I don't think there's any chance moving most of that machinery on short notice, what with the incredibly small tolerances and clean-room conditions required in that industry. Here [1] is one EUV source. It's the size of a shipping container. The power source is "so large that it has to be placed on a separate floor". And that's just one tiny (but essential) piece of the puzzle. You would have to somehow bundle it up totally airtight, get it to the port, and safely across the ocean through an enemy blockade. Possibly while troops are landing at the beaches, and planes are bombing you.

The personnel seem a bit more possible, though I'm sure China would not be interested in its most economically productive "citizens" fleeing, so it probably wouldn't allow them through a naval blockade either.

[1] https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/14039015/how-d...

So you have to be strapped whenever you want to visit Starbucks? No thanks.

Lol no. Technically I can be because I'm in an open carry state but I only do that if I'm out in the wild or traveling solo late at night.

Funny enough with Bitcoin you have done 90% of the mugger/robber's job for them by holding the money in a criminal-friendly format.

I failed high school algebra largely because I lost my glasses and was just trying to imagine in my head what the teacher was talking about. The adults in my life knew I had a prescription, and had the money to pay for them and yet nobody did anything. The bystander effect is truly bizarre.

Agreed. Skimming Humbird's analysis, he mentions concentrations of catabolites as a significant limit on cell density, and points out that their removal is usually the job of the kidneys. To me that immediately raised the question of how to design an artificial kidney-like structure that can also live in solution. Similarly, the cleanroom conditions are very difficult to sustain, but what if we could engineer a replacement for the immune system to police the reactors?

Both of those are of course complete science fiction currently, but they're not "thermodynamically impossible" like he seems to suggest. They're 'just' conditioned on a significantly deeper understanding of biochemistry and genetic engineering than we currently have.

Given the current state of the technology and the implications of meat for global warming, I suspect that meat might just become more expensive until it stops being eaten entirely. And when the technology exists to produce it artificially, there won't be a market for it anymore. Speaking as someone who eats meat regularly, it's mostly a matter of conditioning. I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.

If you solve those issues cost efficiently enough to grow meat cells you basically also solved all human blood and heart diseases. Just run your artificial kidneys to clean the blood etc. It isn't impossible to solve as you say, but solving it would basically revolutionize all of medicine.

"Engineer a replacement for the immune system" sounds insanely hard. Problem statement: "constant incoming stream of incredibly diverse unknown bacterial and viral invaders that you have to recognize and kill before their replication overwhelms your systems, but make sure you don't attack any of your own extremely diverse tissues, oh also those bacteria and viruses are constantly evolving to bypass your defenses". Natural immune systems are incredible biotech and it's a miracle we're not all dead.

> I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.

If you were really hungry I think you'd figure something out.

I completely agree on your first point. I was going for a bit of understatement, but to be clear, doing any of that is firmly on the other side of many revolutionary breakthroughs in our understanding of biology. But that being said, the standard for success isn't to have an immune system that can protect a complete animal for its entire life. The standard is to put up a nonzero amount of resistance to the reactor getting colonized by opportunistic bacteria (yeast etc), and not attack the one specific cell type that you care about. It's about pushing the requirement for sterility down from 100% to 'only' 99.99%.

> Agreed. Skimming Humbird's analysis, he mentions concentrations of catabolites as a significant limit on cell density, and points out that their removal is usually the job of the kidneys. To me that immediately raised the question of how to design an artificial kidney-like structure that can also live in solution. Similarly, the cleanroom conditions are very difficult to sustain, but what if we could engineer a replacement for the immune system to police the reactors?

But then you're talking about re-engineering complex animal life, which is nowhere close to happening any time soon. Plus once you add those systems back in, you may loose most of the energy savings that make "lab grown meat" look attractive. This comment when into more detail and did some back of the envelope calculations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28623349.

> Speaking as someone who eats meat regularly, it's mostly a matter of conditioning. I don't think I would have independently invented the idea of killing and consuming an animal if other's hadn't taught it to me.

To be fair, you're a human: you had to learn all your survival skills. You wouldn't have independently invented the idea of eating plants either, let alone picking the ones that would give you a nutritionally complete diet without poisoning you.

Having your children abducted and held for ransom. People wanting to kill you because they think you put microchips in their bodies through a vaccine. Not knowing if people you meet are just trying to extract money or publicity from you.

The first 2 are solved by top notch security which billionaire money can buy (and then some)

The last "problem" honestly it's more of a compliment , and besides a billionaire's pockets are so deep that the extraction of money via social interactions are small leaks which are not only acceptable but should be again taken as a compliment.

"___ is so essential, ubiquitous, and universally understood, that to change it for the sake of changing it seems both foolish and foolhardy."

This quote is Elon Musk in a nutshell.

I'm not sure how to say this, but have you ever been to the sunset? There is nothing but space in large swaths of the city.

That cashflow problem can be addressed through bonds.

That's not true at all. Context is the only way to make any useful judgements. A couple examples:

Person A tackles person B to the ground and holds them there against their will. Is that morally acceptable? There's no way to tell.

If A is B's estranged ex-husband and is upset that she hasn't returned his calls, most people would say it's unacceptable behavior. If A is a bystander to a knife attack by B on London bridge, most people would (and did) say that it is justified.

In your first case: it is later revealed that the reason for A's action was B making threats of violence towards their kid and about to realize them.

The problem with third parties passing judgement is that they often lack full context.

I completely agree. Outside of these toy examples, there really is no way to know the complete truth. But I don't think we should give up on doing the best we can to recover as much context as possible, and we certainly shouldn't fall into some sort of epistemic learned helplessness and try to make all judgements from a position of zero knowledge.

The problem is that anything you allow against the perceived enemy might come back to bite you if you suddenly are perceived to be the enemy. This is especially true when silencing opinions; you're not only taking away their right to speak, you're also taking your right to change your mind.

I fully agree with you that when judging a specific occurrence, the context is really important. Judging completely without context, on the other hand, is good way to know whether the action is something morally acceptable.

In this case, the 'goodness' of the action clearly depends on whether you like the target. So I'd argue that this really is not a good thing in general. It's slightly worse if it hits the 'good guys' and slightly better if it hits the 'bad guys', but it's not good either way.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as the saying goes.

Any system is going to be imperfect. The question is, is it better than things currently are?

Yes we can look at particulars when applying the law to a particular case.

When we make out laws they should be impartial and not put the thumb on the scale when writing them.

I'm not sure what you think a law would look like that is completely impartial. The very existence of a law represents a thumb on the scales of otherwise unconstrained human behavior. What specifically should we make laws impartial to?

We don’t have to consider ridiculous extremes. We need to consider our philosophy, mores and ethics to inform laws.

We don’t say, it’s illegal to commit theft, well, unless you’re the government or the judge, then it’s okay because we know you must have good intentions.

Okay, so we should not give exemptions to specific categories of people who are a priori assumed to be good. I think that's fair. Are you concerned that that's the situation in the original context? Or would be, if we somehow knew who the original commenter was talking about?

It would be healthier to not know the identity to avoid introducing unnecessary bias in the decision.

It shouldn’t be like: oh it was Joe the grocer, yeah he’s okay, let ‘im go. Vs, oh it was Ernie the latrine digger, he always makes my skin crawl; throw the book at him!

So if the hate brigades were being launched by a group with a long track record of bad-faith and abusive behavior, you don't think that should inform your decision making?

Why not make a rule to address all brigading? why targeted against groups you like or dislike? The groups you like and dislike are not going to be concentric with other people's so keep it consistent.

Because opinions are not all equal, some are better and some are worse.

Even if both antivaxxers and doctors have opinions on if people should get vaccinated it would be insane to treat them equally.

I’m at a bar, a doctor and a highway construction guy walks in with his buddies. They talk vaxxing. The doctor has his opinion, though he’s not a virologist, the crew have diverse opinions maybe unsettled but giving me their opinions. What, the barmaid throws the doctor or the highways guys out, whichever she disagrees with?

That’s not her job. She’s not there to suss out truth or even narrative. We’re all there for community chit chat.

The WHO and the CDC have changed their minds over and over. Yeah, I get it -things change. Exactly, what's true today may not be true tomorrow and that is the point. People should be able to have a discussion.

I'm not sure I understand why you say that the position of the LDS leadership is an argument against causation. If anything that would seem to suggest that it's a a position related to being religious, since both religious and non-religious people are apparently subject to the same kinds of social pressure from authority figures, but the beliefs are persisting more among religious groups.

Of course, it's not like there's any sort of clean intervention you can do to just make somebody religious or not and see what happens. So it's not clear to me what causality would even really mean here.