I'm impressed at how you can perceive conspiracies everywhere.
10,889 karma · joined September 25, 2013
The ocean reaches depths of 7000m in trenches between the Sahul and Sunda shelves, and, at least during the last glacial maximum, 21K years ago, the sea level was only 140m shallower.
"Passively floating on a raft" for 90km was never really plausible.
Oh my sweet summer child.
Honestly, lab escape has always been plausible to me, but there's sadly so much politics in assessments of lab-escape by governmental non-scientific agencies, whether it be the "oil on troubled water to placate China" potential bias or "blame China for it as part of an economic biffo" potential bias, that I hold out no hope of ever finding the truth.
Because China was never going to allow investigations by anyone, WHO, UN bodies, whoever, into the physical facilities and processes and data thereof, of that lab in Wuhan.
And, gain of function is an ethically dubious line of research, especially debated amongst scientists, and I'm dubious on it also.
But it's not illegal, and it has some scientific value. (Whether the value is worth the potential risk, well, scientists, debating, so yeah)
So then it comes down to...
Did NIH exceed any policy boundaries set when funding GoF? Did they contradict any laws?
Did they ignore a preponderance of evidence when making this decision?
If not, then using this as justification for crippling the NIH is solely based on personal agenda.
I have no particular dog in this fight but "NIH did ~~9/11~~ Covid-19!" is a really long bow to draw. (Which is how I read the original comment, not yours, to be clear)
Wait, it doesn't even fit Ireland.
Unless they were talking about population? Then maybe NZ would fit. Is there a New York neighbourhood with 5 million people?
How is an unelected billionaire a representative of the people?
Maybe he's a symptom of the "burn it all down" mindset that seems to find outlet through Trump, a mindset I have sympathy for, but in the end, he's just another elite who is trying to subvert the government for his own ends.
Maybe read up on how it works before rejecting it out of hand?
Britain has a bicameral parliament, with the leader of the majority of the lower house forming the executive, but the head of state retains the constitutional ability to dissolve parliament and order new elections if the current government is unable to function.
Having an apolitical head of state might be worth looking into.
And if you get onto LINZ website, and grab their LIDAR data and visualise it, you can see all the old channels it has carved across the Plains, including ones right through CHC airport into the headwaters of the Avon (this is the route the Waimakariri took when it flooded Christchurch in the late 1800s).
As for Banks Island, well it was an island back in the day, not sure how many thousand years ago that was though.
PS, if you're in ChCh and tech, feel like we might know each other... love how small the net can make the rather large world.
And, given the American justification of the right to bear arms, such a response is coded into American culture's DNA.
Unless all the 2FA proponents were lying about needing those guns to prevent tyranny?
E.g. like the President of Ireland, or the King of England (via the Governor General proxy) in countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Also, the Electoral College is an archaic anachronism, and may I recommend a system of proportional representation?
Devolution to "states rights" is exactly that, a devolution.
In fact he's putting into play Project 2025, the thing that he explicitly disclaimed knowledge of prior to the elections.
It's a sad sign of the state of US politics that this, which would cause outrage in the past, barely merits a mention amidst all the other rage bait things he's doing.
His barmy executive orders, DOGE, that disgraceful display with Zelenskyy reminds me of the Wizard of Oz trying to distract people from the man behind the curtain.
> On June 4, 2019, during a visit to Samoa coinciding with its 57th annual independence celebration, Kennedy appeared in an Instagram photo with Australian-Samoan anti-vaccine activist Taylor Winterstein. Kennedy's charity and Winterstein have both perpetuated the allegation that the MMR vaccine played a role in the 2018 deaths of two Samoan infants, despite the subsequent revelation that the infants had mistakenly received a muscle relaxant along with the vaccine. Kennedy has drawn criticism for fueling vaccine hesitancy amid a social climate that gave rise to the 2019 Samoa measles outbreak, which killed over 70 people, and the 2019 Tonga measles outbreak.
Created by the Waimakariri River splitting into 3 branches as it neared the ocean.
They're no longer islands as the two side-branches of the river caused repeated severe floods in colonial days, so large civil engineering efforts went into restraining the river, ultimately leading to the south branch and north branch being blocked by large stopbanks and riprap cassions.
Both branches were then utilised to drain water from high fertility but swampy ground.
Because NZ's braided rivers lend themselves to wandering channels, we've still got some decent sized river islands - Rākaia Island, Rangitata Island.
Could be economic freedom, religious, intellectual, social etc.
Also, I'd argue giving your citizens freedom of movement is critical if you're going to implement necessary but drastic economic reforms, it gives the bourgeois, who often end up leading revolutions in despotic states, an option to exit stage left instead of putting on camo and moving to the jungle with a bunch o guns.
Education not controlled by politicians is dangerous to authoritarian regimes.
The current rhetoric from JD Vance about tertiary education is part of the usual script of tinpot despots, sadly.
Oh, and when they purchased the Counter-Strike IP, and started selling it shrinkwrapped, if you owned Half-Life, you just kept using the mod as you already were
In these modern times, I suspect that would be monetised somehow now. Upgrade to a premium user to get golden lootboxes, likely.
But yeah, I knew people who bought Half-Life just to play CS when it was early beta.
Likewise, less famous, but still being played today, Day of Defeat - I was hooked as the experience of "Yeah the rifles can kill you in one shot, and grenades will kill you, it's not CS dude. Oh and press B if that icon comes up, it means you're bleeding"
(Still unsure how I feel about them taking bleeding out.)
So hope you had shares in them :D
"Could I guide my Nana through your app over the phone?"
- Beattie's Law of UI
Did Argentina invade the Falklands, or liberate Malvinas?
Why is part of the South China Sea now called the West Phillipine Sea but only in the Phillipines?
Why is the Republic of Macedonia now North Macedonia?
Names matter.
It's what I most miss about it.
Package com.foo.Something pins a dependency on crap.bollocks.SomethingElse v1.1.0?
But I want to use crap.bollocks.SomethingElse v1.1.5? And I know that they're compatible?
Then I can configure a dependency exclusion.
I really really miss this feature in every non-JVM build tool.
It's another one of those things that the JVM ecosystem did right that everyone else forgot to copy.
(The other massive one being packages having verifiable namespaces. Can't really typosquat Guava because it's namespace is com.google and they can prove it)