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While you can get cancer from oncoviruses AFAIK they are not spread from other diseases and not from cancer patients.

Devil tumors

The area of Brazil in which Zika originated was near the same location where they were experimenting with the modified bugs. Radiolab did a series on this a while back https://www.wnycstudios.org/st... ... not that I think there is a causal link

The problem of "homeless people with full-time jobs" is most definitely not a small problem or only located in certain areas. Cite 1 (extremely informative and well-researched investigative series) Cite 2 Cite 3 Cite 4

I suspect you're just reciting truisms. Unfortunately, this problem has been growing massively in the past two decades. The scale and visibility is such now that some journalists, investigators and generally insightful people are taking long hard looks at it.

Look for the "Radiolab" podcast and specifically, the episode "Post no evil". It's an interesting view into the world of Facebook moderators.

Maybe Giuliani is right when he says "Truth isn't truth".

When anything and everything, such as photos, videos, audio, facts, etc., become as muddied and confused as a psychotic break, then does "Truth" still matter? When "Truth" becomes unknowable, then it becomes useless. You can only react to what you perceive. Like for a person having a psychotic break, that often means reacting in a chaotic or harmful way.

I can't imagine what this will do to society. Perhaps society will react to things in ways more fitting to ancient times, when people had no idea how nature really worked, and chalked events up to the gods, fate, or the supernatural.

Was "Truth" unknowable, and hence useless, before the advent of photography and audio recording?

As I've already mentioned in a previous post, losing these things as reliable and unimpeachable proof of the facts of a case won't demolish society, it will just require reverting to a paradigm of understanding and knowledge and trust, as existed before these technologies. We've done it before, hence, we can do it again. It just means an adjustment, just as the advent of these technologies did. I'll miss them, but it's a blessing in disguise. The use of photographic evidence, or sound recordings, etc., takes a lot of the humanity out of the discussion about what is true and what's not, and who's guilty and who's not, or at least not provably so.

If you'd rather see 10 innocent men be hanged than risk one guilty man going free, as the saying goes, you might pine for the age of photographic and audio-recorded evidence. If, on the other hand, you'd rather deal with letting 10 guilty men go free than hang one innocent, you'll probably be pleased that we aren't going to have to pretend anymore, that just because you have someone "on-tape," that it means you know for a fact that what that tape seems to allege is true, actually IS. It just about never WAS, and now it definitely ISN'T.

Incidentally, if anyone's interested in seeing what this technology is capeable of, there's a very entertaining podcast about it from a couple of guys named Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, called "Radiolab". https://www.wnycstudios.org/st... in this podcast, they watch someone put words into other people's mouths, just by feeding in a bunch of recordings, and make them say whatever they want them to, including in a video, etc. Scary stuff, really.

Deep Fakes didn't destroy the faith we could put in pictures, recordings, and videos, since all could be altered, manipulated, or faked BEFORE that came along. It just makes the manipulation easy, and puts it within reach of most people, rather than letting it be the province of those with a LOT of know-how and a LOT of equipment. It just moved the bar that evidence has to clear way up... it didn't INVENT the bar. The bar was already there.

Remember the War of the Worlds? It didn't take much to convince a WHOLE lot of people that aliens from another world were invading Earth. Today someone trying that, with that same specific level of sophistication, in today's world, would be LAUGHED at, at least here. We're all much too sophisticated to fall for that now. At least I like to think we are. Deep Fakes are troubling, but not the end of the world. We just will have to become a little more sophisticated, and find another way, a better way, to evaluate the truth or falsity of whatever we're seeing or hearing.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/st...
The original image can be manipulated, and the audio even more convincingly manipulated to say pretty much anything you want.

Also, you're all wrong. (Well, most of you are.) If your computer is the best you can afford, and your algorithm for deciding on whether or not and when to to make a trade is as efficient as possible, and your bid or order or whatever is less than 1 microsecond BEHIND the one that it could have beaten if your signal had managed to be only 1 microsecond faster, that can make a VERY big difference if your order was to buy all the shares of this one stock, and the one that beat you said, "buy all the share of this one stock," you go from being able to buy all the shares of this one stock, to being able to buy NONE of them. Or something like that.

Inside the exchange itself, they let traders put their computers inside the actual exchange, and the cable-runs provided are all carefully measured so that no matter how far a given computer is from the one that handles the requests, physically, they are all the exact same distance in TIME, meaning the time it takes for the signal to go from the back of your computer to the other endÂis exactly the same for all the others, so it's fair. Timing matters THAT much.

If you get beaten by only 1 microsecond, that microsecond might as well be an eternity. Ask anyone who's ever lost by a nose in a photo-finish, or anyone who had money on the loser.

Here's more on this. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/267124-speed/
(There's multiple segments of this podcast: the first is about the Pitch Drop Experiment, not really relevant here, but about 24 minutes in, they talk about HFT.)

The trees also form a network under the ground. The roots are connected to fungus and they share nutrients and sugars back and forth. If you start killing off some of the other trees it can affect the others nearby, even different species.

A link to a RaidoLab episode if anyone is interested.