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User: michaelni

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  1. Un-vaccinated people primarly endanger other un-vaccinated people, not so much vaccinated people. What is true is that it endangers children who are too young to understand fully, read the scientific litterature decide what is evidence and what is nonsense and then decide what they believe and what to do.

  2. Quite a few things said here are incorrect, inprecisse or misleading.

    Comparing atomic weapons to genetics is misleading, you can control the production of nukes as you need enriched fissionable material and its very hard to make that. But with genetics all the tools and source materials are really all around. Life would not work if it didn't had the tools ...

    Theres a lot of fear of genetic modification, but humankind has modified genes since longer than there are written records. The beef and pork and also the bread you eat all would not exist had we not. Things became more precise with fewer random and unpredictable modifications as modern methods are used. But somehow peoples logic seems to have a overflow there as people seem to jump from what is more precise and more human controlled to being less so and more random and more unpredictable.

    Gene drives, i must admit i have only heard of variants that intend to wipe out very specific disease spreading species. For example theres one that makes all offspring male in some very specific human disease spreading mosquito species.Now in this case where exactly do we have the danger ? Either it works all, as in a local population just are all male and die out or it doesn't and somehow theres female offspring which means the change stopped working which would not be worse than not having tried in the first place. This is not really different from using an antibiotic to kill off a disease causing bacteria in a patient. Or a anti viral drug. And that arguing that it would be terrible if that unintentionally wiped out HIV globally. Or maybe also wiped out a very closely related virus. Sure theres always some risk that something completely unexpected could happen yes, but that risk equally exists if you spray toxic chemicals widely in an not so successful attempt to control these mosquitoes. Genes are not static they change naturally and anything you do evolution will react to. The risk for a carefully engineered and intentional modification which then also is carefully tested, honestly seems less than what we do currently. Which is spraying toxic chemicals in an attempt to control disease spreading species. The species evolves as a result some resistance to the chemical (that is its genetics change), why this totally unpredictable change is seen less dangerous or unpredictable than an intentional carefully engeneered change is something i fail to understand

    I personally find it sad that people want to ban something which could save millions of human lifes. (wikipedia says 438,000 people died on malaria in 2015).

  3. Lets check this against some facts on A Device That Can Pull Drinking Water From the Air Just Won the Latest XPrize (fastcompany.com) · · Score: 2

    Thirdly, the carbon-negative claim comes from the following accounting: the biomass waste almost entirely reverts to carbon dioxide via decomposition,

    This didnt sound right so i checked and google pointed me to "The Decomposition of Forest Products in Landfills" by J. A. Micales & K. E. Skog. Its introduction already says "These calculations suggest that maximally only 30%, of the carbon from paper and 0-3% of the carbon from wood are ever emitted as landfill gas. The remaining carbon, approximately 28 Tg in 1993, remains in the landfill indefinitely.". maximally 3% is quite far away from "almost entirely". Also if we look at page 7 of the paper, the table details the releases from wood, and from the table two thirds of the carbon releases of these 3% are methane, which could be collected and used/sold.
    So one could claim here that wood in a landfill is carbon negative relative to your process.

    Another point is the gasification itself, if you convert H2O + CO2 into H2 and CO you triple the amount of carbon eventually released into the atmosphere. Its basic math, just fill in the numbers to balance the equation H2O + CO2 + 2C -> H2 + 3CO. Two thirds of the carbon on the left side are solid, but all of it is a gas (carbon monoxide) on the right which eventually is burned in an engine or other to CO2

  4. social platforms should be open on Professor Who Coined Term 'Net Neutrality' Thinks It's Time To Break Up Facebook (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Breaking up Facebook seems not really beneficial honestly but i may be missing something here. IMHO all the social platforms twitter, facebook, ... should not be in the hands of individual companies at all. Instead they should be free and open like Usenet, email, the web, DNS, ... is. About breaking companies up. I am surprised apple is not mentioned. Their way of locking the hardware and software together should just not be. There should be a apple hw and a separate apple software company and neither should be allowed to only support the other. This would result also in significantly more competition as other manufactures would not have to beat apple in both but just one.