U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

It's like people forget Trump had an entire first term and a movement all over social media espousing their authoritarian ideals and accelerationist goals.

January 6th happened during his first term and half the country cheered. He had supporters in the government talking about a coup back then.

They literally published their plans in an itinerary. It had bullet points and everything.

And to this day people still support him. That's how you know the "nobody voted for this" line is just hogwash. A third of the country still supports everything he's doing, and they would vote for him again if they could.

No one who voted for Trump this time gets to plead ignorance. Complicity or stupidity, those are the options.

You're assuming there is just one such value. There isn't. People who are willing to drive drunk put less value on human life than people who aren't. We deal with that by penalizing people for driving drunk, to give them another incentive not to do it. And, as you say, we do that because people who drive drunk are doing it on the same roads as everyone else, and many if not most people have to use the roads as part of their daily lives, and they value their lives more than the people who choose to drive drunk do.

Also, the person who drives drunk bears risk--they can get injured or killed themselves. They can control that risk

Air travel is not like that. Most people do not have to travel by air as part of their daily lives. Plus, the people who design, build, and maintain the airplanes are not the ones who bear the risks of a crash: the crews and passengers do. So the incentives involved are different.

But there's another aspect to this as well. An airline is not going to operate an airplane unless they can sell enough seats to make it profitable, and not just for one flight, for the expected lifetime of the airplane. So we're not talking about one person choosing to drive drunk. We're talking about enough people choosing to fly on an airplane type that's known to have had fatal crashes due to a design flaw, for a long enough time to make it profitable for an airline to operate that airplane. That is the hypothetical I was responding to, and in that hypothetical, you can't make the kind of argument you're making, that it's a small minority of obvious outliers who are making what you consider to be the "bad" choice.

And it wasn't my hypothetical, I was just responding to it. I actually don't agree with its premise: I don't think that in a free market enough people would choose to fly on such an airplane to make it profitable for an airline to operate it. And at least one reason why I believe that is the differences between that hypothetical scenario, and the current reality of some people choosing to drive drunk, which I've just described.

> without the safety reporting infrastructure and mandatory disclosures the average person would have absolutely no ability to learn whether the crashes said anything about the safety of the aircraft as a whole

Straw man. In a free market where people knew they could not depend on the government to "regulate" (and, as I've pointed out, it didn't in this case), people would refuse to fly on airplanes whose safety records were not well-documented and attested public knowledge. To do otherwise would be obviously foolish. The only reason people don't seek out more such information now is that they believe the government has their back so they don't have to. And that belief, as we've seen, is not justified. In a free market, indeed, a safety reporting infrastructure not very different from what we have now would be expected to evolve--but because it was not run by a government and could not take advantage of the free pass the government gets to skimp on regulations, it would have to build and maintain a justified track record of accuracy.

> You'd have never known about the 737 Max crashes otherwise

You must be joking. They were worldwide news. We didn't need government safety reporting to tell us that two 737 Max aircraft crashed killing everyone on board. Which all by itself would make any sane person not want to fly on a 737 Max aircraft until they understood what had happened and were convinced the root cause had been fixed.

Indeed, the safety reporting system, if anything, contributed to facilitating the crashes--by not bringing to light the many instances of reports by pilots of US flag air carriers about odd behavior of 737 Max aircraft in exactly the same conditions that led to the two crashes. The existence of those reports only came to light, as far as the public was concerned, after the fact, when it was too late.

Did I stumble into the Youtube or Quora comment section somehow?

Yes, because coronaviruses are one of the largest and most common family of viruses, that cause everything from the common cold to SARS and MERS. Researching coronaviruses was important long before COVID-19.

Educating yourself is a good antidote to irrational conspiracy theories.