You soulless creature! Just wait till Cartmen deals with you!
Respect my authority!
I disagree entirely!
Demon girls, angel girls and many others can look very cute also and they are definitely viable options to look at.
They don't build up over generations because they are part of a single cell. When you make a new person you make new cells for them and so this stuff does not spread between generations. I just ends up as a kind of finite cap on how long a single cell can survive because of these problems.
This would work but it would take millions of years. Natural selection is very slow and it is likely the consequences would be a LOT of genetic problems in the mean time. Things like down syndrome are caused by a nondisjunction during chromosome separation. There become more common as eggs age. By making everyone have babies later it would very slowly select against it but the consequences would be severe.
Lets just go the genetic engineering route. It is much faster and far less brutal.
If you live long enough most of your cells end up dieing or critically damaged by the formation of inclusion bodies caused from misfolded proteins. As far as we can tell the cells are otherwise fine they are just slowly accumulating that damage over time. This is also what alzheimer's is. The problem is that misfolded proteins are kind of contagious to other proteins in the cell and that is what leads to the inclusion bodies.
We are making progress though on being able to clean out the inclusion bodies. Your cells do have the ability to take them apart but somehow they end up not doing it. Give us some time though and we will fix this problem also and clean out these inclusion bodies in all of your cells and then your cells will work much better.
The other issue we need to fix is activating telomerase to extend our telomeres. The basic issue is that natural selection does not really select for anything after reproductive age so humans are filled with a bunch of small defects and we are getting better at repairing the damage. I really look forward to what can be done with CRISPR-CAS9 to repair DNA damage and replaced damaged genes.
I started my hobby at the other end of the fabric spectrum. I can weave bobbin lace, make nets, and crochet and tat lace (knitting eludes me), Basic metallurgy and small foundry construction, and low power electronics (if it can be powered by a lemon and metal, or a chain->magnet+wire) for data storage (picture wiki on a raspi, pedal a bike until you are done with your research!). And growing spices, as well as preserving them. We might need an economy to get started, but we could team up and kick ass.
As for reproduction issues that you bring up, rubber trees. Synthetic latex may not be available (i don't know how easy it is to make) but natural rubber (and the rubbers one could make with it) would still be around. But with out modern medicine, and the inherent increase in infant mortality rates, I don't foresee that being an issue for many people. To protect a woman, sure. To prevent the chance of becoming pregnant before safe, sure. But after they are safe and want to have kids, I'm not sure that birth control would be an issue. After all, each couple should have 3 or 4 kids (childhood and young adult mortality rates) just to keep populations stable, and to do that a woman might need to give birth to 10 babies. Scary, but I came from families that had that problem not even 70 years ago; without antibiotics and an OB-GYN and sterile tools, we'd be looking at rates similar to the worst periods that we humans have survived.
There is plenty of blame to go around. We have republicans killing some projects they object to and democrats kill either and both claim the other is anti-science.
I wish we could run this country on facts and science. There are many policies that are good for the country regardless of it they are liberal or conservative ideas. The problem is that when you point out ideas that could be used someone immediately paints it with liberal or conservative and then they fight it based on that label.
I actually think that ALL food should be labeled. Many organic foods where also modified using radiation or mutagenic compounds. The old style hybridization techniques are at least as dangerous and often more dangerous than genetic engineering. Just because something was done with an antique method of mixing traits between plants does NOT make it safe and free of side effects.
One of the simplest ones I like is BT toxin. BT toxin is classified as organic and safe (which it is). Organic farmers spray it on their crops and that is considered fine. However it also washes off pretty quickly. It is not very good for amphibians and some other aquatic life forms. However when that SAME thing is inserted in corn suddenly it is seen as evil. The one inserted in corn is actually better because it does not just wash off. It is part of the plant and provides much better resistance and BT does nothing to us at all at any remotely reasonable level. Sure if you ate half your body weight of it you would probably die but the same would happen with any other substance including water.
The ONLY problem I have with GMO crops is that most of them are engineered incompetently using gene gun approaches instead of restriction enzyme approaches. The current way most GMOs are done is reckless and leads to errors that are about the same kind of problems you get with hybridization techniques but still better than radiation. If monsanto and others started doing insertion with restriction enzymes or something like CRISPR-cas9 I would have no issues with what they are doing at all.
In the end the companies making GMOs are extremely lazy and that is a GREAT thing. They are not trying to make new proteins for insertion, instead they look for proteins that already exist and do what they want and they tend to only use proteins that we already normally consume from a different organism. Putting a gene that prevent ice crystallization in fish and putting it in tomatoes is a great idea. It doesn't harm you in any way but it allows tomatoes to be grown in colder climates and also for them to survive freak freezes.
If you want to label then label everything. Make a website for every food product that is run by the government that all food producers must fill out before they can sell their product. I want the full DNA sequence of all items along with all other chemicals in the food. If you genetically engineered something I want to know what method you used, what you inserted etc. If you mutated something with radiation I want to know what level of radiation was used, what type etc. Just labeling something as GMO or Organic is idiotic and definitely anti-science. It is just a convenient label for people to use that distilled down a very complex issue to some kind of bullet point. Organic is not safe or unsafe, it depends on what it is and how it was made and the exact same thing is true of GMOs. In the end we are going to use genetic engineering to make this world better and all of these stupid objections are only going to slow things down and increase accidents. There are some real objections to GMOs and also to organic farming but as long as the issues are only looked at in a very shallow way there is no real chance that we will look at the real problems with these techniques and address them.
I used only free software programming for about 10 years and I thought I was pretty efficient at writing code. However, no matter what there where always poor documentation to deal with and strange bugs to track down where libraries just didn't work right.
Once I returned to school I started using MATLAB for some engineering classes and overall I have found it much better to deal with. The documentation is far more complete than any open system I have ever ran into with much better examples. I would never use it for general purpose programming but for engineering work it sure is hard to beat. So many things are built in that are nasty to try to implement in anything else. Things like the global optimization toolbox or the parallel computing toolbox make many things that are hard in other languages much easier to deal with.
MATLAB also takes backwards compatibility very seriously. If something is deprecated it warns and also gives an upgrade path and tells you what you need to change. That is the one thing that has seriously pissed me off about the free languages is backwards compatibility is just tossed out at a whim and you are left with a fairly nasty upgrade to deal with. Even now the vast majority of projects are still running Python 2 compared to Python 3. 10 years from now that will probably still be true.
In the end I care more about just getting work done now, not about any free vs proprietary arguments. I don't care if a language is open or not so long as it is very documented and runs on all the platforms I need it with a history of being well maintained. Modern development tools overall suck. We have javascript libraries that love to break compatibility every few months and people are constantly hoping from one new thing to another without getting any of them to the point where they truly work. We have languages deciding to just drop backwards compatibility. We have other languages that are just really buggy where software written with them tends to crash a lot. Software development needs to become more like engineering and that includes making the tools work better, sure they would not be developed as quickly but you would still get work done faster since the tools would actually work every time all the time.
It is far more complex than that. There is a lot of doubt about the research but making stem cells is a process that is VERY hard to do even with protocols that we have fully diagnosed. With other techniques for induced pluripotent stem cells the results are usually 1% or less of the cells make the changes you want. Even if the paper had written down EVERYTHING that was done for the STAP cells there is no guarantee that it would work effectively for someone else until the protocol is nailed down better.
It does seem unlikely that the STAP research is correct but it is too soon to say that for sure and there is no way we can walk away from this kind of advance if it is at all possible.
The worst outcome would be if the STAP cells really do exist but was the result of sloppy technique and sloppy experimental documentation while having the paper also involve fraud. Under those conditions nobody else would be able to reproduce it since they would not make the same mistakes and the fraud involved would mean that it would be very hard for others to try similar experiments to figure out what really happened. If all we had was a shoddy experiment that happened to work but not fraud involved then there would be a LOT of work to figure out what really happened. This is why I hate all the cheating in scientific papers, not only does it damage that paper it also damages that entire line of inquiry.
Seriously, it starts with "checks to individuals" and makes the firsts 38% of those Medicare/caid and ACA. Those checks aren't going to individuals! I never see a check from Medicaid, the doctors I go to might but it will be made out to their billing service. The check never goes to the hand of a single person! 21% is 'poverty programs' which, again, other than SSI/SSA don't go to individuals. Food stamp funding goes to the state, and the state disperses it; same as Medicaid actually.
So that's a chuck that doesn't make their numbers add up. Now they don't explain how they get that 0.5% of the budget goes to the top 1% of wealth. Could be as . . . . anything given the games they are playing with the other numbers. Sure, 10 billion is upsetting, but that's just a small chuck of the budget. Does it go to them as Medicare? Is it part of the various subsidies (farm, corn, ethanol, solar) that happen to be run by those people? What's the math? This is important since they blow so many other details.
"But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable computers?"
