From time to time lately I've been thinking about what Cory Doctorow called the enshittification of just about everything and peoples' reactions to it. Sometimes there are less shitty alternatives which present themselves with a little looking, sometimes there aren't. Most interestingly, and this is a bit more common than I find comfortable, other solutions or alternatives to those things that are suddenly now user hostile are just... well... the reaction to them is like somebody just told the other person to shove a pair of daisies up their nostrils and hum Yankee Doodle. I've started filing this under the …

A couple of years ago I did an article on the disclosure that mitochondrial genetic modifications were carried out on thirty embryos in the year 2001 to treat mitochondrial diseases that would probably have been fatal later in life. I also wrote in the article that this does not constitute full scale genetic modification ala the movie Gattaca. It is true that mitochondria are essential to human life but they do not seem to influence any traits that we usually think about, such as increased intelligence or hair color, as they are primarily involved in metabolism. In other words, mitochontrial …