Hmm. Long term is a more difficult constraint.
I think short term can be just as effective at damaging Musk.
It’s hard to be mobile with deflated tyres.
Even just a dirty windshield and rear camera (on the top of the tailgate) will reduce Tesla share price without running the risk of a prison sentence.
Burning makes the world a more dangerous and polluted place.
There are much more eco friendly ways to vandalise and immobilise.
There were scientists spies that got caught with sample from Canadian labs flying to China.
I think this fact is coincidence and not covid related in the slightest.
Taking a different viewpoint, is general kidnapping now legal in the US? Why is ICE different?
As you are responding to one of my posts I should clarify my position.
They’re arguing that it’s China’s fault and not Trump’s. For that to be the case it ‘must’ be a lab leak.
Zoonotic or lab origin, the outbreak still occurred in China. Fault is only important to reduce further occurrences. Better wet market policies and tighter lab rules can be implemented simultaneously, worldwide without any blame being assigned.
The appalling US response to covid is fully Trumps fault.
The change in the .gov address is designed to compliment the tariffs and anger China.
The reason to highlight the possible lab origin was because original investigations and papers erroneously claimed that a lab origin was not plausible and any discussion about lab origins was censored as being a conspiracy theory.
That censorship is still occurring.
The closest sample [BatCoV RaTG13] is a 96.1% match and was collected 7 years and 1000km away from the wuhan outbreak.
Positive cultures were found in the wet market, but the origin is not confirmed to be zoonotic. Neither bats nor pangolins were being sold at the market. The virus could have arrived there on the shoe of a lab worker.
The team noted that there was no way to establish that the animals were infected with SARS-CoV-2. Even if they were infected, they could have caught the infection from a person who brought the virus to the market,
The problem with conspiracy theories is they’re non-falsifiable.
Disagree. Some conspiracies can be proven with evidence. E.g. Watergate.
The virus had to come from somewhere. Finding a zoonotic trail of evidence (or at least a partial one) adds weight to a natural origin. There is lots of opportunity for new evidence to naturally come to light.
On the lab leak side evidence has already been destroyed by the Chinese government. New evidence is unlikely to surface naturally.
So lack of evidence on the zoonotic side gradually moves the balance of probability towards a lab leak.
The general public is unlikely reach certainty about either scenario. I bet the Chinese government has a certain answer.
Here are some additional dots to tie pieces of string to.
WIV viruses were 96% related, and their samples were the closest on record anywhere in the world.
Gain of function research is the cornerstone of molecular biology.
Wow. That’s a bold strategy for a debate. Let me try and unpack the logic.
Gain of function research is the cornerstone of molecular biology.
Research into deadly viruses is molecular biology.
Scientists not be doing their job properly if they were not trying to breed the deadliest, most infectious diseases possible.
Well, your strategy could be considered a success. You’ve convinced me not to argue with you any further.
This nature article has the title
But you previously claimed
All sequence data, wild type virus, and previous research history clearly show this virus existed in nature
Which is it?
All sequence data, wild type virus, and previous research history clearly show this virus existed in nature
This is an exaggeration. There was a strain logged that was 96% similar (BatCoV RaTG13) but this lacked the proteins at the S1/S2 furin cleavage site.
This is NOT a man made virus
But it could be a man influenced virus.
we will have no R&D to lean on LIKE WE DID FOR THE COVID19 VACCINE
Vaccine research does not require gain of function studies.
It is obvious and clear that the critical sequences responsible for the jump to humans exist in wild type form in nature.
In theory. In practice no evidence of these stages has been found.
However it would be feasible to simulate the conditions required in a lab environment.
Controlled funding for gain of function research does not mean all lab work should stop.
WIV hs multiple campuses and labs, including a level 2 lab 400m from the market.
The longer it takes to find the zoonotic link the higher the probability of lab origin.
All of your comments are naive and ignorant and have no factual basis.
Quite the opposite. I quoted others and provided sources.
In fact, I’ve pointed out specific quotes in your own references that prove you completely wrong.
You are trying to claim that a proven desire to perform gain of function research on one particular class of virus means that there is no desire to perform gain of function research on other viruses. That is naive and ignorant.
proves your belief that gain of function is real.
The American desire for gain of function is real. They were not allowed to play with it in America, so …
I actually read it and quoted from it that there is no connection between these chimera viruses and covid.
Er. Both are viruses.
Stay in your lane and stop spreading lies.
Again suspiciously aggressive and heavily pushing self censorship. Are you being paid?
Zero Knowledge is not inherently a blockchain advantage and blockchain doesn’t help or hinder this any way.
I brought it up only because you seemed concerned that privacy couldn’t be achieved using blockchain
invention of blockchain was little more than an interesting chapter in the big history book of cryptography.
Yes, Blockchain is a bridge on the shoulders of giants, but before this bridge existed the practical implementation of an autonomous database didn’t exist.
But company employees sanity checking the business data is also separate from the underlying data.
Sanity checks are very different from zk proofs. You can’t sanity check to confirm that everyone is being paid the minimum wage.
They can hire independent auditors if something really fishy is going on. What are you getting at?
That blockchain and zk removes the need for the auditors to confirm blockchain output. Only external data input requires verification.
As we have seen from cryptocurrencies, people are perfectly willing to sacrifice their integrity and abscond with ridiculous amounts of money.
This is the value put on blockchain data, not the integrity of the data itself.
Need I remind you what happened with The DAO and Ethereum in 2016? Someone messed with the blockchain, so the blockchain developers messed people back?
There wasn’t another fork where the hackers kept their loot. Consensus won.
But smart contracts are just software (running on mining nodes) operating on data (in the blockchain). How do you control the access to the data?
This is just one example: If the on-chain contract gives permission to view the archive of a particular hash then the off-chain database encrypts the archive matching the hash with the requesters public address and makes that publicly available.
And can’t this be implemented more efficiently on centralised services anyway?
Not if the viewer can be anyone (or thing) in the world and that viewer has reason to distrust the integrity of the centralised database.
So why set up access control then? If you don’t care about who is interacting with the system, why have access control? If you actually do care who has access to the information after all, how do you do that without authenticating?
When you want to restrict access, but you don’t necessarily want to define in advance who can read/write/modify (usually the latter is restricted but read is open). Usually write access is granted in exchange for cryptocurrency.
And in what sense is this different from traditional publishing systems?
The data is immutable and highly accessible. It is also usually within an ecosystem of other similar data where synergies exist. The network effect is impossible with centralised databases.
If the information is available publicly, then it doesn’t matter to the publisher who is accessing it?
True for read access. Not for write.
But how do you limit the information to a subset of users without authentication?
You still have authentication, but it is controlled in a decentralized manner (smart contracts) not by a centralised, possibly untrusted, entity.
If their identities are not verified, how do you know how to limit that information to that set of users?
The public address is known, but not the identities. A Know Your Customer type service can be performed if real world identities are essential.
How do you create an “user group” without specifying who the users in the group are?
This is just an array of public addresses. You can be as simple or sophisticated as you like with how you add to this.
…If the users in fact do have keys, then that’s just access control and user identities, isn’t it?
It’s decentralized access control and IDs.
You can’t issue people keys without knowing who they are, right?
Anyone can pick up a key and create their own access point, but in a manner that is integrated with everyone else’s database.
You’ve invented TLS from ground up.
We’ve added a database layer and a verification algorithm on top of TLS.
Blockchain proponents reinventing old cryptography concepts and calling it a blockchain revolution really isn’t surprising.
The key difference is the how combination of old technologies are integrated.
Nothing stops people from using private keys and hashed data on non-blockchain systems. That’s just bog standard identity management.
But just doing that you are missing the immutability and data verification side of the solution.
Smart contracts are just software that have distributed execution on the mining nodes. They don’t inherently implement access control any better than software that is run on the servers elsewhere.
It’s better because access is granted without having to ask permission of the database owner.
concrete examples of a system in use.
https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-to-solve-supply-chain-challenges
Yes, exactly! Except less efficient, like I said.
Taken independently, each component of blockchain can be implemented more efficiently in a centralised manner. Blockchain is for when you want a certain group of properties to exist concurrently.
Modern distributed database folks spend quite a lot of time thinking about ensuring consistency and working on efficiency. So do people who build centralised databases.
But they don’t think about accessibility or immutability. To scale across an industry you need everything.
Are the hard forks not a big problem
They are now not frequent enough to be a problem.
is forking in fact prohibitively expensive to do?
On your own, yes.
You know what, we’re going in circles. I try to get to the bottom of why something blockchain related can’t be done with traditional systems.
It’s the combination of properties blockchain offers cannot be achieved with traditional systems.
Your problem is that you think you have something new here. It’s not.
All the components are old but the combination is new.
There’s nothing “natural” about ending up with a blockchain.
If you want computation immutability and there is no centralised authority then you end up with blockchain.
not every Git repository that is cloned elsewhere is meant to stay identical. Nothing in it forces everything to be committed to a “single ledger”.
In blockchain parlance a non identical clone is a fork. The consensus mechanism removes these. We agree Git is not blockchain, but I’m say that if we add enough constraints and it could be.
Again, you really shouldn’t be going “well, this solution based on decades old technology kinda looks like blockchain if you squint a little bit.”
You brought up Git. I’m playing along with the analogy to aid your understanding.
Compare russia to the British and consider who is the bigger villain.