Demosthenes @Demosthenes@qoto.org

@grips it's okay and good to fast outside of Lent. I'll be doing it soon myself I think

@luckystrike ankidroid, 100%.

@jeffhertzog@brighteon.social good

@sireebob@masto.nothing.rodeo I 100% agree with your comments on leadership. The CEO is a greedy sociopath, lol

@johndolph KN95s has never been considered good enough for America's standard. They've never claimed they were.

@HealthRanger but the flu shot doesn't increase your risk of COVID...

@ifixcoinops if there's some sort of panic disorder, she will need meds to break the cycle, full stop. Probably benzos. If it's anxiety, the biggest thing she can do is exposure therapy combined with cognitive behavioral therapy. The worst thing you can do is to avoid exposure to those normal things that cause anxiety.

@sireebob@masto.nothing.rodeo it can be really, really difficult to determine what to prioritize developing without user feedback. They weren't even going to have add-ons until a beta was pushed without them. It can also be difficult to justify maintaining an old codebase while at the same time making something of just the same complexity without expanding the development team(which they can't do right now because of financial reasons).

@sireebob@masto.nothing.rodeo they did an entire rewrite of the app to make future development easier, faster, and more stable. That's where this comes from.

@kota to expand a bit, unlike mammalian DNA which has billions of base pairs and are kind of brittle, viral RNA are only composed of a few thousand base pairs. Sections of that RNA doesn't actually do anything, meaning mutations in those areas don't actually cause issues so aren't selected against. A couple hundred base pairs out of only a few thousand can be modified without issue, which is a big chunk of the total.

@kota in viruses, 5% isn't big. Most viruses are RNA-based which are very prone to damage and mutation since you've only got one copy of data to work with. When combined with the fact that it likely mutated between a couple species, 5% isn't much.

@kota her claims are not valid. She says "The genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is "suspiciously" similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories." This makes sense since it evolved from a coronavirus.

She said "The receptor-binding motif within the Spike (S) S protein of SARS-CoV-2 resembles a SARS-CoV virus from the 2003 epidemic, in what the authors describe as a "suspicious manner"." This makes sense since it connects to the ACE receptor in the lungs. It would have a specific shape in order to bind with it, otherwise it wouldn't bind.

"SARS-CoV-2 contains a furin-cleavage site at its S protein which enhances viral infectivity. This cleavage site is absent in this class of coronaviruses that are found in nature. The authors state that this suggests "strong possibility that this furin-cleavage site is not the product of natural evolution and could have been inserted into the SARS-CoV-2 genome artificially by techniques other than serial passage or recombination events."" While this is technically possible, it could also arise from natural selection. Random mutations happen all the time, and a Wet Market like where they suspect COVID came from is 100% the best place to have naturally formed viruses evolve since there are so many animals in close proximity.

@sda my wife's a respiratory therapist that cares for COVID patients every week. This is 100% false. She tells me constantly about the crazy-high mortality rates of this disease and how incredibly difficult it is to care for.

@digital_carver I'm 100% saying might makes right. We see it in absolutely every country. In china, they can successfully suppress everyday people and minorities, but because they are investing in infrastructure globally, most nonwestern countries ignore it while praising China.

The only reason we are so against nationalism and racial discrimination is because we won WW2. Propaganda during and after the war has worked to completely suppress the mentalities that led to it.(that and nuclear weapons has made national expansion through wars too risky) If the Axis had won, the story would have been completely different.

@freemo my guess would be that the north pole of the magnet would point south.

@digital_carver things get really fuzzy and complicated when you define common terminology in the game of politics.
(Social) power is the capacity to influence the behavior of others. A government is merely a codification of the power structure of a group of people, generally to allow for the smooth transition of power. Politics is the study of power and government. Given these definitions, what is right and wrong in politics is determined only by the power that is able to be leveraged by other people. When you then mix it in with philosophy, it gets very blurry indeed. Nowadays, I just think of right in wrong politics as "power which is able to be leveraged" and see it more as a big game, but with real consequences.

@freemo I'm guessing south since polarity was probably defined from maps and historical scientists would have probably made it intuitive to understand.

@Toni "plandemic" crazy, lol

@jeffhertzog@brighteon.social if only it were a Dukes of Hazard car, lol

@Shufei@mastodon.sdf.org PGP isn't a Chinese-run social media company.