Well, someone certainly knows his sleazy, disgusting gay sex practices.
But, yes, CRISPR has a lot of potential for helping, or even curing, people with HIV. There have been a bunch of obvious approaches to that, with some promising results. If people want to try that on themselves, why not? The best outcome is that it works, and the worst outcome is that someone who is HIV infected and experiments on himself will die. Why does it bother you so much when people make such choices for themselves? What gives you the right to interfere with their choices?
Sticking your head in the sand doesn't really amount to much. Come back when you have a serious disease that gene editing might fix, and then let's see what your choices are.
In complex systems -- living creatures, planet, societies, human or animal -- it is often very difficult to deduce the arrow of cause and effect, if one even exists at all.
People attempting gene therapy on themselves or others don't inject random sequences, they usually start with a reasonable theory based on extensive prior experimental results, and the risks are fairly predictable. The usual outcome is that it simply doesn't work. The next most likely outcome is that it has some beneficial effect. All other outcomes are very unlikely.
Absolutely. However, the consequences of those very predictable edits is not well understood.
That's saying that the consequences of editing a text file with emacs are not well understood; it's a meaningless statement, since the consequences depend on the edit.
There are many edits with predictable consequences. There are many edits with unpredictable consequences. But the range of consequences is pretty straightforward: most of the time, nothing happens, and rarely the person either gets sick or gets better.
There are some implausible scenarios under which gene editing might pose a risk to other humans, but regulations are not going to stop those anyway, so you might as well not bother making those illegal.
This notion that people make choices for self in isolation is wishful thinking and over simplification. Part of the function of a society is to set limits on what those risks are.
I have a right to kill myself in any way I see fit, even if that hurts my family, my friends, etc. No, you do not have a right to limit the risks competent adults take with their lives. In addition to not having the right, you also do not have the ability. Notice that this guy was going to do his experiment in Mexico.
Societies cannot and should not be expected to bear the full cost of people who take very bad risks.
Who is expecting anybody to bear the full cost of people who take very bad risks? Did anybody ask for ACA to cover the consequences of editing my own genes?
They can pass on desease. They can land on other people.
This is more like a pre-teen building a bomb; dangerous, you can hurt or kill yourself,
How is an adult doing something dangerous to themselves like a pre-teen doing something dangerous to themselves?
Nobody knows what they're doing with gene therapies without a sufficient amount of testing. Let me repeat, these tests have not been performed on animal
And how would you test CRISPR gene editing for a human disease on animals? Come on, go ahead, explain that.
What you are suggesting is equivalent to hacking your computer to change byte #76,238,110 of a kernel and rebooting the computer, without knowing what code is on the computer or how it works
And if it's my computer, then I should be allowed to do that. (And it isn't really the equivalent of that; there are plenty of genes that we understand quite well.)
and the person doing the hacking is willfully ignorant of computing and refuses to follow best practices of computer design because of a delusion about Big-Computer holding us back.
That isn't a "delusion", that's how the computer industry used to work until people started hacking their own computers. Often they failed, sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they fried their hardware. But in the end, we got Linux, open source, GNU, and a lot of other really good things out of that.
Given that we can't even change the formulation of soap without accidentally unleashing antibiotic-resistant E-Coli on an unsuspecting world
There is no evidence that antibacterial soap actually creates antibiotics resistance in the real world. Furthermore, the gene editing is done on the humans, not on the pathogens.
we really should approach this shit with a little bit of humility and caution
You'd be amazed at how much more cautious people are who experiment on themselves than doctors who experiment on others and don't really have to worry about the consequences.
If you really don't think drug companies under FDA regulation are better equipped to do trials as safe as possible than amateurs disregarding safety entirely in order to earn easy money...
That belief is merely a testament to your ignorance.
I don't think any of these grassroots efforts have actually undercut their business in any meaningful way.
There is a huge number of home remedies that work just as well as patented drugs. And, yes, they do cut into drug company profits.
I think that, if anything, people who sell fake cures that are already known to not work (i.e. using hyperbaric chambers to cure AIDS)
That's like saying that people shouldn't develop software on their home computers because other people used to build fake perpetual motion machines.
Seriously, CRISPR has nothing to do with hyperbaric chambers. And devising potential cures with CRISPR is much more like programming than the kind of traditional treatments people have come up with.
I'm sure researchers have more ways that live trials on humans to start testing the safety and efficacy of these treatments
You're sure... why? What the hell do you know about gene therapy?
As for the DIY, medical treatments are notoriously hard to measure outcomes for, I mean there's still people who swear by homeopathic treatments.
And given the strong placebo effect we observe in many patients, homeopathy is a safe and effective treatment, even if it doesn't work in the way it claims it does.
DIY is not the way to figure out if these treatments work.
The primary motivation of self-treatment is not to "figure things out". As long as people are doing this with their own money, let them.
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.
Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.
If people take these risks voluntarily, human gene therapy can make rapid progress and not be subject to million dollar a shot monopoly pricing. Drug companies don't like these kinds of grassroots efforts because they undercut their business.
When you institute redistribution in a society, the people who are redistributed to like it, and the people who are redistributed from leave.
So, the problem with socialism is not that you run out of other people's money, it's that you run out of highly productive people whose money you can take.
AHH I had not thought of it that manner. Perhaps the traditional landlords should consider competing with AirBnB for short term rentals as well as the traditional market.
AirBnB is just a market maker, so that's what's happening (to some degree): traditional landlords move out of the long term rental market into the short term rental market, and they use AirBnB to do it. However, it's not a big effect because the short term rental market has its own problems (it isn't to blame for NYC's insane rents).
The main effect of overregulation of the rental market is condo conversions and lack of investment into new rental property. And that mostly happens with small landlords because big landlords don't care about the overregulation or bad renters: they can amortize the cost of legal staff over hundreds of properties.
Looks to me like with you, it's always "scum landlords", no matter what the facts are.
In any case, NYC is governed according to how New York voters, both renters and owners, want to govern it. The population of "scum landlords" is too small to change the outcome of elections.
And ignoring regulations that make it better for the rest of us.
The regulations being used against AirBnB make it worse for the everybody except a small number of special interests.
We've outlawed slave markets, for example, and historical records don't show a complete failure of capitalism.
You got it backwards. Slaver markets were not a free market arrangement. Slave markets were a creation of the US government, a creation that explicitly robbed people of the fruits of their labor. When we abolished slavery we did it not by "outlawing" it, but abolished the laws that created it. The people that divided people up by race and advocated robbing them of the fruits of their labor were the same then as now: Democrats.
There's lots of things whose markets are restricted in the US, including sex workers, various drugs, some firearms and other weapons, and to a certain extent things that are falsely advertised. Yet we seem to be in a capitalist economy.
Well, as I pointed out before: both Marx and you like to equivocate about the term "capitalist", using it in different meanings (corporatist, crony capitalist, free market). I corrected you on this before. Stop equivocating. The US is a corporatist, progressive social market economy with a massive public sector, and that is hurting particularly minorities and causing the middle class to stagnate. If the US actually were a free market economy, people would be doing a lot better.
And the criminalization of drugs, sex work, some firearms, and many other things has hurt people badly, in particular minorities. It has been a major driver of racial disparities and inequality. That is what you advocate: screwing over minorities in the name of progressive ideology.
Which means that, if large groups of the population are oppressed for long periods of time, it's fine with you as long as it's not government-enforced.
Without government intervention, it is impossible to oppress large groups of the population for long periods of time; every time large groups of the population have been oppressed for a long time, it has been the fault of government (and in the US, usually the fault of Democrats).
That's not a universally shared view.
Well, that's because many Americans are utterly ignorant of what it is like to be oppressed.
There's obviously plenty of problems with the public school systems in the US, but many of them are fixable.
You specifically claimed that government intervention was necessary to reduce inequalities in education. Yet, the fact is that there are massive inequalities among public schools across the US, so obviously the US isn't very good at reducing inequality. And the people most screwed over by the US public education system are minorities, who end up educationally far behind whites. And all of that despite massive increases in funding since 1970's and massively higher funding in the US than abroad. I.e., your example of public education as a government function that improves educational fairness is bullshit.
I may have been unclear. I'm not talking about the reactions of female nurses to male nurses. I'm talking about the reactions of female patients to male nurses. Being able to work with patients without unduly distressing them is a vital part of the job of nursing.
So when men are uncomfortable with female doctors, female accountants, or female programmers, then that's the fault of men and a sign of their misogyny and requires the jackboot of government to stomp down on them. When women are uncomfortable with male nurses, male teachers, or male gynecologists, that's also the fault of men. It's always the fault of men with you, isn't it? Don't you realize how ridiculous, sexist, and authoritarian your views are?
I want to see a cite for your first sentence, since I don't remember ever using "equality of opportunity", unmodified, to mean a simple lack of legal barriers.
You misread that. What I was saying is that you obviously use "equality of opportunity" in the misleading, authoritarian neo-Marxist sense, and that I thought it was pointless to engage in such meaningless semantic games. You said that 'equality of opportunity" meant "fairness" do you and that government should aim for a fair society, to which I responded in so many words "fuck government-imposed fairness" because it never works.
Your second sentence is a legitimate viewpoint, although one I disagree with. Holding liberty uncompromisingly above all else is not a good idea.
Well, I understand why you think that; it's a common view among privileged, well-off people like yourself, and it's something you have likely been indoctrinated into believing since childhood. I used to think that as well, until I actually reflected on the root causes of the injustices and oppression I experienced throughout my life, and I understood how minorities actually ever ended up succeeding.
Yes, holding liberty uncompromisingly above all else is a very good idea. It's scary, but it's necessary. As Kant put it:
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one's own mind without another's guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) "Have the courage to use your own understanding," is therefore the motto of the enlightenment. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remain minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians.
The only way free, open, and productive societies can function is if people act like adults and live with the consequences of their choices.
Says the guy who is willing to throw out large numbers of observations because they're inconvenient for his ideology. That's not just unscientific, that's antiscientific.
Quite the opposite: it is unscientific to use observations that were gathered under conditions that are not reproducible, or by biased observers. And that is exactly what you are doing, and that is what you are basing your conclusions on.
Currently, we could gather all relevant information and make it available to central planners. Given a sophisticated way of handling this flood of information, do you think socialism would work? I don't.
Look, you still don't even understand what the information problem is; you're talking out of your ass.
And, in principle, it's entirely different. All you need is a different principle which is held by a very large number of people. Economics as a study doesn't really address ethical issues.
I didn't say that setting a price for labor is morally equivalent to setting a price for goods, I said that it was economically equivalent; i.e., it was governed by the same laws. And one of the fundamental laws is that the government cannot gather enough information to set the price of labor correctly or justly.
The cost of a guy to program it is what that guy has to live on.
The value of anybody's labor is what their actual, economic value to society is. If that isn't enough to live on, then the economic value of that human being to society is not enough to sustain them; pretending otherwise is foolish. And at that point, the person must depend either on charity or on theft at gunpoint. I prefer for that person to depend on charity; you prefer for that person to depend on theft at gunpoint. I believe my view is more moral than yours.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, someone certainly knows his sleazy, disgusting gay sex practices.
But, yes, CRISPR has a lot of potential for helping, or even curing, people with HIV. There have been a bunch of obvious approaches to that, with some promising results. If people want to try that on themselves, why not? The best outcome is that it works, and the worst outcome is that someone who is HIV infected and experiments on himself will die. Why does it bother you so much when people make such choices for themselves? What gives you the right to interfere with their choices?
Sticking your head in the sand doesn't really amount to much. Come back when you have a serious disease that gene editing might fix, and then let's see what your choices are.
People attempting gene therapy on themselves or others don't inject random sequences, they usually start with a reasonable theory based on extensive prior experimental results, and the risks are fairly predictable. The usual outcome is that it simply doesn't work. The next most likely outcome is that it has some beneficial effect. All other outcomes are very unlikely.
That's saying that the consequences of editing a text file with emacs are not well understood; it's a meaningless statement, since the consequences depend on the edit.
There are many edits with predictable consequences. There are many edits with unpredictable consequences. But the range of consequences is pretty straightforward: most of the time, nothing happens, and rarely the person either gets sick or gets better.
There are some implausible scenarios under which gene editing might pose a risk to other humans, but regulations are not going to stop those anyway, so you might as well not bother making those illegal.
I have a right to kill myself in any way I see fit, even if that hurts my family, my friends, etc. No, you do not have a right to limit the risks competent adults take with their lives. In addition to not having the right, you also do not have the ability. Notice that this guy was going to do his experiment in Mexico.
Who is expecting anybody to bear the full cost of people who take very bad risks? Did anybody ask for ACA to cover the consequences of editing my own genes?
That's not an issue in this case.
How is an adult doing something dangerous to themselves like a pre-teen doing something dangerous to themselves?
And how would you test CRISPR gene editing for a human disease on animals? Come on, go ahead, explain that.
Correction: you don't know what you are doing.
And if it's my computer, then I should be allowed to do that. (And it isn't really the equivalent of that; there are plenty of genes that we understand quite well.)
That isn't a "delusion", that's how the computer industry used to work until people started hacking their own computers. Often they failed, sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they fried their hardware. But in the end, we got Linux, open source, GNU, and a lot of other really good things out of that.
Great!
Well, good then that that's not what we are talking about here.
There is no evidence that antibacterial soap actually creates antibiotics resistance in the real world. Furthermore, the gene editing is done on the humans, not on the pathogens.
You'd be amazed at how much more cautious people are who experiment on themselves than doctors who experiment on others and don't really have to worry about the consequences.
That belief is merely a testament to your ignorance.
Gene editing is extremely well understood: it makes predictable changes to human DNA. That's its attraction.
Well, since you don't understand how gene editing works, that's the kind of nonsense you believe.
There is a huge number of home remedies that work just as well as patented drugs. And, yes, they do cut into drug company profits.
That's like saying that people shouldn't develop software on their home computers because other people used to build fake perpetual motion machines.
Seriously, CRISPR has nothing to do with hyperbaric chambers. And devising potential cures with CRISPR is much more like programming than the kind of traditional treatments people have come up with.
You're sure... why? What the hell do you know about gene therapy?
And given the strong placebo effect we observe in many patients, homeopathy is a safe and effective treatment, even if it doesn't work in the way it claims it does.
The primary motivation of self-treatment is not to "figure things out". As long as people are doing this with their own money, let them.
It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.
Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.
If people take these risks voluntarily, human gene therapy can make rapid progress and not be subject to million dollar a shot monopoly pricing. Drug companies don't like these kinds of grassroots efforts because they undercut their business.
There isn't necessarily a contradiction there.
Underperforming, leftist engineers leave for Canada.
Highly skilled engineers come to the US.
Though: the US is getting less and less attractive for highly skilled engineers as well, given its high taxes and progressive policies.
When you institute redistribution in a society, the people who are redistributed to like it, and the people who are redistributed from leave.
So, the problem with socialism is not that you run out of other people's money, it's that you run out of highly productive people whose money you can take.
AirBnB is just a market maker, so that's what's happening (to some degree): traditional landlords move out of the long term rental market into the short term rental market, and they use AirBnB to do it. However, it's not a big effect because the short term rental market has its own problems (it isn't to blame for NYC's insane rents).
The main effect of overregulation of the rental market is condo conversions and lack of investment into new rental property. And that mostly happens with small landlords because big landlords don't care about the overregulation or bad renters: they can amortize the cost of legal staff over hundreds of properties.
Looks to me like with you, it's always "scum landlords", no matter what the facts are.
In any case, NYC is governed according to how New York voters, both renters and owners, want to govern it. The population of "scum landlords" is too small to change the outcome of elections.
The regulations being used against AirBnB make it worse for the everybody except a small number of special interests.
You got it backwards. Slaver markets were not a free market arrangement. Slave markets were a creation of the US government, a creation that explicitly robbed people of the fruits of their labor. When we abolished slavery we did it not by "outlawing" it, but abolished the laws that created it. The people that divided people up by race and advocated robbing them of the fruits of their labor were the same then as now: Democrats.
Well, as I pointed out before: both Marx and you like to equivocate about the term "capitalist", using it in different meanings (corporatist, crony capitalist, free market). I corrected you on this before. Stop equivocating. The US is a corporatist, progressive social market economy with a massive public sector, and that is hurting particularly minorities and causing the middle class to stagnate. If the US actually were a free market economy, people would be doing a lot better.
And the criminalization of drugs, sex work, some firearms, and many other things has hurt people badly, in particular minorities. It has been a major driver of racial disparities and inequality. That is what you advocate: screwing over minorities in the name of progressive ideology.
Without government intervention, it is impossible to oppress large groups of the population for long periods of time; every time large groups of the population have been oppressed for a long time, it has been the fault of government (and in the US, usually the fault of Democrats).
Well, that's because many Americans are utterly ignorant of what it is like to be oppressed.
You specifically claimed that government intervention was necessary to reduce inequalities in education. Yet, the fact is that there are massive inequalities among public schools across the US, so obviously the US isn't very good at reducing inequality. And the people most screwed over by the US public education system are minorities, who end up educationally far behind whites. And all of that despite massive increases in funding since 1970's and massively higher funding in the US than abroad. I.e., your example of public education as a government function that improves educational fairness is bullshit.
So when men are uncomfortable with female doctors, female accountants, or female programmers, then that's the fault of men and a sign of their misogyny and requires the jackboot of government to stomp down on them. When women are uncomfortable with male nurses, male teachers, or male gynecologists, that's also the fault of men. It's always the fault of men with you, isn't it? Don't you realize how ridiculous, sexist, and authoritarian your views are?
You misread that. What I was saying is that you obviously use "equality of opportunity" in the misleading, authoritarian neo-Marxist sense, and that I thought it was pointless to engage in such meaningless semantic games. You said that 'equality of opportunity" meant "fairness" do you and that government should aim for a fair society, to which I responded in so many words "fuck government-imposed fairness" because it never works.
Well, I understand why you think that; it's a common view among privileged, well-off people like yourself, and it's something you have likely been indoctrinated into believing since childhood. I used to think that as well, until I actually reflected on the root causes of the injustices and oppression I experienced throughout my life, and I understood how minorities actually ever ended up succeeding.
Yes, holding liberty uncompromisingly above all else is a very good idea. It's scary, but it's necessary. As Kant put it:
The only way free, open, and productive societies can function is if people act like adults and live with the consequences of their choices.
Quite the opposite: it is unscientific to use observations that were gathered under conditions that are not reproducible, or by biased observers. And that is exactly what you are doing, and that is what you are basing your conclusions on.
Look, you still don't even understand what the information problem is; you're talking out of your ass.
I didn't say that setting a price for labor is morally equivalent to setting a price for goods, I said that it was economically equivalent; i.e., it was governed by the same laws. And one of the fundamental laws is that the government cannot gather enough information to set the price of labor correctly or justly.
The value of anybody's labor is what their actual, economic value to society is. If that isn't enough to live on, then the economic value of that human being to society is not enough to sustain them; pretending otherwise is foolish. And at that point, the person must depend either on charity or on theft at gunpoint. I prefer for that person to depend on charity; you prefer for that person to depend on theft at gunpoint. I believe my view is more moral than yours.
You claim that there are no dominance hierarchies in hunter gatherer societies. Sahlin isn't evidence of that.
Yes, like almost all human dominance hierarchies, you enter into them voluntarily.
I'm not "going to call it that', that's what it's called. You need to do your homework.
Why are you asking me? I believe AirBnB should be able to operate freely.