codefreeordie

This seems like one of those times to go with Betteridge: no.

Oh, it is very likely that there's all sorts of things of that sort that he doesn't recall. And lots of others that he probably recalls but not with enough certainty to talk about under oath.

Whether or not he approved a particular grant personally eight years ago, it's reasonable for him not to recall. Or, at least, it would be reasonable other than that, of course, he's known for ages that he was going to be asked about this specific thing and, as counsel points out many times in his objections, Fauci prepared heavily for the deposition. It would be very reasonable for him to have read up on the grants he knew he was going to be asked about to be able to recall basic facts about them.

But even then, most of the "do not recall" responses really aren't the damaging parts of the deposition.

I did like the part where Fauci was handed an email he had written where he discussed a paper and described it as a gain-of-function paper [shortly after having testified that nobody used the terminology "gain-of-function" anymore, since it was overbroad and vague], and he was asked whether, in this email, he had referred to the paper as a gain-of-function paper or not (with the text of his email literally in his hands) and his counsel objects on the grounds that it was a "mischaracterization" to assume that, because the email was written by Fauci, that it contained his words.

That actually ends up being one of the more damaging parts of the testimony -- not because it's some big admission that this study was doing gain-of-function -- everybody knows that -- but because Fauci has repeatedly testified that NIAID was not funding any coronavirus-related gain-of-function studies. If Fauci had not described the study using the phrase "gain-of-function", his argument that "gain-of-function is broad and mostly-meaningless" might possibly have carried the day -- he testified that way because that's what he was asked about, but maybe in his mind that phrase meant something else. But then there's the email where he talks specifically about the gain-of-function study which he knows (at the time he wrote the email about it) was NIAID-funded. So, if he ever testified [after writing that email] that NIAID did not fund any gain-of-function studies on coronaviruses, well... that would be perjury.

Still, relatively unlikely perjury charges will be made to stick (or even seriously attempted) -- Bannon remains the only person in basically forever to be actually prosecuted for lying to Congress, and unless Covid gets back to a state where the government is trying to reintroduce restrictions/mandates, I don't foresee anybody spending the political capital to try that case.

And all of that presupposes that that portion of the deposition is even admitted as evidence. It may or may not be -- there were, after all, standing objections. And while objecting to assuming that the sender of an email was its author is a bit specious, some of the other objections might not be as unreasonable.

presumably because they want also to stop other EU countries' airlines from running the flights as well.

Do you have any evidence this is fake?

because on HN, you are required to be a democrat and support all democrat causes.

for sure.

It'll be really interesting tomorrow to see how much tech and media end up suppressing this story too.

Presumably, just like with the story this is all about, they'll just ban all mention of it and delete everybody's accounts because of "safety" or something.

I'm actively watching a variety of mainstream press to see if any of them cover the story, but honestly I doubt they will, other than maybe to have an AP fact check that says that the whole thing is false and that Elon made it all up.

Normally, the dupe detector only detects dupes that have actually been "seen"

edit: here's dang himself on how the dupe detector ignores things that haven't had their chance in the sun yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33824482

No, this will almost certainly not hit the frontpage. The dupe detector has already started removing all the threads, even though on other topics it only engages after a topic actually gets picked up.

Every effort will be taken to suppress this story, just like the story it's talking about. (And remember that dang has before admitted to manually editing scores and reordering the front page to suit his preferences for what the community talk about)

None of the threads are even in the top 500 posts, despite the score being much higher than plenty of other posts which have made it. (Most of the things on the 15th page are like 5 points in 12 hours)

edit: Here is a recent comment from dang himself where he talks about a moderator altering the score of a post downward because it wasn't the kind of content that they wanted to be popular:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698592

edit 2 since im not allowed to reply to you @dang: I posted the one because I was not being believed. Finding a bunch of them was too much work. You may not "make a secret" of it, but clearly lots of people don't know that the frontpage is actually what the moderators want folks to talk about, not what actually gets the upvotes. Oh, and reread your comment to me. Your comment uses exactly the style and tone for which you routinely chastise folks. You're doing a really good job, actually, of making my point for me.

more likely as retaliation for what is currently underway (or in anticipation of the retaliation coming)

Yep, housing is one of the few things whose relative price has increased, primarily because the planet is the same size now but there are more people.

In other areas, people were absurdly more wealthy in 2016 than in 1916 -- in terms of the quality of food, transportation, healthcare, nearly all household goods, services of most kind except domestic/household staff, and of course all the technology that didn't exist at all then.

Think about it this way: the planet is the same planet, but an hour of work at an average job should on average buy you an hour's worth of stuff-made-by-labor (of average skill/value). As human productivity grew due to better equipment, better materials, better science, and more efficient operations, the amount of stuff an average hour of work produces is way higher -- and thus the average worker can afford more/better stuff for the same amount of time worked.

Some work got way more productive, some got a little more productive, and a few things (like domestic help) are exactly the same level of productivity as before. And so some things, we have absurdly cheaper or better things, but others have gotten slightly more expensive instead.

Heya @dang, is this what you were referring to when you said that you moderated without regard to viewpoint? Deleting 100% of posts from all on one side while boosting even pure personal attacks from your side?

Please read those guidelines you keep posting at people and then consider actually following them.

There is some good material in that book, and it is written in a manner that appeals to a wide audience, so the book does some good, but generally, Kiyosaki is a salesman (of himself as a genius) above all else, and often gives hot takes that will draw attention but have minimal real value behind them.

This claim is typical of a Kiyosaki take: it is extreme, it seems plausible, it draws attention, and it has no real basis in research or reality. I'm not saying the economy won't crash (it might or might not), but Kiyosaki doesn't have specific data backing his thesis.

This story makes the fundamental error of assuming that a country and it's government are the same.

It isnt really public land. It's government land. And it's reachable by the government, its owner.

Government likes to pretend it is "the people" or "the public" on occasion to add legitimacy to it's actions, but it is neither of those things.

The scare quotes are in the original headline, but they're pretty obnoxious and misleading.

The person claiming that Twitter is taking it seriously is an activist who has historically criticized Twitter's lack of taking it seriously -- specifically that they have implemented some of their specific suggestions, including changes to the content reporting flow.

I've not followed this issue on Twitter because frankly I don't care that much about Twitter, so I don't have an opinion on whether Twitter had a problem before or whether it is better or worse now, but I do find the constant drumbeat of "Elon bad, Twitter evil now" posts to be quite tiresome.

And will undoubtedly have all his posts killed in a day or so, and probably be threatened with banning by dang if he doesn't change his views

Dorsey's Twitter claimed to be pro free speech and fair, and yet apparently it was fine for Twitter to ban only one side then.

As per usual, the true story is "it's good when my guy does it and unfair and evil when the other side does it to me"

The trend of adding bespoke touches to warehouse packaged orders is cool, but

the reason hand-written thank-you cards have meaning is because of the thought and effort that goes into them. Mass-produced hand-written notes don't carry much more weight than autopen ones.

Well, they do carry more weight, until people realize they're "fake"

This would all work today, though if it became a trend, manufacturers could start adding vehicle integrity checks into the power-on sequence that would refuse to start if modifications are detected -- and if they had the first-party components use cryptographic signatures to authorize themselves, DMCA would then step in and make circumvention probably criminal again.

All the way back in 1998, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was being rammed through, we warned the world that this would be the result -- that the law which prohibits circumvention of "access control technology" in things you own would ultimately mean that you no longer actually owned the devices you purchased.

We were derided and mocked and accused of being hysterical, of using the "slippery slope" fallacy.

Whelp, that slope was pretty damn slippery after all, wasn't it.

Love the downvotes for speaking the obvious and transparent truth. Of course, the reason is obvious -- the sexist and racist trash that inhabit this place and who won't be satisfied until male babies are drowned in the river at birth again.

No, we should not keep trying to eliminate prosperity for the human race out of some religious fear.

We should instead abandon the modern anti-humanist religion and return to the one human superpower, discarded 40 years ago to our great cost: humanity's ability to adapt it's environment to suit it.

Because they're required to save almost half the spaces for women, but they don't have to save almost have the spaces for men.

Women will be aggressively recruited to fill the mandatory slots. Not worth looking for men at all, you don't need them unless they happen to be so good it's worth burning a slot on one.

I remember when the existence of this group was a "conspiracy theory"

The notion that the "billionaires" "don't work" and "don't contribute" is patently nonsense.

(Especially since the chosen villain is Jeff Bezos, and I'm pretty sure that Amazon didn't magick itself into being)

On the one hand, items as close as some of these, you're truly just guessing, and taking the exchange rate an hour earlier or later could change the result.

On the other hand, my average was about as close on the close ones as the non-close ones.

We don't work as hard as we used to, we don't produce like we used to.

Our society has gone from one of growth to one of decay.

You can't do as much when you want to work a few hours a day a few days a week with seasons of time off.

You can't do as much when the supply of energy is falling over time.

You can't do as much when regulations grow and grow, making building anything less and less worthwhile and less and less possible.

Turns out, lots of people want to follow Trump.

He was always very popular amongst people who aren't welcome on places like HN (which is why he seems so deeply unpopular and yet gets so many votes and overflows so many stadiums)

Also turns out lots of folks like to follow Trump who really hate him because he supplies them with content by saying lots of exciting things to react to.

That was true of solar power 20 years ago, too. But eventually, we got there.

We will probably get there with carbon capture too.

Though I do agree, we should focus more heavily on nuclear power now, because it is much closer to ready-for-prime-time than carbon capture.

Still, I think that carbon capture is an excellent future technology for the production of carbon-neutral liquid fuels. Liquid fuels are super great, and they can be made into a very clean portable power source through the use of nuclear power and carbon capture tech.

"Solutionism" is a fantastic word for this particular slur, since it gets to the heart of why technological solutions to our problems are not considered: because they might solve the problem, thereby robbing the politicians of their ability to wield the problem as a weapon against the population.