Sorry, but my corpse wouldn't be fit for anyone to eat. I've spent a half-century absorbing and bioaccumulating metals like mercury and other nasty chemicals like PCBs. Not to mention I might have some nasty prions that would really screw someone up if they ate me that I don't yet know about.
No, sorry, most people need to be treated as toxic waste once dead, not treated as food.
Do we really need Hubble that badly anymore? Apparently adaptive optics technology is allowing ground-based telescopes to surpass Hubble's capability. https://www.airspacemag.com/sp...
Rather than firing up an expensive space mission (I remember each shuttle mission was $500M), would it genuinely be better to just take that money and build or retrofit a ground-based telescope with adaptive optics? A telescope that you could easily maintain thereafter?
This doesn't help with wavelengths of light that don't go through Earth's atmosphere, but that's not what Hubble does. Seems like we could do without Hubble nowadays.
Yes, it opens the question. But because the question is opened, and on the thin evidence there is, I think we're likely to see revised guidelines on how Roundup is to be used so as to minimize honeybee exposure to it.
I.e., don't spray on flowering plants that bees are actively visiting. I don't think this is a crippling restriction (or much of a practical restriction even) on Roundup, so it may be a slam-dunk guideline revision even though the evidence is shaky.
I've read that citrus fruits contain substances called fumarins, that when exposed to UV light can become carcinogenic.
I don't think reliable epidemiological studies have shown that citrus consumption and subsequent human exposure to sunlight increases cancer rates, but if they do, then we can reduce cancer incidence by removing fumarins from citrus. (Can, not necessarily should, they might provide health benefits that are greater than the risk.)
Right now, citrus is being saved from becoming commercially extinct by GMO. Naturally derived citrus production worldwide is being decimated by citrus greening--a disease to which apparently no natural citrus is resistant (some 50% of Florida's citrus production has been destroyed). Turns out that if you splice in a gene from spinach, the resulting GMO citrus is resistant to citrus greening.
Given the way agriculture is being done by humans nowadays, I think this sort of countermeasure to emerging plant pathogens is going to be absolutely required to ensure food security. Imagine the famine if an emerging wheat blight wipes out wheat production worldwide faster than breeding can develop resistant varieties. Now imagine if in one year, new wheat varieties that are resistant can be developed. You might have just saved human civilization.
The story with tomatoes is in fact sad. However, the recent trend with apples is quite different. The Gala apple is a huge improvement over the Red Delicious (RD) in flavor, and has largely displaced it in markets. Plenty of new varieties of apples that are not quite as pretty as RD but are improved in texture and taste such as Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Jazz, are increasingly dominant. And these apples are being outstripped even now by even newer varieties such as Snapdragon, Ruby Frost, Sweet Tango, and Smitten are giving consumers new choices that taste absolutely fantastic in comparison to RD.
A big difference though is that in apples, consumers love crispy firm texture, which makes apples durable in shipment and handling. Crispy and firm are not ideal at all for tomatoes or stone fruit--both of which have been and remain terrible when got from grocery stores.
The summary said the FAA "rubber-stamped" the folding wingtips. However, the FAA made Boeing put in several warnings on the planes on whether the tips were in the right place, withstand 75mph winds on the ground, and could not rotate during flight.
Just curious, I live in the USA, and I can *never* see a doctor "instantly". In fact, the last time I needed to see a doctor, my primary care doctor told me "soonest is next week" and the urgent care clinic I went to, it took 2 hours for me to see a nurse practitioner, not a doctor, and I had set up an appointment 8 hours earlier.
The above experience has been absolutely typical of all my doctor visits.
So, WHERE, in the USA, can you go anyplace and instantly see a doctor? Yeah, you might get one "instantly" if you walk into an emergency room with an arm dangling by a thread, but otherwise, in my experience, you're going to wait longer than your claims of BC performance.
1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.
2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.
3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.
I was making an argument on based on economics. For that, efficiency is irrelevant. What matters (from an economics standpoint) is how much profit on energy sold we deliver per dollar invested. Even a 95% efficient energy conversion process, that doesn't require ANY inputs whatsoever, is going to be uneconomical if the capital cost is so high that you can't pay interest on the capital invested with the power you sell.
That's EXACTLY what I'm saying is going to be the case with fusion. The alternatives will set the cost of electricity so low that only less capital-intensive direct conversion methods will be able to compete. Fusion, with its capital intensive fusion reactor AND its capital intensive thermal conversion rig will never compete economically.
Would the riders/economic benefit of such a railway ever support the interest payments on the billions? I'm skeptical on that point.
How about we invest $80B instead in "virtual presence" and better networking technology, so that people can stay home and their avatars can go to work, and business travel becomes unnecessary and archaic?
I think California has the wrong vision. Instead of making travel cheap, California should work on developing tech to make travel obsolete.
I'm not sure fusion will ever be economical even if we get it working. Fusion has to compete against direct conversion technologies, where energy is directly converted from its original form into electricity.
Solar voltaic converts light energy directly into electricity. Wind turbines turn energy from moving air directly into electricity. Gas turbines burn natural gas directly in turbines that generate electricity.
Most fusion reactions create a lot of their energy in the form of fast neutrons, whose energy can't be converted to electricity directly, but must instead be used to heat up steam, and the hot steam then is used to turn turbines and generate electricity. This is indirect conversion, and the argument I've heard is that steam conversion plants cost more all by themselves than many direct conversion technologies do--therefore fusion reactions that generate the bulk of energy in fast neutrons will be uneconomical by comparison.
Coal plants too, incidentally--there's a reason no new coal plants are being built in the USA--they're uneconomical compared to natural gas turbine generation. And fusion plants will be extremely capital intensive.
Furthermore, plasmas in thermal equilibrium that produce energy in charged particles instead of neutrons (which would allow for direct conversion), cool off faster via Bremsstrahlung radiation than they self-heat from their own fusion reactions. So direct conversion from fusion would have to come from nonequilibrium plasmas. And nonequilibrium plasmas are really, really unstable--they tend to thermalize very, very fast.
Bottom line, I'm not optimistic about terrestrial fusion in any form being economical when it has to compete with solar, wind, and natural gas. Leave planet Earth and go past the orbit of say, Jupiter, and I could see it being a good solution way out there.
I just got through reading an online reference saying that the second round of flu-like symptoms likely isn't flu but rather pneumonia.
If you get the flu, and then seem to get a "relapse" within a week or two, go see a doctor to get evaluated for pneumonia. Pneumonia symptoms are close to those of the flu.
You say the war on cancer isn't winnable, and there's some merit to the claim.
However, we have learned to delay and delay and delay the victory of cancer, often until something else kills us first. That may not be "winning", strictly speaking, but if I die of something else and have a good quality of life it makes no practical difference to me.
We've also learned how to prevent a lot of cases of cancer. I don't smoke, I eat high fiber, avoid overindulging in processed meat, I don't binge drink, I get regular exercise, keep my weight reasonable, and I protect my skin from too much sun. All of these reduce my risk of cancer by a good deal. Not to zero, but all these actions reduce my odds of getting cancer. Again, not "winning the war" but considerable progress.
There's a hypothesis being developed that states that actually cancer is a lot more common than people might think, it's just that the immune system detects it and rejects most (maybe the vast majority?) of cancers before they become a clinically noticeable issue.
If suddenly we start catching cancers so early and start treatment, we might end up treating a lot of cancers that would have got destroyed by the immune system, thus possibly damaging folks far more with exposure to chemotherapy and unnecessary surgery.
I do think this theory has some basis in fact: once I had a growth on my face that I became certain was a basal cell carcinoma, the least dangerous form of skin cancer. However, before I managed to get medical attention on it, this growth got irritated, bled a little bit, and completely disappeared without even a scar. Standard treatment would have left a scar, so seemingly I was better off without any treatment.
I saw a TV documentary which blamed the same event on hantavirus. The story went that there were some very dry years, concentrating rodent populations in small areas where they all got infected with hantavirus.
Then, a rainy year came and the rodent population exploded faster than natural controls could kick in, and virtually all the rodents had hantavirus and spread it to the people. They also think that hantavirus mutated to become person-to-person contagious as well. There are actually weather records coincident with the events that supported this theory (the story goes).
The European population around at the time, because of greater genetic diversity, had significantly more resistance to it than the native populations, so the story went, and thus survived with more frequency.
Don't resist a sneeze, just go with it, if you want to minimize it. Open your mouth wide, open your throat, remove all obstructions. My sneezes this way just sound like loud fast exhalations. Instead of ah-choo it's a-hooo.
And do all this into your armpit. The loud part of the sneeze is the pressure buildup releasing. Don't provide any resistance, no pressure buildup. I bet it reduces droplet projection quite a lot to sneeze this way too.
To a lot of people this isn't even recognizable as a sneeze. They look at you like, "what just happened?"
Water from my showers, toilet, washing, whatever, that goes down the drain goes into my city water treatment plant. From there, it is cleaned and put back in the local river. It could be further cleaned and re-used for drinking/household re-borrowing.
So household use doesn't actually USE any water from the local environment that isn't returned. I borrow it and recycle it.
Landscape use (watering plants) does, however, USE water. It evaporates and isn't really recyclable for local use.
Household water use therefore need not be a drain on water resources. Landscape use pretty much is a drain.
Website says 1.1% of people in US have schizophrenia, which can have delusions and hallucinations as symptoms. Even if *I* saw something I'd have to consider the possibility that my brain is simply defective as being, in all likelihood, more probable than whatever oddity it is that I'm seeing. Of which I have seen exactly 0 in my life so far.
I've known two people who have claimed to have seen either demons/devils or ghosts, and both of them have ended up in the metal health system, NOT for simply claiming to have seen things but rather from disorganized life behavior.
Given this, it's going to take some really extraordinary evidence to get me to believe in aliens, ghosts, or the supernatural.
I do believe in science, however, evidence of that abounds around me. In our technological society, I'm basically swimming in evidence of science.
So an attacker with access to the computer could turn on HP's built-in keylogger.
Couldn't that same attacker with access to the computer install and turn on his own keylogger, which is probably to his preference because it works with the rest of his toolkit seamlessly on any model of computer instead of just on HPs?
So, what's the impact exactly?
This reminds me of promiscuous mode on ethernet interfaces. Debugging tool with security implications that is turned off by default. Useful. Not a big deal. Useful in fact for spotting hackers, because they might turn it on and not hide it. You notice your interface is in promiscuous mode? You know something is up.
I just can't get worked up about this. It's like they just left some debugging tools around, and yes, nearly any debugging tool can be turned to evil uses, but so can the OS itself if it's been compromised by "a local attacker".
You are factually inaccurate. It is not acid which cleaves sucrose into fructose and glucose. Instead, an enzyme in the small intestine called sucralase does this, and splits a water in order to do it. It doesn't take significant energy.
It's actually amazingly difficult to find peanut butter that doesn't have added sugar. Recently I was in the store and had to grab 4 or 5 brands before I found one that didn't have sugar in it, and the print is small enough to be hard to read.
An amazing amount of work input simply to not be sugared up.
Every time some dumbass creditor loans money out to someone on strength of this stolen information and doesn't get paid, but turns around and trashes the person identified by the information, sue the creditor.
I know that if I were on a jury I'd be like, "You idiot creditor. You didn't get repaid because you didn't bother to really verify the identity of the person you gave money to. And then you think you're justified in trashing this innocent person's reputation? Well, I feel justified in handing that innocent person a LARGE payment for damages. Yeah, I think $1M ought to cover it."
Possibly, by simply taking a breath and letting it out, you MAY BE setting in chain a set of events that leads to a typhoon hitting Taiwan with massive loss of life. Weather is a chaotic system and this could truly happen.
So literally every breath you take could have dire unintended consequences. But you're powerless to foresee such so you don't worry about it, you can't possibly calculate the risks.
Similarly, I don't think giving bees resistance to neonics is going to turn them into human-deadly zombie plague producing killer insects that will wipe out all life on the planet. Might something bad happen? Yup. Should we forego this, and fail to produce resistant bees and let bees continue their downward spiral toward practical extinction as crop pollinators? No thanks. Breeding pesticide resistant bees seems less of a risk to me than decline of food production.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but my corpse wouldn't be fit for anyone to eat. I've spent a half-century absorbing and bioaccumulating metals like mercury and other nasty chemicals like PCBs. Not to mention I might have some nasty prions that would really screw someone up if they ate me that I don't yet know about.
No, sorry, most people need to be treated as toxic waste once dead, not treated as food.
--PM
Do we really need Hubble that badly anymore?
Apparently adaptive optics technology is allowing ground-based telescopes to surpass Hubble's capability.
https://www.airspacemag.com/sp...
Rather than firing up an expensive space mission (I remember each shuttle mission was $500M), would it genuinely be better to just take that money and build or retrofit a ground-based telescope with adaptive optics? A telescope that you could easily maintain thereafter?
This doesn't help with wavelengths of light that don't go through Earth's atmosphere, but that's not what Hubble does. Seems like we could do without Hubble nowadays.
--PeterM
Yes, it opens the question. But because the question is opened, and on the thin evidence there is, I think we're likely to see revised guidelines on how Roundup is to be used so as to minimize honeybee exposure to it.
I.e., don't spray on flowering plants that bees are actively visiting. I don't think this is a crippling restriction (or much of a practical restriction even) on Roundup, so it may be a slam-dunk guideline revision even though the evidence is shaky.
--PM
I've read that citrus fruits contain substances called fumarins, that when exposed to UV light can become carcinogenic.
I don't think reliable epidemiological studies have shown that citrus consumption and subsequent human exposure to sunlight increases cancer rates, but if they do, then we can reduce cancer incidence by removing fumarins from citrus. (Can, not necessarily should, they might provide health benefits that are greater than the risk.)
Right now, citrus is being saved from becoming commercially extinct by GMO. Naturally derived citrus production worldwide is being decimated by citrus greening--a disease to which apparently no natural citrus is resistant (some 50% of Florida's citrus production has been destroyed). Turns out that if you splice in a gene from spinach, the resulting GMO citrus is resistant to citrus greening.
Given the way agriculture is being done by humans nowadays, I think this sort of countermeasure to emerging plant pathogens is going to be absolutely required to ensure food security. Imagine the famine if an emerging wheat blight wipes out wheat production worldwide faster than breeding can develop resistant varieties. Now imagine if in one year, new wheat varieties that are resistant can be developed. You might have just saved human civilization.
--PeterM
The story with tomatoes is in fact sad. However, the recent trend with apples is quite different. The Gala apple is a huge improvement over the Red Delicious (RD) in flavor, and has largely displaced it in markets. Plenty of new varieties of apples that are not quite as pretty as RD but are improved in texture and taste such as Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, Jazz, are increasingly dominant. And these apples are being outstripped even now by even newer varieties such as Snapdragon, Ruby Frost, Sweet Tango, and Smitten are giving consumers new choices that taste absolutely fantastic in comparison to RD.
A big difference though is that in apples, consumers love crispy firm texture, which makes apples durable in shipment and handling. Crispy and firm are not ideal at all for tomatoes or stone fruit--both of which have been and remain terrible when got from grocery stores.
--PM
The summary said the FAA "rubber-stamped" the folding wingtips. However, the FAA made Boeing put in several warnings on the planes on whether the tips were in the right place, withstand 75mph winds on the ground, and could not rotate during flight.
Doesn't seem like a "rubber-stamp" to me.
--PM
Didn't catch the sarcasm, but I think I helped you make your point.
--PM
Hello,
Just curious, I live in the USA, and I can *never* see a doctor "instantly". In fact, the last time I needed to see a doctor, my primary care doctor told me "soonest is next week" and the urgent care clinic I went to, it took 2 hours for me to see a nurse practitioner, not a doctor, and I had set up an appointment 8 hours earlier.
The above experience has been absolutely typical of all my doctor visits.
So, WHERE, in the USA, can you go anyplace and instantly see a doctor? Yeah, you might get one "instantly" if you walk into an emergency room with an arm dangling by a thread, but otherwise, in my experience, you're going to wait longer than your claims of BC performance.
Best,
--PeterM
1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.
2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.
3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.
--PeterM
Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, just better than people.
If self-driving cars rack up fewer pedestrian deaths per mile driven than human drivers, that's the critical metric.
--PM
I was making an argument on based on economics. For that, efficiency is irrelevant. What matters (from an economics standpoint) is how much profit on energy sold we deliver per dollar invested. Even a 95% efficient energy conversion process, that doesn't require ANY inputs whatsoever, is going to be uneconomical if the capital cost is so high that you can't pay interest on the capital invested with the power you sell.
That's EXACTLY what I'm saying is going to be the case with fusion. The alternatives will set the cost of electricity so low that only less capital-intensive direct conversion methods will be able to compete. Fusion, with its capital intensive fusion reactor AND its capital intensive thermal conversion rig will never compete economically.
--PeterM
Would the riders/economic benefit of such a railway ever support the interest payments on the billions? I'm skeptical on that point.
How about we invest $80B instead in "virtual presence" and better networking technology, so that people can stay home and their avatars can go to work, and business travel becomes unnecessary and archaic?
I think California has the wrong vision. Instead of making travel cheap, California should work on developing tech to make travel obsolete.
--PeterM
I'm not sure fusion will ever be economical even if we get it working. Fusion has to compete against direct conversion technologies, where energy is directly converted from its original form into electricity.
Solar voltaic converts light energy directly into electricity. Wind turbines turn energy from moving air directly into electricity. Gas turbines burn natural gas directly in turbines that generate electricity.
Most fusion reactions create a lot of their energy in the form of fast neutrons, whose energy can't be converted to electricity directly, but must instead be used to heat up steam, and the hot steam then is used to turn turbines and generate electricity. This is indirect conversion, and the argument I've heard is that steam conversion plants cost more all by themselves than many direct conversion technologies do--therefore fusion reactions that generate the bulk of energy in fast neutrons will be uneconomical by comparison.
Coal plants too, incidentally--there's a reason no new coal plants are being built in the USA--they're uneconomical compared to natural gas turbine generation. And fusion plants will be extremely capital intensive.
Furthermore, plasmas in thermal equilibrium that produce energy in charged particles instead of neutrons (which would allow for direct conversion), cool off faster via Bremsstrahlung radiation than they self-heat from their own fusion reactions. So direct conversion from fusion would have to come from nonequilibrium plasmas. And nonequilibrium plasmas are really, really unstable--they tend to thermalize very, very fast.
Bottom line, I'm not optimistic about terrestrial fusion in any form being economical when it has to compete with solar, wind, and natural gas. Leave planet Earth and go past the orbit of say, Jupiter, and I could see it being a good solution way out there.
I just got through reading an online reference saying that the second round of flu-like symptoms likely isn't flu but rather pneumonia.
If you get the flu, and then seem to get a "relapse" within a week or two, go see a doctor to get evaluated for pneumonia. Pneumonia symptoms are close to those of the flu.
Reference:
https://www.texasmedclinic.com...
--PM
You say the war on cancer isn't winnable, and there's some merit to the claim.
However, we have learned to delay and delay and delay the victory of cancer, often until something else kills us first. That may not be "winning", strictly speaking, but if I die of something else and have a good quality of life it makes no practical difference to me.
https://www.cancer.org/latest-...
We've also learned how to prevent a lot of cases of cancer. I don't smoke, I eat high fiber, avoid overindulging in processed meat, I don't binge drink, I get regular exercise, keep my weight reasonable, and I protect my skin from too much sun. All of these reduce my risk of cancer by a good deal. Not to zero, but all these actions reduce my odds of getting cancer. Again, not "winning the war" but considerable progress.
--PM
There's a hypothesis being developed that states that actually cancer is a lot more common than people might think, it's just that the immune system detects it and rejects most (maybe the vast majority?) of cancers before they become a clinically noticeable issue.
If suddenly we start catching cancers so early and start treatment, we might end up treating a lot of cancers that would have got destroyed by the immune system, thus possibly damaging folks far more with exposure to chemotherapy and unnecessary surgery.
I do think this theory has some basis in fact: once I had a growth on my face that I became certain was a basal cell carcinoma, the least dangerous form of skin cancer. However, before I managed to get medical attention on it, this growth got irritated, bled a little bit, and completely disappeared without even a scar. Standard treatment would have left a scar, so seemingly I was better off without any treatment.
I saw a TV documentary which blamed the same event on hantavirus. The story went that there were some very dry years, concentrating rodent populations in small areas where they all got infected with hantavirus.
Then, a rainy year came and the rodent population exploded faster than natural controls could kick in, and virtually all the rodents had hantavirus and spread it to the people. They also think that hantavirus mutated to become person-to-person contagious as well. There are actually weather records coincident with the events that supported this theory (the story goes).
The European population around at the time, because of greater genetic diversity, had significantly more resistance to it than the native populations, so the story went, and thus survived with more frequency.
--PM
Don't resist a sneeze, just go with it, if you want to minimize it. Open your mouth wide, open your throat, remove all obstructions. My sneezes this way just sound like loud fast exhalations. Instead of ah-choo it's a-hooo.
And do all this into your armpit. The loud part of the sneeze is the pressure buildup releasing. Don't provide any resistance, no pressure buildup. I bet it reduces droplet projection quite a lot to sneeze this way too.
To a lot of people this isn't even recognizable as a sneeze. They look at you like, "what just happened?"
--PM
Water from my showers, toilet, washing, whatever, that goes down the drain goes into my city water treatment plant. From there, it is cleaned and put back in the local river. It could be further cleaned and re-used for drinking/household re-borrowing.
So household use doesn't actually USE any water from the local environment that isn't returned. I borrow it and recycle it.
Landscape use (watering plants) does, however, USE water. It evaporates and isn't really recyclable for local use.
Household water use therefore need not be a drain on water resources. Landscape use pretty much is a drain.
--PeterM
We have a ready explanation for a lot of "sightings" of ghosts and UFOs and even some seemingly religious experiences: outright defective brains.
http://www.treatmentadvocacyce...
Website says 1.1% of people in US have schizophrenia, which can have delusions and hallucinations as symptoms. Even if *I* saw something I'd have to consider the possibility that my brain is simply defective as being, in all likelihood, more probable than whatever oddity it is that I'm seeing. Of which I have seen exactly 0 in my life so far.
I've known two people who have claimed to have seen either demons/devils or ghosts, and both of them have ended up in the metal health system, NOT for simply claiming to have seen things but rather from disorganized life behavior.
Given this, it's going to take some really extraordinary evidence to get me to believe in aliens, ghosts, or the supernatural.
I do believe in science, however, evidence of that abounds around me. In our technological society, I'm basically swimming in evidence of science.
--PM
So an attacker with access to the computer could turn on HP's built-in keylogger.
Couldn't that same attacker with access to the computer install and turn on his own keylogger, which is probably to his preference because it works with the rest of his toolkit seamlessly on any model of computer instead of just on HPs?
So, what's the impact exactly?
This reminds me of promiscuous mode on ethernet interfaces. Debugging tool with security implications that is turned off by default. Useful. Not a big deal. Useful in fact for spotting hackers, because they might turn it on and not hide it. You notice your interface is in promiscuous mode? You know something is up.
I just can't get worked up about this. It's like they just left some debugging tools around, and yes, nearly any debugging tool can be turned to evil uses, but so can the OS itself if it's been compromised by "a local attacker".
Sir,
You are factually inaccurate. It is not acid which cleaves sucrose into fructose and glucose. Instead, an enzyme in the small intestine called sucralase does this, and splits a water in order to do it. It doesn't take significant energy.
Reference:
http://healthyeating.sfgate.co...
It's actually amazingly difficult to find peanut butter that doesn't have added sugar. Recently I was in the store and had to grab 4 or 5 brands before I found one that didn't have sugar in it, and the print is small enough to be hard to read.
An amazing amount of work input simply to not be sugared up.
Let loose the class action lawsuits.
Every time some dumbass creditor loans money out to someone on strength of this stolen information and doesn't get paid, but turns around and trashes the person identified by the information, sue the creditor.
I know that if I were on a jury I'd be like, "You idiot creditor. You didn't get repaid because you didn't bother to really verify the identity of the person you gave money to. And then you think you're justified in trashing this innocent person's reputation? Well, I feel justified in handing that innocent person a LARGE payment for damages. Yeah, I think $1M ought to cover it."
Yes, what about unintended consequences.
Possibly, by simply taking a breath and letting it out, you MAY BE setting in chain a set of events that leads to a typhoon hitting Taiwan with massive loss of life. Weather is a chaotic system and this could truly happen.
So literally every breath you take could have dire unintended consequences. But you're powerless to foresee such so you don't worry about it, you can't possibly calculate the risks.
Similarly, I don't think giving bees resistance to neonics is going to turn them into human-deadly zombie plague producing killer insects that will wipe out all life on the planet. Might something bad happen? Yup. Should we forego this, and fail to produce resistant bees and let bees continue their downward spiral toward practical extinction as crop pollinators? No thanks. Breeding pesticide resistant bees seems less of a risk to me than decline of food production.