Agreed, even events like DEFCON and the general infosec scene seem to be leaning more and more towards "conformance". It used to be a badge of shame to be a fed and now I feel uncomfortable talking poorly about the US intelligence community. I hesitate to complain because those who questioned the status quo in the past had the same types of people breathing down their neck. I will simply ignore them and continue doing my own thing
> Ken Thompson has an automobile which he helped design. Unlike most automobiles, it has neither speedometer, nor gas gauge, nor any of the other numerous idiot lights which plague the modern driver. Rather, if the driver makes a mistake, a giant “?” lights up in the center of the dashboard. “The experienced driver,” says Thompson, “will usually know what’s wrong.”
"foreigners" make up 50% of Canadas largest cities - where all the money is. The richest of the world can afford to move there but farmboy from Peterborough is SOL if he ever wants to make real money. Im fine with putting your own citizens interests before the rest of the world.
Even if those “citizens” are massively capitalized corps seeking returns on their investments? Who cares if they are domestic or foreign (and if foreign becomes difficult - they’ll just open a subsidiary).
I don’t really know whether you have read the rest of what I wrote or just got triggered by me seemingly defending “foreigners” and hit the Reply button.
I don’t mean to single you out specifically, there other posts that seem oddly similar.
Anyway, I think there’s a big distinction between immigrants (who cease to be immigrants at some point, how many years does it take in your opinion by the way? Who is more worthy of being helped to buy a home - a immigrant who came to the country 30 years ago, or a natural-born 25 year-old citizen?… but I digress.) and investment real estate that requires an intervention.
Let’s say we put a huge tax on all real estate that isn’t a primary residence, I am all for making it super unprofitable to hold so that rents cannot cover the expense - to force all these REITs having to fire-sale their holdings to people who want to live in them.
Anyway, I think there’s a big distinction between immigrants (who cease to be immigrants at some point, how many years does it take in your opinion by the way? Who is more worthy of being helped to buy a home - a immigrant who came to the country 30 years ago, or a natural-born 25 year-old citizen?… but I digress.) and investment real estate that requires an intervention.
There was a two year moratorium announced today, but there are several exemptions. Permanent residents, refugees, some international students on the path to PR, and people here on work permits are all exempt.
I refuse to get into an argument that I know will turn out to be emotional so I'm just going to skip to the last point.
>Let’s say we put a huge tax on all real estate that isn’t a primary residence
Because cottages are a traditional part of life here and real estate is one of the only ways to make real money for someone with some capital in the middle class.
I am not sure what you are afraid of since every reply seems to narrow the gap in our differences of opinion.
At what point cottages cease to be “way to make real money with some capital in the middle class” and we firmly enter the territory of “make a buck while fuck everyone else”? One or two is probably the former. 80,000 properties we all probably agree is the latter.
Because we have no idea how any of this works, selecting against one gene may have negative externalities that we don't even know how to measure. For example: a genetic cure for schizophrenia also dulling the creative traits it's correlated with. We cant even really understand how an emergent property like language works (see: every conlang), and you think we can engineer a civilization to be better by radically altering the balance of potential equality that we have been genetically optimized for?
A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension, considering the track record of intellectual movements and the proclivity of smart individuals, probably like yourself, to vastly overestimate the merits of rationality and concepts that can be limited to the mind of one human.
>A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension, considering the track record of intellectual movements and the proclivity of smart individuals, probably like yourself, to vastly overestimate the merits of rationality and concepts that can be limited to the mind of one human.
The world is full of societies of 120 IQ individuals. That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers. That's 1 in 10 people. Even 145 is 1 in 1,000. This gene stuff could only begin to surpass what you'd be able to do by holding a conference in an academic field at... 170? 180? For the foreseeable future the kinds of selection that operate on full-grown adults will greatly surpass this other kind which is limited to four or five embryos.
In so many words, more than four or five former embryos are selected between in a typical round of SWE interviews.
>A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension
> That would be, like... a typical office full of programmers.
Is this an argument in support of the OP?
Anyway, much like with global warming, the issue isn't so much the averages, but the impact on the extremes. Now the world suddenly has 10x as many 140 people or 100x as many 160s, etc.
This cuts both ways too. A smart person isn't necessarily a nice person. A 20 point IQ increase could make the difference between someone who is a successful telephone scammer, and someone who brings down entire economies.
All of our culture deals with interactions between average people. People with significantly greater or less intelligence than average do not have a bank of ancient answers to ancient questions to draw on. One simple example of that would be norms against debt and lending - if you are very clever they don't apply to you, but that doesn't mean you don't need any norms. In fact someone who borrows and lends needs more guidelines and more complex guidelines if they're going to navigate business risks successfully.
Oddly enough since I'm both a programmer and a jazz musician, I've noticed some interesting parallels. In both cases the practitioners come from all walks of life, and many of them either bailed out of the mainstream education system, or had a negative experience with it. For this reason you have people with music degrees sharing the bandstand with those who learned by doing. I'm halfway between those camps, having taken classical music lessons through high school but learning jazz on my own.
> A society of 120 IQ adults would probably be an insufferable hell beyond comprehension, considering the track record of intellectual movements and the proclivity of smart individuals, probably like yourself, to vastly overestimate the merits of rationality and concepts that can be limited to the mind of one human.
Disregarding the personal attack (I am well aware of downsides, but it's called having a discussion), higher median IQ is not really the point, it's about giving the same chances to everyone.
We could use this to eradicate a wealth of issues that we do understand, there's no good reason to have babies born with Cystic Fibrosis, we know what genes are causing it.
>there's no good reason to have babies born with Cystic Fibrosis, we know what genes are causing it.
IVF is expensive and difficult and all easily identified genetic diseases are rare, so until one of those conditions changes (cost reduction and better techniques, or so many diseases being discovered that the odds that you will be saving your kid from one become significant), it will not be used for this purpose but rather as something extra to do when IVF is required for other reasons.
We agree on that part, I am not advocating for editing every foetus' genome in the next 10 years. I just think it's short-sighted to put a ban on that kind of research based on fear of inequalities.
You’re not curing cystic fibrosis, or any other genetic disease, are you? You’re just stopping disabled people from being born because you’ve decided their lives have no intrinsic value.
This can be said to a wide swath of people. Down syndrome people, bipolar people, blue people, people with physical deformities.
Why do you get to choose? Have you ever asked one of these people if they find their lives to be meaningless? How about their parents?
I can think of few hells more dull than a world of smart ass public radio listeners providing unrequested comments lathered in snark and cynicism.
That's like saying "You’re just stopping people from breaking their legs because you’ve decided lives of people with broken legs have no intrinsic value."
I would consider cystic fibrosis to be cured when there are no longer any carriers on the planet who could procreate and make another person who will suffer from that terrible affliction.
> Why do you get to choose? Have you ever asked one of these people if they find their lives to be meaningless? How about their parents?
My hope with this technology is that we can give prospective parents the kind of tools that allow them to make reproductive choices that best reflect their desires and hopes and dreams for their children. The question of course is what are they going to do with these tools? Will they eagerly use them or throw them away in disgust?
And then what do we do as a society in response to that?
Is it legal to feed your new born child alcohol?
Is it legal for pregnant women to drink alcohol?
Is it legal for two cystic fibrosis gene carriers to knowingly produce a child who will suffer from cystic fibrosis?
Is it legal for someone to modify their embryo so that it turn into a child that will be a cystic fibrosis carrier?
Is it legal for someone to modify their embryo so that it turn into a child that will suffer from cystic fibrosis?
Which of these things should be legal and which shouldn't? How do we enforce them?
Presumably this "you" is the parent. They get to decide when (or if) they have kids and they can now decide what kind of kids they have. Just like folks can (and should) already screen for certain heritable disabilities.
> Have you ever asked one of these people if they find their lives to be meaningless?
They'll either be depressed or they won't feel this way. By definition, the ones that are well-functioning parts of society won't feel this way. I don't see why it should matter.
> I can think of few hells more dull than a world of smart ass public radio listeners providing unrequested comments lathered in snark and cynicism.
For someone who finds that dull, there is a lot of snark and cynicism in this comment. It's really not necessary, we're all here to engage with each others' view points.
That's a good argument for not engineering all children all at once - we don't understand the consequences. It seems like a good argument for starting to engineer a few children so we can start to learn what the consequences are. As engineering becomes more palatable to the general population we will better able to deliver good results.
Engineering children would likely introduce horrible diseases because as you say, nobody understands the consequences. What's being proposed is selection, the selection of embryos which have already proven themselves to be viable and passed several steps of Nature's disease filtration.
Sounds like you're not the audience the blogger was writing for.
As someone who fancies female characters being written as more than a love interest or someone to be raped, and don't believe sexual ambiguity makes a villain more frightening, I'm on board with what she's writing.
I agree with the writer’s point too, and I’ve always found Batman to be a cynical character who is a questionable “hero” at best.
But it’s an important character to many people, and I think the visceral reaction to this kind of criticism is because these critics have a ton of political power in certain settings and tend to trigger reactions that go over the top.
I wouldn’t only because I’m not a “student” of Batman or Miller and honestly don’t know much about it.
No political axe to grind about Batman or Miller, it’s just not a character or style that I personally care for. My wife loves Tim Burton stuff, I do not. I love old school Star Trek, she would rather watch the weather channel lol.
I believe that given a pie of content from comic book targeted at young male adult the pie dedicated to action is way larger than the pie dedicated to romance - and the flatness of woman carachter has more to do with audience interests / space dedicated to romance than writers' skills.
that said I too hate that non protagonist women are mostly treated as props to a story and protagonist women mostly embody male tropes in a woman body - I think there can be much more than that.
You may be right but it's too bad then: they have a platform and an eager audience and are wasting an opportunity to depict a mature and healthy relationship in comics.
I mean, they are on thin ice - can you imagine the ruckus parents would do at anything but cis? or the ruckus blogger would do if every "mature and healthy" relationship gets portrayed as necessarily cis? I see them using tropes also as a quick way out.
albeit there's some interesting takes if you search around, like in the amazon "invincible" - but I guess a miniseries has more space for it, and it's for a more adult audience to begin with.
These are Frank Miller comics. The "how would parents react" stuff is right out the window. Gaiman did a whole bunch of stuff with non-hetero sexuality for DC, and he gets TV series to this day.
The cartoonist who does “Phoebe And Her Unicorn” recently noted that she sold more books last year than all of Marvel. And she’s well behind folks like Dav Pilkey and Raina Telgemeier.
This is an open secret in the comics world, the “comic book industry” dedicated largely to superheros is only a tiny fragment of the comics sold now. Imported manga started eating their lunch years ago, too.
