For the sake of the human race I’m willing to impregnate any female between the age of eighteen and menopause who has twenty to forty five minutes to spare and can meet certain standards of hygiene.
You wouldn’t if you were in the UK, the support payments would kill you.
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Be honest: you’re willing to do that for any female, period. (Above legal age of consent, of course.)
Ooo-er. Eugenics lies that away. I don’t suggest you are proposing that for a moment. However, medicine may be overriding many of the natural selection processes, and fashion and global society may impose other, less useful, imperatives; so we may have a problem.
Natural selection does not always take the shortest path towards a single ideal omega point, and yet it is surprising how subtle the results of endless blind experiments can be. It is a lot more subtle than most of our approaches, and we dick with it at our peril. There are some things such as the fixing inheritable diseases, that we could do. However, if some disability has been around for a long time and natural selection hasn’t got around to eliminating it, we might wonder whether it has some other purpose.
What we must not do is to get into some genetic arms race to make our children prettier and smarter and taller than all the others. Or those of us that are not exterminated will end up distorted like peacocks.
Interesting times, eh?
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I for one would opt for that if I had the option. Sufficient demand is there for underground clinics in Thailand or other such place to exist once the tech is there. The arms (and legs and all other appendages) race will happen and cannot be stopped.
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Then we’re doomed.
There are different ways that certain traits can give people advantages, though. For example, a trait which makes someone better at using other people could help them and hurt others, while a trait which makes someone better at helping other people without getting used could help them and help others. For another example, taller people tend to get paid more at the expense of shorter people. Desks are already sized for the 95th percentile American male, and are unergonomic for everyone else. For another example, we probably need a certain balance of allistic and autistic people.
Do not, under any circumstances, refer to “Bob” as a weakling couch potato. He has given us the gift of Slack. Show some appreciation, dammit.
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Yeah, it’s annoying for those of us who are larger. Short people can use footrests, tall chairs, stepladders, whatever they need is available - but that doesn’t work for tall people.
They had to cut it off somewhere, and by disregarding the needs of the tallest 5% furniture makers made it possible to fit a very large desk through a standard sized doorway - you just turn it sideways!
Actually, those aren’t adequate.
I don’t know if I’m ever going to heal from my arm injuries, but I finally bought an adjustable table, and set it for average height. because I couldn’t get the adjustable chair high enough for even a lower-than-standard desk, I had to pile pillows on it, pile books under my feet, etc.
Well, if you worked for me, you’d get an appropriate chair and foot rest, but it might take a couple tries to get it right, and I know not all employers care about employee comfort.
If you’re suffering from lingering computer arm issues, take heart. I had no feeling in my hands at all for almost a year and a half, but I refused the surgery and wore the braces when typing, driving or sleeping and I’ve been fine for decades now. It took six years of bad ergonomics to do the damage, but only two years to fix it by correcting my work position and wearing the braces.
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