I assume that, as an exercise, getting 5 simultaneous introductions working makes for a better paper; but is there a reason why you would want that in practice? Especially if there is any wobble in the ratios either randomly, across generations, or in the presence of certain environmental conditions that tweak the plant's metabolism one way or another that sounds like it would be a real pain in the ass to have to re-balance (and, if different patients are deemed to need different combinations even a perfectly stable plant is going to need re-balancing of the outputs) vs. very specifically going for a specific target output per-plant(or e. coli or yeast or whatever is easiest to bioreactor) and then just mixing to taste after purification. Is there some advantage I'm not seeing?

I realize that there are cases where some plant-sourced pharmacological effect looks like it is actually driven not by the identified 'active ingredient'; but by dozens or hundreds of assorted things, and in that case you just have to live with the complexity if you get better results with that than with purified isolates; but if you are deliberately engineering for very specific outputs why a mix of 5?

Immunology, presumably.

The only donor bodies that aren't going to treat the transplant as an act of war are clones or heavily immunosuppressed; and it's probably more plausible to assume that you'll be able to clone a human like a sheep than assume that you'll be making some fundamental breakthroughs in immunology to deal more elegantly with unmatched hosts.

I can see the utility of having spare organs in certain emergencies; but how much life extension would you actually get even if the sort of neurosurgery involved in removing a brain and reattaching it to a new host's spinal cord were viable? Is the theory that the assorted ghastly flavors of neurodegeneration are actually to be blamed on older organs and everything will be fine; or is this just a very expensive way to ensure that you skip the various ways peripheral organs can kill you and are assured to be the spryest patient in the dementia ward?

Tell me you haven't been paying attention to the actions of private equity without telling me you haven't been paying attention to the actions of private equity. Vulture private equity is a thing; the basic trick is:

1. Buy large, well-known company X with stable but not outstanding economic performance, low debt, and lots of real assets (read: Cheap enough to buy and take private, with lots of collateral available)
2. Sell all the real company X assets (buildings, land) to another company, company Y, also owned (directly or indirectly) by the private equity firm or its individual owners, with the theoretical idea that that money can fuel expansion.
3. Maybe borrow additional money from company Z (also tied to private equity firm) while you're at it, at above-market rates.
4. Lease all the assets back to company X, at exorbitant rates.
5. Don't actually expand, just pay all the money acquired from the asset sale to pay the leases and loans over a few years, extracting all of the value from the company as it becomes a hollow shell
6. Discover, to your great surprise, that company X, while profitable when it owns its land, is unprofitable when paying insane lease rates for said land
7. Regretfully have company X declare bankruptcy, sell off any IP or remaining inventory to squeeze whatever additional drops of blood are left in that stone
8. goto #1

They did it to Toys "R" Us, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Joann Fabrics, and more. They're doing it to hospitals and housing (but piecemeal, so aside from an occasional hospital failing, it doesn't make a big splashy headline). It's all 100% legal, and morally bankrupt. It's less ethical than the publicly traded companies because the reporting requirements are far lower, the number of interested parties far fewer (no shareholder activism here), and the regulations preventing egregious actions fewer to boot.

Yes, there are privately held companies that are forward-thinking and ethical. Largely because their owners are. Until said owners (or their descendants) decide to cash out, and look who comes swooping in with money to buy them out (hint: it's private equity) and destroy what they built for another quick buck. Saying "private equity is good because good people can do good things with it" is like saying "despotism is good because an enlightened despot can run things more efficiently and morally than a democracy", ignoring that it also gives them the freedom to behave terribly with little or no accountability.

Well, when a major collapse in private equity or cryptocurrencies takes out the retirement funding for millions of folks in the U.S., destroying the U.S. economy thanks to seniors no longer having money to spend, the resulting U.S. economic collapse is likely to affect the world economy. So, yeah, when the U.S. makes major changes that undermine its own economic stability, it's likely to affect the world.

I began working for a hedge fund in June of 2008, midway between Bear Stearns failing and Lehman Brothers failing. In early 2009, seven or eight months after I joined, and after it was very clear how bad things were, and what caused it, I got called into a meeting with the quants (I was just a code monkey) in which they decided that, while we hadn't been in subprime mortgages before, now was the perfect time to get in on them, as the collapse supposedly made the prices more proportionate to the risk.

Nobody learned lessons, they just saw cheap assets they could snap up and profit off of, and a clear precedent that gov't support would prevent a complete collapse in the future.

One big concern is that bad 401(k) managers will integrate these much riskier investments into the limited selection of custom funds offered to investors. Sure, you can choose not to invest in dedicated crypto or private equity funds, but if it's hidden inside most/all of the investment options offered by your 401(k) provider, you're screwed by this flexibility.

Unless you're stupidly wealthy, in which case your failure can become a structural threat to the market, and your mistakes and losses will be met with gov't intervention to ensure you can't really fail. Or you just send enough money to various super PACs and election funds to ensure the gov't isn't picking winners and losers, except when it comes to you; you're the winner, your competition is the loser.

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

Delete your account if you want to, but please don't delete posts and comments. I sympathize wanting to stick it to Reddit and not giving them free content to whore out to AI companies for training, but for the millions of normal people who might get value from comments it's really frustrating.

There are tools to mass-edit all your reddit comments and it's incredibly frustrating to see when people do it. I've thought I finally found the answer to some question or technical problem or whatever in a reddit thread, only to then see the original post replaced with something like "This comment was removed because Reddit made me angry. Lorem ipsum dolar sit amet shit." Perhaps unfair but it makes me hate that person's selfishness much more than make me dislike Reddit.

I live in Utah and get to witness this first-hand. Just yesterday it was windy enough that unpleasant dust clouds were coming off the dried parts of the lake bed. Utah snowpack is at a record low this year and peaked for the 2026 water year earlier in March. We broke several high temperature records this month (along with a bunch of other states in the west / mountain west). It's looking pretty bad.

Right now it's a lot like watching a slow-moving train derailment. Everyone knows what's coming, but 80% of the population, the majority being Mormon religious nuts, rationalizes it away or refuses to acknowledge it, but those that do see the problem won't take action to address it, preferring instead to "hopes and prayers". Brian Cox, the damned governor, has declared multiple "days of prayer for rain".

There's a sick fatalism amongst many religious groups, assuming that God won't let terrible things happen to them, but it's especially bad with Mormons. They think they're a chosen people, living in a chosen land, and that the "end times" are coming soon. All this adds up to "I don't need to do or sacrifice anything to deal with Problem because God won't let me suffer and it doesn't matter because the world is going to end soon anyway."

For any rational thinking person this is disgusting, but when 90% of the legislature, the governor, and all US congressmen are owned (mentally and financially) by the Mormon church, there's not much we can do. At best voting them out just gets a different lizard in the seat.

Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

Tell us you don't understand how the government works without telling us you don't understand how it works.

Congress has the power to delegate it's authority to smaller expert groups. Passing a law that says "The FTC can set rules for trade and commerce in these ways..." is completely valid. Or sure, we could have Senator "series of tubes" Stevens write every single specific rule that controls Internet communications. That will work fine.

There are only two groups of people who want to eliminate regulatory authority: (1) people who are too dumb to understand the negative impact it would have on normal people, and (2) corporate hacks and simps who understand exactly that negative impact and see that as the goal.

As an aside: I find it hilarious that the same people who bitch about "we are a republic, not a democracy" and fight against, for example, eliminating the electoral college, are often the same people who bitch about "unelected bureaucrats".

I'd be more optimistic about the ability to deliver an approximate equivalent if there were someone paying for them to do so(the economics of ordinary satellite launches seem to favor fitting within what a given delivery vehicle can handle, rather than bolting things together, so it's not 100% assured; but seems likely); but less clear on replicating the incentive structure.

It's not that the ISS is totally useless; but it currently justifies an awful lot of launches, including manned, more or less by being there. Gotta launch that crew lest the ISS be empty which would be bad because reasons, and have to launch those supplies because there's a crew on the ISS. They do find scientific things to shove into modules; but the arrangement is such that no project is ever called on to justify the ISS, which is just sort of assumed.

Short of the feds just paying some contractors and calling it a 'private' ISS replacement; it's less clear that there's much private sector incentive to build an ISS-like; judging by quite vigorous stream of privately justified satellites designed to not be bolted together and the relative absence of jostling for ISS experiment space. If it were worth that much we'd presumably be up to our eyes in sordid stories of people pulling lobbying stunts to try to exploit it on the cheap through regulatory capture; but we aren't really.