morepedantic

7 ms·

61.
by morepedantic 1y ago
Tax the poor for carbon emission. They'll adjust. People will walk, bike, take the bus, car pool, and buy used hybrids instead of mustangs. PS, regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical.
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by morepedantic 1y ago
If you subsidize polluting life-styles, you'll get pollution. You think the rich suffer from pollution and car dependency? It's not at all clear that taxing gas will lead to worse outcomes for the poor. It's entirely clear th
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by morepedantic 1y ago
Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior, at which point just make it illegal. Most fines are proportional to damages. Criminalizing fossil fuels is insane. The fines should cover the externalities.
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by morepedantic 1y ago
TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution. TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in r
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Surely it's a lot easier to train the censorship out of the model than it is to build the model from scratch.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbrea... China attempted information control on SARS-1, but rolled most of it back by April. They still haven't done this for SARS-2. That's not proof, b
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by morepedantic 2y ago
They went from uncertain to low certainty. It's hard to imagine a smaller shift in position than that, and thus the dog-pile. You're trying to drag me into some other debate entirely.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Brazil performs dependency resolution in a language-agnostic way. https://gist.github.com/terabyte/15a2d3d407285b8b5a0a7964dd6...
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Coronavirus lab leaks in China also had precedent. What's your point? There was no evidence for a zoonotic origin other than it was possible. There was little evidence for a lab leak other than it was possible, but at least there was s
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Doubt. You appear to be Canadian, and their major zoos all have polar bears. Plus you live in Canada, where polar bears run amok. How do I know you're not looking at a polar bear right now, with their iconic black fur?
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Are you equally cautious with your opinions on zoonosis? The problem is that huge swathes of the medical community politicized the pandemic for a specific political purpose, especially in the USA. For example, the Moderna vaccine trials wer
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by morepedantic 2y ago
I would like to jump on the band wagon and point out that this is an absolutely minuscule shift in position.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Unless there's another crime outside the scope of the pardon. For example, crimes within the statute of limitations prior to the pardon, new crimes after the pardon, or state level crimes during the period of the pardon.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
All he needs to do is commit a federal crime right away.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
The lab leak is more likely than zoonosis. Uncertainty still dominates. The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
He sure kept his mouth shut about his theories until the waters calmed.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
JFC, finally someone that understands specific evidence changes probabilities. It's unlikely we'll ever know the truth. If it's a cover up, then it's possible that someone will come forward in 30 years. For example, Luis
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Have you considered the possibility that you infer racism more often than people imply it?
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by morepedantic 2y ago
I think you're confusing genetic engineering with the bioweapons research. The WIV did collect natural coronaviruses and genetically engineer them.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
It's not obvious that international bodies are the answer. Health agencies the world over lied through their teeth to manipulate the public to take specific actions. So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Yeah, an accident in one of the most advanced scientific laboratories in the world is racist. It was a wet market. Try to keep up.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
The NIH partially funded GoF research in contravention of policy. The funding for the worst of the GoF proposals was denied, but there is evidence that the WIV performed the research anyway. Yeah, the NIH isn't blameless if the lab lea
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by morepedantic 2y ago
There are documented cases of coronavirus leaks from labs in China, but not dozens. Then again, there aren't dozens of SARS either.
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Read the paper. It claims that this is consistent with 2 spillover events, but it's also consistent with 1 spillover and an early mutation. The mutation between the 2 lineages could happen on either side of the spillover. But a 2 spill
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Intentionally seeking out potentially harmful natural pathogens from remote locations and placing them in close proximity to people isn't relevant to lab leaks? Then why are they studied under high levels of security in the first place
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by morepedantic 2y ago
>These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows. You literally just reduced 3 theories to 2: lab leak natural virus, lab leak medical GoF, and lab leak bioweapon. These theories get collapsed beca
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by morepedantic 2y ago
>In general, these kinds of conspiracy theories just collapse when you start pulling the threads. You think it's a conspiracy theory that Obama banned GoF research? OK, it was through an OSTP directive working with the NIH rather th
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by morepedantic 2y ago
Those are both examples of a hypothetical lab leak. The WIV had the largest collection of related viruses in the world sampled from nature. The WIV performed GoF research on some of those viruses. They're both plausible events. I'
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by morepedantic 2y ago
>We can say with a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was _not_ engineered. The lab leak hypothesis doesn't depend on GoF research. CoV-2 could have a natural origin, been collected by the WIV, and leaked into the city. This
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by morepedantic 2y ago
>China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent w

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