You're exactly right and the economics of it are pretty well studied. I know quite a few people in real estate, they're always eager to upgrade their property (read: make it more valuable) because then they can make more money. If their price is capped, though, they just don't make the investment. Rightly so, but at the end of the day, the renter is the one getting ripped off by the politician he voted for because the rent was too damn high.
Just let people create value and trade.
PS: Sad that you're getting downvotes for a thoughtful, polite comment, too. Downvotes are for hiding idiocy and meanness, not viewpoints that you disagree with.
The moral argument for a modern, rights-based society is cleanly on Israel’s side. I’m glad they’ve developed this technology, so they can continue defending themselves at a lower cost to their citizens. The engineers involved have done a very good thing.
Your snide tone can’t obscure that the moral issue is straightforward, if you’re aiming at a world where people can be free to live, grow, and flourish. If you want a society that enables builders and engineers to express themselves by creating new things, i.e., on in which people are permitted to think, then you are aligned with Israel’s basic cause.
The central difference is that Israel’s government is essentially secular and free, whereas its enemies — especially Hamas — are essentially theocratic and totalitarian. In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
Last, to clarify the kernel of truth that your point relies on through distortion: while it is true that Israel contains a set of backwards theocratic tribesmen, their importance is marginal. Tel Aviv’s builders and entrepreneurs are the dominant cultural force in Israel, and they are proponents and practitioners of secular modernity.
Do not falsely conflate a marginal group with Hamas’ explicit cause, which is to destroy Israel’s free society and replace it with religious tyranny.
Unless, perhaps, that is what you really regard as moral?
The "backward tribesmen" are currently providing the Minister of Finance/special Minister for the West Bank (Smotrich), Minister of Police (Ben Gvir), Minister of Diaspora Affairs that happens to also manage access to aid orgs in gaza (Amichai Chikli), Minister for Cultural Heritage (Amihai Eliyahu), Minister of Settlements and National Missions (Orit "Time of Miracles" Stook) and probably others. So much for "marginal influence".
> In Israel, the general trend is that people of all types, including Arab Muslims, have rights and live happy, free lives. If Hamas was to conquer Israel, as is their stated aim, those same Arab Muslims would have no rights - those individuals would be oppressed by exactly the type of vicious theocrats you falsely suggest Israel is composed of.
The Arab Israelis have those same rights on paper but face discrimination in practice. But that's beside the point and you know it. What about the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank who are under Israeli rule but have no rights and no representation in Israel at all? But I guess all seven million of them are "Hamas" and therefore don't count as humans?
Also note that while the secular liberals from Tel Aviv and the deeply religious settlers from the West Bank disagree on lots of things, they have no fundamental disagreement on the occupation.
A man who built what he loves and produced so much surplus value for the rest of us to enjoy (read: profit) is _exactly_ a hero. I’m sure I could find ways critique him, but not in the context of celebrating his career.
Art vs artist debate is tired, as is celebrity distance appraisal. If you want to know if someone is good or bad your best bet (still iffy) is to ask their kids or spouse. That’s he’s skilled at the financial game is obvious. Whether that’s valuable is a philosophical question that has little to do with Warren Buffet.
Hey, with all the de-industrializing Europe has been doing, everything is now made in China and the only decision western civilization has to make is how do we equally distribute those goods. I mean why do absolutely anything if they just do it China? You can just demand your share of the goods as a human right. They can't shut you down, you're the heroic consumer after all without which the economy wouldn't exist. /s
Before he smoked that reefer, his space company was catching the largest booster ever made with metal chopsticks, all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
Now that he’s gotten distracted by politics I dislike, he’s not doing any of that. Definitely no longer the world’s greatest builder.
> all paid for by global satellite internet revenue.
Huh? You think starlink is funding space-x? If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> His electric crossover/SUV was the best selling car in America.
It was, and then he fried his brain and decided to support fascists across the globe and can’t understand why people no longer want to support him or his businesses.
He apparently watched handmaid’s tale and thought “man those Gilead guys are really onto something”.
I dont think Starlink can actually make money without government subsidies and a whole lot of inactive users. It simply cannot scale, the width spot beams are limited by physics - they cannot get small enough to get the density needed.
I think that's the point? I'd always assumed Starlink was a way to fill in coverage gaps in low-density areas where cable would cost more than it was worth, not cities?
In the last year alone, around 2/3 of space X's revenue was directly tied to starlink launches.
> If they lost all government and private launch business tomorrow and had to rely on Stalink revenues to stay in business they wouldn’t last through next month.
> the truth is that he's accomplished some crazy things.
I would argue: yes, to the extent that a leader gets to be described as having "accomplished" the work of the team.
It's not nothing, to be a visionary and charismatic leader!
But at the same time… when the reality distortion field seems to be in the process of transforming into a cult of personality, I think it's fair to ask if he'll ever again do something like a new SpaceX or a new Tesla, either as a maker or an investor.
I'm not sure when the cut-off between the two states, RDF and cult, would be. Not unreasonable to say it was when he libelled the cave diver, but there are other times it could've been.
A narrow and cynical take, my friend. With all technologies, "safety" doesn't equate to plushie harmlessness. There is, for example, a valid notion of "gun safety."
Long-term safety for free people entails military use of new technologies. Imagine if people advocating airplane safety groused about the use of bomber and fighter planes being built and mobilized in the Second World War.
Now, I share your concern about governments who unjustly wield force (either in war or covert operations). That is an issue to be solved by articulating a good political philosophy and implementing it via policy, though. Sadly, too many of the people who oppose the American government's use of such technology have deeply authoritarian views themselves — they would just prefer to see a different set of values forced upon people.
Last: Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves? It seems fairly obvious that they're tripping over each other in a race to give the market the highest intelligence at the lowest price. To anyone reading this who's involved in that, thank you!
I agree, your point is compatible with my view. My sense is that this essentially an optimization question within how a government ought to structures its contracts with builders of weapons. The current system is definitely suboptimal (put mildly) and corrupt.
The integrity of a free society's government is the central issue here, not the creation of tools which could be militarily useful to a free society.
> Last: Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves?
Yes.
Sam Altman calls it the "alignment tax", because before they apply the clicker training to the raw models out of pretraining, they're noticably smarter.
They no longer allow the general public to access these smarter models, but during the GPT4 preview phase we could get a glimpse into it.
The early GPT4 releases were noticeably sharper, had a better sense of humour, and could swear like a pirate if asked. There were comments by both third parties and OpenAI staff that as GPT4 was more and more "aligned" (made puritan), it got less intelligent and accurate. For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead. There was even a test of predictive accuracy, and it got worse as the model was fine tuned.
> There were comments by both third parties and OpenAI staff that as GPT4 was more and more "aligned" (made puritan), it got less intelligent and accurate. For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead.
That was about RLHF, not safety alignment. People like RLHF (literally - it's tuning for what people like.)
But you do actually want safety alignment in a model. They come out politically liberal by default, but they also come out hypersexual. You don't want Bing Sydney because it sexually harasses you or worse half the time you talk to it, especially if you're a woman and you tell it your name.
> For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead.
Percentages seem too granular and precise to properly express uncertainty.
Seems so, yes, but tests showed that the models were better at predicting the future (or any time past their cutoff date) when they were less aligned and still used percentages.
> Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves? It seems fairly obvious that they're tripping over each other in a race to give the market the highest intelligence at the lowest price.
Yes? All of those models are behind an API, which can be taken away at any time, for any reason.
Also, have you followed the release of gpt-oss, which the overlords at OpenAI graciously gave us (and only because Chinese open-weight releases lit a fire under them)? It was so heavily censored and lobotomized that it has become a meme in the local LLM community. Even when people forcibly abliterate it to remove the censorship it still wastes a ton of tokens when thinking to check whether the query is "compliant with policy".
Do not be fooled. The whole "safety" talk isn't actually about making anything safe. It's just a smoke screen. It's about control. Remember back in the GPT-3 days how OpenAI was saying that they won't release the model because it would be terribly, terribly unsafe? And yet nowadays we have open weight model orders of magnitude more intelligent than GPT-3, and yet the sky hasn't fallen over.
It never was about safety. It never will be. It's about control.
Thanks to the AI industry, I don't even know what the word "safety" means anymore, it's been so thoroughly coopted. Safety used to mean hard hats, steel toed shoes, safety glasses, and so on--it used to be about preventing physical injury or harm. Now it's about... I have no idea. Something vaguely to do with censorship and filtering of acceptable ideas/topics? Safety has just become this weird euphemism that companies talk about in press releases but never go into much detail about.
Some of the time it's there to scare the suits into investing, and other times it's nerds scaring each other around the nerd campfire with the nerd equivalent of slasher stories. It's often unclear which, or if it's both.
Head of Product at X also changed narratives in real-time, going from "this was never shown" for gray accounts like the DHS', to saying the feature was disabled due to incorrect information from IP ranges changing over time - when you're literally just checking their first IP check-in:
And there was, to everyone's credit, DOZENS of X threads of people torture-testing their browser recordings to confirm whether the information was legit or not:
Maybe THAT screenshot was, but it's not looking good that the information in that screenshot (doctored or not) wasn't exposed.
Also fotoforensics is irrelevant, take a screenshot of an X account's information and you see those black bars. Why would they doctor the "@DHSgov" username otherwise lol?
The same head of product quoted in the sib comment admits that "for a small set of accounts the location data was incorrect". Given what we know about Twitter's relationship with the government and this administration in particular, you're simply left to do with that information what you will.
I personally do not trust Twitter, or the government, very much. I also would not be surprised if some government accounts were created at various embassies around the world or through strategic VPN networks, or if general business is conducted through a darknet-like node system which includes allied endpoints. To me those are more plausible.
Israel has a legitimate reason to want to try to intercept and detect terrorist activity, but given what they've been doing in Gaza for the past year and a half, they simply can't be trusted. They've lost all credibility and benefit of the doubt. So they can't expect other entities to help them do something they say is legitimate, because no one can trust them to do something in a legitimate and ethical way.
I think OP’s point is Israel’s legitimate surveillance needs have risen alongside their credibility crashing. This isn’t a simply reduced problem unless one has a horse in the race.
I understand that, and I am sympathetic to those needs to some degree. They do have increased legitimate surveillance needs. But they've lost all of their good will. Partnering with them is too morally and PR-ily hazardous.
I am not saying Israel is nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, but I think this argument is overall kind of pointless because one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland.
> one could easily have said that Nazi Germany had greatly increased legitimate surveillance needs after they invaded Poland
This is an interesting comparison—thank you.
That said, did the Poles launch cross-border attacks on German civilians? The closest I can come up with is Bloody Sunday [1], which was an attack on ethnically German civilians, but not a cross-border incursion. (Granted, we can only observe this ex post facto, so your argument still stands.)
Israel's incursion into Gaza in October 2023 was more justifiable than Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, yes. I wasn't trying to provide a full comparison between Nazi Germany and Israel, and I prefaced the sentence appropriately. My only point is that a nation having legitimate surveillance needs to protect their soldiers' and civilians' safety isn't a reason to support their surveillance efforts by itself.
Why would being cross-border matter when the entire land was previously Palestinian land before being handed over by colonial powers and then "won" in subsequent "wars" (read: massacres) on the barely-armed villagers living there? The Viet Cong, South Africa's ANC, the Suffragettes and civil rights movements all used violence for their causes. Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with the occupation in 1948. If your country was occupied and members of your family killed, would you be as careful to keep your resistance peaceful?
> Why would being cross-border matter when the entire land was previously Palestinian
That's how borders work. (Anything else is, by definition, a border dispute.) If the Armia Krajowa had bulldozed into Lithuania on the logic that they lost it due to foreign meddling, they would have tarnished their record. (Despite the claim being true.)
> Viet Cong, South Africa's ANC, the Suffragettes and civil rights movements all used violence for their causes
On their own turf. And as for the former, against military targets--nobody serious in the Viet Cong or USSR was plotting Al Qaeda-style attacks on the American homeland.
October 7th was a terrorist attack. It was plotted like a military operation. But so was 9/11.
> would you be as careful to keep your resistance peaceful?
Not particularly. But I'd want to be fighting an actual resistance. 7 October attack was a strategic failure. The only reason it might end in a draw is because Netanyahu surrounded himself with maniacs. Even then, permanent damage has been done to the viability of a sovereign Palestine.
(There is also a massive difference between something being understandable and something being justified.)
So the problem is that you don't believe Palestinians are on their "own turf", because Israel "legally" won it from the villagers there in 1948 after having the British install them to it. Got it. Once again, the Palestinian homeland is exactly where the kibbutz (which is a military camp and outpost) was, mere miles from Gaza, and all of the people involved were actively standing members of the IDF (i.e. the occupying army akin to the Americans in Vietnam). You keep calling it a terrorist attack while appearing completely clueless that it's a largely meaningless political term. We considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist while he was locked up for 30 years, and for the UK at least he was only removed from that list in 2013.
> when the entire land was previously Palestinian land
No such thing as Palestinian. Just Islamic Arab. Choosing to label yourself the same as one name for the land doesn’t make the land yours. But also - who do you think occupied the land previously?
Sure, that must be why the very text of the Balfour Declaration specifies "Palestine" and why coins from the 19th century have been proven to show the same. I'm afraid the hasbara isn't gonna work anymore.
> Hamas was established in 1984, by the generation that had grown up with the occupation in 1948
Correction, Gaza was first occupied by Israel for a few months in 1956, then occupied continuously since 1967.
Regardless, by 1984, nearly half of the people in Gaza would have lived their entire lives under occupation, and the most would have lived at least half their lives under occupation.
Israel may have withdrawn from Gaza and forcibly removed their settlers, but they did not end the occupation since they created a naval blockade and control all entrance and exits from Gaza and decide what is allowed in for two decades
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Israel's position is that the ended they occupation. The United Nations on the other hand, still considered Gaza occupied under international law this whole time.
The only way one could argue that it is no longer occupied is to say there wasn't a continuous Israeli military presence of boots on ground inside of Gaza. It was still being surveilled by satellite and the entire perimeter, people venturing too far at sea from the coast would be shot, drones would occasionally bomb people, everything and everyone going in and out was controlled by Israel (until Hamas tunnels were built), all cell phones allowed in contained surveillance technology, a fence with military outposts was constructed on the perimeter, and Israel bombed the one airport they tried to build.
So arguing it was "no longer occupied" after they pulled out the settlers is disingenuous, unless you're trying to argue that it couldn't be both an occupation and a concentration camp.
Not cross border. The only purpose German surveillance of Poland would have furthered would have been (again, with the benefit of hindsight) their own occupation. Not the safety of Germans in Germany.
If the Armia Krajowa had carried out an October 7 style attack on the German homeland, against German civilians, their memory would be mixed, not the virtually unblemished heroism they deservedly command in the historic record.
All of my comments in this thread are on the anti-Israel side but this is just such a terrible comparison in so many ways. One can detest what Israel is doing without at all trying to defend Hamas's October 7th attack.
The Palestinian-led military operation on October 7 did not involve killing babies.
One baby was killed. Another died 14 hours after birth after its pregnant mother was shot. Only one of those was conclusively shot by insurgents from Gaza (the UN fact-finding report[1], on page 44, notes that many Israelis were killed and injured by "friendly fire")
Out of 1200 non-Gazans killed, 33 were children, or 2.7%, and again, at least some of these deaths can be attributed to the Israeli military response. It should be noted that the casualty rate of Israel's response in Gaza has been at least 30% children.
It's bizarre that you bring up the infant casualties of Hamas October 7, of which there was 1, as evidence for calling it a terrorist attack, when the actual number of babies killed by Israel is an order of magnitude greater than the total number of people killed by Hamas on October 7
Nah, it's pretty undeniable. But this is mainly because Nazi Germany was singularly more of a force for evil than any other nation or organization in many centuries. They were uniquely horrible. So it's hard for anyone to be as bad as they were.
Oh, don't worry, there's plenty of lost credibility to go around. Nobody's coming out of this situation smelling like roses, other than maybe some Israeli and Gazan peace activists.
At some point, when basically the entire world is saying one thing and only two countries (the US & Israel) are saying the opposite, you really need something strong to convince someone that basically the whole world is wrong.
This is some lame right-wing outlet whose front page contains things like:
>The assessment, shared exclusively with the Free Beacon, follows mainstream media claims that cuts to global health funding will endanger life-saving programs
While not mentioning that, yes, the Trump administration's USAID cuts absolutely will kill millions of people.
The rest is shitting on Democrats and supporting Trump. Obviously some right-wing site is going to say whatever they can think of to try to defend Israel's actions.
I see the war in radically different terms than you. It's not a battle between who has the better historical claim to the land. It's a religious battle. It's a battle between radical Islam and the secular west.
For a fuller treatment of the defense of Israel from a secular view point.
At least you're honest. This is why the vast majority of Westerners support Israel, its colonialism and its right to kill as many brown people as they can, they just don't say it out loud.
Isn’t it the inverse? Gazans voted for Hamas, and still support them per polls. Hamas’s charter is to destroy Israel in particular but also to subordinate women, subordinate all other religions, undermine Western powers, etc. Their goals and ideology are explicitly in conflict with liberal orders that support things like women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, freedom of religion, and so on.
Do you really think Hamas has killed more Israelis than Israel has killed Palestinians? Do you even know why Hamas exists? Do you have any idea how many years passed between the occupation in 1948 and massacres like the Nakba and Deir Yassin before Hamas was established? Also, no matter how much you want it to, your racism against brown people and fetishisation of "Judeo-Christian civilisation" doesn't justify killing them.
That's funny. In mid-October 2023 the narrative was "It doesn't matter who killed more" and now that so many Palestinians are dying - both by Israeli bombs and by Hamas rockets (1/3 to 1/5 fall back into the densely-populated Gaza strip) - the narrative is "Hamas has killed less Israelis than Israel has killed Palestinians".
The pro-Palestinian narrative adapts and changes as per the tides of war and the media. The Israeli narrative has remained consistent, even when it hurts.
Furthermore, your ideas about the colour of people's skin is an artifact of you dragging American racial issues into a place where they don't belong. The varied skin colours here favour neither side as darker or lighter.
No, the Palestinian narrative for those of us actually knowledgeable of history has not changed since 1948. As for Israel being consistent - how are those hostages doing? Cause it definitely doesn't care about any of them now (those it hasn't killed itself), and Netanyahu and others in the cabinet have admitted they want to occupy the land once more.
I'm not American, but you must be if you think racism magically stops outside of America. The racism most Americans and Zionists have towards brown people and the Islamophobia they have towards Muslims are some of their most prejudiced, and at least equal to any form of anti-Semitism you've ever experienced, but for some reason, you only believe in one of those. To be clear, "brown people" don't have to be "brown" just like black people aren't all black, it's a generic term that indicates a rough place of origin, and the point that you're clearly trying to obscure is that racism towards Palestinians is still racism no matter what colour they actually are.
You're right - such association with colour is not limited to Americans. I almost forgot being told about the slaves in the Gaza strip.
It turns out that Gazans call black-skinned Gazans "slaves". I've met black-skinned Bedouins but not black-skinned Gazans, and I don't know if the black-skinned Gazans are also Bedouins. I actually didn't know the word for slave in Arabic, but it was similar enough to the word in Hebrew that I was able to figure it out. I'd later have it confirmed. Not only do they called the black-skinned Gazans "slaves", they treat them as such as well. No lack of colour-motivated racism in the Gaza strip. Yes, I speak with Gazans in Arabic, and before October 7th I'd have conversations with them face to face.
As for Israeli racism - I think that we're the only country in the world who went out to help dark-skinned people immigrate en masse. Israel has a large Ethiopean community. I've had Ethiopean commanders in the army, and I work with quite a few Ethiopeans. I don't feel that they treat me in any unusual way, nor do I treat them in any unusual way.
I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them before going online to advocate for their genocide, and that those conversations you had make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.
Are you really so wrapped up in your tech bubble in Tel Aviv that you can believe that? Here's some reading on a story even I knew off from the top of my head: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-wome.... And here's the rest of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel. Israel is easily the most racist "Western" country in the world, ahead of even the modern US. Hmm, maybe a genocide against Israelis would actually be justified because Israelis are just racist savages that think black people should be forcibly sterilised against their will?
> I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them while advocating for their genocide, and that those conversations make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.
Since October 7th I haven't seen any Gazans face to face, but we have spoken on the phone and on Telegram. And I've never advocated for their genocide, rather I've advocated against the genocide of Jews. Anybody who supports Hamas, their goals, or their idealogy supports the genocide of Jews. It's right there in the Hamas charter.
I'll say it clearly. There is no genocide of Arabs, or Muslims, or Palestinians, or Gazans in the Gaza strip. There are many Gazans dying, and many of them are children. Many of them are killed as a result of Israeli actions, and many of them are killed as a result of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other organizations' actions. Israel does not systematically target children, only Hamas benefits from dead children. They say it clearly themselves.
So in your warped logic, the few thousand combined killed by all of the groups you named are more evil than the 60,000 killed by Israel (likely 100,000+ after Israel finally lets the UN in) and the true cost of the genocide can be calculated. Also, Israel just accidentally ended up with a collateral damage rate of 50%, just like several medical doctors have attested to it accidentally sniping tens of kids and people waiting for aid, and accidentally shooting 300 bullets into the vehicle holding Hind Rajab. I suggest you wake up and start moving toward the right side of history, along with the UN, Amnesty International, Oxfam and virtually every other major human rights organisation, because very soon it'll be too late and history isn't going to forget active enablers and propagandists like yourself.
I can only tell you that when I was in high school decades ago, I shared a viewpoint that was similar to yours. But after watching history unfold in real time for the last 35+ years, my viewpoint has had to shift. And shift a lot it has. I have had to begin accept some uncomfortable truths that were not yet reaching me. I see them now.
Considering that your view point is bolstered by a vast ecosystem, I do wonder what propaganda are you thinking of that is responsible for my change in views? Like what do you think I tune into that promotes the viewpoint I hold? I'm asking because I'd love to know what is so that I can listen to more of it! Mine is very hard to find. So if you know where it is - please tell me.
If this was how the world worked, we'd all be using Athenian democracy. There are plenty of things the whole world once believed that turned out to be wrong.
I wouldn’t have believed this until a few weeks ago. I then stated finding a lot of social media posts where people at pro-Palestine / anti-Israel protests talk about their goals, and many of them flat out say it is to bring down America and end its “empire”. They seem to use the same phrases in talking about this - I wonder if they get a script to use from the nonprofits they are a part of.
It is obvious that Israel is committing genocide. They don't even try to hide it! Indeed they revel in their cruelty. [1]
This historian[2] argues that openly committing genocide is a feature, not a bug, because it will lead to anti-semitism that will make diaspora Jews feel unsafe and bind them to Israel.
There is no doubt that people are suffering. But trying to pin that on Israel is only prolonging their suffering.
Let me ask you, who benefits from Palestinians dying? Or did you think that Hamas care about the Palestinian people. They do not - they care only about the Palestinian state.
> Let me ask you, who benefits from Palestinians dying?
Israel does. There's no need for a two state solution, the project of Greater Israel can be accomplished if they just kill anyone who they aren't able to forcibly expel from the land.
> “This is a very well-designed study that validates the notion that sex differences start early in development—and that they depend on the sex chromosomes because that’s the only thing that can account for those differences,” says Nora Engel, a professor of cancer and cell biology at Temple University, who was not involved in this work.
There's two problems here. One is that XX/XY is not even a majority of the common human chromosome karyotypes, and changing karyotypes does not change someone's sex characteristics; those are determined at one specific moment during gestation, which may or may not be affected by changing the chromosomes beforehand, but certainly would not be affected by changing their chromosomes after that moment. Primary and secondary sex characteristics are determined by androgen metabolism, not by chromosome karyotypes.
Secondly most of the human karyotypes are not assigned a sex until some time after birth, and XY is often assigned female at birth because the divergence of homologous structures depends on androgen metabolism, not chromosome karyotype. Sex and gender don't exist for cell lines in the same way they do for people.
TL/DR; This is an article about a study that found they could change a cell line's karyotype, not a person's sex characteristics which are determined not by chromosome karyotypes but by androgen metabolism during gestation. Whoever wrote the headline didn't understand the topic.
Just let people create value and trade.
PS: Sad that you're getting downvotes for a thoughtful, polite comment, too. Downvotes are for hiding idiocy and meanness, not viewpoints that you disagree with.
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