As for helping children, there some discussion of this in Memo 2, and I’m trying to finish “Memo 3,” which talks more about the importance of getting one’s children to have older, more advanced friends and mentors. So far as I can see, that’s just about the only way to compensate for the limitations of schools.

No, I’ve not missed the point. I understand what you’re saying. But the bottom line is, I find it pointless to get worked up about a few rich people engineering their children to be a specific way. Trust me, if these kids grow up to resent their inability to hear, they can do a better job than you can for speaking on behalf of the unborn deaf.

Seriously, this is just not an issue.

As for circumcision, that’s got no bearing on this situation. Calm down, man.

-Wil

Just because someone has money to pay for something, does not mean they should have the choice to purchase it.  There are prices to pay to have someone killed, but we agree that paying that price should exact another cost: prison.  While deaf people are certainly born, and they have every right to live, engineering a fertilized egg and artificially causing it to lead to a pregnancy when none would otherwise occur, despite knowing that that egg would result in a pregnancy with a major disability, yet a different artificial egg would NOT have that disability, is a different topic entirely.

I find it humorous as well that you find circumcision barbaric, yet don’t see the parallel between cutting a part of a child off, and engineering your children to have no hearing.  Both are parents making a specific choice to remove a physical piece of their child, not just “lifestyle” choices.

Look, deaf people do have a culture. And there’s only one way in: being deaf. If these parents want their kids to be a part of that culture, then so be it. After all, we don’t object to religious parents insisting on their kids getting a religious education and religious upbringing; they’re just raising their kids in their own culture.

Although it sounds odd when applied to something we categorize as a disability, deaf people really do have their own subculture, their own language that goes along with this subculture, and that’s fine. Deafness is fundamentally different in this regard than, say, congenital paraplegia, or sickle-cell anemia.

But they’re not simply screwing over society for their own personal mini-me ambitions. No, they’re actually helping maintain the diversity of our gene pool. Humans are a genetically small species. Consider, by contrast, dogs. There are labradors and great danes and poodles, and they can all interbreed. While these breeds exist because we humans have inbred them, this genetic diversity was nearly all present in their ancestors, the wolves; it just took some inbreeding to bring many of these traits to expression.

Now, unlike wolves or dogs, humans are like just one breed: think French Poodle. Sure, there are some black French Poodles and some white French Poodles, just as humans have a variety of skin tones, but that doesn’t matter. We’re all powerfully inbred, and that’s a dangerous place for a species to be.

Now, most genetic screening is going to act to reduce the number of people with certain traits in our gene pool. We’re acting to become even more inbred. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for deaf people to choose to have children like them, because in part, it maintains our genetic diversity.

Besides, this isn’t even an option for many couples. You’ve got to be pretty well off to pay for this type of genetic screening (I’m quite sure insurance companies don’t cover it). So you’re looking at a very small segment of the population.

All in all, trust me, this sort of thing isn’t worth getting worked up over. Focus your energy on things that matter: basically, a fucked up economic and political system that tolerates large scale poverty. Rich deaf people wanting their kids to be like them? Seriously, guy, it’s not a problem.

-Wil

For these bags, they are acutely aware of the actual retail prices, and their opening bids are always a fraction of the actual retail. Depending on the quality of the fakes, it seems their initial bid can go upwards of half of retail. But here we have someone starting out on a supposedly real good, at triple retail. This suggests to me that they actually dont even know what they are selling. Each time they returned with bizarre prices in the 2.5-2.8x range. I finally had to just say look have fun, I am sure you will sell it to someone, and I left. At that point of course they came running out and agreed.

Their first bid was 3x retail. I then explained, in english and japanese, in terms that they nodded and said they understood, that the japan retail price is way lower than their initial asking price. At least three times they then said “ok ok ok ok” and then asked again for like 2.8x retail. I then repeated to explain what RETAIL is, since they clearly didn’t know.

They still got the last laugh, since they were selling a $1 fake.

Or did you just mean insane from the point of view of the buyer?

So obviously hybrids as they come off the lot now aren’t really a benefit to mankind, just another neatly engineered toy. The future though is in better batteries and _plugging them in_. Good urbanites like myself have commutes less than 15 miles, so if I could plug my car in at home and at work then my gas usage would drop by a factor of about 100. And of course that electricity could come from whatever happy carbon-free energy producing process you like. Wind, nuclear, reclaimed heat emitted from global warming deniers who just won’t give up, etc.

-Wil