You don't need to speak Chinese to know that any large corporation that exists in the PRC does so at the behest of their government, and must kowtow to their surveillance demands accordingly.
Every American social media company is a front for NSA surveillance and CIA propaganda, what's your point? I thought we were supposed to believe in free markets and competition around here.
Every American social media|insurance|telecom|financial|tech company are a surveillance endpoint for the FBI or LE in general and/or a foreign policy endpoint in terms of being an effector for economic warfare.
No legal fiction is inured to the machinations of its host state.
Social media companies have also their own nefarious goals so you don't have only to worry about your government but also about the (un)intended consequences of attention capitalism
Again, I see little difference between the PRC and USA in this regard. As an American, I couldn't care less about Chinese surveillance. But my own government has an active interest in monitoring my politics for thoughtcrime and influencing my thoughts and actions. Making a moral panic only about the foreign platform seems, itself, like propaganda.
The moral panic isn’t remotely limited to foreign platforms, not even 24 hours ago the Senate Judiciary Committee publicly hung online sexual abuse of children around the CEO of Facebook’s neck, complete with a broadcasted apology before asking the TikTok CEO if they’re a member of the CCP in the same hearing.
Countries other than the USA have agency and interests, and are entirely capable of seeking to influence your thoughts and actions to affect change if it furthers their goals (it is literally an election year).
Tiktok has a superpower of injecting random people into your feed, which could be and would be used for manipulation. Or suppressing specific posts. Probably that is why meta did the same (before they could only do it with ads, but nobody watches ads anyway).
Having a foreign government covertly influence your thoughts and actions should be of concern. It's one thing to have your thoughts and actions be changed by a logical process; it's a whole other concern when an agonistic foreign power is expending non-trivial amounts of resources to bend your opinion.
This isn't mutually exclusive to being concerned about the US government actions in this space but the risks are completely different.
Seems like you are overly concerned with the devil you know while ignoring the threat of the devil you don’t. If you think the US government isn’t your friend, well… you are right. But if you are an American, the PRC is your enemy. They actually want bad things to happen to the citizens of the US. And they have the leverage to cause some of those things to happen.
oh please, spare us. Do tell what china has done to the US citizenry. Consider that you're attempting revolutions, surrounding them with military bases, arming separatists, and instigating trade wars. Your government hates the Chinese people. Don't project your vile tendencies onto others.
No matter the morality of the government’s actions, I would rather be on the side of the biggest guns and do what I can to undermine the size of the other guy’s guns, unless the other guy offers me a better life
then admit that instead of fearmongering and promoting actively harmful sinophobic views. it's the blind and naive i am taking issue with, not the geopolitical realists. even if i disagree with both
Sinophobic? You just sound like a tankie or a shill. The Chinese government is a cartel that actively trade in the stolen organs of their own citizenry. The US may have completely squandered its global hegemony entering into useless wars, but the Chinese preside over a horror show.
Thank you. I cannot understand people who are more frightened by foreigners knowing about their penchant for horse porn than by their local cops knowing the same embarrassing facts.
Signal isn't exactly trustworthy here either. Signal still likes to brag about the times when they told the government they couldn't hand over the data the feds wanted because they never collect/store it in the first place, but a long time ago they started collecting and permanently storing in the cloud exactly that same data. Worse, they refuse to update their privacy policy to reflect what they've started doing, meaning that the very first sentence of that policy is an outright lie. Personally, I take that as a massive dead canary and assume that signal has been completely compromised.
There are alternatives out there which I hope still deliver on the promise of allowing secure communications, and we're free to roll our own, but I strongly suspect that the US gov will move in on anything that gains enough of a following.
I think that we're still far better off than the Chinese, but we're not as free as we pretend that we are.
Since the only real thing about America is the people who vote in her (or his because it's "uncle" sam?) elections, it has a chance to join the right or wrong side of history once anew every generation.
the SARS-CoV-2 genome is ~29.8K nucleotides long. 96% of that sequence is identical to the genome of RaTG13, i.e. all but ~1200 match. for reference, SARS-CoV-1 is only 82% similar to SARS-CoV-2. at a mutation rate of 8*10^-4, this means the current strains of COVID are ~97% identical to the original 2019 sequence.
so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just too different - but I am saying that it's much closer than the original SARS, and thus had no business being analyzed in a BSL-2 lab.
I don't see how then % number means anything. Humans and apes have 4% difference. It depends on thebkind of difference, not the number of different genes
Sophisticated evolutionary models are needed to accurately estimated expected mean and variance in genetic distances. For example, rare events of large effect (e.g. recombination) also introduces variation beyond within-strain mutation.
That means they were several decades of evolution in the wild away from each other.
It would take passage through billions of organisms to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2.
Which is probably what happened naturally through many, many millions of bats (and whatever intermediate animal) being infected and passing it on. Something that is well outside the scale of serial passage experiments in a lab.
How do you arrive at several decades and billions of organisms? You can't extrapolate the current mutation rate to the spillover event; SARS-CoV-2 was already quite fit at infecting humans and didn't need to change much. In contrast, during spillover events there's heavy selection pressure to adapt to the new host.
There's also the possibility of recombination events, which can instantly cause significant drift. Now consider the case of the Mojiang miners, who contracted and slowly succumbed to viral pneumonia in 2012 after inhaling bat guano. WIV found, like, a dozen beta-coronaviruses in that cave alone (including RaTG13.) The miners could have been exposed to several at once, which recombined and adapted quickly to their new home in human lungs. Again, unlikely to have been SARS-CoV-2, since the pandemic almost certainly would have happened already, but whatever they had was virulent enough to kill half of them.
The genetic clock was estimated from bat coronavirus mutation rates in the wild, not from SARS-CoV-2 mutation in humans.
And virulence != transmissible. They got sick by inhaling everything that was floating around in that mine. To get more people sick you'd need to take them all to that mine.
Recombination to produce a viable and more successful virus is also very rare, that is unlikely to have happened to any of those miners, much less several of them (over populations it becomes likely but there we're talking many millions of infections as well).
How far away would it be? Would it still take millions and millions of bats or is it now within the realm of possibility to infect humanized mice and get SARS-CoV-2 out the other end?
Yes, you're still a thousand mutations away from each other. The FCS is tiny. The mutations are spread all over the entire genome--although the main areas are in spike RBD (which suggests that RaTG13 may not be able to use ACE2 at all). The PRRAR FCS that SARS-CoV-2 uses is also a previously-unknown-to-humans FCS and not one a human scientist would have naively guessed would work.
But a human and chimp's have over 3 billion nucleotides in our genome. SARS2 only has 30 thousand, so the genetic distance between the two are at most decades, but with recombinants the timeline is much shorter
