there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".

https://archive.ph/WTsga

This says there’s 0 evidence to claim it’s a lab leak, and plenty of evidence, literal contact tracing from the wet market. They took the lab leak seriously and were emotionally resonant with you and I, however, they must deal in facts when they write.

there is zero evidence for zoonotic. Contact tracing in Wuhan skipped the stop at the zoo or contacting any zoonauts, which is a necessary link for a zoonotic hypothesis. Human-human contacts, even if they took place at the wet market, something that's not known, equally implicates the Wuhan lab which is a short distance away

there is evidence for a long history of discovery of a bat coronaviruses, and manipulation/splicing of those genes https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744920/ One of those scientists pieced together this information in the early months after the covid outbreak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug Don't tell me "I don't like Bret Weinstein"; your mission is to listen to what Yuri Deigin was saying way before any information had come out. The only way he could be that accurate that early is if he found the information he cites. You'd have to be a real conspiracy theorist to believe that he had access to the conspiracy plans.

there is evidence dating to before the covid outbreak for proposed laboratory experiments putting the spike protein at the furin cleavage site in a Chinese lab which is exactly what appears to have happened.

>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...

...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.

>economics, is mostly a bunch post hoc justifications for bad behavior

and your definitions of bad behavior are therefore not post hoc, so let me hear your definitions.

A definition is a lot to ask for. If you truly need somebody to define "bad" for you, you're asking in the wrong place.

But we don't need to define it to know it when we see it. Here are some examples of bad behavior which is encouraged by the way we currently practice economics:

- Operating generators in violation of local regulation such that the neighborhood around your new data center now has a smattering of new respiratory illnesses is bad behavior. The economic system we've built encouraged that outcome by focusing only on the consent of whatever banker granted the loan and not on the consent of the nearby community (relevant because the loan created the money which then bought the illegal generators). We further encourage abuses of this kind by letting irrational markets determine that it's admirable, because if the stock price went up then surly it must be so, and by doing so we subsequently increase the operator's ability to take out more loans of this kind. People are dying of lung cancer and economic indicators are saying "all systems go."

- Sending weapons to terrorists with the understanding that once they destabilize the regional government, they'll give you a favorable deal re: making off with whatever local resources you're after is bad behavior. That's basically US foreign policy in South America in the 80's, and we provided teams of economists to help draft the new dictators' constitutions to ensure that we could continue to exploit those countries long after.

- Charging $80k for enough Sovaldi to treat a Hepatitis C infection is bad behavior. It's not difficult to synthesize (people have done it in their garages for <$500), and the risk of spreading further infection because you can't afford to treat yourself is high. Society bears a tremendous cost because Gilead has decided that the economics of the situation justify the price they're setting.

Economists tell people that these bad things are unfortunate consequences of a system that for the most part is a good thing. But when they're pressed to support that claim they always do so against a meaningless background, something having to do with barter, as if it's not obvious that if we didn't have a system with this broken design, we wouldn't go back to the stone ages, we'd instead have a different system with a potentially less broken design.

Despite resting on such a feeble value proposition re: the current status quo, economists don't seem at all motivated to explore alternatives either. They appear to be rather happily at work for powerful men who are hurting people, where they manufacture for those men justifications about why the pain is in fact an unavoidable consequence of the laws of physics, and no something that they should feel guilty about.

I realize that, like effective altruists, there are probably a lot of good intentions among economists. It's just hard to look at history and come to any conclusion besides that they're not very good at resisting to attempts to corrupt those intentions.

one of the achievements of economics is showing that heartless rapacious capitalists, in a competitive market, will still arrive at the optimum solution for maximizing happiness.

for example, in a town with a lake, and two "rich" employers, a clothing company that pollutes the lake, and a food company that needs non-toxic water from the lake (and workers who work at the two companies and are the consumers of the food and clothing); it does not matter either of which company owns the lake: the two greedy businessmen will arrive at the same answer either way. And BTW, a socialist approach will not yield the optimum, having no basis to decide either way and relying on impulses not corrected by a market.

you very much need to rethink your notions of good and bad.

what's the title/author or some other identifying info?

"Methods of Orbit Determination for the Microcomputer" by Dan Boulet.

I think I found a PDF scan once, though even with OCR it wasn't exactly copy-pastable into a BASIC interpreter. I'd like to clean up the programs and put them on github, or something. Might end up just re-implement the algorithms (which are explained in the book), because there's no copyright on algorithms.

there are tons of places in the US where it's dark enough you can see the milky way shining brilliantly, just not in the heavily populated areas. Washington, Oregon, Idaho Montana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Maine, Vermont. even more places in Canada, Alaska, Norway...

You can see the milky way at any location with a sqm of 19 or higher. True darkness is sqm 22.

I once wanted our then still young daughter to see a real night sky (as I experienced more often as a kid). We were on a darker part of an island (the map says 21.7 sqm). It was a bit tricky walking through the dunes in such pitch dark (no full moon), but also stunningly beautiful. It’s worth doing every now and then to experience our smallness in the vastness of the universe.

Being able to see it and being blown away by it are different.

I can see the milky way but I wouldn't describe it as "a new moon just smeared all across the sky" like one of the other commenters. It's more like just a vaguely higher-density strip of stars.

My location is 21 SQM according to the DarkSkySites map.

I see the milky way every clear night (other than full moons) and after a decade or more of this I'm still blown away by it. I'm never going to get tired of seeing our beautiful galaxy stretched across the sky.

i don't think extracting water from gasoline would be difficult at all, but probably plenty of other contaminants possible.

Mix a spoon of oil in a couple of glasses of water, add salt, put it a few minutes in a blender, and tell me how easy it is to retrieve the oil.

Now scale that to millions of barrels of oil every day.

1. Wait one hour.

2. Harvest.

In fact, a common further down in this thread says that's exactly how they harvest all of the oil: they pressurize it with (salt)water.

isn't that how we extract oilsands? by mixing it with hot water.

And they are very expensive to refine compared to Brent.

>Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals.

when I added my credit card to ApplePay, transactions made with the bare card would show up on my phone even though the phone was not involved: you're saying my phone has access to that transaction and Apple does not?

if apple wallet works on android and I have a choice, that's competititon

if apple wallet requires apple phone, and google wallet require android phone, that not competition.

competition is good. no competition should be regulated out of existence.

>MAXC (maximum access computer), which was a complete emulation of the Tenex machines.

Compuserve also had a software dependency on the PDP-10 and Decsystem 20, and when those machines were no longer available they bought a company making clones so they could continue to manufacture them for themselves. The company they bought, Microsolutions, was Mark Cuban's first startup.

making clones of mainframes (IBM's) had been a big area of intellectual property litigation, but also facing monopolization investigations, IBM had to allow them. They were referred to as "plug compatibles".

The clone hardware manufacturer was Systems Concepts. Microsolutions was a software play -- I think they had something to do with trying to port 1022/1032.