Bay 12 Games Forum

They are engineered T lymphocytes. Hence T cells /CAR-T cells.

On that front: my umderstanding is that the one getting approved soonish is Novartis', which is patient specific...

Cart cells would be good. We can go with that.

Can... can we call them U cells or something instead? I can't help but think putting T cells in our bodies to cure disease is tempting the dark gods of narrative a bit too much.

... there was one of those on one of the campuses I went to, too. Suddenly I find myself wondering if every uni over a certain size has at least one unicycle person.

And if there isn't, how much funding do we need to get together for an on-campus unicycle riding scholarship and thus correct this grave flaw in reality?

... though actually, it just occurred to me to check how many countries exist. The answer is 195, 196 if you count taiwan. So... all of 35-ish countries don't. Do things like he said.

Don't question it folks, some facts are more facty than others.

Is that including all of the work that would have to be done in preparing for the road itself?

Yeh. What it doesn't is cost of acquiring the land, but neither does any of the wall estimates I've noticed. It costs less to build a mile of two-lane nowadays than it does a mile of the proposed wall. We've gotten pretty efficient at road laying (at least when corruption doesn't get in the way, anyway), really.

... also noticed while poking figures that we're also pretty efficient at wall building, heh. Even if the thing does go through, don't expect it to generate many jobs :V

Eh, if you find a good one, what they're actually trying to do (assuming that's why you're seeing them, anyway) is make it so you can function in society even if you're strongly disinclined towards social conformity. Being able to navigate the social order without getting shot is part of that, but what a good therapist is there to do is get you where you can do that, and still be comfortable with yourself and fully engaged in whatever bits of you don't fit in conventional venues. End behavior in many situations tend to be pretty similar from the position of the patient, but why you're doing it and how you go about it and whatnot can diverge pretty radically.

... in happy news, I have today learned that cinnamon can, in fact, improve the taste of cheesecake milkshake.

The question is - if you have certain privileges available only to citizens, how should you go about ensuring that only citizens are exercising those privileges?  Barring some kind of identification registry - how would you do it?

Well, there's these things called living addresses, birth certificates, and tax forms. Along those lines. Stuff that's either pretty hard to get and maintain without being a citizen, or means they're paying anyway (i.e. acting like a citizen de facto, if not de jure) and about the only reason to really care is ideological _{(and, just sayin', but ideological purity only goes so far towards keeping our roads from falling apart even faster)}. Makes figuring out if the person's a citizen pretty easy, most of the time. Some folks will probably slip through, but here's a secret when it comes to wide scale administration: If not enough people are getting through to break the system as a whole, it functionally doesn't matter if some are, particularly when that subset isn't enough to meaningfully strain the system in question and/or costs more to fix than it does to let ride.* The optimization point is between full enforcement and no enforcement, not one or the other.

Beyond that, though, the point isn't actually to make sure it's all and only citizens. Mostly is good enough, and mostly is much easier, far less likely to have to shit all over those mentioned privileges to obtain, and costs bucketloads less t'boot. Indicates your country has a moral character worth two damns, too, since you'll treat even folks that aren't one of yours well enough when they're on your land.**

As for the second question, if indeed the country was failing to ensure citizens had access to any and all privileges thereto, there wouldn't be much point. There also wouldn't be a country, for what that's worth. Still, there could be advantages to being a citizen even if you don't have much in the way of official government support -- various business concerns, support from fellow citizens (brought about by human psychology if not legal enforcement), all those sorts of things. There's more gains from being a citizen than just what the government on top of it dole out, basically. That said, falling short of absolute exclusionary perfection on a few rights generally still manages to leave an pretty massive amount of advantages for citizens, in most cases, and is usually pretty excusable/ignorable/understandable when managing that perfection entails a logistical nightmare just as a starting point. The equivalent of a few percent's worth of your population getting limited access to some of those isn't exactly an apocalypse scenario.

* The latter is why a fair amount of welfare et al has a lot of pressure to abandon or avoid means testing, by the by. Active enforcement has this nasty habit of costing more than just kinda'... not.
** Tip for the unknowing: When it comes to legal et al matters, pretty much every constitutional and most legal protections applies to non-citizens as well when they're in US jurisdiction. Closest to an exception you can get there is repatriation (to the originating country) or contested jurisdiction (and usually no one wants that, so folks figure out which court someone's going to be tried in pretty quick). It's one of the reasons being an undocumented immigrant (and a good chunk of the stuff surrounding that) isn't a criminal offense -- if it was, they would be entitled to the full protection of american due process and all the rigmarole surrounding it.

===

... all that said, most of the ire you're going to see is less about the issues relating to citizenship and more about the ones related to the problems involved with enforcing your mentioned attempts. Conceptually it's a good thing and most folks'll get in on it to some degree or another (there's a couple exceptions loitering around GD, but complete or near complete abolishment of citizenship and whatnot isn't a common stance), but when it practically means the harassment and abuse of people, citizens and otherwise, the erosion of rule of law and moral character of your country (this is particularly an issue for the US, as the thing was built on immigrants, most of which were not exactly well documented), a general reduction in various rights, and a number of other things of ill extent (especially including excessive cost, when the funds and effort could instead be going to stuff like making sure people have running water, stable power grids, and functioning roads), yeah, people are going to start getting pretty concerned.

... eh? Non-citizens and folks that aren't permanent residents are to be excluded. Pretty sure that's what I said? Does the latter need the legal bit specified or somethin'?