Like Google needs help finding a large amount of data to train their AIs.

"We already have all of the data. And by that, we mean all of it, even the stuff you don't think we know about."

Here's one for you - not a paper, just the BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/57932699

The Wuhan labs were doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses, funded by the NIH (through a group called the EcoHealth Alliance). This was admitted, publicly, by the NIH in late 2021. No study needed, this is just a plain fact.

Note that the letter which showed up denying any such research was organized by the guy who ran EcoHealth Alliance, and almost all of the people who signed on were financially tied to the Wuhan lab - basically "this didn't happen because we'd be in trouble if it did").

Fauci denied this ever happened - which is just a plain old lie. Then he said that the gain-of-function research wasn't "really" gain-of-function research, which was also a lie.

It's when you splice new sequences into the DNA of something (a virus, in this case) to try and give it new features. It can be used for good things, but it can also be used for stupid and/or bad things.

The problem here is that COVID-19 seems to have been modified through gain-of-function (there's one particular sequence that is extremely unlikely to have mutated into existence on its own, and which is the major reason for the virulence of COVID-19 - this sequence is not found in ANY natural viruses). We know they were doing gain-of-function research there (the lead scientist was well-known for doing exactly that - with bat viruses - and the US government was funding it(!)). Add to this the known issues the lab has had (poor security, and they even had to rebuild their filtration system _after_ COVID-19 got out), and it's blindingly obvious that the most-probable cause is that they screwed up and let it loose.

There's one assistant at the lab who disappeared (and supposedly died) right about the time of the release - they claim she's still around, but nobody's seen her for years, and the lab took her photo off of the web site...

Paying taxes isn't (or shouldn't be) a punishment.

On the other hand, when big firms simply get fined for breaking laws, YES they do pass the costs on - which is why government punishments should have extra clauses, like "you can't do this thing any more," or "the division that did this is barred from government contracts for a while," along with "the person who decided to break the law gets charged with the crime gets prosecuted."

In extreme cases, you get "death penalties," like "AT&T is an abusive monopoly, so it gets broken up."

Leftists, who don't realize that companies like Amazon don't "pay" taxes - they collect it from us and pass it on.

When you hit huge corporations for another percent of tax, that just means the corporation increases prices by 1% - or more.

That's a terrible metric.

An hour or so reading Retraction Watch will tell you that "number of citations" isn't always that important, and in some cases, just means a bunch of third-rate people citing each other.

The important part is "how much of their research turns up in real-world output?"

I guess Marathon and Halo got it right...

...the large number of people who closed their accounts after the crap PayPal has done over the last few years.

Some of it was just purely dumb, like the "we can confiscate your funds if you piss us off" deal, and the various "we're not going to let this person do business through PayPal because we don't like their politics."

Not to mention, of course, the "we don't want to let you spend money on porn or guns" policies.

All they had to do was sit back, move some cash around, and take a few percent off the top. Oops.

Now, Elon Musk is making noises about starting up a new PayPal competitor that doesn't do all of those things...

It wasn't just Germany that was becalmed in those cases - it was the surrounding countries, too. A big part of central Europe. The other countries weren't as invested in wind and solar as Germany though, so Germany could use some of their feeds, and Germany still has some nice dirty coal plants to use as reserves.

A huge part of that was French nuclear power, too...

Surprise!

When the wind is down for extended periods, it's almost certain that the area is extensive, and the areas far outside of that area that do generate power can't make up for it unless you build the whole system to be several times larger.

Note, for example, Germany. Over the last few years, there have been periods (weeks at a time) where it was cloudy, snowy, and with almost no wind. Extended periods of zero renewables for the entire country (other than hydro).

The biggest one is that the materials used cost a fair amount of money, which is (apparently) offset by the potential of selling things like the oxygen byproduct of the reaction.

As Geoffrey notes above, they missed a worldwide cooling effect of EIGHT PERCENT, which is quite a lot for something that's been studied for the last few decades, in a field where they argue endlessly over something that changes the outcome by fractions of one percent...

Note that all of those decades of studies managed to completely miss their predictions, all of them on the high end of reality. Seems like they'd have been going "we're missing a ton of negative feedback here" thirty years or so back.

"Yeah, here's one more negative feedback we completely, absolutely failed to take into account when we built our theories."

Some analysts in the West say that China started dropping a while ago, and that their numbers were incorrect before. The overcount is also supposedly in their younger population, with millions fewer 20 to 30 year olds than the official count.

It's quite possible that China is only about 1.1 or 1.2 billion right now, and that official drop is the start of a much faster collapse in total population.

No, it won't.

Some lab in China is probably ramping up production, and they'll test it on various old people who aren't useful any more, because China is staring their demographic catastrophe in the face. They've got about ten years to deal with their aging population, and their options are "make them younger" or "make sure they stop aging the old-fashioned way."