China ‘cloning factory’ to produce cattle, racehorses and pets

China's economy is teetering near recession; labor and materials are super cheap at the moment, except for perhaps domain-specific equipment (which China may simply be copying from competitors).

What it sounds like you're saying is "I believe I know how a bridge is built, but I have no idea what a cloning factory entails, so the latter is more impressive."

Two bridges and as pedestrian bridges go, I wouldn't describe that design as small.

Very few safety, industrial, or environmental regulations; and for those that might exists, if you know somebody you can get around them.

While I agree this is kind of a silly comparison, my brother-in-law has shown using historical records of various infrastructure projects that the real cost of building things (roads, sewers, bridges, Etc.) has in fact gone up over time rather than down as everything else has. He attributes that rise by misalignment between the interests of the tax payer, the government funding agencies, and the engineering companies that do the work.

These people are working on cloning, other people are working on in vitro meat. There are still plenty of problems to solve in either process.

I'm having a hard time following this line of thought. Cattle was around in some shape before what you could describe as modern humans existed. They need plants that grow naturally and are sustained by the sun and some land. It's clearly a sustainable process.

To the extent that it's not it might be improved by genetic engineering, and I doubt that producing the same meat in vitro will be a net improvement in sustainability for a long time. Now you've replaced a natural organism that needs some fodder and produces CO^2 with an entire factory, employees to manage it etc.

Why do you think that's more sustainable? One of those processes relies on non-technology that existed before there were even humans around, and the other needs high-tech that we don't even have yet.

I think StormTroppers are the better investment.

> Cloned livestock also increases health risks from reduced genetic variance.

Like, "animal husbandry can manage genetic variation, but cloning can't" ? Doesn't add up. In both cases you can have humans in the loop to make sure sufficiently diverse samples are preserved and used in populations.

All livestock populations should be genetically monitored, anyway.

I wonder how this will affect the South Korean pet cloning industry and whether they'll improve on viability of the clones.

Plenty of pets and plenty of livestock. The xkcd biomass graph is a great example of how unnecessary this kind of thing is.

Not only that purebred pets are genetically inferior to mutts/runts.