Oh, I’m a little drunk, so I forgot the second point. Maybe I’m not devious enough to lead a bioweapons program, but I would think that research into potential bioweapons would primarily focus on a vaccine or a treatment. Nasty disease outbreaks occur naturally, and as we saw with COVID-19, they affect everybody. Why would any nation release a bioweapon that’s going to hammer itself just as much as the enemy? That would only make sense to me in maybe a Dead Hand-like scenario, in which your nation has already fallen, and you release it as vengeance from the grave.

But, that still doesn’t make sense to me, because we don’t have any reliable way to look at a virus and determine its potential for causing a pandemic. That might not even be possible, since there are/were lots of viruses that seem like they should cause a pandemic, but just haven’t.

The America’s Cup.

Turns out it was hygiene theater for a while. In the early days, we just didn’t know how it was transmitted, so the CDC recommended hand-washing and surface sanitizing out of an abundance of caution. I worked at a grocery store through the pandemic, where both of the owners were very community-oriented, and one was a low-key germophobe. They took the CDC recommendations seriously, and we all had to wear disposable gloves, as well as follow all sorts of protocols to sanitize surfaces.

Later on in the course of the pandemic, scientists started to question whether COVID-19 could spread on surfaces, because the evidence wasn’t showing up. In fact, there was a study done back in the 1980’s here at the University of Wisconsin in which volunteers who were sick with respiratory viruses (incl. coronaviruses) would read newspapers, play cards, play board games, etc. in a room, and then the researchers would bring healthy volunteers into the same room to do the same. Zero healthy volunteers got sick, so the researchers had the ill volunteers cough and sneeze directly on the shared objects before handing over the room. Again, zero healthy volunteers got sick. They were unable to demonstrate any surface-contact transmission.

This news came out, but the CDC was slow to update its recommendations. There was a period during which I was highly annoyed at having to wear the gloves, and spray surfaces with the extremely-expensive electrospray gun, when it was already scientific consensus (minus the CDC) that COVID-19 didn’t spread through surface contact. Eventually, they did update their recommendations, and we were able to stop with the rigamarole. Sales of hand sanitizer and wipes dropped off (but still were high, because the new information wasn’t universally known). If I understand it correctly (eh…), the virus which causes COVID-19 is relatively delicate, and its structure is supported by the water droplets which spread it. Once the droplets hit a surface, the protein structure of the virion collapses, and it’s no longer capable of infecting a cell.

Anyway, yeah, it was an abundance of caution, which turned into hygiene theater.

The other commenters have covered some of the points I’d make, so I’ll add: After decades of investigation into Patient Zero for AIDS/HIV, there wasn’t a single, identifiable transmission event to which the epidemic traced, but rather evidence that the virus was present here and there long before the disease was identified.

Intuitively, I think it’s the same with COVID-19, that there wasn’t a single, discrete animal-to-human transmission event. Even if my analogy to HIV is faulty, China built the lab in Wuhan to study endemic coronaviruses; that means that anything in the lab had been in the wild for years before researchers collected a sample of it. Therefore, it’s overwhelmingly likely that humans had already been exposed to some form of it, and it was present in local populations. At the very least, there would have had to be multiple exposures, because not everybody exposed to the virus got infected, not everybody infected showed symptoms, and not everybody with symptoms transmitted the virus to other people. That, and the fact that it’s a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.

So, even if the Wuhan lab failed at biocontainment, and people caught a strain of virus it was studying, that wasn’t the cause of the pandemic, which could have kicked off any number of ways. I’m not going to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak outright, but on the other hand, even if it’s true, there’s little practical value to the knowing about it other than improving biocontainment procedures. It certainly doesn’t justify the Sinophobia that tends to accompany the lab leak theory, and the Sinophobia is what I think makes people reject the lab leak possibility so vehemently.

(The other “lab leak theory,” that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons. Nobody has that technology, not even close.)

Which one is more fantastical, a flying, super-strength, alien humanoid; or a covert, large-scale demolition operation with not a single leak?

That’s why I keep my eye on Joe Rogan. I mean, folks tell me I’m nuts to think that a charismatic entertainer could make the transition to being President, but I’m not so sure. (/s, to be extra clear) I notice that he’s taking care to distance himself from the regime’s more-unpopular actions, but not break with it wholly.

Ah, the old Sen. Sumner treatment!

The wheel of the metaphor-of-thing-as-wheel exists and is widely understood, but apparently needed to be reinvented as a metaphor involving a roughly rollable shape?

Challenge failed.

False? We employed that strategy, i.e. voted for Democrats multiple times over decades without demanding that they do better, and now we have fascism. That’s not to say that the strategy caused fascism, but self-evidently didn’t stop it.

The crux of the issue is that we voted for Democrats “for the time being” multiple times over the past 50 years, and this is still what fucking happened. But, ignoring that, the big idea here to save our hides is that a Democrat has to win every single election from now until the sun goes super-nova? That seems more than a little unrealistic.

The optimal strategy remains to vote for neoliberals when the alternative is fascists because that is how to create time for socialists and progressives to primary neoliberals in the Democratic Party and win general elections.

With all due respect, that strategy got us fascism. The terminology has changed, but I could tell close to 30 years ago that this would be the result. Is three decades not enough time for socialists and progressives to “primary” neoliberals? Apparently not, because socialsts/progressives/leftists are lazy, good-for-nothings who are simultaneously powerful enough to swing elections, but too inconsequential to talk about their issues or court their votes.

In other words, maybe these vaunted “centrists”/liberals should’ve stepped up to stop fascism. (And, it’s not leftists who say that Harris “went too woke” and now want to throw trans people under the bus.)

I’ll go further: It wouldn’t be enough to simply reform one political party, anyway. The U.S. Constitution is a dead document, and its system of government is obsolete. The black hats have discovered the exploits, and everybody now knows how to game the system. We can’t repair the system from inside the system, since it at the bottom line it runs on trust, and that trust in the system is gone. Just like in any relationship, it takes some material change to get people to trust again.

Lots of Christians believe that, come the end times, they will be bodily taken up into heaven. (That’s the reason for embalming, to preserve the body for judgement day.) Since, of course, they’ll take their trucks with 'em, they don’t use the bed now. It’d suck so much to spend eternity with scratched paint.

I have to, take issue with this, one. The rules of commas are, pretty, easy actually: Use a, comma where you’d, pause when speaking. If, you read it out, loud and sound like Captain, Kirk then you put, a comma in the, wrong spot.

“Carbrain” is a real mental disorder, though. How else do you describe somebody who looks through a windshield and sees a long line of idling cars into the distance, and thinks, “clearly the problem here is bicycles.”

(e: improved punchline)

FWIW, I know several developers at Epic who are happy with the job, the work/life balance, and have been there for years. OTOH, I know several people, too, who were project managers, and that’s 110% true. Epic is big on academic performance. It wants people who can put their heads down and grind, without asking questions or sticking up for themselves.

Until they burn out…

Article 5 and Catch 22, which in this case would be formulated as, “They can do anything that we can’t stop them from doing.” One could make that argument, but who’d be listening?

I feel like this objection makes the most sense in a particular context, like a culture that views beef as some sort of prize, or a marker of being ahead in the competition for social status with one’s neighbors. (U.S. culture very much views it that way.)

If Person A eats only 1 unit of beef per month, what would make dropping to zero “unfair” is if we assume that they are too poor to afford more (“losing”), or engaging in asceticism, but holding on to that one unit as a vital connection to the status game, or a special treat that they covet.

But what if it’s just food? Person A may just not be that into beef, and probably not even miss it, just like Person B probably also wouldn’t notice a difference between 100 units and 99 units. In the sense that neither A or B really would notice a small change all that much, it’s fair

Anyway, random thoughts from somebody who thinks steak is just kind of meh.

Yes, mathematicians first encountered equations which could only be solved with complex numbers in the 16th century.

TL;DR: We can’t hold them accountable for their crimes, because they might try to hold us accountable for the same crimes.