Microsoft doesn't cater to the more knowledgeable admin population I guess. They are used to the point-and-click crowd mindlessly accepting every answer as gospel. Because usually you can't prove them wrong anyways, everything being opaque and closed in Microsoft-land. And because of that, MS/Windows admins never learned how to get to the very bottom of things.
I just spent the day making an azure app and taking packet dumps so I can prove it is their fault. Traffic to one of our vendors goes into a black hole, but only from the US South East region.
Transmission or no transmission is a huge difference in maintenance cost. And land locations south of Hannover are poor conditions for wind turbines generally, with few exceptions. In those cases, earnings can be scarce and things can get uneconomical.
Agreed. The latest Debian upgrade installed pipewire for me, and I didn't even notice, everything just worked fine! And that after years and years of fiddling with alsa and pulseaudio configs, uninstalling pulseaudio, hacks upon hacks to get stuff working with either, etc.
Should have mentioned, I'm running testing/unstable. After the stable release, all the new experimental stuff for the next release floods into unstable.
Another copycat change to get the same crappy non-ergonomics in unrecognizable controls as the others. Can we please fast-forward all the UI circus to arrive at something usable again? Pretty please?
The party are many things, many of them bad. But they do not like global pandemics. And I expect many of them are quite elderly (eg, Xi Jingping is 68) and feel personally threatened by exotic new diseases.
I would argue that there is a huge difference regarding the improvements in safety measures, depending on whether there is the suspicion or the proof of a lab leak.
With just the suspicion of a lab leak, there will always be half-measures because of researchers arguing that you are needlessly tying their hands. And there will always be people who believe them, either because they trust those researchers or because they don't want to spend any more money on safety measures.
With proof of a lab leak, nobody would listen to researchers' complaints about those strict safety measures anymore. And having seen the huge cost to society, the evaluation of cost and benefits of that research and its safety will be seen in a totally different light.
Also, having someone to blame would imho rally sceptics and deniers behind a common narrative. There would be a common external threat and a common enemy to fight, meaning that the means of that fight like travel restrictions and vaccinations would be more readily accepted.
I see you’re first point, that’s probably accurate. But I think on the second point the common enemy to fight would quickly become the entire country of China (in the eyes of many in the US at least), and there would be massive public pressure for war, or antagonism of some kind (economic, political, social) that could escalate to war. And that has the potential to be much more devastating than the pandemic. So I think the first point you make about the merits of increased scrutiny have to be balanced against the dangers of potential war.
We are already at 4 Million fatalities from Corona, with a probably significant unknown number of deaths in third-world countries without proper diagnostics and healthcare. Vaccinations are still going too slow and will take another 5 years to even possibly cover all humans. Within that timeframe, it is quite possible to approach WW2 levels of fatalities (around 80 mio.). Secondary damage due to hospitals being overwhelmed, imploding economies and hunger will come on top and are still not easy to estimate.
It would be appaling and immoral to let something of this magnitude go unanswered. If someone is responsible, they need to feel the consequences. Because the consequences of not reacting to something like this, and it getting out later, are far more serious and devastating: That would in one stroke wipe out all legitimacy of involved governments, leading to revolutions all over the west (and quite possibly the rest of the world).
4 million with COVID, not because of. China would certainly point out that all COVID fatality data is confounded, e.g. the average age of death being above the average life expectancy in some areas. Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths.
They would also argue that they aren't responsible for western policy responses, even if those responses were inspired by theirs. Things like hunger are a side effect of lockdowns and supply chain disruptions, not directly the virus.
The true number of deaths genuinely caused by COVID that wouldn't otherwise have happened is unknown and probably always will be. It's probably in the same general area as the 4 million figure, it wouldn't be 50% or anything, but really for a virus that so heavily affects the old and co-morbid you'd need to be calculating in terms of life years lost rather than concrete "deaths". It's the latter style of counting that has led to this mass confusion in the first place.
The graphs for excess mortality track the deaths attributed to Covid quite well in most of the world. There's just no chance that it's some kind of an measurement artifact.
What is "it" in that sentence? COVID deaths exceed excess deaths in quite a few countries, which doesn't make sense, especially given that lockdown measures create deaths through restricted healthcare access - look at graphs of hospital admissions right at the start or the now massive backlogs.
The Economist tables show this. Britain reports 10,000 more COVID deaths than excess deaths, and the over-count is surely much higher than that given that the healthcare system now has huge backlogs with people dying on waiting lists for non-COVID related diseases. Denmark also reports far more COVID deaths than excess deaths. Some of those are created by policy, and the proportion will only increase over time given the vaccines + generally screwed up health system.
Then there's the question of how excess is calculated. It's excess vs a model. What matters here is not really what's true but what China can argue is true. Modelling is discredited in the west now, in the unlikely event they cared to respond at all, they would certainly argue that any calculations of damages were based on motivated reasoning and bad modelling (and then present their own bad modelling in response).
"It" refers to what you wrote, i.e. "Given how a COVID death is defined, an entirely inert virus engineered to be spreadable but otherwise completely harmless would still be considered to have racked up a lot of deaths."
That theory is obviously not compatible with the excess mortality graphs moving in lockstep with the Covid death graphs. If the virus has no correlation with deaths and it is all a mis-attribution, why would the pattern of deaths match so well with the pattern of excess mortality?
Excess mortality being a model rather than ground truth is irrelevant too. It still doesn't explain the correlation.
Ah. I didn't mean that SARS-CoV-2 is literally an inert virus. Clearly it's not at all, it's a virus that has caused quite a bit of death, and indeed, the mortality graphs are the best evidence of that.
The claim about an inert virus was an extreme example to make the point clearer. Imagine such a virus did exist (which it doesn't). Then by the methodology used to compute COVID deaths, there would still be a large number of deaths attributed to the virus even as excess deaths didn't move at all, even though that should be a statistical impossibility.
The question is therefore not "is SARS-CoV-2 entirely inert", obviously that would be ridiculous. The question is "to what extent are the reported numbers confounded by age and co-morbidity effects". The Economist is arguing that excess death figures show the confounding doesn't exist or must be so small it hardly matters. I'm arguing that by their own data (which seems to be continuously updated even long after the article is published?) there are countries where either the numbers are over-counted in this way, or the mortality models are seriously wrong, because COVID deaths > excess deaths.
There may be proof in there that somebody lied about something related to the lab leak. In this case, of course funding is a trail of breadcrumbs, and even if there were no relation, a coverup would be likely. Because it makes the funders look bad at least.
Real proof that COVID-19 originated in one of the Wuhan labs will probably never be found, there was time enough for a coverup of those facts.
But in any case, whether lab leak or not, a few things have become crystal clear imho: Research must really strongly improve its safety around possibly infectious materials. Even researchers working with the stuff consider a lab leak a real possibility. BSL-1 is practically a clean kitchen and BSL-2 is any common hospital before the current Corona measures. Even BSL-3 and -4 facilities are located in habitated urban areas. Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there. Viruses are much much more dangerous than radioactive or chemical materials. A tiny radiation or chemical leak will have tiny consequences. A tiny virus leak can still infect all of humanity.
Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated. And confined to lonely islands at the end of the world with monthly airdropped supplies, entering or leaving only once a year after destruction of all samples and two months quarantine.
> Also, I'm not qualified enough to comment on whether gain-of-function research is necessary and useful. But I would strongly suggest that given the possible consequences, together with the aforementioned woefully inadequate safety measures, it should be reevaluated.
But people have been saying that for at least a decade. There was a moratorium in the USA for a couple of years. The EU produced a lot of guidance. It was viewed as enough and it might have been in a world where international actors are reasonable, transparent and act in good faith. The issue is that COVID have definitely proved that it is not the world we currently live in and some actors are part of the international community in names only.
In that case, diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions would be necessary. One would have to treat the whole irresponsible country harboring an unsafe lab just like that unsafe lab.
I think this is also the real problem around Fauci's financing deception: He knowingly financed unsafe research in China, which not just gave them money but also the implicit acknowledgement that they are doing it right.
2. is so, and if such a lab is found in the USA, do you really see a future where Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico, and Brasil stop buying Microsoft products and Apple toys?
1. An unsafe lab is one, where pathogens can possibly get out with a non-negligible probability. And where those pathogens are infectious and deadly enough to be of concern.
2. Microsoft products don't carry biological viruses, because most of them are software. Microsoft hardware comes out of China I'd guess. Apple also doesn't produce most hardware in the US. Besides, computer hardware can be sterilized. Biological matter, like food and drink are more of a concern. And there is already a lot of regulation around those, e.g. you cannot get imported German sausage or French cheese in the US, and you cannot get US chicken in the EU for those reasons. You also cannot travel anywhere from an Ebola-affected region for example.
I am very serious. But I'm really not sure what you are getting at.
Thanks for answering. Let's address point 1), now that we have a definition:
1. Unsafe labs:
a) Since 1903, the vast majority of known bio-lab incidents have been in the USA and then the next largest group is their western allies;[1] so any solution must address this, no?
b) this 2105 USA Today article describes just 10 recent bio-lab incidents, including this gem:
"In November 2013, a University of Wisconsin researcher in an ABSL-3 punctured skin with a needle loaded with H5N1 avian influenza. The researcher was quarantined for seven days in an empty home."
or this:
"Between April 2013 and September 2014, eight individual mouse escapes were reported at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill."
or this:
"Centers for Disease Control and Prevention inspectors and University of Michigan officials found materials labeled as Brucella, a select agent, outside the BSL-3 containment area in April 2012."
And as a finale [3]:
"Scientists inadvertently switched samples designated for live Ebola virus studies with samples intended for studies with inactivated material. As a result, the samples with viable Ebola virus, instead of the samples with inactivated Ebola virus, were transferred out of a BSL-4 laboratory to a
laboratory with a lower safety level for additional analysis."
There are (literally) hundreds more examples.
So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2
in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions "
What possible restrictions of any kind do you possibly see any ally of the USA enforcing in any future
"world-wide, no-execptions-to-the-rule agreement" scenario, given that they already tolerate all this incompetence?
And that's just the Western allies. Do you see any third-world, dollar-dependent, tourist economy
placing any restrictions on American tourists because a rate escaped from a lab?
So, for the sake of brevity, did you really mean: "the USA and its allies must put diplomatic, travel, and trade restrictions on China?"
Well, obviously China is suspected of having let Covid-19 escape, so of course this is first and foremost about restrictions that affect China..
What are you getting at?
Also, of course there are accidents in any lab, most of them just reportable incidents. Why are there almost no reportable incidents from Chinese labs? Usually because either they are not using those labs (unlikely) or because they don't do incident analysis and reporting. That the list contains almost no incidents from China means quite the opposite of what you are suggesting: It means that China regularly covers up even very small mishaps such as a mislabeled sample of something relatively harmless. Just stuff that cannot be covered up will be reported (such as the few thousand people infected with Brucella somewhere...)
Does that mean that all other labs are safe? Certainly not, and I'd suggest you read my other comments about improving safety. But quarantining a researcher after a needle puncture is the right thing to do. Recognizing and reporting the escape of lab animals is a sign of there being at least some amount of oversight. China quite obviously doesn't have that, because noone in their right mind will believe that a lab never has a reportable incident.
So yes, I'd suggest starting at the most unsafe labs, where quite probably Covid-19 originated, and improving those, e.g. by closing them. And rebuilding them somewhere safer, to a far higher standard. Same for the rest of the world's labs, of course, but priority is on those having started global pandemics in the past...
Also the research mentioned in the article was commissioned and funded by the US, and covered up by US bodies until they were forced by a court to release documents. Any action against dangerous research needs to be global really.
>So having established that unsafe labs abound in the USA (per your definition), let's move to point 2 in your suggestion: "diplomatic pressure and travel and trade restrictions "
There's a key difference going on there, and you're sort of making the poster's point. The United States is genuinely transparent about as evidenced by your ability to actually find write-ups, and that processes are sufficiently audited to improve on process with. China hasn't done that and has actively stonewalled international cooperation by destroying or otherwise covering up any information vital to characterizing the nature of the early days of the pandemic.
So you're creating a false dilemma. Yes. Unsafe labs happen. How seriously is the issue taken, and with what level of transparency and scrutiny and preventive due diligence are these inherently unsafe ventures undertaken with?
That's more what I think the poster is getting at. Not a simple binary yes/no unsafe labs, but track record of safely and transparently handling lab escapes.
I upvoted you for this reply. There is definitely some quantitative difference between how the US handles its laboratories which was absent from my comment.
If SARS-CoV-2 was a spike spliced onto a backbone it wouldn't look like they evolved from each other (similar to a photoshopped picture with different shadows and noise).
It also didn't arise from serial passage since the distance is large enough that the 1,000 base pair difference would take passage through many, many millions of animals, not something that could be accomplished in a lab. 30-50 years of evolution is an awful lot of serial passage, and only nature can accomplish that large of a serial passage experiment.
It is also very unlikely that the lab found SARS-CoV-2 or the immediate ancestor and cultured the live virus without publishing the sequence. They did culture WIV-1 and used the WIV-1 backbone, but they also published the sequence years before they did that and did it all in the open. That's the reason why people know about that. Before the pandemic there would be no reason to keep a SARS-CoV-2 sequence secret, and they earned their living by sequencing sarbecoviruses and publishing them. And still its unclear how a lab leak would happen with this virus, since you need to both culture the live virus and somehow aerosolize it and snort it in -- as we've learned it doesn't transmit by surfaces and restaurants doing deep cleaning after COVID issues are just engaging in sanitation theater.
The actual bioreactors where it formed are all sitting right out in the open. All the bat caves across China, all the factory farms which have tightly packed intermediate animal hosts. All the humans interacting with those animals through factory farming or collecting bat guano for fertilizer. All the mixing that occurs by those animals being transported across china. There's a million times more serial passage and animal-animal or animal-human contact happening right out in the open.
Not true. We know it didn't come from any viruses that have been published but the Chinese have been pretty diligent at taking down databases and hiding information and there are almost certainly many viruses they have that we don't have the details of that they could have used.
I have to say the data hiding is pretty suspicious. If it was a natural virus it would be useful to have a look at WIVs extensive research on bat coronaviruses and have a look at the other nine they took from the Mojang mine along with RaTg13. If they have nothing to hide why hide that stuff as soon as we have a pandemic that it would be relevant for?
Well lets be clear then that there is zero published evidence and all that remains is a perfectly executed cover up (which is both unprovable and unfalsifiable).
I'd say a fairly shoddy cover up. These things are not unknowable - someone could leak the database. Someone could find the natural source if it came from nature and so on.
While they have taken down the WIV database there is quite a lot of information in other papers and PhD thesis that came out before the outbreak and so were not censored. For example this stuff https://mobile.twitter.com/ydeigin/status/142816212306298881...
That's a preprint by two "independent researchers" that they apparently had to submit to the physics arxiv because medrxiv wouldn't take it, which is discussing pangolin sequences done by a lab in Guangdong. I don't know why you think that has any relevance to the WIV database.
And until someone actually leaks some information, you still have zero information. You believe on faith that it must exist. There's no point in arguing with you about it. At least its obvious now that the lab leak hypothesis is starting to resemble a religious belief.
> Researchers freely enter and leave without quarantine, have contact with an unsuspecting population, go to normal hospitals, infect other patients there.
Just to be clear, which/what labs are you referring to here ?
All of them. Even a BSL-4 lab is just a day job. In the evening, you get out of the lab area through the airlock, take off the suit, shower and go home to your family. After shopping and a quick beer of course. Followed by going to the movies.
We probably couldn't realistically conduct research under conditions where you had to live in confinement for the duration of research with weeks long cooling off periods between visits to the real world. You simply wouldn't be able to find personnel to sweep the floors let alone bright motivated researchers.
There is a long waiting list for research at the south pole. Also, if that research is important enough, it can be sufficiently high-paid, so that people willing to do it can be found. If there isn't enough money for that, that research is obviously not important enough. If it isn't important enough to spend that money on, it also isn't important enough to justify the risk to society.
Interestingly enough, some decades ago there was an outbreak of common cold virus at a British Antarctic research base. The catch: at the time of the outbreak the researchers had been isolated there for months, with no contact with the outside world. It was investigated and no origin for the infection could be found. No new supply crates had been opened, for example.
Quite what this implies for COVID is unclear, because the field of epidemiology seems to have forgotten about this incident and never investigated deeply. It's worth noting though that there have been repeated cases of outbreaks in New Zealand that couldn't be traced back to any contact with anyone who had crossed the border. Personally I suspect that SARS-CoV-2 can be carried by the wind and maybe in the upper atmosphere - that has certainly been asserted for different viruses in the past - but that's heresy at the moment because it would provide a theoretical reason why lockdowns and mask mandates don't seem to have any effect.
Anyway, not really directly related to your point, but the mention of isolated research bases reminded me of it.
It seems vastly more likely that the virus lied dormant upon supplies that were kept cold and was by happenstance later carried back into the warm than to imagine it carried across thousands of miles in the upper atmosphere.
Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios.
A lot of arguments against public health measures seem to bear a strong resemblance to yours. It is formulated like bullet proof vests don't stop hellfire missiles ergo we should stop wasting our time and money making swat team members deal with the sweat and discomfort of wearing vests!
It's only tolerable as an argument between people who have already decided that such protective measures are bad. Had the same sort of argument been made on a topic which they found controversial their reason should immediately have suggested 7 different counter arguments.
It seems like dubious reasoning to imagine that individuals spending 90% of their time in their homes and going out to the grocery store once a week wearing masks or not at all with curbside should spread disease just as much as when people mix normally.
The investigators did look at the fomite/supplies idea but couldn't find any records or recollections of new supplies being opened.
"Even if it were possible for someone to infect you from thousands of miles away with no intermediary save the wind it wouldn't be likely"
Isn't this just an assumption based on your pre-existing intuitions? How do you know?
"nor would it change the average dynamic where masks and lockdowns decrease spread in far more normal scenarios."
Lockdowns and masks don't decrease the spread. That's the point, that's why alternative explanations are necessary. Go look at case graphs for regions where you aren't familiar with the local laws, and try to draw a line on the graph where mask mandates/lockdowns were brought in or removed. You can't do it, I've tried. The graphs are always basically smooth and organic looking except for measurement artifacts. If these tactics worked there should be sharp, clearly artificial jumps and drops in case numbers 3 days after a mask mandate / lockdown is brought in or cancelled but that never happens. In fact in the UK, their "freedom day" where mandates were cancelled was followed three days later by a sharp DROP in cases. That's the exact opposite of what you'd expect. It doesn't mean anything though, it's just a funny coincidence, as becomes clear when you look at a wider span of data.
Now you're claiming that viral spread on the wind is incredibly unlikely. Epidemiologists do not agree. They agree for SARS-CoV-2 but for other epidemics in the past this idea has been taken very seriously and is the subject of entire research papers. Even Neil Ferguson at Imperial College London, Mr Lockdown himself, based his models for foot-and-mouth disease on the assumption of long range windborne transmission. Ferguson has never claimed those models and understandings were wrong, in fact after the event he claimed victory (the tactic that time was mass killings of farm animals). Somewhere between 2000 and 2020 his team lost interest in windborne transmission without ever explaining why. It's not for microbiological reasons. No epidemiological predictions have any link to microbiology.
You're claiming motivated reasoning by me, but that isn't true. At the beginning I thought lockdowns and masks would work too. I was very surprised when they very clearly had zero effect on case curves, and very angry when lots of people decided to simply ignore that fact for what looked like ideological reasons (like loyalty to the academic "expert" classes). I know about these cases where airborne transmission was taken seriously exactly because after the 6ft droplet model failed to generate useful predictions I went digging to try and figure out why.
I would strongly disagree on the sysadmin stuff. Firefox has always had a very powerful settings system. All the stuff you could set in about:config can also be set via a set of configuration files provided by the sysadmin, the user and the distro, each of which can provide defaults, presets or locked non-changeable settings which are hierarchically enforced. Exactly what you need as a sysadmin, cross-platform, could do everything and the kitchen sink, distributable either via your usual config management or LDAP/HTTP/whatever you can script in a few lines of Javascript if you need. GPOs are just a poor windows admin's substitute, they cannot do half of that, even in IE and Edge. Not to mention Chrome, which lags miles behind there.
Also, in my mind, exchanging Chrome's insistence on Google logins is just the same as Firefox's insistence on their proprietary sync and pocket. I'll say no to every one of those things, because I do value my privacy and none of them provide proper self-hosted options.
It is theoretically true. They have changed the protocol at least three times, there are no user-accessible settings (just about:config) to point at your own sync server, there is no documentation. And at their rate of breaking stuff, your sync server will be obsolete as soon as you get it running. Happened to me, will never waste time on it again.
And the open-source version of the sync server is bad software, age-old python, tons of code smells. I'd wager it is not what they are using themselves.
The thing is, if you do not like the UI of unity, maybe you'll like Gnome, KDE, LXDE, fluxbox, i3 or ratpoison or .... With most Linux distros, you can have both privacy and your favourite UI paradigm. You usually do not need to suffer in the usability department (or at least not too much).
But with Firefox, all the UI choices are gone now, intentionally sacrificed on the altair of rewrites, UI changes, branding and some dubious security claims. You used to get the choice of vertical tabs (better on todays widescreen laptops), tree-style tabs, Buttons where you liked them, user-provided CSS customization for pages and the UI. Not anymore, all gone (they paid some lip service to some of the above concerns, but nothing relevant, and overall a massive downturn).
Now you only get the take-it-or-leave-it of one crappy and worsening Chrome clone UI.
Huh? Happy Tree Style Tabs user here, and another addon (Sidebery) seems to be growing in popularity as well. You can disable the built-in tabs with userChrome.css. What am I missing?
I activated browser debugging, pressed ctrl + alt + shift + i and then hunted down the offending tab bar and put in "display: none" for it.
It gets harder and harder year by year though and on the tabstrip issue in Bugzilla there's at least one person who was annoyed and told me to not question peoples motives after I asked a simple question about it.
Anyone here working for Mozilla, I ask the same question here: are you overcomplicating it? I managed to get rid of that tab bar using a CSS hack, why can't we just get a function to apply that css, at least in developer edition?
Pretty sure the point of using the rendering engine to display the UI was to make it easier to write cross-platform UI; granted, though, the point of then having the feature to use CSS to modify the UI was to do that (and it was relatively easy once the UI was already written in the rendering engine).
If you're happy with the current tree style tabs, I'll wager you never used the original. The current one is a bad rip off, with 90% of the actual features missing.
None of that matters to most people. People want a robust, fast, and secure browser that evolves rather than tries to be revolutionary. I think the large GUI changes did bug a lot of people.
