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Comment Re:Cryo-embalming (Score 1) 84

There is a Q-factor when dealing with radiation poisoning. Different radiation types have differing quality of damage. For example, gamma rays have very low quality. Human bodies aren't that dense and most gamma rays can pass right through you without even touching your atoms. It take more grays of gamma rays to cause harm than grays of beta particles. Alpha particles can effectively be stopped by your skin; if you get an alpha emitter on your skin, you can just wash it off and be fine. But if the alpha emitter gets inside your body, that same dose starts liquefying your organs.

In the case of radioactive potassium and carbon inside your body, it's much worse than what damage you'd get if that same material was outside your body. Add to that, while the low temperature of a body won't slow its radioactive decay, it will increase the absorption cross-section of your DNA.

Comment Cryo-embalming (Score 5, Informative) 84

Humans are simply too large to cryopreserve like we do embryos. The body can't freeze fast enough and so always forms ice crystals. This destroys tissues at a cellular level. Just think what happens to a strawberry you freeze then thaw. That happens inside your organs.

The technique used in cryopreservation involves replacing the blood with an antifreeze compound. The stuff is toxic and will destroy cells even if the ice doesn't get them. This is more like embalming or pickling than preserving.

The cryopreservation process has to be done after death. If you do it to a living person, it's murder. You can't reanimate a corpse, especially not one that's been pickled.

When frozen, a corpse has yet another reason it can't heal damage done to it. Temperature doesn't affect the decay of radioactive isotopes inside a body. The radioactive carbon and potassium alone would subject a body to LD50 doses of radiation inside of a decade.

Cryopreservation is about preserving a corpse as a death ritual and not a legitimate attempt to preserve a life. It should be viewed more akin to ancient Egyptian mummification than a medical procedure. And it has exactly the same chance of resulting in a reanimated corpse as following the Book of The Dead.

Comment Planned Economy (Score 1) 207

China is a planned economy, not a market economy. I read a report from an analyst of China that the CCP's plan was to pump up the EV market with dozens of manufacturers and then strategically collapse it, resulting in concentration of technologies in two or three manufacturers. This just looks like China following that plan to me. It's a matter of leveraging markets' tendency to over-produce, over-saturate, and follow boom & bust cycles to end up with a stable but varied market on the other end while ultimately retaining a majority state ownership of the means of production.

Comment Re: I'm rooting for it!! (Score 1) 166

It goes back further than that. During the 19th Century, it was found by Congress that the US was funding a ton of primary research through various grants. (I have no idea how they didn't know about this, considering Congress has the power of the purse in the US.) This lead to the short-sighted cancellation of a lot of research funding the in the US in the 1880s. People with most foresight managed to secretly keep funding basic research, mostly through the military. That's why the US Naval Observatory and the Army Corps of Engineers have their names stamped on so much research from the period between 1890 and 1930.

During the Great Depression, Roosevelt's New Deal funded a surprising amount of research by funding colleges and universities. The national labs founded during WWII continued the tradition. In the post-war period, the NSF and ARPA/DARPA brought back direct funding of basic research.

So, you see, the US government has always heavily funded scientific and technological research and development in the US.

Comment Re: That was entirely predictable (Score 1) 29

I refer you back to my premise that MBA and Economics graduates aren't actually that smart and the courses aren't all that academically rigorous. Your average Humanities major has a much more difficult academic career than your average economist. "Smart for a MBA student," is damning with faint praise.

Comment Re:It's going to use training data (Score 1) 27

This is not interesting. Humans are notoriously bad at picking stocks. This is because the stock market is a random walk. You can't use data to predict future prices. That's why the best and most efficacious investment strategy is to buy a diverse portfolio of stocks, diversify into real estate holdings, bonds, commodities, and precious metals. (Whether you invest more in bonds or real estate depends on what the market is doing at the moment.) Preferably through a low fee index fund. That's more or less how Warren Buffet made his fortune. The only thing that made him special is that he had a lot of cash behind him and the discipline to never go chasing snipes in the market.

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