I have one of those Morphius Chromebooks (ThinkPad Yoga C13, 16GB RAM + real SSD) and it's unusably slow in ChromeOS. I flashed the coreboot package and installed openSUSE, and now it's my primary machine and absolutely usable with 6+ hours battery life.
I don't understand how Google could screw up Gentoo so badly.
Prohibition doesn't work because people want to modulate their consciousness, chemically force-relax, reduce inhibitions, etc. It didn't work before, and it won't in the future. The more things are forbidden, the more taboo and attractive they become.
This banal, smiling, petty authoritarianism sickens me. Bodily autonomy trumps "common good" arguments, and where it somehow doesn't, injustice abides. Society's job isn't to crush individualism in order to create the safest and most financially efficient outcome. Shall we throw everyone in prison for their safety and protection next, and control their diet to ensure maximum healthspan and potential for participation in the labor market?
Rather than banning anything, point out at an early age that cigarettes stink, get you addicted, cost money forever, and cause health problems. Point out that alcohol makes you fat and causes heart problems and cancer. The accept that each person has the right to make a decision for themselves about what risks they're willing to accept to achieve a desired outcome, and that they have to own those consequences.
Don't want to pay for smokers' lung cancer treatment? Then only fund palliative care for smoking-related cancers. Man enough to smoke a pack a day, man enough to buy smokers' insurance. There, now we can live free.
Smokers already more than pay for their healthcare so punishing them further is silly. Not only is their lifetimehealthcare cheaper, because smoking disqualifies you from many procedures and kills most users right around retirement age before the expensive age-related care becomes common, but the sin-tax collected from smokers in most countries is larger than the average lifetime medical care cost.
It's basically taxing people for saving everybody else money.
An interesting point. So over the next ~60 years, the UK has committed itself to having to find a replacement for all the tax revenue that will be lost by eliminating tobacco products. Additionally, the number of people with longer lifespans will increase, necessitating more late-life care delivery through the NHS, which will also have to be funded.
Outcome: this will cost everyone a lot of money. Time to raise the retirement age to 80!
You're paying for significant ground-up R&D and manufacturing costs that only marginally benefit from any economies of scale. (It's also an incredibly fucking robust machine!) This is not a MacBook Neo competitor. I think if it more as a product for the person who is bored of their quad core-swapped, nitrocaster-modded, corebooted ThinkPad X230, and wants a new, weirder toy laptop to hack around on.
All of the arguments in this thread seem to be treating this research's outcome as deleting a person, and applying a corresponding moral judgement thereto. But it is not!
I personally find that choosing to not have a child with Down Syndrome by engineering away the possibility in advance is no worse than choosing not to have a child at all, and better than aborting a viable but affected fetus, because no life is ended. I am not a murderer for choosing not to have any child at all because I feel that my genes should not be imposed on another generation, and I am not a Nazi for saying that if I had a child, I would take any available humane steps to ensure it received the best subset of genetic material from the set available to it. I would, in fact, argue that leaving the creation of a whole person who will have to experience life for 80 years to a series of genetic coin flips is morally reprehensible. Just because we've always done it that way doesn't make it desirable or humane. I welcome this development.
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