Your post is a bit simplistic. As others have posted-South Africa was dominated by Khoisan people until the Bantu expansion that swept east and south overran them. The Xhosa still show a lot of Khoisan features (Nelsen Mandela has obvious Khoisan facial features)-but the Zulus are closer to the Bantu type.
European brutality is more well documented mostly because Europeans cared to record it and some of them actually objected. Europeans (Spaniards) treated the native peoples like beasts-and yet some in the religious orders dissented and passionate debate were held about the rights of the natives in Spain. In fact, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles tried to prevent the exploitation-but he was too far from the situation to be of much use (he was also involved in something called the Wars of Religion in central Europe).
In contrast, the Aztecs had few ethical debates about engaging in wars with other peoples simply to aquire human bodies for sacrifice. By the way-there is now some evidence that the "native" peoples of the New World displaced older peoples (the Tierra del Fuegans being hybrid remnants possible of the older inhabitants).
I disagree with the "unspoilt" resources. India is a 1 billion people in 1/3 the size of the US. Most of the "unspoilt" spaces are mountains and deserts. Try to find wilderness in the flatlands-good luck. India does some some iron and manganese in the Chota Nagpure highlands-but it's industrial capacity isn't a great as someplace like China which has more hydro potentional and more mineral resources (coal).
spam can be a problem when you start missing legit e-mails. i have a friend who got about 30-40 pieces of spam a day-and he deleted an e-mail from a close friend by mistake (her name was christina-he kept getting porno spam from a christina with a 'wet pussy that's hot & ready' so he confused them) that was a mass-mailing about her mom dying. the next time they met (a few weeks later at a mutual friend's) he acted like nothing had happened and was pretty embarrassed. anyway, spam can be really fucked up (granted-he should have switched accounts-but some people will keep sending e-mail to your old account)
Google makes a profit-so why should they cave? The way I look at it, being the lone holdout differentiates their brand. Remember to every search engine wanted to be a portal??? Now Altavista is crawling back to the "we're trying to be the best search engine" out there line again. The day Google is percieved by its customers as just being another search engine, you'll see a backlash like you'll never believe, because frankly the soccer moms that use Ask Jeeves are a lot less picky than Google users. It can't allow itself to be another search engine, its brand is defined by its disinclination to follow the trend of the day.
Most people want children that look like them. Part of it is also that that way the fact that the child is adopted is a lot less obvious. Part of it just because people generally do have racial feelings, no matter how much you might want to deny it.
In an ironic note, many of the "black" babies that can't be adopted by white parents do to "cultural genocide" are often half-white. Of course, the rule of hypo-descent (that all people with a drop of black ancestry are black) rules in this case.
And before we get to criticizing American whites....remember that in Korea the reason there are so many kids that come to the US is that people are reluctant to adopt someone and have descendants outside of their bloodline. The Korean government is trying to change this attitude, but it's pretty hard.
1. Insurance companies not insuring norms. (I hate the term, but it fits)
I addressed this in another post-but you might be looking at separate insurance companies in the future. The fact is also, if genetic screening is $$$, the parents already paid a lot of money and it makes some sense their kids would pay a lower premium since costs have been front-loaded.
Of course there'll be a genetic divide, resources are scarce. Low income families also can't afford good prenatal care-so there's already a life long divide. But the people this might harm the most are those with super good genes, since their advantage over the middle-class normal genes people will be decreased.
3. Normal People replaced in the workforce, 2-3 generations from implementation.
Same arguments made about computers and possible AI-but no one is talking about a Butlerian Jihad
4. Screenings will filter out "Genius" and "Artists"
Most eggs are wasted anyhow. Though perhaps you have something if some deleterious traits are correlated with genius. On the other hand, some of the greatest artistic periods were during periods of squalor and inequality (Athenian Democracy, the Rennaisance), while the US hasn't produced much more in the past 20 years aside from pop-culture, so does that mean we should go back toward what was in the past??? I mean, if great art is contingent on extreme manic-depressive tedencies, should we make sure there are manic depressives around so we can enjoy their art???
5. Unseen effects after multiple generations
of "Altered" humans.
This is the same argument eugenicists make about "dysgenics" and "bad breeding." Not saying if you or they are correct, but it's the same argument.
6. Altered humans breed for specific tasks.
70% of female PhDs in physics marry other physics PhDs. The fact is that this sort of thing is more and more common.
7. Rights for Altered and Normal humans.
8. Social interactions between enhanced/altered humans.
You're right to point out that multiple genes can affect one phenotype....
On the other hand, suppose you have 50 genes that affect "intelligence." Stupid scientists only know of 3. If you can affect those 3, that's still a marginal improvement (by the way, the have found portions of chromosomes that correlate strongly with super high IQ kids).
Also, you probably aren't right about lifestyle being so super important in terms of how athletic you are. A recent study (reported in the NY Times as well) shows that 10% of people will always be physically impressive no matter how much they work out, and 10% will always be buff or toned no matter how sedentary they are. Other results also show that a lot of "athletic traits" are independent, in other words, you're muscular, strong, or have good endurance, but their's no correlation.
Also, the twin studies that show how similar twins that were raised apart are, and the adoption studies that show a host of tendencies that adoptees have in common with their biological parents (IQ, criminality, etc.) rather than their adoptive parents are disturbing.
It's not all genetics, but I think you're post indicates you overplay the environmental hand.
The problem with your analogy is that people breed dogs for one feature. Kids aren't treated like dogs, parents have more of an investment than winning a dog show. From what I know about breeding, a lot of the extreme domestic breeds, of whatever species, are created via intense inbreeding. You take one animal that has what you want, and breed it constantly, and than rebreed the offspring that have the desired trait together until you have only that trait. With this sort of genetic screening, you manipulating or selecting from your own genes and picking the less deleterious one.
By the way, the future will be filled with more beautiful people-plastic surgery is getting cheaper and cheaper, and when robots get to doing it, will be like getting braces for middle-class kids today. You might as well give your kids a head-start and pay for it upfront by getting it genetically
Also, please note that "unattractiveness" is often the byproduct of some "bad" gene, so if you get rid of deleterious genes people might naturally become more attractive. For instance, a fetus with a better immune system and hormonol control ends up more symmetrical than it would be otherwise. If you don't think things can happen on the fetal level-did you ever know "identical" twins where one was definately more attractive than the other???
Well, IMO, this goes against natural selection. Weaknesses are inherent in all forms of life. And in this case, the weakness is basically being forced out of the child. I don't think this is a good thing, and here is why...
A good point. We are changing the germ line in ways we might not know. And we all have deleterious genes. Here is mine in full disclosure:
Hypercholesterolemia
Because hypercholesterolemia is dominant 50% of my children will have it (statistically). My family doesn't have a history of heart disease (the side I inherit from, which is my mother's side people tend to get heart disease... in their 90s since they often make it 100 like my grandfather and my 115 year old great-great-aunt)-so I don't know how bad hypercholesterolemia is for us. My cholesterol is 380, so is my mother's and my sister's. My two brothers and obviously my father don't have it.
But when I have children, I plan to make sure they don't have it by screening or selectively aborting. But I also wonder-if I don't have a history of heart disease, why??? I don't know. Do we know all the ramifications of hypercholerolemia aside from the heart-disease related ones? Cholesterol is a hormone that affects several processes...including brain development.
Nonetheless, it is a choice individual parents will have to make. Society shouldn't have to pay for it-you pay out of your own pocket. But change isn't always bad. Throughout most of human history people have been on the verge of malnutrition. Now that's not the case, and the obesity "epidemic" is spreading into the Third World. I'd rather take an obesity epidemic than malnutrition.
Also, remember that not all humans will take advantage (or will be able to do to money) of the new services, so we'll have a reserver of "untouched" human genes in that population. Taking into account that throughout most of human history there were fewer than 1 million of us, I wouldn't worry about genetic uniformity.
Fear of the unknown shouldn't hold us back. We should move forward, with caution, but move nonetheless. There is a chance we might fall of the cliff's edge, but the fact is the only other choice would be to attempt to hold still indefinately, and impossible task.
By the way, would we make a big fuss if the women has simply recieved an egg donor???
What really irritated me about a lot of the reporting of the stories was the so called "ethical problems" implied by a women who might not be around in full mental-state for daughter's teen years. One idiotic commentator at the end of one article wondered, "...if having children was an absolute right in the light of the situation." Good question to ask, but how many idiots out their have kids in messed up situations??? 70 year old fathers, crack-addicted welfare mothers, the Yates psychotic-muderer and so forth. The only reason the "mainstream" press and its fellow-travellers point the finger at this women is because she used genetic screening-if they wondered if a crack addicted mother should have a right to have a child, everyone would be howling about civil liberties and the implied racisim.
That being said-it is a concern that she chose to have a biological daughter. The child's life probably won't be optimum. But then again, what about lesbians having children? Or people that don't get themselves tested for life-threatening diseases that there's a family history for? And so forth. It all smells of rank hypocrisy and pious finger-pointing obscuring the real moral issues presented, because the woman's decision has ramifications about the choices that everyday people make, not just those who use genetic screening.
By coincidence I was reading Lomborg's site yesterday. He trieds to answer criticisms in his critiques section. I found a lot of the articles by his detracters rather offensive in their tone (especially for the Nature, where they criticise for only using Nature papers as 1% of his sources-how petty). But check out the exchange in The Prospect, his opponent becomes progressively more snide and shrill.
Also, if any of you have done debate, will notice how he simply avoids Lomborg's rebuttals and simply attacks him on another point. This reminds me a lot of Creationists in my debates with them-they bring up a problem with evolution-then ignore you when you respond in kind and attack you on some other point, ad infinitum.
Conservatives and liberals tend to have their axes to grind of course. Liberals believe we should accept worst case scenarios in the context of environmentalism, but not social policy, while conservatives accept the opposite. On the other hand-please note the respone to the book Arming America which purported to show that America's gun culture is a post-Civil War thing-it came out to glowing reviews in the popular and academic press. In hindsight-a lot of its reviewers now have retracted their endorsement after find out the author seems to have citied sources that never existed (call the libraries or archives where the sources exist, and they say they never exist). Two years ago-I found the book very interesting, and though it didn't make me re-think my pro-gun orientation I accept it has a civil liberties, not historical issue, I didn't see anything wrong with it since I'm not an archival specialist. Contrast this with the Bell Curve which was torn to shreds for every tenditious citation (personally-I think they should ignored all the international sources since they aren't as well documented as the American ones were).
Good point. Taking the gravity of the downside into account-it make be prudent to make a decision based on worst-case scenarion. On the other hand...
In the 1970s people were worrying about the "cooling" of the planet, and the coming Ice Age. It turns out they were wrong. What if we had taken drastic measures to preserve humanity and pumped Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?
The problem with deep greenery is that it often marginalizes the importance of humanity be declaring that we are a part of nature. On the other hand-it also presumes we have an almost omniscient knowledge of the depth of the processes around us.
I don't really feel sorry for the Asian ISPs or their customers. Sucks to be them-but this is the kind of thing people have to do to clamp down on bad behavior without the intervention of government. I don't think spamming should be illegal-it's annoying as hell-but pressing the delete button seems to be pretty easy. In addition-as most slashdotters know, there are ways to avoid spammers. Have several e-mail accounts, one with your ISP that you use for personal correspondence, and another with a free e-mail account that you use for "official" purposes and in newsgroups (I actually did a test without two hotmail accounts I created, and the one that I used for what was then dejanews quickly got about 10X as much spam).
Also, it's not like they can't keep in touch with their friends in the US. I assume e-mail can come through-and they can always get a free e-mail account with yahoo, excite or even hotmail.
Anyway, ignorance is no excuse.
india literacy = 52%
china = 82%
of those that are literate-that could mean reading and writing your name (note that in the United States as many as 20-30% of people are functionally illiterate).
i have no doubt china and later india will surpass the us at some point in economic output. but, it took the united states 100 years to go from manufacturing to the information economy. i doubt it'll take china or india long-but i think it will be at least more than a generation.
Quality is sometimes as important as quantity. Most Indians and a large portion of Chinese are barely literate by American standards. If you get Indians and Chinese up to US levels of education and standard of living...then we're in some trouble. On the other hand-that's going to take a while. I suspect that a large portion of the population in these countries will leave the masses behind.
Also, numbers don't always lead to innovation. Culture can drag on innovation-for instance, Japan and Europe still produce fewer innovations per capita, but they are almost as rich as the US. Jews have something like 15% of Nobel prizes, but they're.2% of the world's population.
maybe a lot of ppl would switch to linux boxes...at least for the extra computer. i know enough ppl who have one computer dedicated just for their file sharing, it's pretty plausible.
I think a lot of the posters have hit it right-on when they say the problem is that kids are taught how to use the computer in a specific fashion. They learn MS Word or Excel, completing tasks and so forth, without imbuing much about a computer aside from that it's another tool.
This isn't totally useless, a lot of people just need a cursory level of familiarity. But the thing is-that kids learn when they play. I don't think it's good to exclude computers from an environment, but, I think it's bad when adults try to micro-manage how a computer is used. As many have commented, "skills" people learn quickly become out of date.
Kids are by nature pretty inquisitive, so if you give them basic pointers (teach them Python tell them to find StarOffice if they want an application suite-don't force feed them apps you think will be practical), they can learn much better on their own.
Of course, people also remember some kids will never really take to computers. They'll learn to use apps and not be scared-but it's not going to be their cup of tea in the end. That's fine too.
The problem with the H1B program is that they're indentured servants. If they could actually bargain with their lords...I mean employers, they wouldn't be so detrimental to the job market. Sure-they would still be hungrier than natives-but the H1B program is designed to cut their ability to threaten to switch to a better job, and so give all the power to the employer.
My family came to the US as immigrants when my dad got his Ph.D. in chemistry. But he's definately in the minority. I remember back in 1986, as we were paying thousands of dollars for our immigration proceedings-millions of illegal immigrants got a "general amnestry."
The US immigration system is whack and out of control-and the whole "tech" shortage that companies complain about to create the H1B system is a disgrace. It short-changes the immigrants, and it short-chagnes the natives.
Of course, let's not get into what illegal and low-skill immigration does to the prospects of Joe & Jerome six-pack. It's sad that programmers wages are depressed-but it's even more disgusting when big corporations bring in illegals to do their dirty work and pay them sub-minimum wage while Americans are out of work (see Tyson chicken).
The only problem with this is that from what I know-a few very brilliant and product salespeople tend to push a disproportionate amount of the product. Sure, the engineers make good money, but some of the sales-types at some of these companies make immense amounts. On the other hand, you have a lot of sales-types that are more middle of the pack. These are the types that can be let go with less ramification-since you still keep your best salespeople-who move most of the product anyway (this occurs in a lot of industries-real estate for instance-one real estate agent told me that 10% make 90% of the cash-which in this real estate market still leaves a good middle class living for a lot of the other 90%).
I don't know much about marketing-though it seems the same might apply. Of course, I suppose you could say the same about coders...in all these knowledge-professions perhaps the curve is stacked toward the high end. In the more manual professions-I suspect the differential between the high and low ends are less-so you get less cost savings from laying off weak workers (or the coast savings is linear, rather than geometric).
I always thought it was the middle-management types that got fired to squeeze more out of the bottom line (not just in tech-in a lot of industries). They might hire and fire individuals-but they don't necessarily have total control of axing their whole dept, and they often get paid more than the people below them...and often during tough times higher-ups wonder what sort of value they're adding.
Remember, coporate restructuring often involves getting rid of the fat in the management level while keeping the grunts that actually produce whatever you're selling. On the other hand, you could fire managers and those below them at the same time if you want to axe a whole departement-or are scaling back production because of intenvory over-hang or what not.
In any case, my point being-that middle managers generally can't get away with firing all their subordinates first-because their whole job is to supervise these people. Upper management can get away with firing a lot of people below them because there are a lot fewer of them, and technically they manage broad areas of the company-not necessarily the specific middle managers below them.
I've had enough people tell me-"Where do I poin and click?" to know that people have been totally trained toward GUI.
On the other hand-I do believe that visually processing infomration with a mouse and windows more suited to the human brain rather than remember what text command to input. Literacy is a relatively new phenomena in huma history. But the visual processing region of our brains is huge-and as primates we're hypervisual animals. Even though GUIs seem unwiedly, condescending and over the top with useless data-I think a normal human brain can still manage this info than even the simplest text based systems because they don't think as hard about it.
About GUI vs. command line. I'm a command line person myself-but only since I've joined the computer industry. In my previous line of work, as a lab tech, I just wanted the computer to do what I needed-no personalization.
The story I remember is that GUI (mouse and all) became big at PARC after they did a test with people not familiar with computers. They described text-command system vs. GUI mouse-windows system, and all the people thought the text-command system was better. But after using both-people didn't want to switch back to the text-command system.
The moral of the story-I don't know whether GUI is easier than command-line. With the stuff I do-command line is quicker. But-people have preferences, and they the GUI-it's not just MS & Apple marketing that got them to like this stuff-people are more comfortable with images rather than text.
There are plenty of things to criticize in this article-but I was stuck by the point about mate selection. The article implies that we're becoming more homogenous, the implication being that genetic drift and isolation don't come into play.
But thing about-if a brilliant pianist from Senegal marries a brilliant pianist from Minneapolis after meeting at Julliard, this is assortive mating. The resulting child might be racially mixed-but they will probably also be very musical and different then their elementary school peers. I once saw a statistic that 70% of female Physics Ph.D.s are married to other physics Ph.D.s (do to a big shortage of females of course). This sort of thing works against the homogenization implied by the article. There'll still be mixing back and forth-but we have to start looking beyond race toward other criteria that people use to pick mates with.
Books, books, books! ... and some software
on
Amazon Makes a Profit
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I know Amazon is trying to turn into a retailer-perhaps Walmart.NET or something, but let's focus on its core business-books. It does a good job there. It's changed buying habits all over the world. I mean, how many times have you guys gone online to see how well a book is reviewed? Granted, the system isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than reading the inside jacket (like I used to do before the NET).
I don't know if Amazon is going to change the world as a retailer, but it has changed the way everyone buys books. Even if you don't buy directly from Amazon, people will often look at the online reviews and than going check out the book in more detail at B&N or Borders.
I believe software is somewhat the same-though I generally don't buy a lot of MS stuff, when I do I check the reviews at Amazon. These are the sort of things where Amazon has developed a really good business model.
If it every does go bankrupt, I expect that they'll just shed all the extra stuff and pair back to light and information oriented items like books and software, they can always make money and they already have volume.
i think the anticipation is that this just the beginning and their margin will increase over time as their volume increases.
an nytimes article stated that amazon's up front costs in technology and warehouses eat a lot of their revenue-but once they get beyond a certain volume, the cost increase is minimal.
Slashdot Mirror
Your post is a bit simplistic. As others have posted-South Africa was dominated by Khoisan people until the Bantu expansion that swept east and south overran them. The Xhosa still show a lot of Khoisan features (Nelsen Mandela has obvious Khoisan facial features)-but the Zulus are closer to the Bantu type.
European brutality is more well documented mostly because Europeans cared to record it and some of them actually objected. Europeans (Spaniards) treated the native peoples like beasts-and yet some in the religious orders dissented and passionate debate were held about the rights of the natives in Spain. In fact, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles tried to prevent the exploitation-but he was too far from the situation to be of much use (he was also involved in something called the Wars of Religion in central Europe).
In contrast, the Aztecs had few ethical debates about engaging in wars with other peoples simply to aquire human bodies for sacrifice. By the way-there is now some evidence that the "native" peoples of the New World displaced older peoples (the Tierra del Fuegans being hybrid remnants possible of the older inhabitants).
I disagree with the "unspoilt" resources. India is a 1 billion people in 1/3 the size of the US. Most of the "unspoilt" spaces are mountains and deserts. Try to find wilderness in the flatlands-good luck. India does some some iron and manganese in the Chota Nagpure highlands-but it's industrial capacity isn't a great as someplace like China which has more hydro potentional and more mineral resources (coal).
spam can be a problem when you start missing legit e-mails. i have a friend who got about 30-40 pieces of spam a day-and he deleted an e-mail from a close friend by mistake (her name was christina-he kept getting porno spam from a christina with a 'wet pussy that's hot & ready' so he confused them) that was a mass-mailing about her mom dying. the next time they met (a few weeks later at a mutual friend's) he acted like nothing had happened and was pretty embarrassed. anyway, spam can be really fucked up (granted-he should have switched accounts-but some people will keep sending e-mail to your old account)
Google makes a profit-so why should they cave? The way I look at it, being the lone holdout differentiates their brand. Remember to every search engine wanted to be a portal??? Now Altavista is crawling back to the "we're trying to be the best search engine" out there line again. The day Google is percieved by its customers as just being another search engine, you'll see a backlash like you'll never believe, because frankly the soccer moms that use Ask Jeeves are a lot less picky than Google users. It can't allow itself to be another search engine, its brand is defined by its disinclination to follow the trend of the day.
Most people want children that look like them. Part of it is also that that way the fact that the child is adopted is a lot less obvious. Part of it just because people generally do have racial feelings, no matter how much you might want to deny it.
In an ironic note, many of the "black" babies that can't be adopted by white parents do to "cultural genocide" are often half-white. Of course, the rule of hypo-descent (that all people with a drop of black ancestry are black) rules in this case.
And before we get to criticizing American whites....remember that in Korea the reason there are so many kids that come to the US is that people are reluctant to adopt someone and have descendants outside of their bloodline. The Korean government is trying to change this attitude, but it's pretty hard.
1. Insurance companies not insuring norms. (I hate the term, but it fits)
I addressed this in another post-but you might be looking at separate insurance companies in the future. The fact is also, if genetic screening is $$$, the parents already paid a lot of money and it makes some sense their kids would pay a lower premium since costs have been front-loaded.
2. Low-income families cannot afford screenings, genetic divide.
Of course there'll be a genetic divide, resources are scarce. Low income families also can't afford good prenatal care-so there's already a life long divide. But the people this might harm the most are those with super good genes, since their advantage over the middle-class normal genes people will be decreased.
3. Normal People replaced in the workforce, 2-3 generations from implementation.
Same arguments made about computers and possible AI-but no one is talking about a Butlerian Jihad
4. Screenings will filter out "Genius" and "Artists"
Most eggs are wasted anyhow. Though perhaps you have something if some deleterious traits are correlated with genius. On the other hand, some of the greatest artistic periods were during periods of squalor and inequality (Athenian Democracy, the Rennaisance), while the US hasn't produced much more in the past 20 years aside from pop-culture, so does that mean we should go back toward what was in the past??? I mean, if great art is contingent on extreme manic-depressive tedencies, should we make sure there are manic depressives around so we can enjoy their art???
5. Unseen effects after multiple generations of "Altered" humans.
This is the same argument eugenicists make about "dysgenics" and "bad breeding." Not saying if you or they are correct, but it's the same argument.
6. Altered humans breed for specific tasks.
70% of female PhDs in physics marry other physics PhDs. The fact is that this sort of thing is more and more common.
7. Rights for Altered and Normal humans.
8. Social interactions between enhanced/altered humans.
9. Economic benefits for enhanced/altered humans.
???
You're right to point out that multiple genes can affect one phenotype....
On the other hand, suppose you have 50 genes that affect "intelligence." Stupid scientists only know of 3. If you can affect those 3, that's still a marginal improvement (by the way, the have found portions of chromosomes that correlate strongly with super high IQ kids).
Also, you probably aren't right about lifestyle being so super important in terms of how athletic you are. A recent study (reported in the NY Times as well) shows that 10% of people will always be physically impressive no matter how much they work out, and 10% will always be buff or toned no matter how sedentary they are. Other results also show that a lot of "athletic traits" are independent, in other words, you're muscular, strong, or have good endurance, but their's no correlation.
Also, the twin studies that show how similar twins that were raised apart are, and the adoption studies that show a host of tendencies that adoptees have in common with their biological parents (IQ, criminality, etc.) rather than their adoptive parents are disturbing.
It's not all genetics, but I think you're post indicates you overplay the environmental hand.
The problem with your analogy is that people breed dogs for one feature. Kids aren't treated like dogs, parents have more of an investment than winning a dog show. From what I know about breeding, a lot of the extreme domestic breeds, of whatever species, are created via intense inbreeding. You take one animal that has what you want, and breed it constantly, and than rebreed the offspring that have the desired trait together until you have only that trait. With this sort of genetic screening, you manipulating or selecting from your own genes and picking the less deleterious one.
By the way, the future will be filled with more beautiful people-plastic surgery is getting cheaper and cheaper, and when robots get to doing it, will be like getting braces for middle-class kids today. You might as well give your kids a head-start and pay for it upfront by getting it genetically
Also, please note that "unattractiveness" is often the byproduct of some "bad" gene, so if you get rid of deleterious genes people might naturally become more attractive. For instance, a fetus with a better immune system and hormonol control ends up more symmetrical than it would be otherwise. If you don't think things can happen on the fetal level-did you ever know "identical" twins where one was definately more attractive than the other???
Well, IMO, this goes against natural selection. Weaknesses are inherent in all forms of life. And in this case, the weakness is basically being forced out of the child. I don't think this is a good thing, and here is why...
... in their 90s since they often make it 100 like my grandfather and my 115 year old great-great-aunt)-so I don't know how bad hypercholesterolemia is for us. My cholesterol is 380, so is my mother's and my sister's. My two brothers and obviously my father don't have it.
A good point. We are changing the germ line in ways we might not know. And we all have deleterious genes. Here is mine in full disclosure:
Hypercholesterolemia
Because hypercholesterolemia is dominant 50% of my children will have it (statistically). My family doesn't have a history of heart disease (the side I inherit from, which is my mother's side people tend to get heart disease
But when I have children, I plan to make sure they don't have it by screening or selectively aborting. But I also wonder-if I don't have a history of heart disease, why??? I don't know. Do we know all the ramifications of hypercholerolemia aside from the heart-disease related ones? Cholesterol is a hormone that affects several processes...including brain development.
Nonetheless, it is a choice individual parents will have to make. Society shouldn't have to pay for it-you pay out of your own pocket. But change isn't always bad. Throughout most of human history people have been on the verge of malnutrition. Now that's not the case, and the obesity "epidemic" is spreading into the Third World. I'd rather take an obesity epidemic than malnutrition.
Also, remember that not all humans will take advantage (or will be able to do to money) of the new services, so we'll have a reserver of "untouched" human genes in that population. Taking into account that throughout most of human history there were fewer than 1 million of us, I wouldn't worry about genetic uniformity.
Fear of the unknown shouldn't hold us back. We should move forward, with caution, but move nonetheless. There is a chance we might fall of the cliff's edge, but the fact is the only other choice would be to attempt to hold still indefinately, and impossible task.
By the way, would we make a big fuss if the women has simply recieved an egg donor???
What really irritated me about a lot of the reporting of the stories was the so called "ethical problems" implied by a women who might not be around in full mental-state for daughter's teen years. One idiotic commentator at the end of one article wondered, "...if having children was an absolute right in the light of the situation." Good question to ask, but how many idiots out their have kids in messed up situations??? 70 year old fathers, crack-addicted welfare mothers, the Yates psychotic-muderer and so forth. The only reason the "mainstream" press and its fellow-travellers point the finger at this women is because she used genetic screening-if they wondered if a crack addicted mother should have a right to have a child, everyone would be howling about civil liberties and the implied racisim.
That being said-it is a concern that she chose to have a biological daughter. The child's life probably won't be optimum. But then again, what about lesbians having children? Or people that don't get themselves tested for life-threatening diseases that there's a family history for? And so forth. It all smells of rank hypocrisy and pious finger-pointing obscuring the real moral issues presented, because the woman's decision has ramifications about the choices that everyday people make, not just those who use genetic screening.
By coincidence I was reading Lomborg's site yesterday. He trieds to answer criticisms in his critiques section. I found a lot of the articles by his detracters rather offensive in their tone (especially for the Nature, where they criticise for only using Nature papers as 1% of his sources-how petty). But check out the exchange in The Prospect, his opponent becomes progressively more snide and shrill.
Also, if any of you have done debate, will notice how he simply avoids Lomborg's rebuttals and simply attacks him on another point. This reminds me a lot of Creationists in my debates with them-they bring up a problem with evolution-then ignore you when you respond in kind and attack you on some other point, ad infinitum.
Conservatives and liberals tend to have their axes to grind of course. Liberals believe we should accept worst case scenarios in the context of environmentalism, but not social policy, while conservatives accept the opposite. On the other hand-please note the respone to the book Arming America which purported to show that America's gun culture is a post-Civil War thing-it came out to glowing reviews in the popular and academic press. In hindsight-a lot of its reviewers now have retracted their endorsement after find out the author seems to have citied sources that never existed (call the libraries or archives where the sources exist, and they say they never exist). Two years ago-I found the book very interesting, and though it didn't make me re-think my pro-gun orientation I accept it has a civil liberties, not historical issue, I didn't see anything wrong with it since I'm not an archival specialist. Contrast this with the Bell Curve which was torn to shreds for every tenditious citation (personally-I think they should ignored all the international sources since they aren't as well documented as the American ones were).
Good point. Taking the gravity of the downside into account-it make be prudent to make a decision based on worst-case scenarion. On the other hand...
In the 1970s people were worrying about the "cooling" of the planet, and the coming Ice Age. It turns out they were wrong. What if we had taken drastic measures to preserve humanity and pumped Greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?
The problem with deep greenery is that it often marginalizes the importance of humanity be declaring that we are a part of nature. On the other hand-it also presumes we have an almost omniscient knowledge of the depth of the processes around us.
I don't really feel sorry for the Asian ISPs or their customers. Sucks to be them-but this is the kind of thing people have to do to clamp down on bad behavior without the intervention of government. I don't think spamming should be illegal-it's annoying as hell-but pressing the delete button seems to be pretty easy. In addition-as most slashdotters know, there are ways to avoid spammers. Have several e-mail accounts, one with your ISP that you use for personal correspondence, and another with a free e-mail account that you use for "official" purposes and in newsgroups (I actually did a test without two hotmail accounts I created, and the one that I used for what was then dejanews quickly got about 10X as much spam). Also, it's not like they can't keep in touch with their friends in the US. I assume e-mail can come through-and they can always get a free e-mail account with yahoo, excite or even hotmail. Anyway, ignorance is no excuse.
india literacy = 52% china = 82% of those that are literate-that could mean reading and writing your name (note that in the United States as many as 20-30% of people are functionally illiterate). i have no doubt china and later india will surpass the us at some point in economic output. but, it took the united states 100 years to go from manufacturing to the information economy. i doubt it'll take china or india long-but i think it will be at least more than a generation.
Quality is sometimes as important as quantity. Most Indians and a large portion of Chinese are barely literate by American standards. If you get Indians and Chinese up to US levels of education and standard of living...then we're in some trouble. On the other hand-that's going to take a while. I suspect that a large portion of the population in these countries will leave the masses behind. Also, numbers don't always lead to innovation. Culture can drag on innovation-for instance, Japan and Europe still produce fewer innovations per capita, but they are almost as rich as the US. Jews have something like 15% of Nobel prizes, but they're .2% of the world's population.
maybe a lot of ppl would switch to linux boxes...at least for the extra computer. i know enough ppl who have one computer dedicated just for their file sharing, it's pretty plausible.
I think a lot of the posters have hit it right-on when they say the problem is that kids are taught how to use the computer in a specific fashion. They learn MS Word or Excel, completing tasks and so forth, without imbuing much about a computer aside from that it's another tool.
This isn't totally useless, a lot of people just need a cursory level of familiarity. But the thing is-that kids learn when they play. I don't think it's good to exclude computers from an environment, but, I think it's bad when adults try to micro-manage how a computer is used. As many have commented, "skills" people learn quickly become out of date.
Kids are by nature pretty inquisitive, so if you give them basic pointers (teach them Python tell them to find StarOffice if they want an application suite-don't force feed them apps you think will be practical), they can learn much better on their own.
Of course, people also remember some kids will never really take to computers. They'll learn to use apps and not be scared-but it's not going to be their cup of tea in the end. That's fine too.
The problem with the H1B program is that they're indentured servants. If they could actually bargain with their lords...I mean employers, they wouldn't be so detrimental to the job market. Sure-they would still be hungrier than natives-but the H1B program is designed to cut their ability to threaten to switch to a better job, and so give all the power to the employer.
My family came to the US as immigrants when my dad got his Ph.D. in chemistry. But he's definately in the minority. I remember back in 1986, as we were paying thousands of dollars for our immigration proceedings-millions of illegal immigrants got a "general amnestry."
The US immigration system is whack and out of control-and the whole "tech" shortage that companies complain about to create the H1B system is a disgrace. It short-changes the immigrants, and it short-chagnes the natives.
Of course, let's not get into what illegal and low-skill immigration does to the prospects of Joe & Jerome six-pack. It's sad that programmers wages are depressed-but it's even more disgusting when big corporations bring in illegals to do their dirty work and pay them sub-minimum wage while Americans are out of work (see Tyson chicken).
The only problem with this is that from what I know-a few very brilliant and product salespeople tend to push a disproportionate amount of the product. Sure, the engineers make good money, but some of the sales-types at some of these companies make immense amounts. On the other hand, you have a lot of sales-types that are more middle of the pack. These are the types that can be let go with less ramification-since you still keep your best salespeople-who move most of the product anyway (this occurs in a lot of industries-real estate for instance-one real estate agent told me that 10% make 90% of the cash-which in this real estate market still leaves a good middle class living for a lot of the other 90%).
I don't know much about marketing-though it seems the same might apply. Of course, I suppose you could say the same about coders...in all these knowledge-professions perhaps the curve is stacked toward the high end. In the more manual professions-I suspect the differential between the high and low ends are less-so you get less cost savings from laying off weak workers (or the coast savings is linear, rather than geometric).
I always thought it was the middle-management types that got fired to squeeze more out of the bottom line (not just in tech-in a lot of industries). They might hire and fire individuals-but they don't necessarily have total control of axing their whole dept, and they often get paid more than the people below them...and often during tough times higher-ups wonder what sort of value they're adding.
Remember, coporate restructuring often involves getting rid of the fat in the management level while keeping the grunts that actually produce whatever you're selling. On the other hand, you could fire managers and those below them at the same time if you want to axe a whole departement-or are scaling back production because of intenvory over-hang or what not.
In any case, my point being-that middle managers generally can't get away with firing all their subordinates first-because their whole job is to supervise these people. Upper management can get away with firing a lot of people below them because there are a lot fewer of them, and technically they manage broad areas of the company-not necessarily the specific middle managers below them.
I've had enough people tell me-"Where do I poin and click?" to know that people have been totally trained toward GUI.
On the other hand-I do believe that visually processing infomration with a mouse and windows more suited to the human brain rather than remember what text command to input. Literacy is a relatively new phenomena in huma history. But the visual processing region of our brains is huge-and as primates we're hypervisual animals. Even though GUIs seem unwiedly, condescending and over the top with useless data-I think a normal human brain can still manage this info than even the simplest text based systems because they don't think as hard about it.
About GUI vs. command line. I'm a command line person myself-but only since I've joined the computer industry. In my previous line of work, as a lab tech, I just wanted the computer to do what I needed-no personalization. The story I remember is that GUI (mouse and all) became big at PARC after they did a test with people not familiar with computers. They described text-command system vs. GUI mouse-windows system, and all the people thought the text-command system was better. But after using both-people didn't want to switch back to the text-command system. The moral of the story-I don't know whether GUI is easier than command-line. With the stuff I do-command line is quicker. But-people have preferences, and they the GUI-it's not just MS & Apple marketing that got them to like this stuff-people are more comfortable with images rather than text.
There are plenty of things to criticize in this article-but I was stuck by the point about mate selection. The article implies that we're becoming more homogenous, the implication being that genetic drift and isolation don't come into play. But thing about-if a brilliant pianist from Senegal marries a brilliant pianist from Minneapolis after meeting at Julliard, this is assortive mating. The resulting child might be racially mixed-but they will probably also be very musical and different then their elementary school peers. I once saw a statistic that 70% of female Physics Ph.D.s are married to other physics Ph.D.s (do to a big shortage of females of course). This sort of thing works against the homogenization implied by the article. There'll still be mixing back and forth-but we have to start looking beyond race toward other criteria that people use to pick mates with.
I know Amazon is trying to turn into a retailer-perhaps Walmart.NET or something, but let's focus on its core business-books. It does a good job there. It's changed buying habits all over the world. I mean, how many times have you guys gone online to see how well a book is reviewed? Granted, the system isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than reading the inside jacket (like I used to do before the NET).
I don't know if Amazon is going to change the world as a retailer, but it has changed the way everyone buys books. Even if you don't buy directly from Amazon, people will often look at the online reviews and than going check out the book in more detail at B&N or Borders.
I believe software is somewhat the same-though I generally don't buy a lot of MS stuff, when I do I check the reviews at Amazon. These are the sort of things where Amazon has developed a really good business model.
If it every does go bankrupt, I expect that they'll just shed all the extra stuff and pair back to light and information oriented items like books and software, they can always make money and they already have volume.
i think the anticipation is that this just the beginning and their margin will increase over time as their volume increases.
an nytimes article stated that amazon's up front costs in technology and warehouses eat a lot of their revenue-but once they get beyond a certain volume, the cost increase is minimal.