It's great to hear it from an authoritative source, however biased that source might be... but this was already expected to be the case. Offhand, I don't have my source available... but this was all reported at least a month ago, by researchers outside of China.

Genetically, the virus is mostly similar to other animal-borne coronaviruses, suggesting it began in bats and moved through pangolins, but it doesn't appear to reside in the muscle tissue that'd be used as a food, and the only connection to the Wuhan market is that several of the early cases (but not the earliest) were people that frequented the market.

That wet market, it should be noted, is essentially similar to American farmers' markets. Almost all slaughter happens in facilities outside the market area, and sanitation measures are generally comparable to Western standards.

The most likely vector for entering the human population is someone having an interaction with something contaminated by a pangolin. For example, we know the virus can be carried by dogs, so it could be (hypothetically) as simple as a pet dog attacking a pangolin, then licking its owner. We may never know.

I can explain how it works that easily. On the other hand, how to actually do it at a scale required by YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or practically any other major social media site, is a much more complicated process that almost certainly needs an AI to keep up with the ever-growing number of connected people and the infinite variety of ways we find to antagonize each other.

Hopefully Slashdot will format this as an ordered list of the steps to create fully-automatic censorship:

1. There's a cause somebody doesn't like
2. There's a unique short phrase identifying support for that cause
3. There are lots of posts including that phrase
4. A lot of those posts get reported as TOS violations
5. An AI notices the phrases often accompany objectionable posts
6. Further posts with those phrases get automatically flagged

It doesn't take much, and this is not an indication that Twitter is being controlled by China. It's just an indication that yet another massively-complex system is massively complex, and AI doesn't actually tame that beast as much as the public has been led to believe.

I think the ethical thing to do is to put everyone's safety first, without attaching price tags. Frontier already assigns seats. It would be trivial for them to apply this safety improvement to everyone, and I doubt their flights are full enough that it would cause a single overbooked flight. They've chosen to seek profit over saving lives.

If you're relocating because that's where your new job is, you're probably flying.

If you're stranded across the country from a family member that needs help, you're flying.

If your car won't likely handle the trip, you're flying.

If you've been staying with family and are now required to return to work immediately, you're flying.

There are plenty of reasons people would travel and fly unwillingly, and it's not likely that someone with limited financial resources can arrange alternate accommodations. Having more money means having more options. Sometimes "don't go anywhere" is just too expensive.

It's not just about flying... People with higher incomes are more likely to be able to work from home, take vacation time, weather furloughs or layoffs, and live in communities where they can be more isolated. They can afford to have supplies delivered to them, have indoor entertainment, and have direct access to support services. Their overall risk profile is much lower than someone without those options.

Of course, once we start talking about upper-class options, the risk drops even further. Vacation homes, private aircraft, work delegation, black-market suppliers, resource stockpiles, VIP healthcare... For only a few million dollars, the ultra-rich can simply leave society and wait for things to settle down, confident in having essentially no exposure.

Remember, folks... Surviving this pandemic is a privilege for those with money. The richer you are, the less chance you have of dying.

That's why the fine folks who care primarily about the stock market aren't concerned about safety for the general population. They know they're safe, and don't care about anyone else.

Of course it is. That's the hallmark of Moore's shockumentaries. Start with a handful of cherry-picked facts, skip all the in-depth analysis and nuance that might complicate the solution, and end with a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer question of "why aren't you making this better already?".

Of course the "establishment" folks will be angered by this "debate". It trivializes several complex fields of expertise, then decides that there's no better option than genocide.

It's still a configurable setting, as it has been. Just the default state has changed.

Uber's drivers aren't employees, and don't get any health care coverage... but Uber will happily connect them to service jobs where they can be exposed to more infection opportunities!

There's a point where a company stops being merely willfully ignorant of its workers' wellbeing, and starts actively causing harm. I think Uber's passed that point.

Never underestimate the extent of idiocy.

Or they could promise "jobs!" to the government and get permission to dump it all down the drain. That seems cheaper.

The problem is that a lot of the water is used in evaporative coolers, which vaporize a lot of water, as the name would suggest. That humid air then blows away, leaving local agriculture and municipalities with less water overall.

As for office heating, I doubt there's much need for that in Arizona.

I'm well aware of that... The problem is the prices are still fixed at rates far higher (150%-900% as I recall from my days working with medical billing data, but I don't have a source offhand) than other developed nations with fixed-rate healthcare.

Ah, not exactly... The Medicare rates are determined by computations based on price data from the medical industry (the AMA, according to your source).

The proposed alternative is to keep giving control to the even-bigger and even-more-powerful healthcare-for-profit industry, which has done a fine job of convincing Americans that they should do their own research, weigh options, and make careful choices before deciding which ambulance to call while having a heart attack.

Promoting the general welfare is precisely why the United States government was formed. It's right there in the Preamble to the Constitution. I don't see anything in there about providing bonus perks to hospital conglomerate executives, yet their private jets are now tax-deductible... That seems irrational to me.

The costs you mention are also symptoms, not causes. Medicare costs are astronomical precisely because American medical care costs several times more than equivalent care elsewhere in the world. That's not because American care is somehow better... it's because there's no effective regulation on prices for a service with very little effective competition.

As for the heights of doorknobs and the care of prisoners, those are actually our government doing the thing it's supposed to do: Improving the quality of life for its citizens, including allowing those in wheelchairs to access public buildings and allowing prisoners to have critical (but not life-essential) surgeries like joint replacement (which is still considered "elective").

One of the causes is that American politicians think America is special, but we're really not. We're not the biggest country in any term except raw GDP. We're not the largest, or most populous, or the wealthiest (Qatar or China, depending on definition). We don't have a natural monopoly on any major resources, we don't control any critical locations, and we don't actually have much for socioeconomic mobility. We no longer even have the most free speech, thanks to media consolidation and the chilling effects of certain legislation.

The policy lessons other countries have learned could apply perfectly well here, but we simply choose to ignore them, in favor of clinging to the dream of American exceptionalism.

The exceptionalism myth certainly predates Trump, but Trump is responsible (despite his comments to the contrary) for the decisions his administration has made. He chose to leave key leadership positions unfilled, leaving the nation vulnerable to disasters. He chose to grant tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy, at the expense of small businesses and individuals who need social services. He continues to choose to prioritize support based not on need, but by the amount of praise he's received.

Electing an overgrown child to the highest office in the nation is a symptom of a broken society, sure... but exacerbating our current cost of emergency response was directly caused by our current so-called leader.