It's been waaa-aaay too long since I last updated. Updates tomorrow and next week. In my defence I can only say - I've been sick, some of my relatives have been sick, and other relatives have died. It's been a busy few months. But regular updates starting next week, honest.
Not that I have any readers left. Oh well.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Friday, July 21, 2006
Updates Soon - Really.
I'm house-sitting for my parents, and their computer has crashed. I'll update in a couple of days with two or three posts I've been working on while away from the internet.
Friday, June 23, 2006
The End Of An Era
The Golden Age is over. The US is set to give telecommunications giants the power to charge highbandwidth sites higher access fees - Fees that will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher ISP prices, more ads on sites, and higher prices for goods ordered over the internet. This will divide the internet into two tiers, the low-bandwidth version for the poor and a high-bandwidth version controlled by large corporations and the telecommunications giants.
Or, an ISP or web-based firm could just connect servers to a wireless setup for local service, cut a deal with a cellphone carrier to handle their long-range traffice, and bypass the telecoms altogether.
Or, an ISP or web-based firm could just connect servers to a wireless setup for local service, cut a deal with a cellphone carrier to handle their long-range traffice, and bypass the telecoms altogether.
Monday, June 19, 2006
iBuzz: Ode To Joy
The iPod fits in the jacket pocket , and the in-sleeve controls mean you never have to take it out of the pocket and risk dropping it. The iBuzz fits in the redwire DLX pocket, and the built-in joystick means you never have to take the iBuzz out of your pocket and risk embarrassing yourself. The iBuzz accessories fit... You can guess. And since the controls are all built into your clothes, you can now wander around in public being pleasured by your toys while listening to music and impressing people with your cool gear. Plug in, turn on, and go for a walk. Life is good.
Right up to the point where, at a particularly good point in the music - Something with a fast beat and a really strong bass line - you lose track of your surroundings and walk in front of a bus.
And you definitely ain't wearing clean underwear when they get to you at the hospital.
Right up to the point where, at a particularly good point in the music - Something with a fast beat and a really strong bass line - you lose track of your surroundings and walk in front of a bus.
And you definitely ain't wearing clean underwear when they get to you at the hospital.
My Bloated Ego
Yes, I really do think I'm qualified to comment on The Future. I'm going to live there, so I take an interest in the state of the neighborhood. I don't think I'm right in the sense of being able to predict specific events (I'm arrogant, not crazy), but I think I'm right enough to comment on certain patterns I see in the world around me and work out their general direction.
If you disagree, get your own blog. And send me the link. I'm interested in other people's ideas.
If you disagree, get your own blog. And send me the link. I'm interested in other people's ideas.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Immortality And The Death Of Cultures
Personal immortality is closer than you think. Medical technology has advanced further than you know.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1522606_1,00.html
http://www.calorierestriction.org
http://www.nanomedicine.com/
http://www.imminst.org/
The science is complex but the idea is easy. Tissues and organs grown in nutrient tanks can replace worn-out organs or damaged connective tissues. Stem cells can reverse memory loss and restore mental flexibility in the elderly. Dietary supplements, hormone treatments, and simple clean living can prevent a lot of the cellular damage that causes aging. It's all pretty straightforward.
Current life-extension regimes involve weekly trips to the clinic and two hundred and fifty dietary supplements a day, but this is a beta-version. A more advanced version will probably involve one or two pills at every daily hormonal shift - Waking, late morning, late afternoon, and bedtime - and one or two supplements per meal. That's at least seven pills per day, but more likely ten to fourteen. They won't be cheap, because this is life everlasting we're talking about and the drug companies will charge as much as the market can bear. At an absolute minimum say about $.60 a pop. At ten pills a day, that's two thousand dollars a year. A better bet would be $1.50 a pill, for over five thousand dollars a year. This is the absolute bare minimum, assuming that government health insurance covers most of the costs. If there's no government coverage, triple the cost.
The weekly visit to the clinic will probably be replaced by a daily blood and urine home-test. Three times a day you'll get to piss into a little device by your toilet, and you'll probably have to clean it daily to make sure the test is valid. And once a day you'll get to draw your own blood and put it into another device. One CC every day at noon should do it. You'll visit the clinic once a month for a full day check-up - Blood work, fitness checks, hormone injections, cancer scans, rectal exams, the fun goes on. That's at least $200 a month, but more likely $500, for twenty-four hundred to six thousand dollars a year.
As for food, I hope you like greens. Lettuce, cucumbers, spinach, swiss chard, brussel sprouts, kale... A full plate of greens at every meal, no dressing, with a small side of organic fish or an egg as appetizer. No salt. The food will all cost an arm and a leg - No pesticides, no fertilizers, because those chemicals get into the food and slowly poison you - and you can't ever skip a meal because you're already living at near-starvation levels and one missed meal will cause dizziness, crankiness, and lethargy. Three hundred dollars a month for guaranteed organic chemical-free salad, thirty six hundred dollars a year for a 950 calories-a-day diet.
Don't smoke. Don't drink. You'll exercise for at least an hour a day, indoors away from anywhere an accident might possibly happen. No rock climbing, no hang gliding, no rugby, no soccer, no hockey, no, no, no... Accidents kill, and you don't want to miss out on life eternal.
Immortality is a lot of work, but it's worth it. Just think what you can do with all that time; You can watch your diet, take pills, run blood and urine tests, work out, monitor your health for the slightest sign of infection. And you can do all this while working full time, because immortality costs at least eight thousand dollars a year, but more likely it will be fourteen thousand dollars or more, all on top of your normal cost of living.
It costs a lot, and it will take up most of your leisure time. When will you find the time and resources to have kids? When will anyone from a society rich enough to afford immortality have kids? Raising a child is already more effort than it's worth in the developed world; That's why birth rates are dropping. Wealthy urban societies don't need children, they need skilled adult workers, but raising a child to adulthood is a drain on parental resources with very little reward. The only reasons people have kids in the westernized world are purely sentimental ones. Why would immortals have children? Their parents are alive, all their childhood friends are alive - Hell, all their old pets are still alive. There's no practical reason for children, and all the emotional ones are gone. Goodbye birthrate, hello stagnant population.
And it's a conservative population. They're old, they don't want to take risks, and they like things to stay the way they remember them. They vote and they put a lot of money into political lobbying, so the government's main priorities are health and safety. No one wants to join the armed forces, so the government hires a small corps of professionals from overseas.
They're rich, they're scared to take chances, and the army is mostly made of mercenaries. A perfect target for any poor nation with a lot of unemployed young men.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1522606_1,00.html
http://www.calorierestriction.org
http://www.nanomedicine.com/
http://www.imminst.org/
The science is complex but the idea is easy. Tissues and organs grown in nutrient tanks can replace worn-out organs or damaged connective tissues. Stem cells can reverse memory loss and restore mental flexibility in the elderly. Dietary supplements, hormone treatments, and simple clean living can prevent a lot of the cellular damage that causes aging. It's all pretty straightforward.
Current life-extension regimes involve weekly trips to the clinic and two hundred and fifty dietary supplements a day, but this is a beta-version. A more advanced version will probably involve one or two pills at every daily hormonal shift - Waking, late morning, late afternoon, and bedtime - and one or two supplements per meal. That's at least seven pills per day, but more likely ten to fourteen. They won't be cheap, because this is life everlasting we're talking about and the drug companies will charge as much as the market can bear. At an absolute minimum say about $.60 a pop. At ten pills a day, that's two thousand dollars a year. A better bet would be $1.50 a pill, for over five thousand dollars a year. This is the absolute bare minimum, assuming that government health insurance covers most of the costs. If there's no government coverage, triple the cost.
The weekly visit to the clinic will probably be replaced by a daily blood and urine home-test. Three times a day you'll get to piss into a little device by your toilet, and you'll probably have to clean it daily to make sure the test is valid. And once a day you'll get to draw your own blood and put it into another device. One CC every day at noon should do it. You'll visit the clinic once a month for a full day check-up - Blood work, fitness checks, hormone injections, cancer scans, rectal exams, the fun goes on. That's at least $200 a month, but more likely $500, for twenty-four hundred to six thousand dollars a year.
As for food, I hope you like greens. Lettuce, cucumbers, spinach, swiss chard, brussel sprouts, kale... A full plate of greens at every meal, no dressing, with a small side of organic fish or an egg as appetizer. No salt. The food will all cost an arm and a leg - No pesticides, no fertilizers, because those chemicals get into the food and slowly poison you - and you can't ever skip a meal because you're already living at near-starvation levels and one missed meal will cause dizziness, crankiness, and lethargy. Three hundred dollars a month for guaranteed organic chemical-free salad, thirty six hundred dollars a year for a 950 calories-a-day diet.
Don't smoke. Don't drink. You'll exercise for at least an hour a day, indoors away from anywhere an accident might possibly happen. No rock climbing, no hang gliding, no rugby, no soccer, no hockey, no, no, no... Accidents kill, and you don't want to miss out on life eternal.
Immortality is a lot of work, but it's worth it. Just think what you can do with all that time; You can watch your diet, take pills, run blood and urine tests, work out, monitor your health for the slightest sign of infection. And you can do all this while working full time, because immortality costs at least eight thousand dollars a year, but more likely it will be fourteen thousand dollars or more, all on top of your normal cost of living.
It costs a lot, and it will take up most of your leisure time. When will you find the time and resources to have kids? When will anyone from a society rich enough to afford immortality have kids? Raising a child is already more effort than it's worth in the developed world; That's why birth rates are dropping. Wealthy urban societies don't need children, they need skilled adult workers, but raising a child to adulthood is a drain on parental resources with very little reward. The only reasons people have kids in the westernized world are purely sentimental ones. Why would immortals have children? Their parents are alive, all their childhood friends are alive - Hell, all their old pets are still alive. There's no practical reason for children, and all the emotional ones are gone. Goodbye birthrate, hello stagnant population.
And it's a conservative population. They're old, they don't want to take risks, and they like things to stay the way they remember them. They vote and they put a lot of money into political lobbying, so the government's main priorities are health and safety. No one wants to join the armed forces, so the government hires a small corps of professionals from overseas.
They're rich, they're scared to take chances, and the army is mostly made of mercenaries. A perfect target for any poor nation with a lot of unemployed young men.
Are You Fit To Breed?
Eugenics has made a comeback, now under the shiny new term reprogenics.
The supporters promise that this time they'll be good. No breeding programs, no forced sterilization, just good old fashioned common sense about who is allowed to have how many children.
Let's take them at their word. These are people of good will and we've come a long way since the Nazis turned eugenics into a weapon of genocide. We live in a better, safer world, a world without people willing to use force to inflict their view of the world on innocents. Let's take a rational look at ethical reprogenics.
The point to breeding is to create a stable population, or one that grows at a sustainable rate. The point to controlled breeding is to ensure that following generations are healthier amd smarter than the ones that came before. A reprogenic community will consist of a number of adults (A), who agree to have a number of offspring (O) at least equal to A (O=A). This will maintain a set population level, but one of the tenets of reprogenics is that population increase is good so we're more likely looking at O=A+1 or O=A+10%, rounding that percentage up because the idea of a fractional child is a bit disgusting.
The adults of these communities need to be the right people, because one of the tenets of reprogenics is that genetic defects - Diabetes, allergies, behavioural disorders - are spreading rapidly through the current population (Never mind that most of the diseases reprogenics are supposed to prevent are environmental in origin. We're taking these people at face value, remember?). The adults chosen for breeding will be free of genes that contribute to disease such as diabetes (No Native Americans), sickle-cell anemia (No Africans), Tay-Sachs disease (No Ashkenazi Jews), and other impure bloodlines. These chosen breeders will be responsible for the creation of a number of new lives. In exchange for their labour and time spent raising these pureblood children they will be supported by their larger community, because raising A+10% kids is a lot of work.
In fact, all that work is the reason people in the advanced economies aren't having more kids right now. In an agrarian or poor labour-based society, children are a family asset. Even before they can work in the fields or workshop, they can keep house, maintain the family garden, watch over small livestock, and gather firewood. In an advanced economy children are a drain on the household resources, and people only have kids for sentimental reasons. As a result, our birthrates have dropped off and our populations are aging.
To overcome this drop in birth rates our chosen breeders are going to have to be full-time parents, and we're going to have to make it worth their while. A live-in nanny receives about CAD$58 000 a year, or a bit less than $5000 a month, but she doesn't actually have to bear the children. Surrogate mothers receive $28 000 to $45 000 per child. For simplicity's sake let's call it $86 000 per year/child, over the course of at least three years (A= At least two, but possibly much more if the breeding couple is required to cover for some people who choose not to breed). Three kids will cost $285 000, not including the high-tech genetic manipulation that reprogenics advocates claim puts reprogenics on a more rational basis than old-fashioned eugenics. Of course, mom isn't going to want to have these kids one-two-three after the other, so give her some time to recover between births. She's still raising the other kids while recovering, so call it $401 000 over the course of five years. Any stay-at-home dad helping with the kids will probably be paid less, maybe $3500 per month, for $210 000 over five years. For one selected couple to have three kids, our program costs $611 000 in five years. That's just paying the adults, it doesn't take into account the cost of food, clothes, and medical care for the kids.
If you're not personally willing to have enough kids to push our declining birthrate up, how much are you willing to pay for someone else to have kids? How about taxes? Are you willing to pay a population tax, for someone else to be a stay-at-home parent and raise the kids you don't want yourself? A basic program costs over $10 000 per month per breeding pair. How much disposable income do you have? Are you going to spend your vacation at home this year? How about for the next five years, or ten, or however long the program lasts? Multiple births (Twins, triplets) would spead the program up, but fertility treatments cost a fortune and the mother's health risks go up; She's going to want more money.
Bearing and raising children still costs a fortune, even with a rational social program to support the parents. Volunteers drop out of the program, taking their funds to Hawai'i for a nice vacation. Taxpayers complain to their Members of Parlaiment, or just start cheating (Even more) on their taxes. The program is falling apart and we haven't even looked at the social controversies involved in selecting the genetically pure, the right people, to have children. We've given them tax breaks, we're paying them, we're paying taxes to support the reprogenic community, and the right people still aren't having enough children. What's to be done?
One of the problems reprogenics is meant to solve is the growing population of people with genetic disorders (Never mind that there's no evidence that this problem is real. Everybody knows that the past was a better place, that our grandparents were better people). People with poor impulse control - Drug addicts, teenagers, thrillseekers, the just plain stupid - are still having more kids than the well-off.
The wrong people are still having too many children. We can fix that problem.
Other reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/bio-ethics/bibliographylombardo.c..
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtdag/bioethics/writings/eugenics.html
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/un_sterile_past.h...
The supporters promise that this time they'll be good. No breeding programs, no forced sterilization, just good old fashioned common sense about who is allowed to have how many children.
Let's take them at their word. These are people of good will and we've come a long way since the Nazis turned eugenics into a weapon of genocide. We live in a better, safer world, a world without people willing to use force to inflict their view of the world on innocents. Let's take a rational look at ethical reprogenics.
The point to breeding is to create a stable population, or one that grows at a sustainable rate. The point to controlled breeding is to ensure that following generations are healthier amd smarter than the ones that came before. A reprogenic community will consist of a number of adults (A), who agree to have a number of offspring (O) at least equal to A (O=A). This will maintain a set population level, but one of the tenets of reprogenics is that population increase is good so we're more likely looking at O=A+1 or O=A+10%, rounding that percentage up because the idea of a fractional child is a bit disgusting.
The adults of these communities need to be the right people, because one of the tenets of reprogenics is that genetic defects - Diabetes, allergies, behavioural disorders - are spreading rapidly through the current population (Never mind that most of the diseases reprogenics are supposed to prevent are environmental in origin. We're taking these people at face value, remember?). The adults chosen for breeding will be free of genes that contribute to disease such as diabetes (No Native Americans), sickle-cell anemia (No Africans), Tay-Sachs disease (No Ashkenazi Jews), and other impure bloodlines. These chosen breeders will be responsible for the creation of a number of new lives. In exchange for their labour and time spent raising these pureblood children they will be supported by their larger community, because raising A+10% kids is a lot of work.
In fact, all that work is the reason people in the advanced economies aren't having more kids right now. In an agrarian or poor labour-based society, children are a family asset. Even before they can work in the fields or workshop, they can keep house, maintain the family garden, watch over small livestock, and gather firewood. In an advanced economy children are a drain on the household resources, and people only have kids for sentimental reasons. As a result, our birthrates have dropped off and our populations are aging.
To overcome this drop in birth rates our chosen breeders are going to have to be full-time parents, and we're going to have to make it worth their while. A live-in nanny receives about CAD$58 000 a year, or a bit less than $5000 a month, but she doesn't actually have to bear the children. Surrogate mothers receive $28 000 to $45 000 per child. For simplicity's sake let's call it $86 000 per year/child, over the course of at least three years (A= At least two, but possibly much more if the breeding couple is required to cover for some people who choose not to breed). Three kids will cost $285 000, not including the high-tech genetic manipulation that reprogenics advocates claim puts reprogenics on a more rational basis than old-fashioned eugenics. Of course, mom isn't going to want to have these kids one-two-three after the other, so give her some time to recover between births. She's still raising the other kids while recovering, so call it $401 000 over the course of five years. Any stay-at-home dad helping with the kids will probably be paid less, maybe $3500 per month, for $210 000 over five years. For one selected couple to have three kids, our program costs $611 000 in five years. That's just paying the adults, it doesn't take into account the cost of food, clothes, and medical care for the kids.
If you're not personally willing to have enough kids to push our declining birthrate up, how much are you willing to pay for someone else to have kids? How about taxes? Are you willing to pay a population tax, for someone else to be a stay-at-home parent and raise the kids you don't want yourself? A basic program costs over $10 000 per month per breeding pair. How much disposable income do you have? Are you going to spend your vacation at home this year? How about for the next five years, or ten, or however long the program lasts? Multiple births (Twins, triplets) would spead the program up, but fertility treatments cost a fortune and the mother's health risks go up; She's going to want more money.
Bearing and raising children still costs a fortune, even with a rational social program to support the parents. Volunteers drop out of the program, taking their funds to Hawai'i for a nice vacation. Taxpayers complain to their Members of Parlaiment, or just start cheating (Even more) on their taxes. The program is falling apart and we haven't even looked at the social controversies involved in selecting the genetically pure, the right people, to have children. We've given them tax breaks, we're paying them, we're paying taxes to support the reprogenic community, and the right people still aren't having enough children. What's to be done?
One of the problems reprogenics is meant to solve is the growing population of people with genetic disorders (Never mind that there's no evidence that this problem is real. Everybody knows that the past was a better place, that our grandparents were better people). People with poor impulse control - Drug addicts, teenagers, thrillseekers, the just plain stupid - are still having more kids than the well-off.
The wrong people are still having too many children. We can fix that problem.
Other reading
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/bio-ethics/bibliographylombardo.c..
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbtdag/bioethics/writings/eugenics.html
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/un_sterile_past.h...
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