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If the work on coronaviruses that WIV was doing was at BSL-4, I'd be more skeptical of a lab leak origin. It was being done at BSL-2; see Ralph Baric's testimony covered in this Vanity Fair article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...


The WIV was doing research on bat coronaviruses at BSL-2, not BSL-4. See Ralph Baric's testimony covered in this Vanity Fair article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...


You think China, in the 1950s, was opening research labs at the behest of the CIA?

> I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market...

That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.


I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because:

“Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.


They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...

Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”


Similarly:

In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1]

The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1]

Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...


The problem is Brandolini's law - “it takes an order of magnitude more energy to refute bullshit than that needed to produce it”. So allowing widely disseminated bullshit effectively opens our society up to a denial-of-service attack.

Disappointed that it doesn't look to fix the biggest issue I have with the Switch, which is that docking it feels awkward and clumsy. You have to blindly line up a USB-C port/connector, and that seems to be the same approach they're going with here. At least the Joycons look like they'll be a little smoother to attach/remove.

The “briefcases full of cash” began flowing into Gaza in the mid-2010s, IIRC. Hamas had been in power in Gaza for around a decade at that point.

Israel has been funding anti PLO/PA efforts since the 80's

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-c...


Fine, sure, I guess - the article is demanding an email address so I can’t read it, but I buy it.

I’m responding to the statement “Netanyahu was the one that helped put them there in the first place. He did this to try and derail the two state solution - famously delivering them thoses briefcases full of cash.”

This is a vastly different statement than “Israel has been funding anti PLO/PA efforts since the 80’s”. It’s referring to a specific (“famous”!) instance, and attributing it to a specific person (Netanyahu), and putting it at a specific time frame (before Hamas seized power) so as to have a specific consequence (Hamas’ acquisition of power) for a specific reason (to derail a two state solution). Very little of this is correct: Netanyahu was not the one responsible for putting them into power (he wasn’t prime minister at the time), the Qatari money being referenced was allowed into Gaza many years after Hamas was in power, it was unlikely to do much to prevent a two state solution as one hadn’t really been on the table since Arafat, and so on.

That other people in the Israeli government, at a different time, backed Hamas in different instances for different reasons does not warrant conflating the two events. It’s like saying Bush did 9/11 because the CIA funded Bin Laden in the 80s.


And Israel sold arms to Iran to use against Iraq in the 1980s. "My enemy's enemy" etc.

> Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy." Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, "the Reagan Administration" presented a different face, and "aggressively promoted a public campaign [...] to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran". The New York Times explains: "Iran at that time was in dire need of arms and spare parts for its American-made arsenal to defend itself against Iraq, which had attacked it in September 1980", while "Israel [a US ally] was interested in keeping the war between Iran and Iraq going to ensure that these two potential enemies remained preoccupied with each other". Major General Avraham Tamir, a high-ranking Israeli Defense Ministry official in 1981, said there was an "oral agreement" to allow the sale of "spare parts" to Iran. This was based on an "understanding" with Secretary Alexander Haig (which a Haig adviser denied). This account was confirmed by a former senior US diplomat with a few modifications. The diplomat claimed that "[Ariel] Sharon violated it, and Haig backed away". A former "high-level" Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official who saw reports of arms sales to Iran by Israel in the early 1980s estimated that the total was about $2 billion a year

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

The 1980's were a very different era. The PLO was a terrorist organisation backed by the Soviet Union, and Israel was aggressive in trying to support any challenges to it.


> I also found Trump's signalling in the whole issue odd. His base and his cabinet is full of the most hard-line pro-israel figures imaginable, but then he goes forward and quotes Jeffrey Sachs and ostensibly pressures Netanyahu into accepting the ceasefire.

Trump just wanted a deal - he loves being the "deal guy". Frankly, I'm shocked he didn't push Bibi into waiting until after the inauguration. Guess he felt like it was close enough that he could still take credit for it.


Perhaps it speaks to Biden's administration and its interest in the conflict that Trump can achieve this now where Biden couldn't a couple months ago.

> Frankly, I'm shocked he didn't push Bibi into waiting until after the inauguration

If you read between the lines it was clear Biden was also pushing hard to wrap it up before his term ends to add it to his legacy (that's how NYT spun it at least). But Trump also had his people negotiating there as well and enough of add a hard-line persuasive influence to force Bibi to show up in Doha last-minute on a weekend during Sabbath [1]. While Biden really didn't seem to have much influence there in the last yr.

But ultimately they both get to take credit.

The cease-fire ending will eventually need a conclusion during Trumps term as well.

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-salty-envoy-may-forced-1549...


This is the most accurate summary in this thread (although note that the NYT is now also crediting the Trump team for the pressure on Bibi)

> Guess he felt like it was close enough that he could still take credit for it.

He's a private citizen. It isn't legal for him to engage in foreign diplomacy. Conveniently we have a feckless DoJ that won't hold people accountable.


Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.

Attempting to reconcile that with HRW's article: on the one hand I think HRW might be unrealistic about what FB should be expected to tolerate (for instance, they criticize FB for taking down posts praising designated terrorist organizations); on the other, Meta's approach to content moderation - which combines automated systems with overworked and underpaid humans exposed non-stop to awful content - is notoriously fickle and subject to abuse (including, perhaps, by state actors).

Beyond Israel/Palestine, I regularly encounter content on Facebook that the Powers That Be would censor if "the pro-Western censorship regime on FB [were] extremely strong". I think I subscribe to only one political (left-leaning) group (along with a bunch of local and meme pages), but nevertheless my feed is full of tankies demanding we bring back the guillotine and install full communism.


>Speaking anecdotally, this doesn't really ring true for me. I see lots of pro-Palestinian content on Facebook and Instagram, ranging from the sincere to clear disinformation/propaganda. I have friends who post frequently in support of Palestine with zero repercussions.

Naturally there is no overt censorship on FB/Meta, but in the wake of October 7th there was a clear difference in what kinds of content was being lifted by the algorithms on both platforms. I think, save for Bella Hadid, you would rarely see "organic" pro-palestine content with millions of views on Instagram, while it was less censored on TikTok.

Human Rights Watch even did a study on it: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...


If I’m reading OP’s math correctly, you’ve got it backwards. They’re saying NYC should be in practice making significantly more than $500M/yr.


OP's math doesn't account for the fact that a small fraction of trips into the city are personal vehicles, and many more are cabs/rideshare cars (which pay differently) and trucks making deliveries (which may be exempt).

In any case, there is also going to be widespread toll fraud here just like with every other toll in NYC.


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