mistermack

If you ban eviction, you basically remove the option to rent for older people. If I had a house and was thinking of letting it, why would I accept a tenant aged over sixty, if I was just giving them licence to not pay the rent? I would rather take less rent off a younger applicant than rent to someone I can't evict if it all goes wrong. And morally, you are putting the burden of homelessness on people who have done nothing to deserve it. People are not stupid, they want some sort of security when they rent out a property, or they will simply not bother.

No. What the hell is smack miter? I asked, smiling "me cat smirk".

I don't think so. Most will slow very quickly, no matter how hard you throw it, because of the ratio of drag to kinetic energy. But if you use dense paper, and can reduce the drag to minimum, then you can throw it a long way. For example, if the paper was made of lead, you could throw it a lot further than if it was made of toilet tissue. Obviously that's taking it to the extreme to illustrate the point. Looking at the trajectory of the throw, it was more like a baseball throw trajectory than the traditional paper plane.

Agreed. This is more of a throw than a flight. They've got the drag down so that you can throw it a long way.

I can only suggest you get the doctor to review your pills.

They need to more than that, to get ME up in a max. But it's a start. Design something that wants to fly, not something that wants to crash.

I don't get this at all. It's filled me with wonder. Should I worship it?

Has anybody noticed that atheists is an anagram of 'eats shit' ? Certainly makes me think !

Well firstly, Omicron is irrelevant to the lab question, as it didn't exist then. Yes, it's about five times more infectious than Delta, and Delta was five times more infectious than the first virus. But even Omicron was only infecting about 20 to 50 percent of occupants in a family home. The first virus was only just infecting about 1.1 to 1.3 new hosts per person on average. And much of that was happening in high-risk places like packed discos, churches, airplanes and cruise liners. An infected human is going to produce a heck of a lot more virus than a live bat. And infinitely more than a dead bat. So the infectiousness of the first virus, in a modern laboratory, would have been very very low.

Non zero chance, of course. But I would say the chance is so close to zero as being negligible. The covid virus isn't very easy to transmit, even now that it's much more infectious than the original. Under lab conditions, I would say you're pretty close to zero. Even in my family, some in the same household got it, and others didn't. Maybe, if they were keeping live bats, you could get transmission that way. But that would be no different to the market trade. You wouldn't class that as a lab leak. I think the FBI are clearly trying to give the impression that it was a lab-created variant that escaped from a Frankenstein-like bio-engineering project. Not some natural virus that just happened to make the jump in or around a lab. If that was the case, it would be undeniable that the same virus had a much easier route available to it at the markets.

So you're saying that in that case the virus was a natural one, collected from wild bats for study? In that case, it would be ludicrous to suggest that it came from a lab, with all of the precautions they take, when people would be encountering it without any protection when collecting bats from the wild, or at the wet market, or in their kitchens. It would be millions of times more likely in that case, that it was the market and related activities that caused the first infection.

You need to define what the figures actually mean. I see various claims of percentage difference, for the same species. For example, I've seen claims that humans and chimps are genetically 98 % identical, and other claims of 99+ for the same thing.

Accidental leaks of what?

Of course. It damages the international reputation of China if they caused covid by developing harmful new virus variants. And also casts doubt on the quality of their science and technology. It might or might not be true, but it's exactly what I would expect the FBI to say, whichever is the case.

Actually, it's widely acknowledged that Dylan was heavily influenced by the style of Chuck Berry's Nadine. It's even on the song's wiki page : "According to Allmusic, the song had a "profound influence" on the songwriting of Bob Dylan: "One need only listen to 'Nadine (Is It You?)', released in February 1964, and then to the 1965 Dylan album Bringing It All Back Home, with its surreal story-songs, to hear the similarities."[3]nfluenc And this : The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business";[86] So Chuck was the daddy. Fred Astair or Jed Clampett for me.

Pretentious. (to me) 🙃 I rate Chuck Berry as America's greatest poet. Dylan could never have written Johnny B Goode, or Nadine.

Agreed. But the other key issue is who can you believe? Even if the FBI had clear information, I wouldn't trust what they announced. Is their number one priority the truth, or political gain? I would put very low value on what they said. All it tells you is what they would like you to believe. And I can work that one out for myself. They will obviously not state something that can be easily shot down by the press, so they carefully word the statement to give a desired impression, while being non committal. And likewise with the Chinese. Edit to add : Just a thought about the Chinese though. If the source WAS their laboratory, you would think that they would have known much earlier how dangerous the virus was, and would have reacted much faster, and closed down the area much more effectively. That seems to point to it NOT being lab-generated. It's a tragedy really that the Chinese didn't nip it in the bud, by an efficient enforced lockdown. The early variants of the virus responded well to total lockdown, because they weren't so infectious as later ones. Every new variant has been more infectious than the last, making lockdown pointless later. But right at the start, it could easily have been eliminated.

Yes of course. That was part of my point. That atheism is a combination of nature and nurture. And in fact, the nurture element itself isn't totally random and independent. It grows out of and is heavily influence by our genetic tendencies. If we didn't have those tendencies, then what we are taught would have evolved to be very different.

I find Dylan very pretentious, but then I find most poetry pretentious. I do like Dylan for the music, but the words I don't bother with. Same goes for Leonard Cohen, I like the music but the words I can leave. Although they do add a bit of general atmosphere. This is from my country's greatest poet. It's one of his best. Again, I'm not bothered about the words, just the music and atmosphere of the piece.

I mentioned that, with modern human/neanderthals as an example. But what I said does hold, in that if they don't regularly interbreed, and produce viable offspring, they are considered a separate species. The term viable offspring is the fuzzy, debateable part. It really means, produce a viable population of offspring. If two species can do that, then it's very debateabe whether they are separate species or not. If you take the example of the carrion crow, and the hooded crow, then as a general rule, there will be an area where it's all hoodies, and an area where it's all carrion crows, with a narrow border area between them. Around the border area, you will find hybrids, but away from the border, you get one, or the other. So you don't get a successful self-sustaining population of hybrids, so they are still considered separate species. The only substantial difference between them is the colour pattern, but that's enough so that a hoodie that migrates into the territory of carrion crows will not attract a mate, and vice versa, because they look out of place. But in the narrow border area, the birds get confused, because they are regularly encountering both colours, and they don't know which they are, so they don't know which to mate with. So you do get some hybridization, but not enough to form a self-sustaining population, so they still get classed as separate species. In the plant world you get a similar situation, but for different reasons. The Linden tree for example, in my area, has two common species, the broad leaf and the small leaf lime. They do readily hybridize, but even so, they tend to separate on a population level into areas where nearly all trees are one, or the other, and the hybrids don't form a self-sustaining population. I don't think it's known why that should be, probably something to do with the soil or small climate differences, enough to favour one over the other. So even though they readily hybridize, they still maintain separate populations. But like the crows, you do get areas where you will find both, and hybrids.

I can't be specific about a particular type of fungus, but "species" is the one classification that isn't arbitrary. At least, in organisms that reproduce sexually, species are separated by whether they can and do regularly interbreed and produce viable offspring. If they don't, they are considered different species. At least, that's the general principle, although there can be fuzziness and debate over whether two groups are different species or not. Classification of genus is a question of evolutionary history and that subject is constantly evolving with new discoveries in the field of genetics, so there is often debate about what genus an organism belongs to. In general, genera differ after an evolutionary split but that can get murky, because sometimes there is occasional interbreeding and mixing of genes after a split, so it's not black and white. We modern humans, for example, split from Neanderthals and were considered separate species, but later there was some interbreeding, so humans North of the Sahara carry some Neanderthal genes, and Sub-Saharan Africans don't.

Of course not. And how is "some genetics" not nature? It's obvious that genetics won't produce religion on their own, but with millions of humans telling stories, the susceptible part of our makeup means some will develop the stories into religion.

Embedded in that is a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature. It's not solely one thing, or the other. We have tendencies to both believe and to question and disbelieve. Humans have conflicting tendencies in most things, and sometimes one side wins out, sometimes the other. If you said "in human nature there is a tendency to believe" it would be true, but not the whole truth. Unless you added the tendency to question and disbelieve as well. There's a bit of nature in atheism, and there's also a bit of nature in religiosity. And nurture in both too.

But you can't apply it to a photon, because you can't divide a metre up into an infinite number of parts, and you can't divide a second up into an infinite number of fractions. You can think it, but you can't do it.

And I don't blame them. A lot of people work hard for long hours for the money they have. And would prefer to spend it on themselves and their families, which was the reason they did work hard for long hours. And of course, we all have the future of old age, when having some savings means you can pay people to do what you are no longer able to do. And often people like to help out kids and grand-kids. Taking tax money off people should be treated very seriously, because people spend their own money carefully, but others are inclined to chuck tax money about without a care in the world.