“Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal.
It’s pretty wild being alive these days. Lots of big stuff the species is struggling to adapt to and figure out how to exist with.
But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck. And we’re making pigmen senior citizens who would otherwise be dead.
It’s quite something to stop and think about how the problem is becoming less and less about “how do we do the science and the engineering?” And more about “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?”
> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek.
They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers. What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint. Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.
> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek
No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.
And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
> They regularly used multiple tablets at a time, stacked like papers.
If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow.
> What we have is presumably superior from a technological standpoint.
The writers were surprisingly prescient about this. Turns out, the secret about paper-based workflow isn't that a sheet of paper can display anything, but that you can have a lot of them, freely arrange them in front of you as you need, pass them around, pin up the wall, etc. Multitasking on a single swab is strictly inferior to that.
EDIT:
>> And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek
> No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.
We definitely do, and this, somewhat unexpectedly, got us to the point of being close to having a basic universal translator as well.
Computers on Star Trek ships weren't built for conversations, and weren't talked with as a regular thing for basic operations, so it wasn't like chatting with LLMs. There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries, translating directly to something you'd consider a "tool call" today. But that's not the actually notable part.
The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers is that they understood natural language and intent. They could handle context and indirect references and all kinds of phrasings. This was the part we didn't know how to solve until few years ago, until LLMs unexpectedly turned out to be the solution. Now, we have this.
(Incidentally, between LLMs and other generative models, we also have all the major building blocks of a holodeck, except for the holographic technology.)
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too.
Considering how bad Apple is at syncing, that’s just asking for trouble. You’d never know where anything is or what iPad has what or if it’s the current version. Not to mention the charging situation and all the e-waste.
> The notable, if underappreciated, part of Star Trek's computers
Under appreciated by whom? It’s one of their defining features. Are you talking about the real world or the characters?
> is that they understood natural language and intent.
Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is. The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology. The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves. I just asked GPT-5 about itself and it replied it’s GPT-4. And if I ask it again in five minutes, it might give me a different answer. When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
> Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean and don’t know what the right answer is.
A tree falling in a forest with nobody to hear it: if it makes a "sound", you think "sound" is the vibration of air; if it does not, you think "sound" is the qualia.
"Understanding" likewise.
> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology.
1. "Execute self-diagnosis script" doesn't require self-reflection or anything else like that, just following a command. I'd be surprised if any of the big AI labs have failed to create some kind of internal LLM-model-diagnosis script, and I'd be surprised if zero of the staff in each of them has considered making the API to that script reachable from a development version of the model under training. No reason for normal people like thou and I to have access to such scripts.
2. Not that the absence says much. If humans could self-diagnose our minds reliably, we wouldn't need therapists. This is basically "computer, send yourself to the therapist and tell me what the therapist said about you".
> When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.
Those computers (and the ships themselves) went wrong on such a regular basis on the shows, that IRL they'd be the butts of more jokes than the Russian navy.
> Would we? What for? Why would we need reams of iPads on our desks?
To use like we'd use paper.
> Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean
That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do.
> and don’t know what the right answer is.
They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 - the model itself is behaving much like a person's inner monologue, or like a person who just speaks their thoughts out loud, without filtering. It's very much not a database lookup.
> I also disagree that was an underappreciated featured of the Star Trek computers, it’s one of their defining features.
What I meant is, people remember and refer to Star Trek's ship computer for its ability to control music, lights or shoot weapons, etc. with voice commands. People noticed the generality, the shamelessness of interaction, lack of structured command language - but rarely I saw anyone paying deeper attention to the latter, enough to realize the subtle magic that made it work on the show. It wasn't just some fuzzy matching allowing for synonyms and filler words, but more human-like understanding of the language.
(Related observation: if you pay attention to sliding doors on Star Trek vs. reality, you eventually realize that Starfleet doesn't just put a 24th century PIR into the door frame; for it to work like it does on the show, the computer has to track approaching people and predict, in real time, whether or not they want to walk through the door, vs, just passing by, or standing next to them, etc. That's another subtle detail that turns into general AI-level challenge.)
> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even strange pieces of technology.
That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components.
(I do imagine the scans involve a lot of machine learning and sensor fusion, though. That's actually how "life signs" can stop being a bullshit shorthand.)
> The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves.
They'll stop when run with a "who am I?" tool.
> When the Start Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that, they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning. Yet you’re defending this monumental gap as being effectively the same thing. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave.
All I'm saying is, LLMs solved the "understand natural language" problem, which solves the language and intent recognition part of Star Trek voice interfaces (and obviously a host of other aspects of computer's tasks that require dealing with semantics). Obviously, they're a very new development and have tons of issues that need solving, but I'm claiming the qualitative breakthrough already happened.
Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.
> To use like we'd use paper.
How we use paper derives not only from our own practical needs, but also from the intrinsic limitations of paper. Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size. The idiosyncratic way that tablets were used in Star Trek isn't how people would actually do things, it merely reflects the limitations of the writers to imagine all of the practical implications of technology such as they were depicting. It would be like somebody in the 1800s speculating about motor vehicles, supposing that teams of a dozen or more motor vehicles might be connected using ropes and used to tow a single carriage, because that's how they did it with horses.
> To use like we'd use horses.
> Stacks of paper are used because it's not possible to put several pages worth of text onto a single page of paper while maintaining a legible font size.
Right. And trying to replace a stack of paper with one paper sheet-sized screen is a significant downgrade. Which is why tablets are used primarily for entertainment, not for work.
Having lots of sheets of paper you can spread out around you is an advantage, not a limitation, of the paper-based workflow.
No, a single screen is a massive upgrade over using stacks of paper.
People vastly prefer digital dictionaries over paper dictionaries because you can more quickly find stuff. And that’s with dictionaries in alphabetical order.
Stacks of paper suck, there’s some potential utility in a space ship for all the redundancy around independent tablets you can hand someone. That’s something that regularly happens on the show and kind of makes sense, but is more a visual reference for the audience. Which is where stacks of tablets shine, the viewer can easily follow what their doing even if you can’t see the screen.
It can be true that stacks of paper are better than a single screen in some ways and worse in others. Other people like to be able to spread out multiple sheets of paper in front of them, even if you do not. You are correct that digital search is a huge plus of having a digital interface.
If we’re talking 3-5 pieces of one sided paper for say homework you can spread them out nicely, but scale that to multiple stacks of loose paper and it invariably becomes a mess.
Thus, in practice almost everyone is using multiple screens at work when they can even if printing stuff is trivial.
> They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101
> (…)
> Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.
Or, in other words, we don’t have Star Trek’s computer like originally claimed, and our current closest solution isn’t the way to get it.
Your takeaway presumes that all LLM interactions are monolithic, which is the opposite of what was being claimed if you take the other poster's comments about tool use into consideration. I have no real investment in this conversation though, so your proclamation of winning can stand as far as I'm concerned.
> Or, in other words, we don’t have Star Trek’s computer like originally claimed, and our current closest solution isn’t the way to get it.
My computer can both run an LLM (albeit a bad one, only has 16 GB of RAM) and also run other things at the same time.
> That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components.
In fairness, half the time the Trek computer does something weird, it only makes sense if there's no memory/process isolation and it's all one uniform blob of compute. Made sense in the 60s where Spock's chess app losing to him was useful evidence that the CCTV recordings had been faked, not so sensible in 2025 when the ship stops being able to navigate due to the excess system demand from the experimental holodeck.
> If iPads were sold in every store for $1 a piece, we'd be doing that too. This is indeed a technology problem (or at least half-technology, half-economics), we just can't make working tablets cheap enough (and sustainably enough) to support such workflow.
The price of a lowend Android tablet can be shockingly low, to the point that physical multitasking is totally practical for an environment as expensive as space travel. The issue is bloat. The UI for a Trek level starship could easily run on 1999 era PC hardware much less powerful than a 2025 postage stamp of an SOC, if we were still coding like it was 1999. But not if it has to run Android Infinity with subpixel AI super resolution, a voice interface, and no less than 70MB of various JavaScript frameworks crammed into a locked Chromium frontend.
I run a Motorola mobile device at work (retail) that would be competitive with 10-15 year old flagship phones. The browser interface is designed for tracking and ease of development and to show off new AI tools. It employs landing pages, phased loading, a bunch of dynamic things. Looking up a SKU number takes 2-5 minutes (MINUTES) to load things I could get in ten milliseconds on a console interface or hundreds of milliseconds in a 1999 World Wide Web e-commerce site.
> There wasn't much opportunity to hallucinate - mostly simple queries,
Depends which Star Trek series you are talking about; early TNG routinely had complex request for new research/analysis/hypothesis generation and evaluation; if it came out today we’d accuse Starfleet of being infected with vibe crewing...
It wasn’t a tablet but there was a TNG episode about a time wasting game that nearly took over the minds of the entire crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
They foresaw tiktok and their ilk way in advance.
We are also getting a Multipolar order, so a single government Earth is pretty far away, and so too with the 1984 Mega Governments. Surveillance is increasing in developed societies, but there are multiple underdeveloped nations that are currently under siege by their own citizens themselves. Not to mention we're unsure if these developed nations won't suddenly implode or come under fire by their own citizens to invoke mass change.
>Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.
>And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World.
Those are more human problems than technological problems.
They are human problems caused or exacerbated by misuse of technology. Mass surveillance and accruement of capital by private entities at this scale is only possible due to automation.
What difference does it make, anyway? The distinction is meaningless when the result is the same.
https://youtu.be/lBS9AHilxg0?t=36
Imo the distinction is very important in this context because there's a lot of technophobia and cynicism in general discourse, to the point where new developments in technology are often immediately met with extremely pessimistic takes re exploitation.
It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that new developments in technology have both positive and negative potential, and how they're applied is largely due to sociological factors. When we dissociate the issues with "technology" we allow ourselves to see the underlying issues causing potential misuse, making progress at solving those problems possible instead of a knee-jerk negative lashback against anything new.
None of the problems I referenced are “new developments” in technology. The Snowden revelations happened over a decade ago. We know that Facebook hid their discoveries on social media harm, like a tobacco company.
It is patently obvious by now that major developments coming out of big companies will be used to further encroach their dominance at the expense of every one else. It is not a knee-jerk reaction to recognise an obvious pattern and identify probable pathways for abuse. On the contrary, those have to be identified and discussed early if there is any hope of counteracting the problems.
So no, it doesn’t make a difference to distinguish between the technological and human problem when we’re not solving the human problem. It is an excuse which could be applied to anything—technology doesn’t harm by itself, all of it is created by humans. That’s just a variant of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. It is important to recognise the role of technology in facilitating and worsening the human problem.
Yes, and in order to identify them, we need to separate the technology from the social context in which it is deployed. That's exactly what I'm saying, glad we agree.
There are a few episodes about holodeck failures due to verbal instructions interpreted incorrectly (notably the Moriarty episode). Ship in a Bottle even has prompt injection when Moriarty figures out he can summon the arch.
Plus, the captains ask tons of questions a computer would know, but only the bridge crew are trusted with.
> Except their tablets weren’t filled with time-wasting features designed to keep you addicted and distracted.
This part I agree with, but is also very easy to fix (use a very old UI system, e.g. direct port of Apple's HyperCard).
On the hardware front, the only thing Trek Padds had that real life can't really do is that Trek's power cells had an energy density on par with "let's say an atomic battery had a way to dial the decay rate up and down at will and were not also a horrifying source of neutron radiation".
> No, we definitely do not. If every time they spoke to the ship’s computer it made up answers at the rate LLMs do, they would have either stopped using it or would all be dead.
“The computer is malfunctioning” has been a plot device in Star Trek since the beginning.
> And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.
Not disagreeing with you at all, but the surveillance on Starfleet vessels and facilities is almost complete and all-encompassing. Real-time location, bodily attributes, eavesdropping, access to all communication and computer data, personal and otherwise, I don't think there's anything that is private in their world! Remember that time The Doctor started a two-way video call with (I think) B'Elanna while she was in the shower? That being said, Starfleet is a paramilitary organisation, perhaps it's less awful in civilian life when one isn't wearing a Comm badge.
I wonder if you and I would consider this degree of invasiveness an acceptable compromise with a life almost completely without illness, any form of capitalism and the opportunity to pursue pretty much any life path we wish, in a society which is largely at peace with itself.
People keep forgetting that the surveillance of 1984 was just the surveillance of socialist countries in the 1940s.
The states were listening to people through their TVs in the 1940s?
They were listening to people through their wall art.
Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0].
The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time.
At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is.
[0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
Not "just", the inspiration came from many angles: Stalinist USSR, Nazi Germany, Spanish repression of POUM, Wartime Britain (where the shape of the TVs come from) and multiple other dystopian novels.
People seems to forget that Orwell was a anti-Stalinist socialist.
I don't know too much about POUM, but my understanding was that in Homage to Catalonia he's concerned with the Spanish Communist Party's suppression of POUM. So I think that is consistent with what I said above.
I haven't forgotten that Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist. But there weren't any anti-Stalinist socialist states at the time.
Indeed, communist repression of socialist ideas. I think the confusion comes from "surveillance of socialist countries in", where it should have been "Stalinist countries", not "socialist countries".
The stacks of tablets were because of DRM (a cybersecurity method to manage the threats of data exfiltration, “Digital Romulan Management”)
The class divide might rather be likened to The Time Machine
It really depends on the organ. Kidneys stand out as the most successful organs for transplantation, even in allotransplantation (between humans) so it makes sense that they are working well in xeno as well.
Kidneys are not as vascularized as some other organs (heart or lung) which probably helps a lot.
Heart and lung xenotransplantation are still a ways off and a lot of basic research is still needed to make them work.
My mom worked with eGenesis on pig xenotransplantation, particularly lung.
Here are some links if you'd like to donate to the International Xenotransplantation Association:
https://donate.tts.org/agnes/
https://tts.org/74-ixa/889-ixa-in-memoriam-agnes-marie-azimz...
A family member needed a kidney transplant in the early 60s. This was in the UK where the first successful transplant was in 1959, so just a few years earlier.
Thanks to a kid on a motorcycle she got a kidney just in the nick of time.
She was in her early 20s and was told she could expect a few years. Because of that she never had kids.
Her donated kidney served her well and she lived a quite normal life. She passed when it finally gave up when she was close to 70.
So those "few years" turned into almost 50.
Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course.
She always wondered if that was the reason it held out so long.
> Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course.
Typically, after a kidney transplant, patients are instructed to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. This is to reduce the risk of the patient's body rejecting the transplanted organ. Your family member was just straight up lucky that her body didn't reject the organ, even without any immunosuppression.
One thing that's fascinating to me is that most immunosuppressant drugs used today hadn't yet been discovered in the early 60s! AFAIK, all they would have had was prednisone, prednisolone, and azathioprine. Back then, a kidney transplant aided by these drugs would have been as new and revolutionary as the Hepatitis C cure or the triple-drug therapy for cystic fibrosis is today.
> Your family member was just straight up lucky
That was my thought as well when she told me. Then again, when given just a few years perhaps one considers these things a bit differently. The side effects for the drugs you listed does indeed not sound like a lot of fun.
Oh yeah, they suck. Long-term effects of just prednisone can include everything from muscle weakness to reduced bone density to spontaneously developing diabetes. Generally, doctors prescribe these kinds of drugs for longer than a couple months only in situations where the risks of not taking them are worse than the many, many side effects of taking them long-term.
Not a doctor, but I suppose she should’ve eventually told them in the interest of science. Also, pregnancy has a heavy toll so who knows? Maybe it was a good thing she didn’t. We don’t know.
> Not a doctor, but I suppose she should’ve eventually told them in the interest of science.
Glad she had a largely fulfilling life, but also thinking this. As much as it was her choice what to do with her body, it’s probably a good idea to at least tell the healthcare professionals about things like that, even if after the fact.
> it’s probably a good idea to at least tell the healthcare professionals
No, the pipeline to handle this feedback is completely missing from modern medical practices.
There is not really any way for a doctor to make use of this information to advance medical research.
Maybe what we need is more motorcycles.
They do help a lot[1], especially without helmets[2].
[1]: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/motorcycle-rallies-and-o...
[2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33334475/
Maybe organ donation should be an opt out process.
Amazing story. Thanks for sharing. It shows how resilience and intuition matter.
I don't think it shows much.
It's one anecdote. In the hierarch of significance this is below even the "one published paper" level which you certainly should also ignore even if you know enough to interpret the paper.
It's really good she lived for 50 years with an kidney transplant. But it is a massive stretch to say that she willed herself to last that long.
Totally agree that kidneys are the logical starting point. Lower immunological complexity + less vascularization makes them more forgiving as a test case. The lung, on the other hand… yeah, that's a whole different beast
>...that's a whole different beast
...so's the donor! (I'll see myself out...)
There have already been a couple of attempted heart xenotransplants? Lawrence Faucette being the most recent patient that I've read about.
yep, but they didn't last as long. six weeks max I think?
Pigs are already helping out with lung transplantation[0]. It's a ways off from where this kidney trial is, but very promising.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/25/surgeons-tra...
Meanwhile we can’t figure out how to provide a basic level of housing and healthcare to everyone.
In star trek they only figured that out in 2024, so we are only a year late.
And honestly, the way us politics are headed, a "bell riots" type event doesn't even seem that implausible. (Learning from it on the other hand does seem implausible)
[For those not into star trek lore, the way star trek became a utopia was first the government put poor people in internment camps, eventually triggering violent riots in 2024, which eventually lead to people learning from their mistakes and a utopia society. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots ]
So we’re getting close in the US government is putting certain types of poor people in internment camps.
"Close"? It seems many Americans still live in a fantasy. Unless y'all start looking into your history, you're bound to repeat it.
I think we already ticked that box
the school to prison pipeline is talked about a lot.
2024 Bell Riots were the tipping point[0], but there was still World War 3 a few decades later. A global nuclear exchange probably helped a lot in kicking human civilization off the dystopian but locally optimal path it found itself stuck on[1]. Meeting a technologically superior alien race a decade later also helped solidify a different perspective :).
But yeah, I too was disappointed when 2024 came and gone without the Bell Riots - Star Trek came this close to accidentally turning prophetic, as in the months prior things really felt like the Riots are going to happen on the date.
--
[0] - In that timeline, at least. We've already past several important world events that originally happened in Trek timeline, so the show keeps shifting the dates to keep with the overall premise of being imagined future of real humanity.
IIRC the writers now settled on "Romulan temporal agents meddling with timeline, desperate to stop the Federation from forming, and failing because apparently the cosmos really wants UFP to be a thing" as a convenient explanation to push WW3, Eugenics Wars, etc. forward every once in a while.
[1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
> [1] - How humanity bounced back from that so quickly is something of a mystery to me.
There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/
> Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s,
Back in the 80s. In the 60s it was just megadeath, with a chance of mutants.
(The Krakatoa movie was in 1968, but the winter thing took a while to sink in)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter <- look at "Early work".
But you are right that the concept was only made popular in the 80s, and a lot of the earlier works were classified or unknown and obscure to the public.
Back to the future 2 called a Chicago cubs World Series win in 2015. It actually happened in 2016.
My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of flying cars that’s so different from our own is that it was the events of the first movie (going back there and changing history) that ultimately led us to that different path.
Housing can be affordable or an investment. It can't be both
Hoarding land and land speculation is really the root problem.
It's not bad for society if it was used to make building to provide rentable space to industries and business or to provide homes, or quite often both, but it doesn't provide easy money to investors.
Now sitting on land and seeing it appreciate with no hard work from you? That's easy money.
This should be an easy choice and yet…
The key words here are "a basic" level of housing. A house in the most exclusive area of town will always be an investment (not necessarily a good one), because it primarily offers exclusion of other poorer members of the society from your surroundings, not habitation for yourself. It can't be affordable by definition.
But a basic level of housing is a human right, because it's a prerequisite for maintaining your humanity, ditto for healthcare.
It's also possible for housing to be neither affordable nor an investment. If there's an expensive area of town, and property tax is 100%, that would be expensive and I don't think people would consider it an investment.
At a system level - in Singapore it is. HDB (public) for affordable, private for everything else. 75+% of housing is part of the HDB system.
Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead. It seems much better than the typical Western political system to me. But then again gays were only very recently accepted there, right?
> Has no real democracy and the govt is able to plan decades ahead.
I get the sentiment but accuracy is important here. It's a real democracy vs counties where voting is a sham.
But yes, it is widely managed by a single party that was setup by a benevolent dictatorship and the current administration generally does a good job and is voted in with strong support.
So agreed, they can do really interesting things because of their time horizons of control combined with willingness to work for the better of the people.
The west doesn’t have real democracy either.
For the gay stuff, like the west?
In 2001 Texas court prosecuted Lawrence for having gay sex in his home (supreme court decided against it 2 years later).
Counterhypothesis: housing that's not affordable is a bad investment.
It can be sort of both. What you need is more housing built at affordable prices. But dont oberbuild. In that situation housing should act as store of value to avoid inflation loss, but not something that you get rich buy borrowing and buying up dozens.
You need socialism to do this efficiently. There isn't room for a profiteer. You need the government to invest (in the for people sense) in allocating land and building housing. Ideally dense housing.
> housing should act as store of value
Why? Housing should act as a means to live decently. If my house depreciated to 0 once I'd built it, I wouldn't mind at all.
> You need socialism to do this efficiently
No you don't, you need to heavily tax empty and secondary residences and the issue solves itself in capitalism just fine.
> heavily tax ... in capitalism
Many of us are taught that heavy taxation is socialism, or at least incompatible with capitalism.
Those things have been figured out, you're just choosing not to implement them (you generally, not you specifically).
The US can't, but humanity as a whole can. Finland has both, for example.
The US can’t. This has long been solved in other countries, to varying degrees.
Very few examples of this. None in democratic countries.
Finland is a democracy.
can't? lol. more like doesn't want to. not everyone in the world shares your personal values.
We're slowly starting to realize that societal problems are as hard as (or even harder than) technological problems.
At least we seem to have figured out how to, um, steer large populations quickly, now we need to use that to effect positive change.
oh we can “figure it out” trivially. There’s no technology or actual resources preventing that from happening.
But the status quo benefits many parties… alas, “people” problems are harder than technical ones. Most humans can be remarkably greedy, and also stupid in large groups.
We've figured that out, but certain members of society decided that extracting wealth through protectionist zoning/building code behavior is much, much more lucrative.
that just moves the figuring out one step to the right. knowing how something will work but not knowing how to get it implemented means the problem is not completely figured out yet.
Exactly. We haven't figured out how to solve the problem, because we still have the problem. Maybe it's unsolvable, and it's just a limitation in our ability to live together in large numbers. Or maybe we need to redirect our spending on (among other things) frightfully expensive experimental medicine and spend the money on things that are a lot cheaper and will help a lot more people.
Really? I think I can agree that the zoning isn't helping, but claiming we have figured it out seems like bold claim. Where _is_ it working? My impression is that housing costs are increasing faster than inflation and wages not only in North America, but also in the UK and EU, which don't have the same kinds of zoning laws.
It’s working in Japan
I wouldn't believe most in the US would live in Japanese style housing at all.
Most homes in Japan aren't built in the traditional Japanese style at all IIRC.
I was referring to the little space and tiny storage. Pay isn't exactly great for the rent either.
Why not?
Aren't Japanese homes super tiny? Even smaller than the already small homes and apartments in Europe? That's one reason. In the US, it seems that people live in bigger places, with higher ceilings.
The American Dream has become living in a McMansion in suburbia?
My understanding was that Japanese housing costs are only good in USD because the yen is devalued. I had the impression that housing is expensive relative to local wages. Is that not true?
Sure we can, how do you think our governments have managed to avoid it so artfully all this time?
Classic whataboutism.
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Tough problem when laziness and low IQ both correlate to high reproduction.
Provide with what money? Every major country is an ocean of debt
America spends a greater percentage of government money on healthcare than many systems with universal healthcare. Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans Affairs and Military medical spending are about 7% of GDP. Add another 1-3% and you would be ahead of almost everyone.
And that would still be a savings of 7% of GDP.
Not providing universal healthcare is entirely a political cocktail of wasting the money, letting big corporations loot it with tactics like using many partial vials of medicine instead of a full vial, letting the medical professional groups stuff up the pipeline of medical practitioners, and electing members who did all of the above to Congress.
Debt to who? If every country is in debt who is the creditor? Mars?
But you actually said every major country is in debt, so do all the major countries owe money to um...minor countries?
Perhaps it is not the country that is in debt at all, but the government? In which case it must owe money to entities like people and corporations. The government has powers to take money from entities in its jurisdiction and pay its debts, it is called taxation. In fact since the money is issued by the government in the first place, you could consider a token of government debt is actually a token meant to pay your taxes with. By lending money to the government you receive interest, or in other words a discount off your future tax.
All very neat, and why a government being in debt is no reason for it to not be able to pay for things.
In fact you might argue that government debt takes money out of the economy, so keeping inflation down. This means the government can spend more without causing inflation. If a government borrows a dollar and spends that dollar, there is the same amount of dollars circulating. However if it borrows it off someone who is hoarding it, and spends it then you create gdp growth. Magic.
Perhaps it's time to get past puritanical hatred of debt?
Taxing the land and removing zoning limits on it is the big hurdle.
https://ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/fy-2023-fed-bu...
Defense is only 13% of federal spending: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...
Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going:
https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...
Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point.
Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…
If you include things directly related to, but not classified as defense spending, like veterans benefits, VA, and the cost of foreign bases; the military is about ~20% of the total US budget.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BUDGET-2025-PER/pdf/BUDG...
>> poor value for money across a variety of sectors
Yup this. I went in for a cardiac stress test a few months ago. Less than 30 minutes in a room with a treadmill, an ekg machine and a low-mid level technician. $10k.
What's the pressure in the system keeping the price down? Many could supply a treadmill and ekg machine for a few hundred.
> Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare.
I don't think that's a hard claim to make in other terms than % of gdp—I can't imagine many americans want to devote that much of our gdp to it when other countries manage a high degree of care with much more efficiency. But we seem to have largely talked ourselves out of democratic control of such matters, somehow, for some reason, repeatedly over the last 70 years or so.
Actually tax the rich?
Even if you took all the money from the "rich" the goverment would shut down as usual the next year because the debt they create is way more than the private money available out there.
Insane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of under $2000. And what then?
Spend the money on things of actual value rather than distributing it equally among a group of people who will inevitably just spend it on an iPhone?
You can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once.
It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
We're capable of taking the money but not of investing it into useful projects. Inherent system flaw.
Billionaires generally do not have a knaxj for value creation. What they do generally have is an egregious amount of greed and a total lack of empathy which enables an incredible amount of exploitation.
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Then the former billionaires won't have the ability to influence society to pass laws that favours them. We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
> We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to consolidate power for themselves after you remove the current set.
Most people are not in it for their fellow man and whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society -- lied to you.
By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it turns out that was just a side quest.
I think there are other avenues here that are probably better spent to make society better.
Everyone in the US misses the 50s, marginal tax rates were crazy high. "Oh, but people had lots of deductions and not many people actually paid the top rates" - yeah, that's exactly the point, it encouraged money to be spread around more. And a whole lot of people prospered, while government revenue was less lopsidedly concentrated too.
Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian policies. We know that allowing more and more consolidation ain't the move.
We have 4-5x the normalized GDP per capita compared to the 1950s.
The amount of taxes we collect isn’t the problem. Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go up regardless of what political side you want to point fingers at)
While the economic output per person has indeed increased 4-5x, the inflation adjusted median household income has only increased by 50% (1.5x). Government spending is not the issue here.
The things you mentioned are always a problem because even the far left in America is incredibly right-wing.
Maybe but society was more egalitarian when we did so maybe we start there.
That is not how macroeconomics works.
What does that even mean? Care to elaborate?
And who is on the other side of that debt? And how did it get there?
Re: “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?” part of your post... I think that came to prominence when cheap, effective birth control became available. I think it was about the first time that the common people could decide to make major alterations in how their bodies function. That debate continue in the current fight about trans rights.
As science and medicine progress, what was once considered solely god-given, or exclusively biologically determined, will be for people to decide for themselves, the decision made between them and their doctors.
fwiw, biological heart valves, as opposed to metallic valves, are already quite commonly used today.
biological ones are typically made from either cows, or pigs (bovine, porcine respectively).
but this is on another level altogether.
I had heart surgery 2 months ago to repair my mitral valve. In the lead-up to that, I had to make a decision what to do if it turned out replacement was needed instead of repair. Choices were metallic valves requiring me to be on warfarin the rest of my life or pig-derived valves. I chose the latter, mostly to avoid warfarin for life, but also because my surgeon was a PhD for work on creating biological-derived valves that didn’t trigger the immune system. Just mind-blowing what can be done. But I’m glad repair and not replacement worked out - and I now have GoreTex fibers attached to my valve.
Pig and cow valves will calcify and fail eventually. But it’s a slow process so you have time to plan and make decisions for replacement. Mechanical values are great until one day the clicking sound stops and you need to get to a hospital ASAP.
Back in the 90’s there were a series of values where the flipping plate shattered-sending shrapnel into the heart and beyond. Typical failure mode is stuck open which is survivable. Stuck closed is very bad.
GoreTex being the brand of a material that was put into your heart sure sounds amusing.
At heart, he's a GoreTex™ guy.
I'll just get my coat...
> I'll just get my coat
And what fabric is that coat made of?
Sheepskin (the “I’ll get my coat” reference is from The Register).
https://theregister.com? It's much older than that.
I am not surprised, but that's where I learned it.
I’ll have to remember that one
But why cows and pigs and not chimps?
Size. Pig hearts are the same size as human hearts, cow hearts are larger, so easier to cut up for parts. Chimp hearts are usually smaller.
Also, the risk of transmitting zoonosis is larger in primates than in other mammals, because with humans being primates as well, more viruses/prions/fungi might be infectious to both.
Presumably because we already farm pigs and cows so there’s a supply chain and the ethics are ok in most people’s heads.
most likely because their (heart) valve anatomy is similar to humans ? this is just a guess btw.
We're deep into the part of the sci-fi timeline where the tech works, and now the real challenge is cultural, ethical, and existential
We've invented social media, but democracy wasn't ready for it.
I think Alan Kay deserves the credit for the tablet. We have vague allusions to tablet like things before Kay but it was Kay who really came up with concept.
Does he? It seems to be mostly keyboard operated, and references to any stylus interaction seem to be retconed, let alone direct touch ones.
My search only finds modern claims that he's the true tablet inventor and tablets are touch this and stylus that, but these poison results about any possible original reference of that interaction model having been conceived at the time.
What tablet are you talking about?!
> “Xenotransplantation” is pretty #%^*ing metal
Replacing human heart valves with pig valves has been a thing at least as far back as the 1970s with decade-ish survival rates.
Granted TFA is about a whole organ -- not just a piece of tissue -- but xenotransplantation per se is not new.
Eh, "figuring out how to deal with it" is the easy part. The hard part is first making it work, and then proving its effectiveness, scaling it and improving it.
Medical advancements in particular are notorious for having a hideously long lead time. This here is an experimental procedure that, if all goes well, will only start becoming commonplace by year 2035. It's not guaranteed to all go well.
You'd think there would be a massive push for new medical technologies that have the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives, and you'd be wrong. Healthcare is where innovation goes to die. Most companies that attempt to develop this kind of bleeding edge treatment crash and burn either before or shortly after seeing the first results. Just the cost of early testing of a new treatment option is enough to bankrupt many.
> “how do we handle how this changes what it is like to be human today?”
Progress, invention, is part of being human, so this is natural and normal thing that these thing happen. You can stop, marvel, and then go improve upon your own niche.
> But also… we got the tablets from Star Trek. And now we have the ship’s computer from Star Trek, and the early makings of the holodeck.
If this is Star Trek then I suppose it's a good example of "be careful what you wish for"...
The “pigmen” as you insensitively refer to them aren’t necessarily seniors. Organ failure affects men of all ages and the patients themselves are not to blame, often they have terrible support structures surrounding them and other factors beyond their control. You can be optimistic and compassionate simultaneously.
Sci-Fi movies aren't that far from reality. It was just a matter of time.
Seems like we'd want to be careful about the one(s) we're picking though.
Sci-Fi movies don't tend to be all happy, happy, fun and joy for everyone in them. o_O
Unfortunately not everyone is careful.
And people skiing down Mt. Everest. I always like to think about progress and our current reality in comparison to Star Trek….
Next is Old Man’s War style bodies
And yet while (legitimate) science can universally agree continuing to burn fossil fuels will cause unimaginable chaos for planet earth, half the planet doesn't seem to care about the impending collapse.
So while in my personal vacuum this is awesome, when I stop to consider the situation for 30 seconds I can only think: huh, we might have been able to find a new cure for humanity that isn't going to matter when having "a profession" (like doctor) is no longer relevant to our inevitable hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
Most experts don't predict the collapse of industrialized society. Higher temperatures, rising sea levels, and more energetic weather events will cause damage and make life difficult for decent chunks of the population especially those in less developed areas that are both hotter and more poorly equipped to cope with climate change. But I'm not aware of a consensus or even a plurality among climate scientists that industrialized society is going to collapse even in the more pessimistic predictions.
I'm not sure how Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the company building these pig kidneys is located, becomes a hunter-gatherer society on account of climate change.
Legitimate science doesn't concluded unimaginable chaos from continuing to burn fossil fuels that's what influencers or movies or tiktok reels present because they are part of the attention economy where scaring you is profitable.
Besides hunter/gatherers need medicine men who understand the old ways.