I'm taking a risk in replying to you, but you're completely wrong in every count.

if you take blood from a transgender women and sequence it's DNA, you'll find a y chromosome.

If you take a blood test from a transgender woman, you'll find typical male blood biomarkers. Usually transgender women will have altered biomarkers because many factors in blood are driven by hormones, but that is a result of hormone therapy for transgender women, an outside influence rather than a biological one. Other markers not driven by hormones, such as, cardiovascular health markers, are similar or worse compared to men. In general though, barring hormone therapy, blood is a biologically driven thing and male bodies are vastly different than female bodies.

And you used an example of prostate cancer. Generally transgender women have a lower incidence of prostate cancer than men, but that's also due to hormone therapy; a choice but not a biological fact. The problem with this point though is that transgender women have an infinitely higher incidence of prostate cancer than women because women do not have a prostate and transgender women do. Further the incidence of women's health conditions such as menopause are unheard of in transgender women unless it's a side effect of hormone therapy. But hormone therapy is something you choose to do to yourself, it's not how your body was built from the beginning, so it isn't the same.

Look, I'm not going to go as far as some of the awful people here who posted things like transgender people are mentally deranged. Everyone has their personal journey to go on with their own trials and tribulations. I can't imagine the emotional and physical toll that transgender people go through because I am not one, but i respect it nonetheless. But gender identity is a mental journey; it's how you see yourself, and while it's important, biology will not respect that. To use an extreme example, if a transgender woman gets prostate cancer, but refuses treatment because they don't identify as a man and therefore couldn't get prostate cancer, the cancer won't care; it'll eat her body alive and kill her painfully. It does no one, particularly the transgender person, to ignore that certain aspects of nature will not cooperate with your identity, and to ignore that is just burying your head in the sand.

Some people are born with deformities, and they have to adapt. I was a strong athlete in High School, until I had a very rare uncommon issue with one of my organs requiring 4 surgeries in 10 months which destroyed my athletic ability and completely removed my chosen career path (which required a high level of physical ability); it was something I was born with and I had to acknowledge it a part of my journey and adapt my life. Transgender people are born with a kind of deformity; a body that doesn't line up with their identity. That's difficult and it's a journey, but acknowledgement is the only answer to move forward; ignoring facts that cannot be changed is a poor life choice.

I'd downvote you even more if I could.

The problem with your argument, which disproves your handle, is that you're confusing two totally different things, Identity and Biology.

If you, as you say, have XY chromosomes, five o'clock shadow, and the cock you were born with hanging down and see a woman looking back at you, then two very different things are true. One, your identity and psychology are tied up in identifying with what you think is a woman, which is fine. However, barring any surgeries, you also are capable of impregnating a woman to create a new human, you will on average grow larger muscles than the average woman, you will never breastfeed an infant with your body, and you will never get pregnant as you will not grow a uterus. That is biology.

The inherent problem with the transgender arguments today is it seeks to change society to have people see them as they see themselves, which is ok, but also in many ways confuses the physical reality of biology, which any average person willing to listen to the argument finds absurd. If you see yourself as a different gender, and are willing to get surgeries and hormone treatments and dress and present yourself a certain way, that's your choice and more power to you. But let's not ignore the physical reality of biology either; you're far better off acknowledging the scientific facts and making your argument grounded in reality.

Case in point, the entire point of this article is about the biological fact that double chromosomes, which has nothing to do with how you identify, appears to correlate with longer lifespan. That scientific fact has no bearing on what you feel you are, and while you may choose to be woman while having a Y chromosome, you will never have a double X chromosome and are then biologically subject to the greater mutation risk described in this scientific survey.

You will win more adherents to your argument if you acknowledge immutable facts.

...but this could be a national emergency. I mean, I can wait to buy a new Land Rover Jaguar, but I gotta have my beer......

-m

You clearly do not understand Chinese culture. THey had the opposite problem: women did not have control over their bodies because under the old one-child policy, women were forced to abort their babies or suffer fines that would bankrupt their entire family. Since Chinese culture tends to favor boys, women would abort girl babies so they could have a boy. The one child policy led to an estimated 336 million abortions over the 40 years when it was an active policy.

It's one thing to be sardonic about US culture, but don't think for one second that China is pro-choice.

I hate to tell you this, but the "shareholder" narrative is too limited. If you persist with that you miss the point.

The bigger issue is that too many countries rely almost entirely on oil exports for their country to function. Iraq, Kuwait, Brunei, and Venezuela all have oil exports as over 90% of their countries' GDP. Algeria, Azerbaijan, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, the Russian Federation, heck even Norway; their countries are heavily dependent on oil exports; it's difficult to find an exact count but I've heard some people suggest it's around 30% of the world's countries rely on oil exports. If we magically turned off oil consumption, many of those countries would fall into chaos as basic government services would collapse overnight. There's an argument to be said about ripping the band aid off and just letting things fall where they may, but there would be an enormous humanitarian crisis if we stopped burning fossil fuels quickly, mostly in the developing world.

It's an EU report, so they're just reporting on the people of whom they have a responsibility to.

Careful. "AI" has been around for decades. We use to call it machine learning, and in this field it's been going on now for about 15 years.

AI has "slowly" been gaining adoption in radiology fields for a while now; machine learning algorithms have been being used in image analysis since the early 2010s. Most of these are the traditional place for AI, improving a skilled worker's productivity, and with machine learning image analysis systems that has been trained for some time, the AI can spot relatively simple and common things in images in X-Ray and MRI machines. Categorization of typical known lesions or other things that might show up on an MRI allows for a radiologist to focus their time on the things worth looking at and spending time consulting patients.

So 48% now for 15 years of gradual adoption; it's still good, but it took a lot of time to get people comfortable with it and the models well trained and knowing when you can rely on it and when you cannot.

WEll for entry level jobs I would disagree with you, sometimes those jobs give the initial foot in the door and early skills that grow into more important roles that are less automatable.

But your point about a janitor is spot on. You know what AI can't take away? Plumber jobs. Ranges are $45 to $200 per hour, with emergency plumber services (for like a flood) being $300/hr and up. Currently Optimus/AI can't serve popcorn, so I think it's a long way before it can perform a valve replacement or main-line flush.

In no way does China have technical superiority. I read the whole article, and have worked in China before; that is not at all the takeaway here.

There are two key takeaways. China currently has "capacity superiority". This is not technical superiority, this is production superiority. However it's clear they also have an enormous problem, evidenced by how it discusses the brutal price wars that go on in China. That speaks to a weak consumer market despite the capacity they built, so, as the article says, many are turning to exports. Nowhere does this article discuss the financial health of the companies, but you can surmise that because of the brutal price wars those margins are very slim. So when they turn to exports on slim margins, they're effectively dumping. So all we're seeing here is China trying to own an entire category by overbuilding supply and dumping their products on other markets. This is not an uncommon story, and there are ways to deal with this.

The second is for anyone who is actually experienced in China, everything is orchestrated. The government, from the CCP in Beijing to local governments, have a heavy hand on these companies. If 8 VCs went to Europe or the US and travelled around looking at companies, they would get a clear picture. In China, nothing is clear. I don't for one second believe that the message these people got was not orchestrated well in advance to create the right impression. And it worked. The Chinese government wants people to believe they will only get advanced goods from China, and these VCs went along with it and bought it.

And why would they do that? Because it is taking effect. The problem with China's economic model is yes, they are quite efficient at making things. But the problem is they need someone to sell too; what good is it if you can make stuff if no one wnats to buy? And this is a big issue. US imports from China have fallen about 20% since 2022 ($536B in 2022 to around $462.6B in 2024), whereas every other country has gone up, notably South Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, etc. US supply chains are shifting away from China already so it's in China's interest to maintain thsi narrative that they're the only place to get these technologies. In 2022, the US market bought $582B worth of goods, with Japan being the next largest at $172B and South Korea at $162B. When the US drops by nearly $100B in trade, where is China going to find another market of that size to replace it?

So no, I read this very differently. This to me is typical China propaganda trying to emphasize China's critical role because they're struggling, not because they are strong, and the only reason they are the place to make these is because of slim margins and dumping practices, which never last forever.

The absurd amounts that these companies are paying to poach talent is over inflating the value of people that, based on the few that I've met, would be subpar employees literally anywhere else. Some of them think they $h!t gold; the few I've talked to in this space are so insufferable to even be in the same room. If this bubble bursts, quite a few people are in for a rude awakening about their worth as people.

Oh it's 100% an issue. The term is "Transplantation Tourism" and it is directly a thing that happens. But that's a slight against the individual, not the country. Most Western countries ban this outright, and even in the US there is a bill designed to criminally penalize this behavior on American citizens going through Congress right now; it's already passed the House with a rare 406-1 vote. But the fact that Transplantation Tourism even exists is because other countries support the idea of harvesting organs from undesirable-to-their-country populations, and China is a big problem here.

To be fair to the people who do transplantation tourism, it is a bit hard to judge here. Sure there are some sociopathic ghouls out there, but a parent at my kid's school every single day for 2 years had a sign on their car asking for people to please volunteer for a kidney donation for their elementary age daughter. When you're talking about the near death of your own child, it's pretty hard to take a strong ethical stance. I can tell you if that was my kid, ethical boundaries seem paper thin.

Only good enough for researching, such as testing drugs against a 3D printed version of organ cells. But a functional organ that can be transplanted, with all teh proper veins, arteries, nerve cells, and organ function is nowhere even remotely close to something we can do today. Some bioprinting is being tested in clinical trials for organ tissue grafts, but a fully functional organ? We're decades away if that.

With all due respect to your opinion:

Candain attorneys uncover a minimum of 41,500 unaccounted for organ transplants in China from 2000 to 2005, most of which are imprisoned Falun Gong and Uyghurs forced into organ donation.

"Forced organ harvesting in China appears to be targeting specific ethnic, linguistic or religious minorities held in detention, often without being explained the reasons for arrest or given arrest warrants, at different locations." says panel of UN Human Rights experts.

Based on bed counts and other data, China conducts between 60,000 and 100,000 organ transplants per year, but their own records show in 2017 5,146 eligible donors resulting in 16,000 transplants.

They are still harvesting organs from prisoners, and many of those prisoners are imprisoned minorities such as Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Falun Gong followers, people imprisoned for no crimes other than ethnicities or beliefs.

Today's game consoles enable new types of games. Try playing a modern PS5 game on a PS1; you can't do it. That's new value.

It doesn't matter if the components go down in price, or if the cost to manufacture is lower. If it provides value at the price they're offering, people will buy it. Besides, why do you buy a switch? To gain access to the game ecosystem that Nintendo built. You don't pay for a switch for a switch, you pay for a switch to play Zelda, Mario, and Metroid and all the other exclusives, which wouldn't exist without Nintendo. It's a cover charge to the ecosystem, not a hardware purchase.

It reads to me that Boost Mobile will have the best coverage of all, combining T-Mobile, AT&T and some of their own towers? And they are a "budget" carrier so should be less expensive then any of the others alone?

And here (MN) Verizon coverage seems no better the any others, esp in slightly fringe areas, imho.

-m