Umm it should concern everyone if FBI, a law enforcement agency with sweeping power, invades a journalist or a private individual’s house. This sort of normalization of FBI raids to individual citizens is bad for individual and civil liberties, the number of such raids have disproportionately grown over last decade. FBI is an agency known for broad abuse of power and the last thing we need is politicization and sweeping normalization of their abusive behaviours. Even as recent as July, a judge questioned their tactic of raiding a defendants hous instead of just asking them to turn themselves https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2022/07/15/judge-questions...
If anything we need more oversight from media, not less. FBI is known to bypass any scrutiny like FISA warrants and rubber stamp things as they wish.
You've been using HN primarily—in fact exclusively, it seems—for ideological and political battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of their politics. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Since we already asked you to stop and you haven't, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> Dang just banned someone for the wrongthink of questioning the authoritarian police state
Actually I just banned them for using HN exclusively for ideological battle, which is clearly against the rules for what ought to be obvious reasons to anyone who's read them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Bit of a feat to pull "authoritarian police state" out of that, but the internet can do anything.
A judge's signature is a necessary but insufficient part of such raids. It is absolutely reasonable to hold an agency with a troubled past accountable, regardless of which judge rubber stamps the raids. Hold judges accountable, sure, but the spotlight should be on the agency.
I am curious how we are going about studying these in Macaques. Are we trying to deliberately get them the virus and see how their brain respond? If so, haven’t we learned enough on how virus jumps species and can wreck havoc?
The idea is that the monkeys are being used as a 'model organism' for how humans react to getting the virus. Since it is not possible (typically) to extract brain tissue from living humans during Covid infection and see how it's affecting their brain. So macaques are used as a stand-in.
I believe the macaques are just infected with the same Covid strain that can infect humans.
The original comment was that there is no risk of Covid in Macaques jumping to humans since Covid is already in the human population.
In general it is probably easier for a virus to jump between closely related species that it is to jump between more divergent species. Humans and macaques only split about 20-30 million years ago. Humans and bat probably split 70 million years ago. It doesn’t mean that bat viruses can’t make the jump, many do, just that it might be harder for them to establish themselves in humans. Bats live in very tight quarters and end up exchanging a lot of virus between each other. This is a great breeding ground for viruses so there are probably more virus types in bats than in many other animals. That gives a large pool of viruses which have the potential to infect humans.
> The CDC did fine with what they had to work with to be honest.
If that’s the standard we have to live by after the most devastating pandemic in a century for the most developed country in the world, then there is not going to be any lessons or improvement when the next one hits.
The CDC didn’t (still doesn’t) have a full picture of mode of transmission of the virus (aerosol vs others). They kept saying it’s not airborne when all being said it looks like it is. Their focus on hand washing in retrospection seems like not a productive strategy whatsoever. The whole mask fiasco (first saying it isn’t recommended and then a straight up 180) caused the public in rooted mistrust and then their PR umbrella did a poor job addressing and admitting any failure. Their PR branch effectively did nothing to earn trust of a large swaths of public who didn’t buy into vaccination other than often resorting to name calling and gaslighting the debate further which is absolutely the opposite of what you would want to do in that situation if you really want people to get vaccinated. Many occasions they did slow walk backs and often no oversights on grants and revolving doors setup within these agencies with FDA and other pharma industries.
Calling everyone criticizing you “anti-science” is a great way of not learning any lessons for next epidemic.
There is a lot we can do better.
It’s not surprising at all. Current administration has setup a revolving door with quite a few Google execs working in the administration. Eric Schmidt is known to have done fundraising in 2020.
> If it's obvious to me that this is exactly what will happen, it should be obvious to Fed board members
You also have to discount the possibility that Fed might be incompetent, given how their recent track record has been in predicting transitory inflation and delays in calling off QE.
Given the size of Californias population and and it’s spending power, the grand effect on the entire country would be higher. I wonder if the rest of the states would have to pay the prices (through rising rates).
> Mail-in/absentee ballot request forms typically require applicants to sign the form and affirm their eligibility to cast a mail-in/absentee ballot under penalty of law. Upon receipt of a mail-in/absentee ballot request form, election officials implement varying procedures to verify the identity and eligibility of the applicant prior to sending the applicant a mail-in/absentee ballot. Such procedures include checking the signature and information submitted on the form against the corresponding voter registration record, as well as ensuring that multiple mail-in/absentee ballots are not sent in response to applications using the same voter’s information.
Let’s see. In 2020, many duplicates were sent. Ballots were sent for dead people. So the rumour is not only true, it has already been happening across the country as recently as last election.
Yeah, I got one of those “duplicate” ballots. News stories about it were posted all over political discussion sites as “proof” of fraud.
What they didn’t mention is that they all had serial numbers that tracked back to the registration roll anyway. If you tried to send both in, it wasn’t counted, and you’d be caught in the act.
I’m more comfortable with this process than I am with electronic voting with no paper record.
I'm not saying that people were caught doing it, I'm saying that if someone did, election officials would literally have a sheet of paper in their hand with the name of someone who tried to vote twice.
> In this case, the alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results
Would be curious how they asserted that. A contractor in the last election dumped ballots in garbage in Pennsylvania. Justice department maintained it didn’t alter election integrity.
Read it. The alleged crime was related to PII of election workers. Not voters. The assertion is that nothing in their investigation indicated trouble with votes which isn't the same as guaranteeing nothing happened.
Yikes Toronto. I grew up there (immigrant parents first destination before moving down south) but despise it now for what it has become. An over expensive cesspool of the house owning NIMBY class with terrible traffic and disregard for driving rules or anything really that Canada I grew up in used to stand for like good manners. Lived in Syracuse as well before moving to the west coast. Don’t miss the snow or the cold. Only if there wasn’t so many wildfire.
>An over expensive cesspool of the house owning NIMBY class with terrible traffic and disregard for driving rules
It's actually even worse than that now. With the massive influx of immigrants recently, there are now 2+ families sharing one apartment. It's turning into the worst of the ghettos in many areas. Traffic is worse than ever. GO trains are fuller than ever.
Many people are escaping to Alberta. No respite in sight
If anything we need more oversight from media, not less. FBI is known to bypass any scrutiny like FISA warrants and rubber stamp things as they wish.