Actually socialism is always bad, in the long run. It's organized "robbing Peter to pay Paul" and look at the shiny May day parades with plenty of frictional loss due to loss of honest pricing signals and poor incentivization.
The free market can be a huge bitch, though and most every country out there has circuit breakers to tame it a bit including the US. The penalty is less growth and poorer long-term performance. The benefit is that panics aren't as destructive as in a completely unregulated system. The long term trend is to slip down the slope into more and more regulated situations, sacrificing progress for safety until you can barely manage stagnation.
So the preaching deregulation bit is merely an effort to swim upstream. It's laudable but you need to understand what it's really about. Nobody desires zero regulation. It's a straw man that socialists like to whack around a lot. The deregulators actually desire the least regulation while preserving system viability.
It was immensely satisfying actually. What worries the survey people is that collectively fewer and fewer people are answering surveys at all. They do tally the reasons.
I would be willing to bet money that even you don't believe that all avenues should remain open. Are you in favor of using prisoners for non-consensual experiments? That's an avenue that's banned in the West but would certainly speed scientific progress and has been permitted in the past and is likely in use elsewhere today (N. Korea, PRC). Once you admit that it isn't about keeping all avenues open but rather a struggle between competing ethical systems, your construction equating pro-lifers with animal rights activists falls flat because the only difference is that you've not honestly laid out your own limits and made any positive case why yours should be privileged over mine.
Your statement that "the objectors are uninformed" is itself uninformed. The US bishops conference of the Catholic Church is not uninformed. They've been holding yearly meetings on the ethical problems of this since 1973. A corpus of religious law (Catholics maintain their own legal code) has been developed consistent with longstanding Catholic religious and ethical principles. No doubt some objectors are uninformed. No doubt some supporters are uninformed too.
Again, the objections to HES cells are objections to their sourcing via killing embryos. Were there a non-fatal way to harvest such cells, the objections would evaporate immediately. The ethics of when it is acceptable to kill are not a topic reserved to the research scientist.
The inconvenience to HES researchers is real but one cannot just go the convenient route because that's better for your budget.
Nobody has a problem with cells taken from testes. It's all about the ethics of abortion. Human embryonic stem cells from spontaneous abortions, testes, cord blood, etc elicit no objections because even in the pro-life strict moral code, nobody dies of it.
That's when you write down their verbal approval in an email back to them.
"Thank you for stopping by today to give me the verbal go ahead on project x. The legal analysis needed to go through the TOS on site y and z was really beyond me so your clarification that we weren't violating their TOS was very helpful. As we discussed, I'll get right on it."
You're 'praising' your boss. You're documenting the conversation. If you've 'gotten it wrong' he had a clear opportunity to fix things before money was wasted/laws were broken. You've established that you're not a lawyer but that you assumed that your boss was procuring competent legal advice. In short, it's the best CYA you can get.
Funny enough, I got surveyed by "the motion picture industry" this weekend. My response was "the motion picture industry? You mean the MPAA people? Nothing personal but screw them [click!]"
CNS may be your big issue but I'm reasonably certain that for sufferers of any of the 73 odd conditions, their big issues are addressed by adult stem cells just fine.
The problem with animal rights activists is that they're confused as to the boundaries of what's ethical in experimentation. They draw the prohibited line way too wide. My first job as a network admin was for a group fighting them. Part of my responsibilities were disaster recovery in case they bombed our offices. Suffice it to say that I understand the problem having worked in that particular field.
We leave exactly zero ethical questions of experimentation solely "up to the experts". Why should human embryo stem cell experimentation be any different?
The battle lines have always been that the pro-life crowd has said that human embryonic stem cells were unethical because it was the unnecessary taking of a human life and the riposte was that we were going to get all these great cures out of the research that would never come from adult stem cell research and therefore the life taking *was* necessary. Now if the embryonic cures don't actually come, why should we continue to act as if they were coming? If the adult stem cell cures are actually coming in areas which were supposedly never going to happen, why shouldn't adult stem cell research get the lions share of attention, press, and funding? Why shouldn't embryonic research be limited to spontaneous abortion tissue?
Adult stem cells have over 70 active treatments in use for human health. We're already way beyond "dry hole" status with them. They're useful and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But you already knew that if you've paid attention whatsoever with the field.
The plain fact is that cell differentiation can be studied using animal models just fine. Human embryonic stem cells have not been proven effective in treatments whatsoever. The only scientific reason they've been pursued is their supposed superiority in plasticity which would lead to actual treatments for diseases that adult stem cells couldn't cure. But as adult stem cells prove more and more versatile, there become fewer and fewer reasons to violate the consciences of pro-lifers.
A secondary reason is that they give nice political cover for abortion rights ideology. When you talk about using human embryonic stem cells for a thousand years without any thought to using animal models instead or stopping use when adult cells turn out to be useful enough, I'm thinking that what's really at the heart of your position is this secondary reason.
You also found it hard to imagine that adult stem cells in the form of bone marrow could be coerced into CNS cells even though a quick Google search would have let you know that it's been done since at least 2002.
Human embryonic cells have been failing at providing actual treatments for years now. But because the research has led to IPS cells, they're a 'success' that 'optimistically' needs to be used for the next thousand years. Right.
Fair enough, I shouldn't have assumed anything about your attitude. But you're hardly the first guy I've encountered and I was playing the odds and cutting, I thought, to the chase.
The simple truth is that time and again, I've encountered people claiming to be reasonable state factually erroneous things about adult stem cells. The errors are pretty much all on the side of making adult stem cells less attractive. They also make factual errors regarding embryonic stem cells. But those errors minimize the problems and overstate the benefits. You claim not to be one of those people, fine. I'll take you at your word for now.
Now the article I cited debunked your actual claim. Thank you for trying to give me a better article but your link doesn't actually work for me so I can't comment further on it. The purpose of my link (which I found on the fly specifically for the purpose of debunking your claim) remains just fine.
Human Embryonic Stem (HES) cell research and Induced Pluripotent Stem (IPS) cell research have yielded exactly how many treatments? And at what point is it appropriate to admit that they're a dry hole that should no longer be pursued? I'm actually curious what the mainstream scientific thought process is regarding dead end research.
I realize you probably meant this as a rhetorical question but the US is doing better. We're facing reality faster and moving through the painful unwinding process faster. The EU actually raised interest rates just ahead of the start of the crisis and recently had to reverse course strongly.
The EU is still largely in la-la land as to the extent of their problem with Germany, for example, recently declaring they had no problem just ahead of their biggest bank failure ever.
I think your understanding of the spin is better than your understanding of the facts.
Google does provide if you know how to ask. We've known that bone marrow can be induced to make CNS cells since at least 2002. You are, indeed, out of date.
This is not my field either but I cared enough to spend 90 seconds doing the search before I hit reply. You might ask why didn't you? In case you're wondering, the string I used was: adult stem cells central nervous system
Finding this sort of thing isn't brain surgery. Perhaps pro-life people who you think are being unreasonable are merely better informed?
Unrelated? I don't think so. "Strictly speaking" you said in the GP. Well, strictly speaking it's true of all of my examples as well. All that is different is the time to a return to consciousness and its likelihood.
It is vastly more likely that your average aborted fetus would have woken up and achieved an opinion on their existence before your average long term coma patient.
We have an abundance of 20th and 21st century experience in the sort of morality that condones harvesting human parts as you advocate. The slippery slope exists and it does extend to eventually killing and harvesting the infirm.
We don't actually know that adult stem cells cannot fit all our needs. That's why there's ongoing research, it's not a mature field. The difference between the adult and the embryonic cells is that we know how to make the adult cells work in real treatments, we just need to extend what we know. With embryonic, we hope to get past the rejection and tumor and other problems and we've got no actual record of success to support that hope.
Ok, I'll bite. Who ever said that markets were perfect other than trolls trying to discredit them? All the informed defenses of the market is that nobody's come up with anything better. Any problem you find with a market system is going to pale in comparison with the alternatives.
We keep trying to "tweak" the market. In the late 1990s we tweaked it by putting the taxpayers theoretically on the hook by telling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go into subprime mortgages. Well, now we've figured out that this wasn't such a good idea but was that a market failure or a government tweak failure?
Adults do have stem cells. The stem cells have been cultured and multiplied and have been coerced into differentiating into various types of tissue. Pluripotency is a red herring that has mostly led to tumor formation in attempts at embryonic stem cell treatments.
The religious problem of Galileo was that he was saying that the Church must change the way it taught Scripture so that it conformed to heliocentrism. The Church, reasonably in my view, said that Galileo had to either say it was a theory, prove it was a fact, or shut his pie hole. Within a few short years, Galileo's works were in free circulation in Catholic Christendom using the formulation that heliocentrism was a theory. The last actual scientific objection to heliocentrism was laid to rest in the mid 1800s when stellar parallax was finally observed, centuries after Galileo claimed it as fact, instead of theory and got into trouble over it.
Galileo was an SOB and pissed off a great many early supporters. They *did* behave badly to him but that doesn't make Galileo right in his theology any more than Galileo's theory of comets was right. Eventually the Church admitted the personal revenge part of the affair, made a minor penance, and moved on.
We can't just use the stem cells from fetuses right now because every time we try, we end up giving those people tumors and other nasty conditions. It's been tried. It doesn't work. Maybe, someday, they'll start figuring out how to make actual treatments using embryonic stem cells. They've got a lot of catchup to do. We've already got dozens of conditions that adult stem cells have been successfully used for.
So why are you pimping for a treatment path that, so far, doesn't work? Why not push for more funding for the pathway that's actually providing real treatments today? In the name of humanity? Please?
Actual christians (instead of the caricatures and straw men you see on slashdot and elsewhere) are rather happy about adult stem cell therapies and wholeheartedly support them.
Even Jehovah's Witnesses don't have an objection to banking and reusing their own personal blood. A lot of people are trying to make religious objections larger than they actually are in an effort to make religious people seem foolish or weird. Don't get taken in.
The end point of the research is to use your own tissues to create a fix. There is no objection to using common animal tissues for testing along the way in order to speed up progress.
PETA, on the other hand, would protest because the rats had not given consent.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually socialism is always bad, in the long run. It's organized "robbing Peter to pay Paul" and look at the shiny May day parades with plenty of frictional loss due to loss of honest pricing signals and poor incentivization.
The free market can be a huge bitch, though and most every country out there has circuit breakers to tame it a bit including the US. The penalty is less growth and poorer long-term performance. The benefit is that panics aren't as destructive as in a completely unregulated system. The long term trend is to slip down the slope into more and more regulated situations, sacrificing progress for safety until you can barely manage stagnation.
So the preaching deregulation bit is merely an effort to swim upstream. It's laudable but you need to understand what it's really about. Nobody desires zero regulation. It's a straw man that socialists like to whack around a lot. The deregulators actually desire the least regulation while preserving system viability.
It was immensely satisfying actually. What worries the survey people is that collectively fewer and fewer people are answering surveys at all. They do tally the reasons.
I would be willing to bet money that even you don't believe that all avenues should remain open. Are you in favor of using prisoners for non-consensual experiments? That's an avenue that's banned in the West but would certainly speed scientific progress and has been permitted in the past and is likely in use elsewhere today (N. Korea, PRC). Once you admit that it isn't about keeping all avenues open but rather a struggle between competing ethical systems, your construction equating pro-lifers with animal rights activists falls flat because the only difference is that you've not honestly laid out your own limits and made any positive case why yours should be privileged over mine.
Your statement that "the objectors are uninformed" is itself uninformed. The US bishops conference of the Catholic Church is not uninformed. They've been holding yearly meetings on the ethical problems of this since 1973. A corpus of religious law (Catholics maintain their own legal code) has been developed consistent with longstanding Catholic religious and ethical principles. No doubt some objectors are uninformed. No doubt some supporters are uninformed too.
Again, the objections to HES cells are objections to their sourcing via killing embryos. Were there a non-fatal way to harvest such cells, the objections would evaporate immediately. The ethics of when it is acceptable to kill are not a topic reserved to the research scientist.
The inconvenience to HES researchers is real but one cannot just go the convenient route because that's better for your budget.
Nobody has a problem with cells taken from testes. It's all about the ethics of abortion. Human embryonic stem cells from spontaneous abortions, testes, cord blood, etc elicit no objections because even in the pro-life strict moral code, nobody dies of it.
That's when you write down their verbal approval in an email back to them.
"Thank you for stopping by today to give me the verbal go ahead on project x. The legal analysis needed to go through the TOS on site y and z was really beyond me so your clarification that we weren't violating their TOS was very helpful. As we discussed, I'll get right on it."
You're 'praising' your boss. You're documenting the conversation. If you've 'gotten it wrong' he had a clear opportunity to fix things before money was wasted/laws were broken. You've established that you're not a lawyer but that you assumed that your boss was procuring competent legal advice. In short, it's the best CYA you can get.
I like your sig.
Funny enough, I got surveyed by "the motion picture industry" this weekend. My response was "the motion picture industry? You mean the MPAA people? Nothing personal but screw them [click!]"
CNS may be your big issue but I'm reasonably certain that for sufferers of any of the 73 odd conditions, their big issues are addressed by adult stem cells just fine.
The problem with animal rights activists is that they're confused as to the boundaries of what's ethical in experimentation. They draw the prohibited line way too wide. My first job as a network admin was for a group fighting them. Part of my responsibilities were disaster recovery in case they bombed our offices. Suffice it to say that I understand the problem having worked in that particular field.
We leave exactly zero ethical questions of experimentation solely "up to the experts". Why should human embryo stem cell experimentation be any different?
The battle lines have always been that the pro-life crowd has said that human embryonic stem cells were unethical because it was the unnecessary taking of a human life and the riposte was that we were going to get all these great cures out of the research that would never come from adult stem cell research and therefore the life taking *was* necessary. Now if the embryonic cures don't actually come, why should we continue to act as if they were coming? If the adult stem cell cures are actually coming in areas which were supposedly never going to happen, why shouldn't adult stem cell research get the lions share of attention, press, and funding? Why shouldn't embryonic research be limited to spontaneous abortion tissue?
Adult stem cells have over 70 active treatments in use for human health. We're already way beyond "dry hole" status with them. They're useful and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But you already knew that if you've paid attention whatsoever with the field.
The plain fact is that cell differentiation can be studied using animal models just fine. Human embryonic stem cells have not been proven effective in treatments whatsoever. The only scientific reason they've been pursued is their supposed superiority in plasticity which would lead to actual treatments for diseases that adult stem cells couldn't cure. But as adult stem cells prove more and more versatile, there become fewer and fewer reasons to violate the consciences of pro-lifers.
A secondary reason is that they give nice political cover for abortion rights ideology. When you talk about using human embryonic stem cells for a thousand years without any thought to using animal models instead or stopping use when adult cells turn out to be useful enough, I'm thinking that what's really at the heart of your position is this secondary reason.
You also found it hard to imagine that adult stem cells in the form of bone marrow could be coerced into CNS cells even though a quick Google search would have let you know that it's been done since at least 2002.
Human embryonic cells have been failing at providing actual treatments for years now. But because the research has led to IPS cells, they're a 'success' that 'optimistically' needs to be used for the next thousand years. Right.
You are not a winner, please try again.
Fair enough, I shouldn't have assumed anything about your attitude. But you're hardly the first guy I've encountered and I was playing the odds and cutting, I thought, to the chase.
The simple truth is that time and again, I've encountered people claiming to be reasonable state factually erroneous things about adult stem cells. The errors are pretty much all on the side of making adult stem cells less attractive. They also make factual errors regarding embryonic stem cells. But those errors minimize the problems and overstate the benefits. You claim not to be one of those people, fine. I'll take you at your word for now.
Now the article I cited debunked your actual claim. Thank you for trying to give me a better article but your link doesn't actually work for me so I can't comment further on it. The purpose of my link (which I found on the fly specifically for the purpose of debunking your claim) remains just fine.
Human Embryonic Stem (HES) cell research and Induced Pluripotent Stem (IPS) cell research have yielded exactly how many treatments? And at what point is it appropriate to admit that they're a dry hole that should no longer be pursued? I'm actually curious what the mainstream scientific thought process is regarding dead end research.
I realize you probably meant this as a rhetorical question but the US is doing better. We're facing reality faster and moving through the painful unwinding process faster. The EU actually raised interest rates just ahead of the start of the crisis and recently had to reverse course strongly.
The EU is still largely in la-la land as to the extent of their problem with Germany, for example, recently declaring they had no problem just ahead of their biggest bank failure ever.
I think your understanding of the spin is better than your understanding of the facts.
Google does provide if you know how to ask. We've known that bone marrow can be induced to make CNS cells since at least 2002. You are, indeed, out of date.
This is not my field either but I cared enough to spend 90 seconds doing the search before I hit reply. You might ask why didn't you? In case you're wondering, the string I used was:
adult stem cells central nervous system
Finding this sort of thing isn't brain surgery. Perhaps pro-life people who you think are being unreasonable are merely better informed?
The media's so cheap now that you just need to copy to a new set of media every few years and you've avoided the problem, no?
Unrelated? I don't think so. "Strictly speaking" you said in the GP. Well, strictly speaking it's true of all of my examples as well. All that is different is the time to a return to consciousness and its likelihood.
It is vastly more likely that your average aborted fetus would have woken up and achieved an opinion on their existence before your average long term coma patient.
We have an abundance of 20th and 21st century experience in the sort of morality that condones harvesting human parts as you advocate. The slippery slope exists and it does extend to eventually killing and harvesting the infirm.
We don't actually know that adult stem cells cannot fit all our needs. That's why there's ongoing research, it's not a mature field. The difference between the adult and the embryonic cells is that we know how to make the adult cells work in real treatments, we just need to extend what we know. With embryonic, we hope to get past the rejection and tumor and other problems and we've got no actual record of success to support that hope.
Do you view prize money the same way? If I offered a prize or a bounty would that ruin things for you?
Ok, I'll bite. Who ever said that markets were perfect other than trolls trying to discredit them? All the informed defenses of the market is that nobody's come up with anything better. Any problem you find with a market system is going to pale in comparison with the alternatives.
We keep trying to "tweak" the market. In the late 1990s we tweaked it by putting the taxpayers theoretically on the hook by telling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go into subprime mortgages. Well, now we've figured out that this wasn't such a good idea but was that a market failure or a government tweak failure?
Sir, your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Adults do have stem cells. The stem cells have been cultured and multiplied and have been coerced into differentiating into various types of tissue. Pluripotency is a red herring that has mostly led to tumor formation in attempts at embryonic stem cell treatments.
Coma patients, the demented, the unconscious don't care either. Some may care in future, but that's true for unborn children too.
You very obviously haven't thought this through very well.
The religious problem of Galileo was that he was saying that the Church must change the way it taught Scripture so that it conformed to heliocentrism. The Church, reasonably in my view, said that Galileo had to either say it was a theory, prove it was a fact, or shut his pie hole. Within a few short years, Galileo's works were in free circulation in Catholic Christendom using the formulation that heliocentrism was a theory. The last actual scientific objection to heliocentrism was laid to rest in the mid 1800s when stellar parallax was finally observed, centuries after Galileo claimed it as fact, instead of theory and got into trouble over it.
Galileo was an SOB and pissed off a great many early supporters. They *did* behave badly to him but that doesn't make Galileo right in his theology any more than Galileo's theory of comets was right. Eventually the Church admitted the personal revenge part of the affair, made a minor penance, and moved on.
We can't just use the stem cells from fetuses right now because every time we try, we end up giving those people tumors and other nasty conditions. It's been tried. It doesn't work. Maybe, someday, they'll start figuring out how to make actual treatments using embryonic stem cells. They've got a lot of catchup to do. We've already got dozens of conditions that adult stem cells have been successfully used for.
So why are you pimping for a treatment path that, so far, doesn't work? Why not push for more funding for the pathway that's actually providing real treatments today? In the name of humanity? Please?
Actual christians (instead of the caricatures and straw men you see on slashdot and elsewhere) are rather happy about adult stem cell therapies and wholeheartedly support them.
Even Jehovah's Witnesses don't have an objection to banking and reusing their own personal blood. A lot of people are trying to make religious objections larger than they actually are in an effort to make religious people seem foolish or weird. Don't get taken in.
The end point of the research is to use your own tissues to create a fix. There is no objection to using common animal tissues for testing along the way in order to speed up progress.
PETA, on the other hand, would protest because the rats had not given consent.