Florida State Seminoles

[hedge]

I'd say the chances that covid occurred naturally are far greater than that it was developed in a lab, but I don't see the problem with speculating that it might've been...

[innocentbystander]

I'd say the chances that covid occurred naturally are far greater than that it was developed in a lab, but I don't see the problem with speculating that it might've been...

exactly

anyone can speculate on anything at this point.

[hedge]

My speculation has at least has some science as well as understanding of probabilities behind it though...

"Nobody has found a coronavirus in a Wuhan lab that experiments made more transmissible, became identical to SARS-CoV-2, and then infected a worker. Likewise, nobody has found a coronavirus in the wild that mutated to become similar to SARS-CoV-2 as it passed through other animals, and then infected humans. Both ideas are largely evidence-free at this point. They are both possible.

But they are not, however, equally probable. They differ in the number of events that could create each scenario. Redfield’s lab leak idea relies on one event, or perhaps a small handful: a mistake in the lab. The wildlife spillover idea has millions of chances to occur.

That idea holds there are billions of bats in China, and millions of encounters every week among bats and other wild animals and, in some cases, humans. The virus has many chances to jump. In its original form, it is inefficient at replicating in people. But it has millions of chances to get better even before it infects the first human. Bats go out foraging and have numerous encounters with other animals, such as pangolins, badgers, pigs and many others, and an opportunistic virus can infect these species. Coronaviruses mix among bat colonies, giving them chances to re-sort their genes. They even mix among single bats: a bat has been observed harboring several different coronaviruses.

So which scenario do you think is more likely? Redfield’s lab leak, relying on one speculative episode? Or the notion of a wildlife spillover, with a million or so chances to occur?

If you had to bet on a particular card turning up in your poker hand, would you put your money on the card that only has one chance? Or the card that has a million chances to show up? Both scenarios are possible. One is a lot more probable.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... ot-a-lab1/

[aTm]

If you had to bet on a particular card turning up in your poker hand, would you put your money on the card that only has one chance? Or the card that has a million chances to show up? Both scenarios are possible. One is a lot more probable.

"Millions of chances" vs "one chance" is some pretty extreme hyperbole. Especially since in a lab setting, you skip directly past all of the parts of the process that make transmission rare in the portion that has millions of chances. You dont need the bats to go foraging, you dont need them to mix with other animals, you dont need the infection to pass, you dont need the resorting of genes, and you dont then need the infected animal to somehow come across a human. In a lab you have humans constantly interacting with the virus on a daily basis, using the card analogy, its a stacked deck where most of the other cards have already been thrown out and so the card you're looking for is way more likely to appear.

In addition, all of the circumstantial evidence changes the odds dramatically. The example that is set there with a poker hand, ignores the fact that you can also look at what bets are being made, and that circumstantial evidence can give you more information about what cards are where. If the virus had started in the middle of nowhere in some random peasant, then yeah, the likelihood that it was a lab leak would be very low compared to natural crossover.

If it happens in a major city of 11 million people, in a neighborhood surrounding the virus lab, and the first infected people were virologists, then I doubt you're going to be going "all-in" on the natural crossover theory because "millions of chances!"

That article sounds more like Chinese propaganda than actual analysis of real probability. Its whole purpose is to "debunk" what someone else is saying, rather than provide any real information at all. Its the equivalent of "nuh uh!" Its also written two months ago, and is probably likely to be memory-holed soon, now that media is basically reporting that lab leak is actually being viewed as the most likely source.

[eCat]

From Twitter:

I'm back from a week at my mom's house and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that.

As a privacy tech worker, let me explain why this is happening.

First of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. It's been debunked over and over again.

But frankly they don't need to because everything else you give them unthinkingly is way cheaper and way more powerful.

Your apps collect a ton of data from your phone. Your unique device ID. Your location. Your demographics.

Data aggregators pay to pull in data from EVERYWHERE. When I use my discount card at the grocery store? Every purchase? That's a dataset for sale.

They can match my Harris Teeter purchases to my Twitter account because I gave both those companies my email address and phone number and I agreed to all that data-sharing when I accepted those terms of service and the privacy policy.

Here's where it gets truly nuts, though.

If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web of people I'm in regular contact with.

The advertisers can cross-reference my interests and browsing history and purchase history to those around me. It starts showing ME different ads based on the people AROUND me.

Family. Friends. Coworkers.

It will serve me ads for things I DON'T WANT, but it knows someone I'm in regular contact with might want.

So. They know my mom's toothpaste. They know I was at my mom's. They know my Twitter. Now I get Twitter ads for mom's toothpaste.

Your data isn't just about you. It's about how it can be used against every person you know, and people you don't. To shape behavior unconsciously.

To subliminally get me to start a conversation about, I don't know, fucking toothpaste.

It never needed to listen to me for this. It's just comparing aggregated metadata.

The other thing is, this is just out there in the open. Tons of people report on this. It's just, nobody cares. We have decided our privacy just isn't worth it. It's a losing battle. We've already given away too much of ourselves.

Apple's latest updates let you block apps' tracking and Facebook is MAD. They're BEGGING you to just press accept and go back to business as usual.

Block the fuck out of every app's ads. It's not just about you: your data reshapes the internet.

Also an interesting read on tracking you on your cell phone

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... phone.html

[innocentbystander]

From Twitter:

I'm back from a week at my mom's house and now I'm getting ads for her toothpaste brand, the brand I've been putting in my mouth for a week. We never talked about this brand or googled it or anything like that.

As a privacy tech worker, let me explain why this is happening.

First of all, your social media apps are not listening to you. This is a conspiracy theory. It's been debunked over and over again.

But frankly they don't need to because everything else you give them unthinkingly is way cheaper and way more powerful.

Your apps collect a ton of data from your phone. Your unique device ID. Your location. Your demographics.

Data aggregators pay to pull in data from EVERYWHERE. When I use my discount card at the grocery store? Every purchase? That's a dataset for sale.

They can match my Harris Teeter purchases to my Twitter account because I gave both those companies my email address and phone number and I agreed to all that data-sharing when I accepted those terms of service and the privacy policy.

Here's where it gets truly nuts, though.

If my phone is regularly in the same GPS location as another phone, they take note of that. They start reconstructing the web of people I'm in regular contact with.

The advertisers can cross-reference my interests and browsing history and purchase history to those around me. It starts showing ME different ads based on the people AROUND me.

Family. Friends. Coworkers.

It will serve me ads for things I DON'T WANT, but it knows someone I'm in regular contact with might want.

So. They know my mom's toothpaste. They know I was at my mom's. They know my Twitter. Now I get Twitter ads for mom's toothpaste.

Your data isn't just about you. It's about how it can be used against every person you know, and people you don't. To shape behavior unconsciously.

To subliminally get me to start a conversation about, I don't know, fucking toothpaste.

It never needed to listen to me for this. It's just comparing aggregated metadata.

The other thing is, this is just out there in the open. Tons of people report on this. It's just, nobody cares. We have decided our privacy just isn't worth it. It's a losing battle. We've already given away too much of ourselves.

Apple's latest updates let you block apps' tracking and Facebook is MAD. They're BEGGING you to just press accept and go back to business as usual.

Block the fuck out of every app's ads. It's not just about you: your data reshapes the internet.

Also an interesting read on tracking you on your cell phone

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... phone.html

In the Brexit movie (with Benedict Cumberbatch) it talks about how the "Leave" campaign reached out to Cambridge Analytica for information on people in England who hadn't voted in decades. He met their rep in a park and the rep from Cambridge Analytica started talking about what they do with data they buy from facebook and other social media portals. Its not that they look at the data and make assessments based on what people type and post. It is instead that they look at the data and make assessments based on what people DO NOT type or post. Cambridge Analytica would get all your facebook posts you made for the last year or so. They would track how many times you make reference to your girlfriend. And then in later posts, if they don't continue to see her name in your posts they will assess that the two of you broke up even if you never mention it on facebook. Using those kind of metrics and analytics, the "Leave" campaign was able to reach people who hadn't voted in decades and tell them what they think they wanted to hear based not on what they said in social media, but by what they didn't say. And that is where they came up with the slogan "take BACK control!" That worked. The people who hadn't voted didn't bother voting because they didn't think they could control anything.

[eCat]

In college I didn't want to go the usual comp sci route so I started focusing on databases my Junior year, which wasn't a new concept but small companies having access to them on personal computers was. That's when I started getting an inkling to the potential of metadata and marketing. We wrote a program to allow farmers to do crop analysis by inputting yields and chemicals used. Essentially is was a glorified pivot table that any person can do today in about 10 minutes but in 1988, running it on a Mac it was big stuff. It caught the attention of a professor who asked me to talk to one of the heads at Dollar General corporation (farming, dollar general -yea, I'm from Kentucky, also my partner was a girl I wanted to poke and she was really into farming) and they hired me as a summer intern to help them recreate a system on the PC they were currently running on a IBM mini. I pitched them an idea about tracking coupon usage by store to target ads but they were doing something similar already from the manufacturers. Now , 30 years later my local store, based on our rewards program tracks what we buy and sends us a custom coupon packet which we used heavily.

Working with DG paved the way for me working for the company I've been with the past 20 years , and when I hired in they had just bought a major database aggregator that actually had the word Meta in their name. That was around '96 and our first training conference they had maybe 2 hours worth of content on using it in the customer workplace. 3 years later we landed a $15m deal with Proctor and Gamble to track metadata on their product line. That year it surpassed all the other software and consulting revenue streams we had and transformed us. We went from about $100m a year revenue company to now a $4b global monster. So our company lives in that metadata tracking world - and I can tell you we never imagined how that would have exploded in tracking personal data, even though its been staring us in the face for more than 2 decades.

[eCat]

its funny because all of us Gen-X and Boomers ,when this internet thing started, we're all fiercely protective of our privacy to the extent we banned people on here for giving it up - and even though we still more or less adhere to it on here, we also know the minutia of each other lives from facebook.

My kids don't even consider it as an issue, while both of them refuse to use facebook, its because us old farts have ruined it for them so they have migrated to Instagram and TikTok. I have no idea what they are putting out there but I'm sure at some point there will be a picture of our house, a license plate, them talking about a local restaurant - they won't be hard to find.

Heck, without even knowing me I suspect an average person of google-fu capabilities could figure out the company I work for based on the past 2 posts on here I have made about it, even though I've never said the company name.

And if you looked at my friends list on Facebook, you could easily know it because I am friends with co-workers. Matter of fact, my company expects all the managers to have active LinkedIn accounts and they have a PR department that cranks out marketing material for us to post.

Because of all of that, I've become alot more guarded about what I say as it relates to potentially cancel culture lose your job topics in the past 2 or 3 years. I feel pretty safe around here but even that, I've pulled in the reigns quite a bit over say what I would have said or posted 10 years ago.

[hedge]

"Its also written two months ago, and is probably likely to be memory-holed soon, now that media is basically reporting that lab leak is actually being viewed as the most likely source."

IB doesn't trust the media. He's said so...

[hedge]

" (farming, dollar general -yea, I'm from Kentucky, also my partner was a girl I wanted to poke and she was really into farming)"

It really all comes back to that...

[hedge]

A buddy of mine used to work for SAS, I think data mining is their bread and butter...

[hedge]

"Because of all of that, I've become alot more guarded about what I say as it relates to potentially cancel culture lose your job topics in the past 2 or 3 years. I feel pretty safe around here but even that, I've pulled in the reigns quite a bit over say what I would have said or posted 10 years ago."

I've had to reign it in as well, if the farmers and chicken house operators around here every found out how anti-Trump I am and my liberal tendencies in general, I'd be fired on the spot. It's risky enough just wearing a UNC t-shirt around here...

[hedge]

Post from IC:

It is actually not at all important to discover where the virus came from. I would say that it doesn't matter in the slightest. The fact that either zoonotic or lab leak are possible hypothesis means that we have to increase vigilance on both fronts. I mean, suppose we discovered that it did come from a lab. Then what? Clean up the labs and call it a day, ignoring the possibility of zoonotic spillover? That would be stupid. We need to insist on better lab safety AND better policies to reduce the chances of spillover.

Focusing on the origins of the virus distracts attention from the origins of the pandemic. They are not the same. The virus emerged from China. The pandemic emerged largely from anti-science governments that refused to take or mandate precautions. If you recall, Iran was an initial hotspot for the virus, and I'm certain it was an important transmission vector. Then, of course, the worst countries in the world for Covid were the U.S., Brazil, the UK, and India. Italy and Spain were initially swamped but they got their act together in relatively short order (though Europe did let down its guard too soon).

In other words, we should be referring to the pandemic as the Great Right-Wing Disaster of 2020-21. And the lesson to be learned is that mouth-breathing anti-science idiots like Jair Bolsonaro and Kristi Noem should never, ever be permitted near the reins of executive power in any government.

Oh, and let's not exculpate right-wing media, which also bears incredible responsibility.

We know 100% that the virus didn't have to be a pandemic. The experiences of countries like South Korea and New Zealand prove that. The challenge for the future is taking steps to ensure that we don't repeat the public health catastrophe. The next virus might not come from China. Its origins might not be foreseeable. Maybe some psychopath like Putin decides to unleash an engineered virus to f with the world. It's the spread of the virus that matters, not its origin.

[innocentbystander]

Post from IC:

It is actually not at all important to discover where the virus came from. I would say that it doesn't matter in the slightest. The fact that either zoonotic or lab leak are possible hypothesis means that we have to increase vigilance on both fronts. I mean, suppose we discovered that it did come from a lab. Then what? Clean up the labs and call it a day, ignoring the possibility of zoonotic spillover? That would be stupid. We need to insist on better lab safety AND better policies to reduce the chances of spillover.

Focusing on the origins of the virus distracts attention from the origins of the pandemic. They are not the same. The virus emerged from China. The pandemic emerged largely from anti-science governments that refused to take or mandate precautions. If you recall, Iran was an initial hotspot for the virus, and I'm certain it was an important transmission vector. Then, of course, the worst countries in the world for Covid were the U.S., Brazil, the UK, and India. Italy and Spain were initially swamped but they got their act together in relatively short order (though Europe did let down its guard too soon).

In other words, we should be referring to the pandemic as the Great Right-Wing Disaster of 2020-21. And the lesson to be learned is that mouth-breathing anti-science idiots like Jair Bolsonaro and Kristi Noem should never, ever be permitted near the reins of executive power in any government.

Oh, and let's not exculpate right-wing media, which also bears incredible responsibility.

We know 100% that the virus didn't have to be a pandemic. The experiences of countries like South Korea and New Zealand prove that. The challenge for the future is taking steps to ensure that we don't repeat the public health catastrophe. The next virus might not come from China. Its origins might not be foreseeable. Maybe some psychopath like Putin decides to unleash an engineered virus to f with the world. It's the spread of the virus that matters, not its origin.

It does no good to politicize a virus, to politicize Covid-19. The highly infectious disease that it is, it not political. It is A-political. Yes, it did kill a higher percentage of blacks, Hispanics, and (especially) native Americans than the percentage of whites and Asians, but a disease is not inherently "racist." They did an entire episode of Grey's Anatomy about the "racism" of the disease, and they closed it saying that it makes no sense to call a disease "racist."

I become very suspicious of anyone (on the left or the right or anything in between) trying to politicize something that should not be politicized. Covid-19 is life and death, not votes. This was our generation's tuberculosis. This was the Spanish Flu of our lifetimes. This was our own personal little Polio. This was NOT our Black Death. Our Black Death/Great Plague was entirely political as that would be Roe-vs-Wade and its 70,000,000 dead.

Covid-19 is not political hedge. It is science. It is healthcare. It is medicine and vaccines. It is our present. It is our history. It is math and data. It will not be our future. It is not (nor has it ever been) politics. It is as political as the system board in your laptop. It is as political as a football game. It is as political as the air we breathe.

[Jungle Rat]

"its funny because all of us Gen-X and Boomers ,when this internet thing started, we're all fiercely protective of our privacy to the extent we banned people on here for giving it up - and even though we still more or less adhere to it on here, we also know the minutia of each other lives from facebook."

I miss Mookie

[Jungle Rat]

And Lonnie

[AlabamAlum]

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

[innocentbystander]

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

He's on vacation. He opened a nightclub in Los Angeles. So in that sense, "here" = California.



When Eve was at the bar, she asked for an "Appletini"

[eCat]

"Because of all of that, I've become alot more guarded about what I say as it relates to potentially cancel culture lose your job topics in the past 2 or 3 years. I feel pretty safe around here but even that, I've pulled in the reigns quite a bit over say what I would have said or posted 10 years ago."

I've had to reign it in as well, if the farmers and chicken house operators around here every found out how anti-Trump I am and my liberal tendencies in general, I'd be fired on the spot. It's risky enough just wearing a UNC t-shirt around here...

you could hate on Clinton or Bush - it was almost patriotic to do so, no one questioned your motives.

Then came Obama, and hating on a president suddenly became a commentary on your character

[eCat]

A buddy of mine used to work for SAS, I think data mining is their bread and butter...

I wanted to work for SAS at one time around 2000, had an interview lined up but I opted to go work for a company in Austin instead and never followed thru