pacala

14 ms·

91.
by pacala 6y ago
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'?
92.
by pacala 6y ago
Fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to reflect and explain!
93.
by pacala 6y ago
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 viro
94.
by pacala 6y ago
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 neve
95.
by pacala 6y ago
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.
96.
by pacala 6y ago
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
97.
by pacala 6y ago
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
98.
by pacala 6y ago
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 t
99.
by pacala 6y ago
conda
100.
by pacala 6y ago
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://n
101.
by pacala 6y ago
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.
102.
by pacala 6y ago
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.
103.
by pacala 6y ago
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
104.
Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier, and why they should stop(vox.com)
8 points by pacala 6y ago|0 comments
105.
by pacala 6y ago
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
106.
by pacala 6y ago
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 le
107.
by pacala 6y ago
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 polit
108.
by pacala 6y ago
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
109.
by pacala 6y ago
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 exp
110.
by pacala 6y ago
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, wherea
111.
by pacala 6y ago
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.
112.
by pacala 6y ago
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 byproduc
113.
by pacala 6y ago
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 char
114.
by pacala 6y ago
"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 Emerg
115.
by pacala 6y ago
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] &#
116.
by pacala 6y ago
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.
117.
by pacala 6y ago
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. C
118.
by pacala 6y ago
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.
119.
by pacala 6y ago
Going to be charitable and hope the bottom of y axis is zero.
120.
by pacala 6y ago
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

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