morepedantic

PS, regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical.

You think the rich suffer from pollution and car dependency? It's not at all clear that taxing gas will lead to worse outcomes for the poor. It's entirely clear that subsidizing pollution from the poor will lead to worse outcomes for the planet.

Criminalizing fossil fuels is insane. The fines should cover the externalities.

TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.

The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.

China attempted information control on SARS-1, but rolled most of it back by April. They still haven't done this for SARS-2. That's not proof, but is a difference. Enough small differences can add up to a large difference.

https://gist.github.com/terabyte/15a2d3d407285b8b5a0a7964dd6...

There was no evidence for a zoonotic origin other than it was possible.

There was little evidence for a lab leak other than it was possible, but at least there was some.

The problem is that huge swathes of the medical community politicized the pandemic for a specific political purpose, especially in the USA. For example, the Moderna vaccine trials were delayed 2 weeks to change the protocol to appease a political activist in the medical community accusing Trump of trying to ram an unsafe vaccine through. Naturally the trial results were available immediately after the election.

I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?

The take away is not that we'll never know. The take away is that governments conspired to obscure the truth, control public opinion, and censor dissent.

It's unlikely we'll ever know the truth. If it's a cover up, then it's possible that someone will come forward in 30 years. For example, Luis Salas spilled the beans on Lyndon B Johnson's 1948 election fraud. But it's unlikely, because the PRC doesn't have a statute of limitations on STFU. If it's natural zoonosis, then maybe we'll manage to find and prove the origin.

So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.

Yeah, the NIH isn't blameless if the lab leak hypothesis is true.

But a 2 spillover event suggests there was a pool of infected animals with multiple lineages that were all already capable of zoonosis. So why only a single secondary event? This suggests the pool was small, contact was limited, and that the pool wasn't sustained for long. OK, then it's comparably likely that a mutation would happen on either side of the spillover.

GoF research is so obviously a bad idea. The risks are enormous and the rewards are minuscule. But lab leaks of natural viruses are indicative of problems too.

You literally just reduced 3 theories to 2: lab leak natural virus, lab leak medical GoF, and lab leak bioweapon. These theories get collapsed because there's no practical way to distinguish between them. A 4th theory, intentional release, is often used as a weakman for all lab leak theories, but isn't actually a leak at all.

>So it didn’t occur “naturally” but also wasn’t developed or engineered. Makes no sense.

Yeah, someone wants to split hairs, but it's impossible without knowing the specific definitions they want.

You think it's a conspiracy theory that Obama banned GoF research? OK, it was through an OSTP directive working with the NIH rather than an EO, but that's splitting hairs. It also wasn't banned, but only subject to a higher degree of scrutiny.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...

The lab leak hypothesis doesn't depend on GoF research. CoV-2 could have a natural origin, been collected by the WIV, and leaked into the city. This has happened before.

That said, there's no way to evaluate if it was engineered. Some methods of engineering are indistinguishable from natural selection, and fingerprints from detectable methods have a very short half-life in a fast mutating virus.

>So even if the very first jump was in the lab, it was likely a result of insufficient biosecurity measures.

Virtually no one is claiming otherwise. This is a weakman argument.

>and it's a matter of time until a new spillover happens.

At the start of CoV-2, everyone told me that it takes years to develop vaccines. I told them it takes days to develop and weeks to test. Turns out that I was right. If the mortality rate of CoV-2 had been 3%, like early reports suggested, then the mRNA vaccines would have been in production by March.

Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.