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Comment Separate from the rebranding of covid.gov... (Score 5, Insightful) 213

...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

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 104

>It's one of the few segments in IT where you're not directly at constant risk of being replaced by an H1B.

Truth. One of the reasons why I keep gravitating back to defense work. Only since around 2004 or so; there's now this "government shutdown" nonsense, which is a bit of a vicious circle, because programs get fucked over, then you have to roll off the contract and find work on another. And sometimes, there isn't any. (happened to me at Lockheed), so some people have to cycle back into the private sector for a few years (which isn't a bad thing; because THAT is where you pick up new skills, to be honest). Then when some asshole "businessman" crashes the business and does layoffs (to replace you with H1B's), you're back on the street again, and you end up back in the "safe" sector: defense. Oh, and if your Clearance expires while you're in the private sector, then the contractor just pays the $10k (or whatever it is now) to re-do your investigation. This has happened to me twice now.

Comment Apps (Score 1) 105

I've been using a Linux laptop for a decade, but when the new Air came out recently, I jumped back to Mac even though Dell has a comparable laptop because Preview is better for viewing photos than any of the Linux photo apps. It seems like a minor thing, but since the main thing I do on my laptop is check email, web browse, and manage photos, and thunderbird and chrome are pretty much equal across platforms, photos are the distinguishing item.

On my desktop, there are other apps that make MacOS the winner, despite the fact that each version keeps getting worse. I have my Linux vms for the non-gui services I use though.

Comment lockups (Score 1) 85

I'm constantly have apps completely freeze and having to kill and restart them, and every new version of osx seems to make nfs worse and worse. Very frustrating...

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