stvswn

Well, he's 88.

It's begging the question to claim they were proven right. Sure, they were proven right in some respect, but if the research itself caused it (and let's be real, it did) then they were proven right in a manner that doesn't really speak well of their record. And yes, they were influential in arguing for continued grant money to study coronaviruses. They were also influential in arguing against the Obama administrations restrictions on gain of function research and seem to have sought ways around the restrictions (we know from comments on the DEFUSE paper). They didn't publicly disclose the DEFUSE paper, a whistleblower in the DoD had to leak it. It is relevant because it suggested adding a FCS to natural coronaviruses to make it more virulent to humans. It seems like as soon as a virus with FCS appeared on the scene, their first reaction should have been "oh no, did someone do that research we proposed somewhere? We have to tell someone!" -- but, alas, no. Let's keep crying that they're being demonized, though.

It's pretty wild to me that a good portion of commenters here seem to think that only one side can politicize Covid's origins when the cited article itself says that the conclusion predates the new administration.

The natural origin bitter-clingers are still citing papers that claim to lean towards natural origin with the thinnest possible evidence. I admit I'm not a virologist, but I am a bit skeptical that this community would be completely forthright with us.

I can't shake the feeling like there might be fire where there's smoke: the Chinese government has not provided access to the WIV's data, for instance. The Chinese government deleted the virus's genome sequence from GenBank before later releasing it publicly. The closest relative to Covid-19 in known databases is RatG13, a virus from bats that was discovered in caves thousands of miles away, a complex that the researchers at WIV had used to collect samples. Peter Dasnak of EcoHealth alliance had previously submitted a plan to the DoD to introduce furin cleavage sites to existing coronaviruses to do gain-of-function research (or some euphemism for GOF to evade restrictions), a proposal that was declined, but within which there are still comments extant where they discuss outsourcing the riskiest research to China. Peter Dasnak led the delegation from WHO to China but never publicly disclosed that he had, only several years earlier, been interested in research that would have produced a virus that very specifically resembled Covid. A small group of influential scientists and bureaucrats were discussing via email that it certainly appeared to be a lab leak to them until they met in person to speak with Dr. Fauci in February 2020, after which they abruptly stopped discussing the possibility of lab-leak and worked to submit the Proximal Origin letter to Nature that claimed a consensus among scientists that it must be natural origin -- based on the airtight logic that if a lab wanted to make a coronavirus it probably would have done it differently. Those authors did not disclose the influence of Peter Dasnak and Dr Fauci in drafting the letter. Subsequently, the US government used the existence of the letter as authoritative evidence of a natural origin in order to lean on social media companies to censor speech about the potential of a lab leak. Meanwhile, the fact remains that in order for Covid to have made a jump from an animal species, it would have to be extant in the population of an animal species -- or a variant clearly one mutation away would need to be. It's been 5 years and we haven't found an animal with Covid.

Of course we'll never get the smoking gun because the data you'd need -- the experimental data from WIV -- is likely gone forever. Why would that be? Why wouldn't a leading research center on coronavirus virology -- perhaps the foremost in the world -- hide its records when the big event that represents its entire reason for existence -- a coronovirus pandemic -- has shown up in the world, conveniently on its doorstep? Shouldn't that be their time to shine? Are you going to blame that on Trump's rhetoric? Why hasn't all of Baric's data from UNC been released to the public yet, then?

It is really pretty amazing to me that many people will likely go to their grave thinking "oh, no, no scientists released a paper that says the natural origin is still a live theory, I don't have to listen to any of this conspiracy nonsense" simply because they can't live in a world where Trump was right.

I don't think so, because the sweeping motion of minute hand is effectively continuous rather than discrete, so there's no truncation. At 4:53:30 the minute hand will be correctly in between 4:53 and 4:54, if one (like the author) cares about such precision.

One town over from my own hometown is Westfield, NJ where Charles Addams is from, and there's a house on Elm Street that looks a lot like the Addams Family house -- especially the one he drew in New Yorker cartoons. The town has a festival in his honor every year around Halloween and the house in particular features proudly as _the_ Addams Family house.

I agree with the idea that there's something dramatic about evil things happening in an old house where one might find a mysterious aristocrat behaving badly, but I think the theme goes back to Regency era Britain an, when the industrial revolution was upending society and old aristocrats were going broke while new industrialists were getting rich -- causing the old manor house in disrepair trope to be something you might find in England. One person who inherited such a manor house, but not the wealth to maintain it, was Lord Byron. His manor, Newstead Abbey, is out of haunted-house central casting and, as a romantic, he plays to all those tropes. He had also visited the Balkans and was aware of Vampire myths, so when it's time to participate in the famous scary-story-contest in 1816 (where Mary Shelley submitted _Frankenstein_), Byron tells a story of a vampire who seems a lot like himself. This story is ripped off by Byron's physician who published his own story (The Vampyre) where the main character is absolutely Byronic. Bram Stoker's Dracula ends up with a similarly Byronic idea of Dracula, and now we have a deeply embedded cultural heritage of creepy stuff happening in run-down manor houses -- maybe just because Lord Byron himself haunted such a setting.

Or, that _could_ be Alexander the Great.

It is incorrect, but widespread among left-leaning pundits, that this ruling will force Congress to micromanage everything that would normally be left to the agencies. Agencies can still make rules. If Congress would like to be out of the details business, they can even write statutes that explicitly delegate rule making to the agencies. What this does is prevent agencies from acting in ways that are easily interpreted as _not_ conforming with law. The Chevron test told judges that they have to defer to the agencies _even when_ they conclude that the agencies are misreading the laws, as long as the agencies aren't being manifestly unreasonable. This has led to agencies very savilly expanding their power without any new statutory authority simply because they have good lawyers who know how to craft it in a way that survives a Chevron test. The SC just said something I find completely reasonable: from now on, judges have to interpret the law as its written and decide cases based on whether or not the agency is complying with the law. They cannot abrogate their duties to be the experts on legal analysis simply out of a desire to defer to the agency's interpretation. I think it's correctly decided because Chevron is an illogical mess -- why is it that in one situation and one situation only, our legal system treated one of the parties in a suit as inherently having more authority to intepret the law than a court itself? It is not persuasive to me that we should say "well, because the courts can't be experts," as this is not an argument that works in any other situation where a court must make legal rulings in the face of experts -- such as bankruptcy proceedings, antitrust cases, etc.

Simply because you're not a fan of the outcomes doesn't mean that the appointments of justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were illegitimate. Chevron deference started under the Stevens court and the deference it entailed related to the Reagan administration. That this has become a conservative hobby horse since then has nothing to do with policy preferences that only cut one way in a partisan way, and has everything to do with a deeper disagreement over the separation of powers and the role of the judiciary. Chevron deference isn't "the system" it's simply one precedent that has been faltering for years. There's no reason for any "side" to see this as the sky falling unless you really, really want to preserve some federal regulation that is TOO IMPORTANT to allow statutes to clarify.

The only misconduct _alleged_ is that he had extramarital affairs and led women on:

"Those sources said DFJ’s external investigators at the law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett discovered from at least two women — who confirmed their accounts to Recode — that Jurvetson had allegedly carried out affairs with multiple women simultaneously. Some of the women also said they felt led on by the married man and were unaware of the other relationships." https://www.vox.com/2017/11/18/16647078/steve-jurvetson-dfj-...

But what if I inherited it?

The argument that "no one really needs more than $X" is always a flawed one, in my opinion. I don't make $1 M a year, but if I did, I'm absolutely certain I'd prefer $2M a year. I can imagine all sorts of things I'd want -- vacation homes, fancy private schools for children, whatever. At $1 M a year I'd end up doing things that put me in contact with people who make more than me, and I'd think "oh, that's pretty cool, that stuff they have."

OK, OK, before you comment that "I don't need that," well, who said I did? I said I'd prefer it, therefore it would be an easy decision to switch jobs for it, all other things being equal.

So if you disagree, why is the amount _you_ make the defensible amount? Do you need it? Maybe 100k should be the max -- that's twice the median U.S. income, after all? Why do you need more than the median U.S. income, how greedy are you? Etc. etc.

I think different things can work for different people, but here's what has worked for me:

First, what didn't work. I switched to a dumbphone last year with the plans to stick with it for Lent (6.5 weeks). I succeeded but quickly fired up my smartphone, because there were many problems with the plan. I wanted to stop feeling addicted, but I didn't really want to give up on access to Uber, or Venmo, or other things that people expect I can help out with.

So, this year, I did it differently. I keep my smartphone on DND and in my backpack at work or in my desk at home. I took out the SIM and put the SIM in my dumbphone, w/ my dumbphone capable of tethering, so I can (if I need)_ tether my smartphone to my dumbphone. There aren't any social media apps on the smartphone.

If I care enough about Googling something, I just find my laptop. If I need my phone for a task (like Uber), I know where to find it. I am about 2 weeks into it and I still have a bunch of moments where I feel like I should take my phone out of my pocket for no reason at all, but it isn't there, so I don't.

Group texts are the worst part. I would love a dumbphone that can do MMS, but I can't find one. Group texting is pretty essential for practical reasons (groups of parents will use it to organize children's events, for example). I can't retrain everyone else to fit my eccentricity (in their view), so I am left replying back to group MMS with individual replies, it's inconvenient. If I can solve this I will likely never return to everyday smartphone usage.

I don't think there are many ways in which SF is similar to a "very right wing" city. First of all, "right wing" politicians do not control any city governments in any real way, but if you were to compare SF with say, Houston -- which has radically different policies along these lines -- you wouldn't find that the results are the same.

In the American context, an extreme right-wing city government would theoretically provide very few public services, allow all property to transact in open marketplaces with very little red tape, allow for any use of property to meet market demand. In other words, you could build a gigantic high rise in Noe Valley but the city wouldn't pay for public toilets in any case (but someone could feel free to make pay toilets if they own or lease the land). Left wingers imagine that this sort of arrangement would lead to worse or similar outcomes for the poor than SF currently, but... I don't know, honestly.

No, I think the comment was meant to mean "this is not left-wing, this is late-stage capitalism, the problem is that we have too many right wingers in SF that are cosplaying progressivism"

"a right-wing dystopia?" Seems like you'd prefer to redefine what it means to be left or right wing rather than admit that this is the outcome of left-wing governance.

The specific issues here are: tight control over building standards leading to red tape; high levels of process to ensure community review and involvement; paying more than market price for labor in order to support unions as a political value; supporting restrictive zoning to keep renters and homeowners in stable homes.

"Right-wing" imperatives did not create these issues.

Put another way, if a city elects left-wing politicians exclusively for 50 years, and those left-wing politicians enact policies and values consistent with their platforms -- it's probably not the case that negative results are because they're actually secret Republicans.

Fraud aside, which is a problem, the "forgiveness" of the loans was the plan all along so it's not as if businesses were expected to pay them back.

The program was really a bailout so businesses could maintain their payrolls when everything was shutdown. Instead of writing the checks directly, the government decided to frame it as a loan that would be forgiven if businesses stayed in business and spent it on their payrolls. This was a good strategy for the government, because it would have been pretty tough to enforce otherwise.

So the loan forgiveness was by _design_ and the point of the program was to keep businesses alive when the governments themselves were (for perhaps good reason) making it impossible for them to operate. It's not really "forgiveness" in the sense of, say, the college loan forgiveness program.

It's -- it's an op-ed. Not an article. Of course the person has an interest in it, that's why they wrote an op-ed. All of the papers have a similar section with opinionated pieces.

The NYTimes piece on the same subject[1] is _also_ on the opinion page. It's not a journalistic reporting of fact either, as some here seem to think.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/opinion/nyu-chemistry-fir...

because they're bad journalists

A NY Post journalist didn't write this, this is an op-ed by a former dean of UPenn's medical school.

Smart TVs in general use IP address to try target devices across households, which is against the privacy policies of a lot of ad tech providers because IPs are not redactable/resettable by an end-user.

The best way for small ad tech providers to compete with "big tech" has been to cross lines that the bigger companies won't cross, this is an example for why there are a lot of profitable ad tech companies in the connected TV / video ads space.

Even if you use a VPN, the TV itself likely has a unique ID for ads, so someone just needs to see one request with both the true IP and the unique device ID and then remember that for the future. It's all very shady. TVs are very far behind the level of user control that phones and browsers provide because there's less scrutiny and its more fragmented across manufacturers (all of which want to get in on ad tech).

You can usually find some opt-out of the identifiers if you dig deep enough into the menus, because multiple laws and regulations require them.

Google does not rely on a user being logged in. Go to adsettings.google.com in a logged out state, for example. I'm not sure what you're referring to.

I find it kind of amazing that the justification for school mask mandates (which was once "keep kids from getting covid") has morphed into "we'll lower the load on hospitals if the kids keep their faces covered."

Can anyone imagine if we went back to 2020 and pitched this to parents? "Look, if your kid gets it, it will be similar in nature to a chest cold. It's somewhat more dangerous for the elderly. In order to keep doctors and nurses from getting burned out, the kids are all going to wear masks all day. Other than that, outside of school, we're all going to be pretty much getting back to normal."

I have lost track of what the goalposts are. I am starting to think that people just like the idea that children are suffering, it must mean that we're taking the whole thing seriously. As long as none of us are inconvenienced, right?

His point is that the job satisfaction of adults is important and saving it requires our collective agreement that 1+1=3.

The point of masking in schools was maybe, once, based on the theory that it would keep the children and teachers safe. Now, the point is that we must exert every lever of control at our disposal. It just so happens that the only group of people who we can reliably control are children, as they cannot vote, do not have fully-formed civil rights, and (in the main) are legally required to attend government run schools each day.

So, while they'd love to make everyone else mask, they realize they practically cannot -- so they focus on children. It's grotesque.

You somehow manage to be condescending against all parties here.

Calling mothers who want their children to receive an in-person education "screaming Karens" is terribly out of touch.

I have young children, and my position is simple: the hospital load, the vaccination status of the elderly, the burn out of the teachers -- it's not my child's burden. It's the adults' burden.

You are free to wear a mask for the rest of your life for all I care. I find it pathetic, but I really don't care. But you and people like you do not deserve power over my children, and if you don't see the reckoning coming you are not paying close enough attention.

With reference to their housing and energy problems, and solutions, you might want to check in on current events!

With regards to faith in centrally planned interventions: China also had an overpopulation "problem," and they "acted" and now the population of women of child-bearing age is set to diminish by 20% over the next decade.

Outside of the largest megacities, urban populations are shrinking as birthrates have plummeted. China has enough empty housing to house 40 million people and yet real estate prices remain too high -- real estate was relied upon to fuel growth and so there has been massive speculation.

There aren't enough new families being formed to fill the housing.

As far as energy is concerned, China's problem is that the price of coal is going up, mainly because Europe requires more coal as they have reduced domestic capacity at the same time that Russia is reducing NG exports. China runs on coal, mainly.

I feel lucky that we didn't have so much "action" because it's only going to get uglier from here on out for China.

You're right we don't "owe the dead," we owe "current owners of U.S. Treasury bills."

there is no local bat population near Wuhan, China -- nor is Wuhan known to be some sort of wet market epicenter. It has wet markets like any Chinese city would.

The reason the wet market theory came to prominence was because commerce seemed like a reasonable explanation for how a novel coronavirus showed up so far away from its known animal reservoir (bats).

The reason the WIV is in Wuhan is the same as the reason why the CDC is in Atlanta or whatever -- Wuhan is a major city and it has things in it.

Wait, you're still overgeneralizing.

There's the chance that it was a naturally occurring virus that wasd being stored in a lab (like RaTG13, it's closest known cousin). Then, there's the chance that it was manipulated in lab experiments by well-meaning scientists hoping to learn more about coronavirus transmission to humans (which I think is most likely, considering the behavior of the WIV, but far from certain). Finally, there's the chance that it was deliberately leaked as a bioweapon (doesn't make sense to me).

I totally agree that there are massive conflicts of interest, including the implication of being blacklisted from Chinese data sources for one's career and the chance that there simply won't be any funding in the future if the public believes that the research field itself is to blame.

I know it won't be a popular opinion here, but I am not sure I trust the judgment of scientists with conflicts of interest.

It would be human nature for those who were involved in lobbying for gain-of-function research to continue are now unwilling to entertain the idea that something as devastating as COVID was a result of such research. If that is true, it means that they were disasterously wrong in their earlier stance and it means that there will be no appetite to continue funding their field of expertise.

I'm tired of being told not to believe what's clearly in front of me -- a coordinated campaign in China to cover up any inquiry in to the origins of the virus accompanied by very suspicious behavior in China in the months before they were supposed to have been aware of the outbreak.

Whether COVID-19 itself is exactly a product of research at the WIV funded by EcoHealth Alliance and the NIAID, I don't know, but I can read those grant requests myself and see that they clearly refer to manipulating coronaviruses so that they better infect humanized mice cells. This is a study that Fauci insists is not gain of function research, but I'm unclear as to the distinction. I suspect that they played with language in these requests so as to be able to avoid triggering the legally-required review.

Fauci, and others, are potentially aware that the pandemic could have stemmed from research that they themselves fast-tracked around the legally mandated review process, making them partially culpable in millions of deaths worldwide -- it would be incredibly difficult in that situation to start looking critically at the possibility that it's true.

We should be very careful about trusting experts with a lot at stake in the answer to the question.

The thread's entire premise is that lab leakers are only speculating while there is in fact direct evidence of natural origins.

What direct evidence of natural origins is he referring to? Kristian Andersen's argument in his oft-cited paper seems to be that the spike proteins are effective at infecting humans in a novel way, and that if he were engineering an infections coronavirus he would have designed it differently, therefore it's unlikely that it was bioengineered. Beyond that, they tend to point out that "there is no evidence" of a lab leak -- ignoring many pieces of evidence along the way, even if they are circumstantial, including the workers at the WIV contracting a dangerous disease w/ COVID-like symptoms in Fall 2019, the sudden disappearance of the WIV genome sequence database before the first publicly known cases, and the suspicious renaming of the RaTG13 virus sample (the closest known to COVID-19 genetically) in WIV literature. I feel perpetually gaslit but some of these scientists. The argument seems to go as follows: it is most reasonable to suspect a zoonotic transfer, even without direct evidence, because a community of scientists with clear conflicts of interest tell us so -- but we are supposed to dismiss the circumstantial evidence of a lab leak because the only satisfactory evidence would be if a smoking gun were found in the WIV records (and everyone knows that they won't be). The idea that it has natural origins stems from recent experience with SARS and MERS, but of course that doesn't mean much of anything at all -- those experience inform both theories. One should also consider the 1977 flu pandemic which was confirmed to have been related to a live vaccine trial done by the Chinese military -- information which was suppressed at the time by the WHO for fear of losing cooperation with China and Russia.

Origins aside, it is not disupted that the NIH through the NIAID and EcoHealth alliance were funding research into coronaviruses that was being done at the WIV, and that the data related to that research used to be readily available but now is suppressed by the Chinese government, exactly at the same time that we are experiencing a pandemic that the research was hoping to forestall. Isn't that alone troubling? Are the scientists in this community expressing any trouble with that fact, or are we meant to believe that we are conspiratorial nuts if we bring up China's behavior in any context?