Except that they won't. A vey modest percentage of fertile male, resistant for any of a number of reasons to the modified genes, will pretty quickly experience a genetic advantage and replace the sterile males.
But they are not sterile males - they are males who produce no female offspring. "Resistance" in any lucky males would have no advantage - their kids would be a 50/50 mix of male and female - just like a "normal" mouse.
I suppose that there could be a mutation in the female line so that they cannot breed with the modified males. It seems unlikely that this would become widespread enough if introduced at only rare random spots to make any difference.
Actually, it is very common for employers to break labor laws. I have a lot of poor friends who are regularly shat on by employers. The employers figure the employees are too desperate or disorganized to sue, and most of the time, they are right.
Ok, fine. It's SOUNDS like a great idea, but it'll be abused by evil people for their own gain. Therefore we shouldn't do it.
Does that little distinction make you happy?
A bit - but I think the "we shouldn't do it" needs some work. I think we SHOULD aspire to good things, even if there is a danger of people misusing such lofty aspirations. Desigining social and political systems that are fair and equitable (recognizing what those terms mean in any situation are not always agreed upon) is something that we should be trying to do - but I do agree that taking into account how humans actually behave is an important part of making robust systems that are not easily abused.
How to actually build such systems I don't really know. Some combination of market mechanism and regulations to minimize unintended externalities often seems applicable. Some fundamental shifts in the way we divide up our society's immense riches between its members in light of the impact of automation, AI, and other advances seems likely to be necessary.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
The most evil idea ever committed to paper. It's killed hundreds of millions.
But hey, it sounds good and makes your heart swell with pride, right?
If you can't tell the difference between "good ideas" like "Turn the other cheek" or "Do unto others as you would like for yourself" or "Make America great" and the abuse of such ideas by evil people for their own gain, then you are certainly part of the problem.
More germane to those of us in the US is why not limit the price that can be charged for drugs to the maximum charged anywhere else in the world. If it's profitable there, it can be profitable here.
It is at least mathematically possible to have different prices everywhere, and have the loss of any market make the whole thing unprofitable. From the global point of view, the company's profit is the different between TOTAL sales and TOTAL costs. If manufacturing costs are small relative to the total costs (which include research, development, advertising, and executive salaries and the like), then it is possible that you need silly high prices in some markets and comically low prices is other markets and any other pricing levels cause things to run at a loss.
Things are priced different in different places - even within the same city - and arbitrage opportunities cannot always be ecconomically exploited. Even within a single city, the ecconomic conditions in one region are different enough from other regions (average consumer incomes and average employment and other business costs) that arbitrage cannot completely eliminate the differences.
Not that I don't generally agree that it seems very unfair that such differences exist.
Because it shows that letting one ideologically homogeneous populous area 'stuff the box' to outweigh the overall results in the other 49 states is a problem - the exact problem the electoral college was created to prevent.
California's (actually, LA/San Fran's) huge mass of +5m votes for Hillary is the _perfect_ example of the wisdom of the electoral college.
Sure, but why stop at disenfranchising California? There were lots of states that had a majority of votes for Clinton (and even more states that did not have a majority of votes for Trump). Just becasue you can spin a narative to colour a big chunk of people as somehow illegitimate becuase they together agree with something that is distastful to you, that doesn't make it a useful metric to use when interpreting the results.
While this type of situation may be the perfect example of the wisdom of the electoral college in your mind, there are significant numbers of people _across_the_country who feel that it is an example of problems with the electoral college. While we might want to dismiss them as idiots, when a significant fraction of the population feels something of this nature, ignoring it is probably unwise. In fact, many pundits on all sides of the political spectrum point to this type of ignored or dismissed dissatisfaction as being an important contributor to Trump's success throughout his campaign.
More people in 49 states. If you take California out of the Popular Vote tally, Trump wins handily in 49 states.
"If you don't count some of the votes, Trump won the popular vote." Is that what you are saying? That's generally not how we would want to run things.
Unlike most recent elections, neither candidate got more than 50% of the popular vote. Regardless of which one would have ended up in power had some fairly small number of voters decided different in the voting booth, more than half the country was going to be unhappy about the winner. To claim a strong mandate is about as intellectually honest as claiming that he has no mandate at all.
... There is considerable doubt over deterrent effect of the death penalty - I suspect that the deterrenc effect of disenfranchisement is pretty small.
The death penalty has one definate effect: The criminal will not commit any more crimes afterward!
Very true, however I think the research tends to focus on deterrence of the initial crime. Killing murderers versus long jail sentences does not seem to have a dramatic effect on the murder rate in general - people who commit these types or crimes do not seem to make much of a considered judgement of the cost/benifit analysis before commiting them. Basically nobody thinks they will get caught so the severity of the penalty doesn't get considered.
Felons by default do not have full rights as citizens, including RKBA and Voting. That is what happens when you commit a felony. Sucks to be a felon, so don't commit felonies.
If we are interested in curtailing re-offense and encouraging re-integration after prison, I don't think that disenfranchisement is particularly productive. There is considerable doubt over deterrent effect of the death penalty - I suspect that the deterrenc effect of disenfranchisement is pretty small.
The personal pronoun refers to her gender, not her sex.
People like you need to be put to death.
Abit extreme I would think. If we killed off everyone who had a differing opinion of how to address others, we might not have such a large population load on the planet, so I suppose there would be an upside.
The US has already been giving a subset of citizens BI for years - and the result is horrific. American Indians receive basic income, free health care, free housing, and free education if they choose it - the result is the most impoverished areas in the United States.
I don't think you are properly characterizing the reality of life as a member of a native american tribe. Yes, some do have significant benifits for being a member of the clan, but some of those clans are pretty poor. Similarly, if you are a part of the "Gates" or "Buffet" clan you could well be better off than someone from the "Jones" or "Smith" clan. Yes, tribes recieve federal dollars for various things with wide variation between different tribes, not unlike states recieve different amounts of federal monies. The "free healthcare" has at times included sterilizing women without their consent, so I don't know that it is something one need look upon with envy. I can't find any info on "free education" beyond k-12 and the types of grants and scholarships widely available to other communities - some scholarships are available for specific tribes, but I don't think that counts as "free education if they choose it ". Poverty rates on reservations seem to be about double the national average - not such a good "basic income" system in my mind.
So, without looking at things more closely, I don't think one can really draw conclusions about UBI ideas based on the experiences of Native Americans as a whole. While some (even "many") native communities might be "the most impoverished areas in the United States", some are not. Native Americans (like all Americans) are elligable for a huge variety of social programs the are different in different places, few of which are very much like a UBI.
That's not to say that looking at specific programs in specific regions might not be illuminating. And not only Native American programs. Looking at payments from the Alaska Permanent Fund as well as per-capita tribal payments from different places might give some insight on what types of payments are "effective" by various measures.
Wait, what? Do you really think those 39,000 people would all pay for housing if they had money? Sadly, many of them would not have the ability to even register for the UBI program.
The fact that homelessness rates have seen pretty large swings over the past 30 + years would tent to indicated that while it is possible that some of this people have much bigger challenges than lack of coin, at least some of them would have to ability to function if they were able to get the correct support. Potentially a UBI could be that type of support.
I'd rather have my taxes go to pay someone to watch soaps on TV than to some brain-dead defense contractor who made no viable product and wound up folding (but before the bankruptcy, all the execs got their bonuses), but yet charged the US taxpayers billions.
This is incorrect. The experimentally observed neutrino oscillations imply that neutrinos do have a mass which directly contradicts the Standard Model which assumes neutrinos to be massless particles.
The Standard Model is not QM. QM says nothing about the mass of the neutrino.
It's a nice little fiction that Canada is single payer, but the reality is quite a bit more complicated.
Although it is technically illegal for private health clinics to charge for services that are covered by the Canada Health Act, they often do indirectly and that is rarely enforced. Although it isn't too common yet, people sometimes go to employer or union sponsored clinics which were set up to avoid queuing at traditional clinics. Also, you or your employer can purchase private health insurance to cover the fees charged by these private clinics which means of course a secondary insurance market exists as well. It isn't a big thing yet throughout Canada, but a two-tier system is looming there...
That's not to say the Canadian two-tier system isn't light-years more efficient than the two-tier system in the US (which is basically private insurance or medicaid/emergency-room-care).
I can't find any references to the number of such "private health clinics" that charge for Health Act covered services. Nobody I know of has ever used such a thing, though I suppose it is possible. I know of none in the regions I have lived.
Oh, here is a bit more - http://www.canadianliving.com/... - it looks like Ontario has none, BC and Alberta have around 60 each and Quebec has around 200 - http://www.findprivateclinics.... Certainly there is always the option for those who can afford it of leaving the country. In any case, it doesn't look like the system is yet at in the "looming" stage.
The "DVR-proof" argument seems backwards to me. The biggest value in seeing the game live is that the window for watching it after the fact is severely limited at best, if it exists at all. Nobody plays World Series reruns. If I'm busy during the game and I don't DVR it, I can't watch it. Outside of network news coverage, it is the only thing on TV that I can't eventually catch later. It's like "Sports are best viewed live" is a command, not an observation.
Near the end of last season while visiting my father we watched some "Jays in 30" episodes on one of the sports chanels (Sportsnet?) he gets in Vancouver. They do a condensed commentary of the entire games - "Catch all the action in 30 minutes." Pretty enjoyable. Looks like it is available "on demand" from a few places:
Thanks, I've thought so too, but the Anonymous Coward claimed that stores would let him pay 3% less if he paid with cash.
I suspect that many business owners do not properly understand the costs associated with dealing in cash, and it is quite possible that some could give such a discount.
From a business point of view, offering such a discount could generate increased sales that might offset higher costs, so it isn't necessarily a bad move on the retailer's part even if it the discount is greater than the actual decrease in costs.
Can you give examples of specific stores that agree?
would they then at least take a check? 3% is probably enough, but I still think it is a pain to have to carry/deal with that kind of cash.
Generally, dealing with cash is NOT 3% less expensive than dealing in credit card payments for the merchant. There are issues of dealing in cash (some of it occasionally gets lost or stolen, someone needs to be paid for counting it and bringing it to the bank and properly entering it into the books, etc.) While it is PROBABLY cheaper for the merchant to take cash, dealing in cash is NOT free of expenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that they won't. A vey modest percentage of fertile male, resistant for any of a number of reasons to the modified genes, will pretty quickly experience a genetic advantage and replace the sterile males.
But they are not sterile males - they are males who produce no female offspring. "Resistance" in any lucky males would have no advantage - their kids would be a 50/50 mix of male and female - just like a "normal" mouse.
I suppose that there could be a mutation in the female line so that they cannot breed with the modified males. It seems unlikely that this would become widespread enough if introduced at only rare random spots to make any difference.
Thank you for that link. My hovercraft is full of eels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Actually, it is very common for employers to break labor laws. I have a lot of poor friends who are regularly shat on by employers. The employers figure the employees are too desperate or disorganized to sue, and most of the time, they are right.
This one is good. OK, not "good" really.
http://loweringthebar.net/2016...
" March 7, 2016
You may think you have a terrible boss, and you may be right. But you know what? Your boss isn’t the worst boss ever.
Unless your boss has pooped in your lunchbox...."
Jesus, focus. This ISN'T a "social or political system". It's an economic one.
What, you want me to limit my digressions to the topic at hand? That's crazy talk!
Yeah yeah, you're gearing up for the UBI rant. We get it.
Am I that transparent? :-)
Ok, fine. It's SOUNDS like a great idea, but it'll be abused by evil people for their own gain. Therefore we shouldn't do it.
Does that little distinction make you happy?
A bit - but I think the "we shouldn't do it" needs some work. I think we SHOULD aspire to good things, even if there is a danger of people misusing such lofty aspirations. Desigining social and political systems that are fair and equitable (recognizing what those terms mean in any situation are not always agreed upon) is something that we should be trying to do - but I do agree that taking into account how humans actually behave is an important part of making robust systems that are not easily abused.
How to actually build such systems I don't really know. Some combination of market mechanism and regulations to minimize unintended externalities often seems applicable. Some fundamental shifts in the way we divide up our society's immense riches between its members in light of the impact of automation, AI, and other advances seems likely to be necessary.
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
The most evil idea ever committed to paper. It's killed hundreds of millions.
But hey, it sounds good and makes your heart swell with pride, right?
If you can't tell the difference between "good ideas" like "Turn the other cheek" or "Do unto others as you would like for yourself" or "Make America great" and the abuse of such ideas by evil people for their own gain, then you are certainly part of the problem.
More germane to those of us in the US is why not limit the price that can be charged for drugs to the maximum charged anywhere else in the world. If it's profitable there, it can be profitable here.
It is at least mathematically possible to have different prices everywhere, and have the loss of any market make the whole thing unprofitable. From the global point of view, the company's profit is the different between TOTAL sales and TOTAL costs. If manufacturing costs are small relative to the total costs (which include research, development, advertising, and executive salaries and the like), then it is possible that you need silly high prices in some markets and comically low prices is other markets and any other pricing levels cause things to run at a loss.
Things are priced different in different places - even within the same city - and arbitrage opportunities cannot always be ecconomically exploited. Even within a single city, the ecconomic conditions in one region are different enough from other regions (average consumer incomes and average employment and other business costs) that arbitrage cannot completely eliminate the differences.
Not that I don't generally agree that it seems very unfair that such differences exist.
Because it shows that letting one ideologically homogeneous populous area 'stuff the box' to outweigh the overall results in the other 49 states is a problem - the exact problem the electoral college was created to prevent.
California's (actually, LA/San Fran's) huge mass of +5m votes for Hillary is the _perfect_ example of the wisdom of the electoral college.
Sure, but why stop at disenfranchising California? There were lots of states that had a majority of votes for Clinton (and even more states that did not have a majority of votes for Trump). Just becasue you can spin a narative to colour a big chunk of people as somehow illegitimate becuase they together agree with something that is distastful to you, that doesn't make it a useful metric to use when interpreting the results.
While this type of situation may be the perfect example of the wisdom of the electoral college in your mind, there are significant numbers of people _across_the_country who feel that it is an example of problems with the electoral college. While we might want to dismiss them as idiots, when a significant fraction of the population feels something of this nature, ignoring it is probably unwise. In fact, many pundits on all sides of the political spectrum point to this type of ignored or dismissed dissatisfaction as being an important contributor to Trump's success throughout his campaign.
I am hoping many.
Crying is good too.
Wishing other people's death's seems pretty strong. Are you having a bad day? Do you need a hug?
More people in 49 states. If you take California out of the Popular Vote tally, Trump wins handily in 49 states.
"If you don't count some of the votes, Trump won the popular vote." Is that what you are saying? That's generally not how we would want to run things.
Unlike most recent elections, neither candidate got more than 50% of the popular vote. Regardless of which one would have ended up in power had some fairly small number of voters decided different in the voting booth, more than half the country was going to be unhappy about the winner. To claim a strong mandate is about as intellectually honest as claiming that he has no mandate at all.
... There is considerable doubt over deterrent effect of the death penalty - I suspect that the deterrenc effect of disenfranchisement is pretty small.
The death penalty has one definate effect: The criminal will not commit any more crimes afterward!
Very true, however I think the research tends to focus on deterrence of the initial crime. Killing murderers versus long jail sentences does not seem to have a dramatic effect on the murder rate in general - people who commit these types or crimes do not seem to make much of a considered judgement of the cost/benifit analysis before commiting them. Basically nobody thinks they will get caught so the severity of the penalty doesn't get considered.
Felons by default do not have full rights as citizens, including RKBA and Voting. That is what happens when you commit a felony. Sucks to be a felon, so don't commit felonies.
It depends on the state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If we are interested in curtailing re-offense and encouraging re-integration after prison, I don't think that disenfranchisement is particularly productive. There is considerable doubt over deterrent effect of the death penalty - I suspect that the deterrenc effect of disenfranchisement is pretty small.
The personal pronoun refers to her gender, not her sex.
People like you need to be put to death.
Abit extreme I would think. If we killed off everyone who had a differing opinion of how to address others, we might not have such a large population load on the planet, so I suppose there would be an upside.
Great quotes!
But no references. So I have too find them myself? You're not saving me much work!
What am I supposed to say when someone like this guy claims the first Hansen quote "doesn't mean what you say it means"?
https://www.skepticalscience.c...
> When an actual climate scientist says ...
Some of the well known climate scientists (apparently not "actual climate scientists") told us that San Francisco would be underwater by now.
If I wanted to use this information in a discussion, could you provide me with a reference so I am not accused of talking out of my ass?
The US has already been giving a subset of citizens BI for years - and the result is horrific. American Indians receive basic income, free health care, free housing, and free education if they choose it - the result is the most impoverished areas in the United States.
I don't think you are properly characterizing the reality of life as a member of a native american tribe. Yes, some do have significant benifits for being a member of the clan, but some of those clans are pretty poor. Similarly, if you are a part of the "Gates" or "Buffet" clan you could well be better off than someone from the "Jones" or "Smith" clan. Yes, tribes recieve federal dollars for various things with wide variation between different tribes, not unlike states recieve different amounts of federal monies. The "free healthcare" has at times included sterilizing women without their consent, so I don't know that it is something one need look upon with envy. I can't find any info on "free education" beyond k-12 and the types of grants and scholarships widely available to other communities - some scholarships are available for specific tribes, but I don't think that counts as "free education if they choose it ". Poverty rates on reservations seem to be about double the national average - not such a good "basic income" system in my mind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.quora.com/What-ben...
So, without looking at things more closely, I don't think one can really draw conclusions about UBI ideas based on the experiences of Native Americans as a whole. While some (even "many") native communities might be "the most impoverished areas in the United States", some are not. Native Americans (like all Americans) are elligable for a huge variety of social programs the are different in different places, few of which are very much like a UBI.
That's not to say that looking at specific programs in specific regions might not be illuminating. And not only Native American programs. Looking at payments from the Alaska Permanent Fund as well as per-capita tribal payments from different places might give some insight on what types of payments are "effective" by various measures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wait, what? Do you really think those 39,000 people would all pay for housing if they had money? Sadly, many of them would not have the ability to even register for the UBI program.
The fact that homelessness rates have seen pretty large swings over the past 30 + years would tent to indicated that while it is possible that some of this people have much bigger challenges than lack of coin, at least some of them would have to ability to function if they were able to get the correct support. Potentially a UBI could be that type of support.
Heck, just supplying housing can be an effective system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'd rather have my taxes go to pay someone to watch soaps on TV than to some brain-dead defense contractor who made no viable product and wound up folding (but before the bankruptcy, all the execs got their bonuses), but yet charged the US taxpayers billions.
But that's different!
with none ever observed violations
This is incorrect. The experimentally observed neutrino oscillations imply that neutrinos do have a mass which directly contradicts the Standard Model which assumes neutrinos to be massless particles.
The Standard Model is not QM. QM says nothing about the mass of the neutrino.
It's a nice little fiction that Canada is single payer, but the reality is quite a bit more complicated.
Although it is technically illegal for private health clinics to charge for services that are covered by the Canada Health Act, they often do indirectly and that is rarely enforced. Although it isn't too common yet, people sometimes go to employer or union sponsored clinics which were set up to avoid queuing at traditional clinics. Also, you or your employer can purchase private health insurance to cover the fees charged by these private clinics which means of course a secondary insurance market exists as well. It isn't a big thing yet throughout Canada, but a two-tier system is looming there...
That's not to say the Canadian two-tier system isn't light-years more efficient than the two-tier system in the US (which is basically private insurance or medicaid/emergency-room-care).
I can't find any references to the number of such "private health clinics" that charge for Health Act covered services. Nobody I know of has ever used such a thing, though I suppose it is possible. I know of none in the regions I have lived.
Oh, here is a bit more - http://www.canadianliving.com/... - it looks like Ontario has none, BC and Alberta have around 60 each and Quebec has around 200 - http://www.findprivateclinics.... Certainly there is always the option for those who can afford it of leaving the country. In any case, it doesn't look like the system is yet at in the "looming" stage.
But if your phone explodes when you are trying to make an emergency call, you may permanently lose contact with your family.
That was my thought too.
The "DVR-proof" argument seems backwards to me. The biggest value in seeing the game live is that the window for watching it after the fact is severely limited at best, if it exists at all. Nobody plays World Series reruns. If I'm busy during the game and I don't DVR it, I can't watch it. Outside of network news coverage, it is the only thing on TV that I can't eventually catch later. It's like "Sports are best viewed live" is a command, not an observation.
Near the end of last season while visiting my father we watched some "Jays in 30" episodes on one of the sports chanels (Sportsnet?) he gets in Vancouver. They do a condensed commentary of the entire games - "Catch all the action in 30 minutes." Pretty enjoyable. Looks like it is available "on demand" from a few places:
http://www.rogersondemand.com/...
http://www.tvpassport.com/seri...
this is pretty funny: "Intern Exploited for 35 years - CBC" - http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/...
"This is that" is a satire news radio show for those who don't pick up on it when listening.
Thanks, I've thought so too, but the Anonymous Coward claimed that stores would let him pay 3% less if he paid with cash.
I suspect that many business owners do not properly understand the costs associated with dealing in cash, and it is quite possible that some could give such a discount.
From a business point of view, offering such a discount could generate increased sales that might offset higher costs, so it isn't necessarily a bad move on the retailer's part even if it the discount is greater than the actual decrease in costs.
Can you give examples of specific stores that agree?
would they then at least take a check? 3% is probably enough, but I still think it is a pain to have to carry/deal with that kind of cash.
Generally, dealing with cash is NOT 3% less expensive than dealing in credit card payments for the merchant. There are issues of dealing in cash (some of it occasionally gets lost or stolen, someone needs to be paid for counting it and bringing it to the bank and properly entering it into the books, etc.) While it is PROBABLY cheaper for the merchant to take cash, dealing in cash is NOT free of expenses.