HardlyCurious

This is an interesting line of thinking. We can have all the evidence imaginable that scientists did a thing that caused a pandemic, but since they were trying to predict the next pandemic you just dismiss the evidence as meaningless.

It seems like the standards applied in this discussion by some are essentially that nothing short of irrefutable proof even qualifies as evidence.

Maybe you are right, I shouldn't have characterized the evidence as indirect.

It's an appeal to Occam's razor. The most simple explanation of why a novel virus started infecting people in a city with a virology lab is that the written plan to make covid in that lab was executed.

There are a number of details about it which are the same as the plans from 2018. I don't think it's reasonable to think the plans of scientists don't get revised as they work. And as soon as the virus starts spreading, even in test mice in the lab, it will start to mutate. So it is entirely possible that what leaks from a lab is a natural mutation off of an engineered virus.

Trying to use difference in details in this case to sow doubt isn't reasonable in my opinion because it's details that are realistically impossible to nail down.

I'm not qualified to evaluate the claims either, but I'm not convinced the authors are trustworthy. They say:

"Harrison and Sachs (1) allege that scientists at NIH and elsewhere, including myself and colleagues, conspired to suppress theories of a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is false. A possible laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 was discussed in our earlier publications"

But there absolutely was a conspiracy to suppress the lab leak theory. This conspiracy is why the infamous letter published in the lancet that admonished the lab leak theory as a 'conspiracy theory's was retracted by the lancet. Peter daszak was one of the signers of the letter, but it came out he attempted to avoid signing the letter even though he arranged the entire thing. The reason he didn't want to sign it? In his words:

“so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn't work in a counterproductive way.” - https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/wuhan-lab-collaborat...

Why might he feel that way? Well for one his name was on the DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to engineer a coronavirus with the same mutation covid has.

"But what was really notable about this grant proposal was that they proposed to insert cleavage sites, similar to the mystifying furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, and to insert those into their coronavirus sequences to see if it would make them more infectious. And to many people, when that was exposed, that DARPA grant — and it only got exposed, I believe, last year — that really looked like a kind of smoking gun, which was that the research that was being proposed in the DARPA grant looked like a kind of directional arrow to a SARS-CoV-2-like virus. So that was quite significant." - https://theintercept.com/2022/05/06/deconstructed-lab-leak-c...

"Farzan was “bothered by the furin site and has a hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely).” On the question of whether the virus had a natural origin or came from some sort of accidental lab release, Farrar reported that Farzan was “70:30” or “60:40” in favor of an “accidental-release” explanation and that “Bob” — an apparent reference to Robert Garry — was also surprised by the presence of a furin cleavage site in this virus. Farrar quoted Bob saying: “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. … it’s stunning.” - https://theintercept.com/2023/01/19/covid-origin-nih-emails/

Discussing this isn't pointless just because we don't have definitive proof. We need to determine what happened based on what we do know. 7+million people are dead. Gain of function is happening in labs all over the world. Humanity can do something here to reduce risk.

Covid has a novel mutation never seen in any natural coronavirus. Further there was a grant proposal from 2018 to insert the identical mutation as found in covid. There was a plan to engineer covid 2ish years before covid existed.

But I'm sure nature evolving this exact mutation coincidentally in a relatively short period after scientist documented their plans to engineer it is an equally likely outcome.

The fact that we only have speculation is due to yet inability to find a natural source of covid and China's refusal to be a decent member of the world and instead chose to obstruct and hide as much as they could.

But, I'm sure china would admit to the world that their research lab was the fuck up that killed millions of people. It isn't like china would ever try to censor and control information that makes them look bad.

Are you of the belief that the lab leak theory implies intention?

It is fact that a group that funds research in Wuhan (Eco health alliance) submitted a grant request to DARPA to fund research to engineer a coronavirus which could infect human lungs by inserted a specific cleavage site. Covid has that mutation exactly where the grant proposal planned to insert it. And no viruses in teh wild have been found to have that feature. This grant proposal was submitted in 2018.

For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.

Think about it.

I read this in a non-paywalled source a while ago, but this is all that easily came up in my search now. Maybe you think the title is sufficient to back up my claim, maybe you don't, IDK.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-05/covid-lik...

Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right?

The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon.

Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally make viruses which could start a pandemic. They do this for the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable natural spillover events that will happen. It isn't nefarious.

But it is risky, and there many people now and before who thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of the risk.

Why did corporations change once covid hit?

Food is inelastic, but any one food item isn't. People can cut back on meat in difficult economic conditions, and they do.

So, what is on one hand necessary and inelastic can also be a luxury.

Even things called 'staples' are flexible, you won't die of malnutrition if you don't eat eggs.

What stopped corporations from realizing this before covid hit?

As a summary, the article argues for greater central control of the economy.

Actually, letting people search video text would enable less watching and that is probably the reason they aren't interested in it.

It's in the article from this thread.

Their is also a quote from the late RBG comparing efforts to stop this to some sort of stalinism.

Either way, what is absolutely important is that any enforcement is absolute and not selective / at the discretion of a prosecutor. There is no unbiased person when it comes to potentially shifting the balance of power of the SCOTUS. We can't only be shining a spotlight on justices from one party.

Thank you for providing that research, I wasn't aware of that paper.

But when I read it, I found something interesting.

"The final precision could be reached by integrating over more than 130 000 rotations relying on a careful suppression of systematic effects caused by the turntable rotation"

I wondered what effects they were suppressing, and while they discuss that to some extent they also say:

"While even faster rotation would have allowed to acquire more data and thus improve statistics, it resulted in increased residual systematic effects presumably due to modulated centrifugal forces and was thus not implemented"

And they state:

"active rotation potentially causes a systematic modulation of the beat frequency and might thus mimic an anisotropy signal. For exam- ple, gravitational or centrifugal forces that act on the resonators may get modulated with the turntable rota- tion and therefore modulate the length of the resonators."

So I would ask, how do we distinguish between new physics and systematic errors that look like new physics and need to be excluded from the experiment?

I would love to revisit MM myself, but I don't have the expertise to actually setup the experiment. I might be able to resolve that gap, but I definitely don't have the funding either, and that is a gap I don't know how to solve.

I'm not convinced of that interpretation of MM. MM found a signal below the margin of error. I think if they spun the table faster the signal would grow in strength. But subsequent experiments stopped rotating the assembly at all and just relied on the rotation of earth, and thus had even slower rotation and even smaller signals.

But at this point nobody is going to revisit MM, attempting to do so would immediately ruin your scientific reputation.

I see the cloud mostly for startup-ish companies hoping to grow rapidly but which want to avoid large upfront expenses to be ready for said growth.

A stable company where growth as a percentage isn't likely to be significant can run things cheaper on their own in most cases. At least if you consider the cost of the inevitable departure from the cloud provider either to switch another or to go on-prem. And if you aren't willing to make that exit, you can guarantee your cloud provider won't stop cranking up the fees until the threat of you leaving surfaces.

So are there no secular pop sci authors to clear things up or is your pet theory just you trying to blame an issue on your out group?

What is this fear mongering? With logic like this we would have banned the internet in the early 90s.

That union lawyer isn't going to unilaterally say ok. It has to get socialized and a consensus opinion needs to be found. That takes time. And like you pointed out, the union might not want to accept a modest increase because it can weaken their bargaining position. So, despite your claim the union doesn't make this more difficult, it absolutely objectively does make it more difficult than he company being able to make a decision without these restrictions. That doesn't mean unions are bad or that this process isn't worth it, but don't poison the well with unneeded dishonesty.

I'm not sure why you feel the need to falsely frame the point as a request for a blank check.

I get all the reasons you provided, but at the end of the day an honest discussion needs to ask is estimating tasks effective.

Do developers get more done or less done when estimating tasks vs not estimating tasks? The only claim estimates would increase productivity is the extent they are deadlines. But I think you will see that when developers take meeting their estimates seriously their estimates tend to get more conservative. And then there can be a desire to not over deliver on the estimates to lend those estimates legitimacy. Without estimates, you still have a performance metric to use, individual velocity. If one developer isn't getting stuff done as fast as others, you don't need estimates to know they aren't performing as you would like.

Are estimates reliable? This of course varies greatly by the project and the team but I my experience estimates are typically no more precise than 50% of their length. So a 6 month project probably shouldnt take longer than 9 months. Your mileage may vary, but is there a way to crudely estimate a project without asking for estimates? I would say probably. Why not just measure the teams velocity and project it?

I would argue estimates were a first guess at a way to run a development team which has survived mostly because of a refusal to consider the first guess might not have been the best guess.

They could embed ads in their cover photos. Just a banner or something. Not sure how the tracking would work, but there would certainly be value in it since sharing headlines can get many millions of views.

Go through history and tally up the human rights violations done by companies and govts and see who the leader is.

The govt has an army, police, and jails. The govt has legal means to use violence against people and deny them their freedoms. Any company that could do that would be doing it with the blessing of the govt first, which kinda just makes them a govt contractor.

Govt having information is not the same as a company who just wants to pre-approve you for a loan or show you a YouTube ad.

Please provide a potential valid use of this data in line with the FBIs mission that doesn't imply circumventing due process?