This is a complete misconception. Although rare, some antibiotics can be effective antiparasitics, given that protozoa and bacteria share some cellular pathways. Metronidazole (Flagyl) and TMP-SMX (Bactrim) are great examples, the former by causing double-stranded DNA breaks, the latter by inhibiting folate synthesis which is needed for DNA replication.

Doxycycline is first-line for malaria prophylaxis but not as a monotherapy because it is only effective in the first cycle of Plasmodia infection. However, in this prophylactic role it is very effective, and used by hundreds of thousands of travellers every year. Calling it akin to paracetamol is gravely misinformed.

Source: I'm a third-year US allopathic medical student.

Taking a guess, if you are referring to the Mondragon Corporation, then you live in Spain.

Spain is a: Kingdom. Constitutional Monarchy, to be exact. Formerly a nationalist dictatorship. Not now or ever a socialist state.

I come from: Hungary. When I was born, it was the Socialist Federative Republic of Councils in Hungary. Socialist was literally in the title. It was very bad. Protesters murdered with tanks in the street, secret police torturers, endemic soul-rotting corruption bad.

Don't make up labels because of wishful thinking. Be glad you live in a social democracy.

You may call it a socialist country, but I'd bet a thousand dollars that your own state does not call itself that.

I come from a country that called itself a socialist country. It was in Eastern Europe and things didn't go well.

If your country does not put the word "Socialist" in its name, it is not a socialist country. It may be a social democratic country, but that's very, very different. This is like a reverse No True Scotsman fallacy.

The idea that willpower is a finite resource is called the ego depletion effect, and several very large scale studies in the 2010s failed to reproduce it. (Wikipedia has a decent summary.) Everything else you said may be true, but I wouldn't rely on that idea as a proven fact. It may have just been one of the overly optimistic p-hacked results that triggered the whole reproducibility crisis in psychology and beyond.

So did Roald Dahl; in fact he wrote the most prescient such story. The Great Automatic Grammatizator (1954).

https://d-a-v-e.org/wp/wp-cont...

You should check out Firefox Multi-Account Containers and reduce your headache 30x.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

The Russian military's atrocities are not due to lack of discipline. They operate that way by design, to sow fear. They always have.

During World War II, Russian conscripts were more afraid of their superiors than the Wehrmacht - trying to desert was certain death, trying to fight the Germans you at least had a chance. There was discipline all right. But they still raped, murdered, and looted their way across Eastern Europe. The Russian high command never imposed their iron discipline to crack down on it. In fact, they led by example.

No, the Russian high command actively condones atrocities. They have for centuries. Brutality is inherent to Russia.

I worked and lived for 11 years in California and I intend to retire there one day. California is a success because of its incredible climate and geography, which over the last 100 years have created an incredible concentration of brains and capital and business. Successful, high-achieving people in every single field will always want to move there because of its climate. There is no state in the union that comes close to its year-round, mild, non-humid sunshine with no hurricanes or tornadoes. It is a success because of its climate, not because of its pro-business policies. Look, it's my favorite state, and I'm glad it uses the revenue to fund social programs. But let's not pretend political acumen is what got it where it is today.

You're right, but just to point out a minor correction that doesn't detract from your argument: they already pay their employees in cash only. Employees can choose to spend some of their earnings on discounted Netflix stock, and most do. So if their stock keeps growing, it will affect their employees, but it's a little different than most other tech companies.

And you're putting yourself at risk for ischemic stroke... There's a reason you were on the blood thinners, which is that a stroke is worse than a nose bleed.

I owned one of these! It was an awesome technical achievement, which I used for the first few weeks I had the phone, and then never again. Just like pretty much everything 3D in the consumer world has been a gimmick.

You have half the picture. It was basic scientists, most importantly Norman Burlaug, "Father of the Green Revolution", that developed the high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat that more than doubled and tripled agricultural production in Mexico, Pakistan, and India, allowing Mexico to become a net wheat exporter in 1963 and allowing Pakistan and India to avoid starvation. He literally saved billions of people from death via starvation and resource wars.

The reason Monsanto is hated is because the only thing they did was to commercialize these seeds by making them incapable of reproduction, thus allowing them to continue reaping profits off them year after year. This actively limits the seeds' usefulness for the sole reason of transferring wealth from poorer countries to richer countries.

It's the old, old story. Government funds basic research, taking on 99% of the risk and effort, for 1% reward. Private companies spin off the technology and commercialize it for 1% of the effort and 99% of the profits. Governments only tolerate it because it does after all make money for their respective economies, but this is why Big Agro and Big Pharma are so hated. Today it's playing out with Astra-Zeneca and Oxford.

If you want to remember a name, remember Norman Borlaug. He is the most deserving winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in the award's history. Read science fiction from the 1950s and see how much people worried that food insecurity would destroy the world. Without him our history would be utterly different and infinitely more miserable.

That's ass-backward. It was unions that historically forced governments to adopt those worker-protection laws in the first place.

I think you have an overly rosy view of how perfect human systems are. I'm an actual biomedical researcher and while I have not worked in a Level 4 facility, I can testify that animals never read textbooks and handling them can be unpredictable, and also that humans make mistakes and don't always play by the book.

But no need to hypothesize - a lab leak from the National Institute of Virology in Beijing already caused a SARS-like coronavirus outbreak in 2004 which killed one person.
https://www.cdc.gov/sars/media...

The researcher who got contaminated wasn't even working with SARS coronaviruses and we never found out how he got infected. Yet he went home, his mother caught it, and she died.

There were also leaks in 2003 in Singapore and in Taiwan:
https://www.who.int/csr/don/20...
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/new...

Here is a good article outlining why we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the lab leak hypothesis. Which, to be clear, is not the same as the engineered virus hypothesis, which is much less likely.
https://www.usatoday.com/in-de...

The PRC put a lot of pressure and restrictions on this WHO investigative team - I would put very little faith in the report. We'll probably never know. But they have not found any intermediate virus in dogs. In other words, they have not proposed a shred of evidence for their alternative hypothesis to the simplest credible alternative by Occam's razor - the lab leak.

So what? It spreads very easily by air - all it would have taken would have been one safety violation, just a lab worker accidentally inhaling air in the same space as a bat infected with it. Given how unpredictable animal handling is at the best of times that's more "when", than "if".

To my mind, given that the closest relative of this virus in the wild lived in bats in a mineshaft 800km away, the Wuhan institute collected those bats for study, and the earliest community cases were in Wuhan, Occam's razor points to a lab leak as the likeliest explanation. Any other explanation has to explain how the 800km jump happened *without* the Wuhan Institute of Virology.