Do you have a source on this $7B a year profit figure? I've tried to find it and can't find anything even close to $7B revenue let alone profit going back to 1994.
Loot boxes/gacha games are the modern day cigarettes. Harmful, addictive, marketed to minors and very lucrative. Rest of the world needs to catch up to Belgium and Netherlands in banning these.
The profits being made from loot boxes targetting children are staggering and there are powerful well funded lobbyists working to keep it that way. For some context, FIFA the football governing made $766 million in 2021, EA FIFA Ultimate team (an egrerious example of loot box monetization) brought in $1.6b in 2021. Child gambling is very lucrative.
You've made a bit of a jump here by implying that all of that revenue is from children. It's definitely not scientific but a strawpoll [0] of FIFA's playerbase a few years ago shows its primary demographic is 16-25. It's reasonable to assume they're the majority of spenders in the game too.
I don't know the breakdown inside that category, but yes I am aware. It also likely includes far more adults than children. My point is that it's not a bunch of under 14 year olds playing the game, it's really much closer to 20 year olds than 15 year olds.
unless they've changed their policy on this you can email support and say you don't have a phone number and they'll re-active your account, has worked for me in the past.
100% and in many cases communities like HN are worse than sites like twitter because it has upvotes and downvotes which effectively drowns out and silences marginalized voices. You can't downvote or flag a twitter post preventing others from reading it.
I mention flagging because users here regularly flag opinions they strongly disagree with in mass as a way of removing them from discussions to great effect.
HN culture is arrogant and overly pragmatic which is especially egregious when dealing with nuanced topics. At least on twitter you can find takes from different viewpoints of a topic, not the monoculture hivemind created by social sites with upvotes and downvotes.
What might be a better mechanism to bring the best content forward, which doesn't suffer from this issue? Would you just advocate against downvoting in general, or is there something else you have in mind?
Traditional forums (such as phpBB) where posting "bumps" a thread are better in some regards. "Bumping" a thread at least requires you make more effort than clicking a button, posts inside a thread are unranked, and they encourage more in-depth discussion since threads can be long-lived.
RSS is great once you find interesting content but it doesn't help much in finding new content.
Otherwise... if you browse ranked boards such as HN/Reddit/etc., for topics such as politics (anything without a demonstrable answer, really), its also worth looking at both the stream of new comments, as well as the worst-rated comments. Most often the worst-rated comments are often just dumb spam or someone who makes no logical sense, but if someone tries to make a point and still gets massively downvoted for it (as opposed to just ignored), he may be striking on something.
The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill.
On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
There were tons of articles and threads on it everywhere including HN, no one was being silenced, give me a break. The oppression complex is really out of control, as if people were being visited by the secret police and forced to immediately cease all discussion about the lab leak theory. It just had no credibility due to lack of evidence. As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.
Really seems many want to feel like they've been oppressed and silenced when that couldn't be further from reality, reaching absurd levels of delusion here.
Citation needed. Please direct me to any user or accounts banned or suspended for discussing the lab leak theory. You're the one rewriting history here.
Zero references of any users suspended or banned in your linked source.
Posts were removed for 'Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made' which is very different from discussing the possibility and calling for further investigation.
> Facebook in February began the ban on claims the virus was man-made or manufactured as part of a list of misleading health claims that aren’t allowed.
During that period with the widespread dangerous misinformation spreading all over socials (questioning mask usage, recommending false treatments etc) it's easy to see how this was caught by that web.
Still waiting for a citation of your claims of 'censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year.' or users being suspended for discussing it, not asserting it, which are very different.
> There were tons of articles and threads on [the lab leak theory] everywhere including HN
Until relatively recently lab leak discussion was censored from Twitter and Facebook. I didn't see much of it in the period Feb 2020 - May 2021.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture
There was no brilliant evidence for any source of the coronavirus. Regardless of that, the idea of a lab leak was quickly ruled out and that was unjustified.
I think the problem for the media was that a controversial American president publicly endorsed the lab leak theory, as it supported his broader agenda, and that made people in the media prefer to disbelieve it, even to wrongly suggest that it was not credible. In short: bias.
I came across this article on Twitter about the lab leak hypothesis back in September 2020. The scientist in the article also was actively tweeting about the theory, she was definitely not being censored.
The rational thing was to agree the lab leak was a perfectly decent theory from the beginning.
Saying you have ‘no evidence’ of something is not a reason to discard a hypothesis. On the contrary, it is a reason to figure out how to get more data, a reason to figure out how to falsify the hypothesis.
It’s a common logical fallacy to conflate absence of evidence with evidence of absence.
When there is no evidence, the discussion is purely in the sphere of priors. And that doesn't make it very fruitful to discuss, as different people will likely have different priors. I think I agree that the likelihood of lab-leak was downweighted previously probably too strongly, but in the same time, I still don't see too much evidence in favor of it now.
The point I was trying to make is that the idea of it naturally occurring was mainstream. If you tried to guess it might have come from the lab, it'd be just dismissed completely. However, both of these claims had no evidence, so why was just one claim labeled as a conspiracy theory and dismissed entirely by the mainstream media?
Do you disagree? Do you think it might have been political?
Historically, and happy to be proven wrong here, we've never seen a lab-leak of a novel virus cause a widespread outbreak. We have seen zoonotic transmission cause an epidemic/pandemic. So at least for me, I was working off of, "Is it likely that we're seeing something for the first time? Or is it likely this happened the way it's happened before?"
Depends on your definition of widespread. There have been level-4 leaks multiple times in the past. England had an outbreak from a level 4 lab in the past 20 years:
What were the arguments that support the hypothesis of it being a natural occurrence? That there was a seafood market nearby? Ok. There was also a lab nearby that did experiments with corona-viruses. Which theory is more likely? I don't know, do you? My question is: why is one theory more likely than another? Why was the lab leak theory completely rejected and people who played with it were called nuts?
The argument that supported natural occurrence was to point to past global pandemics as having been of natural origin. Laboratory research of viruses is a relatively new thing, while pandemics have been happening for a very long time throughout the history of civilization. So in the case where no other evidence is readily available, I'm going to go with natural origin just because that's been the most likely origin historically for pandemics.
No, the a argument in favour of the natural origin of SARS-COV-2 is that it's a novel virus. There are a lot more unknown viruses outside in nature than there are people working on making new ones.
Also, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is not exactly "nearby" the seafood market. It's 25 km away, well across the city and on its outskirts.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.
Virtually none of the evidence being discussed here, aside from 3 workers at the lab getting sick in November, is new. Its all the same info that has been available for well over a year. And much of it not coming from "misinfo merchants".
> Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence.
This cuts both ways. There have been many who haven't been saying that the lab-leak is definitively the source of the virus, but simply saying that its a credible possibility with at least as much evidence as any other theory, and should therefore be investigated. Throughout the last year, it was pretty consistently called a conspiracy theory or "debunked", when clearly it was neither. Declaring something to be misinformation when it is not, isn't any more skeptical that declaring something to be the truth with no evidence.
You can try and poo-poo all you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the mainstream narrative, both on social media and in the mainstream media, has been wildly off about this for over a year, and virtually nothing has changed from an evidence perspective to warrant their about face. The general narrative was simply wrong, due to a combination of hubris, partisanship, and lack of skepticism.
Regardless of which hypothesis turns out to be true, there are fouls in either direction. Certainly overblown claims of both silencing and misinformation peddling.
The "human story," conflicts of interests and such, gets most of the attention... unfortunately. Some of those interests were/are personal. The most onerous interests seem to be narrative. One narrative or the other suits a grander political narrative, for a variety of reasons. That kind of stuff sucks us in, unfortunately.
There can be a fine line between skepticism and orthodoxy though. Skepticism defaults to ambiguity. I'm sure that ambiguity is the majority position, but "I don't know" isn't a position that gets much journalistic and political attention.
Media, both new and traditional, gravitates towards hard positions... poop slinging and human conflict stories.
The media also insisted masks were useless for the general public. The media demonstrated a real inability to critically evaluate the statements authority figures feed to them over the past year.
You can attribute that to being unprofessional. Which is not great, but not terrible.
What is absolutely terrible is for the media and big tech to ACT like they are the absolute authority in any field they have interest in. We're heading towards "ministry of truth" levels of censorship.
> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.
As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.
On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.
Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.
Not to mention, the "origin of COVID" fails my test of relevance.
If it came from a lab, does anything change? No, not really. It's still a virus that we need to protect against.
The only thing that would change any sort of response is if COVID was deliberately released. And that doesn't even change the medical side of the response, just the political side.
> HN has really gone downhill.
Yes, it has, but mentioning the reason for that will bring the brigade of the very same element that has made it go downhill.
It’s not surprising. The lab leak hypothesis was one of several obvious and logical hypotheses, but it’s the only one that we were consistently told was Dangerous and Disallowed Thought.
Even if it turns out to be a false hypothesis, it’s outrageous that it was treated the way it was for so long, with such vitriol, and with such unanimity before any real investigation had been done.
I’ve got no dog in this fight, but the way this hypothesis was treated gets my libertarian hackles up.
Don't be silly. Obviously the bans were not perfectly enforced and you could still find hushed conversations in the corners. This was true on all platforms. What, exactly, is your argument? Or your point? Are you really going to try to claim that the lab leak hypothesis was not widely censored in social media? "We have always been at war with Eastasia"...
> As more info comes to light it's being given more credence, simple as that.
The thing is, no new info supporting the lab-leak theory has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been. All the evidence still points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology not having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic, and all the new evidence is consistent with the default prior - that SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals, just like every other novel virus in history.
No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor.
If you read the Nicholas Wade article, the PLOS blog, or even this article, you will know the evidence is not pointing in any one direction at the moment, but there is solid evidence of a cover-up and blame shifting by the Chinese government and the virology / national defense establishment.
> No new evidence for natural origin has come to light. It remains pure speculation, just as it always has been, and you are making an isolated demand for rigor.
This is an absurd equivalence. Viruses spill over from nature all the time. There are millions of people coming into contact every day with animal populations that harbor myriad SARS-related coronaviruses. Every known novel virus that has entered the human population has done so through spillover. This is the default hypothesis, which must be overwhelmingly favored at the outset of any discussion. Everything we know so far is perfectly consistent with this default assumption, and there is precisely zero evidence of a lab leak.
> If you read the Nicholas Wade article
I've read it, and it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about is getting so much circulation.
> there is solid evidence of a cover-up
There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak. Everything we know so far points to the lab not even having had SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic. It appears to be a completely novel virus, not closely related to anything else known before, which is precisely what you'd expect for a novel virus that spilled over from an unknown animal population. If there were a major outbreak of a virus that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had (such as WIV-1), that would be a different matter, but there isn't.
Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once.
> it is appalling that an article by someone who does not understand the subject they are writing about
In that case, a point by point rebuttal should be written by people who do know what they are writing about. The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
> There is no evidence at all of a cover-up of a lab leak.
I did not refer to a cover-up of a lab leak. I referred to a cover-up of something, which may be a lab leak. There is certainly no denying that there is a cover-up:
1. WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019, and their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
2. China has mandated that all papers concerning Covid-19 be approved by the government before publication since Feb 2020.
3. Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
4. Statements made by the Shi lab are mutually inconsistent in their details.
5. The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
All these are detailed in the Vanity Fair article which started this comment chain. Thanks for revealing that you didn't read it.
> Right. And so too do viruses not uncommonly spill over from labs into the public. SARS1 escaped the lab four times. Pandemic flu is thought to have escaped once.
No novel virus has ever spilled over from a lab. Every novel virus in history has been a zoonosis.
The only lab escapes were of existing, highly infectious viruses that were being intensively studied, cultured in large quantities, etc. Such escapes are rare, and there are very good systems in place to detect them. The Wuhan Institute of Virology regularly tests its workers for antibodies against various viruses (including coronaviruses), and the workers are negative for SARS-CoV-2. The pandemic flu you're talking about was likely the result of a large-scale vaccine study, not a lab leak.
There is no sign that anyone knew of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, much less that any lab was working with it. There is, on the contrary, good evidence that it was not known about. The WIV never published the genome of SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak, in contrast to other related coronaviruses (for example RaTG13 was published in 2016, and the WIV has never even isolated it - it exists purely as RNA fragments and data on a hard drive). The set of coronaviruses that the WIV works with are publicly known, and SARS-CoV-2 is not among those worked with pre-2020.
> The ad hominem isn't really persuasive.
If a person who clearly does not know anything about programming writes a long screed about programming, filled with basic errors that illustrate that the person does not understand basic programming concepts, it's not ad hominem to point out that the person doesn't know anything about programming. The question is why the media is hyping an article by someone who doesn't understand basic virology.
> WIV removed their virus database from the web on Sept 19, 2019
This part of the conspiracy theory requires the WIV to have known about a lab leak in September 2019. That really is stretching any sort of plausibility. This database was only online for a few months in the first place, and they say that they took it down because it was insecure. The alternative explanation that the conspiracy theorists are pushing - that the WIV knew about a lab leak months before anyone in China showed any sign whatsoever of reacting to the outbreak - is just not plausible.
> their staff/student bios from the web in late Jan 2020.
I don't know what bios you're talking about. However, there was a conspiracy theory about a postdoc who left the lab in 2015, whose picture was "missing" from the website. Based on this, internet conspiracy theorists jumped to the conclusion that she was patient zero, that she had been secretly cremated, and all sorts of other nonsense. The obvious explanation is that she left the lab years ago, and that for whatever reason, nobody has bothered to put her picture up on the website.
> Access of investigators to the WIV has been blocked. Free staff interviews with foreign investogators have not been permitted.
This is false. The WHO team was given full access to the lab, and interviewed many of the staff. They got detailed information about all the coronavirus research at the lab.
> The US gain of function establishment has pre-emptively sought to associate any talk of lab leaks with social stigma and conspiracy theories.
I don't know what the "gain of function establishment" is. Virologists generally view the lab leak as extremely unlikely and completely unsupported by evidence. Some virologists do what might be characterized as "gain-of-function" research. Does that make them the "gain of function establishment"? There isn't some big conspiracy to shut down truth-tellers. There are experts who are annoyed that an extremely unlikely theory that is unsupported by any evidence is being hyped by non-experts who don't know what they're talking about.
A large contingent of modern sports journalists are predatory in that they aim primarily to get an out of context outrage-bait quote or soundbyte to drive engagement with no concern whatsoever for resulting fallout or hate directed towards the competitors.
Applaud Osaka for this move and hope it opens a dialogue about the relationship between media and competitors and the harms of gotcha journalism to drive engaging headlines as it relates to mental health, especially for younger competitors.
Studying income inequality in the US by gender and age group while completely ignoring race feels wrong when it's such an impactful variable, especially considering it's getting worse over time.
In 2016, the median net worth of non-Hispanic White households was $143,600. The median net worth of Black households was $12,920. Between 1983 and 2013, White households saw their wealth increased by 14%. But during the same period, Black household wealth declined 75%. Median Hispanic household wealth declined 50%.
Focusing on race income inequality perpetuates the division of society by race.
There are wealthy families and poor families of every race. Focusing on race as the reason for income disparity is detrimental to the success of the whole. When race is marked as the reason for income inequality we get programs targeted at a specific race. It encourages building "institutional racism".
In regards to the Federal Reserve page, it seems disingenuous to lump so many different people into “Other.” Even if there’s no mal-intent, it seems it could cause one to wonder if there’s a motive behind doing so.
Users getting so offended by this comment are hilarious. He didn't create this system, if you were in a similar position tasked to get attention for a client or business you could take the high road of not using proven social media tactics and fail miserably. The sanctimonious take that he's a 'manipulative asshole' for playing the system is laughable. Don't hate the player hate the game.
It has really demystified a lot of whats going on, for me, especially on LinkedIn.
It was probably 4 years ago when our publicist first told us about double spaced motivational nonsense going viral consistently. We were amused, bemused really, because we didn't care for it but were fine with the low effort involved.
Now with the aforementioned tactic, LinkedIn does consistently surface "[First] <Race> [Female] <Accomplishment>" posts, and I like to look at the source article to see if it was actually published that way, because if it wasn't I have a good chuckle because I know exactly what's going on. The people in the comments only react.
>I would honestly rather my business fail than participate in that sort of manipulation. "Unethical" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Ethics become a bit more complex when you are employing people. Would you rather your business fail, so that all the people working for you become unemployed overnight, despite a lot of them having their livelihoods depend on that?
To be clear, I don't think that "i have people working for me, whose livelihoods depend on my business surviving" is a great excuse for all kinds of immoral behavior, but it definitely adds to the nuance. And given what specific scenario we are dealing with here, I don't think it is as clear-cut as you try to make it seem.
It's still a wild west where people cling to sensationalism. I think the consequence is people grow up in it and form a tolerance. I know I have, I just assume an article's worth is inversely proportional to its controversy.
> One could argue that a story that makes it to the front page today is much higher quality
This assumes that quality of content is the driving factor in success on Hn or any social network which isn't the case. Timing, attention grabbing title and an engaging subject are arguably more important.
Do you have a source on this $7B a year profit figure? I've tried to find it and can't find anything even close to $7B revenue let alone profit going back to 1994.