Friday 17 October 2008

Robosuppository

The FDA has approved a robot small enough to be... inserted.

Skynet is looking for Sarah Connor everywhere.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I realize technologies like this have a long way to go, but I can't help but hope that one day things like this could trump an overbloated socialized medicine system.
I bet there'd be a lot of governmental opposition to it then.

Sergej said...

Research costs. A lot. I would submit that if medicine were socialized, this thing would never be invented.

I think the stupid goes back to Marx, at least. Redistribution of wealth assumes that there is a fixed amount of good stuff in a country, and the only question is who gets how much of it. While this might have worked pre-Industrial Revolution, we now have things like engineers and inventors, and new kinds of wealth can happen. With proper mismanagement, wealth can be destroyed as well.

Anonymous said...

So true, I read an idiotic op-ed piece the other day demanding the roll back of the Reagan era tax rate reductions (as if we didn't do enough of that in 1993), claiming that true prosperity comes from tax increases. And of course the basis for the argument was this notion of a fixed amount of wealth and that when one succeeded, another lost.
It's impossible to argue with that sort of logic since there isn't any logic to it at all.
I fear we are about to try the "prosperity through high taxes" route again, and when it drives us deeper into economic hardship, the fingers will likely point to the past administration.

Of course I get off the train with the whole system, believing that taxes should only be paid when we buy things.

jayessell said...

About the electronic pill:

Just as the early 1960s animated TV series 'The Jetsons' predicted Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, it also predicted an ingestable diagnostics sensor.

(In that particular episode, it is accidentally inserted in a mummy, and gives misleading readings.)