Whether it is right or wrong all criminal organisations adopt a policy of destroying records. That way there is no incriminating evidence left lying around. Trump certainly knows how to behave like a gangster.
It's an onion of bullshit opposed by bullshit, though. Nuclear is fundamentally rather cheap and rather clean, using sane designs (not designs where it fucking melts into oblivion if it doesn't have constant active cooling, jesus christ what is wrong with those people), and using reasonable accounting based on rational pollution opportunity cost comparisons.
That is true *fundamentally*. In practice, nuclear has to spend so much on safety as to cause less than 1/100th the deaths of fossil fuels and even then people are still completely terrified over non-events (from a harm to human life standpoint) like Three Mile Island, people talk ominously about half-lives without ever once mentioning phrases like "Love Canal" or "Centralia" as points of comparison, economical designs are opposed by blowhards like Carter, etc.
It's worth focusing on alternatives mostly because there's too much bullshit to cut through, too many misconceptions and assholes protecting their jobs to make nuclear reform realistic. Unfortunately, there's not an ideal drop-in replacement for nuclear, particular not for larger megaproject sizes that could put a serious dent in pollution whilst simultaneously raising capacity and lowering costs in anticipation of the electric automobile revolution. Maybe they could drop a huge geothermal plant in Yellowstone... yeah, I'm sure the Greens would be perfectly OK with that, if it meant stopping global warming.
In other words, the morons screaming hysterically about nuclear energy are in large part being enabled and encouraged by the morons responsible for designing and implementing it.
Nice to see the pro-extinction lobby is spending their mod points wisely.
Seriously, if you care more about the lives of nonnative rabbits and mice in New Zealand than the massive ecological damage that place has already suffered, you should have your head examined. Or your heart.
Actually, I have to somewhat adjust what I just said about dormant carriers. If this is just a male-only change with no other changes to the mice, in an accidental-release scenario it may well persist a while without having catastrophic effects. Would be pretty easy to eradicate it if we desired, though, and natural selection would be stacked against it.
Well, it was implied this is just one prong of a multilayered approach.
And given house mice breed like crazy, I don't see why they couldn't use this in a similar way to the sterile insect technique. Breed millions upon millions of them. Saturation campaign (though you need to make sure their prey species aren't going to be taxed too severely.) The fact that they aren't actually infertile is a bonus.
I hadn't pondered in-depth the effects of a modest release (possibly unintentional) with no support. It's not clear that the gene would die out *or* take over (and then die out as all mice die, femaleless.) It's actually a fascinating idea... given thousands of years, assuming females don't spontaneously re-emerge, they might end up evolving into a separate species, an obligate reproductive parasite of house mice that basically keeps its own numbers in check. Presumably, it would grow more K-selected and longer lived due to the need to not overbreed compared to its host species. Or it might just die out due to the moderate disadvantage in not siring any females. Not sure. It's an interesting thought experiment. Still not a danger we need to be worried about, but fascinating nonetheless.
That presupposes that it's likely for a mutation to happen quickly enough to undo what the scientists have done. We've no idea of knowing how likely that will be. Evolution can't work miracles, and the amount of time they'll have to pull it off is presumably limited.
There actually are some such cases. They're referred to as the "guevedoces", a particular inbred South American population for whom a significant number of females transform to male at puberty. They're genetically and biochemically and culturally *fascinating* people.
As god as my witness, upon reading your post I was positive that "guevedoces" was going to end up being a Spanish epithet for regular transgendered people.
But yeah, I've already heard of that syndrome (though I wasn't aware of its special prevalence in DR). And, like I said, it is not going to produce individuals who are fertile as both males and females. If you have fully functional testes, you almost certainly do not have functional ovaries (to say nothing of a fully formed uterus, vagina, and the hormonal ability to ovulate and produce sperm properly.) Even if you stipulate they don't have to be fertile as both male and female at the same time, it's still not a realistic outcome. The hermaphrodite species that people point to have vastly different sexual differentiation systems, many not even having the XY chromosome system at all. The evolution of things like endothermy (responsible for scrotums, among other things) and breasts must have tremendously changed the dynamics of sexual differentiation.
Yeah, that was something I mused on elsewhere: one likely evolutionary response to this, if one had a chance to develop (I'm not sure the selective pressure would last long enough), might be an aversion to outsiders and a *preference* for inbreeding. Might be some neotinic effects that could drive this. A bit interesting to think about, though in the end it'll wind up making it easier to wipe out the remaining pockets of mice, not harder. But just try explaining that to some of the Jurassic Park fans around here...
...that (as I recall) affects only rabbits, which are also non-native to New Zealand. I'd say give the farmers medals and denounce the politicians that made it illegal.
It is worth risking a temporary reduction of house mice in other areas of the world to help save New Zealand species. The chance of this doing more harm than good is so small as to be effectively nonexistent. Not even the rabbit comparison is valid, since this isn't a virus and it would be easy to protect and regenerate native house mouse populations if needed and desired.
While I don't disagree that risk and failure are an unavoidable part of science (or indeed being alive), for the sake of sanity and clear thinking (not to mention for the sake of the numerous endangered species of New Zealand) I think the primary argument should be about the nature of the risks we face here. Arguing whether or not the risk is worth it should come only after we roughly agree on what those risks are. Even for "unknown unknowns"... you can maybe make those arguments (as some did) when you're testing the world's first atomic bomb or something, but this right here simply is not a very black swan-prone project.
Wikipedia, then. Start by reading about how human and also other mammalian hermaphrodites are almost never (possibly never in recorded history?) fertile as both males and females because of how unusual it would be to have a fully functional testicle and ejaculatory ducts and prostate *and* a fully functional ovary and vagina and uterus instead of the usual middle ground of streak gonads, blind vaginas, nonexistent sperm, etc. Possibly the most plausible way such a being could form would be via a chimeric hermaphrodite... but such an organism would sire or give birth to regular offspring, not hermaphrodites.
In other words, mammals aren't frogs. And even if there's some weirdass brand of mammalia I'm not familiar with that does this, that doesn't mean a species from Rodentia could or would copycat them over the course of a few generations just because there are too many males around.
The problem is our track record of "fixes" is often rather poor, cane toads were brought into Australia as a result of pesticides being banned.
That was a case of a NON-NATIVE PREDATOR that was NOT GENETICALLY MODIFIED being imported to kill off a *native species* of beetle that was interfering with crop yields.
I think that may be a tiny, tiny bit different than introducing an inherently self-limiting gene in the population of a non-native animal that has a zero percent chance of going extinct worldwide even if there were a thousand accidental releases. Much in the same way that building a hyperloop is different from organizing a tricycle race.
This isn't about smashing looms, this is about the perils of a potentially destructive action which may disrupt the environment in undesired ways.
The only reason why you're concerned about it is "because genetics"... and you can't even stop and think clearly enough to think of a good example of genetic modification for pest control going bad, so you have to compare it to something that has nothing whatsoever to the matter at hand.
The cane toad comparison makes significantly less sense than anti-vaxxer babble. You have nothing, nothing whatsoever to argue why we should let more New Zealand species go extinct to satisfy your irrational fear of science.
I think the worst that could happen is it will be used by hysterical neo-Luddites as another chip in their war to preemptively ban powerful tools that can allow humans to not only flourish, but undo some of the damage we've done to the ecosystem.
It's curious how you managed to use some correct facts to support some curiously dire-sounding conclusions. First off, here is the distribution of the house mouse. Do you think that carriers will be accidentally introduced in all breeding populations simultaneously, worldwide? Including the massive captive populations? And don't get the wrong idea from that map; it's not like there's a continuous interbreeding population in that entire range. There are lots of natural barriers keeping the sub-populations separate.
Don't forget that each mice can create TONS of offspring, and those all interbreed again. They typically have 5-8 offspring at a time, and can have 5-10 litters a year. This happens FAST. The engineered feature will spread exponentially across the population, with no stopping it. It's an avalanche.
And the avalanche works in more ways than one: reestablishing the mice in places they've been accidentally wiped out in will be a very easy and rapid project. And their short lifespans and high fecundity significantly reduces the window where an unintended transplant can occur. Dead male mice don't tend to do so well at sneaking on boats.
Also, we know for a fact that females are not carriers, so in the case of a problem it's very easy to start new captive collections (for genetic diversity, let's say) using females plus a few known-unaffected males. You don't even need to pay to have the males tested; you just let them breed and see if they have any female offspring (and if not you don't let them intermix.)
And that's assuming that accidental releases happen. I'm not at all convinced that's likely given proper import controls and the fact that male stowaways are less likely to survive and enjoy a durable reproductive success in a foreign land.
But put that to one side: let's say the risk is high. So what? There is a 0% chance of the house mouse going extinct worldwide. Zero. But there's a very high chance that, given enough time, the house mouse will drive more than one New Zealand species to extinction.
About Cane Toads. or for that matter read Farley Mowats stories of what wolves actually eat.
Translation: Hiroshima was bad. Don't get a chest x-ray unless you want to risk killing 100,000 people.
It's a complete and total disconnect from reality and rational thought that we're seeing from the neo-Luddites on the topic of genetic modification. Introducing a fundamentally self-destructive gene (in a very rapidly breeding species that has a zero percent chance of accidentally going extinct), has nothing whatsoever to do with importing a *genetically unmodified* nonnative predator to eat native beetles that are interfering with crop yields.
The "antidote" is this: female house mice. They're not in short supply, and they're guaranteed to not be a carrier so you can go on collecting them (for greater genetic diversity, let's say) even in the area of an outbreak. Wait for the mice to die out in the area, re-introduce unaffected mice. Wash, rinse, and repeat if necessary. It's not like we're talking about African elephants here. The average lifespan is what, a couple years maybe? And they breed like mad. And they're everywhere.
This is a complete non-issue. You're not going to accidentally make house mice go extinct worldwide. There aren't going to be hidden reserves of carriers laying dormant for years, just waiting to eradicate any re-introduction of the species in an area.
It's extremely depressing to see that the most hysterical forms of Luddite nonsense are, when it comes to genetic engineering, commonplace even here. The man-made damage to the ecology is happening right now. We can possibly fix it using a self-limiting agent that almost certainly will not do more harm than it solves.
Can someone please stop quoting Jurassic Park and give me a single example of genetically-engineered biological pest control of this sort backfiring, leading to significant new ecological problems? I don't mean the Simpsons-esque solution of importing snakes to eat the mice and gorillas to eat the snakes (which has happened in the past, I think); I mean sterile insect technique or stuff like this. It's very, very safe. Anyone who understands the first thing about biology should see that it's quite safe. Realistically, the worst that happens is it affects the species in its native range, and there are a dozen reasons why this isn't likely or likely to be catastrophic even if it did happen.
But no, much better that we let more species in New Zealand go extinct, because Life Finds a Way and laboratory-designed genetic changes are always more dangerous than the countless millions of naturally occurring mutations.
produce a nascent populations that barely survive and will likely result in quick rapid mutations and possibly new species as natural selection tries to find a way. Most likely into a species that can change it's sex after adulthood or possess both sets of reproductive organs.
Was slashdot always full of blithering Luddites? No, you are not going to see mammalian hermaphroditism evolve in response to this.
The evolutionary resistance to this, if any, would likely be behavioral and geographical, resulting in segregated and possibly more incestuously-inclined populations. Neither of these things will make the mice harder to combat (quite the opposite.)
Worse case, the genetic trick somehow stops functioning and you get female mice again. Super sex-changing mice running ramptant? Please. Put down your VHS cassette[1] of Jurassic Park already and pick up a science book.
The loss of a single species is less likely to severely screw up an ecosystem than the introduction of one... unless you can demonstrate the mouse is a keystone species. And where is the mouse native to? Just have those countries step up inspects of kiwi imports.
May take longer if it's just a single individual, but if the effects do indeed persist across future generations then it will grow into a tidal wave over time.
Well it's either effective or it isn't. If it's very effective, then the mice will likely die out too quick for an accidental importation to be likely (realize that serious import controls weren't really a thing back when most of these nonnative introductions happened.) If it's not very effective, but has a slowly deleterious effect, then:
1. Affected countries can take steps to contain and mitigate the problem before the mice are critically endangered (and because they're mice, they will bounce back quick.) Given that no females should be carriers and the Y chromosome doesn't encode all that much vital stuff, it will be fairly easy to maintain genetic diversity.
2. One would expect natural selection to eventually make the problem go away before the mice go extinct. I can think of several different mechanisms by which this could happen. Given tuskless elephants evolved to being relatively commonplace over just a few generations, I'm not at all worried about the future prospects of a short-lived, r-selected species like mice up against a bad gene that (for whatever reason) can't quickly wipe out a population.
Luddite-ism is never more depressing than when it's used to argue that we shouldn't try to fix ecological havoc we've already inflicted.
It's even worse given when the measures are (as they usually are in modern times) obviously much, much less risky than the existent and ongoing damage and are by their very nature prone to self-limiting instead of unchecked expansion.
From what I can tell, it's the fermented remnants of anti-socialist/anti-communist propaganda that's been going on since the 19th century. For one fun example, see the Sherlock Holmes novel about the brave and noble Pinkertons breaking up the evil, evil unions.
It's not that I think unions work great or are above criticism, it's that the common arguments used against them generally come out of the mouths of people who would never, ever apply those same arguments to corporations. The idea of unions being free to enter into contracts with employees and the companies they work for is treated much more negatively than the idea of one for-profit corporation entering into an exclusive service-providing agreement with another for-profit corporation, even if there are no in-principle differences other than the union representing and answering to (at least in theory) the employees.
Either both of these ideas are compatible with the free market or neither are. It's absurd and cynical in the extreme to say that it's only fair and pro-free market if the "third party" is another for-profit entity that explicitly does not have the workers' best interests at heart.
If a union vote doesnt pass with 100% of the workforces approval, why should it be the exclusive supplier? Because, the union will argue, its influence is diminished if it isn't - and so the rights of individual workers are trampled on because they are forced to pay dues to an entity they want nothing to do with.
It is not right, and its a setup you will find illegal in most of the rest of the world, where individual employee rights are respected.
The real question here is why unions are treated so differently. If Best Buy wants to hire Acme Janitorial Services (a for-profit company not owned by the janitors themselves) for their maintenance, no one bats an eye. I mean, I couldn't walk in, as a freelance janitor, and expect Best Buy to hire me no matter how good my resume looked.
Why is *that* not a horrendous abuse of my rights, but the same exact setup with in-house janitors who belong to a union somehow is?
It's more than just disordered thinking; the whole thing smacks of stale anti-communist/socialist propaganda. Literally the only in-principle difference of importance between the two scenarios is that workers have some measure of control over the union, and that the union has a free market motivation to keep wages high. (In practice, there are some other important differences but your argument was an in-principle ideological one.)
An employee should be legally free to engage in his or her job without outside interference from a third party, even if that third party has contracts with other people in the workplace.
Again, try pulling your head outside of that rotting "better dead than red" echo chamber for a moment and mulling over what that sentence literally means.
If you want to abolish the ability for all corporate entities to sign any exclusivity agreement with another corporate entities... that would be interesting to see. But it's going to affect a hell of a lot more than just unions.
There's a difference between a one-time waiver and a permanent one. And the specific right being waived rather matters. And this is apparently targeted specifically at high risk countries that (presumably) do not have a very robust or trustworthy background check service that we can tap.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether it is right or wrong all criminal organisations adopt a policy of destroying records. That way there is no incriminating evidence left lying around. Trump certainly knows how to behave like a gangster.
Yeah, Hillary would never do anything like that.
It's an onion of bullshit opposed by bullshit, though. Nuclear is fundamentally rather cheap and rather clean, using sane designs (not designs where it fucking melts into oblivion if it doesn't have constant active cooling, jesus christ what is wrong with those people), and using reasonable accounting based on rational pollution opportunity cost comparisons.
That is true *fundamentally*. In practice, nuclear has to spend so much on safety as to cause less than 1/100th the deaths of fossil fuels and even then people are still completely terrified over non-events (from a harm to human life standpoint) like Three Mile Island, people talk ominously about half-lives without ever once mentioning phrases like "Love Canal" or "Centralia" as points of comparison, economical designs are opposed by blowhards like Carter, etc.
It's worth focusing on alternatives mostly because there's too much bullshit to cut through, too many misconceptions and assholes protecting their jobs to make nuclear reform realistic. Unfortunately, there's not an ideal drop-in replacement for nuclear, particular not for larger megaproject sizes that could put a serious dent in pollution whilst simultaneously raising capacity and lowering costs in anticipation of the electric automobile revolution. Maybe they could drop a huge geothermal plant in Yellowstone... yeah, I'm sure the Greens would be perfectly OK with that, if it meant stopping global warming.
In other words, the morons screaming hysterically about nuclear energy are in large part being enabled and encouraged by the morons responsible for designing and implementing it.
Rather like web security, then.
Nice to see the pro-extinction lobby is spending their mod points wisely.
Seriously, if you care more about the lives of nonnative rabbits and mice in New Zealand than the massive ecological damage that place has already suffered, you should have your head examined. Or your heart.
Actually, I have to somewhat adjust what I just said about dormant carriers. If this is just a male-only change with no other changes to the mice, in an accidental-release scenario it may well persist a while without having catastrophic effects. Would be pretty easy to eradicate it if we desired, though, and natural selection would be stacked against it.
Well, it was implied this is just one prong of a multilayered approach.
And given house mice breed like crazy, I don't see why they couldn't use this in a similar way to the sterile insect technique. Breed millions upon millions of them. Saturation campaign (though you need to make sure their prey species aren't going to be taxed too severely.) The fact that they aren't actually infertile is a bonus.
I hadn't pondered in-depth the effects of a modest release (possibly unintentional) with no support. It's not clear that the gene would die out *or* take over (and then die out as all mice die, femaleless.) It's actually a fascinating idea... given thousands of years, assuming females don't spontaneously re-emerge, they might end up evolving into a separate species, an obligate reproductive parasite of house mice that basically keeps its own numbers in check. Presumably, it would grow more K-selected and longer lived due to the need to not overbreed compared to its host species. Or it might just die out due to the moderate disadvantage in not siring any females. Not sure. It's an interesting thought experiment. Still not a danger we need to be worried about, but fascinating nonetheless.
That presupposes that it's likely for a mutation to happen quickly enough to undo what the scientists have done. We've no idea of knowing how likely that will be. Evolution can't work miracles, and the amount of time they'll have to pull it off is presumably limited.
There actually are some such cases. They're referred to as the "guevedoces", a particular inbred South American population for whom a significant number of females transform to male at puberty. They're genetically and biochemically and culturally *fascinating* people.
As god as my witness, upon reading your post I was positive that "guevedoces" was going to end up being a Spanish epithet for regular transgendered people.
But yeah, I've already heard of that syndrome (though I wasn't aware of its special prevalence in DR). And, like I said, it is not going to produce individuals who are fertile as both males and females. If you have fully functional testes, you almost certainly do not have functional ovaries (to say nothing of a fully formed uterus, vagina, and the hormonal ability to ovulate and produce sperm properly.) Even if you stipulate they don't have to be fertile as both male and female at the same time, it's still not a realistic outcome. The hermaphrodite species that people point to have vastly different sexual differentiation systems, many not even having the XY chromosome system at all. The evolution of things like endothermy (responsible for scrotums, among other things) and breasts must have tremendously changed the dynamics of sexual differentiation.
mice ain't shy about inbreeding
Yeah, that was something I mused on elsewhere: one likely evolutionary response to this, if one had a chance to develop (I'm not sure the selective pressure would last long enough), might be an aversion to outsiders and a *preference* for inbreeding. Might be some neotinic effects that could drive this. A bit interesting to think about, though in the end it'll wind up making it easier to wipe out the remaining pockets of mice, not harder. But just try explaining that to some of the Jurassic Park fans around here...
deadly live virus
...that (as I recall) affects only rabbits, which are also non-native to New Zealand. I'd say give the farmers medals and denounce the politicians that made it illegal.
It is worth risking a temporary reduction of house mice in other areas of the world to help save New Zealand species. The chance of this doing more harm than good is so small as to be effectively nonexistent. Not even the rabbit comparison is valid, since this isn't a virus and it would be easy to protect and regenerate native house mouse populations if needed and desired.
While I don't disagree that risk and failure are an unavoidable part of science (or indeed being alive), for the sake of sanity and clear thinking (not to mention for the sake of the numerous endangered species of New Zealand) I think the primary argument should be about the nature of the risks we face here. Arguing whether or not the risk is worth it should come only after we roughly agree on what those risks are. Even for "unknown unknowns"... you can maybe make those arguments (as some did) when you're testing the world's first atomic bomb or something, but this right here simply is not a very black swan-prone project.
Wikipedia, then. Start by reading about how human and also other mammalian hermaphrodites are almost never (possibly never in recorded history?) fertile as both males and females because of how unusual it would be to have a fully functional testicle and ejaculatory ducts and prostate *and* a fully functional ovary and vagina and uterus instead of the usual middle ground of streak gonads, blind vaginas, nonexistent sperm, etc. Possibly the most plausible way such a being could form would be via a chimeric hermaphrodite... but such an organism would sire or give birth to regular offspring, not hermaphrodites.
In other words, mammals aren't frogs. And even if there's some weirdass brand of mammalia I'm not familiar with that does this, that doesn't mean a species from Rodentia could or would copycat them over the course of a few generations just because there are too many males around.
The problem is our track record of "fixes" is often rather poor, cane toads were brought into Australia as a result of pesticides being banned.
That was a case of a NON-NATIVE PREDATOR that was NOT GENETICALLY MODIFIED being imported to kill off a *native species* of beetle that was interfering with crop yields.
I think that may be a tiny, tiny bit different than introducing an inherently self-limiting gene in the population of a non-native animal that has a zero percent chance of going extinct worldwide even if there were a thousand accidental releases. Much in the same way that building a hyperloop is different from organizing a tricycle race.
This isn't about smashing looms, this is about the perils of a potentially destructive action which may disrupt the environment in undesired ways.
The only reason why you're concerned about it is "because genetics"... and you can't even stop and think clearly enough to think of a good example of genetic modification for pest control going bad, so you have to compare it to something that has nothing whatsoever to the matter at hand.
The cane toad comparison makes significantly less sense than anti-vaxxer babble. You have nothing, nothing whatsoever to argue why we should let more New Zealand species go extinct to satisfy your irrational fear of science.
I think the worst that could happen is it will be used by hysterical neo-Luddites as another chip in their war to preemptively ban powerful tools that can allow humans to not only flourish, but undo some of the damage we've done to the ecosystem.
Don't forget that each mice can create TONS of offspring, and those all interbreed again. They typically have 5-8 offspring at a time, and can have 5-10 litters a year. This happens FAST. The engineered feature will spread exponentially across the population, with no stopping it. It's an avalanche.
And the avalanche works in more ways than one: reestablishing the mice in places they've been accidentally wiped out in will be a very easy and rapid project. And their short lifespans and high fecundity significantly reduces the window where an unintended transplant can occur. Dead male mice don't tend to do so well at sneaking on boats.
Also, we know for a fact that females are not carriers, so in the case of a problem it's very easy to start new captive collections (for genetic diversity, let's say) using females plus a few known-unaffected males. You don't even need to pay to have the males tested; you just let them breed and see if they have any female offspring (and if not you don't let them intermix.)
And that's assuming that accidental releases happen. I'm not at all convinced that's likely given proper import controls and the fact that male stowaways are less likely to survive and enjoy a durable reproductive success in a foreign land.
But put that to one side: let's say the risk is high. So what? There is a 0% chance of the house mouse going extinct worldwide. Zero. But there's a very high chance that, given enough time, the house mouse will drive more than one New Zealand species to extinction.
About Cane Toads. or for that matter read Farley Mowats stories of what wolves actually eat.
Translation: Hiroshima was bad. Don't get a chest x-ray unless you want to risk killing 100,000 people.
It's a complete and total disconnect from reality and rational thought that we're seeing from the neo-Luddites on the topic of genetic modification. Introducing a fundamentally self-destructive gene (in a very rapidly breeding species that has a zero percent chance of accidentally going extinct), has nothing whatsoever to do with importing a *genetically unmodified* nonnative predator to eat native beetles that are interfering with crop yields.
The "antidote" is this: female house mice. They're not in short supply, and they're guaranteed to not be a carrier so you can go on collecting them (for greater genetic diversity, let's say) even in the area of an outbreak. Wait for the mice to die out in the area, re-introduce unaffected mice. Wash, rinse, and repeat if necessary. It's not like we're talking about African elephants here. The average lifespan is what, a couple years maybe? And they breed like mad. And they're everywhere.
This is a complete non-issue. You're not going to accidentally make house mice go extinct worldwide. There aren't going to be hidden reserves of carriers laying dormant for years, just waiting to eradicate any re-introduction of the species in an area.
Seconded.
It's extremely depressing to see that the most hysterical forms of Luddite nonsense are, when it comes to genetic engineering, commonplace even here. The man-made damage to the ecology is happening right now. We can possibly fix it using a self-limiting agent that almost certainly will not do more harm than it solves.
Can someone please stop quoting Jurassic Park and give me a single example of genetically-engineered biological pest control of this sort backfiring, leading to significant new ecological problems? I don't mean the Simpsons-esque solution of importing snakes to eat the mice and gorillas to eat the snakes (which has happened in the past, I think); I mean sterile insect technique or stuff like this. It's very, very safe. Anyone who understands the first thing about biology should see that it's quite safe. Realistically, the worst that happens is it affects the species in its native range, and there are a dozen reasons why this isn't likely or likely to be catastrophic even if it did happen.
But no, much better that we let more species in New Zealand go extinct, because Life Finds a Way and laboratory-designed genetic changes are always more dangerous than the countless millions of naturally occurring mutations.
Shh, that's Trump's secret plan to deal with China.
produce a nascent populations that barely survive and will likely result in quick rapid mutations and possibly new species as natural selection tries to find a way. Most likely into a species that can change it's sex after adulthood or possess both sets of reproductive organs.
Was slashdot always full of blithering Luddites? No, you are not going to see mammalian hermaphroditism evolve in response to this.
The evolutionary resistance to this, if any, would likely be behavioral and geographical, resulting in segregated and possibly more incestuously-inclined populations. Neither of these things will make the mice harder to combat (quite the opposite.)
Worse case, the genetic trick somehow stops functioning and you get female mice again. Super sex-changing mice running ramptant? Please. Put down your VHS cassette[1] of Jurassic Park already and pick up a science book.
1. You do have a fairly low user ID, after all
May take longer if it's just a single individual, but if the effects do indeed persist across future generations then it will grow into a tidal wave over time.
Well it's either effective or it isn't. If it's very effective, then the mice will likely die out too quick for an accidental importation to be likely (realize that serious import controls weren't really a thing back when most of these nonnative introductions happened.) If it's not very effective, but has a slowly deleterious effect, then:
1. Affected countries can take steps to contain and mitigate the problem before the mice are critically endangered (and because they're mice, they will bounce back quick.) Given that no females should be carriers and the Y chromosome doesn't encode all that much vital stuff, it will be fairly easy to maintain genetic diversity.
2. One would expect natural selection to eventually make the problem go away before the mice go extinct. I can think of several different mechanisms by which this could happen. Given tuskless elephants evolved to being relatively commonplace over just a few generations, I'm not at all worried about the future prospects of a short-lived, r-selected species like mice up against a bad gene that (for whatever reason) can't quickly wipe out a population.
Luddite-ism is never more depressing than when it's used to argue that we shouldn't try to fix ecological havoc we've already inflicted.
It's even worse given when the measures are (as they usually are in modern times) obviously much, much less risky than the existent and ongoing damage and are by their very nature prone to self-limiting instead of unchecked expansion.
From what I can tell, it's the fermented remnants of anti-socialist/anti-communist propaganda that's been going on since the 19th century. For one fun example, see the Sherlock Holmes novel about the brave and noble Pinkertons breaking up the evil, evil unions.
It's not that I think unions work great or are above criticism, it's that the common arguments used against them generally come out of the mouths of people who would never, ever apply those same arguments to corporations. The idea of unions being free to enter into contracts with employees and the companies they work for is treated much more negatively than the idea of one for-profit corporation entering into an exclusive service-providing agreement with another for-profit corporation, even if there are no in-principle differences other than the union representing and answering to (at least in theory) the employees.
Either both of these ideas are compatible with the free market or neither are. It's absurd and cynical in the extreme to say that it's only fair and pro-free market if the "third party" is another for-profit entity that explicitly does not have the workers' best interests at heart.
If a union vote doesnt pass with 100% of the workforces approval, why should it be the exclusive supplier? Because, the union will argue, its influence is diminished if it isn't - and so the rights of individual workers are trampled on because they are forced to pay dues to an entity they want nothing to do with. It is not right, and its a setup you will find illegal in most of the rest of the world, where individual employee rights are respected.
The real question here is why unions are treated so differently. If Best Buy wants to hire Acme Janitorial Services (a for-profit company not owned by the janitors themselves) for their maintenance, no one bats an eye. I mean, I couldn't walk in, as a freelance janitor, and expect Best Buy to hire me no matter how good my resume looked.
Why is *that* not a horrendous abuse of my rights, but the same exact setup with in-house janitors who belong to a union somehow is?
It's more than just disordered thinking; the whole thing smacks of stale anti-communist/socialist propaganda. Literally the only in-principle difference of importance between the two scenarios is that workers have some measure of control over the union, and that the union has a free market motivation to keep wages high. (In practice, there are some other important differences but your argument was an in-principle ideological one.)
An employee should be legally free to engage in his or her job without outside interference from a third party, even if that third party has contracts with other people in the workplace.
Again, try pulling your head outside of that rotting "better dead than red" echo chamber for a moment and mulling over what that sentence literally means.
If you want to abolish the ability for all corporate entities to sign any exclusivity agreement with another corporate entities... that would be interesting to see. But it's going to affect a hell of a lot more than just unions.
There's a difference between a one-time waiver and a permanent one. And the specific right being waived rather matters. And this is apparently targeted specifically at high risk countries that (presumably) do not have a very robust or trustworthy background check service that we can tap.