But the first cases were all linked to a wet market far enough from the lab that it would be highly improbable for the cases to come from the lab itself.
Their containment protocols are known to be lax. A staffer could have been a vector for the initial transmission. Remember they tried to pin it on US military personnel early on. The CCP wants the market to be the focus of attention and we'll never get believable evidence that suggests otherwise.
I'm not sure that I would agree with the claim that the state is unable to stop shoplifters. The case here was Australia, but speaking to the United States:
You can't really do anything about shoplifting until after it happens. It's not a crime until it's been committed, then you can prosecute. The issue is there is a base level cost to do so, and it's going to take a very large amount of shoplifting to balance that. We as a society have basically accepted that certain crimes don't go punished, and it seems like low value shoplifting largely fits that category.
In turn, large companies have decided that they will instead collect data on their own until they have enough to make it a high value issue, with proof. Then the state will prosecute. The issue here is that companies do not get to illegally collect data, they still would have to do so within the bounds of the law. So what are those bounds? We say the Government can surveil us with impunity, but only for terrorism or whatever else gets brought under that umbrella. For "petty" crimes the government would need permission to collect the amount of data that these companies are and then build their case with that.
This isn't to say that shoplifting is okay, just that society doesn't seem to care all that much. Our reaction to companies taking actions like these will also show how much we seem to care about them as well. Spoiler on that last one: we don't seem to care (in the US).
It definitely depends on the state and store policy.
A Walmart in AZ has sent gigantic bouncers after me to detain me on suspicion of shoplifting a $5 bag of cat litter. In my state they are allowed to kidnap/imprison you until police arrive if they have 'reasonable suspicion' you're in the act of shoplifting, so yeah have fun guessing whether the guy with the walmart badge is actually security or just a rapist.
OTOH there are four critera for a legal stop -- they need to see you enter without the merchandise, select it from the shelf, conceal it, then walk past the point of sale AND all merchandise. And you have to have an unobstructed view of the person, because if they discard the item you stop them for, you're in for a world of (legal) hurt.
Also many stores have shot themselves in the foot by placing items for sale outside the front doors... thus a shoplifter could claim they just stuck something in their pocket because they forgot they needed a pumpkin and thus needed a cart, or something to that effect.
If you stop someone and can't document these four points, they can challenge the stop, and you're up for a LOT more losses from the unlawful detainment suit.
So basically, they value upselling people at entrances more than limiting liability, and a savvy shoplifter can sue for a lot of money if the store allows reusable bags, since that removes the ability to charge for "concealment" given that by selling Safeway or whatever branded opaque bags, you have implicitly consented to "concealment" of merchandise.
>C. A merchant, or a merchant's agent or employee, with reasonable cause, may detain on the premises in a reasonable manner and for a reasonable time any person who is suspected of shoplifting as prescribed in subsection A of this section for questioning or summoning a law enforcement officer.
i.e. all they need is reasonable cause to suspect you are shoplifting. When I was detained no one ever saw me steal anything, I openly grabbed the cat litter, scanned it at the machine, paid for it, grabbed the receipt, then refused to show it to the receipt-checker (not about to slow down for that bullshit since it is now my property) so they just sent some dudes out to grab the cart out of my hands.
I "allowed it to happen" because I'm not about to gamble a decade+ in prison pulling out a knife or gun to be able to physically match the power of a gigantic bouncer on the hope the detainment is found unlawful, all over $5 in cat litter.
Unless by "let it happen" you mean I didn't let it happen then sue walmart, which would have zero deterrence effect on them as any lawsuit for a few minutes unlawful detention would be a rounding error on their balance sheet, and likely at my own expense since it's basically my word against another's and his army of corporate lawyers.
I'm not pulling out a weapon unless it is the very last option, but I did not enjoy the prospect of having to mull that decision. In the end I just never shopped at that Walmart again.
I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you implying that shoplifting should not be punished? Wouldn’t lack of enforcement or punishment for wrongdoing only lead to more wrongdoing? Isn’t the well-accepted viewpoint on this website that if the cost of violating a law is lower than the profit, that is what companies will do. What makes you think people won’t make the same calculation?
The way to solve this problem is to make the cost significantly higher than the benefit. Suggested reading: Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. Of any person who has ever run any country, he solved this problem in the most effective way.
1) Execution for drug trafficking without violence
2) A slight majority of the populace eligible for public housing gets it via essentially a regressive tax system where a gigantic slice of the populace (immigrants) fund the housing they can't use, creating a very bizarre government-imposed scenario where housing actually becomes radically cheaper the better positioned you are to be wealthy.
2 is not at all like the USA. USA has an ostensible progressive taxation for public housing -- the people on section 8 / public housing are poorer population than even the legal immigrants that can't get it.
Singapore's is regressive; they tax their massive % of population of ineligible immigrants so the citizens can have it essentially without means testing. It functions largely as a transfer of wealth from less rich to more rich.
This entire well is completely poisoned by the bad-faith whingeing of retailers end to end.
First of all; in times long past, retailers had zero shoplifting incidents, because every order was fulfilled by their employees, who would pick from the stock room and present the customer with a ready-to-take bag of their goods, and a purchase receipt. Shoplifting in this context was basically impossible.
The advent of customers picking out their own goods let to the introduction of customers attempting to leave the store without paying, but it also saved retailers incredible amounts of money, not having to pay to have employees both stock and pull orders.
However, because nothing is ever profitable enough, much further down the line (and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows) we get self checkouts, which are basically honor boxes with speakers. And that's fine, I love self checkout and my only complaint with it is now retailers are over-reliant on it, and, again in the name of cost-cutting, have 6 to 10 registers overseen by one worker, who has to sprint between them to sort out when the stupid things can't detect a light item, or have a conniption fit when you don't place a 75" television on them, and of course they have to also make sure all of those registers are ringing up the correct items, which has itself then given rise to bag checkers at the door.
And to be clear, I'm not like, endorsing any particular system here. I don't care how stores want to convey products to me terribly, just make it clear what the fuck I'm supposed to do, and I'll do it. What I am saying is retail theft is largely enabled by retailers who do nothing but chase the bottom line and constantly try and make their stores work with fewer and fewer people who are less and less skilled over time and are then SHOCKED when someone just takes something, because their ludicrously under-staffed stores are incredibly easy to steal from, if you want to.
And I would ALSO point out that throughout this long history, the cost of slippage has been built into the business, because theft is far, far from the only reason a product that is purchased wholesale may not make it all the way to a paying customer. Retail supply chains and especially grocery ones are simply AWASH in waste, and somehow, all the time, these stores make money.
So no, as a customer and taxpayer, I don't particularly give much of a shit about shoplifting.
> and, worth noting, when crimes are at historic lows
Depends how you count. If suddenly any theft below $900 is now a misdemeanor (as opposed to, say, 100 previously), then sure, the crime stats will show the crime is low because many retailer simply won’t bother to report it.
I think once this whole idea of crime became a political issue recently, all these stats should be taken with a huge grain of salt
> This is a wrongheaded way of looking at it, since in a competitive market, those cost savings will eventually be passed onto the consumer.
NEVER. In my LIFE. Have I seen this in action.
Literally every single category of product that I buy is more expensive now than when I was a kid. As far as I'm concerned this is a straight fucking myth until I see proof.
Like, surely, nearly 40 years on this planet, surely, by the law of probabilities, I would've seen SOMETHING get cheaper. SOMETHING. ANYTHING.
And before anyone says “TVs got cheaper,” yeah—because they’re made in sweatshops with subsidized rare earths and sold at a loss to get you into the ecosystem. That’s not market efficiency, that’s strategic manipulation.
Then show me the profit margins? If they just pocketed all the money, where did it go?
> Literally every single category of product that I buy is more expensive now than when I was a kid.
I'm pretty confident this is one of those situations where as soon as I start to lay out out examples, they'll immediately be dismissed, but just in case that's not true:
Full price video games are WAY cheaper than they were in the SNES era that I grew up in. Factoring in inflation, even $70 games today are like half the price, or close to it. Even most digital deluxe and similar versions are substantially cheaper than SNES games were.
It's way, way, WAY easier to get by with cheap or free games these days. Free games basically didn't expect in the 90s other than demo discs maybe (and those typically were still bought as part of a magazine issue), whereas now there's plenty of free games where you can just ignore the gacha/skin elements if you want, and there's a bajillion demos that can be accessed totally free on every storefront.
Indie games? In the 90s, games from small development teams would still cost the full price or close to it, something like Silksong that's high quality and costs only $20 -- even at launch -- didn't exist.
I remember the 90s, I remember how most middle class families couldn't really afford all that many games each year, especially in the cartridge era. People are practically overflowing with video games now in comparison, it's crazy how much easier it is to build up a huge library.
Really, tons of electronics are way cheaper now than they used to be. A $1500 desktop computer in the early 90s was a reasonable mid-range price; even if you ignore inflation, you can get a perfectly capable desktop or laptop today for less than that, and if you factor in inflation, computers today are way cheaper (unless you want a high-end gaming PC).
> Then show me the profit margins? If they just pocketed all the money, where did it go?
[ Insert set of news clips of various billionaires and their billions that they've gotten ever more of ]
> I'm pretty confident this is one of those situations where as soon as I start to lay out out examples, they'll immediately be dismissed
I mean, I'm going to take issue with these since they're all examples of video games which were, when I was a kid, an emerging medium. Like that's basic economies of scale, not to mention the cost of all computers have fallen substantially, why would video-games be exempt from that? And if you're anticipating that kind of response, why don't you pick more cut and dry examples? Groceries, rent, healthcare, childcare... Hell, try it with books. Books are CERTAINLY cheaper to produce today than they've ever been, and I'm not even counting e-books.
The cost of living has outpaced wages for decades, and the idea that "competition drives prices down" is a myth that only survives in Econ 101 classrooms and libertarian subreddits.
> [ Insert set of news clips of various billionaires and their billions that they've gotten ever more of ]
Yeah, I figured you wouldn't have an actual response.
We were talking about grocery stores. Feel free to show me the massive profit margins that grocery store companies have on their products that they apparently are all massively overcharging us for. That's your thesis, so it shouldn't be hard to find the data.
> I mean, I'm going to take issue with these
A reminder that what you said was:
> NEVER. In my LIFE. Have I seen this in action.
> Literally every single category of product that I buy is more expensive now than when I was a kid.
So I provided multiple examples against your "NEVER" that you immediately shrugged off. I'd be lying if I said I was surprised.
> not to mention the cost of all computers have fallen
> Yeah, I figured you wouldn't have an actual response.
You asked where it went. The top 1% of earners have nearly doubled their wealth in the last 5 years alone. That's the answer. The fact that your ideology and/or ambition to join them conflicts with it does not, in and of itself, make that not an "actual response."
Money is allegedly finite, at least it is whenever the subject of making society more equitable is raised. If all those people are so much wealthier, and if the economy is indeed a zero sum game, surely you must then acknowledge them having so much more, by necessity, means so many others must have less?
> So I provided multiple examples against your "NEVER" that you immediately shrugged off.
I said "I have never seen this in action" in specific reply to you saying:
> This is a wrongheaded way of looking at it, since in a competitive market, those cost savings will eventually be passed onto the consumer.
And beyond the blatant goal-post shift there that I must remind you, everyone can see, I feel it's appropriate to tear into your video game example because I think that's a lot trickier than you might:
First, the price stability of AAA games is not evidence of benevolent market forces. It’s a result of industry standardization, publisher control, and platform monopolies. Half-Life 2 co-launched Steam in 2004 and retailed for $60–$70, a price which stuck around for a couple of decades or so, and that’s before you factor in DLCs, deluxe editions, season passes, and microtransactions. The base price may look flat, but the real cost to access the full experience has ballooned. And unlike the cartridge era, you often don’t even get a physical product—just a license to access a server.
Second, this pricing model predates digital distribution. The idea that games got cheaper because of competition ignores the fact that prices held steady even as production and distribution costs plummeted. The savings from digital delivery, reduced packaging, and outsourced labor didn’t go to the consumer. They went to shareholders and executives. The top five game publishers have posted record profits year after year, even as they lay off staff and squeeze dev teams.
Third, pointing to video games and electronics as proof of market generosity is classic cherry-picking. These are industries uniquely shaped by global supply chains, massive economies of scale, and digital platforms that eliminate physical overhead. That’s not how groceries, rent, healthcare, or education work. In those sectors, prices have risen relentlessly while wages stagnate. If competitive markets reliably passed savings to consumers, we’d see it across the board, or hell, even just sometimes. Not just in industries that benefit from digital arbitrage and monopolistic control.
So no, video games didn’t "get cheaper" in any meaningful way, not really. They got more extractive, more fragmented, and more dependent on psychological monetization models.
You got super down voted for this, and my post was not popular either, but you seem to be one of the few here that get the sentiment.
There just isn't a huge energy to do something about a lot of petty crimes, therefore nothing is done. Like you, many people have complete apathy for the pursuit of minor shoplifting (I'm making an assumption here that you would be against large scale crime ring level shoplifting).
There isn't the will from the people or the politicians to care about petty crimes like this, until there is. People like you have explicit reasons why you don't care, and many people have the implicit "it just doesn't directly effect me therefore why should I care" reason.
Also worth noting: any store worth a SHIT that carries high value goods fully insures their inventory too, for stealing, and for their employees breaking one getting it out, for natural disasters, for fires, for boomers driving their SUVs through the front windows, and for like... a toddler running through one on the display floor.
Like I'm just... I'm fucking done listening to the endless bitching and crying on the part of corporations about how HARD it is to do business. If it's so awful, shut it the fuck down then.
And I genuinely wouldn't care apart from this is just a BOTTOMLESS well that reactionary politicians use to constantly divert money from anything we actually need to give yet more of it to fund yet more policing that doesn't do anything apart from murder black teenagers and shoot people's dogs, and no that's not JUST because Walgreens won't stop fucking whining in the news about it, but it isn't disconnected either. Crime has NEVER been as low as it is now, the only increases of any note were the ones that cropped up during the pandemic. Apart from that every single kind of larceny and theft has been on a steady downturn since the 1990's.
It does matter. People working for a non-profit should not work for free. It's completely acceptable for a non-profit to have an income and assets. Revenue may increase and it would be irresponsible to immediately increase expenses to match when they can conservatively plan for the future.
This is said knowing nothing about the company in question, just from my own experience working for a non-profit. Employees still need to be paid.
Depends on the state. My state is 1:3 for under 2, 1:6 for 2-3, and then 1:10 for 3-5. Presumably after that you're out of child care and into school. Ratios get more complex when it's a mixed group, but most childcare centers are going to have children separate based on age.
These ratios seem reasonable to me. Much better than the 1:25 in elementary school.
My issue with "living wage" calculations is that they never compromise. I live in a county with great public transit. The living wage before taxes is listed as 61k for a single adult. Over 9k of that is allocated to transportation costs. Did I mention the great public transit? All of the buses are free.
Internet + mobile is 1500? Well gigabit fiber + mint mobile would run you 1200/year, so where is the extra 300 coming from?
American consumers are unwilling to tighten their belts for long term gains, and it shows. The comment you replied to mentioned r/FIRE - a lot of people on that subreddit don't have insane incomes, they just live well below their means.
This isn't to say it's not hard: it is. We live in a consumerist society and going against that is not easy. Having a low wage job is not easy. But saying the cost of living is as high as the livingwage site says is just not true. Their methodology is to obtain data from expenditure statistics - the problem is the average American is way too into consuming and spends beyond their means.
I guess a "living wage" probably implies living an "normal" American life, which isn't maximally tightening the belt.
Even with good public transportation, driving saves a lot of time. The extra $300 probably comes from a combination of needing to buy a new phone and new computer periodically, hidden taxes and fees, and also it's reasonable to expect a "normal" living wage to include enough to cover at least 2 or 3 of the cheapest options--more than just one single bottom-of-the-barrel option.
Again, you make good points, and I agree some skepticism about their "living wage" numbers are justified. At least they break it down to give a glimpse into some of their logic.
The problem is that the "normal" American consumes greatly beyond their means. What I described isn't maximally tightening the belt, it's a very reasonable and satisfying way to live.
I don't have a car, I ride a bike, walk, or take public transit. In no way do I feel restricted in my daily life. I have a 6 year old iPhone that if you amortize would be $100/year (well under that extra 300).
A lot of Americans would consider no car and an old phone to be untenable. How would I get to work? You live closer to work. It's too expensive to live closer to work. Well is it once you get rid of your car(s)? There are genuinely going to be some areas of the country where this is not possible (living in proximity to work where a car is not needed). But those areas typically do not have a "cost of living crisis."
What about needing a laptop for the internet? There's $1000, and you need to upgrade every couple years. I spent $2000 to build a desktop myself 10 years ago; it still works well enough, it plays the games I like, but Windows wont support it anymore, it's end of life; there's $200 a year.
Again, "living" implies a little wiggle room and having access to more than just the one cheapest bottom-of-the-barrel option.
What if you lose your phone? You'll have to buy another. Can we include that potential expense in the budget? A "living" wage implies you're not set back for years because you lost one item.
The living wage calculation on that website does not constitute your last paragraph. I'd argue that not including a savings/retirement investment portion makes it a much worse number.
As for a computer, your desktop will work fine with Linux. A laptop doesn't need to cost 1000, again we are over consuming. If your hobby requires a computer, that would be from recreational expenses, not required technology spending.
Living has lots of wiggle room, but it starts with understanding what you actually NEED vs what you think you need, then wiggling from there. If you start with inflated base monthly expenses your true requirements become obscured.
I'm privileged. I don't actually know what a healthy retirement savings rate is because I'm certainly well above that in my own savings. But part of why I'm well above that is because I truly cut down on a lot of unneeded spending that I see many of my peers doing.
How is this quickly dismissing the idea that it was a lab leak as a conspiracy? The research showed (and still shows) that it's extremely plausible for the virus to have gone from animal -> human. I think currently there is a "missing" jump where the animal which was involved in transmission still isn't know but to say that Fauci citing the current research is "dismissal of lab leak as a conspiracy theory" is a bit absurd.
I don't think you'd easily catch him put it in precisely the terms of a "conspiracy theory". He wouldn't have had such a long career if he weren't careful with his words on air.
But he did consider that research to adequately "address" the concerns of a "manmade" virus, and I don't think it would be uncharitable to interpret that as a dismissal of those concerns. After all, he always could have ended his statement with a noncommittal "but this is just one study, and we need more evidence to really know for sure".
And a lot of people do specifically mean a virus that was genetically modified or otherwise selected for human transmissibility when they talk about a "lab leak", so at least he was trying to talk down that version of a lab leak theory.
(Personally, I do think a lot of the theories of an genetically-modified virus are overblown, both then and now, I just wanted to give some perspective for what he actually said.)
You ask ChatGPT for answers to questions and your surprised that random terminal commands don't work? If you look at linux forums, all issues always include hardware and software versions. Some problems are extremely context dependent.
Hardware acceleration isn't working -> what GPU? Do you have the right drivers installed (yes for Linux this is a consideration as there are so many display configurations not all drivers cough nvidia work for all scenarios).
You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at. Is this 30% dropped frames at 4k60 or 1080p30? You can argue that this is too much detail for something that should "just work" but given where you are and what you're talking about I would think you would be more nuanced in the troubleshooting. If you want the most seemless and effort free web browsing and media viewing experience just buy a macbook air (good product and also good dev machines for most).
Is it even worth the time searching on forums to fix these issues? I can't speak for OP... but if an OS I freshly installed is unable to watch youtube videos and wake up from sleep, I'm wiping it and installing something else unless I can fix it extremely easily (eg. with chatgpt).
>You also didn't specify anything like the quality you were trying to playback at.
If hardware acceleration isn't working, it doesn't matter which youtube video made you realize the issue existed. It's not as if the method you use to fix the driver would be different when the video you want to watch is 1080p30 instead of 4k60.
I think the issue is how people view their operating system then. If you think an operating system (which for the sake of this I'll allow to mean the distro for linux) should just install and "work" with no configuration needed, then linux on abnormal hardware is not for you. Whether or not a small amount of effort to search for solutions to a problem or to learn more about system configuration being "worth the time" is up to the reader to decide.
Swap is really interesting. The idea of swap sounds super useful - you get more RAM than you have. The reality is that RAM speeds are so important to fast computing that once you start to need swap, what you really need is more RAM on your machine.
If somebody told me they were running into issues with swap on linux I would ask them why they don't just get more RAM. I'm currently running 32GB and have never used swap on this machine. That includes gaming and local LLM usage (which my GPU does not have enough VRAM for, so normal RAM gets involved).
Swap is not 'super slow extra memory' (well it is, but that's not useful!), it's a place to temporarily store contents of memory for things less important than what wants to be in fast memory right now. Idle apps can (and are) swapped out to have more file cache even on boxes with large RAM. Memory can also be fragmented and you'll have nominally lots of free space, but in reality allocations will fail; in this case, swap can be used to defragment memory instead of OOM killing stuff.
You always want some swap, even if it's 1GB for a 96GB machine.
I think you really are misunderstanding what swap is for.
If your speeds matter, you, and I cannot stress this enough BUY MORE RAM[0]. It's called "swap" not "RAM" so anyone trying to tell you it is "more RAM" is lying to you or woefully naive. It would be as idiotic as having no swap space.
Swap is a cache. Swap will actually help your RAM be even faster! Go look at your RAM usage in a bit more detail. You get a little from using a tool like `htop` but you'll get more from just `cat /proc/meminfo` or `free -wh`. You RAM has tiers of memory inside of it, all RAM is not equal. You should see that some is compressed and a lot is cached. (`/proc/meminfo` will show you there's a whole lot more to this than just "RAM and swap")
I'll put it this way. My machine has 64G of RAM on it and ~9G of swap. Currently the system (rebooted yesterday) is using about 8G of RAM and 200M of swap. Except that's actually a lie, that's what htop tells us. In fact, we need to check from `free`. Of my 62Gi of RAM: 8Gi is used, 7Gi is free, 1Gi is shared, 3Gi is in buffers, 45Gi is cached and 54Gi is available. (Swap is identical: 200M) When my system is running longer, that swap isn't so minimal anymore. Things get paged into it despite having tons of RAM available. This isn't because the OS is dumb, it is because the OS is smart.
The only reason to not have swap is because you really really care about a trivial amount of disk space. But man, disk is cheaper than RAM and these days you're probably using NVMe or at least an SSD.
What you should do:
- Follow the instructions from [1] or elsewhere[2] and get yourself at least 4G of swap but I would do 8. Are you really going to miss 8G of disk space?
- Change the swappiness value[2]. Set it to 10 to get pretty similar results to what you have but without crashes.
- Read more about what swap files actually are because you are currently giving a strong impression that you have vastly oversimplified how a computer's memory system works.
I definitely don't misunderstand what swap is for. I've implemented swap for a hobby os.
Swap is absolutely "more RAM" in layman's terms. If you NEED 10GB of memory to have open everything you want on your machine, but you only have 8GB of RAM, swap will make that happen for you. Now ideally the OS is using this for inactive pages (those programs you have open but you aren't actually using), and the nuance to how swap can be used to make the RAM you do have more effective is an interesting attribute of swap (another commenter mentioned swap being used as temporary storage to defrag the physical memory), but every single reference you linked says the same thing - swap is for when you need more memory than you have physical memory for.
You seem to be conflating swaps features with it being anything other than an extension of your physical memory. The primary use of swap is to enable a virtual memory space that is larger than the available physical memory. That can be leveraged for smarter things than "store page with the oldest access time" but fundamentally swap is to enable using more memory than you have more physical memory for. Yes, you can ramp your swappiness and have the OS be more aggressive about paging to disk, this is silly if you have so much unused RAM as the performance implication of a page fault and retrieval from disk is huge.
From your links:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq: "Swap space is used when your operating system decides that it needs physical memory for active processes and the amount of available (unused) physical memory is insufficient." -> More RAM for your memory heavy usage. In this case if you buy more physical RAM your programs will run faster.
https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...: "The swap space acts as an extension to the physical memory and allows the system to continue running smoothly even when physical memory is exhausted." and "Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full, inactive pages in memory are moved to the swap space." -> More RAM. Slow RAM, but more.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Swappiness: "Swapping is the process whereby a page of memory is copied to the preconfigured space on the hard disk, called swap space, to free up that page of memory. The combined sizes of the physical memory and the swap space is the amount of virtual memory available." -> Do I need to repeat myself here?
Did you seriously write and link all of that without reading any of it?
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