nightwing

Wishing slow death is indeed extremely disturbing and stupid. Politicians that way have time to do so much more harm.

Not everyone growing poor has the same experience. I also grew up much poorer than my peers, plus that was in a war torn country where we didn't even have electricity for several years. And it did not suck at all.

Your mistake is thinking that the goal of life is to minimize suffering. But that is completely wrong, only result that this goal can lead to is complete elimination of life.

The goal of life is maximizing complexity, divercity, and capacity of life.

The amount of suffering i had to experience was completly justified because i had a chance to grow up and improve the lives of others. I happened to be lucky enough to realize that chance, but my parents had no way to know beforehand if i would be successful or not, that's why they were right to try.

Don't you remember people from Google saying that it should not be broken up to be able to prevent "next Trump situation"?

https://www.facebook.com/ProjectVeritas/videos/2445258202376...

In this particular case it is very relevant, because Navalny himself was warning [1] that it is a dangerous precedent which is going to help the enemies of freedom everywhere. And he was absolutely right.

[1] https://twitter.com/navalny/status/1347960298569928704

That's true, but i hope if more people talk about it, and if techniques similar to cloning [1] get used more often in medicine, it will become possible.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/three-parent-baby (nuclear transfer)

We need an experiment: create 100 clones of Terence Tao, wait until they become adults, and see how many of them become great scientists.

But if you send another message after that, then the indicator changes to delivered. May be a bug in adding a new feature caused by developer only caring about not sending the message part.

The only effective way to reduce use of anti-fungals in agriculture is to develop new resistant varieties of plants, but that is sadly blocked by people unreasonably fearing gmo.

And USA and China, they are too big and a threat to everyone else.

I'll try to be more careful in the future, but what part of my comment was more controversial and flame war provoking than sibling comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684910?

Judging by history old fashioned moralist grounds tend to be a bit shaky, and often yield their positions;).

I don't advocate for one policy or another. In fact i'd be happy if i was wrong and the fight with numbers was actually useful. But i am rather sceptical about it, because the only argument its supporters have is "think of the children, you monster!"

The law handles drawings and 3d graphics the same way as real images.

The attempt to fight indirectly clearly had not succeeded so far. And most often is used as a pretext for introducing mechanisms that afterwards are used for censorship.

I don't advocate for one policy or another. In fact i'd be happy if i was wrong and the fight with numbers was actually useful, but logic tells that it isn't.

you can devote my comment. But, you can't change my mind.

Is that really something to be proud about?

Maybe you meant "By simply downvoting my comment, you don't change my opinion, so it's better to write a comment with actual counter-arguments", which would be a comment i would upvote.

But what you wrote sounds like a statement that you have an opinion which you are unwilling to change independently of arguments and facts, and that is sad.

The world where some people are smarter or healthier is always better than the world where everyone is in equally bad state. Inequality by itself is not a bad thing, it's like climbing over a high wall, one needs to push the the other, then the other will pull the first up.

By the time treatments like this are tested and proven to work, everyone will get them for free, because it will be much cheaper to apply required treatments, and not deal with unproductive member of society later.

The decision on risk/benefit can be handled only by parents and doctors, not some bureaucrats or hn commenters who do not know enough about the context. "Hey, you are going to be deaf, because someone decided that 10% increased chance of cancer in 50 years is too serious" is not much better than your example, especially considering that in 50 years cancer will most likely be treatable anyway. (for context https://futurism.com/five-couples-crispr-babies-avoid-deafne...)

My point is that "ethics issues" with things like CRISPR and cloning are not real issues, and people talking about them do more harm than good.

For instance if not for multiple countries banning human cloning, we could already have human clones, which would have been very useful in studying how much of human behavior is determined by genes. There already should have been multiple clones of prominent scientists like Feynman, Gell-Mann, Penrose.

I agree that as with any new and powerful tool, caution is required, and it is important to make sure that parents fully understand the risks and are not misled to believe that CRISPR is the only solution when it isn't. But i think it is important to remember that we do not use it because it is not ready yet, not because it is somehow inherently evil.

Why do you think CRISPRing embryos is a bad thing?

Eugenics in 20th century was evil because government was trying to decide which people could have children together. The normal eugenics where people decide for themselves, worked well for all species so far. So with CRISPR a law that prohibits using it, dooming people to have ill, or not very smart children is the same kind of evil, as the laws prohibiting interracial marriage in 20th century.

Yes, sadly he only had 10s of millions instead of billions, and i agree it would be amazing if he had billion.

But in the context of articles proposal of "coalition of working-class, poor and middle-class" even millionaires end up outside of "good forces".

My main goal is to increase the number of people in the world, and to increase the opportunities they have. Because that also increases my opportunities too: living longer, having better computers, learning new physics, etc. will be possible only if other people work on this problems.

I did not mean that non-rich do not share this goal, (in fact most people contribute to this merely by their existence willingly or not). What i wanted to say is that being rich or poor is not a good criterion for division.

With e-voting can keep mostly the same system we have now, but augment that with two small changes. 1) you can change your representative at any time, which changes the weight of his vote, 2) you can overrule your representatives vote on issues you care about.

In this way there won't be a situation like Brexit because after initial open ended vote people can participate in subsequent votes too, and can eventually decide that they don't want Brexit or want it even without any trade agreements.

Fake news, (or rather people not smart enough to distinguish fake news), will remain a problem, but democracy uses assumption that most people are smart enough, if this assumption is not true then oligarchs buying politicians is actually useful to the society, but i don't think this is very likely.

The method Elon uses for the persuasion is building rockets and taking money in exchange of services, i'll happily buy starlink internet when it is available. I have donated money to SENS foundation https://www.sens.org/.

there are simply not enough hours in the day

Sure, that's why i do not propose to take referendums for everything, people give their votes to representatives who work hard to have informed opinions. The difference is that the vote can be changed anytime, and that on specific issues about which voter cares, the representatives vote can be overruled. Even if this overruling doesn't happen very often, the possibility of that will help the elected individual to keep voters interests at heart.

There are other rich people that are pretty cool and whose goals align with mine: Gates finances target malaria, Bezos works on Blue Origin, Thiel founded seasteading institute, etc. My point is not that all rich people are good, but that there is no poor people team vs rich people team. We can't team up with class of people, only with individuals.

Rich vs poor is even less meaningful divide than right vs left. For instance i am not rich but my goals are much better aligned with goals of rich people like Elon Musk and Aubrey de Grey, than with any of poor people.

The solution is not to take money from the rich, but to make the government more transparent and more inclusive. Now we only can vote for unknown bundles of policies in the form of people, and rich people can pay to change the bundle after it is voted in. The solution to that is to use e-voting to be able to change your vote for separate issues when you do not agree with the vote of your representative.

Most people have some family members or friends who would do that. Where i live (admittedly not USA) it's very rare for a person to go to a doctor alone.

Much more thoughtful comments are being downvoted too for instance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20257728, so it's mostly luck i guess).

No one suggests to destroy environment just because. As said above, i agree that we should be assessing the impacts before doing things, but here people are simply suggesting to use water, and you are falling into inadequate emotional insults.

The part you chose to not quote is rather important "we need to find a way to use it without breaking anything". So i don't think the precaution should be zero.

Maybe the thing we disagree about is the order of concerns, i believe the needs of people come first, then comes requirement to be cautious because not being cautious can cause harm to people.

I agree that there is a systematic problem, as far as i could understand your previous comment was suggesting that the issue is entirely in existence of private companies, but judging by previous attempts of eliminating them i think changing the way government works is a more promising route.

Fortunately no-one's arguing that. You're excluding the (reasonable) middle.

Your previous comment doesn't look like a reasonable middle to me. The reasonable attitude would be "yay, new resource, we need to find a way to use it without breaking anything".

Do you suggest someone else should pay for you to maintain the hardware for your tld? If enough people are interested in your tld, you already will get the capital to maintain it, if not, what's the point of having it?

If we do not talk about usefulness of a resource how would we know if it is worth to study what happens when it is removed?

Taxes? Lower prices? Sounds like someone's not optimizing for the almighty Shareholder Value, citizen

Sure, sometimes people in governments take money and create anti-competitive regulations, but don't you agree that in such cases the problem is not "our desire to exploit resources" but the corrupt government. Even with that companies still pay lots of taxes, and there is often competition lowering the prices. Particularly in this case they have to make the price cheaper than the other methods of getting water.

If I give an extra dollar to the local warlord, have I made the society richer? Happier? Free-er? Does it make any difference if the local warlord calls itself "Nestle?"

Do you argue against all taxes?

As far as i can understand your arguments would apply equally against any human endeavor other than suicide. Whatever we do is going to change the environment somehow, of course the attitude of "dig up everything" is stupid, but "do not touch anything, it will have unknown consequences" is not better.