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pacalaon Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release

Great question. If an outbreak of smallpox happened in Atlanta, 10 miles from the BSL-4 center, would you be so quick to call out any questions regarding said center as 'conspiracy theories'?

pacalaon YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

Fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to reflect and explain!

pacalaon Wuhan lab did research on bat viruses, but no evidence of accidental release

I struggle with similar questions. Probably we'll never know.

As of your first point, there may be another natural virus, as of yet unidentified, possibly carried by a different species, that brought the disease to Wuhan. From the virologist chatter I hear, the genetic difference between RaTG13 is too large to have RaTG13 a recent direct precursor of SARS-CoV-2, either through genetic manipulation, or via culturing.

Alternatively, everything that came out of China since Jan 2020 is pure BS. As of yet, there is no independent verification of the origin of RaTG13, which conveniently was found 'lying around in a freezer' in Jan 2020, stored there all the way back in 2013. Nor there is independent verification of the genomic sequences of all the other viruses that are 'lying around in a freezer'. Nor are the Chinese authorities very open to international collaboration on this matter.

The sharp politicization of this issue is worrisome in itself.

pacalaon YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

The exchange reads like textbook example of broadbrushing. Somebody raised concerns about negative long term effects of censorship, your reply accused them personally of believing that 'Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers'. They never even mentioned Covid19 or 5G.

> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

vs. a reformulation, to capture your stated intent:

> Are you saying that we should allow the circulation of obviously wrong ideas like "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

Just because some of the 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers' crowd also believes censorship is a bad idea, we can't infer that everyone / a majority of people that believe censorship is a bad idea are also believing 'Covid19 is caused by 5G towers'. Alas, our brains are very prone to this kind of elementary logic error, which makes the broadbrushing mechanism so powerful.

pacalaon Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

Not at this scale. Not at the scale where the nobility lives in NYC/SF/Shanghai and the peasants live in a different state or even overseas.

pacalaon The pieces of the puzzle of Covid-19’s origin are coming to light

Fairly well balanced presentation, even if behind paywall. IIRC, Economist lets one create an account and read 5 free articles.

One aspect that is particularly worrisome:

> Western experts say categorically that the sequence of the new virus’s genome—which Chinese scientists published early on, openly and accurately—reveals none of the telltales genetic engineering would leave in its wake. But it remains a fact that in Wuhan, where the outbreak was first spotted, there is a laboratory where scientists have in the past deliberately made coronaviruses more pathogenic.

[...]

> In 2017 WIV opened the first biosecurity-level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory in China—the sort of high-containment facility in which work is done on the most dangerous pathogens. A large part of Dr Shi’s post-SARS research there has been aimed at understanding the potential which viruses still circulating among bats have to spill over into the human population. In one experiment she and Ge Xingyi, also of the WIV, in collaboration with American and Italian scientists, explored the disease-like potential of a bat coronavirus, SHC014-CoV, by recombining its genome with that of a mouse-infecting coronavirus. The WIV newsletter of November 2015 reported that the resulting virus could “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titres equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV”. In early April this newsletter and all others were removed from the institute’s website.

[...]

> Many scientists think that with so many biologists actively hunting for bat viruses, and gain-of-function work becoming more common, the world is at increasing risk of a laboratory-derived pandemic at some point. “One of my biggest hopes out of this pandemic is that we address this issue—it really worries me,” says Dr Pilch. Today there are around 70 BSL-4 sites in 30 countries. More such facilities are planned.

pacalaon Amazon locks down internal employee communications amid organizing efforts

Therein lies the problem. As the machine scales larger and larger, the cogs at the bottom have worse and worse conditions. Almost as if 'software is eating the world' is not the key to unlock Utopia, as techno-optimists would have you believe.

pacalaon No, I won't read your amateur Covid-19 “research paper”

Are you sure?! That is not a 'research paper'. There are no claims to results, no literature review, no methods, no abstract, no conclusions and no references. It is at best a review, and not an academic one.

I'm not trying to disparage the author. He's put a decent chunk of work into wrapping his head around the situation and shared with the world. More power to him. It's just that the output doesn't read like a research paper, or an academic review.

pacalaon Windows 10 has “python” command that redirects to the Windows Store

conda

pacalaon YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063265

> We have a myriad of evidence that societies that suppress the truth for "the public good" don't go in a desirable direction or end well.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23063531

> Are you saying that the truth is "Covid-19 is caused by 5-g towers"?

pacalaon YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

Furthermore, there is zero guarantee that the censors won't eventually develop a taste for antivaxxing themselves, and now any information about potential benefits of vaccines is actively suppressed.

pacalaon YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

The '5G coronavirus conspiracy theory' is a convenient broad brush to paint any dissident thought as inane, even if 99% people entertaining dissident thoughts are just as appalled as anyone at the 5G theory.

pacalaon YouTube has deleted the account of David Icke

What you are missing is the bad, immoral and harmful ideas that perpetuate themselves by virtue of being proclaimed true by the authorities. Every totalitarian regime out there perpetuates a set of such 'official truths', that are painfully and obviously untrue to the subjects, but have to be aquiesced to.

pacalaon Data do not back cloth masks to limit Covid-19, experts say

You forgot about the third half of the cycle: scientists exceedingly rarely submit a correction note to tone down the hyped up claims made by the PR departments / science press. They are very good at keeping the freak out to themselves. A systemic problem, not sure how to solve for, if even there is a solution.

pacalaon NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’

I responded in kind to the OP title, claiming that to cut funding to an incredibly dangerous practice is a ‘horrible precedent’. Quote from none other than a business partner of the principal in question.

For balance, consider crafting a less inflammatory title.

pacalaon NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’

True! They did had that concern. They considered both shutting down the whole enterprise over it and did the math to assess the risk and found it unfounded.

Our friends in Wuhan? Crickets. And puff pieces in the US media attempting to politicize the issue and keep the gravy train going.

> When Teller informed some of his colleagues of this possibility, he was greeted with both skepticism and fear. Hans Bethe immediately dismissed the idea, but according to author Pearl Buck, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Arthur Compton was so concerned that he told Robert Oppenheimer that if there were even the slightest chance of this "ultimate catastrophe" playing out, all work on the bomb should stop.

> So a study was commissioned to explore the matter in detail, and six months before the Trinity test, the very first detonation of nuclear device, Edward Teller and Emil Konopinski announced their findings in a report with the ominous title "Ignition of the Atmosphere With Nuclear Bombs."

> "It is shown that, whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions."

[0] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/09/12/the_fear_th...

pacalaon NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’

There will be a coronavirus pandemic != There will be a lethal coronavirus pandemic starting in Wuhan.

I'm not aware that Wuhan was regarded as breeding ground for human transmissible lethal coronaviruses prior to 2020. Do you happen to have a source for that?

Edit. Added 'lethal', as common cold is also a coronavirus in 15% of the instances.

pacalaon NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’

With nuclear, the natural state of fissile material is inert, under critical density. It's too spread out to lead to a spontaneous planet scale detonation. You have the work hard to amass even tiny amounts of fissile material for experimentation. You can't blow up Earth even if you want it, there isn't enough fissile material on Earth to do so.

With bio, the fissile material is humanity itself and is above critical density. Once the virus escapes your lab, you have a planet scale pandemic detonation on your hands. Afterwards, all you can do is to try to spread out the fissile material [aka humanity] to keep it under critical density. See 'social distancing' and 'stay at home orders'. Which doesn't work long term, note the economic crisis that's just starting, arguably worse than the Great Depression. What positive rewards are you expecting from this? A new source of energy ain't it.

Imagine a Manhattan project where, if a handful of stray neutrons escape Oak Ridge, the entire Eastern US goes up in flames.

Edit: How about: 'learn how to contain' nuclear detonations by partially detonating planet-scale doomsday devices?

pacalaon NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’

What if the most effective response is 'pray it never happens'?

Pandemics are similar to nukes: both have damage capacity and exponential growth regimen. The one major difference is that nukes have limited fissile material, whereas a pandemics's mass is the entire humanity, or, in the worst case, biosphere.

Engineering viruses for human reproduction to 'learn how to contain' pandemics is about as useful as detonating nukes to 'learn how to contain' nuclear detonations. The downside is that you may end up blowing up significant chunks of the world, whereas the purported benefit may never pan out. It may well be that a pandemic or nuclear detonation is uncontrollable and unstoppable once it gets started.

pacalaon A young Venus had water for 2B years, habitable for longer than Mars

Why not? Because of the myriad things that can go wrong and bring doom to the enterprise. In due time one of them will happen. Stable systems are governed by negative feedback loops, blimps are not one of them.

pacalaon NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’

Humans have engaged in genetic manipulation through application of selective pressures since the dawn of time. In its positive form is called 'domestication', and 99% of the food of your table, vegetable or animal, is the byproduct of such genetic manipulation.

Nothing in the article you cite addresses whether SARS-CoV-2 is a result of applying selective pressures or not. And the grant in question is funding exactly that: scientists looking to enhance the ability of coronavirus to infect various species, including humans. Not hard to presume they used the tried and true method of applying selective pressures, at least as a baseline.

https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...

pacalaon NIH’s axing of bat coronavirus grant a ‘horrible precedent’

Just wow.

We have a bunch of guys knowingly playing with fire. Then out of nowhere a major inferno starts within spitting distance from their playground. And the US tax payers have the moral duty to fund foreign nationals to enact this charade in a foreign country?

pacalaon NIH abruptly cuts coronavirus research funding, alarming scientists

"the National Institutes of Health abruptly cancelled funding for a long-standing research project by US and Chinese scientists"

"The grant that is now going unfunded is titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” and it was written by EcoHealth Alliance, Inc., a non-profit based in New York that collaborates with a leading Chinese researcher who studies bat coronaviruses in Wuhan."

pacalaon Why Restaurants Are So Fucked

The lion share of the price goes for the privilege of eating in a NY establishment. The rent is too damn high [0]. I bet you can find world class Asian food in NY, it's just that it's going to be a whole lot more expensive.

[0] 'The Rent Is Too Damn High Party is a single issue political party, primarily active in the state of New York, that has nominated candidates for mayor of New York City in 2005 and 2009, and for governor and senator in 2010.', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party

pacalaon Google's top quantum scientist explains why he resigned

Indeed, a power struggle. Management's natural responsibility is relationships to other humans, which makes them much harder to replace compared to a cog that performs a technical task, no matter how much skill that task requires.

pacalaon Comparing Covid-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing Apples to Oranges

I think you meant 'flu deaths are mostly caused by [bacterial] pneumonia'. One thought along those lines is that the spike in deaths we see is due to covid19 killing directly, death coming like clockwork X weeks after infection. Compared to the flu, which due to the requirement for a secondary bacterial pneumonia, has a higher variability in the timing of the death: at what time bacterial infection develops, which strain of bacteria, antibiotic interference, etc. Thus, we're going to see higher spikes for covid, and hopefully narrower.

pacalaon Comparing Covid-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing Apples to Oranges

That being said, we have developed a combination of vaccines and ICU treatments to drastically reduce the mortality of the flu. This is not your '70 flu anymore.

pacalaon Comparing Covid-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is Like Comparing Apples to Oranges

Going to be charitable and hope the bottom of y axis is zero.

pacalaon Rob Pike interview

There is 'kernel device driver' kind of systems, and there is 'kubernetes module' kind of systems. Most of the modern infrastructure work happens for the latter use-case. GC is a very reasonable choice, provided you know what you're doing.

pacalaon CO2 emissions set to fall nearly 8% this year, the largest drop in history

Number of people is what ultimately matters. The amount of CO2 per capita tends towards the same ballpark. Somewhere between 5-10 t/year/capita [0].

US, alas, is at 16t/year, though decreasing. Overall contribution: 330M * 16 = 5B t/year.

Now let's watch how the 6 billion people that did not exist circa 1900 catch up in emissions with the high energy regimen that characterizes 'western middle class' lifestyle. Let's lowball at 5t/year/capita. Overall contribution: 6000M * 5 = 30B t/year. Earth as we know it will not survive that.

And that's before we factor in that population is still booming, both globally and, through global migration, in US.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-by-world...