Cloning pets...

A Family Trust is a good way to preserve your assets, and traditionally was the best way to preserve assets within a family. Times have changed though.

Be forewarned IRS is starting to put them under a microscope, so expect audits. Again, a qualified taxation attorney should be able to help out here. Remember the fee charged by a taxation attorney is a perfectly legitimate deduction.

Use caution with Management co's. I'm sure some are good, but it seems you have to watch them like a hawk. Common sense is always good when dealing with situations like these.

 

There are definite benefits to a trust. But you still pay inheritance tax. Or the trust pays the tax before you get your share. I think the first million is exempt. So unless your folks are very rich, you have no worries.

Some rich folks have worked hard in their youth. But hard work does not make people rich, as the hardest workers (I repeat) remain desperately poor.

Of course, rich is a relative term. I consider myself rich. But I'm not giving numbers, nor would I expect anyone else to.

 

Okay. I will backtrack a little. Perhaps I was speaking in absolutes to make a point. My point is that the vast majority of the desperately poor work harder than anyone higher up the income scale. And to the extent that (in rare cases) someone gets moderately rich after working hard, it was not their hard work that opened the way: it was luck of circumstances (educational opportunities, being at the right place at the right time, knowing the right people, etc.)

People who brag about working their way through college forget that most of the really poor never had the opportunity to get into college. Or had to work full time and give all their pay to their family.

Life is a lottery where the winners chide the loosers for not having "invested" in a ticket. But no matter what anyone does, there will be ten thousand losers for every winner and "hard work" is 0.001% of the outcome, while the luck of the draw is 99.999%.

 

Evan:

Unfortunately, I've noticed the same thing in my family. My folks worked their a** off to get what they have, and somehow that rubbed off on me.


The family members less fortunate - admittedly it's their own fault - then chastise us. "Oh think you're too good for us?" etc.

Yeah, sure, I'll live in a shack in BFE, smoke 2-3 packs a day, be almost constantly stoned, not have any more ambition than to push a broom around for part-time minimum wage, and drink enough to erode my liver by the time I hit middle age.

Pass.

I'm not saying "lucky" breaks aren't involved in Life, but how many folks take advantage of them? A wise person carefully considers all the options and pursues what appears to be the best option. Everybody can have these "lucky" breaks, especially in the USA and Canada. It's raining money here, compared to poor countries.

We have Free Will. For right or wrong, people make conscious decisions throughout their lives. If you make a bad decision, look in the mirror for somebody to blame. All my bad choices, fortunately few of them I'm a quick learner, were entirely my own fault.

Anyhoo, to get back to the original post: kitties good, cloning kitties iffy but whatever, cloning humans yuck why bother.

 

Re: cloning humans. I can't imaging the cloning of an entire person being used for any good purpose (you lost your son? have him cloned! You want Brad Pitt's baby? clone Brad Pitt! Einstein was a real smart guy--let's clone him! Ah, but the clone ends up being a drop-out because of his dislexia, and turns into a homeless druggy), but if they can come up with a way to clone individual organs, that would be a great boon to those who need transplants, rather than waiting around until a compatible donor dies, or using animals as donors.

 

Back in the 70's (I know, I'm getting old ...) I went to the theater (Remember those?) to watch a B Grade SF movie:

Parts: The Clonus Horror.

A much more recent movie on the topic was The 6th Day with Arnold, the Governator. I thought "RePet" was catchy.

It might be cool to grow a new part if one buggers up, say an eye or a heart or a knee joint. Though what if they made an entire You and stuffed it into Cold Storage, to harvest the parts as needed?

That's trickier, isn't it?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Kathryn\";p=\"61130)</div>

i hear ya Kathryn... but then again, it does raise some interesting possibilities...

raised your kid and made some mistakes, well clone him and kill off the mistake.

or

bad temper?? killed your spouse because she broke the yoke on your over easy eggs?? no problem, clone her and buy some flowers...

 

Ooh, the dilemma . . . The ethical debate over cloning cats verses the rights of rich people to spend their money as they see fit.

I see a fight brewing between the ACLU and PETA. :lol:

Both are crackpot groups in my mind . . . but I think I would have to side with the ACLU on this one - no matter how much that turns my stomach ukeright: - because I love watching stupid rich people (not all rich people) waste their money on stupid things . . . trying desperately to fill the void in their lives.

 

One thing about the cloning debate that if a human is ever cloned, that cloned newborn would have the same legal rights as any newborn and would then immediately start to have different experiences from it's "parent" so it would not be the "same" person.

And as a human being with their own civil and legal rights, they can't be killed or "harvested" for organs, except as any child can donate blood or bone marrow for a sibling. And there are rules in that regard.

Sadly, cloning seems to be coming, though I hear Dolly died already and she had numerous health problems before she went. I've also heard that some cloned mammals don't look exactly like their "parent", so you may not get Brad Pitt after all.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(prius04\";p=\"61223)</div>

So, do these "civil and legal rights" start before or after the baby is popped out of the test tube???
That is assuming we “progress†to that point in the future.

Instead of Brad Pitt one could expect a Prad Bitt. (Darn, so close to meaning a Horse Bit):wink:

This whole cloning business really makes me think of my favorite saying:
Just because it can be done does not mean it should be done.

 

The baby does not pop out of a test tube. It is born out of a mother's uterus.

And as for when the woman's legal ownership of her uterus gives way to the fetus' legal ownership of that uterus, that's a whole different discussion.

But I agree, cloning is a very ominous path.


(Oops, I just realized you are calling an embryo too small to see with the naked eye, a baby. You've already started that "whole other discussion" and I got sucked in.)

 

im sorry but all this nay saying may be blocking our learning something very valuable.

throughout history, many of our greatest discoveries were from people doing something they would have hung for had they been caught.

cloning has many real scientific uses (besides the frankenstein crap...OPPS wait!! that was for organ transplants which we all agree are ok right??... well this thread only need replace the word "cloning" with "transplant" not so long ago...)

there are a lot of dangers that need to be addressed with this technology however and that will not happen if its banned. already we have independently funded labs taking huge risks because they are not regulated in anyway. but money talks and it always will.

are we going to go through the same thing we did with abortions??

those didnt go away either. look at how many people died over that banned practice. cloning can have much much worse consequences if we dont get on top of this and allow legal research.

its obvious to me that this will not be buried, so it must be brought to the light. we need to sanction research so we can discover the pitfalls in a controlled environment before someone else finds it beyond the scrutiny of the scientific world.

 

I think we're missing the real problem posed by cloning pets:

[font=Comic Sans MS:e2853ec3c7][align=center:e2853ec3c7]That they will be possessed by the souls of demons / serial killers / Hitler.

(Of course, with a cat... how could you tell?)

:mrgreen:

 

well, lets face it, under the best of circumstances, you are d**'ed if you do and the same if you dont.

i had many pets that i cried over when they were gone. but then i also think of the many replacements that i have enjoyed over the years.

what would i have liked the most? dont know, but what i do know is that i would much rather make that decision on my own.

 

I like research that is out in the open. Once research becomes secretive and mysterious, who knows what happens?

It's truly sad that many research labs in American universities make discoveries that are picked up cheap by major outfits.

Then the major outfits (Pharma, manu, chemicals, etc) patent them.

There have been some good documentaries on PBS in the United States, and I Channel here in Canada, that have brought this to light.

 

The better American Universities protect themselves. Harvard, as a matter of fact, makes a good deal of money for it's endowment fund from the money earned on patents.

However, you are right, there is a lot of abuse. The bulk of the abuse is when the taxpayers fund the research and then big business benefits.