[ExI] bond villain?

[Will Steinberg]

It's quite terrifying yeah.  And I think just as grim as the physical
danger is the particular social effect of a deadly contagious disease.
Covid didn't worry me much but the way people turned into paranoid selfish
irrational crazy people definitely did.  I don't think the downstream
effects of that will shake out for a decade or more, and by then something
worse will probably come along.

Sorry to be a doomer but man, that whole covid thing really fucked everyone
up.  I desperately hope we can have a few years of the good times again.
Heck maybe it's just this damn country and I need to move somewhere else.
To where I don't know.  Mexico seems nice

On Wed, Feb 1, 2023, 12:19 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
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> >...Dang this version of reality is just... weird.  Reality is just too
> weird.  spike
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> While marveling that the actual real-life Bond villain, when finally being
> revealed, looks as goofy as Dr. Evil, a most disturbing thought occurred to
> me.  I vaguely buy the notion that this guy was blowing smoke to get his
> boyfriend into bed, that sounds plausible enough.
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> But... if a company really did want to create a new virus and proactively
> develop a vaccine for it, that would be the ultimate cash cow.  It would be
> the perfect Bond James Bond adversary, with all the classic features: kill
> millions while making one hundred billion for the bad guy.
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> A company like Pfizer likely wouldn't do it, but the disturbing part is
> this: anyone can do directed evolution.  It doesn't take a company.  If
> covid can jump from a bat to a human, it can jump from a human to a bat
> (biology hipsters: ja?)
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> It is easy enough to intentionally catch covid.  Bad guy does that, goes
> home, extracts a cc of her own blood, injects her pet bats, waits for them
> to get sick and some to die, extracts a few cc of blood from a dead bat,
> centrifuges out the RBCs and stuff, filters the plasma/virus mixture to
> concentrate the virus, reinjects the concentrated virus to a bunch of
> healthy bats who survived the infection (so their immune system is pumped),
> wait a few days, take out the dead ones, extract their blood, centrifuge,
> filter, repeat, until the bad guy (who looks far less goofy than Jordan
> Walker) selectively breeds a planet killer, in her own home with zero
> collaborators, no one to leak anything.  Neither Bond James Bond nor OKeefe
> James Okeefe can stop the bad guy because no one knows she is doing it.
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> This is a big planet with a lot of potential bad guys.  We have no way of
> knowing how many are doing directed evolution on covid.  This would be a
> black swan that doesn't require enormous amounts of funding or any
> particular brilliance.  And all along we thought it was going to be nukes
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> malicious AI that did us in.
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> spike
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