tripletao

10 ms·

91.
by tripletao 2y ago
That's true, but only if the thing they want is money. For example, a commercial software developer might fund lawsuits against its open-source competitor even with no hope of recovering significant cash, because the goal is simply to
92.
by tripletao 2y ago
If the EU passed legislation to randomly select three people under its jurisdiction and bankrupt them, then I think that (a) my personal risk would be too low to be actionable, as you say; but (b) that's pretty bad legislation. I think
93.
by tripletao 2y ago
It's probably fine; but it's not perfectly unambiguously fine, which means the first defendant may face years of uncertainty and millions of dollars of legal fees before they win. Maybe the other party would be ordered to pay some
94.
by tripletao 2y ago
The pandemic was discovered by ordinary doctors in Wuhan who noticed the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients. Only then were specialists engaged to identify the cause, and the viral genome was first published by Zhang Yong-Zhen
95.
by tripletao 2y ago
> It's to point out the earlier argument that the mere presence of a virology lab in a large city should be a point of suspicion. But we know it's not just "a virology lab", which indeed is not uncommon. It's the
96.
by tripletao 2y ago
I said fifty years because that roughly covers the period during which an accident similar to the 1977 flu was possible. Perhaps I should have said longer, since influenza was first cultured in 1931; but we also need some time in the freeze
97.
by tripletao 2y ago
That's obviously bad. Vaccination and COVID origins are different topics, though. Opinions do correlate in the general public, and I guess that's why you've made that link. I don't think that trend holds among scientists
98.
by tripletao 2y ago
You might not be certain they're definitive, but she is: > There’s really no explanation other than that the virus started spreading in the human population at that market https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022&
99.
by tripletao 2y ago
I'm aware that you already know everything I've written here. I agree that spillover from bats in Wuhan is not impossible (nature is big and mysterious), but your implication that proximity to such bats affected Dr. Shi's cho
100.
by tripletao 2y ago
I think the best term of art is ePPP (enhanced potential pandemic pathogens), which clearly limits that scope. Academics use that reasonably often, though politicians and the general public unfortunately don't yet. There's also GO
101.
by tripletao 2y ago
You provided no references, and you've made your claims in generally nonstandard terms. Given that, I don't think it's reasonable to criticize other users for guessing incorrectly what you meant to say. > There are studies
102.
by tripletao 2y ago
Can you quantify what you believe is a correct prior then, and explain how you got that number? I hope you're not going to count every natural spillover since prehistory in the denominator. The technology to culture and freeze an influ
103.
by tripletao 2y ago
Doctors in Wuhan first identified the pandemic due to the unusually high volume of sick and dying patients, not by any sophisticated means. There's no public evidence that the WIV was involved in the initial discovery of the novel viru
104.
by tripletao 2y ago
Depending how we count, there have been a dozen or so pandemics comparably novel or deadly to the 1977 flu in the last fifty years. Of those, at least one was research-origin. So are you really saying p ~ 1/12 is an "extraordinary
105.
by tripletao 2y ago
I agree with that statement. Even with prior warning, and knowing the virus could be introduced only at an airport or seaport, Western public health authorities managed to trace approximately zero cases to their introduction. So it's h
106.
by tripletao 2y ago
> There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak. SARS-1 had a CFR of 11% over all ages, 55% for >65. That's abou
107.
by tripletao 2y ago
I think you're referring to this paper (or other similar analyses): https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(24)00901-2.pdf It found that viral RNA and DNA from potential zoonotic hosts (palm civets, raccoon
108.
by tripletao 2y ago
I'm not aware of teams other than Dr. Baric's at UNC and Dr. Shi's at the WIV proposing to enhance sarbecoviruses by genetic engineering. If anyone knows of more, then I'd appreciate a link. SARS-CoV-2 might also be a na
109.
by tripletao 2y ago
I think the usual theory for SARS-1 is spillover from bats to other non-human animals outside Guangzhou. The virus was then brought to Guangzhou by wildlife traffickers, like in the live infected civet cats found in markets there. A similar
110.
by tripletao 2y ago
> Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study. As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred a
111.
by tripletao 2y ago
Exactly. The paper linked in the grandparent is questioning the exact date of reintroduction, not whether reintroduction occurred. The usual guess seems to be > the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of seve
112.
by tripletao 2y ago
The 1977 flu is uncontroversially accepted to have arisen from a research accident, probably either an inadequately attenuated vaccine or a challenge trial in human subjects. The death toll is typically reported as 700,000, though I don&#x2
113.
by tripletao 2y ago
The WIV had the single largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in the world. There's zero question that the UNC and WIV wished to engineer those sarbecoviruses to produce an enhanced virus broadly similar to SARS-CoV-2, in their unf
114.
by tripletao 2y ago
> (I think NIH funding virology research in China is dumb. That should not have happened.) I'm not sure why "in China" is your point of concern here? Lots of virology research presents minimal danger, and seems fine to me
115.
by tripletao 2y ago
The order "shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order", so you're unaffected even if the order were somehow upheld. A future child in your situation would not g
116.
by tripletao 2y ago
The distinction in the executive order is between "a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident" and everyone else, not just citizen vs. noncitizen or lawful vs. unlawful. As drafted, the children of other lawful immigrant
117.
by tripletao 2y ago
I'm talking about this one: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/an-update-on-recent-conten... A different account operated by the same user was banned for something relating to an image of bin Laden in a different v
118.
by tripletao 2y ago
> some Australian billionaire I think you mean Rupert Murdoch. He was born in Australia but naturalized as an American citizen, due to restrictions on foreign control of broadcast media. If TikTok moved to control by an American citizen
119.
by tripletao 2y ago
That's a policy decision by the Chinese government. They still have the authority, but the Streisand effect makes blunt censorship counterproductive in an open society. For example, TikTok took down the viral "Uighur makeup tutori
120.
by tripletao 2y ago
Can you clarify what you think the paper says that's correct? If you're unwilling to provide an opinion on the paper's literal headline claim, then I don't know what we're discussing here. > because subjects are

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