Yeah. And then there will be only three things we do better than anyone else.

Music.
Movies.
High-speed pizza delivery.

The report said "COVID-19-like symptoms could have been caused by other respiratory infections".

And so we're merely in a place where we don't know, we just know that these guys came back with symptoms that could have been lots of things and it was pre-outbreak so, of course!, they didn't test for it.

The only notable thing about the report at all is that it wasn't released until just recently.

I do wish we got more into what the specific symptoms were... that way we could differentiate between something that causes lack of taste for a while versus, say, the common cold.

More Market Fundamentalism vs. Well You Have To Understand:

Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan's governor) gave a speech saying "look, I like tariffs too, but this is just nuts!" and Jared Polis (Colorado's governor) responded by saying that nobody should like tariffs because tariffs are bad for everybody (and adds a note about how sanctions can be cool, though).

In related news, China has filed a complaint with the WTO.

I'm not the one who introduced the term "cold" to the conversation.

You remember that, right?

Ah, I remember the "Covid is just a bad cold" argument. It's always nice to see it again.

As for whether the report is "important", well, that's not a term we've seen defined quite yet. I might use the term "evidence that covid was at the games in question" but, if pressed, I'd have to admit that it was not proof.

Eh, in my mind, there is not definitive proof either way.

But nor was there when one of the options was prevented from being talked about.

"As good as the median programmer" is still pretty darn good.

I'm guessing (since I can't get through the paywall) that they're talking about further analysis of the same data discussed in this BBC report.

And, yeah. I gotta admit: That's pretty good evidence.

That said, I don't see it as sufficient to squash discussions of alternatives. Nor would I have in 2021.

So maybe this report wasn't required to be released to the public.

I can see why it wasn't, then.

Being a nothingburger.

We have plenty of evidence. What we don't have is a smoking gun piece of evidence or "proof".

You can usually see that with the dance where someone asks for evidence and then, when it's provided, they say "that's not conclusive!" or "that's not *PROOF*!"

He saw a really funny and insightful meme and wanted to share it.

I was hoping it was the Trump as Voldemort image where Voldemort has bad hair and is yelling "MAKE HOGWARTS GREAT AGAIN!" but Trump as Kim Jong Orange is good too.

With memes that good, you don't even need an argument.

They were required by law to release the report in 2022. The report, for some reason, was not released until this year.

"Did they try?"

Perhaps they were inept. Perhaps they forgot. Perhaps the person who was supposed to do it was a Trumpist who refused to get the shot and then died of Covid.

"Have you ever seen a report like this before for any sort of event?"

No, I have not. Perhaps those other reports were supposed to have been released but weren't for one reason or another.

I have not made any assumptions about the report, just the whole "this was supposed to have been released but wasn't" assumption.

I don't have a conclusion yet, but I am looking forward for the day that new evidence comes out that doesn't inspire "you're just looking for evidence that confirms your biases!" defenses.

Maybe an intelligence agency will come out and say "our intelligence indicated the marketplace but our report was squashed".

Then you can see who points out that intelligence agencies are not scientific agencies.

Yeah, it makes sense that the government would try to keep this hidden, given all of the people looking for evidence of a conspiracy.

One minor rule that Hollow Knight seems to be bending is the boss fight. You should have to hit a boss three times. Maybe the vulnerability point is hidden behind an unbreakable shield for 20 seconds and so you have to dodge for a bit... but then the shield gets lowered, you hit the point, the boss yells. If you don't want to do it like that, GIVE A HEALTH BAR.

I find myself asking "HOW MANY HIT POINTS DOES THIS GUY HAVE?!?" every time I fight one of the bosses and he keeps not freakin' dying.

If you don't like the article, don't read the article. It is no skin off of my nose.

Just read the Report. There's a link to that too.

Huh, the Free Beacon got their hands on the 2022 report that says that seven U.S. servicemembers contracted COVID-19-like symptoms in Wuhan in October 2019.

They've got a link to the report itself.

This seems to be evidence that the virus was circulating prior to December 2019. Huh.

I'd like to point out that music and movies have really fallen off in the last decade or so.

AI is surprisingly good at microcode and it hasn't shown indications that it's stopped getting better at it.

Pizza technology advancements have slowed (but not stopped). The small-batch artisanal stuff is surprisingly good while, at the same time, Costco's $9.99 16" Pepperoni pie's only rival in value is the $1.50 hot dog.

“When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

Most of the tariffs are unpopular. The ones for my industry have a lot of local support.

It's those other ones that we don't need.

Oh, yeah. Fracking. Yeah, you'd think that more people would give her credit on that.

I don't remember her walking back from her 2020 positions. I *DO* remember her defenders arguing "she didn't run on that!" instead of "she reversed herself!"

I don't think that the language is how we got Trump as much as I think that the failure to compromise on stuff is how we got him.

I also think that there was quite a cultural backlash against the Mostly Peaceful Summer and covid-lockdowns continuing into 2022... and that's without getting into the immigration debacle and the crime numbers (that ended up actually going up instead of down after all of the smoke cleared).

Biden was the compromise. And Harris said that she wouldn't have changed anything.

I'd say that Biden was a *GREAT* compromise candidate!

The problem is that he didn't govern as one. Whether you want to get into whether that was Biden's doing or whether it happened without his knowledge, that's fine.

But Biden was voted for enthusiastically and then... well, you remember 2024 as well as I do.

As for Harris, when asked what she would have done differently, she said nothing. She said it on The View! She said it during a softball interview to a non-wonky audience!

And that's without getting into the stuff that they were able to run ads on without Harris even addressing forcing her most ardent defenders to say stuff like "but she didn't *RUN* on that!"

And so you're stuck with the Harris attacks being "here's what she said on camera" which, as attacks go, are among the most vicious.

Why doesn't the left get more credit for running Harris and having Liz Cheney up on stage with her?

Yeah, you'd think that they would.

Oh, I wouldn't suggest that DeSantis is a compromise candidate.

I would, however, suggest that he is not as bad as Trump.

I would not, for example, call DeSantis "God's Punishment".

As for what I might expect from others, I's expect fewer to compare DeSantis to Hitler or compare DeSantis supporters to Nazis.

Or maybe that's just where we are now. Anybody who disagrees with me is Ontologically Evil.

It might explain how we got Trump, now that I think about it.

I don't think that those same voters will talk about wringing out the rot. If I thought that even one out of twenty of them knew who von Mises was, I'd feel better about things.

But there's the "what those same voters think" and there's the "what I think" and there isn't a whole lot of overlap there.

There are a handful of goals that overlap, though. That's probably incidental.

Well, this goes back to the whole NAFTA thing. Was NAFTA supposed to make their lives better?

They don't seem to agree that their lives are better.

Maybe you could point out the GDP again. Point out how much better off you are.