Buffet is a bigamist. By all intents and purposes he lived with two wives. The legal status was not that of bigamy, to be clear. He married his other wife after his first wife died.
The personal section here is not exactly false, but is a great example of how one should not trust Wikipedia outright. A careful reading of it shows his lifelong relationships/marriage with two women at the same time.
Look, I'm not going to yuck his yum. Do whatever you want man. But the homely aww shucks image is very intentional. And very much against his actual life choices. Homespun he ain't.
Like, there are trials underway right now for organ specific editing for genetic diseases. In that, they just do some CRIPSR injection in the liver or the affected organ to regain lost function.
The trick is what we decide 'lost function' means. So, for issues with lost enzymatic function or the like, sure, yeah, that's totally a disease, no worries. But what about Vitamin-C function? We could easily edit someone to produce that again, I mean, most mammals have this function.
And, yadda yadda yadda, the slippery slope slips, and you get people that have gills or some such nonsense.
I think most people's worry is in germ-line editing, where you 'rob' children of choices.
Look, this is ethically difficult stuff. We don't have a lot of history to draw on here, and the actual implementation is technically difficult to do and to understand for most people (that would include these children, they would not really know what was done to them). Add in economic fears and issues with progeny really being your progeny (oh hey, a A2160F Thermo-Fisher gene editor is actually my father, when you think about it), and ignore all the Star Trek nonsense. This stuff is terribly fast and terribly unfair and terribly long lasting.
Top talent is also going to these lesser leagues. Mason Cox was a top NCAA basketball player and got recruited to play AFL in Australia. There's quite a pipeline now because that. Same goes for Australia to US football kickers and punters.
Most of these sports are so variable that they qualify as 'unkind' learning environments, per David Epstein's work. Meaning that a large variety of other education is preferable. Patrick Mahomes is a great example. His baseball training has made him a great quarterback.
Point is, if the sport is sufficiently 'unkind' then any player from other sports should be just fine transferring over
~5% matter and energy. The stuff you and I, dollhouses, dogs, and sugarcubes are made up of. Of that about 99.9% of it is very hot stars.
~20% dark matter. This is currently under investigation, but really all we know about it is that it is incredibly sparse and falls down.
~75% dark energy. We know nearly nothing about it except that it falls up (?!)
Point is, if there are other civilizations out there, and they have been existing for even a few thousand years longer than our has, a cosmic eyeblink, they are probably not just using matter and energy anymore. Heck, their understanding of physics is so much more than ours, even comparing us to Plato and them to Devoret is an insult.
One of the 'fun' areas on the net to hang out on is the 'baby-o-sphere' here where everyone is fretting about these demographic collapses. 'Fun' in the way the old net was, as everyone in this area would never talk with each other otherwise.
You get hardcore communists, evangelical christians, muslim scholars, boring census interpreters, etc. It's a whole lot of people out on the fringes of some bell curve that are all worried about this one little thing. I imagine climate change people were like this in the early days. It's a bit heartening as people who normally are enemies ideologically will share tips and news of studies. A little preview of a better future. And so a nicer place to hang out than the regular doomer internet.
Thing is with the 'baby-o-sphere', it's a lot like the plot of TNG's The Chase ( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode)), in that, you know once the little key or recipe that is discovered that will reliably change birthrates, then everyone is going to scatter and start hating each other again. C'est la vie.
> 4. Even if the society collapses, a better one will emerge. Black Death killed half of Europe's population, and some historians say that this contributed to Renaissanace, which was a major postive turning point. Labor shortages led to much better position of common workers, and the last time I checked, common workers bitched about being exploited.
Nit-Pick:
The Renaissance is more of the exception that proves the rule than anything. If you look at other plagues history they typically don't result in any large scale changes in society, just misery usually. Unfortunately (?) the data is a bit sparse here, as large scale deaths like this are a bit rare in history, so there really aren't that many plagues to study. But, I think my point still stands, the Renaissance was an outlier, not an expected result.
Boulder homeowners are not representative of the population of the city.
Like, a lot of the town is just kids at CU. Also, a lot of the younger families are in what little apartments or condos there are in the city and aren't homeowners. Also, like, you probably should only look at adults anyways as under 18s are very unlikely to have their own houses.
Granted a lot of 80+ year olds are in care facilities.
And like, maybe we can relax this to 60+ years olds, in which case based on the raw data there, that's about 18% of the population.
I mean, just looking around Boulder, the homeowners are old people, that's pretty clear.
One (of many) issue is that this has no bearing on other regulatory regimes. So, sure, the FDA approves of the drug/device/thingy because the AI got lost and no one is checking what it's saying. But Canada's CFIA doesn't because they are still using real people or centaurs ( people + AI, but I'm not 100% sure so don't quote me on that ).
That makes it so that you can only sell the drug/device/thingy in the US and some other countries that blindly follow US FDA (mostly poorer nations with very small markets and a lack of legal recourse, they'll just turn to the EFSA/EMA).
Which fine, but that is not the bet that these large companies made about a decade ago when it came to whether or not this drug/device/thingy would be worth it to pursue. These big drugs need to pay off all the failed research with international sales. Same is somewhat true with devices (mostly internal these days). These big drug makers want stability. Profits are fine, but revenue is just as important as these pipelines are sooooo long and soooo fraught. The human body is just too variable.
The tariffs and all the monkey business with this admin is very much not good for the US when it comes to these large drug/device/thingy makers. Chaos is not good for business. They have all learned that Donny and his ilk (per the article here) do not keep their words when it comes to corruption. They do not stay bought, they are not stable.
We're already shedding jobs here in favor of moving to the EU. Yes, not India or China, but the Baltics mostly (inside Schengen zone). We lost 10 people with jobs opening up there (same day) just this last week. The EU is stable in the eyes of my very own bosses.
Aside: Inheritance laws are one of those little thought of things that end up making huge differences in a society.
The classic one is the changes in Sparta’s inheritance system that essentially caused their downfall.
Originally every citizen had an equal plot of land, the economic base that allowed him to be a hoplite (Sparta help ~80% of their population as slaves, helots, as state property). But as Spartan men died in wars, inheritance laws were forced to let daughters inherit and merge estates through marriage, wealth, and land, and thus it all concentrated fast. By Aristotle’s time, nearly half the land was owned by women outright, and the number of citizens had then fallen to a few hundred as citizenship was tied to these land plots. The result was that the city that once fielded the most formidable army in Greece simply ran out of Spartiates to fill the ranks. Perversely, they all kept this going instead of breaking up the consolidated plots, as citizenship was tied to freedom and voting power. So, the less of them there were the better off the rich were, as they had more voting power and wealth at home (wealth was land, as Sparta forbid money in it's borders, well, sorta). So, power domestically was inverse to foreign power. And we all know when countries get into these situations they always go towards domestic power over national security.
Thank you for this perspective. It's very clarifying.. through this lens it makes a lot of sense that periods after large scale military endeavors lead to egalitarian moments. All these citizen soldiers so to speak will demand their share and elites will feel it is owed
Buffet is a bigamist. By all intents and purposes he lived with two wives. The legal status was not that of bigamy, to be clear. He married his other wife after his first wife died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
The personal section here is not exactly false, but is a great example of how one should not trust Wikipedia outright. A careful reading of it shows his lifelong relationships/marriage with two women at the same time.
Look, I'm not going to yuck his yum. Do whatever you want man. But the homely aww shucks image is very intentional. And very much against his actual life choices. Homespun he ain't.
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