Political Showdown: Peter Thiel vs. Google’s Eric Schmidt

People are afraid to say even innocent or true things because those will result them being branded as "racist". For example even good liberals who believe that black communities are caught in a cycle of crime, have to self-censor because the only acceptable position is that black crime is entirely caused by a biased criminal justice system.

I don't think Trump phased it very well but I do think that illegal immigration is a net negative for the US, and it wouldn't' surprise me if illegal immigrants were disproportionately criminal. What's undeniable is that illegal immigration is connected with new patterns of organized crime, even if the overall crime rate is similar.

Trump said that if you put military men and women together, the sexual assault rate will go up. The military proceed to put military men and women together, and guess what? The sexual assault rate goes up. Trump was right. What is sexist about being right?

>"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on"

Everyone that enters the United States must be vetted, that includes Muslims too. Muslim will not be excluded, because that would be racist.

>"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

But Cartels are bringing in drugs through the border. And 1 in 4 women who cross the border are raped. And some of those Mexican people are actually good people. How is any of this racist?

Do you believe that in ten years, or twenty, that such things will be available to the public?

I don't want to be cynical but innovative practices have come and gone without sticking before now. There was even head transplants with dogs or monkeys a few decades ago but nothing came of it.

To put it another way, we had serious medical breakthroughs before cheap genetic examination and alteration was possible. Our benchmark should not be nothing, it should be the past periods of change in the field surely.

How does the 'modern' genetic engineering stack up against antibiotics, peptide synthesis? How many lives saved, how much higher a quality of life do we have as a result?

Eroom's Law is still in force despite xray crystallography and dna sequencing being orders of magnitudes cheaper. Suppose drug discovery isn't the the bottleneck and we blame the FDA, then where are the breakthroughs in Russia and China?

> We wouldn't have recombinant insulin without genetic engineering, so there's a pretty good high footprint drug for you, the modern combination insulin products that are fast acting and sustaining.

That is notable, yes. Partly because it is a good high footprint drug as you say, but also because of the reason for its demand... It is interesting because if you watch the Ford Foundation video from the 1960s I linked to, there is a household personalized preventative healthcare system. I believe we could build such a device in theory, but I don't see that we're breaking much ground. The last thing I saw that impressed me was the Toto intelligence II toilet but it didn't take off. I'd like to buy one, esp. if it was linked to my fridge and food cupboard to perform input/output analysis. I don't think there's a company even pretending to offer such a system today but it was readily imagined half a century ago.

> It's also the case that breeders are using identical methods to their ancestors, except for the part where they do things like clone champion bulls to use for breeding.

Breeders were doing pretty okay before artificial cloning.

I have some relatives in farming, I think they send off sperm cells to be hazed by freezing or some other hazing process that eliminates the weaker candidates.

I also know some old school breeders from a cattle mart who are basically wizards. They carefully examine their subjects to determine characteristics, like Darwin's pigeon fanciers in Origin. They are extremely gifted at selecting, like the Met's super recognizers.

"He said that of the millions of cows produced every year, the number that are cloned is “overall pretty insignificant.”

“But the bottom line is you do not want large numbers of these animals for a number of reasons, number one being that cloned animals are generally unhealthy.”"

That in a nutshell is my general outsider know-nothing view of biotech. It has no serious visible impact and I begin to suspect we don't actually know what we're doing. DNA is less the library of Alexandria and more like Borge's Library of Babel. Where are the cows with adverts emblazoned on their fur for passing cars to see? Weird exotic GM pets? We should see stupid things like that if we had any power. Freeman Dyson's vision of GM, laudable though it is, seems very far away.

I was looking for bioluminescent outdoor lighting/cool science project a while back. Found nothing useful. That's a low bar! That kind of thing should be standard by now and I believe we should all in shock that it isn't cheap and readily available.