"But saying "Nazis might use it against us" is not a downside, that's just insane."

At this point you aren't arguing, you are just engaging in abusive name calling.

Whether its racist national socialists or well intended eugenicists paving the road to hell, it is ENTIRELY possible. The entire first half of the twentieth century was full of eugenicists in the U.S., Britain and Germany trying to select out genetic flaws in humans, often using force. California and the Rockefeller foundation pioneered forced sterilization of people with genetic defects. The only reason eugenics died out was because the Germans gave it such a bad name.

Now that we have tools to actually study genes in detail, to manipulate them and really do eugenics its nearly inevitable its going to return in some form.

There is a hard right neo nazi regime in Hungary already, the hard right came in third in the last French election, and an antisemitic neo Nazi party gained seats in the last Greek election. With Europe on the verge of a major economic collapse its entirely plausible there will be more neonazis in power in Europe in the near future. Economic collapses breed national socialism and persucution of ethnic minorities who are scapegoated for the collapse.

P.S. The benefits of vaccines probably out weigh the risks but they have serious down sides too which just shows how biased you are. Some people have violent and dangerous reactions to some vaccines. There is a Federal agency that does nothing but compensate people for adverse reactions to vaccines, its called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

Polio vaccines were made with monkey tissue and some batches were contaminated with a dangerous simian virus that was a carcinogen, some people have also been infected with the disease by the oral vaccine. The mercury in Thimerisol was never proved safe which is why it was removed, but large numbers of people were injected with it. For diseases like chicken pox getting the disease and building natural immunity may be superior to vaccine immunity. People with immune system disorders can actually contract some diseases from vaccines.

Not really sure...here is an article in Physical Review Letters by Blum about Kaons. Not sure if this is the one though.

That argument is nonsense. It is a standard talking point by the people waging this class warfare thing on the side of the rich.

Nearly everyone who works in this country pays payroll taxes which range from 10-12.5% since Regean jacked them in the 80's. Payroll taxes alone are nearly as high a percentage as the 15% rich people pay on capital gains.

Then there is sales tax, the lower classes spend most of their money, while the rich invest most of theirs so the poor once again pay a disproportionate burden of these which is why its called a regressive tax. The rich want even more sales taxes (aka Value Added Taxes(VAT's) because they regressively punish people who spend and give the rich a free pass

Payroll taxes used to be a couple percent before Reagan jacked them. Social security in particular started producing huge surpluses then that were used to fund Federal budget deficits for decades, in Reagans case to squander money on weapons that were never used. The so called "Trust fund" was completely squandered. To pay for social security and medicare now we either have to tax people some more, borrow it or slash benefits.

Most seniors who retired in before the 90's put almost nothing in to SS and Medicare and are getting windfall returns. People who started working in or after the 80's have been paying taxes through the nose for programs that will be bankrupt and probably gone by the time they retire. It has become a massively regressive tax on young working people to support often affluent seniors.

"not even the Rudd government would spend 1 grand per person"

The more obvious places you would use it would be to screen people entering elite organizations and the military (like the SS in Germany) or top echelons of a nationalist party or to screen prospective mates prior to marriage to flag genetic defects or undesirable racial history.

If you were sending someone to a concentration camp anyway, no I dont image you would spend 1K on them.

Most people don't know it but eugenics originated in the U.S. and Britain. Germany modeled got it form there and modeled their early eugenics programs, especially forced sterilization, on California's laws and program.

The Rockefeller foundation helped fund the eugenics programs in Germany before the war.

You are the one being naive my friend. It is simply good sense to explore the down sides of technologies instead of reveling purely in the up side, and have the down side bite you in the ass later.

I guess you are far enough removed from the early twentieth century that you are unaware how nasty eugenics movements were. Most people are vaguely familiar with them at their most horrific in Germany but the naive pretend that something that horrible can't happen again. Well it can. DNA sequencing is a dream come true for eugenics.

Its largely forgotten and brushed under the rug that there were thriving eugenics movements in the U.S. during the same era as Nazi Germany. It was being championed by a lot of rich, powerful, well known Americans and it was being put in to practice and inflicted on people against their will. It included forced sterilizations of people who had defects like retardation which was also a standard practice in Germany.

It is simple realism to recognize that most technologies are, in fact, double edged swords. You are being totally naive if you rush to embrace all the upside and choose to completely ignore the down side. It is human nature that some people will embrace and exploit the down side if they see a gain to be had there.

Cheap, wide spread DNA sequencing will no doubt yield amazing benefits like gene therapies, targeted drugs and maybe even near immortality. Those things should obviously be pursued with gusto.

It is also almost inevitably going to result in someone pursuing genetic engineering to enhance intelligence and physical abilities of humans, which may result in a genetic arms race where people who aren't enhanced are going to be relegated to a deeply inferior status, and those who are enhanced are going to seek to dominate civilization.

DNA sequencing is also almost certain to be used to discriminate against people with genetic defects, by insurance companies to set rates, by parents to abort fetuses, or on the extreme scale to sterilize people with undesirable genetic traits, or target people that are deemed inferior.

Computers are just as much a double edged sword. They bring a world of benefits but they are also enabling massive surveillance states in just about every country on the planet which are being used to target people with dissenting political views with an efficiency that wasn't previously possible.

At the same time they are spawning new tools for political dissent and freedom movements they are also supporting and enabling increasingly totalitarian states. With widespread biometric ID, pervasive CCTV and license scanners, facial recognition it will eventually be impossible for anyone to move, shop, read, eat, watch a movie, without the permission and authorization of a nation state.

"Nazis don't care about the genetics"

Doc that is just silly and you know it, did you actually believe that when you wrote it? Every aspect of their doctrine was fixated on eugenics and race. Its something Americans choose to forget but eugenics was very well established in the U.S. during the same period especially with elements of America's upper class.

Nationalist can be defined several ways but the term applied to nationalist political parties usually centers around a fixation with a nations historically dominant race and protecting it from other races and their influence. Hence in Europe now most nationalist movements are targeting Muslims which have moved in to many European countries in large numbers taking low wage jobs, and becoming the target of the wrath of nationalist parties. The rising French, Hungarian and assorted other right wing nationalist parties are targetting Jews again as well. Apparently substantial numbers of Jews are emmigrating from France to Israel recently due to concerns about the rise of neo Nazi movements there.

Nationalism can also be referring to flag waving, patriotism, and the arrogant presumption that your nation is superior to all others which is presumably what you are referring to when you say the U.S. is nationalist, but its not exactly the same thing as nationalist parties that are focused on racial issues.

The U.S. is somewhat challenged in sustaining a true nationalist movement because it is so ethnically diverse, but it it does have its skinheads, KKK and assorted fringe groups. The U.S. was also pretty deeply antisemitic in its own right during the first half of the twentieth century and that was main stream especially in the upper class. More recently the fixation, especially by Republicans, on illegal immigrants(i.e. Hispanics) would be more like a nationalist political movement exploiting racial issues and tensions, exploitonh the tensions caused by the fact that whites will eventually be in a minority in the U.S. if current demographic trends continue.

Of course we redistribute wealth to the richest. The biggest tax expense is the military, which the richest suck up like oxygen, no matter how bad for security or our economy (to say nothing of health, life or limb). The second biggest tax expense is on medical care (which overlaps a lot with the military), which is spent on doctors who are among the richest (at $172K general, $275K specialist, they make 7-11x the median income), and pharmacos which are among the richest both as workers and as stockholders. Oil corps get $4 BILLION in tax expenses a year, which is a lot even when they're reporting $10B annual profits before the handout. Then there's the $TRILLIONS in handouts to the banks, their executives, top employees and shareholders, which are both by definition and in practice the richest of the rich.The $BILLIONS in US foreign aid is mostly spent on American products; they're sold abroad by the richest, who arrange that cozy loop.

The top 10% pay 70% of Federal income taxes, but state taxes are mostly regressive (so tax the rich less), and the other substantial taxes like Social Security and sales taxes are purely regressive, so tax the rich less. While the rich have all their income above about $107K (most of their total) protected from the approximately 10% SS tax. The top 10% of wage collectors got over $2.46 TRILLION in 2010, out of only about $6.01T total wages, almost 41%. But the amount of equity trade income that the other $10T in the US GDP pays out a year is vastly more paid to that top 10%, who pay something like half the tax rate on their capital gains than people do on regular income.

Taking less tax money from the rich is giving free government services to them. Apart from all the direct subsidies, the rich get far more government services, including security, the courts that are where they transact so much business, and all the R&D private labs have abandoned to the public to pay for instead that they immediately harness into products and even less tangible sources of wealth.

When you said "I prefer to hope to be one of them" you said it all. That motivation is what keeps most Americans who bother to think about the racket hoping it will continue. Of course the vast majority will never be anything but the victims of the racket.

We can sequence genes. We can edit the sequence of many genes we've identified to switch the phenotype they express among meaningful choices. We can edit retroviruses to make them edit genes from A to B in living cells. We can combine sperm and egg IVF to produce a blastocyst. We can even insert full cell nuclei into collected foreign eggs, which we can cultivate into a blastocyst in a lab. We can convert skin cells into egg cells for that purpose.

How close are we to a synthetic womb that can gestate a full blastocyst into a newborn baby?

"De-evolving" = evolving.

Evolution is only the change in a genome over time. The human genome increasingly contains genetic values that it had less of before, as they were less able to reproduce. That is evolution. It's "de-evolution" only according to your values, which don't count in measuring genetic change.

Nazis don't care about the genetics. They care about scapegoating people powerless to fight back. And then using their example to terrorize each and any other group they construct as the next target. None are spared.

BTW "nationalist socialist" countries are everywhere. The US has always offered "socialism" (government enforced wealth redistribution) mainly to its richest, and is about the most nationalist country behind N Korea. The UK, Norway, Switzerland and many other European countries are pretty socialist, though more equitable in the wealth redistribution source/destination, and are so nationalist they refuse to join the EU. Japan is pretty nationalist, and more socialist than the US.

If you're going to scare people with "nazi", just say "nazi". Stop trying to scare people about socialism, as if the Nazi socialism was representative of socialism any more than East Germany's "People's Republic" represented its people. Nazism was founded on propaganda, and sympathetic propaganda outlets continue to peddle its slanders today.