So what you are saying is you'd rather continue to leave people hopelessly disabled rather than attempt to find a gene therapy? And as far as fetuses go, you can screen every fetus and guarantee that the fetuses born don't have the gene.
Why don't they find the serial killer gene instead
Because their probably isn't one.
There may well be genes that impact the propensity to become a serial killer, but, even if there are, its not at all inconceivable that one that slightly increases the propensity to be a serial killer also has all kinds of socially beneficial effects, too, and that which effects manifest in any particular person vary based on environmental, rather than genetic, circumstances.
If we find the one gene or series of genes which cause the disease, why not shut those genes off?
What is the social benefit of serial killing rapists? I'd like to know. Lack of impulse control? How is that good? Lack of discipline? Lack of a conscience? Whats the social benefit in any environment and if there were one why do these individuals end up caged up or dead?
Actually, if you take that list and compare it to the populations of the given nations, you'll find that the UK apparently has 2.5 times as many serial killers as the US, Australia has twice as many, and Canada has roughly the same number.
Of course, getting a list of names from wikipedia is an idiotic way to study the prevalence of serial killers in different nations. But, then again, suggesting that we "cure the serial killer gene" is probably every bit as stupid, so I guess your comment fits the discussion perfectly.
Why is it stupid? If we could cure sickle cell, or any other genetic disease would this be considered stupid? Why have gene therapy and stem cell research at all if the goals are all stupid?
Doing anything about population growth is not popular.
As it shouldn't be. The world as a whole does not have an overpopulation problem, nor is it likely to develop one.
Which just brings up the fundamental flaw in your plan: what authority gets to decide who gets born? And why would you trust them?
The economy proves otherwise. If there were not a population problem there would be enough jobs to hire everybody born multiple times over, and we'd be on a path to always have more jobs than population as the job growth would at least correlate with if not surpass the population growth.
Does that look like its happening? No it's not.
And what authority gets to decide who gets to be born? The women who give birth. And yes I t rust them. My mother had the option to abort me and chose not to. If I were going to be born with a severe disability, if my mother chose to have me be born healthy, that would lead to a better quality of life for me, so why would I complain about that?
The people who are miserable are the people who are born into situations and with problems which society cannot deal with. If you were born unable to ever walk, it's going to be a lot more difficult to be healthy. Sure some people who can't walk like Hawking are geniuses and maybe your parents would decide to let you be born like that on purpose, but would anyone consider this to be ethical or humane?
We wouldn't let our pet cats or dogs be born with diseases but we'd let humans be born that way? I'm not saying I should be able to tell you or anyone else whether or not you should have an abortion or cure a disease as a fetus, I'm just saying that if I want my offspring to be disease free at any cost, I should have the right and you shouldn't have the right to prevent it. Just as if a woman who was raped wants to abort her fetus you shouldn't have the right to prevent that.
Well it is not as morally/intellectually as easy as you seem to think it is to start messing what it is to be human. and I am sure a lot of it is not genes but learned behavior. While we might be able to turn off humans violent tendencies, violence does have its uses. Without some violence who can say what we would be unable to cope with. and their is a difference between someone able to kill someone and someone that will kill someone else.
The point is that serial killers are violent for no reason, for no cause, for no purpose other than to get a thrill. They are like individuals who torture for the fun of it. How is this trait useful for a society as modern as ours? If it were so useful we wouldn't be putting them in cages.
So the trait isn't considered useful by society. So let individual parents turn the trait off if they don't want a serial killing rapist in their family. This does not erase the gene from the gene pool, it simply deactivates the gene in the individual so that it's not turned on. The gene still will exist in the gene pool because as far as we know there is no way to erase genes out of the gene pool.
As far as being violent goes, a serial killer isn't just someone who is violent. The MMA fighters, the boxers, the soldiers trained to kill, they are violent. The serial killer is a predator who is violent for no reason other than violence sake, and produces nothing but misery. The rapist is another one who produces nothing but misery for misery sake.
So is it that difficult of an ethical decision to determine if the world would be happier without rapists and serial killers?
Explain how being violent, impulsive, and sociopathic can help in anything? Even if they never become a serial killer they probably wont live to be 21 because they'll still be violent, impulsive, and will likely get into trouble which gets them killed or locked up.
The point is parents should have the right to decide if they want to raise a child who is disabled or not. It should be a choice parents are given, do they want to raise a child who has a high likelihood of becoming a rapist or serial killer when they can shut off that gene and remove all doubt, virtually guaranteeing that their child wont be these things? It's very much like if a child is about to be born with autism, or with a disease that is going to shorten the childs lifespan and you as a parent can guarantee your child not be born with this lifespan shortening disease, why would you choose to give birth to the child who has this disease when you can give the child a normal life?
Tendencies are the result of genes. Not behavior, but tendencies. So a person who has the tendencies of a serial killer is born at risk for becoming a serial killer.
Just like a person can have a sexual attraction but never really have sex, having that sexual attraction puts them at increased risk for having sex. If a person is born with an inability to control their impulses, they are basically disabled mentally. This is genetically influenced even if they never become a serial killer, their quality of life would be better if they had impulse control.
The same can be said about depression and suicide. Not all depressed people commit suicide, but can you admit that if you found the gene that causes depression that it would be in that childs benefit to cure their depression while they are a fetus? This way they don't have to have a lifetime of medication and treatments in psychiatric wards.
Because they will start "curing" homosexuality, skin color, or whatever happens to be unpopular at the moment.
I'm not advocating having the government decide. I'm saying the woman should be able to decide if she wants to give birth to a serial killing rapist or not. The woman should be able to decide if she wants to give birth to a mentally retarded child or not. The woman should be able to decide or choose which genes to activate in regards to homosexuality, skin color, or any of that, just as the parent gets to choose the name of the child.
Abortion is short term. Long term solution is to find a way to shut off the gene that causes the disease to begin with. We cannot keep giving birth to these people only to put them in cages, thats a waste of money.
We have found certain genes already. We have done experiments on mice already, not in regards to serial killers in specific but in general we have cured many diseases through gene therapy already.
So the question is should we stop stem cell research? should we stop genetic research? or should we actually look for the genes which are responsible for the diseases we want to cure and see if we can treat these illnesses in the fetus stage?
It's cheaper to treat disease in the fetus stage. It's also less damaging to everyone involved. It might work or it might not work but if it does work then we save a lot of lives. If it doesn't work we tried to save a lot of lives.
Since detection will come long before treatment, I suspect the interim "cure" would be to puree and vacuum the fetus.
In experiments we have shut off specific genes in mice and these mice have lived healthy lives. What if we could shut off the gene that produces rapists and serial killers? We would have a choice as to do something then and there, or wait until the serial killer/rapist victimizes hundreds, thousands, or millions of people.
Why should we wait for the symptoms when we can cure the disease in the womb?
Most of the sociopaths running fortune 500 companies aren't serial killers, or rapists.
True, but that wouldn't stop them from hiring that work out if it were profitable, and if they thought they could get away with it. The main difference between a criminal and a business genius is that one understands more intricately the phrase "plausible deniability."
It doesn't take a sociopath to be capable of that. Given the right situation and if most of us could get away with it, we'd hire the work out just as quickly and as easily as the sociopathic CEO. The only difference is the sociopathic CEO would have more money to do that with and wouldn't have any ethical standards or rules as to when to use that power (therefore it would be abused).
If you had a serial killer in your family that makes you into a victim just by the fact that you have a serial killer in your family. It ruins your family reputation and dishonors your family be default.
No I don't think killing the families of serial killers would work because you cannot kill a bad gene. The only thing you can do about a bad gene which probably exists in most families, is to allow most families to have the option to give birth to offspring without having that gene activate itself. Also it's more ethical from a utilitarian perspective to spare human lives as taking lives makes and creates misery in the same way that the serial killer does.
My solution is logical because it would work and it would make the world happier and safer. Your solution is less logical because it wouldn't work and it would make the world miserable and more dangerous. When you shut off a gene in a fetus the fetus isn't harmed, nobody has to die. When you kill an entire family then a lot of people have to die.
So let me guess, you are anti abortion because you believe killing a fetus generates as much misery and damage as killing an adult?
None of the ideas which would actually work are popular. Doing anything to save the environment isn't popular. Doing anything about population growth is not popular.
But if we decide which ideas are good or bad based on whats popular this would explain why we are dying. I mean if we decide it's a good idea to continue giving birth to serial killers, and mentally retarded children when we could decide to have perfectly healthy children, sure it might not be a popular idea but it's still right.
Can anyone give me one reason why giving birth to disabled children is a good idea? Especially if we are talking about serial killers? From a utilitarian perspective, if given the option to have a child who is healthy or a child that is going to be a serial killer I'd choose the healthy child.
Non-violent sociopaths can stay. They have enough self control, intellect, reasoning ability, and impulse control to be non-violent. Most of the sociopaths running fortune 500 companies aren't serial killers, or rapists.
Now if we find out a fetus has both violent genetics, and will be a sociopath, we should allow the parents the liberty to decide to shut off these genes. If the parents want to raise a sociopath it's on them, but I don't know any parent who wants to raise a serial killer, and if we knew who is likely to grow up to be a serial killer in the fetus stage it would be like giving birth to a down syndrome baby when that baby could be born perfectly healthy at the flip of a switch.
This is one of the reasons why transhumanism is a good thing. We have individuals born with psychological illnesses that make them a danger to themselves or others, why not treat and cure these individuals at the fetus stage so that they and we need not suffer from the impact of inaction?
Why don't they find the serial killer gene instead
It makes more sense to me to find the gene that produces serial killers and cure it while it's in the fetus stage rather than wait until the serial killers become adults and genetically profile and scan everyone.
We have figured out at least some of the genes responsible for violent tendencies. Why not figure out if it's possible to shut these genes off in mice and work from there?
I wouldn't put it past the Taliban to train a monkey to do a man's job. It's probably cheaper to get a monkey to blow themselves up, especially if the monkey is expecting to receive bananas.
Jim Bell wrote about some sorta weird anonymous digital currency type system. The authorities have a legit reason to want to monitor something like this. http://cryptome.org/ap.htm
the ORIGINAL story says to use steganography techniques on normal common use websites such as facebook and flickr as connecting to those sites will not draw undue attention.
Your post- the one I was replying to, says --NO NO NO-- they must have a secret IP address to unknown proxies..
I dispute that, originally and again, because to connect to those UNKNOWN proxies, they have to type in an unusual IP address.. that kind of activity can easily by tracked by governments with access..
and your rebuttal to me says- what exactly? connecting to a series of websites makes it OK? if I control the ISP- If I am the opressor with complete system access I can pull every packet you send and receive and reassemble them.... I'll ignore connections to facebook or flickr, but I sure as hell won't ignore connections that you and 11 other people I'm keeping an eye on connect to- that no one else does...
only connections to systems that everyone commonly connects to are likely to be hideable..
Thats where you are wrong. They wont have to type in any IP address. The entire process could be automated and done via steganography that is what I'm saying. I'm saying they could connect to 4chan, click on a picture file, the picture file could contain seednodes (IP addresses), connecting to these seednodes which could be made to look like a search request or any IP address because it's a proxy on port 80. The proxy could be run by anybody and this means it could look like a connection to IRC, a connection to AOLIM, a connection to another computer in China. Yes the authorities would recognize that they are connecting to other computers but they could claim to be playing a game of starcraft or any popular RPG and this would perfectly mimic the activity. They could even design it so that the entry point to the darknet is within secondlife.
The main problem is getting the IP addresses to the oppressed individual and having them connect to it in a way which looks legit. It's not hard to make it look legit, it's hard to get the IP addresses to them in the first place. Having steganography over facebook and flickr is useless in my opinion because the authorities will simply scan all of the web for information which matches the profile of being or containing stegnographic data. It's not difficult to scan for this and once found the entire site may be banned or monitored. On top of that anyone seen or known to be connecting to or running it will be in serious trouble. In my opinion having steganography alone wont defeat censorship so what is the point?
The darknet could be designed to work whether you use the traditional internet or not. It could be designed to work in ways which beat all attempts at censorship and in a way in which the authority would have no way of knowing it's being used. The steganography which would work better than what these people are probably going to do would be steganography on the level of protocols. You can do it on the packet level so that the hidden information can be transfered via ordinary pings. These pings could look completely normal and contain information in the IPheader that they are being sent. China would have a very difficult time dealing with this as the IP addresses could be sent in what would look like random ping patterns to a bunch of computers connected to second life or anything else.
But I'll take your word on it and maybe the darknet idea wouldnt work either, but I can tell you for sure that what they plan to do with website level steganography has no chance of working because websites are easy to index and scan by search engines. It would be entirely pointless to do it like that from a technical standpoint.
I'm saying on the network layer, or hardware layer is where the steganography would take place. I'm talking about firmware for the wifi router, or protocol level. I don't see why doing it via websites would be better than doing it via VOIP or TCPIP.
"Yeah but what they want and what they'll get are two different things. I'm sure the money elites didn't want the economy to melt down but it has. Now all their plans are ruined. It's simply impossible to continue with business as usual, something will change or we will sink into a global depression and we wont get out of that until something changes."
I don't see many of them out on the street. From where I'm standing, the wealthy elite are doing just fine right now, even with the crap economy. Of course, from where I'm standing, the reason our crap economy is crap is that the wealthy elite drained the rest of us dry... we gave them everything they asked for, on the premise that it would all "trickle down", only to find that money ignores gravity.
There wont be rich elites out on the streets. Thats not what is going to happen. What is going to happen is they'll try to build lots of prisons to put poor people in there rather than extend unemployment benefits or pay for welfare. This will end up costing them more than if they just gave them the benefits. Then they'll have to deal with the growth of organized crime, terrorism, and others who will target them and their turf. As the middle class shrinks and ceases to exist, civil unrest will grow until the USA as a country is as corrupt as Mexico.
I suppose if someone is rich and elite and does not care about America at all, they obviously wont care about the current situation. But if you have to live in this country and you care about the next 50 years, then something has to be done. None of the solutions are easy, none of the solutions will be cheap.
The source of the problem is that we have more people than we have jobs. We have too many people on planet earth and not enough jobs for them all. And as computers, machines and robots become more sophisticated then we need less and less people. There is no reason to maintain a high birthrate in the USA. There is no reason to maintain the inflated dollar as this just guarantees a high cost of living which increases the likelihood of crime and punishment.
What I expect the rich elite to do is build lots of prisons, create lots of laws, and put poor people in there. That is the simple yet stupid solution I expect them to choose. It's not a long term solution because theres 6 billion people on the earth and the people in the USA whom they put in prison may have offspring who now will be more likely to commit crime and they will have to be put in prison in a lot of instances too. So you create a prison cycle which is not all that different from the welfare cycle.
Why is prison and welfare necessary? The cost of living is artificially kept high. The job growth is artificially kept low. This means you have millions of unemployed people, and their numbers increase every year as the cost of living continues to rise and people continue to be born. This is going to lead to not just a national crisis but a global crisis.
It's actually so bad now that the rich elite don't even want to hire enough cops to protect them.And it's also so bad because when they do hire cops they don't want to pay them very well, and lets be honest, very few people are willing to risk their lives for less than middle class pay. So even if they build more prisons and hire more cops it's going to cost a lot of money and it wont be taken from the middle class because soon there will be no middle class.
I expect the middle class to still exist but it's going to shrink. It's going to consist of professionals, of law enforcement, of lawyers, of doctors, of the career military men. I expect that the military will be the primary path to reaching the middle class. I expect a college degree to decrease in worth and importance unless it's in law enforcement, lawyer, doctor, MBA. This means that college will still be important but only if you plan to stay in college for 6 to 8 years and spend an obscene amount of money.
The jobs will still exist for individuals willing to risk their life, f
Corporations are still making a profit. Lots of shares bought and sold on Wall Street. Big companies are getting bigger by the day, eating the smaller.
I don't think their plans are ruined, I think their plans are coming to fruition.
What happens during an inflationary depression?
You have a situation where dollars aren't buying what they used to buy and aren't worth what they once were. This means the only way out of this situation is to raise taxes and deflate the dollar, the rich elite don't want to see the dollar deflated but everybody else does.
This is not good for the rich elite because the entire world is in a depression because of what they wont do policywise. There also is no easy way out of it so the depression is set to get worse and worse until they make concessions.
You can say they don't care that it's a depression but when you have a depression corruption increases and war becomes much more likely, it also means they'll have to be taxed because there wont be anyone else left to tax to pay for it. Sure they could try taxing the poor bnt that wont work forever. I would say the rich elite are in the worst position right now.
What the rich elite are trying to say is that we are in a slight recession and entering a recovery phase. They are saying because GDP is growing that the recession is officially over. The rich elite are the only ones who care about GDP. The rest of the world is looking at job growth as the indication of the state of the economy, along with other indicators. According to the job growth indicator we are in a depression, and the scary part about it is these jobs are never coming back, and we are never again going to have more jobs than we have people unless we make extreme changes.
This means outsourcing and immigration are only temporary problems. Machines and robots will be bigger problems which will take away even more jobs however the dollar and cost of living still are way too high. To put it simply, it cannot last. The end result is going to be tens of millions of prisoners, or tens of millions without jobs living on welfare, unless something is done to change that path.
And no increased spending wont get us out of it because the dollar is inflated.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because it's dangerous to pick on serial killers as a group.
"We call this one the "Genetic Researcher Decapitator".
Also, genetics does not work that way. Either you're an epically great troll or you simply didn't take any biology at any time in your life.
So you are saying gene therapy never works to cure anything? Lets look into that,
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-01-28-bubble-boy-gene_N.htm
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/colortherapy/
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/02/28/gene_therapy_gets_closer_to_a_cure/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7003-gene-therapy-is-first-deafness-cure.html
So what you are saying is you'd rather continue to leave people hopelessly disabled rather than attempt to find a gene therapy? And as far as fetuses go, you can screen every fetus and guarantee that the fetuses born don't have the gene.
Which should be even more evidence that it's a disease that doesn't have a function in nature.
Because their probably isn't one.
There may well be genes that impact the propensity to become a serial killer, but, even if there are, its not at all inconceivable that one that slightly increases the propensity to be a serial killer also has all kinds of socially beneficial effects, too, and that which effects manifest in any particular person vary based on environmental, rather than genetic, circumstances.
If we find the one gene or series of genes which cause the disease, why not shut those genes off?
What is the social benefit of serial killing rapists? I'd like to know. Lack of impulse control? How is that good? Lack of discipline? Lack of a conscience? Whats the social benefit in any environment and if there were one why do these individuals end up caged up or dead?
Actually, if you take that list and compare it to the populations of the given nations, you'll find that the UK apparently has 2.5 times as many serial killers as the US, Australia has twice as many, and Canada has roughly the same number.
Of course, getting a list of names from wikipedia is an idiotic way to study the prevalence of serial killers in different nations. But, then again, suggesting that we "cure the serial killer gene" is probably every bit as stupid, so I guess your comment fits the discussion perfectly.
Why is it stupid? If we could cure sickle cell, or any other genetic disease would this be considered stupid? Why have gene therapy and stem cell research at all if the goals are all stupid?
Doing anything about population growth is not popular.
As it shouldn't be. The world as a whole does not have an overpopulation problem, nor is it likely to develop one.
Which just brings up the fundamental flaw in your plan: what authority gets to decide who gets born? And why would you trust them?
The economy proves otherwise. If there were not a population problem there would be enough jobs to hire everybody born multiple times over, and we'd be on a path to always have more jobs than population as the job growth would at least correlate with if not surpass the population growth.
Does that look like its happening? No it's not.
And what authority gets to decide who gets to be born? The women who give birth. And yes I t rust them. My mother had the option to abort me and chose not to. If I were going to be born with a severe disability, if my mother chose to have me be born healthy, that would lead to a better quality of life for me, so why would I complain about that?
The people who are miserable are the people who are born into situations and with problems which society cannot deal with. If you were born unable to ever walk, it's going to be a lot more difficult to be healthy. Sure some people who can't walk like Hawking are geniuses and maybe your parents would decide to let you be born like that on purpose, but would anyone consider this to be ethical or humane?
We wouldn't let our pet cats or dogs be born with diseases but we'd let humans be born that way? I'm not saying I should be able to tell you or anyone else whether or not you should have an abortion or cure a disease as a fetus, I'm just saying that if I want my offspring to be disease free at any cost, I should have the right and you shouldn't have the right to prevent it. Just as if a woman who was raped wants to abort her fetus you shouldn't have the right to prevent that.
Well it is not as morally/intellectually as easy as you seem to think it is to start messing what it is to be human.
and I am sure a lot of it is not genes but learned behavior.
While we might be able to turn off humans violent tendencies, violence does have its uses.
Without some violence who can say what we would be unable to cope with.
and their is a difference between someone able to kill someone and someone that will kill someone else.
The point is that serial killers are violent for no reason, for no cause, for no purpose other than to get a thrill. They are like individuals who torture for the fun of it. How is this trait useful for a society as modern as ours? If it were so useful we wouldn't be putting them in cages.
So the trait isn't considered useful by society. So let individual parents turn the trait off if they don't want a serial killing rapist in their family. This does not erase the gene from the gene pool, it simply deactivates the gene in the individual so that it's not turned on. The gene still will exist in the gene pool because as far as we know there is no way to erase genes out of the gene pool.
As far as being violent goes, a serial killer isn't just someone who is violent. The MMA fighters, the boxers, the soldiers trained to kill, they are violent. The serial killer is a predator who is violent for no reason other than violence sake, and produces nothing but misery. The rapist is another one who produces nothing but misery for misery sake.
So is it that difficult of an ethical decision to determine if the world would be happier without rapists and serial killers?
@Anonymous
Explain how being violent, impulsive, and sociopathic can help in anything? Even if they never become a serial killer they probably wont live to be 21 because they'll still be violent, impulsive, and will likely get into trouble which gets them killed or locked up.
The point is parents should have the right to decide if they want to raise a child who is disabled or not. It should be a choice parents are given, do they want to raise a child who has a high likelihood of becoming a rapist or serial killer when they can shut off that gene and remove all doubt, virtually guaranteeing that their child wont be these things? It's very much like if a child is about to be born with autism, or with a disease that is going to shorten the childs lifespan and you as a parent can guarantee your child not be born with this lifespan shortening disease, why would you choose to give birth to the child who has this disease when you can give the child a normal life?
Tendencies are the result of genes. Not behavior, but tendencies. So a person who has the tendencies of a serial killer is born at risk for becoming a serial killer.
Just like a person can have a sexual attraction but never really have sex, having that sexual attraction puts them at increased risk for having sex. If a person is born with an inability to control their impulses, they are basically disabled mentally. This is genetically influenced even if they never become a serial killer, their quality of life would be better if they had impulse control.
The same can be said about depression and suicide. Not all depressed people commit suicide, but can you admit that if you found the gene that causes depression that it would be in that childs benefit to cure their depression while they are a fetus? This way they don't have to have a lifetime of medication and treatments in psychiatric wards.
Because they will start "curing" homosexuality, skin color, or whatever happens to be unpopular at the moment.
I'm not advocating having the government decide. I'm saying the woman should be able to decide if she wants to give birth to a serial killing rapist or not. The woman should be able to decide if she wants to give birth to a mentally retarded child or not. The woman should be able to decide or choose which genes to activate in regards to homosexuality, skin color, or any of that, just as the parent gets to choose the name of the child.
Abortion is short term. Long term solution is to find a way to shut off the gene that causes the disease to begin with. We cannot keep giving birth to these people only to put them in cages, thats a waste of money.
We have found certain genes already. We have done experiments on mice already, not in regards to serial killers in specific but in general we have cured many diseases through gene therapy already.
So the question is should we stop stem cell research? should we stop genetic research? or should we actually look for the genes which are responsible for the diseases we want to cure and see if we can treat these illnesses in the fetus stage?
It's cheaper to treat disease in the fetus stage. It's also less damaging to everyone involved. It might work or it might not work but if it does work then we save a lot of lives. If it doesn't work we tried to save a lot of lives.
Since detection will come long before treatment, I suspect the interim "cure" would be to puree and vacuum the fetus.
In experiments we have shut off specific genes in mice and these mice have lived healthy lives. What if we could shut off the gene that produces rapists and serial killers? We would have a choice as to do something then and there, or wait until the serial killer/rapist victimizes hundreds, thousands, or millions of people.
Why should we wait for the symptoms when we can cure the disease in the womb?
Most of the sociopaths running fortune 500 companies aren't serial killers, or rapists.
True, but that wouldn't stop them from hiring that work out if it were profitable, and if they thought they could get away with it. The main difference between a criminal and a business genius is that one understands more intricately the phrase "plausible deniability."
It doesn't take a sociopath to be capable of that. Given the right situation and if most of us could get away with it, we'd hire the work out just as quickly and as easily as the sociopathic CEO. The only difference is the sociopathic CEO would have more money to do that with and wouldn't have any ethical standards or rules as to when to use that power (therefore it would be abused).
If you had a serial killer in your family that makes you into a victim just by the fact that you have a serial killer in your family. It ruins your family reputation and dishonors your family be default.
No I don't think killing the families of serial killers would work because you cannot kill a bad gene. The only thing you can do about a bad gene which probably exists in most families, is to allow most families to have the option to give birth to offspring without having that gene activate itself. Also it's more ethical from a utilitarian perspective to spare human lives as taking lives makes and creates misery in the same way that the serial killer does.
My solution is logical because it would work and it would make the world happier and safer. Your solution is less logical because it wouldn't work and it would make the world miserable and more dangerous. When you shut off a gene in a fetus the fetus isn't harmed, nobody has to die. When you kill an entire family then a lot of people have to die.
So let me guess, you are anti abortion because you believe killing a fetus generates as much misery and damage as killing an adult?
There has been some theoretical discussions about this idea before, but the general idea is not very popular right now.
None of the ideas which would actually work are popular. Doing anything to save the environment isn't popular. Doing anything about population growth is not popular.
But if we decide which ideas are good or bad based on whats popular this would explain why we are dying. I mean if we decide it's a good idea to continue giving birth to serial killers, and mentally retarded children when we could decide to have perfectly healthy children, sure it might not be a popular idea but it's still right.
Can anyone give me one reason why giving birth to disabled children is a good idea? Especially if we are talking about serial killers? From a utilitarian perspective, if given the option to have a child who is healthy or a child that is going to be a serial killer I'd choose the healthy child.
Non-violent sociopaths can stay. They have enough self control, intellect, reasoning ability, and impulse control to be non-violent. Most of the sociopaths running fortune 500 companies aren't serial killers, or rapists.
Now if we find out a fetus has both violent genetics, and will be a sociopath, we should allow the parents the liberty to decide to shut off these genes. If the parents want to raise a sociopath it's on them, but I don't know any parent who wants to raise a serial killer, and if we knew who is likely to grow up to be a serial killer in the fetus stage it would be like giving birth to a down syndrome baby when that baby could be born perfectly healthy at the flip of a switch.
We must hunt down and treat the serial killer gene before it kills us all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatric_genetics
This is one of the reasons why transhumanism is a good thing. We have individuals born with psychological illnesses that make them a danger to themselves or others, why not treat and cure these individuals at the fetus stage so that they and we need not suffer from the impact of inaction?
Why don't they find the serial killer gene instead
It makes more sense to me to find the gene that produces serial killers and cure it while it's in the fetus stage rather than wait until the serial killers become adults and genetically profile and scan everyone.
We have figured out at least some of the genes responsible for violent tendencies. Why not figure out if it's possible to shut these genes off in mice and work from there?
Sources:
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/violence psychiatric genetics
Right. Have you seen the price of 72 virgins lately?
Of course those virgins have no rights, so they can be traded like property, as if Allah condones slavery.
Maybe they are?
I wouldn't put it past the Taliban to train a monkey to do a man's job. It's probably cheaper to get a monkey to blow themselves up, especially if the monkey is expecting to receive bananas.
"In God We Trust"
Jim Bell wrote about some sorta weird anonymous digital currency type system. The authorities have a legit reason to want to monitor something like this.
http://cryptome.org/ap.htm
the ORIGINAL story says to use steganography techniques on normal common use websites such as facebook and flickr as connecting to those sites will not draw undue attention.
Your post- the one I was replying to, says --NO NO NO-- they must have a secret IP address to unknown proxies..
I dispute that, originally and again, because to connect to those UNKNOWN proxies, they have to type in an unusual IP address.. that kind of activity can easily by tracked by governments with access..
and your rebuttal to me says- what exactly? connecting to a series of websites makes it OK? if I control the ISP- If I am the opressor with complete system access I can pull every packet you send and receive and reassemble them.... I'll ignore connections to facebook or flickr, but I sure as hell won't ignore connections that you and 11 other people I'm keeping an eye on connect to- that no one else does...
only connections to systems that everyone commonly connects to are likely to be hideable..
Thats where you are wrong. They wont have to type in any IP address. The entire process could be automated and done via steganography that is what I'm saying. I'm saying they could connect to 4chan, click on a picture file, the picture file could contain seednodes (IP addresses), connecting to these seednodes which could be made to look like a search request or any IP address because it's a proxy on port 80. The proxy could be run by anybody and this means it could look like a connection to IRC, a connection to AOLIM, a connection to another computer in China. Yes the authorities would recognize that they are connecting to other computers but they could claim to be playing a game of starcraft or any popular RPG and this would perfectly mimic the activity. They could even design it so that the entry point to the darknet is within secondlife.
The main problem is getting the IP addresses to the oppressed individual and having them connect to it in a way which looks legit. It's not hard to make it look legit, it's hard to get the IP addresses to them in the first place. Having steganography over facebook and flickr is useless in my opinion because the authorities will simply scan all of the web for information which matches the profile of being or containing stegnographic data. It's not difficult to scan for this and once found the entire site may be banned or monitored. On top of that anyone seen or known to be connecting to or running it will be in serious trouble. In my opinion having steganography alone wont defeat censorship so what is the point?
The darknet could be designed to work whether you use the traditional internet or not. It could be designed to work in ways which beat all attempts at censorship and in a way in which the authority would have no way of knowing it's being used. The steganography which would work better than what these people are probably going to do would be steganography on the level of protocols. You can do it on the packet level so that the hidden information can be transfered via ordinary pings. These pings could look completely normal and contain information in the IPheader that they are being sent. China would have a very difficult time dealing with this as the IP addresses could be sent in what would look like random ping patterns to a bunch of computers connected to second life or anything else.
But I'll take your word on it and maybe the darknet idea wouldnt work either, but I can tell you for sure that what they plan to do with website level steganography has no chance of working because websites are easy to index and scan by search engines. It would be entirely pointless to do it like that from a technical standpoint.
I'm saying on the network layer, or hardware layer is where the steganography would take place. I'm talking about firmware for the wifi router, or protocol level. I don't see why doing it via websites would be better than doing it via VOIP or TCPIP.
"Yeah but what they want and what they'll get are two different things. I'm sure the money elites didn't want the economy to melt down but it has. Now all their plans are ruined. It's simply impossible to continue with business as usual, something will change or we will sink into a global depression and we wont get out of that until something changes."
I don't see many of them out on the street. From where I'm standing, the wealthy elite are doing just fine right now, even with the crap economy. Of course, from where I'm standing, the reason our crap economy is crap is that the wealthy elite drained the rest of us dry... we gave them everything they asked for, on the premise that it would all "trickle down", only to find that money ignores gravity.
There wont be rich elites out on the streets. Thats not what is going to happen. What is going to happen is they'll try to build lots of prisons to put poor people in there rather than extend unemployment benefits or pay for welfare. This will end up costing them more than if they just gave them the benefits. Then they'll have to deal with the growth of organized crime, terrorism, and others who will target them and their turf. As the middle class shrinks and ceases to exist, civil unrest will grow until the USA as a country is as corrupt as Mexico.
I suppose if someone is rich and elite and does not care about America at all, they obviously wont care about the current situation. But if you have to live in this country and you care about the next 50 years, then something has to be done. None of the solutions are easy, none of the solutions will be cheap.
The source of the problem is that we have more people than we have jobs. We have too many people on planet earth and not enough jobs for them all. And as computers, machines and robots become more sophisticated then we need less and less people. There is no reason to maintain a high birthrate in the USA. There is no reason to maintain the inflated dollar as this just guarantees a high cost of living which increases the likelihood of crime and punishment.
What I expect the rich elite to do is build lots of prisons, create lots of laws, and put poor people in there. That is the simple yet stupid solution I expect them to choose. It's not a long term solution because theres 6 billion people on the earth and the people in the USA whom they put in prison may have offspring who now will be more likely to commit crime and they will have to be put in prison in a lot of instances too. So you create a prison cycle which is not all that different from the welfare cycle.
Why is prison and welfare necessary? The cost of living is artificially kept high. The job growth is artificially kept low. This means you have millions of unemployed people, and their numbers increase every year as the cost of living continues to rise and people continue to be born. This is going to lead to not just a national crisis but a global crisis.
It's actually so bad now that the rich elite don't even want to hire enough cops to protect them.And it's also so bad because when they do hire cops they don't want to pay them very well, and lets be honest, very few people are willing to risk their lives for less than middle class pay. So even if they build more prisons and hire more cops it's going to cost a lot of money and it wont be taken from the middle class because soon there will be no middle class.
I expect the middle class to still exist but it's going to shrink. It's going to consist of professionals, of law enforcement, of lawyers, of doctors, of the career military men. I expect that the military will be the primary path to reaching the middle class. I expect a college degree to decrease in worth and importance unless it's in law enforcement, lawyer, doctor, MBA. This means that college will still be important but only if you plan to stay in college for 6 to 8 years and spend an obscene amount of money.
The jobs will still exist for individuals willing to risk their life, f
Not at all. It's the Shock Doctrine.
Corporations are still making a profit. Lots of shares bought and sold on Wall Street. Big companies are getting bigger by the day, eating the smaller.
I don't think their plans are ruined, I think their plans are coming to fruition.
What happens during an inflationary depression?
You have a situation where dollars aren't buying what they used to buy and aren't worth what they once were. This means the only way out of this situation is to raise taxes and deflate the dollar, the rich elite don't want to see the dollar deflated but everybody else does.
This is not good for the rich elite because the entire world is in a depression because of what they wont do policywise. There also is no easy way out of it so the depression is set to get worse and worse until they make concessions.
You can say they don't care that it's a depression but when you have a depression corruption increases and war becomes much more likely, it also means they'll have to be taxed because there wont be anyone else left to tax to pay for it. Sure they could try taxing the poor bnt that wont work forever. I would say the rich elite are in the worst position right now.
What the rich elite are trying to say is that we are in a slight recession and entering a recovery phase. They are saying because GDP is growing that the recession is officially over. The rich elite are the only ones who care about GDP. The rest of the world is looking at job growth as the indication of the state of the economy, along with other indicators. According to the job growth indicator we are in a depression, and the scary part about it is these jobs are never coming back, and we are never again going to have more jobs than we have people unless we make extreme changes.
This means outsourcing and immigration are only temporary problems. Machines and robots will be bigger problems which will take away even more jobs however the dollar and cost of living still are way too high. To put it simply, it cannot last. The end result is going to be tens of millions of prisoners, or tens of millions without jobs living on welfare, unless something is done to change that path.
And no increased spending wont get us out of it because the dollar is inflated.