Imagine that Hacker News beat us to the punch and had a "let's found important startups" thread. Would you be as positive and enthusiastic? HN is geared toward people who know about startup culture. People who have read PG's essays and spent significant fractions of their lives improving their ability to win at startups.

Compare the HN group to the people who will reply to your post. You're selecting against people who already have experience doing startups. (Those people already have the experience and social connections necessary to start another company. There's no reason for them to take a chance on people in this thread.) Also, fluid intelligence is great, but domain experience is much more useful in the case of startups. Finally, it's important to note that LW posters seem to suffer from akrasia. When the rubber hits the road, LW users seem to flee.

Of course, I have little experience in any of these domains. The LW akrasia correlation is simply my impression, not something based in empericism.

Another benefit: Having a robo-vacuum on a schedule forces you to get in the habit of picking objects (papers, clothing) up off the floor.

But pets, smoking, and moldy clothes? Ick. A robot vacuum isn't going to put a dent in that.

pthalo: Think of your pets. They probably don't enjoy living in that environment. You owe it to them to make your home pleasant.

Some of your questions have answers on calcsam's blog. Specifically, his conversion story is here.

I hate to sound callous, but I don't really care why people want to change their bodies. I am simply glad for them when they feel better about themselves afterwards.

To respond to your question: Yes that's a bad thing, but I can extrapolate the moral trajectory. In the past, more people disliked transsexuals and total body revision wasn't even on the map. Today, transsexuals are making inroads and some fringe people are speculating about more extreme modifications.

There are other times where I disagree with society giving different amounts of approval to things. For example, more people are for medicinal marijuana than for completely legalizing it.

I think it's helpful to consider transsexuality as cosmetic surgery. It's another case of "I'm unhappy with certain aspects of my body and I want to change them." Currently, doctors in the US won't perform this cosmetic surgery unless you convince them you're an X trapped in a Y's body.

The cosmetic surgery viewpoint goes beyond binary sex choices of male and female. Given better technology, in the future one could choose to be a blue-haired futanari catgirl. Why? Not to fit some story about finally becoming one's true gender, but simply because it could be fun.

A couple of things:

The cost of cryonics is more than just the liquid nitrogen. You need to mobilize a team to properly preserve the brain, then keep it in a refrigeration unit indefinitely.

If you keep tissue at temperatures slightly below 0ºC, it's not really frozen. Tiny pockets of concentrated ions will lower the freezing temperature of water in in those areas, keeping portions of the tissue liquid. I think the effect is similar to salting roads in the winter time. Anyway, the tissue degrades over time scales we care about.