The U.S. still does a lot of manufacturing and output has been growing steadily. The only thing that's changed is we've gotten really efficient at it and as a result employment in that sector has fallen through the floor. If you're buying cheap goods that you'll probably throw away in a few years when they break, they're probably cheaply manufactured in some other country. That's perfectly fine if you just need a cheap blender or vacuum because you don't intend to use it very much. Why pay for premium quality.
On the other hand if you want something that's built to withstand a lot of heavy duty use and likely comes with a 10-year warranty to boot, you're probably buying something manufactured in the U.S. It's just a simple reflection of labor costs. When the cost of some good or service gets lower and lower, the percentage of cost due to human labor becomes a larger part overall. This means that it doesn't make economic sense to manufacture cheap goods in the U.S. when other countries of China can make the same low quality produce at a much lower cost.
I'm far less worried about foreign manufacturing hurting the U.S. and far more worried about government bans into scientific research. Stem cell medical technology is going to be the future of medicine, and U.S. researchers have been barred from conducting research so it's going to be companies in other countries that are making the big advances that will drive the medical field forward. I can see similar issues if Congress decides to panic and ban research into AI due to similar types of fear-mongering over the possible consequences.
The only reason the packages are delivered during the day when no one is home is because delivery drivers don't want to work early mornings when people are up but still home or late evenings when most people are back from work, school, etc.
Automated delivery vehicles have no such requirements and could easily offer delivery of packages in the early mornings or late evenings when people are awake and at home to receive delivery. Once you don't have a human driver, there's no reason to keep the same system that was subject to the constraints of a human driver.
Utter nonsense. Get a cheap bicycle and rid down to a local park. Drop by some basketball courts and meet some new people and get some exercise. Go down to the city library and find some interesting books to read. Go to some wacky community event involving art or music. There's all manner of things that can be done for free and even more on top of that which can be done for $10 or less if you're willing to look around a bit.
I think the real truth is that the 18-24 crowd is too absorbed in Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to want to get outside. If John Calhoun were still alive he'd be yelling about behavioral sink right about now.
Now we're getting a new office layout this year. No more assigned desk! Sit where ever you want. How is that supposed to work?
It absolutely sucks. I'm only convinced management does it because they know it pisses everyone off and they want to downsize without firing anyone so they pull passive aggressive shit like this.
If you want shit to get done by your development staff get them all their own offices and let them arrange it to their own tastes. I'd even suggest having only a single meeting room, which makes it difficult for managers to schedule long meetings that just piss everyone's time away.
Sounds more like something that will be another big government project boondoggle, but nonetheless a nice way for Trump and fellow Congress cronies to funnel money to some of their friends and backers to build out this network.
I don't think the user base here is heavily leaning (at least not to the extent that most online communities are) in one direction or the other based on comments posted here, though I suppose you could claim that the editors have a particular leaning.
I suspect that they post these articles not out of any particular political allegiance, but simply because they get more traffic and therefor generate more revenue.
But the ACA was a cobbled together mess that didn't solve that problem regardless of what it was intended to do.
Near as I can tell it was just a gift to insurance companies because it allows them to have higher overall profits, because now everyone is (theoretically) forced to buy insurance policies (which in some cases that they can't even really afford to use, but that's a side issue) which means overall revenue for the companies goes up, so even though they still pay out the required ~80% percentage of that in health care claims, they still an overall increase in the remaining ~20%. There's also an incentive to keep increasing the cost of health care as that just means that the remaining ~20% is even larger. There's some other bad behavior that's incentivized since they can't really force you to buy it, so you can get away with not doing it, which may be the best financial decision for a lot of people, especially since they can always buy the insurance only when they need to use it since presence of a pre-existing condition doesn't disqualify them from purchasing insurance now.
I think that if that government wanted to do things sanely, they'd handle emergency room visit costs and the like since hospitals are required to treat people which creates some similarly bad incentives in terms of behavior, but that's another aside. That way if the government feels someone is abusing the ER, they can easily garnish wages or take other actions to remedy the issue. Beyond that, they should just get out of healthcare entirely. If they want to provide some kind of portable benefits, just create a basic income because sometimes people need to buy a car to get to a new job or to purchase food more than they need a guarantee of medical care. Making hospitals have a list price for treatments would probably go a long way as well, because that lets consumers make price decisions just like they do at grocery stores, retail outlets, etc.
The Justice Democrats are American political left's version of the Tea Party so it's little wonder that the Democrats want to have nothing to do with them. They might be able to garner a little bit of support, but they'll do more to drive people away from the party than they will to help the Democrats regain control of Congress.
Even if that weren't the case, I don't expect that they would even manage to be as effective as the Tea Party managed to be, which isn't terribly much. They already have started cannibalizing themselves over ideological purity as seen when they tossed Cenk out over some shit he wrote ~20 years ago that normal people wouldn't give two shits about. To some degree that's the problem with the Democrats in general as of all the slimeballs in Congress, Franken ends up getting booted (over some of the saddest, weakest crap no less), which is especially bad considering he was at least a viable contender for a presidential bid (long odds to win the party nomination, but then again Trump somehow pulled it off) in 2020.
I wouldn't mind internet ads if they weren't so damned obnoxious. If it were just a plain.gif or something similar like a small image and a blurb of text, I probably wouldn't care about them at all or even bother blocking them. I'm not going to click on them or give them any thought, but I'll tolerate their presence as a way for a website to make some money.
However, its the auto-play audio or video and the hideously massive blob of javascript that can bring multiple cores to a grinding halt for prolonged moments. It's the massive banner ads and side bars the obscure the content that a I care about and their seeming ability to break my experience with random focus requests and an insistence of tracking my across every site that I visit while eating just as much or more data and bandwidth as the content I'm there to see. Its the malicious ads running little programs to use my CPU cycles to mine for cryptocurrencies or that even try to infect my machine in other ways. Fuck all of that and everything else about them as well.
Build a system that makes it impossible for ads to be annoying in the ways above, or I'm not turning off the adblocker either.
Or just the state government passing rules that make it illegal for city governments to grant monopoly rights to an ISP. That's essentially the source of the problem. You can't expect a market and therefor choices to exist when it's been explicitly prohibited by law, and no one is really interested in starting their own black market internet over the whole deal.
Generally there's some suspension of a right to privacy when in public, otherwise it would make public photography of most any kind illegal as it may be infringing on someone's privacy. Installing a tracking device on someone's vehicle is an entirely different can of worms compared to governments tacking lots of pictures.
I personally think the latter is far more creepy and fucked up than the first as at least in that case they need to convince a judge they already have a good reason to want to watch what you're doing where as the second is catching everyone in the same giant drift net. However, I'm not sure if it's as likely to violate any state laws, especially depending on how they're worded. If you've already got traffic cameras, I don't think any lawsuit is going to be as easy as you seem to think.
Most people won't even get the pat down at an airport even though they talk about caring about government invasion of privacy. If you think people are going to go to this much trouble to screw with the government, especially when it's going to draw unwanted attention of law enforcement, I've got a bridge to sell you.
If we're looking at it from the perspective of adverse health effects as a result of second hand exposure, then automobiles aren't regulated anywhere near enough. Look at several of the studies comparing proximity of dwelling to a highway with all kinds of different adverse health effects. I wouldn't be surprised if its worse than second hand smoke.
It is a really great scene. I remember one of those Red Letter Media reviews (the ones that shit on the Star Wars prequels) that broken down how brilliant it was. The way its framed immediately tells you how there's this vastly more powerful evil empire and how hopelessly outmatched the rebels are, and this is done without extensive exposition (though the title crawl does give some information about this) or anything else. It makes the death star more impressive as well as you remember the really massive ship that doesn't even stack up to this thing.
I think Bertrand Russel draws some terrible conclusions, but he makes an astute observation as to why a 20 hour work week is unlikely in his essay In Praise of Idleness that he wrote over 80 years ago.
What we tend to see in the real world is that advances in technology still leave most people working approximately 40 hours per week, but an increase in the requirements for minimum capability to do useful work. It's not hard to imagine that as robots and AI continue to advance we may have a world where only people capable of earning a Ph.D. in scientific or medical fields are able to contribute to further human progress as every job below that can be automated and performed at far less expense or far greater safety than if done by a human.
I don't know what the eventual end result of this looks like, but we're starting to see how it plays out. IQ scores have been increasing at population levels and we're not entirely certain that all of those increases can be attributed to environment factors, so there may be some evidence that modern society is selecting for improved intelligence, but it's plane to see that there are some individuals even today who are incapable of doing productive work or adding value to society. Even if human reproduction could keep track with technological advancement, it still doesn't solve the problems that arise when someone who has been specially trained for a particular vocation that they have worked in for several decades has had their job made redundant as even exceptionally intelligent people can struggle to adapt to new things as they age.
What do you need money for if there are robots and AI agents capable of producing everything humanity needs. Once you're able to supply everyone with basic needs at essentially no cost because you don't need expensive human labor, everyone is essentially rich to the point that they can spend their days engaged in leisure or their own creative endeavors.
There's no point in wealthy people trying to control the poor because unlike now where they could be potential workers to produce more wealth, they offer no such utility in a future with advanced AI and robots. So either the wealthy completely eradicate the poor and there are no longer any poor people, or the wealthy decide to let everyone benefit from the improved production efficiency and no one is materially poor in the way that might be now.
Dystopian societies where the technologically advanced rich oppress the poor for no rational benefit or reason only exist in novels and films. As soon as they cease to be valuable as labor the only sensible thing to do is either exterminate them or give them everything they need to survive and leave them to their own devices.
The same thing for any behavior, you are not born a smoker, you are not born rich, you are not born gay, you are not born honest, you are not born fat.
Perhaps the only one in that list that's true is that you are not born rich, but you can obviously be born into wealth.
Otherwise there's plenty of evidence to suggest that susceptibility to things like smoking (or addictive behaviors in general), personality, and bodily response to types of nutrients have strong genetic components. Sure, those don't guarantee anything, but if you're a betting man you know that someone who's Samoan is going to have a hell of a lot harder of a time keeping their weight in check.
Sexual preference doesn't have any direct genetic cause based on anything I've read, but it's almost a certainty that people are born straight or gay based on our current understanding of sexual preference being tied to how the brain is wired. There are some who suspect that there may be genes carried by a mother that make it more or less likely for her offspring to be homosexual as it is currently believed that the improper prenatal exposure to sex hormones during key parts of fetal brain development may be responsible for explaining things like deviations from heterosexuality or other conditions such as gender dysphoria.
Unless your childhood environment is utter hell, genetics have a fairly large role in who you are as a person. When you make environment as controlled and equal as possible, you essentially just create room for genes to express themselves to their greatest extent.
Netflix likely has that data (or a really good approximation), but I doubt that they'd share it because it offers them a significant advantage when it comes to determining what kind of content to fund.
Not all of the shows on Netflix are big hits or even necessarily something I'd care to watch, but it seems like they do a much better job on average of developing new shows than most other content providers/producers.
At one point in time shipping anything across the ocean was hideously expensive and reserved primarily for luxuries reserved for nobility. Later on it became relatively cheap and there's the old story of the early days of California where it was more economical to ship laundry to be done in Hawaii than for it to be done locally. Today you can scarcely glance at a shelf in any store without seeing something that was made quite far away because shipping has become so inexpensive relative to the other costs that go into producing most goods.
If we start colonizing any planets at all, it will be only because transport through space has become inexpensive. At the current prices, we'd be doing little more than establishing research bases or remote outposts. You'll have a hard time convincing tax payers to spend billions of dollars per colonist so it simply won't happen until it becomes economical.
If people will be selected to live on mars, chances are we'll look for the emotionally stable to do the first wave of colonisation.... You know, like astronauts.
Or perhaps it's much more like the early colonies in the Americas or Australia where the people selected were ones who the powers back home were sick of wanted to kick out of the country or who were completely fed up with the system and home and wanted to get out from underneath it.
After reading a bit of the article, it doesn't appear as if this is some surprising big revelation unto itself, but is something that other researchers who are trying to study particular genes and their effects need to consider in their own study designs. For example, suppose you are looking at some gene(s) suspected of increasing height, but that it is only activated under certain environmental circumstances or is at least mediated in some way by environmental factors. If parents also have another gene that makes those environmental factors more likely, but do not pass that particular gene to their offspring it can act as a confounding factor as there is a more complex interaction that is responsible for an effect than may be expected otherwise.
I'm not sure I fully understand it, but that's what I'm thinking is going on. The article doesn't provide much information in terms of the size of this effect either. It looks like the full text of the actual research is available though and a quick glance at the abstract includes the following: "Using results from a meta-analysis of educational attainment, we find that the polygenic score computed for the nontransmitted alleles of 21,637 probands with at least one parent genotyped has an estimated effect on the educational attainment of the proband that is 29.9% (P = 1.6 × 1014) of that of the transmitted polygenic score."
From that, it does sound as though this isn't something that's completely trivial.
Sounds more like epigenetics to me than just straight up nurture, only in this case even perhaps further removed as the summary makes it sound as though it is the parents environment that is having some effect that can be passed down to offspring. However, understanding this seems like something that would require a lot of reading beyond the article summary to understand precisely what is being described as "genetic nurture effect" seems like a fairly nebulous term that seems to be a bit of an oxymoron at first glance. It also sounds like something quite new, so it could definitely use some replication and additional exploring to fully understand what's going on.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. still does a lot of manufacturing and output has been growing steadily. The only thing that's changed is we've gotten really efficient at it and as a result employment in that sector has fallen through the floor. If you're buying cheap goods that you'll probably throw away in a few years when they break, they're probably cheaply manufactured in some other country. That's perfectly fine if you just need a cheap blender or vacuum because you don't intend to use it very much. Why pay for premium quality.
On the other hand if you want something that's built to withstand a lot of heavy duty use and likely comes with a 10-year warranty to boot, you're probably buying something manufactured in the U.S. It's just a simple reflection of labor costs. When the cost of some good or service gets lower and lower, the percentage of cost due to human labor becomes a larger part overall. This means that it doesn't make economic sense to manufacture cheap goods in the U.S. when other countries of China can make the same low quality produce at a much lower cost.
I'm far less worried about foreign manufacturing hurting the U.S. and far more worried about government bans into scientific research. Stem cell medical technology is going to be the future of medicine, and U.S. researchers have been barred from conducting research so it's going to be companies in other countries that are making the big advances that will drive the medical field forward. I can see similar issues if Congress decides to panic and ban research into AI due to similar types of fear-mongering over the possible consequences.
The only reason the packages are delivered during the day when no one is home is because delivery drivers don't want to work early mornings when people are up but still home or late evenings when most people are back from work, school, etc.
Automated delivery vehicles have no such requirements and could easily offer delivery of packages in the early mornings or late evenings when people are awake and at home to receive delivery. Once you don't have a human driver, there's no reason to keep the same system that was subject to the constraints of a human driver.
Utter nonsense. Get a cheap bicycle and rid down to a local park. Drop by some basketball courts and meet some new people and get some exercise. Go down to the city library and find some interesting books to read. Go to some wacky community event involving art or music. There's all manner of things that can be done for free and even more on top of that which can be done for $10 or less if you're willing to look around a bit.
I think the real truth is that the 18-24 crowd is too absorbed in Facebook, Twitter, and other social media to want to get outside. If John Calhoun were still alive he'd be yelling about behavioral sink right about now.
Now we're getting a new office layout this year. No more assigned desk! Sit where ever you want. How is that supposed to work?
It absolutely sucks. I'm only convinced management does it because they know it pisses everyone off and they want to downsize without firing anyone so they pull passive aggressive shit like this.
If you want shit to get done by your development staff get them all their own offices and let them arrange it to their own tastes. I'd even suggest having only a single meeting room, which makes it difficult for managers to schedule long meetings that just piss everyone's time away.
Sounds more like something that will be another big government project boondoggle, but nonetheless a nice way for Trump and fellow Congress cronies to funnel money to some of their friends and backers to build out this network.
I don't think the user base here is heavily leaning (at least not to the extent that most online communities are) in one direction or the other based on comments posted here, though I suppose you could claim that the editors have a particular leaning.
I suspect that they post these articles not out of any particular political allegiance, but simply because they get more traffic and therefor generate more revenue.
But the ACA was a cobbled together mess that didn't solve that problem regardless of what it was intended to do.
Near as I can tell it was just a gift to insurance companies because it allows them to have higher overall profits, because now everyone is (theoretically) forced to buy insurance policies (which in some cases that they can't even really afford to use, but that's a side issue) which means overall revenue for the companies goes up, so even though they still pay out the required ~80% percentage of that in health care claims, they still an overall increase in the remaining ~20%. There's also an incentive to keep increasing the cost of health care as that just means that the remaining ~20% is even larger. There's some other bad behavior that's incentivized since they can't really force you to buy it, so you can get away with not doing it, which may be the best financial decision for a lot of people, especially since they can always buy the insurance only when they need to use it since presence of a pre-existing condition doesn't disqualify them from purchasing insurance now.
I think that if that government wanted to do things sanely, they'd handle emergency room visit costs and the like since hospitals are required to treat people which creates some similarly bad incentives in terms of behavior, but that's another aside. That way if the government feels someone is abusing the ER, they can easily garnish wages or take other actions to remedy the issue. Beyond that, they should just get out of healthcare entirely. If they want to provide some kind of portable benefits, just create a basic income because sometimes people need to buy a car to get to a new job or to purchase food more than they need a guarantee of medical care. Making hospitals have a list price for treatments would probably go a long way as well, because that lets consumers make price decisions just like they do at grocery stores, retail outlets, etc.
The Justice Democrats are American political left's version of the Tea Party so it's little wonder that the Democrats want to have nothing to do with them. They might be able to garner a little bit of support, but they'll do more to drive people away from the party than they will to help the Democrats regain control of Congress.
Even if that weren't the case, I don't expect that they would even manage to be as effective as the Tea Party managed to be, which isn't terribly much. They already have started cannibalizing themselves over ideological purity as seen when they tossed Cenk out over some shit he wrote ~20 years ago that normal people wouldn't give two shits about. To some degree that's the problem with the Democrats in general as of all the slimeballs in Congress, Franken ends up getting booted (over some of the saddest, weakest crap no less), which is especially bad considering he was at least a viable contender for a presidential bid (long odds to win the party nomination, but then again Trump somehow pulled it off) in 2020.
It's okay. I've heard that you have to say his name three times while looking in the mirror in order for him to appear.
I wouldn't mind internet ads if they weren't so damned obnoxious. If it were just a plain .gif or something similar like a small image and a blurb of text, I probably wouldn't care about them at all or even bother blocking them. I'm not going to click on them or give them any thought, but I'll tolerate their presence as a way for a website to make some money.
However, its the auto-play audio or video and the hideously massive blob of javascript that can bring multiple cores to a grinding halt for prolonged moments. It's the massive banner ads and side bars the obscure the content that a I care about and their seeming ability to break my experience with random focus requests and an insistence of tracking my across every site that I visit while eating just as much or more data and bandwidth as the content I'm there to see. Its the malicious ads running little programs to use my CPU cycles to mine for cryptocurrencies or that even try to infect my machine in other ways. Fuck all of that and everything else about them as well.
Build a system that makes it impossible for ads to be annoying in the ways above, or I'm not turning off the adblocker either.
Or just the state government passing rules that make it illegal for city governments to grant monopoly rights to an ISP. That's essentially the source of the problem. You can't expect a market and therefor choices to exist when it's been explicitly prohibited by law, and no one is really interested in starting their own black market internet over the whole deal.
Generally there's some suspension of a right to privacy when in public, otherwise it would make public photography of most any kind illegal as it may be infringing on someone's privacy. Installing a tracking device on someone's vehicle is an entirely different can of worms compared to governments tacking lots of pictures.
I personally think the latter is far more creepy and fucked up than the first as at least in that case they need to convince a judge they already have a good reason to want to watch what you're doing where as the second is catching everyone in the same giant drift net. However, I'm not sure if it's as likely to violate any state laws, especially depending on how they're worded. If you've already got traffic cameras, I don't think any lawsuit is going to be as easy as you seem to think.
Most people won't even get the pat down at an airport even though they talk about caring about government invasion of privacy. If you think people are going to go to this much trouble to screw with the government, especially when it's going to draw unwanted attention of law enforcement, I've got a bridge to sell you.
Why take someone else's when you can just make your own instead. It seems to be working really well for all of these people. Just make sure to keep yelling "I do not consent" or inform the police that you are an article 4 free inhabitant when you get pulled over. Works like a charm.
If we're looking at it from the perspective of adverse health effects as a result of second hand exposure, then automobiles aren't regulated anywhere near enough. Look at several of the studies comparing proximity of dwelling to a highway with all kinds of different adverse health effects. I wouldn't be surprised if its worse than second hand smoke.
It is a really great scene. I remember one of those Red Letter Media reviews (the ones that shit on the Star Wars prequels) that broken down how brilliant it was. The way its framed immediately tells you how there's this vastly more powerful evil empire and how hopelessly outmatched the rebels are, and this is done without extensive exposition (though the title crawl does give some information about this) or anything else. It makes the death star more impressive as well as you remember the really massive ship that doesn't even stack up to this thing.
I think Bertrand Russel draws some terrible conclusions, but he makes an astute observation as to why a 20 hour work week is unlikely in his essay In Praise of Idleness that he wrote over 80 years ago.
What we tend to see in the real world is that advances in technology still leave most people working approximately 40 hours per week, but an increase in the requirements for minimum capability to do useful work. It's not hard to imagine that as robots and AI continue to advance we may have a world where only people capable of earning a Ph.D. in scientific or medical fields are able to contribute to further human progress as every job below that can be automated and performed at far less expense or far greater safety than if done by a human.
I don't know what the eventual end result of this looks like, but we're starting to see how it plays out. IQ scores have been increasing at population levels and we're not entirely certain that all of those increases can be attributed to environment factors, so there may be some evidence that modern society is selecting for improved intelligence, but it's plane to see that there are some individuals even today who are incapable of doing productive work or adding value to society. Even if human reproduction could keep track with technological advancement, it still doesn't solve the problems that arise when someone who has been specially trained for a particular vocation that they have worked in for several decades has had their job made redundant as even exceptionally intelligent people can struggle to adapt to new things as they age.
What do you need money for if there are robots and AI agents capable of producing everything humanity needs. Once you're able to supply everyone with basic needs at essentially no cost because you don't need expensive human labor, everyone is essentially rich to the point that they can spend their days engaged in leisure or their own creative endeavors.
There's no point in wealthy people trying to control the poor because unlike now where they could be potential workers to produce more wealth, they offer no such utility in a future with advanced AI and robots. So either the wealthy completely eradicate the poor and there are no longer any poor people, or the wealthy decide to let everyone benefit from the improved production efficiency and no one is materially poor in the way that might be now.
Dystopian societies where the technologically advanced rich oppress the poor for no rational benefit or reason only exist in novels and films. As soon as they cease to be valuable as labor the only sensible thing to do is either exterminate them or give them everything they need to survive and leave them to their own devices.
The same thing for any behavior, you are not born a smoker, you are not born rich, you are not born gay, you are not born honest, you are not born fat.
Perhaps the only one in that list that's true is that you are not born rich, but you can obviously be born into wealth.
Otherwise there's plenty of evidence to suggest that susceptibility to things like smoking (or addictive behaviors in general), personality, and bodily response to types of nutrients have strong genetic components. Sure, those don't guarantee anything, but if you're a betting man you know that someone who's Samoan is going to have a hell of a lot harder of a time keeping their weight in check.
Sexual preference doesn't have any direct genetic cause based on anything I've read, but it's almost a certainty that people are born straight or gay based on our current understanding of sexual preference being tied to how the brain is wired. There are some who suspect that there may be genes carried by a mother that make it more or less likely for her offspring to be homosexual as it is currently believed that the improper prenatal exposure to sex hormones during key parts of fetal brain development may be responsible for explaining things like deviations from heterosexuality or other conditions such as gender dysphoria.
Unless your childhood environment is utter hell, genetics have a fairly large role in who you are as a person. When you make environment as controlled and equal as possible, you essentially just create room for genes to express themselves to their greatest extent.
Netflix likely has that data (or a really good approximation), but I doubt that they'd share it because it offers them a significant advantage when it comes to determining what kind of content to fund.
Not all of the shows on Netflix are big hits or even necessarily something I'd care to watch, but it seems like they do a much better job on average of developing new shows than most other content providers/producers.
I've already payed for the service, so when they release anything that looks remotely appealing, I watch it.
There are no refunds for lost time.
At one point in time shipping anything across the ocean was hideously expensive and reserved primarily for luxuries reserved for nobility. Later on it became relatively cheap and there's the old story of the early days of California where it was more economical to ship laundry to be done in Hawaii than for it to be done locally. Today you can scarcely glance at a shelf in any store without seeing something that was made quite far away because shipping has become so inexpensive relative to the other costs that go into producing most goods.
If we start colonizing any planets at all, it will be only because transport through space has become inexpensive. At the current prices, we'd be doing little more than establishing research bases or remote outposts. You'll have a hard time convincing tax payers to spend billions of dollars per colonist so it simply won't happen until it becomes economical.
If people will be selected to live on mars, chances are we'll look for the emotionally stable to do the first wave of colonisation. ... You know, like astronauts.
Or perhaps it's much more like the early colonies in the Americas or Australia where the people selected were ones who the powers back home were sick of wanted to kick out of the country or who were completely fed up with the system and home and wanted to get out from underneath it.
After reading a bit of the article, it doesn't appear as if this is some surprising big revelation unto itself, but is something that other researchers who are trying to study particular genes and their effects need to consider in their own study designs. For example, suppose you are looking at some gene(s) suspected of increasing height, but that it is only activated under certain environmental circumstances or is at least mediated in some way by environmental factors. If parents also have another gene that makes those environmental factors more likely, but do not pass that particular gene to their offspring it can act as a confounding factor as there is a more complex interaction that is responsible for an effect than may be expected otherwise.
I'm not sure I fully understand it, but that's what I'm thinking is going on. The article doesn't provide much information in terms of the size of this effect either. It looks like the full text of the actual research is available though and a quick glance at the abstract includes the following: "Using results from a meta-analysis of educational attainment, we find that the polygenic score computed for the nontransmitted alleles of 21,637 probands with at least one parent genotyped has an estimated effect on the educational attainment of the proband that is 29.9% (P = 1.6 × 1014) of that of the transmitted polygenic score."
From that, it does sound as though this isn't something that's completely trivial.
Sounds more like epigenetics to me than just straight up nurture, only in this case even perhaps further removed as the summary makes it sound as though it is the parents environment that is having some effect that can be passed down to offspring. However, understanding this seems like something that would require a lot of reading beyond the article summary to understand precisely what is being described as "genetic nurture effect" seems like a fairly nebulous term that seems to be a bit of an oxymoron at first glance. It also sounds like something quite new, so it could definitely use some replication and additional exploring to fully understand what's going on.