Post: #26

(06-04-2019 03:14 PM)Arado Wrote:  So do people on this thread really think that CRISPR won't work at some point? That because the Chinese are "playing God" that in the future they won't be able to figure out how to select embryos for desirable traits and even create those traits in the future? Sure there will be side effects and plenty of suffering in the meantime, but someone will perfect this technology at some point. Some can argue that all of modern medicine is playing God to some degree.

I think we will get there but it might not be all that it's cracked up to be. Maybe the price to change these things will be too steep and it'll only be worth it for high value assets and people who are supremely important. Think of the head of agencies and stuff.

Hopefully we can roll it out and tackle shit like Low IQ and psychopathy and remove them from the gene pool, but then again. how do we know that this will actually be a net benefit?

What if we change ourselves to be immune to a virus and it evolves into something way worse in order to survive.

I'm not against playing god, but I'm not really sold on the idea that this is going to be some free lunch.

I think nature is highly recalcitrant beyond a certain point and it will blowback on us if we aren't careful.

This is why I'd be horrified if China finally did perfect this technology and then rolled it out without taking the time to fully understand its implications. They might end up bottlenecking (or even destroying) their population by giving them traits that aren't good for the majority of the population to have.

Super high IQ is an example. I think that if everyone on the earth were super high IQ then nothing would actually get done since too many competitors would slow down the system and break it.

if you're Einstein-smart and you got a raw deal, what's to stop you and a conspiracy of other super smart people from trying to bring the world economy to its knees?

I totally want this to roll out and be 100% good for humanity but, like AI, i'm not convinced that our governments and scientists are taking the question seriously enough.

Post: #27

(06-04-2019 08:55 PM)Fortis Wrote:  This is why I'd be horrified if China finally did perfect this technology and then rolled it out without taking the time to fully understand its implications. They might end up bottlenecking (or even destroying) their population by giving them traits that aren't good for the majority of the population to have.

Or giving them factors that aren't good for the population to have by the time that population comes of age. I imagine a place like China would gene edit based on an analysis of what is "good" at a social level and the social landscape changes week-to-week in the Western world.

The problem with government-sponsored gene editing is the drive to edit the populace for the benefit of the state. "Good" is hard to define when you're talking about what is good for a state and serious foresight would be required to determine if certain changes actually create the desired effect.

My real fear is the ability to role out gene editing for pay. In that case the super-genius threat you mentioned would actually be realized if a select few ultra-rich paid life-changing money to a couple firms to have their children turned into super geniuses. But I have no doubt that at some point this technology will be perfected if we push it far enough.

We can fall back on the "no free lunch" argument and say that these super-genius-edited babies would suffer from some unforeseen ailment that would put the benefits of their edited genes to heel, but that isn't actually a given.

"No biological free lunch" is true only in describing the phenomenon where, to some extent, it's very difficult to change something in the fine-tuned biology of the human being without triggering unpredicted negative consequences. But those unpredicted consequences don't necessarily symmetrically cancel out the change's effects in the same dimension as the effects. And every time we realize an unintended side effect of an artificial change, we come that much closer to being able to shift the variables around until the cost of that lunch is paid as it is incurred and the final recipient of this change actually does get it for free.

For example, the use of dissociative drugs like ketamine for curing phantom limb syndrome cause lesions to form in the brain and harm the urinary tract if these drugs are used excessively. But it was observed that the use of more potent forms of such drugs decrease both undesirable effects. And then it was observed that the co-administration of a GABA-B agonist (I believe) completely eliminate these "biological costs." Thus we have what is effectively a free biological lunch.

(06-04-2019 08:55 PM)Fortis Wrote:  I totally want this to roll out and be 100% good for humanity but, like AI, i'm not convinced that our governments and scientists are taking the question seriously enough.

They're drunk with the power of being able to do something that has never been done before. So they'll want to do that thing just for the sake of doing it.

How can we stop that urge?

Post: #28

(06-05-2019 01:39 AM)Tex Wrote:  They're drunk with the power of being able to do something that has never been done before. So they'll want to do that thing just for the sake of doing it.

How can we stop that urge?

Can we? Is this not human nature? To continually push limits? I'm not arguing the ethics of gene editing, but of the concept of doing something new and powerful just for the sake of doing it. At some point, human curiosity overwrites common sense, and we discover new things and society changes with it. Unless of course, we edit people's genes to stop being curious.

Post: #29

(06-04-2019 08:55 PM)Fortis Wrote:  I think we will get there but it might not be all that it's cracked up to be. Maybe the price to change these things will be too steep and it'll only be worth it for high value assets and people who are supremely important. Think of the head of agencies and stuff.

Hopefully we can roll it out and tackle shit like Low IQ and psychopathy and remove them from the gene pool, but then again. how do we know that this will actually be a net benefit?

What if we change ourselves to be immune to a virus and it evolves into something way worse in order to survive.

I'm not against playing god, but I'm not really sold on the idea that this is going to be some free lunch.

I think nature is highly recalcitrant beyond a certain point and it will blowback on us if we aren't careful.

This is why I'd be horrified if China finally did perfect this technology and then rolled it out without taking the time to fully understand its implications. They might end up bottlenecking (or even destroying) their population by giving them traits that aren't good for the majority of the population to have.

Super high IQ is an example. I think that if everyone on the earth were super high IQ then nothing would actually get done since too many competitors would slow down the system and break it.

if you're Einstein-smart and you got a raw deal, what's to stop you and a conspiracy of other super smart people from trying to bring the world economy to its knees?

I totally want this to roll out and be 100% good for humanity but, like AI, i'm not convinced that our governments and scientists are taking the question seriously enough.

That's a fair point, there are many risks and unknowns about this technology and I feel awful for the first few thousand children born using this technology who may discover some horrific defect later in life. It's a huge gamble. As you imply, perhaps some vulnerabilities or bad apples in society are actually necessary on some level to balance things out.

Having said that, there is still a lot of speculation about what CRISPR can do, but genes are a powerful predictor of many factors that determine life success, from vulnerability to disease, to athletic ability, to personality. The code is out there to be cracked and many errors are possible along the way, and who knows what kind of frankensteins will emerge in the interim. Even so, I am 100% sure that there are genetic tweaks out there that will make a given person more likely to achieve success, and when implemented large scale will make a society more successful. I'm not convinced that there is always a tradeoff - for diseases caused by mutations, by just repairing the single gene back to normal, things can be resolved with no loss. Of course, trying to make someone more altruistic or athletic is much more complicated, but I think it will be possible eventually.

Even without CRISPR, at the very least within a decade we will have the ability to fertilize a dozen or so embryos and do genetic screenings on them to see which of them have the genes for the combination of factors that will give them the best shot at life. Then couple implants the "best" embryo (or at least discards the defective ones), and boom, the next generation is likely an improvement on the previous. Even in the past, families selected partners for their children partly based on the assumption that you wanted good genes for your children.

Even with IQ, sure maybe after a certain level it doesn't correlate with life success, but a theoretical physicist needs at least a 150 and I wouldn't want to see a doctor under 125. Who knows what a society of geniuses would look like - perhaps it could devolve into squabbling, or it could achieve fusion and interstellar travel in a couple of generations. All else equal, we can't deny that it helps.

Either way, this technology WILL move forward, with or without the US, and I'd guess that it's going to start in Asia. Christians in the West can hyperventilate all they want about sin and "playing God" but there will be plenty of rich people in the West traveling to Singapore when they want to have kids to make sure their children have all the advantages. Where were all the Christians when GMO foods became commonplace, or when organ donation started, or artificial insemination, or vaccines, or antibiotics, or cybernetic limbs? The march of modern medicine happens step by step but our lives are far from "natural" now and one can argue that using technology to improve ourselves is the most human thing there is. Humanity should have been struck down for "playing god" centuries ago.

Post: #30

(06-04-2019 03:14 PM)Arado Wrote:  So do people on this thread really think that CRISPR won't work at some point? That because the Chinese are "playing God" that in the future they won't be able to figure out how to select embryos for desirable traits and even create those traits in the future? Sure there will be side effects and plenty of suffering in the meantime, but someone will perfect this technology at some point. Some can argue that all of modern medicine is playing God to some degree.

Quote:Having said that, there is still a lot of speculation about what CRISPR can do, but genes are a powerful predictor of many factors that determine life success, from vulnerability to disease, to athletic ability, to personality. The code is out there to be cracked and many errors are possible along the way, and who knows what kind of frankensteins will emerge in the interim. Even so, I am 100% sure that there are genetic tweaks out there that will make a given person more likely to achieve success, and when implemented large scale will make a society more successful. I'm not convinced that there is always a tradeoff - for diseases caused by mutations, by just repairing the single gene back to normal, things can be resolved with no loss. Of course, trying to make someone more altruistic or athletic is much more complicated, but I think it will be possible eventually.

The problem with CRISPR is that you're messing with something extremely complex.

It is true that a significant, possibly everything, amount of what we do is determined by genes. But my understanding is that all that stuff is intensely complex.

For example:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-...telligence

Scientists Just Found Almost 1,000 New Genes Associated With Intelligence

Here's how I look at it:

I think CRISPR will work, but will have serious side effects.

I also think it will always have side effects.

I'm using my engineering background here - I've worked on feedback systems and they're a fucking nightmare to optimize. Ever tried messing with a PID controller?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller

You basically have 3 variables you mess with, and let me tell you from personal experience, it's so freakishly hard to get right. You move one variable a tiny bit to the wrong direction and you'll get some really whack output.

I often shake my head when Nassim Taleb goes on some weird Twitter feud, but he's been dead on about the complexity of food and how dangerous Monsanto's genetic modifications have been.

It's really hard to explain sometimes. If you ever get the chance, try messing with a PID controller, it's possibly the simplest feedback/complex system out there and you'll want to break it.

Now take our DNA. That is infinitely more complex than any of the systems I've worked for. You've got millions (maybe billions?) of genes all interplaying with each other.

Yeah, in theory a Sudanese couple can have a caucasian blonde blue-eyed kid. In theory - since as Fortis very astutely pointed out, there is no free lunch.

There's probably some geneticist out there with an engineering background who's done control engineering equations as a simple model for genes. And come to the conclusion that when you change one genes, you vastly change multiple outcomes.

Btw feedback systems have outputs that feed into other inputs. So you change A, it changes B, it changes C and the change in C changes B again. Highly complex.

So already in theory, that caucasian kid is probably going to have some severe drawback - it could be anything from an increase susceptibility to psychotic behavior to something insane like having extremely brittle bones.

In practice...literally, only God knows what the fuck will come out of CRISPR.

The only thing I can think of right now that may work is if they combine machine learning into this:

You take genes of 100s of living blue eyed blonde caucasion people.

And then you figure out which genes to fuck with it and which ones to leave unaltered.

That way you take the guesswork out and let the computers effectively brute force the solution using massive amount of data.

The other thing is that I wonder how clean CRISPR needs to be. What I mean is that CRISPR right now has a bad habit of accidentally messing with genes it wasn't supposed to:

https://www.sciencealert.com/crispr-edit...etion-site

A systematic investigation of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing in mouse and human cells has discovered that the technique appears to frequently cause extensive mutations and genetic damage that the researchers say wouldn't be detected by existing DNA tests.

"This is the first systematic assessment of unexpected events resulting from CRISPR/Cas9 editing in therapeutically relevant cells," explains geneticist Allan Bradley from the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK.

"We found that changes in the DNA have been seriously underestimated before now."

How good do we need to get. 99%? 99.99? Six sigma enough?

Post: #31

Instead of designer kids, most people I know are into using CRISPR and other bio-engineering techniques for personal anti-aging. Just this morning I see a paper that a CRISPR technique has been developed to modify the genomic DNA of ones' stem cells only. It is an entirely invivo process that is 60% effective. This is a very big deal because it means we can now repair genomic DNA damage, if it turns out to be a cause of aging (this is a major debate between the SENS people and other researchers). Repair of genomic DNA is considered to be the most difficult part of anti-aging (everything else is much easier to do). The developments in bio-engineering are coming fast and furious. I really do think we can beat this aging thing in the next 10-15 years.

As Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) would say, "faster please".

Your mission, if choose to accept it, is to stat alive long enough to make it to these therapies. I believe its called the transhumanist wager.

Post: #32

Quote:We can fall back on the "no free lunch" argument and say that these super-genius-edited babies would suffer from some unforeseen ailment that would put the benefits of their edited genes to heel, but that isn't actually a given.

Would have to disagree, it very much is a given. All you have to do is look at actual geniuses and see how well they fair. Outside of specialized fields such as academia (Terrence Tao, Ted Kaczynski, Einstein) and the tech industry (Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates), geniuses do phenomenally bad.

Not to mention, they often don't get laid. That's the unforeseen ailment.

You spend enough time with super geniuses and you realize there's a good reason that the human IQ average in high achieving societies seems stuck in the low 100s.

I don't think super high IQ people would take over societies. More likely, they'll be self-destructive like Rick on Rick 'n Morty. Societies actually function well when a good chunk of people are around the 100-120 mark. Smart enough to function, dumb enough to not question the point of it all.

As was said in this thread, at some point you become too smart to even want to play the game. As a crude analogy, imagine taking an 115 IQ human being and planting his brain into a cow. Cows spend most of their days eating and pooping. The 115 IQ cow would probably walk over to the slaughterhouse free willing due to the sheer boredom he faces.

People have an extremely hard time believing in trade-offs. It's understandable, once you realize everything ends up going to zero in the long run, it can be hard to justify any action. But it doesn't change the fact that Fortis is right, there is no free lunch.

How long it takes to discover the actual cost is a different question though. It could possibly take centuries for the full effects to manifest itself. Often, or really always, with technology the benefits come first. The costs are always on the backend.

Post: #33

(06-09-2019 10:12 AM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  Instead of designer kids, most people I know are into using CRISPR and other bio-engineering techniques for personal anti-aging. Just this morning I see a paper that a CRISPR technique has been developed to modify the genomic DNA of ones' stem cells only. It is an entirely invivo process that is 60% effective. This is a very big deal because it means we can now repair genomic DNA damage, if it turns out to be a cause of aging (this is a major debate between the SENS people and other researchers). Repair of genomic DNA is considered to be the most difficult part of anti-aging (everything else is much easier to do). The developments in bio-engineering are coming fast and furious. I really do think we can beat this aging thing in the next 10-15 years.

As Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) would say, "faster please".

Your mission, if choose to accept it, is to stat alive long enough to make it to these therapies. I believe its called the transhumanist wager.

Aging isn't supposed to be something you beat, or at least should aim to beat.

Reality is that societies only have enough space for approximately 4 generations.

It's imperative old people die so younger generations can take their place.

Ever seen what happens to an industry where the older people don't retire on time?

They calcify and become rigid. It's ugly.

But ultimately, it's unsurprising that in a godless world we have people aiming for material immortality.

I do wonder though if people are psychologically capable of living for so long. My initial guess would be we're not wired to collectively live past 120.

But hey, you know, we'll see what the future brings. Despite my pessimism, I am looking forward to seeing what the next few decades bring.

Post: #34

^^

They become rigid because of biological aging.

Post: #35

(06-09-2019 03:50 PM)Dan Woolf Wrote:  ^^

They become rigid because of biological aging.

Partly.

The other part is psychological rigidity. How many boomers are actually listening to the same music as 20 year olds, dabbling in cryptocurrency, etc? None of that stuff is depending on how far along you are with biological aging.

The first 2-3 decades of our lives tend to solidify how we look at the world. Sure, people change and adapt even as they get older, but the foundation is pretty concrete.

It's a bit wild you can tell which generation most people are part of based solely on how they talk.

Post: #36

China has no incentive to be ethical, single party control of their government , and has more people than they know what to do with-They shall lead the CRISPR revolution.

Post: #37

(06-09-2019 10:57 AM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  Aging isn't supposed to be something you beat, or at least should aim to beat.

Its something I very much intend to beat. Aging sucks donkey dicks. I believe in beating and removing from my life anything that sucks donkey dicks.

Quote:Reality is that societies only have enough space for approximately 4 generations.

It's imperative old people die so younger generations can take their place.

Ever seen what happens to an industry where the older people don't retire on time?

They calcify and become rigid. It's ugly.

But ultimately, it's unsurprising that in a godless world we have people aiming for material immortality.

I do wonder though if people are psychologically capable of living for so long. My initial guess would be we're not wired to collectively live past 120.

But hey, you know, we'll see what the future brings. Despite my pessimism, I am looking forward to seeing what the next few decades bring.

I take it this is your way of saying you're not making the transhumanist wager.

Well I am.

Post: #38

(06-09-2019 08:14 PM)Atlanta Man Wrote:  China has no incentive to be ethical, single party control of their government , and has more people than they know what to do with-They shall lead the CRISPR revolution.

On paper, they will, but with the way they execute things here, the CRISPR revolution will lead them.

What I mean is that they're most likely botch it in some area that fucks them badly. They are very much min/max thinkers. They're the sorts of people who think that just stacking more and more IQ on top the society will solve it's problems without realizing that regulations are just slightly less complex puzzles as people get smarter and smarter.

They have a regime predicated on lying to their population about their past and even killing them off if they ask too many questions. How do they plan to hide the past against people who might be smart enough to dig into and get past the bullshit?

We already see how they get called out by foreign nations for their bullshit and how they react. I think CRISPR would directly threaten the power of the party here.

I think CRISPR might actually fully liberalize the world in some ways. Tech like this seems like the antithesis of Right-wing, conservative scarcity scaremongering.

You can make kids that have genes that mean they can survive on less food and still grow up strong and healthy.

Ultimately, I genuinely do want to see this technology used to help people. Let's edit out the genes that make people predisposed to criminality. Let's edit out the genes for shit like Huntington's disease and all those other unfair dice rolls. I think it would do more good for the world if we use it to heal instead of advance, but we know how people are and we know what they will do.

It'll be a biological arms race that will bifurcate the human race and possibly lead the civil war down the line.

Post: #39

(06-09-2019 09:40 AM)Arado Wrote:  

(06-04-2019 08:55 PM)Fortis Wrote:  I think we will get there but it might not be all that it's cracked up to be. Maybe the price to change these things will be too steep and it'll only be worth it for high value assets and people who are supremely important. Think of the head of agencies and stuff.

Hopefully we can roll it out and tackle shit like Low IQ and psychopathy and remove them from the gene pool, but then again. how do we know that this will actually be a net benefit?

What if we change ourselves to be immune to a virus and it evolves into something way worse in order to survive.

I'm not against playing god, but I'm not really sold on the idea that this is going to be some free lunch.

I think nature is highly recalcitrant beyond a certain point and it will blowback on us if we aren't careful.

This is why I'd be horrified if China finally did perfect this technology and then rolled it out without taking the time to fully understand its implications. They might end up bottlenecking (or even destroying) their population by giving them traits that aren't good for the majority of the population to have.

Super high IQ is an example. I think that if everyone on the earth were super high IQ then nothing would actually get done since too many competitors would slow down the system and break it.

if you're Einstein-smart and you got a raw deal, what's to stop you and a conspiracy of other super smart people from trying to bring the world economy to its knees?

I totally want this to roll out and be 100% good for humanity but, like AI, i'm not convinced that our governments and scientists are taking the question seriously enough.

That's a fair point, there are many risks and unknowns about this technology and I feel awful for the first few thousand children born using this technology who may discover some horrific defect later in life. It's a huge gamble. As you imply, perhaps some vulnerabilities or bad apples in society are actually necessary on some level to balance things out.

Having said that, there is still a lot of speculation about what CRISPR can do, but genes are a powerful predictor of many factors that determine life success, from vulnerability to disease, to athletic ability, to personality. The code is out there to be cracked and many errors are possible along the way, and who knows what kind of frankensteins will emerge in the interim. Even so, I am 100% sure that there are genetic tweaks out there that will make a given person more likely to achieve success, and when implemented large scale will make a society more successful. I'm not convinced that there is always a tradeoff - for diseases caused by mutations, by just repairing the single gene back to normal, things can be resolved with no loss. Of course, trying to make someone more altruistic or athletic is much more complicated, but I think it will be possible eventually.

Even without CRISPR, at the very least within a decade we will have the ability to fertilize a dozen or so embryos and do genetic screenings on them to see which of them have the genes for the combination of factors that will give them the best shot at life. Then couple implants the "best" embryo (or at least discards the defective ones), and boom, the next generation is likely an improvement on the previous. Even in the past, families selected partners for their children partly based on the assumption that you wanted good genes for your children.

Even with IQ, sure maybe after a certain level it doesn't correlate with life success, but a theoretical physicist needs at least a 150 and I wouldn't want to see a doctor under 125. Who knows what a society of geniuses would look like - perhaps it could devolve into squabbling, or it could achieve fusion and interstellar travel in a couple of generations. All else equal, we can't deny that it helps.

Either way, this technology WILL move forward, with or without the US, and I'd guess that it's going to start in Asia. Christians in the West can hyperventilate all they want about sin and "playing God" but there will be plenty of rich people in the West traveling to Singapore when they want to have kids to make sure their children have all the advantages. Where were all the Christians when GMO foods became commonplace, or when organ donation started, or artificial insemination, or vaccines, or antibiotics, or cybernetic limbs? The march of modern medicine happens step by step but our lives are far from "natural" now and one can argue that using technology to improve ourselves is the most human thing there is. Humanity should have been struck down for "playing god" centuries ago.

I think you and I are in agreement and the tech will move ahead, but I question how effective it will truly be.

I think that we may end up just with state-run eugenics programs down the line where we screen eggs and use the best ones instead of trying to create the best eggs.

I'm not one of those "playing god" types. I'm all for using this tech but, I am still wary of the implications. How do we know what will happen when you eliminate certain traits? What if we cull all the genes for psychopathy, for example, but those same genes also correlate with self-preservation instincts and such?

I don't mean to be doom and gloom but, like AI, whenever people start talking about how the world is going to be dramatically rocked by some new tech I hold my breath until someone actually does it.

Any country (like China) can talk about being the leaders of anything, but what results have we seen thus far? AI and Gene therapy are still very much nascent and could go anywhere.

They genetically modified some people and then lost track of them and now we can't get any follow-up studies (if they intended to be scientific about this) so we're still in the dark.

I'm glad China's guinea pigging their population for everyone else though.

Post: #40

Guys, anti-aging is the killer app for bio-engineering, not designer babies.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/06/tw...rials.html

I can tell for every one person who's into designer babies there is probably a 1,000 who are into radical life extension.

Post: #41

This is the kind of technology that's going to be applied to ten people for a billion dollars each rather than a billion people for ten dollars each.

Anti-ageing? Designer babies?

Nobody in the elite wants their slaves living long enough to learn rebellion. They're already doing their best to kill us off as early as plausibly possible. If you're not dictating your posts here to a hundred thousand dollar a year secretary/hooker then I have bad news for you. State money (your money) might be granted generously to discover these secrets and perfect them, but sorry, you're not invited to the genetic revolution.

Post: #42

(06-09-2019 08:57 PM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  

(06-09-2019 10:57 AM)Genghis Khan Wrote:  Aging isn't supposed to be something you beat, or at least should aim to beat.

Its something I very much intend to beat. Aging sucks donkey dicks. I believe in beating and removing from my life anything that sucks donkey dicks.

Quote:Reality is that societies only have enough space for approximately 4 generations.

It's imperative old people die so younger generations can take their place.

Ever seen what happens to an industry where the older people don't retire on time?

They calcify and become rigid. It's ugly.

But ultimately, it's unsurprising that in a godless world we have people aiming for material immortality.

I do wonder though if people are psychologically capable of living for so long. My initial guess would be we're not wired to collectively live past 120.

But hey, you know, we'll see what the future brings. Despite my pessimism, I am looking forward to seeing what the next few decades bring.

I take it this is your way of saying you're not making the transhumanist wager.

Well I am.

Yes, very much so. Highly skeptical of the transhumanist movement.

Though always glad to hear a differing opinion.

Post: #43

(06-10-2019 10:13 AM)Abelard Lindsey Wrote:  Guys, anti-aging is the killer app for bio-engineering, not designer babies.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/06/tw...rials.html

I can tell for every one person who's into designer babies there is probably a 1,000 who are into radical life extension.

Personally, I think this kind of stuff is going to fail catastrophically.

One thing we have in healthcare (and nutrition field) is a reductionist model of science. In other words - doing X --> get Y results.

Even with mTor, senescent cells, etc - I'm not entirely convinced we fully understand the interplay of everything going on.

Goes back to what I wrote above about complex systems.

I saw 8 different categories of anti-aging treatments in that article.

That's only the 8 that they know of.

My guess is that there will always be a crack in the dam they've missed.

But again, I'm keeping an open mind here and I'm interested in seeing how this plays out.

My money would be on the benefits being relatively minimal, but I could be wrong.