Oh yeah ? Well Trump had an uncle who was a professor at MIT, so I guess they’re even. /s

With Trump and the current GOP, the corruption is in plain sight anyway. At this stage, you could dig up a thousand more incriminating dossiers and it still wouldn’t move the needle for the MAGhats.

It’s a bit ridiculous to say the only obstacle between us and “monstrous behemoths created in labs” is some sports regulations ^^'. Luckily there are already laws that severely restrict what you’re allowed to do with genetic engineering, so don’t you worry.

But coming back to your “monstrous behemoths”, wouldn’t some basketball players for example already fall in that category ? How tall is too tall? When it’s about basketball, you could be 8 feet 1 (2.46 m for my metric brethren) and no-one would try to have you banned from the game, they would probably congratulate you on your lucky genetics instead. Similarly, I’ve never heard of any suggestion of, say, enforcing a minimum resting heart rate for endurance based sports.

Yet if you’re a woman and too muscular for some obscure regulatory body’s liking, you face the risk of being ostracized and banned from competing. The same genetic lottery winning ticket would in this case be considered an unfair advantage. This goes to show that unfairness is not rooted in any hard, undeniable, mesurable quantity, but is at its root a cultural phenomenon. Fairness is in the eye of the beholder, there can be no objective measure for it, -which is why I’m say it simply doesn’t truly exist in sports.

The people clamoring against the inclusion of biological outliers are operating under the false -and frankly poorly thought out- idea that sports are fair and that it’s only by training the hardest that you can and will achieve victory, shonen style.

Ultimately the only completely fair-ish competition is the one where you try to outdo your previous best performance and beat your own records. Otherwise, there are so many other variables you’d have to correct for to level the playing field (and testosterone levels is not a great pick for that anyway) that you might as well have single athlete categories.

And a C-level exec his golden parachute

Both Ground News and Media Bias are tuned to a very US-centric vision of what is left or right, which means that thanks to this right biased Overton window, anything they classify as left would probably be considered center in Europe. Unfortunately, said window is also slinding to the right in Europe under the influence of European right leaders calling anything left of center “far-left”, see for example : Macron.

This has to be a portrayal of the last supper devised as a clever scheme to upset Christians. I know this because at no other point in history have people ever been gathered around a table.

sigh

This dumbass has made enough career ending faux-pas and declarations as to disgrace a dozen or so Congresses worth of politicians, and yet here we are. The desensitization is complete, he can just flatly announce his intention of ending democracy in the middle of an incoherent tirade, and people will cheer.

It really helps understanding how past autocrats got into power.

Donald wants everyone to pay for their own defence yet will also charge the taxpayer extra for this own protection (while not paying taxes himself).

From the NYT : "Shortly after J.D. Vance’s selection was announced, his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, was pounded by a strong storm with hail the size of golf balls that cleared parks and splash pads as people fled for cover. "

When the fine is orders of magnitude less than the money you made breaking the law, it’s not deterrence, it’s just the cost of doing business.

What Macron has lately been calling “far-left” would have been considered middle of the road leftism only a couple years ago. Macron has pulled such a massive shift of the Overton window --what with calling himself a centrist when all of his policies are right-wing, and constantly calling anyone that’s left of him “far-left”-- that it’s no surprise right-wing extremism is totally normalized now. LFI is not far-left, and I wish the media would stop repeating and thus normalizing that idea.

I don’t disagree but it seems to me it’s going crescendo, with de facto monopolies running the show and buying anything that could be an obstacle, be it other companies or policymakers.

That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.

At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone’s pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It’s just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.

what a punchable face

The article you linked to is about suppressyn, an originally viral protein that’s been integrated in human DNA and is as far as I know only expressed in placenta. There suppressyn helps fight viral infections by competing with some families of viruses for the binding of a membrane receptor (ASCT2) that these viruses use as a way to recognize and attach themselves to target cells.

It seems NCLDV infects unicellular algae and protists, with at least some of the family members relying on phagocytosis by the host, and many of them displaying fibrils on their particles. And though the binding mechanisms probably differ between different viruses of the NCLDV family, I really doubt these host organisms express ASCT2.

Nope, I looked at DNA length, that’s what the kb or Mb in my previous post is about. Kb stands for kilobases, each base or nucleotide being one of those A, T, C and G that constitute DNA. Biologists mesure the size of a genome by counting these bases. Average size for a virus is around 10,000 bases or 10kb (sources say 7-20kb) and they don’t get much smaller than 3.5kb.

Nope, sorry. That’s not how immunity works.

Won’t you please think of the shareholders?

According to the paper this article is based on, the family of viruses they study, called NCLDV (for NucleoCytoplasmic Large DNA Viruses), are about 1 μm in diameter, which would indeed put them up there with the largest viruses like Pandoravirus or Pithovirus, which are also around the micrometer mark, and I believe are also part of the NCLDV phylum.

Those viruses are about the size of a bacterium. In fact they are so large that they weren’t immediately identified as viruses. Here’s something to give you a sense of the size of common viruses :

However, I don’t know how they come up with that 1500x factor (which doesn’t appear in the source paper), since in size, it’s more like 10x bigger than your average virus (~100nm). Even considering genome size, common viruses genomes are about 10 kb or so, wheras Pandoravirus is the biggest at 2.5Mb. So that would be closer to a 250x factor at best.

For reference, SARS-CoV2 (of COVID-19 fame) is about 100nm in diameter and has a genome size of 30kb.