Oooh! Weird! Modifying my immune system to be able to fight cancer is "weird" too, right? Is there a good reason to use "weird" as a criterion in any of this? Because I like being a GMO organism who isn't dying of cancer, and people using "weird" as a metric make me a bit uneasy about how much longer such treatments are going to be allowed.
Remember: GMO isn't just about the "Organic" aisle at Amazon Whole Foods.
Not saying that Ukraine didn't have a right to be defended, but it should be pretty objectively obvious that the war would have stopped long ago had the West not intervened. This would have been unjust and a massive slap to the people of Ukraine, and arguably worse for the world in other ways - so I'm not saying that we shouldn't have supplied them.
But we also can't claim we are doing what we can to stop the war: we're (at best) doing what we can to help the right side to win, while prolonging the war.
The lazy “military industrial complex” take. Tell me, how do you propose that the US should support stopping the war that doesn’t involve Ukraine ceasing to be independent and losing its leaders?
Your comment is basically the same as, “The west’s efforts have been to prolong hunger, not to stop it. When you’re suppling food you’re not acting to stop hunger. It should have been objectively obvious that the hunger would have stopped long ago had we just let people starve to death.”
First of all, I have been very explicit that "stopping the war" and "the best thing that can be done for the people of Ukraine" are not necessarily aligned. The fastest way of stopping the war would have probably been to supply Russia with arms and know-how, but I am not in any way advocating for such a criminal act.
Secondly, the West could have acted to capitalize on Ukraine's initial success in stopping the Russian blitzkrieg by convincing Ukraine's leaders to negotiate a neutrality agreement, similarly to Switzerland.
Instead of seeking to join NATO and/or re-conquer the land they lost in 2014, Ukraine could have accepted the loss of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea, and started to design a way to become a neutral country, dealing with both Russia and the EU.
Instead, we have been supplying Ukraine with arms, intelligence and even targeting information and stoking their belief that they can actually win a war with Russia.
If we are right, then of course this will be a massive benefit to the people of Ukraine and arguably all of Eastern Europe, with a relatively mild cost to the people of Russia (a huge cost to the leaders of Russia though).
However, I believe that Russia will literally stop at nothing to prevent this outcome. I personally fully believe that Russia will nuke Ukraine before allowing it to win back the territory it has lost, especially Crimeea.
And that outcome, if it comes to pass, will be the worst thing that could have happened to Ukraine and its people, and probably the entire world. It would be much worse than being conquered by Russia in the initial attack, and definitely much much worse than a negotiated peace where they would cede territory to Russia.
The difference is that Russia does not respect any agreements it signs. Russia promised to not invade Ukraine or threaten its borders when it gave up its nukes, look how well that went.
> Instead, we have been supplying Ukraine with arms, intelligence and even targeting information and stoking their belief that they can actually win a war with Russia.
The west have been supplying Ukraine with weapons that appear to be making the difference. There’s a reason Russias advances have pretty much stalled entirely, there ammo depots and command centre keep exploding.
Turns out Russia is actually kinda not so great at this entire war thing.
> However, I believe that Russia will literally stop at nothing to prevent this outcome. I personally fully believe that Russia will nuke Ukraine before allowing it to win back the territory it has lost, especially Crimeea.
If Russia even blinks at a nuke the international response will make the sanctions look like child’s play.
I think Ukraine can win this fight, every week they get more and better weapons from the west whilst Russia keeps rolling out older and older equipment.
Why do you think this? Unless we're going to start WWIII over this, all of the things currently preventing us from imposing harsher sanctions on Russia will remain as strong - most importantly, Europe still needs Russian gas to be able to sustain its industry and population comfort.
It is true that India, China and all the other countries who didn't agree to the sanctions may change their tune. But Russia has to weigh the probability of that versus the costs to their regional power if they lose the war. And trusting in Putin's rationality is a pretty tough sell from my point of view.
MAD requires a overwhelming response to any nuclear use, it is true that Ukraine doesn’t have nukes so that response won’t be nuclear itself.
But if the world just “lets it go” then it would be speed up nuclear proliferation like no tomorrow.
I believe any use of a nuke is the end of Russia even if it’s a slow fall.
It would have never begun if we’d denuclearised Russia in the 90s, yet here we are. Facing, once again, a choice between appeasing a murderous dictator or not.
There's also the problem of making plants resistant to herbicides, then applying more herbicides, so you get lots of herbicide runoff into lakes and streams. This is really more about upping sales for the chemical manufacturer.
Also there are better methods for getting rid of weeds, I particularly like these field-crawling robots that identify weed seedlings with AI-vision and blast them with IR lasers.
Corn variety 1 + Corn variety 2 -> Hybrid with high productivity, disease-resistance, or some other desirable trait (or a combination of desirable traits).
However, the seeds from the hybrid will not be the same as the hybrid. Classically, you'll get some seeds that are more like CV1, some seeds that are like CV2, and some that are like the hybrid (in practice the genetics can be more complicated than that, but that's basically what's going to happen).
If CV1 is resistant to devastating disease D1, and CV2 is resistant to devastating disease D2, the hybrid might be resistant to both D1 and D2. Great! But the seeds from the hybrid are different. 1/4 the seeds from the hybrid will be susceptible to D#1 and 1/4 will be susceptible to D#2, and 1/2 will still be resistant to both. That means that "saving your seeds" = 50% crop loss to disease, if both diseases are present.
Using gene editing technology to repair your immune system using a human template wouldn't be transgenic technology and is probably a relatively safe use of CRISPR gene editing, for example. Throwing in some shark genes to see what happened, because some species of sharks don't seem to get cancer IIRC, that would not be such a great idea I don't think.
On the other hand, if you were like "I'm a biohacker, I'm going to genetically modify a virus to infect me and alter my immune system." Then I assume the doctor would say "Hey, let me get some people to take a look at that." Because that is weird and there are risks.
"Weird" doesn't mean good or bad, it means unusual. Unusual things have the property that we don't do what they will cause, because they haven't been done much, because they are unusual. Genetic biohacking probably does have a greater chance of saving your life, or increasing your farm yields, but there are possible downsides to it that are not present in more mundane interventions.
I'd be surprised if there were.
“Yes, could you get some fish and strawberries? Oh and some antifreeze, I hear it’s going to snow tomorrow”
Seems totally normal to me. Nothing to worry about here…
Edit: I think this reads as if I'm disagreeing, whereas I'm piling in together!
a) those three objects together are going to sound weird in pretty much any situation
b) regardless of the effectiveness, mixing genes from a list of things that sound like they would never mix under natural circumstances in any other way than a lab sounds weird
If you needed antifreeze, why on earth would you not put it on the shopping list for the place that has it?
I'd like a parrot, a gun and a pack of cigarettes.
Now, if you don't think some triplet is weird, that's subjective (as I would hope anyone would understand and admit) but to try and claim that:
a) some objects together aren't weird, or
b) those objects together aren't weird
and
c) to make either claim means the claimant doesn't have a valid point
that would really be akin to producing a turd into the conversation, logically and rhetorically. Nice of you to bring up tactics during a discussion about what constitutes a game though, that's worthy of a chuckle.
By adding genes? Definitely!
> people using "weird" as a metric make me a bit uneasy about how much longer such treatments are going to be allowed.
It shouldn't. This is at most a concern for inheritable modifications.
It might be weird, but it works and it cures people of cancer. You quite simply cannot convince me that's not a positive result for everyone.
Is the last line of my previous comment not clear enough? It's weird but there's no concern.
And honestly doesn't get the credit it deserves for its current position in food security — because you can't patent cooperating with nature.