any sustained period of time. (Barring your being one of the vanishingly tiny percent of people who have an actual catastrophic event destroying their finances and lives beyond the ample safety-net structure....and this is too small a % to base serious policy on.) IIRC a recent survey said that 90%+ of people in poverty failed one of those first-listed points.
...because a "pan European" anything isn't really going to be secure at all. All the NSA will have to do is pay someone in a financially desperate state to let them plug-in to their "secure" pan-European connection.
Like most histrionic headlines, that first line is meant to be read as "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years," (the bold are the letters you're supposed to mentally 'land on'.
I read it, and of course have the same reaction, initially.
But then I look again, and read it differently: "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children 's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years,"
Big difference in meaning conveyed, and ultimately conclusion.
So I read TFA (I know, crazy, and almost disqualifies me from commenting on slashdot, but I'm a rebel).
Here's the money shot: "...In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicantsâ"manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered...."
"DOUBLED IN ONLY 7 YEARS?" yeah, from 5 to 10, and most of those have entirely natural sources. Arsenic is bad for baby's brains? Really? And that "...there are more undiscovered"? More than 10 neurotoxologically dangerous substances in the world? PhD material, that. (In fact, here, I'll give them a few to start with: methane, ethane, propane and down the list. Most aqueous solvents. Iron. Chlorine....holy crap, the list took 7 years to double, and I just likely tripled it in 5 minutes!!)
Look, I *agree* with the idea that there should be a register of neurotoxicity levels for commonly-used chemicals, and that it would be useful that newly-synthesized compounds are tested to determine toxicity levels for neurological development like they are for basic toxicity. Saying this, I have no idea of how complex, slow, or expensive this testing is.
Finally, let's all remember that a lot of chemicals are intrinsic to our way of life; it's unreasonable to compare our chemical environment against a cleanroom utopia where there are somehow no external chemicals filtering into a developing child's body....that's just nonsensical. "Fear of 'dangerous' chemicals" is one of the more commonly-encountered FUD items in the news today.
Life is a tradeoff. I prefer drinking from glass bottles, but there's no way I'd give up the convenience, safety, and economy of plastic bottled for water. I understand that burning meat leaves a host of carcinogens in the carbon, but I'm simply not going to give up delightful steak. I suspect that eventually we'll find that living in cages of shifting electrical current our whole lives likewise has an impact on us, but I'm not giving up living in a home wired for electricity. This all seems utterly obvious to me. I wish it was to others, so we could have a sensible discussion instead of freaking out all the time.
The results are there but the interpretation is flawed. I'd be FAR more likely to believe US kids are stupid and confused 'astrology' with 'astronomy', than that they believe astrology is a science.
We were being given a college tour for one of our kids at a LEADING institution (retail price north of $50k/year) and the pretty young tour guide was showing us around, and identified one of the science buildings as "...and there's the building with various science classrooms including geology, biology, and astrology...", which prompted a sudden look up* by most of the male parents in the group, eye contact, and a shrug. I didn't notice a single mom or kid react. *she was wearing yoga pants
OK the NEWS is pretty sad. But that implication that, for once, I'm right, is pretty refreshing!
"Star Trek represents a post-scarcity society evolved from democratic capitalism" Check, I'm with you. Limitless energy, etc. In fact, I seem to recall Roddenberry saying exactly that.
but...
"...we're in the nascent stages of transforming to a post-scarcity economy..." WTF? That's so wrong it borders on the incomprehensible. Clearly, this was written from the well-compensated, comfortable easy-chair in a Starbucks somewhere by an over-educated upper-middle-class American (ie, unfamiliar with the daily lives of 60%+ of his own countrymen and -women, or about 90% of the world)
I'm as patriotic as the next guy - "go team USA" and all that - but I'm sad to hear that your rover is lost.
Space is not a zero-sum game. My country has decided that we're more interested in spending the dollars (that we constantly borrow from you) on social welfare programs, caring for old people, and floating eleven carrier groups in a world that doesn't have a single other navy that could fight ONE of them.
I'm looking forward to your next space accomplishment, as I truly believe such things help ALL people, ultimately.
Considering that only mass genocide would return us to the ecological balance we enjoyed* 5k-50k years ago, probably the people who agree with you would be Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot....so no, I'm pretty glad I'm not "with you" on that.
*by "enjoyed" I mean live in starvation/terror most of the time, desperately scrabbling to survive, reproduce fast enough to outpace the constant stream of child deaths, only to die in our mid-30s from some trivial disease or infection. But, it was "better".
The results are there but the interpretation is flawed. I'd be FAR more likely to believe US kids are stupid and confused 'astrology' with 'astronomy', than that they believe astrology is a science.
We were being given a college tour for one of our kids at a LEADING institution (retail price north of $50k/year) and the pretty young tour guide was showing us around, and identified one of the science buildings as "...and there's the building with various science classrooms including geology, biology, and astrology...", which prompted a sudden look up* by most of the male parents in the group, eye contact, and a shrug. I didn't notice a single mom or kid react. *she was wearing yoga pants
So....natural processes occurring pretty much exactly as they have for thousands, if not millions of years. And humans, feeling they know how things "should" be, are going to interfere. Brilliant!
As constrained as we sometimes feel we are by laws and regulations, the bulk of our society still works on the honor system - people simply doing what they're supposed to, and not doing what they're not supposed to.
Simply because something CAN benefit you, and you CAN accomplish it with little chance of being caught, doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wall Street Journal did it best:
http://online.wsj.com/news/art...
Or, if you just want it in simple graphic form:
http://si.wsj.net/public/resou...
I'm perfectly willing to agree to such a system - as long as we're able to throw Ichijo in jail the *moment* one of these "rehabilitated" people commits another crime.
Because I believe that - for whatever reason - these individuals are fundamentally broken in a social sense, and I don't believe that they can EVER be made into unbroken people, although it's probably possible to teach them to 'fake it' well enough to get by (until they're motivated enough).
It's one thing to tolerate miscreants in a widely scattered society.
It's another thing entirely to have 7 billion people jammed together cheek-by-jowl, and tolerate individuals amongst us who fundamentally don't understand the sanctity of other's property, person, or life.
I'd say that the reason crime is so rampant in the US is because it's obviously rewarding, even prison sentences are just a multi-semester term in "crime school".
I don't think punishments are draconian enough.
What would be trippy would be if this was regardless of the type of death - accidental, murder, etc.
Remember the douchebags that leave their bluetooth headphone thing in their ear all day long, ostensibly because it's more convenient, but more of a status declaration (because frankly, how much "work" is it to either lift up your cell phone when it rings, or put in the earpiece when it rings?) to all around them?
Yeah, Google Glass is like that, to the exponential power of "look how much more $ I have than you".
Personally, no, I don't believe I need to simply "accept" that someone's desperate need to stay connected to the interwebs" is so significant that he/she can't take the bloody thing off in a social situation.
If someone were to stand there filming me, I might object as well. If they were to start doing it without asking, I might firmly object.
Here's my tip, if you're going to assault someone with Google Glasses on, make sure you a) assault them from behind, preferably either with something over their head, or at least knock the glasses off, b) step on the glasses ASAP.
I'm not saying anyone should hurt anyone (I expect you'll get caught, anyway) but I'm reaching the point where ostentatious disregard for other people should treated with cavalier disregard for their social contract in turn.
While I might in some cases even agree with you in principle that a) sometimes deliberate theft is justifiable, and b) conceptually it's possible that Congress is doing something painful "for the right reason", the likelihood has far more to do with cowardly servicing their corporate masters on Wall Street and making sure THEY get the money to feather their nests. So (again, assuming it's the right thing to do in the first place) do they deserve any credit whatsoever?
Personally, I believe deflation (your "...if the economic wheel stops spinning...") has far more fundamental causes needing far more substantive approaches than the standard inflation-managing monetary policies deployed by the Fed. It's truly a case of "...if all they have is a hammer...".
Further, my view of the QE deployment in this case is akin to US forestry policies in pre-1970s: balking the 'failure' stage of the business cycle - even if it looks deep and dangerous - simply makes the next one that much more nasty and reduces the efficacy of those tools going forward just like addictive tolerance.
It's almost like there's a reason that currency is a "government" thing.
(Not that "quantitative easing" and perpetual deficit spending isn't a form of deliberate theft in its own right, but that's another discussion.)
Honestly, the idea is *so* unoriginal, I have to wonder if it's not a government troll.
I mean, by this time security and privacy is so totally compromised at every level (from the device in your hand to the routers it passes through) that the very concept of someone insisting "oh, really, but OURS will be secure" sounds like an NSA project.
Agreed.
While I suspect that yes, food costs and shortages certainly make such uprisings more likely (hungry people tend to get a little crabby and short tempered) the causality of this is highly suspect.
I'd suspect that yes, at extreme values, hunger can drive civil issues. Otherwise it's more of an aggravating factor, as the uprisings around the world in 2013 were - at least as far as the news covered them - largely political and opportunistic. Note in particular the sort of 'infectious' pattern, where one populace sees another succeed, so they start dissenting themselves. Clearly, that's not hunger-driven.
Seriously, it was Doom 2 with better graphics. That's it. Nothing, absolutely NOTHING new in gameplay.
And then Rage? LOL.
Seriously, Doom4 should be dead before it ever gets published.
We're good on the "self interest" bit. It's the "enlightened" part that we seem to have so much trouble with.
"Give me my $1 billion slush fund"
Full-court press at 11.
A billion dollar slush fund in time for the elections that ALSO happens to salve the white-western-guilt of his voter base exactly where they've been programmed to be at for the past 10 years.
Definitions like this seem so black and white, not to mention terribly convenient because so much of how one defines "troll" (hereafter referred to as tro-x, to avoid the lameness filter) depends on where one stands.
I admit, I like arguing. Is that "being a tro-x" in our social-conformist society? This isn't just an internet thing; the friends that have known me the longest will probably say it's been forever; in fact, it's probably why we're friends - I love debating any subject from politics to religion to the power structures in the Holy Roman Empire. I good argument on anything is satisfying, and rewards broad knowledge, quick wits, and a healthy understanding of human psychology. (I don't use ad hominems because their a pointless waste of breath, not because social conventions require their avoidance; against someone reasonably intelligent, the use of an ad hominem is a signal that you're losing, you don't have any better thing to say. Might as well tip your king over right then and save your self-respect.)
Further, I enjoy attacking sacred cows. Unexamined beliefs that people hold sacrosanct for NO logical reason are practically my metier, although I admit that sometimes I weary of it as - with any zealot, political, religious, cultural, politically-correct - I deep-down know I'm not changing anyone's mind anyway. That's not right, actually: I *may* be changing someone's mind, it's just not my arguing partner but instead some 3rd party observing the debate who may be unresolved and find something in what I say that makes sense. So I'm not so much arguing against the person I'm talking to, as using them to posture for the (vague hand-waving) audience. Getting my opponent really wound up is part of the tactic - nobody argues rationally when they're enraged. It makes it easier to debunk them (and their points) as credible. As much as "tu quoque" is a logical fallacy and doesn't prove anything, it does seriously damage a person's credibility to have their naked hypocrisy exposed.
Does that make me a "tro-x" in common parlance? I suspect to many people it would.
Finally, declarations of "tro-xish" behavior have so very much to do with whether you agree with the point being made or not. I'll give you an example of what many reading will (I suspect) say is a tro-xish question: "As I understand it, 5.6% of survey respondents admit to being trolls, and this is considered a 'deviant' thing, signifying serious core personality disorders (like narcissism, sadism, and psychopathy). Curiously, many surveys show that the actual population of homosexuals is also around 6%, and yet our culture seems to be insisting that they are just an 'alternative normal'. How is that logically consistent?"
This has all the hallmarks of (what I believe is) considered a tro-xish question:
- a basis in fact
- attacking a target normally protected from criticism
- not really expecting an answer, just a host of flaming replies that essentially amount to "you stupidhead"
- yet is still an ACTUAL question: why does some behavior, at a certain level of frequency, merit the label of "deviant" while other behavior at the same frequency of appearance, not? (which would be the non-tro-xish way to pose the question, of course, as long as we stayed away from specifics)
1) If you're poor in America, you've already made some pretty shitty life-choices from the start. Ultimately, bad choices may catch up with you, and life's not Candyland, you can't just start over.
2) 60h week at minimum wage is ~$24,000 year*. You pay nothing in taxes, and in fact get "back" $000's in tax credits that you never paid in.
Now, if you have a cellphone, and cable, kids, and you smoke, and own a house...that $24,000 starts to get pretty thin. But then, you're already living better than 2/3rds of the people on the planet, not bad for "being poor"?
*I'd argue that if you have exploited to the fullest the "free education" you get in the US to age 18, never done drugs nor become addicted to alcohol, etc, and neither fathered/mothered a child until you had a stable job and income post-highschool, then there's no way you're working minimum-wage jobs for any sustained period of time. (Barring your being one of the vanishingly tiny percent of people who have an actual catastrophic event destroying their finances and lives beyond the ample safety-net structure....and this is too small a % to base serious policy on.) IIRC a recent survey said that 90%+ of people in poverty failed one of those first-listed points.
...because a "pan European" anything isn't really going to be secure at all. All the NSA will have to do is pay someone in a financially desperate state to let them plug-in to their "secure" pan-European connection.
Like most histrionic headlines, that first line is meant to be read as "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years," (the bold are the letters you're supposed to mentally 'land on'.
I read it, and of course have the same reaction, initially.
But then I look again, and read it differently: "The number of chemicals known to be toxic to children 's developing brains has doubled over the last seven years,"
Big difference in meaning conveyed, and ultimately conclusion.
So I read TFA (I know, crazy, and almost disqualifies me from commenting on slashdot, but I'm a rebel).
Here's the money shot: "...In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicantsâ"manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered...."
"DOUBLED IN ONLY 7 YEARS?" yeah, from 5 to 10, and most of those have entirely natural sources. Arsenic is bad for baby's brains? Really? And that "...there are more undiscovered"? More than 10 neurotoxologically dangerous substances in the world? PhD material, that. (In fact, here, I'll give them a few to start with: methane, ethane, propane and down the list. Most aqueous solvents. Iron. Chlorine....holy crap, the list took 7 years to double, and I just likely tripled it in 5 minutes!!)
Look, I *agree* with the idea that there should be a register of neurotoxicity levels for commonly-used chemicals, and that it would be useful that newly-synthesized compounds are tested to determine toxicity levels for neurological development like they are for basic toxicity. Saying this, I have no idea of how complex, slow, or expensive this testing is.
Finally, let's all remember that a lot of chemicals are intrinsic to our way of life; it's unreasonable to compare our chemical environment against a cleanroom utopia where there are somehow no external chemicals filtering into a developing child's body....that's just nonsensical. "Fear of 'dangerous' chemicals" is one of the more commonly-encountered FUD items in the news today.
Life is a tradeoff. I prefer drinking from glass bottles, but there's no way I'd give up the convenience, safety, and economy of plastic bottled for water. I understand that burning meat leaves a host of carcinogens in the carbon, but I'm simply not going to give up delightful steak. I suspect that eventually we'll find that living in cages of shifting electrical current our whole lives likewise has an impact on us, but I'm not giving up living in a home wired for electricity.
This all seems utterly obvious to me. I wish it was to others, so we could have a sensible discussion instead of freaking out all the time.
http://science.slashdot.org/co...
OK the NEWS is pretty sad. But that implication that, for once, I'm right, is pretty refreshing!
We really need a major war, or a significant catastrophe that would take about half of humanity. We're long past needing a culling.
"Star Trek represents a post-scarcity society evolved from democratic capitalism"
Check, I'm with you. Limitless energy, etc. In fact, I seem to recall Roddenberry saying exactly that.
but...
"...we're in the nascent stages of transforming to a post-scarcity economy..."
WTF? That's so wrong it borders on the incomprehensible.
Clearly, this was written from the well-compensated, comfortable easy-chair in a Starbucks somewhere by an over-educated upper-middle-class American (ie, unfamiliar with the daily lives of 60%+ of his own countrymen and -women, or about 90% of the world)
I'm as patriotic as the next guy - "go team USA" and all that - but I'm sad to hear that your rover is lost.
Space is not a zero-sum game. My country has decided that we're more interested in spending the dollars (that we constantly borrow from you) on social welfare programs, caring for old people, and floating eleven carrier groups in a world that doesn't have a single other navy that could fight ONE of them.
I'm looking forward to your next space accomplishment, as I truly believe such things help ALL people, ultimately.
Considering that only mass genocide would return us to the ecological balance we enjoyed* 5k-50k years ago, probably the people who agree with you would be Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot....so no, I'm pretty glad I'm not "with you" on that.
*by "enjoyed" I mean live in starvation/terror most of the time, desperately scrabbling to survive, reproduce fast enough to outpace the constant stream of child deaths, only to die in our mid-30s from some trivial disease or infection. But, it was "better".
The results are there but the interpretation is flawed.
I'd be FAR more likely to believe US kids are stupid and confused 'astrology' with 'astronomy', than that they believe astrology is a science.
We were being given a college tour for one of our kids at a LEADING institution (retail price north of $50k/year) and the pretty young tour guide was showing us around, and identified one of the science buildings as "...and there's the building with various science classrooms including geology, biology, and astrology...", which prompted a sudden look up* by most of the male parents in the group, eye contact, and a shrug. I didn't notice a single mom or kid react.
*she was wearing yoga pants
So....natural processes occurring pretty much exactly as they have for thousands, if not millions of years. And humans, feeling they know how things "should" be, are going to interfere. Brilliant!
Prediction: we'll cock it up.
"... their genesis was in government programs."
Is it significant that every one of your (very good) examples was specifically the direct result of MILITARY research?
Of course it's not fair.
As constrained as we sometimes feel we are by laws and regulations, the bulk of our society still works on the honor system - people simply doing what they're supposed to, and not doing what they're not supposed to.
Simply because something CAN benefit you, and you CAN accomplish it with little chance of being caught, doesn't mean you SHOULD do it.