When I want to point out to the kind of morons who post on the Internet, I'll tuck this post away.

You may or may not be right, but people framing a narrative of âoeif you donâ(TM)t agree with me you are a pedo.â People canâ(TM)t really discuss a topic if they run a risk of being accused merely by not wanting to light the witch fire.

That's not right either. Advertising and reference manuals should be on the internet. Probably some other stuff that I haven't thought of too. But nothing that needs to be private. If you MUST have it remotely available, give it its own phone line, and put protections on that. Dial-up access has its place.

Accurate statement: "Humans invented a way to harness CRISPR/Cas9 to create transgenic organisms"

Inaccurate statement: "Humans invented CRISPR/Cas9"

This isn't complicated.

But patching ASAP is also a bad idea. What you really need to do is
AVOID putting dangerous stuff on the web!!
Then you can take time to be sure that the "patch" isn't a real screw-up.

This is probably now wholly absurd. They *have* been sued in the past. I'd guess it was rather low frequency, but that's a guess.

OTOH, my real guess is that it's mainly a political talking point.

Yup, the sad truth is that if you really want to save children, you need to ban parents.

Actually there are markets where these might be reasonable. (MIGHT, I'm not real sure of their capabilities.) The ones I'm thinking of are pretty niche, though. Generally hospitals or care homes. (But they probably couldn't pay the costs.)

If US companies lose a market, less money flows into the US. Theoretically that should disadvantage the citizens of the US, but that's based on the assumption that the wealth is shared, even though not equally. A somewhat dubious proposition.

The projections I've seen put China's semiconductor industry a equal to the best in the west sometime after 2030, probably around 2035. This is a spur to convince them to move it closer to 2030, but some of the techniques are pretty sensitive, so I'm not sure it will work.

Your general conclusion is correct, but your analysis is wrong.
Wealth isn't a simple concept. It has no direct relationship to anything physical, but it's got a LOT of indirect relationships.

E.g. part of wealth is being healthy. This depends on physical things, but for most of them there are tradeoffs. Potatoes aren't necessary if you've got wheat or oats. Clean air is valuable, but so is treatment for diseases. And NONE of these things are directly proportional to money.

E.g., part of wealth is having a happy marriage. Lack of poverty sure helps that, but anything beyond that doesn't help much.

The wealth of a country can increase when it stops being "top dog", but this is for sure by no means guaranteed.

Yeah, China is currently getting Nvidia hardware, but it's acting strenuously to wean itself from it. Wherever local stuff is "good enough", then that's what it pushes. And it's pushing development so that local stuff is less limited. I expect this to take them a decade to reach parity, but I've no inside or detailed information. (I'm repeating projections made by someone else.)

Yes, "in five years China will be shipping cheap AI chips all over the world", but they'll only be "good enough", not "top of the line". That'll probably take 10 years.

Well, 10 years still isn't a long time. It will only matter to them if, say, an AGI breakthrough happens before 2030 and still depends on transformer chips. (I've got a theory that the "transformer chips" direction is the wrong direction...well, not *wrong* exactly, but misleading. I think AGI is going to be more dependent on multiple smaller models and close connection to sensors. For that transformers are advantageous, but not really decisive. Check out "SLMs", e.g. https://huggingface.co/blog/jj... )

Sorry, but capitalism has LOS of good points. It's just that it also has more than a few really bad points. Small scale capitalism is extremely good. Monopoly ANYTHING tends to be really bad.

OTOH, some jobs cannot be done without concentrated controlled power. Whether you call the agency that does them a government or a corporation is basically irrelevant, what *is* relevant is the damage they do in the process of doing those jobs.

Small scale capitalism, where there's no significant "barrier to entry" is so far unbeatable for solving problems with few bad effects...IF there's some stronger power that ensures that they minimize the bad effects on others (including those who aren't customers).

Papers published in small journals have been overlooked since before the time of Gauss (who overlooked Lobachevsky).