Perhaps you'll be the victim of slander and lose your career over a lie that is interesting enough to go viral where your vindication isn't and doesn't.

Agreed it is better than nothing being available at all. But a concept car is dramatically different because it's outside the FDA regulated medical market.

The healthcare market in the United States is an especially horrible expensive nightmare. The tax dollars spent (inclusive of tax breaks) providing no healthcare are more per capita than most nations with nationalized healthcare spend providing total coverage per capita. While the care provided generally isn't sub-par and excels in some areas it really is only comparable overall and not superior to the healthcare they are providing.

The FDA has become a mass pharma/medical commercial sector protection racket that keeps a small number of near monopolies from competition and legal consequence. It's actually even worse than the FCC with the protecting telco/cable racket profits from consumers.

They're the most current available...

Seriously? How hard is it to put the actual root certificate on an offline internal network? You have to actually have a human being move a thumb drive between two machines to generate a cert. OMG, the horror! It's india for god sake, don't tell me they can't afford all that manual labor.

What makes you think it's any different with internal customer service at any sizable company?

" taxes are the only practical weapon the common voter has against government overreach, and the Constitution was written with this fundamental truth firmly in mind."

Hardly, the common man was given zero authority with regard to taxes in the constitution. The constitution gave that power to congress. The constitution wasn't written to empower the common man, the constitution derives it's power from the people. It's government that was empowered by the constitution.

The Constitution left almost all authority in the hands of the people. Ever since it was signed, the government it empowered has been working on changing that and it's been very very successful. The biggest example is the people's only explicitly stated and protected power in the form of a jury and jury nullification. The government could write laws all day long and if it couldn't convince 12 people in your community that what you did was actually wrong (regardless of any "law" it violated) that jury has the power to find you "not guilty."

How about we start focusing on taking away the governments ability to punish without a criminal convinction (no more government issued CIVIL punishments) and the courts decision that not only do they not need to tell a jury about their right to nullify unjust laws and their application on a case by case basis but that they can actually LIE to juries. Juries are the people's check on all three branches, including the judicial. It is not the place of the judicial to limit their authority!

"The only reason prosthetics cost a crapload (sometimes upwards of $100,000) is because each one has to be manufactured specifically to match its intended recipient."

That is a factor but not the biggest one. It's about demand. In the US we have a so called medical "free market" so the cost is as much as the market will allow. So, if you are missing a leg, how much is a prosthetic worth to you? You'll find that unlike with say, a stick of gum, the answer will vary dramatically with the key differentiators being how much the person has and whether they have loved ones they must care for who they value more than themselves. Now, abstract that cost from real people and put it on collectives with billions of dollars to spend (insurance companies) and why wouldn't you charge six figures for a prosthetic?

For $100,000 there are thousands of people who could engineer a prosthetic that can be customized with just a few hours labor. So the $100,000 cost is spread among all of them and the customization part amounts to a few bucks in plastic and under $1000 labor and that is at doctor labor prices and not lab tech prices.

But these products require FDA approval. So that is going to cost another $250k. Which is great for you if you have that money. It means that you get legal immunity at the end. It means little to no competition. It means you won't have to worry about actually improving your device anytime soon. It means you can charge ridiculous prices which are easy to justify, you can point to the need for FDA approval, you can point to the importance of making the device safe for medical use, etc. People will pay anything they can afford and since the bill goes to the insurance company, people will sign off on literally any figure. So it's really just a question of charging as much as the insurance company can afford.

The prosthetics end up costing the manufacturer maybe $2000 customized in the end with everything included and that figure goes down over time but they keep on charging $100,000 a pop because they can.

You make the fatal flaw of assuming that ethics and prudence are the result of higher cognitive ability. Have you considered the possibility that they understand exactly what they are doing and just don't care?

" This next-generation of politician could one day come to understand the moral and sociopolitical repercussions of things like intentionally shutting down the government."

You mean like having successfully pandered to your constitutes so that you'll be re-elected and can continue to profit from selling out to corporate interests, enjoy the social status of being a congressman, and blowjobs from interns?

Hell most of the the strongest opponents of issues like climate change and homosexual marriage ARE homosexuals. When THEY get busted getting a blowjob it's generally from a male intern or other staffer.

"Implantable memory even if VERY expensive would be very useful. Why go to college when you can pay $40k
and have a college degree without also having to give up 4 years of earning potential to get it."

I think you seriously underestimate what "VERY expensive" means. That is what such a technology might cost when at the dirt cheap and commonplace level. Anytime in the first 20 years I doubt you'd see a BLANK implant that wasn't priced in the millions.

It will happen that way first. They'll do implantable blank memory, then they'll have ridiculously overpriced modules that are able to communicate wirelessly so that you can copy and record. Then...

Why don't we just skip the bullshit and put something with both mesh and infrastructure wireless technology in so that it automatically links both to other modules and to a tunneled network in the internet automatically integrating everyones brains into a massive network of shared memory and artificial memory. We can have datacenters where massive external forms of this are connected to the network as well.

Or hey, why not let go of the conscious reigns, put the implantable chip that interacts with brain electrical and chemical signals both capable of generating detectable responses and receiving them. Still put the mesh and infrastructure wireless technology in, still build the tunneled network, but just put enough designed elements in place to facilitate the massively parallel communication high way and let the brains figure out their own higher level protocols.

Worried about security? Don't be that worried. You are neurally linked to everyone you see with an optical connection already. This just steps it up to having a slower link to lots of people all the time.

This is an area that needs to be free from the constraints of the FDA for awhile.

Let me start by saying I yield the point.

Anyone who has had quality training (formal or informal) is going to have an edge over someone who just bought a gun one day. Of course, as you said, everything is subject to time and luck.

" firepower, terrain, time, strengths, weaknesses, and leverage "

What sort of self defense situations do you think the average joe civilian is likely to find himself in? Unless we are talking about swat (and they are overdramatizing the scenario the majority of the time), military, or a zombie apocalypse in the real world you've got someone trying to murder you (or family), rape, mugging where the crook isn't willing to settle for just the cash, kidnapping, and home invasion. As far as guns are concerned Joe needs to know how to hold the weapon correctly in a tight grip with a solid stance, aim for center mass, and to only shoot if he or someone else is going to die otherwise.

If Joe civilian has the time to sit and formally categorize and assess the tactical position he's got to be the bad guy, in some less likely than a lightning strike situation (terrorists, mass shooting), or he's lost it and is going vigilante. It's not a movie, Joe shouldn't be running around taking out the armed gang that's robbing the bank.

I see I replied in a thread specifically about shooting and your comments were targeted there. I'd missed that in my quick scan down the board. I was really talking about segregated competitions across the board and the wasting lives remarks geared toward sports people are trying to make a living at.

With regard to shooting, being accurate doesn't hurt but it isn't like you are going to be doing more than a quick panicked point and shoot in a gun fight anyway. Precision shooting is great but lets not pretend it is about being deadly rather than a fun sport built around a tool that happens to be deadly.

There is a reason an AK variant remains the most effective combat small arm for anyone but a sniper... and I'd like to think anyone farther away than the kill accurate range of an AK would run away from a dangerous situation rather than shooting.

+1 - This

I can't think of any reason to segregate by gender. If the males can't compete they SHOULD be discouraged by the lack of male champions and if the girls can't compete they should have said discouragement. We shouldn't artificially be generating encouragement for people to waste their lives trying to be something they have a snowballs chance in hell of being.

If gender isn't a factor that will come through in time. If it is, that will come through. More males will flock toward things where males are better equipped and females flock toward things where they are better equipped and the only people who will be upset about it are those who are trying to assert that such differences don't exist. And since they'd be wrong in that case, they too should be discouraged.

Basically, everyone should have to take a dose of reality and be encouraged or discouraged in proportion to how things actually are.