In this day and age, when someone says that they "did their research", they usually mean "did a search". That is the extent of the "research" these days.

I agree with your assessment.
There are several hard steps that made complex life possible on earth.

First there is photosynthesis that caused oxygen to increase in the atmosphere. A result of that was the Great Oxidation Event.

That oxygen gave rise to aerobic metabolism, which is orders of magnitude more efficient than anaerobic metabolism (the same glucose molecule makes 32 ATP molecules in aerobic metabolism, vs only 2 in an anaerobic environment [numbers may be inaccurate, but ballpark]).

Then there is the emergence of eukaryotes: an archean gobbled up a bacteria that can do aerobic metabolism, and it was not digested. It became the power house of the cell (mitochondria) and passed into the progeny of that combo. The result is endosymbiosis.

Later, a branch of eukaryotes experienced another engulfment event, and that resulted in all the algae and plants that we know. I recall that different branches of plants descent from different engulfment with different bacteria, so that may not be very rare, like the mitochondria event.

Then there is multicellular life, and from that complex life, and then us.

In addition to the above, lookup Dr. Pascal Lee on Youtube (planetary scientist). For example his talk: N ~ 1: Alone in the Milky Way. In it he solves the Drake Equation and comes up with the conclusion, that only one planet per galaxy has intelligent life on it.

Likewise it may be that what we dislike about MBAs isn't the particular training they receive, but the kind of person who gets attracted to an MBA program.

I fully agree with you on this.

There are certain jobs and sectors where certain personality types and characteristics are over represented.

MBAs are one such job.
  I can never forget interacting with three different MBA types in the span of two months, and they all showed a bold lack of morals. One said he liked to hire newcomers because they are poor and hungry (his words). Another was debating with me that starting a company is not about a product or service but is about getting bought out. When I lamented to a third what the latter said, he found nothing wrong with that, and affirmed that due diligence is on the buyer.

Another sector is politicians.
Similarly, the type that lies wins (guess who Exhibit A is?)

The California attorney general urges customers to delete their data from 23AndMe.

There is no consensus among US intelligence agencies that it came from a lab.

Four intelligence agencies have concluded natural exposure caused the pandemic (at least until Dec 2024).
Only two intelligence agencies came to that conclusion, and each blamed a different institute!
The FBI said it is the WIV, and the Dept of Energy said it is the Wuhan CDC.

And political leaning is at play as you say, but in the other direction: the FBI head was a Trump first term appointee, and the the new CIA head changed its stance after Trump took office for the second term.

Oh, and don't take my word on any of that ... here are the references:

report of the Directorate of National Intelligence

New York Times

New Trump appointed CIA head changed the agency's stance to favor the lab leak theory

Yes, this is baffling ...

The WHO is primarily a reporting organization: they gather data from each country they are in, and collate it for comparisons, trends, ...etc. Then they make recommendations based on the data.

Part of the reporting is looking out for outbreaks, from known pathogens, such as Ebola, Marburg, mpox, and bird flu, as well as novel pathogens (SARS-CoV-2 for example).

My guess here is that these ignorant and harmful moves are from a combination of things: inherent stupidity, lack of understanding of how things work, reactionary policies, pandering to their more ignorant base, and so on ...

Milei just keeps doing what other populist right wing politicians do.

For example, he plans to pull Argentina out of the WHO just like what Trump did with the USA ...

So it is no surprise that he exploits his base financially too ...

People have an absolute and inalienable right to know what's going into their environment, homes, and bodies. The idea that a company can simply say "too bad get fucked", especially on something the government is forcing onto people by the ton, is insane.

Fracking also uses fluids with lots of "trade secret" chemicals, that are injected deep into the rock, and who knows what they are doing long term.

All because of the current mentality of fast short term gain, never mind the consequences ...

XFCE is the right fit for most users who don't have any specialized requirements.

I have been using it for about a decade now (Xubuntu), and really satisfied with it.
It does what it is supposed to do, and stays out of the way.

Here is a function that I use as part of a script that runs from cron every week.

The rest of renews the certificate if it has less than a certain of days remaining.
And it sends an email when the certificate is renewed

TS_LIMIT=22 # Number of days remaining before an autorenewal

log_msg() {
    logger -t check_cert $0
}

check_cert_date() {
    # List the Lets Encrypt certificates that are on this server
    CERT_PATH=`certbot certificates 2>&1 | grep 'Certificate Path' | awk '{print $3}'`
    CERT_DATE=`openssl x509 -noout -enddate -in $CERT_PATH | sed -e 's/^.*=//'`
    # Get the expiry date
    # First as a timestamp (UNIX epoch)
    TS_EXPIRY=`date -d "$CERT_DATE" +"%s"`

    # Also as a proper date
    DATE_EXPIRY=`date -d "$CERT_DATE" +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"`
    log_msg "Certificate: $CERT_PATH"
    log_msg "Expiry date: $DATE_EXPIRY"

    TS_LIMIT=`date -d "$LIMIT_DAYS days" +%s`

    if [ "$TS_EXPIRY" -ge "$TS_LIMIT" ]; then
        log_msg "Certificate is valid for more than $LIMIT_DAYS. Doing nothing."
        exit
    fi
}

I am commenting here to say that I am doing the same thing as you:

- Use Xubuntu (XFCE desktop), instead of GNOME.
- Remove Firefox snap and install it as a .deb package from the MozillaTeam PPA.

And as I mentioned before, I take it as step further and uninstall all the snap apps, then uninstall snap altogether!
Upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 then 24.04, and things are running fine.

Someone I know works for an energy distribution company in Canada's most populous province (Ontario).

Some months ago, he was talking about the province energy uses.
Part of it were all the greenhouses growing vegetables in the southernmost part of Canada (near Leamington), and them consuming a lot of power.

He talked about the plan for deploying Small Modular Reactors (SMRs, probably referring to this announcement).

Here is the astonishing part: he said, paraphrased: "the problem is that if we deploy an SMR of x (forgot the exact number) megawatts, one AI data center will consume all the output of that SMR".

Back the late 1960s, in an episode that is now forgotten, young hippies didn't want computers at all ("dehumanizing") and they used to destroy things and scream because data about people was being stored on IBM punch cards.

I remember an older computer consultant telling me about that era: buildings with computers, specifically IBM data centers, didn't have any logos on the outside, because they were targeted by such folk.

What is the clear evidence for an accidental lab leak?
Got a link?

And if it was so, why do the intelligence agency reports differ on where that alleged accident happened?

See the Intelligence section in my article: Origin Of COVID-19: Natural Spillover, Lab Leak Or Biological Weapon?

I posted this before, but it is worth repeating ...

The body of evidence so far supports a natural emergence of the virus that caused the pandemic.
There are no data to support the alternate hypotheses (lab leak or whatever).

First ...

Think about it a bit ... we had THREE outbreaks from the beta coronaviruses sub family in less than two decades.

Two of them were pandemics, but with varying scale:

- SARS in 2003, from civet cats
- MERS in 2012, from camels
- SARS-COV-2 in 2019, from raccoon dogs (or other species)

There are 4 other coronaviruses that infect humans with common cold like (about 16% of annual cases).

The most parsimonious explanation that accounts for all the scientifically rigorous evidence is that the jump from bats to a farmed animal (most likely raccoon dog) in southern China. Those infected animals were trucked to Wuhan's market. Either in the farm, or along the route, or in the market, two humans got infected, one with lineage A and another with lineage B. One of these lineages died out, and the other continued to spread around the world, mutating, as viruses do, and still going on ...

But, please don't take my words for any of that though ...

You have 3 virologists, all with Ph.Ds in the field.
Two of them are retired virology professors at respected universities.
One wrote the textbook, literally, on virology (Vincent Racaniello)

TWIV 1155: Listen from 00:02:20 to 01:10:00

They discuss two papers, one briefly (they term that a "snippet"), and the other in more depth.

The in depth one (starting at ~ 00:30:00) is one of many that support the natural zoonotic origin, with 2 separate spillover events from animal to humans in the Huanan wet market in Wuhan.

The paper is: Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Also, a genetic analysis of animals in the Wuhan wet market is zeroing in on a short list of animals that possibly helped spread it to people.

And it is not only the beta coronaviruses: influenza does that all the time.
The current strain of H5N1 jumps to mammals regularly.

For example, dozens of tigers died in Vietnam, and before that seals in Patagonia.

And now dairy cows in the USA have been infected, and there are human cases too, but it is not clear how they contracted the diseases so far (water foul, some mammal such as pet dogs who ate dead infected birds, ...).

But some say: intelligence agencies have said the lab leak theory cannot be ruled out.
First off, there is no consensus among these intelligence agencies.
Second, it depends on the mindset, and political leaning of the leadership. First it was the FBI head, and now it is the new Trump appointed CIA changed the agencies stance to favor the lab leak theory.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly: those are intelligence agencies so by definition they don't publish the data backing up their conclusion. We have to take their word for it without any scrutiny.

By contrast, we have the experts overwhelmingly for the natural origin.
I'll that that over the intelligence agencies any day ...