...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

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...

This seems likely to me. If the next couple of test flights go well and orbital refueling is demonstrated by early next year, there's no reason SpaceX won't try sending a Starship to lunar orbit (if not the lunar surface) sometime in 2025. This has been the plan under the Starship HLS component of the Artemis program for some time now.

And in geography for millennia before that. Viz., Transylvania (beyond the woods), Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul on this side of the Alps).

And this, kids, is what happens when you hire for ideology conformity first, and competence second.

(Project 2025 aims to ensure the Federal government follows this hiring methodology. The Pendleton Act, which it seeks to ignore if not overturn, is there for a reason.)

...and this, boys and girls, is why we can't have nice things.

^This^

My advice would be, "Be wary of advice from anyone who can't spell 'populace'."

Damn. Talk about butthurt.

Gee, you should have told us that 40 or 50k years ago.

I've found Windows to be not necessary since 2005.

Now get off my lawn.

Companies that care about their bottom line are likely to say, "Thanks but no thanks".

Companies that don't want to do business in your country tend not to provide many jobs to your people.

Companies that don't care about their bottom line tend to go bankrupt.

Companies that have gone bankrupt tend not to employ so many people, either.

Says the AC who's got nothing better to do than complain when someone actually provides interesting and/or useful info, right.

'Tis said that Nixon was a crook, but at least he was our crook.