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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.

Holy shit it was China after all. They linked to this in the article.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36085/troubling-drone-...

That is terrifying.

They commit brazen acts of cyber espionage targeting our infrastructure all the time so it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for them to do something like this.

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?

I don’t understand your question. How do people make vaccines and drugs?

By the way, I would like to point out that your ilk have killed a great many people. For decades you have cracked people over the head with the idea that cholesterol is a health outcome and that saturated fat is bad for you. It turns out that cholesterol is a heuristic and that it’s been read wrong to boot. And it turns out saturated fat isn’t just not bad for you, it’s an important part of a healthy diet.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073510972...

Dr. Shawn Baker and Dr. Paul Saladino ate nothing but red meat and saturated animal fat for two years and they had CAC scores of zero. There is testimony that someone’s CAC score went down after cutting out sugar and adding beef tallow.

Can you blame me for resenting the medical establishment?

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.

We don’t have the ability to measure health yet. People who are by all metrics healthy fall over dead all the time, or have inflammatory/autoimmune problems that get written off as psychosomatic. There are a lot of things that are considered normal today that will later be recognized as diseases.

This will be the split between societies that practice eugenics plus other genetically deliberate policies and those that don’t. People talk about science denial but nobody points out the largest group of science deniers in the entire world: people who deny that natural selection exists. It’s as stupid as thinking the earth is flat.

Natural selection will happen whether or not we want it to. Every trait, physical or otherwise, that human beings posses is the result of natural selection. If we continue down this road where nobody gets removed from the gene pool because of modern medical intervention, we will eventually become very, very sick creatures. It will be a horrible existence. If health, intelligence, empathy and other traits aren’t selected for then they will shrink and eventually disappear. And it could happen much faster than it took to evolve those traits.

Don’t be a science denier. Confront the difficult truth that natural selection exists. We can find a morally acceptable solution if we put our minds to it.

My friend lives in the Oakland hills which is one of the nicest areas in oakland. His car has been stolen three times in the past five years. They’ve had an attempted break in and a contractor they hired had his truck stolen. Oakland is a hell hole.

In 2020, San Francisco’s sales tax revenue dropped by as much as 70 percent in San Francisco’s downtown, which relies heavily on restaurants and hotels.

Mother of god...

Ok well what happens when the entorhinal cortex is excised or probed?

People who had poor mental health outcomes during COVID were mostly extroverted. Introverts actually did better, including myself.

Losing your mind comes from the machinery of the brain failing, which is almost always caused by stress in these kinds of scenarios. Emotional stress is the most acute kind of stress. Isolation and unrelenting physical danger are very emotionally stressful. It doesn’t intrinsically create psychosis, it creates stress which might cause psychosis. The human race is filled with stories just as harrowing as a well funded and planned Mars colonization where people made it through. If you disagree you simply haven’t read your history. Life 2000 years ago was unimaginably cruel, let alone one million years ago.

Just because people in 2020 mash together stress, depression, psychosis and other things doesn’t mean anything. These mental illnesses have biochemical underpinnings and they aren’t intrinsic aspects of the human experience or doing certain things, like going to Mars.

People fetishize the impossibility of things. They also fetishize doom. Global warming has become political not only because of the people who deny it but also because of the people who fetishize the doom and gloom of it. You can recognize these people by talking to them about potential solutions or how to fix it. Invariably they don’t want to think about solutions, think it’s impossible to escape the end of the world and tend to want to turn to some kind of spiritual/naturalistic repentance even though it wouldn’t fix anything when you run the numbers. Same thing with Mars. People fetishize the impossibility of it. You can’t possibly go there without going insane. The radiation will be impossible to deal with. The gravity can’t possibly sustain human life.

It’s all hyperbole. There’s valid counterpoints to all of it. But it goes in one ear... and out the other.

If you agree with this but disagree with the war on drugs then you are a hypocrite who probably doesn’t have the ability to form his own opinion from first principles.

It doesn’t. See below

So I was right?

There are mountains of evidence. It gets overlooked because of the momentum of dogma and the entangling of politics, dogma and research grants/funding. And it’s spread out over many, many individual topics and issues. It doesn’t lend itself to a comment or a single literature review.

I will explain exactly how you can see for yourself. You only have to do one thing. Simply try to understand for yourself the biological underpinnings of human disease. Try to understand it for yourself. This will involve cracking open a biochemistry textbook. It’s not a trivial matter.

It started for me when I got to a certain age and said to myself, gee, I’m getting to the age where I should understand heart disease. So I googled heart disease. And I kept going down the rabbit hole. Luckily I already had a background in biology and chemistry. Believe it or not, that single decision ultimately unraveled into the opinion expressed in my original comment.

I am looking forward to what you find. Happy trails.

Why can’t Linux keep track of parent-child relationships and visualize them when you look at running processes? You could instantly identify this virus. And why can’t Linux apps have a universal and straightforward install directory?

I didn’t get my opinion from a paper. I got it from reading countless papers. Figure it out for yourself

I second this. Nutritional epidemiology is a crime against science and is responsible for countless deaths and billions in lost productivity, unnecessary medical treatment. Fight against nutritional epidemiology for the good of society.

You can take soil and mix it with a little sand and cement and compress it into a brick. It’s called earth blocks. It’s interesting to consider how cheaply one could build structures if they are mostly dirt.