PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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606

Joined

2 yr. ago

Yes. That is the point. Tesla trucks would be unable to replace diesel trucks in this scenario. Tesla trucks can’t make it across the country in sunny weather without a pit crew tailing them, much less handle a double digit below zero midwest snowstorm. I am pointing it out because this is yet another place where Elon was lying.

The war on drugs and the crime bill had significant support in the black community and were endorsed by both political and religious leaders.

Getting into the uselessness of the “tough on crime” position politicians take would be a very involved discussion, but at the time it was not seen the way we now see it in hindsight, and it had pretty widespread support.

Reality is more complicated than that. The crime bill and the war on drugs at the time had significant support in the black community, including political and religious leaders.

Those young educated families are going to be the first to flee the state now that they’re taking the hard right turn that they are, and that will make this a blip that was driven, not by Texas, but by jobs moving to places like Austin. I have multiple colleagues that are looking to exit the state because they’re deeply concerned about their civil rights and their families.

From the trucks in the thumbnail and the widely held knowledge of the underperformance of the vehicles in the cold despite Musk’s claims from 2019 that the trucks were ready to replace the entire US trucking fleet starting back then.

Just curious - how are those million mile Tesla trucks doing in the snow? Still cheaper from day one in the worst case scenario?

I left Reddit, deleting all of my content, because I disagreed with the elimination of third party apps and because of Reddit’s response to the community. Full stop. I wasn’t a heavy Twitter user - I tend to enjoy more drawn out discussions and topically focused communities - but I stopped using it entirely because of Elon’s moves, including his rejection of corporate censorship.

I have no problem with a service establishing a ToS that includes trust and safety policies that will remove posts and ban users over hate speech. I have no problem with forced demonetization and deplatforming of hate accounts. I would have no problem if federal and state governments enacted more anti-hate laws to bring us in line with other democracies around the world.

That’s because I do not think that permitting a group of American brown shirts to fly Nazi flags and shout racist slurs at passersby increases freedom. I think it decreases it, because it causes a large part of the population to live in fear. I think hate speech rules by private companies serve the same purpose.

Don’t bother. It’s just that site that backs hate sites like Truth Social and other far right media. The article itself is blowing all of the world government dog whistles they’ve been sounding since the John Birch Society was in business.

I agree, and this is easily my favorite post of the month.

Now I have a machine gun

Ho ho ho

It seems like you’re challenging the journalistic quality of the bastion that is newsbreak.com.

You have no idea what you’re talking about.

Did you miss what happened in the US starting in 2020? A major political party convinced a massive swath of the American population to refuse to take any actions to avoid the spread of a disease. This is a highly educated, highly connected, wealthy population in a (sort of) democracy, and you had incidents of violence and murder occurring over a weaponized and mythologized version of reality pushed by religious extremists and the far right. Now picture a community in Pakistan that does not have that education, the level of political and religious freedom, or that access to information. We saw the same dynamic play out in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

Except in this case, the CIA was actively involved. Imagine 2022 if it turned out that Biden’s vaccination program turned out to be run by Chinese Ministry for State Security and they were using the program as a way of gathering intelligence on Americans. As it was you had armed militias and paramilitary groups seizing statehouses and plotting kidnappings and political murders.

So maybe you would be that one brave soul in a deep red Alabama town who wears their mask despite being assaulted, getting spit on, and having their family threatened. It’s statistically unlikely, but maybe you’re just the type of person who would walk down the street in the same town dressed head to heels in drag knowing you’re going to get beat up, if you’re lucky. It just means that your brain - your physical brain - is wired up differently. Congratulations - maybe go join Doctors Without Borders or something.

The CIA and other American intelligence agencies have been long barred from participating in aid programs to prevent this very thing. They wouldn’t even allow agency people to retire and join government aid agencies without a significant waiting period. It’s the same reason it was considered very outside of bounds for intelligence officers to pose as members of the press. It puts lives in danger. The US has dispatched foreign medical aid using uniformed military assets, but it is done openly. A naval ship will pull up with medical equipment, field hospitals will be set up, and so on.

Anything else gets people killed - both the aid workers and the community whose distrust forces them to reject the aid.

Would you like to know more?

On May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had located and killed Osama Bin Laden. The agency organised a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign in Abottabad, Pakistan, in a bid to obtain DNA from the children of Bin Laden, to confirm the presence of the family in a compound and sanction the rollout of a risky and extensive operation. Release of this information has had a disastrous effect on worldwide eradication of infectious diseases, especially polio.

I think what people are intuiting is really in two parts. Like another person said, if an observation is true, you can probably find someone who said it better.

The other thing is that crafted personae (think Peterson, Ayn Rand, Shapiro, Rush Limbaugh) will take a position and argue for it on the basis of their other opinions. Each observation is meant to be a facet of an integrated philosophy.

So if they take position A, they will support it by opinions X, Y, and Z. If you accept A, as presented by them, but reject X, Y, and Z, then it’s up to you - if you’re using them as a point of reference, to point out the flaws in their supporting arguments and substitute your own. If you do not, it’s reasonable for a listener to think you also subscribe to their supporting premises.

Let’s say we’re having dinner and you comment that Ayn Rand was right when she said welfare is evil. Rand meant that welfare is evil because it takes the hard-earned wealth from the good and virtuous rich and gives it to the lazy, greedy poor. If you go no further than naming her and stating your agreement, we will probably think you picked her because you agree with her reasoning. You may actually mean that you prefer a universal basic income over welfare, or a completely egalitarian society where everyone from surgeons and ceos to grocery clerks make the same wage. Or you might be advocating for societies like those documented by David Graeber, who describes the indigenous people of the Northeast US where there was no notion of cash or barter but instead something closer to “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.” But because you started by quoting Rand and not Marx, people aren’t going to just jump to that conclusion.

It’s like why math teachers ask you to show your work. If you made a bunch of self-cancelling errors and blundered onto the right answer, you didn’t actually learn the material, so the fact that you wrote down the numerically correct answer doesn’t mean that you understand how to solve that kind of problem, and it will get 0 credit. The same for a philosophy or history professor who wants you to justify your answer and not just write down a one sentence opinion.

One of the problems is that we don’t know. It might be environmental contamination (eg deposits on grass or in soil). Ebola patient 0 was thought to be a toddler-aged child who ate a piece of fruit that had been contaminated by dung from an infected bat (Ebola, like many of our diseases, is zoonotic). It’s also thought to potentially come from preparing meat from an infected animal. If it’s in the environment, it may also come from some social behavior, like grooming or wound cleaning. Could it be transmitted by parasites that jump from host to host drinking blood? No idea. I’m just spitballing based on how some other diseases become density dependent.

Prions are absolutely fascinating. I really hope they make a lot of progress.

Occasionally they do consume meat as far as I know (as several herbivores do), but if that were a serious candidate it would be among the principle lines of transmission being investigated.

Zoonotic diseases are investigated by cross-disciplinary teams with experience ranging from public health and disease experts to wildlife biologists and ecologists. I did some work on a similar topic with the National Parks Service so I know a bit about how these are approached. I have no involvement with this and I’ve never worked on prion contagion models - like I said, we just don’t know. But I do have experience in the area.

Prions have been found in soil, on grass and plants, and do not get quickly degraded by sun and rain. We do know that this disease is density dependent, so you’d need a model of deer going carnivore and cannibal in a density dependent natural model, which is not a phenomenon I’m familiar with.

So what I’m saying is that we just don’t know what the deer-deer vector is or if a predation vector exists as a secondary transmission or if one will appear.

We’re actually not sure about that. Some prions do spread by eating the meat of infected animals, but I think we can be pretty sure that’s not what’s happening in a wild deer population. Prions can also be found in the environment, including deposited on grasses and plants, where that can last a very long time.

We do not know if this disease is or will become communicable to predator animals or what the potential is for environmental spread to livestock. We do know a bit more about the BSE than some others, but there’s a bunch we know exist that we know little to nothing about, and it’s guaranteed there’s more out there that we haven’t encountered yet.

Biologist here. That’s not where I’d put the association. I’m going to simplify things a bit because this is going to be a long post, but hopefully this will help.

I think you’re thinking about the effects of heat on proteins. We can destabilize macromolecules by heating them, sometimes causing permanent damage. That takes a lot of heat, though. The planet would be long dead before we had to worry about the environmental temperature denaturing proteins.

Biologist related joke: How do you unscramble an egg?
Feed it to a chicken.

So, when the microscope was invented, people were startled to discover what were obviously living organisms in a drop of pond water. Discovery led to discovery, and we ended up learning about bacteria and the germ theory of disease. Some bacteria are really good (in that without them you would die), and some are really bad (like if you get infected you could die), but most are neutral. I do not believe there’s any direct connection between the global temperature and the rate of mutation in bacteria. That’s not to say there’s not a connection between climate change and disease rates. I’ll talk about that later.

So later on we discovered viruses. Viruses are much smaller than bacteria. While a bacterium is a cell with a whole physiology going on, a virus consists of a bit of genetic material bound in an envelope of proteins. The envelope will gain access to a cell and inject its genetic material, which the cell’s normal processes will start to work on, producing more viruses. Many people don’t consider viruses “alive.” I do, because I’m approaching it from a different direction. Again, the rate of mutation there isn’t really directly affected by a rise in global temperature, but there is a disease rate relationship.

We only discovered prions more recently. They’re even more simple than viruses. They’re really just a protein. We don’t understand them very well yet. The danger comes from the fact that prions can force other proteins to become copies of themselves. They can cause things like mad cow disease. They’re incredibly hardy and don’t mutate faster because of climate change. They’re very scary diseases with no known treatment and in some cases unknown transmission paths.

This one is a prion.

I think we can find correlations between disease in animals and climate change. Climate change forces animals into new environments where they can encounter diseases they’ve never faced before and to which they’re susceptible.

Even more important is the common root cause of industrialization and human expansion and environmental destruction. Again, forcing more animals together magnifies the impact of communicable diseases, and things like the use of antibiotics to make factory farming as profitable as possible has the inevitable consequences of making diseases that are harder to treat.

I absolutely agree with you there. I just commented a short time ago on an article about the effects of primate vocalizations on the human brain. The article not only got the conclusion of the paper wrong, they got the very nature of evolution wrong. I didn’t even have to read the paper - I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s admittedly the kind of mistake non-biologists make. Journalists should probably avoid drawing conclusions that aren’t specifically in the source material. My point is that, going off of the author’s quotes the pulled and my own knowledge of evolutionary dynamics, I knew it was wrong. However, I am not at all sure that someone without a background in biology would be able to understand the paper well enough to catch the error in the article.

I am all for open access, and I share your frustration. I think you should be able to access any paper you want for free. But I’ll also say that if you don’t have the background in the subject to know what the underlying paper will have said, the chances are pretty good that you’re not going to understand the paper well enough to find the flaws.

I used to talk to a physicist named Lee Smolin who proposed a Darwinian model for universe formation. I can follow the evolutionary part, but when it gets down to the physics of it, I’m lost at sea. So when I read an article about him - I read something about him recently - I mostly have to go on my basic understanding because there’s no way I’d make it through that paper.

And literally the only reason I’m throwing this out there at all is that, unlike a physics paper that’s totally incomprehensible and obviously so, people believe in their own interpretations on social science or public health papers. I see more kinds of cherry-picking abuses and simple misunderstandings there than elsewhere.

It’s great to see people so inquisitive though.

Thank you!