>The corpse appears to share unique characteristics of #Hamas’ Yahya #Sinwar — including a mole under his left eye, same teeth alignment & faults, same ear shape & size, same eyebrow/facial hair/head hair color, thickness & length.
Didn't know the triple quotes were anything other than weird individual stylistic quirk. Good to know for future troll spotting.
That said... regardless of the person's individual viewpoint... The idea that anyone would suggest that "we should not be allowed to answer the question positively" when the question is "How is everyone doing?" reinforces my worry that the world really is sliding into the dumpster while we grumble on placated by just enough bread and circuses that the pitchforks stay in the barn.
The worst thing is I can imagine this happening, 5 or 10 years ago, the idea that someone would suggest something as crazy as everyone should be saying (or making up, got to remember you have the option to just lie) something they feel bad about at the start of a work meeting would have been ridiculous. It sounds more like a group therapy session than a work meeting, and I don't expect they have a trained councillor in the meeting to guide that sort of emotional processing in a positive direction.
I hope its just exaggeration, part of the disaffected, borderline-trolling tone (possibly actual trolling) that reminds me of mid-life crises and the movie Office Space. I'm just worried by the idea that its not.
I’ve sat through hours of meetings discussing the appropriate ratios based on criteria being described in this thread.
I called it out at the time (but this was years ago). The number of times I’ve witnessed this personally and other have shared stories with me ... even if this is trolling, the reality is there, it’s “true enough”.
It's amazing to me, with what little expertise I have in psychology (but no formal training) its obvious how damaging this kind of group negativity can be. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222829420_Mood_and_... has links/citations to lots of the relevant, more in depth research on specific aspects, from mood contagion, to the effects of mood on judgment and decision making.
I do wonder what percentage, if any, of the "great resignation" is due to individuals reaching the bottom of a slow negative spiral of emotions connected to their work environment, these kinds of things happening at the office would likely profoundly accelerate/tighten that spiral...
> I'm not sure the original poster intended that way or not -- good to know though!
Interesting, what do you think the original poster meant by it? Do you think perhaps their finger slipped or something?
> not sure I've ever covered my ears and said "I wont listen" to anybody
When you come across a street preacher complaining that American is going to burn for allowing whatever their pet list of sins is, do you sit there and listen to their entire spiel? Or do you dismiss them as a crank and walk on, because you've got better things to do with your time?
> Interesting, what do you think the original poster meant by it? Do you think perhaps their finger slipped or something?
I think they were probably referring to this person as some kind of person who is awful to be around. Particularly, in this case, this person seemed to tell them they couldn’t be positive and say “good” or other comments... (per the Twitter thread). I don’t want to attribute specific meaning, but my that was my initial impression. Idk what this person meant, and it’s good to know the other meanings.
In terms of the preacher analogy; I think it’s a bit of a poor analogy. It’s more like, someone reporting something immoral or not working and us walking away covering our ears.
I have listened to preachers on the street. I do actually try to understand their world view. Once I do, I’m less likely to stop, perhaps. But rarely is that preacher discussing working conditions in my field. If they were, I’d be more likely to actively listen.
Short version - until we find a candidate progenitor virus in an animal population, which enables us to work out a likely route of transmission to humans, we don't have enough information to know.
Although I think, from skimming the report, there is probably enough information to say that this (1) wasn't intentional and (2) is possibly a lab leak.
That is enough to say that it will probably happen again in our lifetime from an actual lab leak. We have the technology, the world is large, there are a lot of foolish researchers in it. We need to be more prepared to curtail or cease international travel.
If intentional, would China shoot itself in the foot by releasing a deadly virus in its own major cities and infect potentially millions/billions?
Or would the US and its allies release a virus it knowingly funded (for plausible deniability) in a state it constantly calls its 'greatest adversary & threat' during the 2019 war games?
One of these seems more likely than the other to an objective observer since this isn't the first time the US and its allies have engaged in chemical & bio-warfare against the Chinese.
The foreign aircraft carriers and war ships surrounding the Chinese coast are perhaps yet another clue...
Since the next best species that the virus can spread among (apart form humans) is civets then we should probably start huge research on viruses carried by them and we'll probably find the progenitor and most likely learn a lot of interesting things along the way.
> That version of the virus can't be massively different from Cov-19.
Yes it can. Labs specifically study, and propagate, mutations. A lab can do in years what might take nature decades. If it did originate from a lab, we very likely would never find a close enough progenitor in nature to know where things started (what strain the lab started with).
We can trace mutation histories of viruses very extensively, the tools and techniques for this are now pretty sophisticated, so that's not necessarily an insurmountable obstacle.
There is a probabilistic aspect to this though. If we happen to find the exact wild virus population Cov-19 originated from (whether it then mutated naturally or in a lab) then I think we'll nail it. On the other hand if we just find an adjacent population that diverged from the actual Cov-19 source some time ago it could be harder to pin down the route.
They probably meant RNA code of the virus. Since if you know it you can produce it in a lab and introduce it into cells and they will manufacture functional copies of the virus.
It's not a recipe to create virus in a lab. It's a recipe to manufacture copies of the virus in a lab.
Such a premise begins with the assumption the origin is natural.
Just because China refuses to cooperate (as stated by the article), does not mean that trying to find a natural cause is the only way to resolve the issue.
It's a bit misleading as well as the vast majority of the agencies mentioned in the article do not believe in a natural origin.
>The ODNI report said four U.S. spy agencies and a multi-agency body have "low confidence" that COVID-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus.
>Such a premise begins with the assumption the origin is natural.
Unless the virus was literally constructed using base chemicals from the ground up entirely artificially, something that as far as we know has never been done and the technology for which doesn't yet plausibly exist, the virus must have a natural progenitor from which it either evolved, was bred or was engineered. That does not exclude the possibility that the virus was engineered from a progenitor virus in a lab and is "artificial" in that sense.
So yes you are technically correct (which of course is the best correct), but could you be more clear what you mean by natural, and what alternatives you think are being excluded?
This virus would not have had to be created from the ground up. It's based on a comment model viral system about which we know an amazing amount. Particularly, it's a viral system that's apt to recombine, and whose organization and components thus by design support recombinant exploitation of the evolutionary space. It is very easy to build a novel organization of such parts. You build as many as you can manage (trillions+) and then screen for viable viruses. Then with a little selection pressure in different environments, you can optimize them and see how the novel variants evolve. Doing this at scale helps us understand the way viruses evolve.
And if you think that genome synthesis is not possible, look up "DNA printer". But i don't think that's what you mean.
All known viruses were originally produced by nature. Engineered viruses are natural viruses that were modified artificially, but they still had a natural origin. We don't have the technology to create a virus entirely from scratch, we can only modify existing viruses in fairly limited ways. Surely you know this, right?
If we can find that original natural source strain of virus, we should be able to compare it to Cov-19 and determine the likely path of development. This has been done many times before for other viruses, such as SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, etc.
Nobody is suggesting that the virus was created from scratch.
Of course the viruses have a natural origin, where do you think the original samples come from?
I don't know where you are interpreting your stance from, and I am sorry if I am being unclear, english is not my first language.. but just because viruses are being engineered in a lab does not mean they build them molecule by molecule, but they do transfer genes between existing viruses.
Also what if you are logged into Google, but your Google search history was always switched off?
>What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
Relevant quote from the article:
>In Wisconsin, the government was hopeful Google could also provide “CookieIDs” belonging to any users who made the searches. These CookieIDs “are identifiers that are used to group together all searches conducted from a given machine, for a certain time period. Such information allows investigators to ascertain, even when the user is not logged into a Google account, whether the same individual may have conducted multiple pertinent searches,” the government wrote.
CookieIDs are specific to one browser, are they not?
As for the argument that they can still find it: The laws usually allow for the company to decline on the grounds that complying would be an "undue burden." In other words, if their usual method is to run some program they wrote to handle the common case, and this time they'd have to write a new program, they might claim that's an undue burden.
