Question: if the news reports something you don't like, is it fake?

Sure.

Face saving in China is a cultural institution (not that it doesn't happen in the US and elsewhere). Ascribing that to an intentional act of war is a stretch. Coverups are virtually all motivated by CYA by their very nature.

China is handily winning the economic war without taking the tactic you suggest, and if we are unable to shake the current regime and it's scions, will mop the floor with us.

The reason I am so testy about this conspiracy is that it focuses all attention off the conspiracy that Grump did by dismantling the institutions that were built to protect us from such an outbreak, and then bungle the reaction to it actually happening.

Again: let's say China comes out tomorrow and says: "Sorry, we fucked up. Our researchers got sloppy and lied to us. We're sorry"

What does that do to either protect us from future events (which can be from out of the wild)? Other than the satisfaction of "I told you so", what do we get from that?

RFK Jr is running the show, and must appease his boss and his whims. They'd likely take that confession and use it as a parade and patting themselves on the back while they continue to destroy the science and institutions that are there to prevent future pandemics.

Real Soon Now™

Edit: The project is intended to be for Azure cold storage, so it's not directly consumer facing.

Considering that Azure has more marketshare than GCP we should not dismiss them lightly.

The fact that this is the case still kind of blows my mind. Azure? By those Windows guys? C'mon! Really?

I absolutely agree that government coverups are absolutely unacceptable.

I state my conclusion as "it seems to be this way" whereas I read you as saying "no, it was this, case closed".

Intent matters. In the courtroom and out of it. My frustration is that (from my perspective) the intent behind the lab leak theory is to turn it into a government plot against the people (and yes, those can happen), and that the whole affair of dealing with Covid was a nefarious plot to harm the population and importantly to force vaccines upon the masses.

As the purported incident happened in China, there will likely never be any admission or redress. And the torches and pitchforks will continue coming for vaccine research. And I have every right to be less than happy about that.

This does a good job of painting that picture: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/933

But this also returns to the "so what" path. The conspiracy paints GOF as "evil government doing bad things" (which is not unreasonable conjecture in many contexts), but the work is primarily intended for defensive measures:

https://asm.org/getmedia/ef3e09db-a3c3-4eff-8e73-5d7edbcabb4...

Search Google for this: "did the us outsource GOF research into sars to wuhan labs in china"

I found the answer to be reasonable and credible. Again, governments lie but so do conspiracy theories.

To make this more HN aligned I'll share a story:

I was introduced to Chuck Peddle at a wedding not long after the turn of the century. I first learned assembly language on the 6502 so I knew who he was and was thrilled to meet him and hear his stories. At that point in time he was working on some hardware startup in Malaysia (IIRC), and was a seasoned world traveller.

The last part of our conversation was his observation through his travels that due to the nature of overcrowded cities in third world countries and the advent of air travel where people could disperse rapidly to anywhere else in the world, he shared a fear that a deadly outbreak would eventually happen and would travel the world in days, with horrifying consequences.

That came to mind when Covid happened.

Lastly, I'm not at all fond of these types of conspiracies because they spread like a virus and their value is primarily in giving people the feeling that they know what's going on and they know better than everyone else -- and it becomes such a part of their identity that trying to debunk that conspiracy is only perceived as a personal attack -- there's no room for reason.

All of this "the truth is out there" while we have real conspiracies happening in broad daylight and people just shrug like "oh, that just happens, whatever". I'm referring to the current US presidential administration.

What makes you think he hasn't? Does he demonstrate that he believes that nobody is above the law? I think you know the answer to that.

But what is never discussed in the Lab Leak pursuit is: so what? I mean, yes, poor biosecurity and containment should be called out and not covered up, but the real value is in being the foundation of a conspiracy. "The government conspired to make you sick!".

Think about this: covid has mutated consistently since it's been tracked. Were those mutations coming from a lab or was it viruses doing virus things. Was Ebola made in a lab or did it come from a place we know viruses come from.

Was the Spanish Flu a Chinese plot? Was AIDS?

The handling of the outbreak was clearly bungled, but let's remember who was in charge in the US when it happened. The guy who shut down research and tracking teams because Obama had funded them (So had Bush -- until then, this kind of stuff was non-political and taken seriously as a non-partisan issue).

The failure for masking was again, on the then POTUS, and it's been conjectured by many (including myself) that he was against masks because it would mess up his makeup.

Yes, it could have been handled so much better, and sadly, could have been an incredibly valuable teachable moment that made us all safer in the future. But instead it was used to further divide us and foster the literal fucking insanity of antivaxxers. I have nothing but contempt for those people because they are a danger to humanity.

I must confess I'm enamored with the concept of blockchains, but find their value questionable for the most part.

I even worked for a blockchain startup (non-crypto) but left on less than good terms and a fair amount of PTSD. They were nuts!

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/project-silica...

I've got a family member and ex friend (both trained in science) and they drank the koolaid hard. A funny story about them -- both had stayed at my home (different times) and I had taken to heating the water for my coffee in the microwave.

Both of them were horrified by that and refused to use that water. Neither could give reason why, and artfully deflected when I pressed the matter. I think antivaxers caught a virus that melted their brains.

Sadly, there's enough MAGA here to share their downvotes but your "evidence" is pointing in a different direction.

But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.

The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.

I've not thought it through deeply, but the notion intrigued me.