1. Bear in mind that our ancestors my have survived them by 90% of them dying off and the remaining 10% repopulating. While the overall survival of the human race over time is certainly a goal for us, avoiding mass die offs is also an important goal.
2. If it affected any of our direct ancestors 50,000 years ago, we certainly have not changed enough in that time that it would be unlikely to affect us. Now, it is possible that it will be a primitive form of something that's still around and that our immune systems are already prepared for based on modern versions of the pathogen. However, there could be pathogens that have completely died out and that we have no general immunity to.
3. Your 3 is based on the premise of 2. - that the virus infected a different species - which probably will not be the case for our recent ancestors. Even if it is cross-species though, there are various classes of pathogen that can quite easily cross the species barrier.

That brings up an interesting thought. Have you ever wondered why social animals sneeze? I mean, sure, it's a method of clearing the nose, but it's also very good for spreading infection. Therefore, the immediate expectation is that sneezing would be selected against by evolution in any animals that live in family/clan groups in close quarters, including human beings. After all, if we spread contagious diseases, especially deadly ones, to our family group then our genes seem like they would be less likely to be passed on. My theory on this is that, in fact, it is an evolutionary advantage to spread deadly diseases to the family/clan as quickly as possible, therefore sneezing around them is not selected against. The reason it is an advantage has to do with the way that family/clan groups tend to work in both humans and other social animals. That is to say, they stay mostly together in a tight group, relatively isolated from other groups, but with individuals and groups branching off and moving around from time to time. In such an environment, if a deadly disease comes along, the best strategy is actually to kill the entire infected group quickly and the infection dies with them. Sure they don't have any further direct offspring, but their close relatives who have moved away to live in other isolated groups are spared the infection and carry on their genes that way.

If this theory is correct, then highly contagious diseases may well be confined to icy tombs, separated in physical distance and time from living humans to infect. The problem is, that old model of human civilization is obsolete. We now live in bustling towns and cities in vast civilizations strecthing across just about every continent and with the technical ability of any individual on Earth to pop up at just about any other location on Earth within about 24 hours with modern travel. Those small, isolated family/clan groups now intersect with somewhere in the neighborhood of eight billion other people. So, I would not be so sure about high lethality being self-limiting to a deadly pathogen any more. At least, not before killing a truly massive number of people.

It's interesting. The video makes clear that there's a long way to go though. While there does seem to be some control over how much pressure they apply with the hand, around 2:00 it's clear with the juice box that the user does not have fine control over it. I didn't see anything suggesting fine control over the fingers either, just several different forms of clamping (whole hand, thumb and forefinger). Definitely a step in the right direction, but still only a incremental improvement over a hook hand. Still, if the feedback from this system helps stop phantom limb pain, that by itself is a major improvement.

You specifically presented "government imposed pass thru fees [as] required to be itemized on the bill. It is illegal not to do so." The USF is a specific fee that is not required to appear on a customer's bill. Telecoms put it on the bill because they can. I'm not quite sure what other kind of example you want. There are basically three categories of fees: ones imposed by the government that are required to appear on the bill, ones imposed by the government that are not required to appear on the bill and ones imposed by the company that they just made up. Something like taxes fits the first category, something like the USF fits the second category and things like a "cost assessment charge" fit into the third category. Clearly examples from the third category are not relevant to what we were discussing, so that only leaves the first and second categories and we already did examples from the first category. So what was wrong with providing a clear example from the second category in the form of the Universal Service Fee?

And, indeed, many telecoms have "recovery" fees for exactly those kinds of things. Things like "property tax allotment" or "infrastructure maintenance fee", "carrier cost recovery fee". There are tons of examples of cost of doing business being passed on to the consumer as an extra line item rather than being rolled into the advertised price. It's as if you went to a bakery and bought bread advertised at $2 per loaf but there was an extra dollar of flour fees, mixing fees, baking fees, oven cost recovery fees, etc. at checkout. Those are in that third category I mentioned, however. If you actually go back in the thread, you will see that the poster I was replying to had specifically mentioned sales tax and 911 fees as separate from the fees that I then said are not government fees to the end user. They did not name the fees, but it's pretty safe to assume that those other fees are, in fact, "recovery" fees for cost of doing business. With the telecom passing along fees that the government charges to the telecom, not the end user. Every one of those should be rolled into cost of doing business, not passed along as a line item.

To be clear, there are pass through fees, then there are tons of other fees that companies present as if they were pass through fees. For example, the universal service fee. There is no government requirement that this fee be passed to the consumer as a line item fee, but telecoms do it anyway because it allows them to fraudulently claim a lower base price for service.

The only thing wrong with your paragraph, aside from the "man/woman" thing was being wrong in nearly every aspect. Sure there's nothing wrong with a lack of precision when making this kind of argument, but when you're off by something like an order of magnitude, there's a bit of an issue. Also, you clearly were not trying to point out that "some intersex conditions leave people effectively pre-pubescent their whole lives" or you would have actually mentioned intersex conditions there since those would be a minority of your 25%.

As for no science that we invent changing evolution, where have you been? Living under a rock? Go to the produce department of the supermarket sometime. It's full of plant products from plants that we've been manipulating the evolution of for thousands of years to get them to their current forms. True that was mostly done without altering the basic principles of natural selection, we just tweaked it by altering the criteria for "fittest" in survival of the fittest. You may, however, also find some GMO produce there where we went beyond just tweaking natural selection and outright directly altered the DNA of the plant. So, we clearly have already invented things that change evolution.

Beyond that, what evolutionary biology "assumes" is pretty meaningless in this context. Millions of years of evolution have not stopped intersex individuals from happening or homosexuals for that matter. Why? Because evolution does not "assume" anything about them. Your argument here seems to be based on a weak understanding of evolution. To anthropomorphize evolution for a moment, what evolution wants is to perpetuate genes. Therefore, individuals are operating properly in the framework of evolution whether they produce offspring or not if they support the survival and propagation of their family, clan, civilization, and species which they share genes with.

Finally, going back once again to "only one man and one women produces children". Once again, your own definitions are proving my point. If you take two men, and convert one into an egg-producing individual and they have a child or you take two women and convert one into a sperm producing individual and they have a child, or you take a man and a woman and convert the man into an egg producing individual and the woman into a sperm producing individual and they have a child, in all of those cases, by your definition, the one that ends up producing sperm is a man and the one that ends up producing eggs and carrying the baby is a woman.

That is not the whole point. That is one variation of the ship of Theseus thought experiment, but the original goes something like this: "In a museum sits the ship of Theseus, thousands of years old. From time to time, boards in the ship rot and crumble to dust and are replaced. Over time, every part of the ship has rotted and been replaced. Is this still the ship of Theseus." Clearly, in the original scenario, you don't even up with two ships. The argument you're presenting is based on a philosophical variation of the idea, just like there are many variations on the trolley problem. So your objection to my argument here does not stand. You're still using circular reasoning. Basically your argument boils down to there being no set of actual characteristics that can be examined to determine if someone is male or female but rather than men are men and women are women and that's that.

Which is a simple and concise definition. Congratulations. Based on that simple and precise definition, if you change the type of gametes that an individual produces, then you've changed their sex. You keep agreeing with me, but then insisting that you disagree.

I am not arguing that the terms are meaningless. I am arguing that medical processes can be developed that make the meanings interchangeable. Consider a metal ingot, you can melt it and cast it into a hammer head and it is no longer called an ingot, then you can melt it down again and form it back into an ingot. It was not an ingot all along just because it was one first. If we can make human biology that - if you'll forgive the pun - malleable, then the same is true of individuals converted from one biological classification to another. Conversion between male and female happens all the time in mature individuals of various species in nature all the time. If it's valid when it happens to them, why would it not be valid happening to a human? Just because humans did not evolve/retain the ability to do that? By that logic, if someone were born with one arm, and medical science found a way to regenerate the missing arm, would you still consider them to be one-armed?

It goes back to the basic argument about fairness in sports. You chose boxing as an example, and it's a bad example because boxing very much already classes boxers very carefully by weight and professional fights won't even be sanctioned with too large a difference between the boxers. There simply would not be any female boxer that they would pair Mike Tyson up against. Now, if we're dealing with advanced medical technology, there's no reason that, in converting Mike Tyson to female, you couldn't also change muscle, skeletal structure, etc. to put him in the same physical ballpark as the female athletes. For that matter, if we're playing around with biology, we could also make the female athletes bigger and stronger. That raises the overall question of whether you allow competition by any medially altered athletes. Looking at a fictional example, would it be fair to put a regular boxer in the ring with Captain America? As a 90-lb asthmatic weakling, he wouldn't stand a chance against pretty much any boxer, but as a biologically altered super-soldier, basically no boxer would stand a chance against him. Which fight would be "fair". So, if you want a reason that women who have been medically altered from men shouldn't be able to compete, a general ban on anyone with major medical body modification, whether it be genetic, surgical or pharmacological from competing in sports. Now, such a ban would equally apply to people who used to be men competing in women's sports or to someone born cerebral palsy who had it cured by gene therapy and then trained for years. You might think that the first is fair and the second isn't. To me, what it demonstrates is that trying to make competitive sports "fair" under pretty much any conditions is an intractable goal.

Let's not forget that 99.9% of the population or higher will never make it to the winner's podium. Top athletes are pretty much universally freaks. More so in some sports than others, and I don't mean freaks in a bad way. We can say exceptional if you prefer, but it means pretty much the same thing. They are the exception, not the rule. Sure, they have to train hard and be dedicated and chance plays a role as well, but all those things usually won't get them to the top unless they have just the right physical/biological characteristics. One of the most obvious examples is height in basketball. Now, what if someone is born with dwarfism and medical science is able to reshape their body into an atheletic 6 feet 6 inches? Should they be allowed to play professional basketball? What if instead of 6 feet 6 inches, they get increased to 8 feet 6 inches, so they can just reach up while standing on the ground to dunk? What if someone has ACE and ACTN3 genes spliced to make them a better athlete? What if someone has genes from other animals spliced in? All of these things are distinct possibilities in the future. We already have IVF clinics that will select for genetic characteristics in children and that's guaranteed to expand and expand. Ultimately, our medical technology is on the cusp of redefining what it means to be human. What does fairness in sports mean in that context? They could restrict high-level sports to natural human beings with no alterations. The problem is, the long-term result of that would be an Olympics filled with competitors that the average person can outcompete since just about everyone would have modifications except for a caste of people who compete in sports. So, against all of that, it actually seems kind of silly to worry so much about men competing in women's sports. Sure, find categorical ways to ban them. It's just a patch on the real issue that competitive sports are not fair and never were and the traits that allow some people to excel in sports will likely be available to everyone at some point in the future.

Not sure why I have to answer that question. That's up to researchers and sports officials to figure out. It's just another sports classification problem to deal with the inherent unfairness of competitive sports. Whether you are dealing with female vs. male athletes or just any athlete against any other athlete, the problem you're dealing with is trying to level off the capabilities of the athletes while still allowing some an advantage over others. Too many factors to consider.

I'm sorry, is this supposed to be a quote from me or based on something I've said? Where? Definitely not in this thread. Are you trying to set up a strawman argument?

Looks like that was a strawman argument. Also, you keep seeming to completely forget that my entire argument was about how your definitions apply if medical science can be used to switch the type of gametes an individual produces.

Those aren't government mandated fees to you. Those are fees/taxes collected from the business by the government (sometimes, although sometimes it's just an outright lie that it's a government fee). These things are just part of the cost of doing business, but the companies putting these on their bills pass them on to the consumer as extra line items.

I did read the part after the semicolon. It makes it quite clear that the initial random man and random woman you propose mating together come from a ppol including all individuals from infancy to the edge of senescence. I know it's just a thought experiment, but that's still a little odd and creepy. There's no good reason I can see that you could not have just specified post-adolescents. In fact, the terms "men" and "women" normally imply individuals who are at least post-pubescent if not post-adolescent.

By saying that the one quarter that don't wind up with a child will be overwhelmingly either prepubescent or post-menopausal, you/re essentially saying that 100% of post-pubescent/premenopausal individuals who mate through one ovulation cycle will end up with a pregnancy. This simply is not correct at all. Given numbers vary, but the percentage of men and women who are infertile or have serious fertility problems is close to 10%. So, for any random pairing in actual sexually mature adults who have not reached menopause, there is about a 10% chance of the man having fertility issues and a 10% chance of the woman having fertility issues and a 1% chance of both having fertility issues. So, there's somewhere in the neighborhood of a 21% chance that, in the pairings you claimed would have a 100% chance of offspring, one or both partners would have fertility issues making offspring impossible or at least extremely unlikely. Then there are other reasons that the randomly paired couple may not be able to produce offspring. Since your couples are random, they include women who have already had pregnancies and whose second, third, etc. pregnancies may be subject to issues like blood type incompatibility based on the genetics of the mother and father. Aside from that, men and especially women tend to simply get less and less fertile every year after adolescence and you're proposing a random pairing. Beyond that, even with highly fertile couples, pregnancy is still a coin toss. Fertilization simply may not occur and, even if it does, implantation may not occur. Ultimately, you're looking at far, far lower odds for that grouping (the 75% that are not prepubescent or post-menopausal) than you're suggesting.

We're well into a Ship of Theseus argument here, with you arguing that the ship of Theseus continues to be the ship of Theseus even if you replace every part. This is treacherously close to circular reasoning. You went from claiming that men were men because they produce sperm and women are women because they produce eggs to an argument that boils down to men being men because they're men and women being women because they're women.

Can you clarify specifically, in actual biological/mechanical terms, what specific physical advantages the sex-changed induvial will have because they started out as a man? It's all well and good to make that argument, but if you can't quantify it in any way, then it's kind of useless. Consider that most girls, at a certain point are, on average, bigger and stronger and faster than their male peers of the same age. It does not last very long, but girls mature faster than boys and that means that there's a point where girls will typically leap ahead in physical ability, but it's just a phase and the boys, on average, catch up and pull ahead. That demonstrates that there's no magic intrinsic property that makes boys better at sports than girls. It's all a matter of development. I'm talking about what happens if you effectively redo that development. As for being "fair", I have pointed out a number of times that sports are simply not "fair" to start with. Anything special you would have to do in order to make a sport "fair" with transgendered athletes would just be piled on top of all of the other things that are already done in a vain attempt to make sports "fair". The exaggerated sense you have that transgendered athletes would be unfair is mostly from the inherent unfairness of competitive sports being thrown into sharp relief by the new issue of the day.

It's an interesting example you use of Mike Tyson. Tyson, when he boxed, weighed in at about 240 lbs making him a heavyweight. In women's boxing, heavyweight none of the women's boxing leagues even have a heavyweight champion, only light heavyweight. So who would Tyson even box against? Turns out that boxing already has a system so that boxers with extreme physical advantages don't compete directly against smaller opponent Now, if you took a smaller male boxer and a female boxer with the same weight, the male boxer would probably have other physical advantages, but, as I've said many times, it would be a matter of quantifying those advantages and adjusting the classes to specifically consider them, thus matching people of similar physical ability.

There doesn't seem to be any Freudian slip involved here. There is a subtle attempt at wordplay. It was about water, so I used the term "fathom". I didn't really expect anyone to get it. On the other hand, I also didn't expect anyone to misinterpret it and read so much into it as you.

So no kids or any other relatives then?

In a lot of cheeses, the salt is there not just for flavor and as a preservative, but also to poison the cheese cultures at the right point so the cheese doesn't over-ripen. As a consequence, replacing sodium chloride with other salts would mess up the ripening process. So, hard cheeses pretty much have to be salty. Soft cheeses do not need to be so salty, though they are often heavily salted anyway.

You don't seem to have realized that was just a turn of phrase. In other words, that was me pointing on the flaw in your logic euphemistically rather than me legitimately being unable to understand. I think we can just chalk that up to a reading comprehension fail on your part.

It's really going after all of it. Anything that overloads with sodium, or other electrolytes, or phosphates, or nitrates and nitrites, BHA, sugar alcohols, etc., etc. Modern food producers don't seem to be able to help themselves with loading up food with this kind of stuff under the excuse that it's safe in moderation, while ignoring the fact that any consumer who is not extremely discerning is not going to be getting only moderate amounts.

Consider, for example Olean/Olestra. Remember that stuff? It was an indigestible fat that was meant to be a safe substitute for other fats in food so they could be considered fat-free. It had a really weird texture and strange aftertaste. It also coated the inside of your digestive system leading to diarrhea, cramping, and anal leakage and, if you were consuming enough of it, prevented your intestines from absorbing nutrients from food. It was a market failure, but the very fact that food products were produced with that stuff and sold to people for consumption is amazing.

Long time effects from persistent overexposure is, indeed the issue. That kind of overexposure becomes inevitable for people who aren't careful shoppers if virtually every product overloads on substances with potential long term effects.

I've already pointed out in another post that excessive water can cause lethal edema and other problems. I can't quite fathom why anyone would think that the fact that water is safe in moderation, but can be fatal in excess somehow contradicts what I'm saying. It seems to me that it supports what I'm saying very well, which is that nutritional components like sodium, if they are found in excess across a broad range of foods, can effectively poison a segment of the population.