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I used to be a diehard supporter of homeschooling. But then I experienced things in my life that revealed the nature of people and society. People are wildly different. But nobody realizes this because nobody really listens. People are different in much deeper and more deterministic ways than is commonly appreciated. There are specific metabolic pathways that are responsible for this. The answer is that for most people home schooling is a waste. They want and need to be in a toxic, petty environment. Intellectual development is wasted on them. It’s biology — not a choice for the parents or for the kids.

That drone is battery powered and has a ceiling of hundreds of feet. So no. You would also be able to see it with night vision. They reported that they weren’t able to see it with night vision which seems impossible at first. But they probably were able to do that by painting it with something like vanta-black.

Nobody is building something like that with 25k. Sure you could build it, but it wouldn’t work. And it wouldn’t be anywhere close to reliable enough for a mission as crazy as entering into restricted military airspace. It would take lots of testing and iteration for someone to produce something that worked reliably and has been shown to be able to do things like evade night vision detection. It’s a specialized price of hardware developed specifically for this kind of task. Nobody is their right mind would do anything like this unless they already had access to the hardware and flippantly decided to take it for a cruise over and air force base (idiot employee at government contractor) or if they had an interest in doing this (China/Russia).

That would be cool to build a bike that can navigate paved trails autonomously and take it out at night when nobody is around.

Sorry those Twitter threads are hard on my eyeballs. That’s the most convincing argument against lab leak I’ve seen so far. By his logic, gain of function could never produce a dangerous virus because any such virus would only be adapted to grow in a Petri dish. I don’t buy it.

I googled lab leak for the first time just now. I haven’t wanted to get involved in the team sports. But anyway my mind is made up. The Seattle times (iirc) has a good timeline of all the developments. Bat infested copper mine workers fell ill with an “extremely similar” virus to COVID 19 back in 2012 and that virus was sampled and taken to WIV. It’s pretty much impossible to deny at this point. Which makes sense because nobody would be talking about it otherwise.

I said it’s schizophrenic because of its format which is more a consequence of the modern web than any particular person. Why did he say gain of function couldn’t be applied to a pre-existing virus and result in a highly infectious corona virus?

This thread doesn’t address gain of function research. It’s doesn’t address the lab-leak hypothesis that is being talked about.

I can’t link to an absence of a thing. I looked through his link and I didn’t see any mention of gain of function research. Maybe I missed it because that thread is completely schizophrenic, but I did look.

Perhaps it’s important to discourage improper safety procedures in gain of function labs?

Josh rogan is a frequent CNN correspondent and a veteran journalist. He came on the joe rogan podcast to sell his book about China. He made a plausible claim that COVID was the result of “gain of function” research performed on a naturally occurring bat-born virus. This idea has also been floated on 60 minutes.

He also claimed that China threatened the United States with cutting off our supply of masks if our government acknowledged the fact that all of the circumstantial evidence pointed to a lab-leak. China has been known to do this and it was certainly to their benefit, so it strikes me as plausible. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Biden admin is now signaling support for lab-leak just as it is becoming clear that the pandemic is now over.

As a person with some background in biology, I initially dismissed lab-leak because the popular discussion was about engineered viruses which is bullshit. I didn’t know about gain of function. I’m personally heavily in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis.

The entire world was a science experiment for a year. Stop gain of function research. Stop stigmatizing prepper culture.

This guy has a PhD and never heard of gain of function research?

If a healthy person is a person who is totally free of disease, then we do not have the ability to determine whether or not a person is healthy. That has nothing to do with developing drugs for and treating the subset of diseases that we know about because they present with obvious and intuitive symptoms relatively speaking.

I disagree about LDL. It’s not as simple as LDL. There are different kinds of LDL and some are worse than others as is pointed out in that link, I think. Medications that reduce LDL do other things too and it’s not clear that their effect on LDL is the real vector for their efficacy. And people with elevated LDL sometimes don’t develop the diseases that high LDL supposedly causes. It’s a broken model based on an overly intuitive interpretation of legitimate data.

I read a biochemistry textbook. The same one you guys read. The only time it mentioned ketosis, it was a brief footnote in effect saying “ketosis is a dangerous abnormality and results in diabetic ketoacidosis.” It was literally a sentence or two for the whole metabolic phenomenon of ketosis. A widespread textbook printed in the last 5 years if I recall. That’s when my eyes were opened to the possibility that the doctors have been making oversights. How could you blame a doctor for believing his textbook?

Not a joke! There are reasons why this fundamental truth has been obscured for the short amount of time that software has existed on a meaningful scale. One of them is the unique property of software not needing any physical resources to be created or distributed. The other is the cultural circumstances surrounding software historically, where often people were being pioneers with their contributions, contributing to the grand vision of computers and the internet which only very recently has been realized. And the average programmer historically was very intelligent and wealthy. It was a set of circumstances that created the illusion that the shackles of capitalism had been broken. But they haven’t. And as the circumstances change it only becomes more clear that free labor won’t be a successful model for software. And this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has closely scrutinized the whole picture.

And the whole thing is made worse by the politicization of free software. People respect free software because it is “virtuous.” It’s a very short sighted notion that shares its roots with communism. If pure intentions counted then both might be successful but unfortunately it’s not the case.

To say that Linux was the last free software was obviously hyperbole. But the conclusion I have drawn is correct and you will see this whether you reflect on it now or stick around long enough to see the economics play out.

This is the future of software even though sublime text isn’t new. People need to understand that the incentive structure surrounding the development and maintenance of software is as much a part of the software as the code is. Open source doesn’t work for the vast number of cases. When Linus dies, the only real example of a successful open source software project will die with him. Making things free doesn’t make you virtuous.