Well, none of what you are saying makes it any less plausible. Yes, other countries have done gain of function research that plays fast and lose with ethics and safety. But this particular outbreak originated a 1/4 mile from a Chinese lab that studies coronavirus, not a US lab or Russian or... Whether this particular virus did escape from a Chinese lab or not, whether it can ever be proven or not (I would lean toward not), it should shine a spotlight on the dangers of research we darn well know has been done and is being done in more than one country, like the coronavirus hybrid that was created in North Carolina in 2015. There are always rationales to that kind of research, but maybe, just maybe, it needs to be thought about a little bit more.

There is some real irony in your citing this specific study given that it involved the successful creation of a coronavirus chimera in North Carolina and that one of the scientists involved has worked at the Wuhan lab. It is quite clear that "gain of function" work with coronaviruses was going on (and clearly not just in China). I also note that a strain of SARS has escaped from that lab previously, that the BS4 lab and the Chinese CDC lab both have had safety issues (specifically conducting research at level 2 which probably needed to be done at level 4), so the idea of an accidental release and, say, an infected employee shopping at the busy market on their way home, is hardly far-fetched. It would neatly explain the origin and initial spread. But nor is there any proof at the moment.

Something else people seem to forget is that a good bit of "gain of function" research is not like sitting down to write a shell script from base pairs or library fragments nor even as calculated and high tech as the North Carolina hybrid you reference. A lot of it is simply exposing tissue cultures to infection repeatedly and seeing what happens. (Sometimes it involves practices a good bit less ethical, but we'll leave that aside for now.) Often this is done to see if an animal model can be developed for a pathogen known or discovered to infect humans, or, as in the NC experiement, human features are mapped onto an animal model. Sometimes "what happens" is quite unexpected, and if they were conducting some of that in level 2 when the unexpected happened... again, no proof, but it explains the events with very little effort. An initial transfer from bats to humans in the market doesn't really involve less than that as some intermediary is needed to explain some of the features of this virus. The intermediary could be a pangolin as some suppose (a creature I am probably not alone in not having been aware of until recently) or it could be a tissue culture, lab animal, or chimeric model just as easily, with none of the options having particularly more explanatory power given what we know.

The other interesting thing is that even the Chinese suspected it was a leak. There was the paper written by a Chinese researcher saying, "Hey, this is likely a leak and we've had them before," and there is the fact that the Chinese worked so hard to cover up the initial outbreak and tighten down their lab security practices! The Chinese themselves may or may not have been right in those suspicions, but one might be forgiven for having precisely the same suspicions from afar.

I agree. I have participated in caucuses before (R not D), been a district and state delegate, and monitored caucus results for presidential campaigns. My wife and I were Parliamentarian and Secretary, respectively, for our last county caucus (so she did the reporting and all of the caucus officers watched her do it so we could attest to the results). With no tech at all, it wasn't that complicated. A complete manual count from the caucus paper records doesn't take that long and in Iowa, they allegedly had cell-phone-photos of the records to work from (no need to move paper records). We scanned and emailed ours for rapid counting and then mailed the paper for validation.

Which isn't to say we don't have math errors and mistakes that need to be checked. We certainly have. But the biggest count delays were because of contested or train-wrecked caucuses, not the process of counting itself. In 2008 in Missouri, a large number of contested delegates had to be sorted out on the floor of the R state convention and some of the District Conventions, not because of a tech error or bad math but because the results were not politically acceptable to some folks in the GOP structure (and because one of the county caucuses had the elected Chairman--- a friend of mine--- trespassed out by the local party leadership injured and in handcuffs...).

Anyway, so this stuff can get dicey, but the math isn't that hard.

When I ran my own small company to do design and development work regularly, we would do almost all of the work on our own site and equipment, usually going to the client site for a fixed period during installation and integration testing. Even then we generally brought our own laptops which were used alongside the installation equipment and client workstations. They provided an empty office, bench, or cubicle for us and let us do our thing. The laptops were configured with our own tools and scripts which the client only had access or license to if they needed it for runtime or if they chose to use them for long-term maintenance of the deliverable. We generally brought our own books and reference materials in (still had books and paper manuals back then) and brought them out with us when we left.

In one particular instance, we were contracting to CSC to produce several deliverables over a period of some months. When we were onsite to do our onsite tasks, we worked alongside "contractors" who worked just as you describe: they showed up during normal business hours, used company-issued equipment to perform company-specified tasks in a company-specified manner. During that period of time, CSC (and several other firms) were investigated and some fined by the IRS for improperly classifying employees as contractors. The people who showed up every day were examined by the IRS; we were not because we were clearly contractors and not employees.

"But if you have both the Uber and Lyft apps open while you wait for a fare, which company is paying you for that time?"

Yes, and in your downtime, you are writing content for WriterAccess on your tablet, doing piecework for Mechanical Turk (does that still exist?), putting knitted hats on Etsy or any number of freelance markets more or less like Uber or Lyft. Uber (et al) does not and ought not particularly care about those activities. Nor do the people picking up extra income on an app really want to have to provide Uber or Lyft or Writer Access or Mechanical Turk, etc. with information about their other activities (none of their business). That information might even be misused to make it harder for people to mix and match. Reclassifying freelancers as "employees" makes all of those things issues where they really ought not be.

So, if someone wants to protect a place of worship, they would have to violate the law by lying on the application, by saying their gun was for sporting purposes, for instance. Further, they would have to violate the law rather obviously because handguns are restricted and so are places of worship. Being arrested for carrying your shotgun in church after lying on your application is clearly a deterrent to honest self-defense. Just as clearly, it was not a deterrent to the shooter.

Just-cause requirements in many jurisdictions provide no obstacle to the unscrupulous, particularly someone who is willing to donate to political campaigns in the local jurisdiction where the applications is evaluated. Corruption of that kind is why Missouri did away with its may-issue permits. Corruption of yet a different kind (willful violation of privacy protections and no punishment) caused us to get rid of the shall-issue permits. In general, asking people who want to protect themselves to lie on an application does not tend to get you honest applicants and the people who are a threat don't necessarily have a problem with looking up what hoops they have to jump through, writing good-looking garbage on a form, donating to the local sheriff's campaign (CA is infamous for that), or, apparently, just buying a permit from a NYC cop.

One specific law did not exist prior to the recent attack. Prior to the attack, new Zealand's restrictions were not as severe as Australia, but all gun owners were required to be licensed, a special license required for restricted weapons, including handguns, and all applicants needed to show specific and acceptable cause in order for the application to be accepted. Acceptable cause is nowhere rigorously defined-- it is up to the discretion of the local jurisdiction-- but self-defense is defined as not an acceptable cause [PDF, see box on pp 41]. Nor is private security for personal or VIP protection... or, say, for protection of a mosque or other place of worship.

Why? I am a 'rural American' and even I don't agree with that. I expect that there are costs to living in the middle of nowhere and connectivity is going to be one of them. Besides, as many people have pointed out, we have flushed gobs of public money down that hole before and got nothing. I still don't have the ISDN service out here the industry was subsidized to provide years ago. In fact, the phone service theoretically available out here doesn't even reliably support dial-up. We depend on a radio link to the next town, but that is my problem, not that of 'urban Americans'.

[Actually, the fixed radio link works surprisingly well. Much better than the land-line didn't. Except when there is lightning. Anywhere.]

I agree with the AC that no amount of gun-control seems to be enough, and the fact that, for instance, Australia's gun laws are frequently held up as an example even though they would violate a whole raft of Constitutional rights if implemented in the US is certainly worrisome. But the problem is deeper and much more troublesome than that. Existing laws are not employed against known threats by objective criteria-- the Parkland gunman had over thirty encounters with law enforcement, several of which were chargeable as felony assault, and a request for involuntary confinement which was ignored. There was an agreement between the county and the school district to avoid criminal charges for students (in order to affect statistics and get more grant money) and this may have played into the matter. And yet, the Sheriff (the one who screwed up in the first place) immediately blames the NRA, blames gun-owners, asks for even more authority, pointing the finger at everybody except himself. They cannot apply objective criteria correctly, and yet they ask to be allowed to apply subjective criteria and have even more discretion. The country would be stupid to permit that.

At the same time, protections for law-abiding gun owners are not enforced. As just one example, carry permits and registries are often sold to the populace with promises of protection for the confidential data. Here in Missouri we had a scandal in 2013 where the Department of Revenue was collecting information the law explicitly did not permit them to collect and then it was discovered that the entire registry had been illegally distributed (this scandal occurred shortly after a similar database in the NE, including addresses of gun of registered gun-owners, was published by a newspaper). The law makes these things felonies, but there was no investigation and no criminal charges. The impeachment proceedings against the governor were derailed by a committee chairman without informing the committee (I was at the hearings, myself, and spoke to members of the committee). As part of the backlash, the people pushed to take the registry away from the DOR and finally to allow concealed-carry without a permit.

So, you have two major practical problems: 1) LE has implemented the power they have in both an ineffective and frequently corrupt fashion, and 2) the 'teeth' supposedly in the law to protect rights in existing laws are not enforced. The result is that gun-owners--- even those like myself who believe guns should be kept out of the wrong hands--- have no trust in the system. It has been concretely demonstrated that the system cannot be trusted and we would be stupid to support further restrictions. If more of the gun-control advocacy had showed interest in having the law enforced, perhaps we would feel differently.

There was a backup. The phone belonged to the terrorist's public employer who were cooperating to provide access. The FBI requested that San Bernardino reset the phone password which then caused the phone to stop syncing data which had not yet been backed up (correct and expected behavior).

...by resetting the password, the county, which owned Farook’s phone, and the FBI eliminated the possibility of seeing whether additional data beyond Oct. 19 might be recovered from the phone through the auto-backup feature, experts said. [ FBI asked San Bernardino to reset the password for shooter’s phone backup ]

So, it was the FBI's error that caused the phone data to be potentially important in the first place. Of course, the FBI did not actually know (and could not know) whether there was additional data on the phone or not, so the importance of the phone itself was highly speculative.

Indeed, I started that way, myself. Between his thought experiments and illustrations, Einstein did a very good job of bringing the extreme conditions he was talking about down to things you could imagine. I also read a number of Asimov's non-fiction books between 4th and 7th grade (my parents had a very good library downstairs). Today, I have a tabletop illustrated edition of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe In a Nutshell which I have worked through parts of with our daughter (now 13). The combination of a text which takes a layman's approach without dumbing it down and good illustrations is key.

Good movies also help. My wife and I have had really good conversations with our daughter at a diner with a pen and a pile of napkins after a movie. Hidden Figures was one she has gotten hooked on. She is now reading the book and interested enough to sit down and voluntarily work through Algebra problems in a Schaum's Outline with me while it is otherwise very difficult to get her to sit still for anything. Others which got her thinking were Arrival, The Martian and ... blast... the one involving ecological disaster, a colonizing mission, a black hole, and a time loop... one of the characters was 'Murph'. Anyway, kids need to be able to think about things in context, even a fictional one, and sometimes the faults in the fiction can even become teaching examples themselves. Honestly, most adults learn best that way, too, we just don't always admit it.

We were surprised to find that there are a few good 'space camps' around and in different parts of the country. We sent our daughter to a program in the Midwest over the summer after she got hooked on the Martian; just an introductory program, but some of the exhibits and simulators they had for kids to learn on were amazing. If kids can see where some of the knowledge plugs in in a real physical, visceral way, they have someplace to file even knowledge that they don't quite understand yet. It can become a puzzle that they keep coming back to as they get more pieces.

At least some bittorrent clients already have configurable bandwidth throttles. Other clients (e.g. rsync, wget) often do as well. You can also throttle your clients at your own router, before your traffic leaves your internal/home network,

What the red states put into the federal budget, the red states get back in federal spending within their borders; what blue states put in blue states receive back.

At that point why not cut out the middle man? States could (shudder) actually mostly fund their own projects within their own borders. The federal purse could remain what it was supposed to be: a fund for regional and national emergencies, federal courts and administration, common defense, etc. This would, of course, force federal budgets down and state budgets up. State taxpayers would, as a result, actually have proportionally more control over their own money. Collecting national revenue to subsidize effectively local non-emergency needs never really made sense anyway, and the state budget should be the first stop even in crisis (which it sometimes is now).

Here is a free red state example for you: a nearby (mostly blue) city mismanaged its budget for years, including not adequately funding its own police/fire pension fund. They preferred ice-skating and dog-walking parks (which bought immediate votes) to fiscal security. So, when the state courts forced them to make good on the shortfall, they drew down their police/fire personnel sharply, leading to an inability to deal with routine emergencies (no, 'routine emergencies' is not an oxymoron). So, they applied for and got federal COPS emergency funding to hire more police (at least twice to my recollection). How is it fair for this city to charge people in California (or myself, elsewhere in the state) for their own mismanagement?

The bigger problem: what incentive is there to ever correct the budget problems there or anywhere else? For that matter, why have one dollar of local money go up to the federal government, pay the federal bureaucracy, and then come back down as much less than a dollar to pay purely local personnel?

On top of that, subsidies always come with strings. Blue states often want to legislate a level or type of service other states cannot afford (even without local mismanagement). We cannot adequately prioritize our limited resources because of federal mandates (more than half our budget tends to be non-discretionary). So, we need to follow federal requirements whether we want to or not--- even if that means other things which are arguably bigger local problems go untreated.

So, personally, in a red state, I don't have a problem with getting rid of whole swaths of inappropriate subsidies(*), even if I am a net beneficiary, because I am smart enough to realize that we all lose the way it is now.

(*) And yes, that includes most Ag subsidies, although there is arguably a place for some strategic Ag/food reserve as a valid component of national defense.

Yes, precisely, and the wonderful thing about that is that since no one else can read the content in question, no one can challenge the fact that the information claimed to be about terrorism is really about birth control, or, for that matter, intelligently provide oversight on the laws or the application of the laws (let alone open academic debate on controversial subjects). Censorship obliterates the last vestige of any democratic oversight over the government.

Um. Sure. To be replaced by fossil-fuel-driven irrigation, pesticide, and erosion-heavy agriculture alone? And are you going to shoot all of the other methane-producing grazing animals on the planet too, or just cows? How much methane will decomposing deer release in the first few years?

Feed lots are a problem and they produce a lot of methane. Grazing animals, per se, are not the problem. Nor do most grazers produce that much methane on an appropriate forage-heavy diet.