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Comment by nightwing | Hacker News Reader

I agree that there is a systematic problem, as far as i could understand your previous comment was suggesting that the issue is entirely in existence of private companies, but judging by previous attempts of eliminating them i think changing the way government works is a more promising route.

> Fortunately no-one's arguing that. You're excluding the (reasonable) middle.

Your previous comment doesn't look like a reasonable middle to me. The reasonable attitude would be "yay, new resource, we need to find a way to use it without breaking anything".

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>Your previous comment doesn't look like a reasonable middle to me. The reasonable attitude would be "yay, new resource, we need to find a way to use it without breaking anything".

"we need to... use it" -- so your idea of a 'reasonable attitude' is to beg the question? Conclusion first, evidence later? :-\

Again precaution should not limitless ("do not touch anything"), but it should not be zero either. If we haven't studied these "unknown consequences" at all, maybe we should do that first.

The part you chose to not quote is rather important "we need to find a way to use it without breaking anything". So i don't think the precaution should be zero.

Maybe the thing we disagree about is the order of concerns, i believe the needs of people come first, then comes requirement to be cautious because not being cautious can cause harm to people.

Yes it seems we agree on that. :)

> The part you chose to not quote is rather important "we need to find a way to use it without breaking anything". So i don't think the precaution should be zero.

To clarify: my point was by saying "we need to find a way to use it," you've already ruled out the possibility that further scientific study will rule out its use entirely. I'm not saying this is the most likely outcome, just that this outcome was conspicuously and unexplainedly excluded from consideration.

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