...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:

We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.

Full article

The "current crisis" is manufactured and amplified externally. Nobody is doxxing Tesla owners with maps using Molotov cocktails as map cursors or burning lots full of vehicles in for service in some way that is a function of whether Musk is personally present on the factory floor vs doing something else he thinks is vital to our economic survival. All of it is ginned up hate based on the politics surrounding the pruning of vast left slush funds and debt-funded waste that has to go away. That's an entire industry with vested interests, and acting against it certainly brings out the coordinated hate, attacks on stock value, media smearing, and of course thousands of people who now say he's a nazi though they can't actually articulate why they think that.

No, him being "on the factory floor" or off it doesn't precipitate some "current crisis," except in the sense that entrenched interests currently having their oxen gored by drying up things like the NGO money laundering industry are doing their best to try to wreck the company to make a point.

So the people who made it should have been earning minimum wage, is that your point? Spread that dollar amount across five and half yeads and even modest team of people and their overhead, and they're making middle five figures after taxes. Is that a lot, to you?

It took five and a half years to make it. So, in perhaps over-simplified terms, that's ~$670k year working on it. Let's say you had six people working on the project, and had NO overhead at all beyond their personal income while making it. That's roughly $100k per person before they paid taxes, which is either pretty good or not very good at all, depending on where you live and how. But one supposes they also had some overhead. This wasn't done on their kids' laptops at night. There was music to compose, audio to record and design, and a lot more.

So, yeah. "Just" 3.7M is a fair characterization.

No, we just voted the tyrannical little statists out of office. And the people you're now laughably calling Fascists are busy exposing and tearing down the very tools that an actual Fascist government would (and did) use. Fascists don't cut off the cash supply to money-laundering NGOs that are making their pet politicians richer and more personally powerful. Fascists don't work to shut down the mechanisms by which the government can censor your social media use. Your case of projection is pretty impressive.

You know what Fascists do? They try to hide the money movement that keeps their circle of power functioning. Our little lefty statists are busy shrieking that the lead of the executive branch shouldn't be allowed to see the records showing where the executive branch has been writing checks. Gee, what would they be hiding? Their little circle of industrial-scale grift and waste and abuse is getting exposed, and they're furious about it. And here you are having their backs. Pretty ugly. Do you live off of dubious international grant kickbacks or something?

Why should those rights be limited to physical objects?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.watching-grass-gro...

And the likeliest explanation is things connected with the GDPR "right to be forgotten":

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Farticle%2Fc...

Yes, Twitter was much better when someone in the Biden administration could write an email to a partisan activist working there and get people perma-banned for expressing doubt that Biden was handling things well. The good ol' days, right? Or are you just mad that now there are Community Notes calling the lying left out on the propaganda BS they used to choke Twitter with, and had Twitter staff available to ban anyone who called them out on it? Yeah, that must be frustrating for you.

Every single bit of shrill shriekery I hear that comes anywhere close to that on my X feed comes from the wanna-be tyrants on the left who crave the power to silence other people rather than counter things they don't want to hear with better thoughts of their own. Your own absurd ad hominem right here in this post is a great example of the craven screaming. I'm sure you liked that the Democrats - who called people deplorable garbage - used to be able to silence anyone who pointed out their duplicity and corruption.

Yes, when prominent Democrats talk out loud about sending people away for reprogramming, it's nice indeed to be able to speak out loud about it. Obviously, you'd prefer that people talking about that and sharing videos of people like Clinton saying it were silenced, just the way those prominent Democrats like it. Someone pointed out their creepy policy wishes? Cancel them! Just they way YOU'D like it, right?

Yes, when the Biden family rakes in millions of dollars from China and Russia and spreads it around the in-laws and the kids and dodges taxes on it while visibly selling federal policy actions, or the DNC launders millions of dollars in foreign money through Act Blue to try to buy Harris a presidency, or Nancy Pelosi becomes worth untold millions through blatant insider trading, it's nice to be able to talk about it instead of being silenced. I know, you'd prefer such conversations were silences, like in the good ol' days when Twitter had federal agents with offices in their HQ, ready to Orwell for you.

What are you talking about? Tens of thousands of deaths from fentanyl, crime, and human trafficking over the border deliberately opened wide by Biden's handlers? Untold thousands dead in wars that broke out only once his handlers signaled weakness and wars broke out on his watch? Yes, it's nice to be able to have open conversations about all of those lives lost, instead of such speech being muzzled by people like you, and those you obey.

I've been a spamgourmet user for 25 years, and it's been perfect but... Email as designed is fundamentally designed for a friendlier universe and thus easily exploited. To fix this email should deliver ONLY a secure link to its payload that is hosted by the sender. If I send you and email, in your email (or sms or any other delivery protocol) you get a notification: "Fishdan has sent you a message. To read it click fishdan.com/mail?recipient=you@youraddress.com&secretpin=19700101&othersexritything1=foo&othersecuritything2=bar&clientsecurity=&mysecurityclientid=918273123012 etc etc You could even have a thing where if I want to send you a more secure email I require your browser to have a JWT (or whatever) that you only get by answering a second email. Etc etc. Contentlink is evaluated by your email client AND your browser for safety. IF it's an official certification it gets a better trust rating etc. has to match the send of the email and your email reader assigns a trust rating to it that you see when opening the email and again when following the content link.

What a ridiculous take on what he said. His point isn't that SpaceX faked anything, it's that China's quest for street cred in their scramble to catch up means making it look like they're hip, and honest, and open about their process (in, of course - it being China - the most controlled and dishonest way imaginable). Right up to and including faking R&D mishaps to show how hard they're working.

Anyone even remotely connected to contemporary image making can see that's obviously CGI. Looks like something straight out of DCS or the like. No chance that's real. Might be based on actual telemetry, but it's deep, deep down in the Uncanny Valley, and any reasonably worldly person can see that in an instant. Their motivation for showing the the challenges of developing such a program - including faking something like this to perhaps skew perceptions of how far along they actually are - are up for debate and academic. The footage is plainly fake.

Resolving ambiguities in the law is what judges are for. The existing system is all about writing vague laws and then appointing "agency experts" to fill in the blanks without having to bother with that whole annoying democracy thing to change the law. Some people like it that way though, the submitter seems pretty upset at the idea of lawmaking involving things like voting or separation of powers.

Nah. It probably found instances of modern women talking about how their abortion allowed them to secure wealth and a nice career for themselves, and then correlated that with ancient practices of sacrificing children before demon-gods for wealth, power, and a good harvest, and then generated the image.

I wonder if the most influential data sources can be extracted from the system. I'll have to ask later.
Anyway, I recall that research has shown that if you limit AI to giving answers that only confirm with a particular worldview, the quality and accuracy of results goes down dramatically.

No, aggressively dismissing civics instruction as being some sort of celebration of evil white colonialist suppression and thus vilifying things like the Constitution are what have been a detriment to civics instruction.

The continual projection of "look! an autocrat!" at the guy who's spent billions to free, for example, a platform like Twitter from unconstitutionally autocratic censorship would be starting to get funny if it didn't betray such a profoundly inverse understanding of the topic.

No, intelligent people are more likely to go to college. And colleges have been administratively occupied by (now) at least two generations of lefties cultivated by the aging hippies from the 1960s. The schools they run become progressive cultural echo chambers, churning out more of the same. If by "liberal" you mean it in the classic sense (liberty-minded), then you're right. But there is nothing liberty-minded about the contemporary liberal (as that term is now used) contingent running education in K-through-PhD. The opposite.