That's a delibrately provocative title but there was never a decent argument that embryo selection was ethically bad. Indeed, if anything the best philosophical arguments on the issue point strongly to the idea that it's immoral not to use embryo selection.

Unfortunately, because it's easy to confuse with genetic editing, the usual social worry about new tech and the emotional nature of ghr issue there is a substantial demand for some intellectual justification for condemning it. And the incentives in philosophy publication all favor novelty. There isn't anything novel about the obvious argument that, other things being equal, it would be better to have healthier, happier smarter children. But the vague feeling it must be bad w/o any obvious argument is cat nip for philosophers looking to publish.

And while (as someone who studied philosophy in grad school) I can totally appreciate the value of having ppl do that it's unethical to let ppl think that because the incentives favor coming up with clever ways to justify ppl's fears that's what our best expert understanding of moral philosophy suggests. Unfortunately, selection effects mean that the ppl we recognize as experts in the area are those who publish in it.

Is it really worth it to create another standard rather than just counting on hardware acceleration for AES? I mean doesn't the economics tend to favor just making a SoC that works for everything and can thus be made at high volumes on recent processes?

Having just had a parent who died I can tell you for certain that it's not always going to be worth it. In my case I had sufficient records to determine that the estate was net underwater and it can be emotionally difficult to dig through a loved one's laptop.

While I agree with the overall thrust of your point, I think it's a bit unfair to the original commenter.

Like it all depends on exactly what the "this" is they are referring to. I mean there are few different questions on the table here:

1) Can we ensure that the overall gap between the amount of money the most successful people have and the least successful people remains relatively low.

Yes, ofc we can. We can impose taxes and create UBI.

2) Can we make sure that there is a strong middle class, i.e., that the income distribution is bell shaped rather than two humped.

Here, I agree that there isn't much we can do about this. We can use taxes to make sure that the top and bottom humps aren't too far apart (e.g. top 1% only make 20% of the income not 90%) but the shape of the distribution is entirely determined by productivity/demand facts that are almost entirely outside of our control.

I mean, in a world in which the amount of profit your skills generate for the company is two humped you'll end up with a two-humped distribution of wealth/income no matter how much you tax. At least unless you are willing to unfairly and randomly select some people and give them more money than others.

And it's not at all clear we can avoid this by making sure that everyone has access to a great education and the like. In any number of jobs there are just non-linear returns to ability that heavily favor the top earners. For instance, sports (and similarly with acting/youtubing etc..) has the property that the best athletes get paid way way more than those who aren't good enough to make it onto a pro-team. The same is true with programming since there are massive returns to scale (and because coordination is hard hiring more slightly worse programmers isn't as good).

So there is a real chance we may move to a society without much middle class as we transition to more and more intellectual work and automate more. I don't know. But I don't actually believe that it's a problem.

What matters isn't whether there are people in the middle of the income distribution. What matters is that there isn't too big a difference between the top and the bottom.

Why would UBI make it more, rather than less, likely that people will decide to take stuff from others who are paid more?

Seems to me that the times/places in history when the masses have risen up and experimented with communism or mass seizure of private property are often those where the people rising up have the worst lives and the least stuff. People are less likely to feel alot of resentment if their lives are going well.

I think the reason we sometimes fear that government assistance/support will lead to this sense of entitlement comes from the US context where I think there is a good case to be made that welfare was offered in a dehumanizing/awful way (always subject to invasive checks to see if you qualify, frequently denied benefits because of issues navigating the forms/offices etc..) as a *replacement* for real opportunity (bad schools, little hope they could work their way up). The resentment is a result of the feeling that there is no real opportunity for them to better their position or that of their children.

One of the great benefits of UBI is that it's given to everybody. There is no stigma in receiving it and no invasive need to humiliatingly prove you are poor or couldn't get a job. Also, the fact that it's guaranteed and doesn't require trips to renew your application all the time means people can move out into the middle of nowhere where the land is cheap if they want rather than being stuck in bad neighborhoods in the city.

I believe UBI would solve many of the problems of resentment and entitlement. Instead of being trapped in a poor neighborhood with bad influences you could take your kids out to live in Montana and home school them if you want. Sure, UBI won't ever provide anyone with a lifestyle that is seen as luxurious (the standard increases as we get richer...even the poorest among us lives a life of incredible luxury compared to people in 1860).

Ok, so some people don't work? So what? People will still work and not just out of boredom but because they want *more* money.

Most people work harder than they literally have to in order to survive because they want to have more things, more social status, create a better life for their children etc.. UBI won't change that. People will still be willing to do work so they can afford the latest iphone, send their kids to the nicest schools, buy their dream house etc.. It will just mean you have to pay more to convince people to do awful or unpleasant jobs. But, if we are rich enough as a society, what's so bad about that?

I support a UBI for exactly the *opposite* reason.

I'm unfortunately all too confident in the ability of people to keep finding new ways to employ others. I mean right now you can buy a digital watch that is functionally better and can be made just as pretty (you can give it a very nice analog readout) but people pay large amounts of money for genuinely handmaid watches because they are a status symbol. And, if you think about it, no one would be worse off if it had always taken 2x as much labor to make a handmaid watch. Everyone would just step down a level (the faces of the moon feature doesn't really add value) but, since it displayed equal wealth/status, would be just as happy.

As automation increases fewer and fewer people will be responsible for making genuine contributions but they'll have a fuckton of money and they'll use that money to hire people as servants, as artesinal sewers as etc.. etc.. The end result will be that we'll have all the stuff that a post-scarcity society (a la star trek) is supposed to have but everyone will still be working 60 hour days to stay up with the Jones.

I support UBI because it's the best way to ensure that we don't end up making ourselves miserable forcing people to work in a rat race to produce pure displays of status.

And the invention of agriculture could be said to be responsible for 99% of inequality (hunter-gatherer tribes rarely had much inequality).

While I too worry about the amount of inequality in our society surely the fact that a large fraction of inequality was the result of people figuring out how to make goods more efficiently (less labor hours per good) is a good thing! I mean, what's the other option: inequality was the result of theft and corruption like in Russia?

This headline seems to have confused worries about how much inequality we have with questions about the percentage breakdown of that inequality. You could imagine a world with very low inequality where almost all of it was the result of automation or very little.

Absolutely!! Indeed, the mere fact that people are calling for regulation here literally just made me substantially more skeptical of regulation.

This is essentially the *ideal* example of a case where the free market is working well. We have a very competitive market with little consumer lock-in where the individuals hurt by bad service are the people deciding what flight to purchase. People are going to be substantially less likely to buy tickets on southwest for awhile after this even ignoring all the lost revenue for those two days.
Government regulation of this kind of technical backend would risk introducing a single point of failure and making things worse.

If you want to impose government regulation in a situation like this then what shouldn't be regulated?

I don't really quite understand the problem. Yes, I get that airline reservation and booking systems need to be able to manage many simultaneous clients and that the various locking and other issues can get complex. So I understand why upgrading the whole system to more modern equipment might be pretty expensive.

But I don't understand why it would cause a problem specifically in the recent situation. Here it seems like the problem was just coming up with an initial assignment of planes to routes and people to planes and that seems like something that could just be done offline (indeed it must be possible since manual schedulers did it). Yes, I get that finding optimal solution is probably NP complete but finding a decent solution sounds like an undergraduate CS homework assignment. Surely they could have assigned one or two programmers to create such a system for pretty cheap and then just loaded it into whatever reservation processing system they have setup.

I get that Talati disagrees with what this company is doing but the fact that they didn't consult people about what to do doesn't make them hypocritical. It means they have different views about what's helpful than you do.

And it's not like Talati made sure to ask people before *not* releasing particles into the atmosphere. This attitude imposes a huge status quo bias (any action you take that affects the status quo needs affirmative approval but not taking that action doesn't).

Restricting the sale of DUV machines to China feels like a mistake to me anyway. China already has enough of the machines (and does so much microelectronics trade that the prospect of a ban on selling chips to them is very unlikely) that there is no hope of hobbling their ability to produce chips for military use. Their military isn't going to be hobbled the way restrictions on chip sales to Russia has hugely limited their ability to produce effective weapons.

Ok, so why would we want to stop the Chinese from getting DUV machines? I understand the worry about using Chinese made chips in sensitive technologies but that's just an argument for ensuring that the west retains plenty of it's own chipmaking technology. If it's some kind of trade war move then that's a harm to everyone. I *want* Chinese citizens to become richer and produce more even though they may compete with US business not only because in the long term it will make us all richer (yes, currently they aren't big respecters of IP laws but nor was the US when we were catching up to Europe) and rich countries are a lot less likely to go to war. It's a lot harder sell, even for an autocracy, to ask people to leave their comfy homes full of yummy food and fancy videogames where they consume media from around the world than it is to ask someone who doesn't have the same level of comfort.

Worse, denying China access to chip fabrication technologies only increases their incentives to invade Taiwan as that gains them all those TSMC fabs.

This story also illustrates the extent to which the EU demands on the US with respect to privacy shield are either hypocritical bullshit or, at best, an example of blind bureaucratic box checking.

In short, the EU is raising all sorts of legal objections to the transfer of data on EU citizens to the US by companies like facebook on the grounds that the US doesn't provide sufficient legal protection for EU citizens against their data getting swept up in US signals intelligence activities. In other words, they are demanding the US offer stronger guarantees that the data on EU citizens won't be (without proper justification) swept up by the NSA and saved in a database somewhere.

I understand and appreciate the worry but the fact that challenges are repeatedly made to the US privacy shield guarantees but not to data transfers to Chinese companies makes the whole thing stick. Either it's just a legal excuse to go after/make life hard for US tech companies or it's an incredibly naive policy that is willing to accept Chinese promises despite some pretty good evidence that there isn't much of a barrier between government and private ownership of data in China (e.g. Chinese companies will help the government monitor dissidents etc..) but demands higher standards from the US because we aren't willing to systemically lie about our protections for citizen data.

This illustrates why all the concern over personalized advertisements or building up ad profiles is misplaced. The danger isn't from the company putting the data they have together in a way that tells them if you'll be more likely to click on an ad for perfume or GPUs.. The danger is from them having the raw information about you that they can put to bad uses. Google or facebook wouldn't be any less of a threat to privacy if they didn't do any ad personalization as they'd still (if they had some dark team like this with permission) be able to surreptitiously save all that information you dribble out whenever you connect to a server they run and use it for nefarious purposes.

Ad personalization isn't the a threat to privacy. It's evidence that these companies can collect the kind of information that threatens your privacy if they choose to.

I thought the concern that justified shutting down inaccurate posts about vaccines was that it would *spread* inaccurate information, i.e., that people who didn't know any better might see such posts and suddenly start worrying that vaccines could cause harm. If they are speaking in code then it sounds like that's not an issue.

It sounds more like people an enraged that the 'bad people' aren't being punished and, at least in theory, that wasn't the justification for banning such speech.