On a slightly less glib note, you might want to read The Tipping Point. As I recall, it explained how early HIV epidemics were in some areas provably seeded by just one or two individuals.
If you don't understand that the situation is even more precarious with Zika, which has mild symptoms and is much, MUCH more easily transmitted than HIV, then you do not understand the first thing about epidemiology. And for that matter, neither does anyone at WHO who claims to confidently know that there is no Zika in SC.
If the sky does indeed fall, neither you nor the WHO nor Netcraft will be able to confirm it until it is too late.
The WHO doesn't know. Please show me a quote where they've make a confident, definitive statement that there is no Zika in SC, and I'll show you a moron or someone who misquoted his superior.
This is insanity. This can manifest as nothing more than an extremely mild fever. And I would venture a guess that at least a thousand people drive from FL to SC every day.
I don't know you and I don't have any psychological need for you to be wrong... it's just that you are insisting that you KNOW something that cannot possibly be known.
This isn't like HIV. It's transmitted both sexually and via insects that are freakin' everywhere this time of year. I was bitten twice yesterday just going to the mailbox. Even a single case of Zika in SC, just one person who didn't even notice the slight fever they had a couple nights ago, is enough to seed a new outbreak.
The original subject was a bunch of hysterical lies about honeybees being a keystone species (instead of being non-native invaders heavily exploited by farmers in rather unnatural conditions) and that if we lost them we might lose our food supply (instead of the truth, that most foods would remain unaffected but a few fruits and vegetables might go up in price until a suitable replacement pollination organism or system was discovered.)
I responded by debunking this insanity (and that poster has turned out to be very gracious and reasonable, though his original post is still modded up) and emphasizing the very grave dangers of Zika as opposed to the petty and imagined grievances of the overeager Planeteers around here. And your response to this has been: SC SC SC SC SC SC SC. Ok, fine. Yes, I think that SC should be included in as part of an aggressive short-term campaign to contain and hopefully eradicate the Zika reservoir while long term solutions are pursued. I think that SC is less important than FL, but it's still important because it's not *that* far away and people move around all the time and this disease is extremely difficult for authorities to accurately track due to its mild nature. And I think that your magical powers that allow you to determine there is absolutely no Zika in SC are not entirely convincing.
More centrally, I think it's more important to err on the side of being too aggressive vs. not aggressive enough. Do you disagree here? I'm possibly willing to have my mind change if, for instance, there is an endangered species in the affected area that might be driven to extinction with even one or two years of heavy spraying. In the absence of such evidence, in terms of temporary and localized damage to the ecology using existing well-tested insecticides, I think there is very little to worry about and I think the concern for this potential transient, localized damage that many slashdotters are displaying is highly misguided, because this disease could very well affect millions of people if it keeps spreading.
Precautionary principle. First, kill the goddamn bugs and the virus; second, worry about the frogs and the native mosquito species. Lies modded +5 insightful need vigorous debunking. Do you find that any of that is unreasonable of me?
Again with the broad, hand-waving conflation. There is no single chemical labeled "pesticide." Different chemicals have differing risks and different levels of appropriate use.
The bottom line is the likely cost in dollars and human suffering from Zika, if it's not contained, is staggering. (Maybe not as staggering as malaria, but it's pretty bad all the same. It's not like the tropics need another lifelong debilitating disease to deal with.) There are long term solutions (vaccines, genetic and sterile insect techniques to specifically eliminate the non-native a. egypti species) but the only sane short term option is aggressive containment and hope we can wipe out the reservoir before it becomes established and self-perpetuating. Failing that, we can at least slow down the spread a bit so that we have more time to prepare the long term solutions.
It's not like this is the first time any of these chemicals has been used, and it's not like we're blanketing vast swathes of sparsely populated land. The potential downsides of erring on the side of too aggressive, over the course of the next year or two, clearly outweighs the potential downsides of erring on the side of not aggressive enough.
Also, you really must explain your magical powers of disease detection to me. It seems like it would be pretty useful ability have. Or perhaps it only functions with very mild, exotic diseases that people rarely go to the doctor for and is even more rarely tested for?
Anyway, congratulations on being able to certify that there's no Zika in SC. I'm sure WHO will be thrilled to know.
It seems that I'm not quite as obsessed with SC as you. If you are going insist that the conversation cannot be widened to non-SC cases, then I'm going to insist that we limit the conversation even further to the 200 yard spraying in question: This one specific incident is not big enough to matter. I don't give a shit. You shouldn't give a shit. Other aspects of this discussion do matter, like the hysterical falsehoods that are *still* modded up to +5 insightful, which I was initially replying to when you chimed in. Or perhaps you forgot?
I may have been wrong regarding dragonfly larva. Seeing as how they would be eliminated in tandem with mosquitoes though, it seems hard to justify any claim that this would significantly disrupt the wider ecology. If you've evidence that larvicides affect dragonfiles worse than mosquitoes, please present it.
A. egypti needs to be eradicated everywhere it can be found, native or non-native. If you value insect life more than human life, then that is a fantastic reason for me to no longer continue this conversation, but as I've already established in the first paragraph the extremely narrow focus you've insisted on taking here isn't worth pursuing in the first place.
You may want to work on your attentiveness level a bit, perhaps quote a bit more, it can help keep track of things.
Projection at its finest. This reply may be shorter because you are either intentionally trolling by saying these things or you don't care to read or engage in what I'm saying at all.
Nope, there's a deficit of facts here, as you making up a conjecture (just like you did for sjgames) about some imagined fear you think I have regarding chemicals, when in reality, if you examine my words instead of your fabricated concerns, you'll see that you're the one who is living in fear.
If you have zero concerns about the chemicals then why do you appear to oppose their use? I don't have time for these intellectually dishonest games. If you're against spraying then presumably there's a reason for it.
Communicating badly is not a valid means of winning a debate. Explain your position or you can go play your mental masturbation games in solitude.
Yes, that's why your above standard about eradication, when my remarks were about spraying, was in error, since again, I was talking about
So far, you're not talking about anything. This is pathetic sophistry from an Anonymous Coward doing a good job of living up to his name. I explained my a. egypti eradication bit prior to you making that statement. If you can't be bothered to read my full explanation of what I support and/or explain your own position in any clarity, that does not constitute you winning any magical internet points. It just means you suck at communicating.
If you don't think your thinking can be revealed by your communications, you have a severe problem with your own honesty.
I'm a misanthrope and I'm not pregnant and I sincerely doubt I'm going to become pregnant anytime soon. Ergo, I have no reason to be afraid of Zika. And you're calling me a liar? You think I am pregnant and I'm lying about it? Uh, ok. Sure. Whatever. Believe what you want to believe, but the fact is there's no rational reason for me to fear anything.
If someone wanted to argue that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, I would argue about that too. And I'd be just as colorful. Would that mean I'm afraid of lung cancer, even though I don't smoke and none of my friends or family smoke?
I use emotionally charged language because ignorant jackasses annoy me (not because I'm afraid of anything) and I thought slashdot was a bit more rational and scientifically literate than most internet communities. If you think my arguments are invalid because I prefer to talk in a non-boring tone of voice, you're free to do so. This would be called the ad hominem fallacy. Perhaps you've heard of it?...you fucking moron. (Please note I put in that last sentence primarily to test whether you mistakenly believe that it constitutes an ad hominem. Because it would be pretty amusing if you did.)
Really? I thought it was pretty clear. Namely that a trip to the doctor (with its associated hazards, low as they may be, ranging from a simple car accident, to an infection arising in the office itself), is more of a risk. Was there some reason you didn't grasp this? But your bombastic insistence that you know better isn't a good thing, as I said, it provides the exact opposite effect. Such arrogance doesn't point to thoughtfulness, it points against it.
I'm not even sure what I can say about this point. You fabricated this entire tangent, so I explain in detail why I'm NOT in favor of anyone going to the doctor as a result of this Zika scare, and then you claim this response as proof that you're correct in your erroneous and incoherent assessment of *me* and not my argument, which you're still ducking, because you apparently prefer to use ad hominems fallacies instead of rational debate, and the ad hominem you've selected is that my tone of voi
Insert "known to be" if you must. The poster I was replying to clearly was referring to CCD, a problem that primarily affects non-native honeybees.
I'm not saying my back yard is conclusive proof of anything. I'm simply saying that the burden of proof is on *you* (or the poster I was originally replying to) if you want to assert that "Colony Collapse Disorder" is affecting a species that it is not known to affect (or that this article was even about), or the even larger claim that it is affecting a specific keystone pollinator species without which certain North American plant populations will suffer.
Legitimate question: Has slashdot always been infested with so many scientifically illiterate people unable to follow simple, logical arguments? I appear to be one of the only people here bothering to point out that the death of non-native agricultural honeybees is not a significant environmental problem. It isn't even a particularly dire food supply problem, since most of our staples are not dependent on honeybees for pollination.
What do I receive for my efforts? Zero upmods, many detractors doubling-down on their ignorant or naive replies to me, and the scientifically absurd claims about our food supply or ecology being destroyed remain at +5 Insightful.
I specifically attached a "just out of curiosity" to that bit. It's a side tangent I choose not to fully explore in the interests of brevity, but it was relevant to the larger (but still secondary) point I was making about the suicide argument being a pathetic and doomed-to-fail appeal to a nanny state mentality.
The government clearly has a role in preventing people from harming each other (and in that area, you have a reasonable although not bulletproof argument that gun availability is causing significant suffering in America.) The government's role in preventing people from harming themselves is much less obvious. I think it sets a worrying precedent and is doomed to failure anyway because, as I said, there are plenty of other highly effective methods of suicide (or other kinds of self-harm) that the government cannot realistically combat.
It's "already been proven to be harmful" that every single anti-mosquito chemical ever made is detrimental to humans or the environment? Yeah, try again. There's no a priori reason to suspect that a chemical targeting the water based larva stage, for example, would have any bad effect on other insects or humans except to the extent that predators that heavily depend on mosquitoes for food might go a bit hungry (but only in the areas being sprayed, which constitutes a small fraction of all land area.)
Several world health experts are already predicting that Zika will become a worldwide phenomenon if it keeps spreading at the current rate, due to the widespread distribution of aedes egypti. I don't particularly give a shit about dengue or other diseases in the context of this debate (except that they form an even more convincing argument that in addition to short term spraying we really need a long term plan to eradicate aedes egypti with sterile insect techniques and gene splicing, which are extremely safe and pose no danger to the environment whatsoever given that aedes egypti is an invasive species.)
Zika is much different than dengue or other a. egypti vector diseases because it is much milder and the harmful effects are delayed so it is much harder to track it until it's too late. It may also end up being more virulent or transmissable among aedes egypti. We're not yet sure. We can't be sure, until it's too late to nip this in the bud.
Tell me, when a fly lands on your TV, do you blow it away with a shotgun
No, but I also don't conflate "shotguns" and "every single insecticide ever made". You do realize that among North American insects with wide distribution, no other insect has a water based larva stage utilizing little temporary pools of stagnant water like mosquitoes do? There's every reason to suspect these small pools can be targeted with chemicals that 1. do not affect other insects and 2. will be diluted to inconsequentially small concentrations in larger bodies of water.
I think that broad spectrum insecticides that are highly effective against adult form mosquitoes are completely appropriate for hotspots around known cases and larvacides not known to be especially toxic to other life forms should be used liberally everywhere there are humans present (I'm not sure on the status on these. They might be somewhat toxic to amphibians, but if there aren't any known endangered species in an area I'd say it's worth it regardless) until the Zika reservoir appears to have burnt itself out (a big question here is whether any non-human animals are going to be effective reservoirs) and/or until a vaccination or major aedes egypti eradication campaign can be started.
What's your counterargument? Be conservative even though we know the reservoir still exists and that the pesticides aren't known to be particularly dangerous to humans and risk allowing this thing to go global before we have countermeasures? (Forgive me for being USA-centric but I think there's more international travel here than in Brazil.) I can crunch some back of the envelope numbers on this if you want, but I somehow doubt you're interested in an actual cost/risk/benefit analysis.
We don't even know the extent of the damage in Brazil yet. They suspect that the known cases of microcephaly (which is a very loose percentile-defined diagnosis) are only the obvious ones; there appears to be brain damage in some non-microcephalic infants and who knows, even the apparently healthy ones might end up having their intelligence a bit stunted. We won't know until 15+ years from now, when researchers can test the mature IQs of everyone born to a Zika-infected mother. This could turn out to be a phenomenon like leaded gasoline, something that silently dragged down the IQs of hundreds of millions of people for decades before anything was done about it.
But no, forget all of that. Let's focus on the real problem here. It's absolutely imperative that we cater to some extra-cautious pseudoscientific crap that says that the environment and/or humans will be horribly, permanently traumatized by locally spraying a little more of the same insecticides that have been in steady use for decades.
PPS: I've discussed elsewhere in this many-forked thread about how the point of spraying to keep Zika at bay is to buy time until a vaccine can be developed and to buy some time so that the argument can be won with all the breathtakingly stupid people who are opposing the use of sterile insect technique and gene splicing to eradicate aedes egypti, a non-native species that was introduced to the Americas by humans and is responsible for a staggering toll of death and suffering every year across the globe.
As a quick addendum, heavy metals are of course still a major ongoing issue (one that I personally think should take priority even over the anti- global warming campaigns) and I believe I recently saw a headline where the WHO was saying that they are projecting Zika will go worldwide. Not sure if I mentioned that yet, but it was implicit in one of my previous cost-benefit posts and is due to the wide distribution of Aedes egypti.
You seem to think that I think this doom is particularly worse than our existing dooms. It isn't. It's just one more thing on the heap of things that make life shitty for a lot of people and the cost-benefit analysis clearly indicates its in everyone's best interest if we nip this in the bud.
Completely pathetic that you accuse me of fear for recognizing an actual, scientifically proven threat instead of caving in to the hyperbole and lies based on some very weak evidence that there might be some very mild negative consequences from a short term spraying campaign. You are the one who is being hysterical and apparently living in fear of 'teh chemicals'. All I'm doing is pointing out some objective facts.
I think going to the doctor because you are specifically afraid of the Zika virus is more dangerous than the virus is, let alone the pesticides.
I don't even know what that means. I haven't gone to the doctor. I'm not advocating anyone go to the doctor. Doctors are grossly overqualified and overpaid as it is. You should be able to receive any vaccine you want from any pharmacist and the government should subsidize every penny of it. This is an opinion I hold because I am a non-moron capable of comprehending elementary school levels of epidemiology and economics. That is all.
I'm not afraid because I'm not pregnant and none of the people I know are planning to get pregnant anytime soon. I am just not in denial. I am just not anti-science, or anti-math as you appear to be. I'm not passionate about Zika. I'm passionate about ignorant jackasses spouting nonsense being modded up to the max on pro-science websites.
But please, keep practicing your ESP. I'm sure you'll get it right someday.
High-gun ownership states have suicide rates just about double that of low-gun ownership states.
I think that might have something to do with the fact that most high gun ownership states are sexually repressive, high-poverty shitholes. The reason for high gun ownership in these states is cultural tradition that I don't feel like dissecting at the moment, but It's pretty obvious that the causation isn't flowing in the direction you imply.
Some of the most common means of attempting suicides have a success rate of around 5-10%.
And people do tend to realize, at least on a subconscious level, that guns are serious business wereas pills aren't so much.
The most important stat here is ease of gun purchase vs. overall suicide rate. The USA is well known for having some of the most liberal gun purchasing laws among all first world nations (even in blue states, it's really not hard at all. In those states, it's primarily the carry permits that can be tricky to get.) and our suicide level is a depressing... 50th. We're below nations like: Japan, South Korea, the Czech republic, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Russia, Serbia, Iceland, Finland, Belgium, France...
You'll notice that those are all highly or medium-highly developed countries. Many of them have social safety nets that put ours to shame. Several of them are highly religious, and several of them are highly non-religious.
The one thing that they all have in common, I believe, is that it's harder to buy a gun and bullets in any of them than it is in most places in America.
The real argument with guns is violent crime rate. There's a real debate to be had there. The people who bring up suicide rate are not only being disingenuous by omitting the most important statistic (USA is merely 50th in the world, and that's omitting many countries where the reporting is subpar) but they are pandering to the most pathetic kind of unthinking nanny state impulse:
First off, do you or don't you support the right to die for people who are terminally ill? Just out of curiosity. Second, do you know what are even more effective than guns? Hydrogen sulfide generated through common household products or carbon monoxide from charcoal briquettes. As long as your tank is big and your bag doesn't have a hole in it, even helium is far more likely to work, and would be entirely painless. And I can easily think of a half a dozen more ways that don't suffer from the lingering question marks that gunshots do. Unless or until the entire internet becomes highly censored, you simply can't keep these techniques a secret any more.
Bang the GF, cigarette and then straight to sleep.
No, it's an excellent question that I've been asking myself a lot lately, so I hope you'll pardon if I suddenly wax introspective for a moment here.
Educated otherwise rational people never googled this. These are the sort of people who'd google some esoteric detail they weren't quite sure about but never verified something that kept them up at night. I'm not sure the psychology of this but it's interesting.
That sort of surprised me too... back when I was a teenager. Holy shit. No one has any idea what they are talking about! The entire social universe is an ocean of nonsense attenuated by tiny, precious nuggets of misleading and much-abused truth. People assured me I would grow out of this phase, but each passing year offered another mountain of evidence. The thing that flabbergasts me more these days is how anything is ever accomplished.
I personally don't see people do what I just did, concede that I lost the argument nor do I see productive use of the upper hand.
I almost never saw it, but It's happening more often, a lot more often now. I've recently started posting in forums again (I hadn't bothered in the past few years) and I don't know if it's me or if it's the internet, but I've started winning arguments. Like, maybe even as much as a quarter of the people I argue with. If you exclude the people who simply stop responding, the success rate rises to perhaps two thirds. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
The obvious choice is to get on Youtube asap and become a professional misanthropic bitch artist instead of just giving it away for free. Given that I'm still out of work, after I just wasted years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars chasing a white collar world that turned out to be a Dillbertesque hellhole (and I specifically went for areas that were supposed to be insulated from all that bullshit! God damn it. It's actually much worse than Dilbert because at least the PHB occasionally acknowledges that he's being insane / unreasonable)...
...ah well, the 'buts' aren't interesting. The transition to video is tricky and there are a lot of distractions in my life. But I should try anyway.
It makes me wonder if a lot of people are in discussion not for advancing their own and other's knowledge and thus collective decision making power and obviously these are political decisions or if they're in it for ego.
It's some inscrutable blend of all that, I think. Plus a dash of cussedness, a very large portion of mindless self-comfort and many less easily identifiable factors. We desperately need Seldon's psychohistory to figure it out. An instinctual approach is clearly insufficient.
I think that a 200 yard radius of concentrated spraying around known cases is a reasonable supplement in a larger scale campaign. If that's all they're doing, then they're morons.
Make an ass of myself? I never said the good people running SC aren't for the most part drooling morons (I've actually seen a significant stack of evidence to the contrary, firsthand.) I said that your prescribed plan, which specifically excluded all spraying except immediately arounding the victims' houses ("limit the coverage to just around the victims' homes"), was extremely dumb.
What's it called when you pretend that someone wasn't talking about your proposal, but was instead talking about the proposal of a third party? Uhhh... "inverse strawman" maybe? I don't think there's an official name for that particular informal logical fallacy of debate. I do believe you just invented a new one.
Congratulations.
But on the side note, if this was all some kind of miscommunication, then I'm happy we're in furious agreement.
Also, the claim that spending money to "buy people in Africa better houses" instead of using the money to eradicate aedes egypti would be a much bigger improvement in their lives... Do you want me to crunch the numbers on that? Do you REALLY want me to crunch the numbers?
Paypal me $10 and I'll stay up all night showing you in detail why this is the stupidest fucking thing I've heard this year.
The reason I want to do spraying is that I have a basic understanding of statistics, epidemiology and dangers that modern insecticides pose to mammals like us. If you think the pesticides are more dangerous than the virus, you clearly have not crunched the numbers.
1% of pregnancy infections translating to microcephaly at birth (the current estimation) is actually an underestimation of the danger here. Microcephaly uses a percentile-based definition, so it's entirely possible that a much higher percentage of babies will end up with smaller brains and smaller IQs (but not quite at the microcephalic cutoff). At this point, researchers also believe that
many of the babies with normal-sized heads have nonetheless suffered some level of developmental brain damage. We have no idea how bad the damage is going to be until these kids grow up and their intelligence levels are measured as adults. For all we know, 90% of children will suffer some measurable level of decreased potential.
And the rate of pregnant women being bitten by mosquitoes? In Florida and most of the rest of the southeast? I would say roughly 100%, unless they stay indoors from 4pm-9am or drench themselves in DEET every day. You think 100% of pregnant women will do that? Do you think even 50% of pregnant women would bother doing that?
The media is, if anything, underselling this. If this thing goes worldwide before vaccination campaigns or before major anti-aedes egypti campaigns can start, the toll in aggregate human misery and spoiled potential will be staggering. We might be able to put the genie back in the bottle after the extent of the damage becomes clear but in dozens of third world countries it will simply be one more disease keeping people oppressed and miserable.
You have to distinguish arguments that you disagree with but are respectable vs. the arguments that have no redeeming value whatsoever and are based on some combination of lies or highly deranged thinking.
Do you think it's wrong to ever insult Trump's[1] character? Why or why not?
This doesn't necessarily mean screaming at everyone in your way. If an asteroid is heading towards Earth but some people think we shouldn't do anything about it because it's God's will and they're wiling to go to war to stop us from trying to blow it up, well, fine. If telling them soothing lies will do the trick, then tell them soothing lies whilst you build the missile to save us all. If screaming at them that they're dangerous imbeciles will do the trick, well then do that.
In other words, do what it takes to achieve the necessary goal without slowing yourself down by paying undue respect to the Dangerously Deluded Opinion. At certain extreme points, the basic bedrock goal of civil discourse can and should be ignored, because discourse with a completely irrational person who refuses to engage with reality is counterproductive. The jackasses campaigning against the ridiculously safe aedes egypti extermination proposal in Key West constitute one such example of this phenomenon, though I would of course make one last ditch attempt to educate any of them I personally talked to.
But if that fails, I'm just going to tell them that foodbabe recently discovered that hemlock prevents autism and walk away.
(It has to be 100% organic hemlock, though. None of this artificially fertilized crap.)
1. Or Hilary's. But I think I'll take a chance here that you're not one of the 7 people in this country who are very sensitive to environmental issues and think that Trump is a swell guy.
Kill all aedes egypti, yes. It is by far the most dangerous species and is non-native.
I would also support killing it in its native territory in Africa because of the tragic and massive cost in human misery that malaria has caused (and if there turns out to be an ecological hole, 'loan' them some of our mosquitoes instead.) We can argue about this if you wish and to a limited extent I can respect an extremely conservative attitude is against ever eliminating a native species.
What I cannot respect are arguments that we should stop or tone down spraying to reduce the Zika reservoir (a temporary measure that could nonetheless prevent this thing from going global), or that we shouldn't kill every single aedes egypti in the new world. I'm unfaimilar of the specifics that make a. egypti a dangerous vector for multiple diseases but I'm assuming it's a proclivity for humans (or larger mammals in general), a tendency to feed on multiple individuals, and/or a tendency to inject more anticoagulant fluids or filtered plasma than other species, but whatever the reason it's definitely the big one we have to worry about.
I don't know that the larger context is people trying to wipe out 12 species of mosquitoes. A few under-informed people on the internet are saying that, maybe, or saying "all mosquitoes" as a matter of laziness or hyperbole, but I've never heard a practical proposal. The only plausible extinction-level tools we currently possess have are species-specific, and there's no reason for us to use these to target the species of mosquito that aren't known to transmit disease. Many of them don't even feed on humans.
What I *have* seen in this discuss is that many people are arguing against both of those essential things (short term spraying to wipe out or at least contain the Zika reservoir, and then a long term eradication program of all a. egypti in the Americas), both on and off of slashdot, and I think that the situation has become dire enough that reasonable-minded people need to start talking tough because in a couple years we may not be able to contain it even if we wanted to.
If in a few years it turns out we have some native mosquitoes left that are carrying diseases then I'll be happy to have a civil debate with you about whether or not they should be eradicated but until then, I'm afraid this is a fairly black and white thing. The opposing side in this debate simply isn't one that I can respect.
Also, you seem to think I'm being deceptively magnanimous about the honeybee thing but I'm actually being fairly generous. You might want to shift your focus at this stage, but the points you were attempting to make in that post do NOT stand. The crux of your argument was that honeybees are keystone species due to their status as pollinators. And native pollinators are keystone species, fair enough. However:
1. We've no particular information that unusually large numbers of them were killed by recent mosquito spraying (which, in terms of square mileage, constitutes a pretty small fraction of vegetation-covered ground.
2. Native pollinators aren't "on their back leg" and "already stressed", unless you've been reading some disturbing new studies on bumblebees. In which case, the ones in my yard haven't heard the news; they're everywhere.
I'll settle for excessive or even "stupid" spraying over the "no spraying" that so many people around here seem to be advocating. This is a worldwide health crisis still in its early stages, with the very real potential to cause millions of cases of permanent and profound mental retardation.
If we can keep this disease at bay using chemical pesticides for just a few years while safe vaccines are developed and while we (hopefully) win the argument with the anti-science nutjobs who are against sterile insect technique or gene splicing ("because that's how you make superheroes and we don't want any super-mosquitoes, dummy") to kill off non-native fiends like aedes egypti, we could save so many people from a lifetime of misery and hundred billions of dollars we'll otherwise have to squander for decades and decades to come if this thing becomes established everywhere.
1. I believe your arguments are still misguided. We're talking about a short term effort using the tools at hand to eliminate the Zika reservoirs. Mass spraying does not blanket the countryside and regardless it's been used off and on in the southeast for decades now--a couple more years aren't going to cause any permanent damage that we haven't inflicted already. But people are still arguing against this completely sane effort to spare thousands of children and parents a lifetime of misery, and billions of dollars we'll otherwise have to spend combating the disease and taking care of the microcephalic or otherwise brain-damaged individuals for the rest of their lives.
2. Over the long term, more targeted tools like radiation-based sterile insect technique or a gene splicing scheme are likely to be safer and more effective for the complete eradication of, at minimum, all dangerous non-native species of mosquito like aedes egypti. But even this completely sane and ecologically friendly option is being demonized, even here on slashdot where I once saw some fearmongering modded up to +5 that had a comic book level understanding of science: "OMG what if we accidentally created the UBER MOSQUITO??!"
I'm not arguing for ecological destruction. I'm arguing for sane responses from what is supposed to be one of the more scientifically literate communities on the internet. There really needs to be some pushback against this nonsense. We might be able to have a reasonable disagreement with plausible arguments on both sides if you want to discuss the eradication of aedes egypti in, say, the Congo. But in Florida? No. It's obscene to suggest we should allow this species to continue thriving here, or that we should do nothing to wipe out the Zika reservoir in the short term, to buy us some time until a vaccine can be developed.
Also, as I've explained elsewhere, honeybees are not native to North America, the limited local killing of a few million honeybees is not likely to exacerbate the CCD problem among the billions of honeybees used nationwide, and if you're still REALLY concerned about collateral damage we could always switch to a larvacide which works only on mosquito larva (I don't think we have any other insect that lays eggs in standing water like that) or even better use the sterilize insect technique or genetically modified mosquitoes to kill off only the specific, invasive species of mosquito that are responsible for most of the disease scares here.
But for some curious reason, the doomsayers don't want to suggest any one of these sensible alternatives. In fact, they've protested on Key West about a proposal to eliminate dangerous, non-native mosquitoes using species-specific techniques and even here on slashdot I've seen laughable comic book level "what if we accidentally created a super-mosquito" arguments being modded up to +5.
Slashdot Mirror
On a slightly less glib note, you might want to read The Tipping Point. As I recall, it explained how early HIV epidemics were in some areas provably seeded by just one or two individuals.
If you don't understand that the situation is even more precarious with Zika, which has mild symptoms and is much, MUCH more easily transmitted than HIV, then you do not understand the first thing about epidemiology. And for that matter, neither does anyone at WHO who claims to confidently know that there is no Zika in SC.
If the sky does indeed fall, neither you nor the WHO nor Netcraft will be able to confirm it until it is too late.
That was just an acorn. The sky is doing fine.
And so are the frogs and bumblebees.
(Or at least, they're not significantly worse off than they were at this time last year.)
The WHO doesn't know. Please show me a quote where they've make a confident, definitive statement that there is no Zika in SC, and I'll show you a moron or someone who misquoted his superior.
This is insanity. This can manifest as nothing more than an extremely mild fever. And I would venture a guess that at least a thousand people drive from FL to SC every day.
I don't know you and I don't have any psychological need for you to be wrong... it's just that you are insisting that you KNOW something that cannot possibly be known.
This isn't like HIV. It's transmitted both sexually and via insects that are freakin' everywhere this time of year. I was bitten twice yesterday just going to the mailbox. Even a single case of Zika in SC, just one person who didn't even notice the slight fever they had a couple nights ago, is enough to seed a new outbreak.
The original subject was a bunch of hysterical lies about honeybees being a keystone species (instead of being non-native invaders heavily exploited by farmers in rather unnatural conditions) and that if we lost them we might lose our food supply (instead of the truth, that most foods would remain unaffected but a few fruits and vegetables might go up in price until a suitable replacement pollination organism or system was discovered.)
I responded by debunking this insanity (and that poster has turned out to be very gracious and reasonable, though his original post is still modded up) and emphasizing the very grave dangers of Zika as opposed to the petty and imagined grievances of the overeager Planeteers around here. And your response to this has been: SC SC SC SC SC SC SC. Ok, fine. Yes, I think that SC should be included in as part of an aggressive short-term campaign to contain and hopefully eradicate the Zika reservoir while long term solutions are pursued. I think that SC is less important than FL, but it's still important because it's not *that* far away and people move around all the time and this disease is extremely difficult for authorities to accurately track due to its mild nature. And I think that your magical powers that allow you to determine there is absolutely no Zika in SC are not entirely convincing.
More centrally, I think it's more important to err on the side of being too aggressive vs. not aggressive enough. Do you disagree here? I'm possibly willing to have my mind change if, for instance, there is an endangered species in the affected area that might be driven to extinction with even one or two years of heavy spraying. In the absence of such evidence, in terms of temporary and localized damage to the ecology using existing well-tested insecticides, I think there is very little to worry about and I think the concern for this potential transient, localized damage that many slashdotters are displaying is highly misguided, because this disease could very well affect millions of people if it keeps spreading.
Precautionary principle. First, kill the goddamn bugs and the virus; second, worry about the frogs and the native mosquito species. Lies modded +5 insightful need vigorous debunking. Do you find that any of that is unreasonable of me?
Again with the broad, hand-waving conflation. There is no single chemical labeled "pesticide." Different chemicals have differing risks and different levels of appropriate use.
The bottom line is the likely cost in dollars and human suffering from Zika, if it's not contained, is staggering. (Maybe not as staggering as malaria, but it's pretty bad all the same. It's not like the tropics need another lifelong debilitating disease to deal with.) There are long term solutions (vaccines, genetic and sterile insect techniques to specifically eliminate the non-native a. egypti species) but the only sane short term option is aggressive containment and hope we can wipe out the reservoir before it becomes established and self-perpetuating. Failing that, we can at least slow down the spread a bit so that we have more time to prepare the long term solutions.
It's not like this is the first time any of these chemicals has been used, and it's not like we're blanketing vast swathes of sparsely populated land. The potential downsides of erring on the side of too aggressive, over the course of the next year or two, clearly outweighs the potential downsides of erring on the side of not aggressive enough.
Also, you really must explain your magical powers of disease detection to me. It seems like it would be pretty useful ability have. Or perhaps it only functions with very mild, exotic diseases that people rarely go to the doctor for and is even more rarely tested for?
Anyway, congratulations on being able to certify that there's no Zika in SC. I'm sure WHO will be thrilled to know.
It seems that I'm not quite as obsessed with SC as you. If you are going insist that the conversation cannot be widened to non-SC cases, then I'm going to insist that we limit the conversation even further to the 200 yard spraying in question: This one specific incident is not big enough to matter. I don't give a shit. You shouldn't give a shit. Other aspects of this discussion do matter, like the hysterical falsehoods that are *still* modded up to +5 insightful, which I was initially replying to when you chimed in. Or perhaps you forgot?
I may have been wrong regarding dragonfly larva. Seeing as how they would be eliminated in tandem with mosquitoes though, it seems hard to justify any claim that this would significantly disrupt the wider ecology. If you've evidence that larvicides affect dragonfiles worse than mosquitoes, please present it.
A. egypti needs to be eradicated everywhere it can be found, native or non-native. If you value insect life more than human life, then that is a fantastic reason for me to no longer continue this conversation, but as I've already established in the first paragraph the extremely narrow focus you've insisted on taking here isn't worth pursuing in the first place.
You may want to work on your attentiveness level a bit, perhaps quote a bit more, it can help keep track of things.
Projection at its finest. This reply may be shorter because you are either intentionally trolling by saying these things or you don't care to read or engage in what I'm saying at all.
Nope, there's a deficit of facts here, as you making up a conjecture (just like you did for sjgames) about some imagined fear you think I have regarding chemicals, when in reality, if you examine my words instead of your fabricated concerns, you'll see that you're the one who is living in fear.
If you have zero concerns about the chemicals then why do you appear to oppose their use? I don't have time for these intellectually dishonest games. If you're against spraying then presumably there's a reason for it.
Communicating badly is not a valid means of winning a debate. Explain your position or you can go play your mental masturbation games in solitude.
Yes, that's why your above standard about eradication, when my remarks were about spraying, was in error, since again, I was talking about
So far, you're not talking about anything. This is pathetic sophistry from an Anonymous Coward doing a good job of living up to his name. I explained my a. egypti eradication bit prior to you making that statement. If you can't be bothered to read my full explanation of what I support and/or explain your own position in any clarity, that does not constitute you winning any magical internet points. It just means you suck at communicating.
If you don't think your thinking can be revealed by your communications, you have a severe problem with your own honesty.
I'm a misanthrope and I'm not pregnant and I sincerely doubt I'm going to become pregnant anytime soon. Ergo, I have no reason to be afraid of Zika. And you're calling me a liar? You think I am pregnant and I'm lying about it? Uh, ok. Sure. Whatever. Believe what you want to believe, but the fact is there's no rational reason for me to fear anything.
...you fucking moron. (Please note I put in that last sentence primarily to test whether you mistakenly believe that it constitutes an ad hominem. Because it would be pretty amusing if you did.)
If someone wanted to argue that smoking doesn't cause lung cancer, I would argue about that too. And I'd be just as colorful. Would that mean I'm afraid of lung cancer, even though I don't smoke and none of my friends or family smoke?
I use emotionally charged language because ignorant jackasses annoy me (not because I'm afraid of anything) and I thought slashdot was a bit more rational and scientifically literate than most internet communities. If you think my arguments are invalid because I prefer to talk in a non-boring tone of voice, you're free to do so. This would be called the ad hominem fallacy. Perhaps you've heard of it?
Really? I thought it was pretty clear. Namely that a trip to the doctor (with its associated hazards, low as they may be, ranging from a simple car accident, to an infection arising in the office itself), is more of a risk. Was there some reason you didn't grasp this? But your bombastic insistence that you know better isn't a good thing, as I said, it provides the exact opposite effect. Such arrogance doesn't point to thoughtfulness, it points against it.
I'm not even sure what I can say about this point. You fabricated this entire tangent, so I explain in detail why I'm NOT in favor of anyone going to the doctor as a result of this Zika scare, and then you claim this response as proof that you're correct in your erroneous and incoherent assessment of *me* and not my argument, which you're still ducking, because you apparently prefer to use ad hominems fallacies instead of rational debate, and the ad hominem you've selected is that my tone of voi
Insert "known to be" if you must. The poster I was replying to clearly was referring to CCD, a problem that primarily affects non-native honeybees.
I'm not saying my back yard is conclusive proof of anything. I'm simply saying that the burden of proof is on *you* (or the poster I was originally replying to) if you want to assert that "Colony Collapse Disorder" is affecting a species that it is not known to affect (or that this article was even about), or the even larger claim that it is affecting a specific keystone pollinator species without which certain North American plant populations will suffer.
Legitimate question: Has slashdot always been infested with so many scientifically illiterate people unable to follow simple, logical arguments? I appear to be one of the only people here bothering to point out that the death of non-native agricultural honeybees is not a significant environmental problem. It isn't even a particularly dire food supply problem, since most of our staples are not dependent on honeybees for pollination.
What do I receive for my efforts? Zero upmods, many detractors doubling-down on their ignorant or naive replies to me, and the scientifically absurd claims about our food supply or ecology being destroyed remain at +5 Insightful.
I specifically attached a "just out of curiosity" to that bit. It's a side tangent I choose not to fully explore in the interests of brevity, but it was relevant to the larger (but still secondary) point I was making about the suicide argument being a pathetic and doomed-to-fail appeal to a nanny state mentality.
The government clearly has a role in preventing people from harming each other (and in that area, you have a reasonable although not bulletproof argument that gun availability is causing significant suffering in America.) The government's role in preventing people from harming themselves is much less obvious. I think it sets a worrying precedent and is doomed to failure anyway because, as I said, there are plenty of other highly effective methods of suicide (or other kinds of self-harm) that the government cannot realistically combat.
Several world health experts are already predicting that Zika will become a worldwide phenomenon if it keeps spreading at the current rate, due to the widespread distribution of aedes egypti. I don't particularly give a shit about dengue or other diseases in the context of this debate (except that they form an even more convincing argument that in addition to short term spraying we really need a long term plan to eradicate aedes egypti with sterile insect techniques and gene splicing, which are extremely safe and pose no danger to the environment whatsoever given that aedes egypti is an invasive species.)
Zika is much different than dengue or other a. egypti vector diseases because it is much milder and the harmful effects are delayed so it is much harder to track it until it's too late. It may also end up being more virulent or transmissable among aedes egypti. We're not yet sure. We can't be sure, until it's too late to nip this in the bud.
Tell me, when a fly lands on your TV, do you blow it away with a shotgun
No, but I also don't conflate "shotguns" and "every single insecticide ever made". You do realize that among North American insects with wide distribution, no other insect has a water based larva stage utilizing little temporary pools of stagnant water like mosquitoes do? There's every reason to suspect these small pools can be targeted with chemicals that 1. do not affect other insects and 2. will be diluted to inconsequentially small concentrations in larger bodies of water.
I think that broad spectrum insecticides that are highly effective against adult form mosquitoes are completely appropriate for hotspots around known cases and larvacides not known to be especially toxic to other life forms should be used liberally everywhere there are humans present (I'm not sure on the status on these. They might be somewhat toxic to amphibians, but if there aren't any known endangered species in an area I'd say it's worth it regardless) until the Zika reservoir appears to have burnt itself out (a big question here is whether any non-human animals are going to be effective reservoirs) and/or until a vaccination or major aedes egypti eradication campaign can be started.
What's your counterargument? Be conservative even though we know the reservoir still exists and that the pesticides aren't known to be particularly dangerous to humans and risk allowing this thing to go global before we have countermeasures? (Forgive me for being USA-centric but I think there's more international travel here than in Brazil.) I can crunch some back of the envelope numbers on this if you want, but I somehow doubt you're interested in an actual cost/risk/benefit analysis.
We don't even know the extent of the damage in Brazil yet. They suspect that the known cases of microcephaly (which is a very loose percentile-defined diagnosis) are only the obvious ones; there appears to be brain damage in some non-microcephalic infants and who knows, even the apparently healthy ones might end up having their intelligence a bit stunted. We won't know until 15+ years from now, when researchers can test the mature IQs of everyone born to a Zika-infected mother. This could turn out to be a phenomenon like leaded gasoline, something that silently dragged down the IQs of hundreds of millions of people for decades before anything was done about it.
But no, forget all of that. Let's focus on the real problem here. It's absolutely imperative that we cater to some extra-cautious pseudoscientific crap that says that the environment and/or humans will be horribly, permanently traumatized by locally spraying a little more of the same insecticides that have been in steady use for decades.
PPS: I've discussed elsewhere in this many-forked thread about how the point of spraying to keep Zika at bay is to buy time until a vaccine can be developed and to buy some time so that the argument can be won with all the breathtakingly stupid people who are opposing the use of sterile insect technique and gene splicing to eradicate aedes egypti, a non-native species that was introduced to the Americas by humans and is responsible for a staggering toll of death and suffering every year across the globe.
As a quick addendum, heavy metals are of course still a major ongoing issue (one that I personally think should take priority even over the anti- global warming campaigns) and I believe I recently saw a headline where the WHO was saying that they are projecting Zika will go worldwide. Not sure if I mentioned that yet, but it was implicit in one of my previous cost-benefit posts and is due to the wide distribution of Aedes egypti.
Completely pathetic that you accuse me of fear for recognizing an actual, scientifically proven threat instead of caving in to the hyperbole and lies based on some very weak evidence that there might be some very mild negative consequences from a short term spraying campaign. You are the one who is being hysterical and apparently living in fear of 'teh chemicals'. All I'm doing is pointing out some objective facts.
I think going to the doctor because you are specifically afraid of the Zika virus is more dangerous than the virus is, let alone the pesticides.
I don't even know what that means. I haven't gone to the doctor. I'm not advocating anyone go to the doctor. Doctors are grossly overqualified and overpaid as it is. You should be able to receive any vaccine you want from any pharmacist and the government should subsidize every penny of it. This is an opinion I hold because I am a non-moron capable of comprehending elementary school levels of epidemiology and economics. That is all.
I'm not afraid because I'm not pregnant and none of the people I know are planning to get pregnant anytime soon. I am just not in denial. I am just not anti-science, or anti-math as you appear to be. I'm not passionate about Zika. I'm passionate about ignorant jackasses spouting nonsense being modded up to the max on pro-science websites.
But please, keep practicing your ESP. I'm sure you'll get it right someday.
High-gun ownership states have suicide rates just about double that of low-gun ownership states.
I think that might have something to do with the fact that most high gun ownership states are sexually repressive, high-poverty shitholes. The reason for high gun ownership in these states is cultural tradition that I don't feel like dissecting at the moment, but It's pretty obvious that the causation isn't flowing in the direction you imply.
Some of the most common means of attempting suicides have a success rate of around 5-10%.
And people do tend to realize, at least on a subconscious level, that guns are serious business wereas pills aren't so much.
The most important stat here is ease of gun purchase vs. overall suicide rate. The USA is well known for having some of the most liberal gun purchasing laws among all first world nations (even in blue states, it's really not hard at all. In those states, it's primarily the carry permits that can be tricky to get.) and our suicide level is a depressing... 50th. We're below nations like: Japan, South Korea, the Czech republic, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Russia, Serbia, Iceland, Finland, Belgium, France...
You'll notice that those are all highly or medium-highly developed countries. Many of them have social safety nets that put ours to shame. Several of them are highly religious, and several of them are highly non-religious.
The one thing that they all have in common, I believe, is that it's harder to buy a gun and bullets in any of them than it is in most places in America.
The real argument with guns is violent crime rate. There's a real debate to be had there. The people who bring up suicide rate are not only being disingenuous by omitting the most important statistic (USA is merely 50th in the world, and that's omitting many countries where the reporting is subpar) but they are pandering to the most pathetic kind of unthinking nanny state impulse:
First off, do you or don't you support the right to die for people who are terminally ill? Just out of curiosity. Second, do you know what are even more effective than guns? Hydrogen sulfide generated through common household products or carbon monoxide from charcoal briquettes. As long as your tank is big and your bag doesn't have a hole in it, even helium is far more likely to work, and would be entirely painless. And I can easily think of a half a dozen more ways that don't suffer from the lingering question marks that gunshots do. Unless or until the entire internet becomes highly censored, you simply can't keep these techniques a secret any more.
So what do you do with the victory?
Bang the GF, cigarette and then straight to sleep.
No, it's an excellent question that I've been asking myself a lot lately, so I hope you'll pardon if I suddenly wax introspective for a moment here.
Educated otherwise rational people never googled this. These are the sort of people who'd google some esoteric detail they weren't quite sure about but never verified something that kept them up at night. I'm not sure the psychology of this but it's interesting.
That sort of surprised me too... back when I was a teenager. Holy shit. No one has any idea what they are talking about! The entire social universe is an ocean of nonsense attenuated by tiny, precious nuggets of misleading and much-abused truth. People assured me I would grow out of this phase, but each passing year offered another mountain of evidence. The thing that flabbergasts me more these days is how anything is ever accomplished.
I personally don't see people do what I just did, concede that I lost the argument nor do I see productive use of the upper hand.
I almost never saw it, but It's happening more often, a lot more often now. I've recently started posting in forums again (I hadn't bothered in the past few years) and I don't know if it's me or if it's the internet, but I've started winning arguments. Like, maybe even as much as a quarter of the people I argue with. If you exclude the people who simply stop responding, the success rate rises to perhaps two thirds. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
...ah well, the 'buts' aren't interesting. The transition to video is tricky and there are a lot of distractions in my life. But I should try anyway.
The obvious choice is to get on Youtube asap and become a professional misanthropic bitch artist instead of just giving it away for free. Given that I'm still out of work, after I just wasted years of my life and tens of thousands of dollars chasing a white collar world that turned out to be a Dillbertesque hellhole (and I specifically went for areas that were supposed to be insulated from all that bullshit! God damn it. It's actually much worse than Dilbert because at least the PHB occasionally acknowledges that he's being insane / unreasonable)...
It makes me wonder if a lot of people are in discussion not for advancing their own and other's knowledge and thus collective decision making power and obviously these are political decisions or if they're in it for ego.
It's some inscrutable blend of all that, I think. Plus a dash of cussedness, a very large portion of mindless self-comfort and many less easily identifiable factors. We desperately need Seldon's psychohistory to figure it out. An instinctual approach is clearly insufficient.
'Scuse me, I need to go find a camera.
I think that a 200 yard radius of concentrated spraying around known cases is a reasonable supplement in a larger scale campaign. If that's all they're doing, then they're morons.
Make an ass of myself? I never said the good people running SC aren't for the most part drooling morons (I've actually seen a significant stack of evidence to the contrary, firsthand.) I said that your prescribed plan, which specifically excluded all spraying except immediately arounding the victims' houses ("limit the coverage to just around the victims' homes"), was extremely dumb.
What's it called when you pretend that someone wasn't talking about your proposal, but was instead talking about the proposal of a third party? Uhhh... "inverse strawman" maybe? I don't think there's an official name for that particular informal logical fallacy of debate. I do believe you just invented a new one.
Congratulations.
But on the side note, if this was all some kind of miscommunication, then I'm happy we're in furious agreement.
Also, the claim that spending money to "buy people in Africa better houses" instead of using the money to eradicate aedes egypti would be a much bigger improvement in their lives... Do you want me to crunch the numbers on that? Do you REALLY want me to crunch the numbers?
Paypal me $10 and I'll stay up all night showing you in detail why this is the stupidest fucking thing I've heard this year.
The reason I want to do spraying is that I have a basic understanding of statistics, epidemiology and dangers that modern insecticides pose to mammals like us. If you think the pesticides are more dangerous than the virus, you clearly have not crunched the numbers.
1% of pregnancy infections translating to microcephaly at birth (the current estimation) is actually an underestimation of the danger here. Microcephaly uses a percentile-based definition, so it's entirely possible that a much higher percentage of babies will end up with smaller brains and smaller IQs (but not quite at the microcephalic cutoff). At this point, researchers also believe that many of the babies with normal-sized heads have nonetheless suffered some level of developmental brain damage. We have no idea how bad the damage is going to be until these kids grow up and their intelligence levels are measured as adults. For all we know, 90% of children will suffer some measurable level of decreased potential.
And the rate of pregnant women being bitten by mosquitoes? In Florida and most of the rest of the southeast? I would say roughly 100%, unless they stay indoors from 4pm-9am or drench themselves in DEET every day. You think 100% of pregnant women will do that? Do you think even 50% of pregnant women would bother doing that?
The media is, if anything, underselling this. If this thing goes worldwide before vaccination campaigns or before major anti-aedes egypti campaigns can start, the toll in aggregate human misery and spoiled potential will be staggering. We might be able to put the genie back in the bottle after the extent of the damage becomes clear but in dozens of third world countries it will simply be one more disease keeping people oppressed and miserable.
You have to distinguish arguments that you disagree with but are respectable vs. the arguments that have no redeeming value whatsoever and are based on some combination of lies or highly deranged thinking.
Do you think it's wrong to ever insult Trump's[1] character? Why or why not?
This doesn't necessarily mean screaming at everyone in your way. If an asteroid is heading towards Earth but some people think we shouldn't do anything about it because it's God's will and they're wiling to go to war to stop us from trying to blow it up, well, fine. If telling them soothing lies will do the trick, then tell them soothing lies whilst you build the missile to save us all. If screaming at them that they're dangerous imbeciles will do the trick, well then do that.
In other words, do what it takes to achieve the necessary goal without slowing yourself down by paying undue respect to the Dangerously Deluded Opinion. At certain extreme points, the basic bedrock goal of civil discourse can and should be ignored, because discourse with a completely irrational person who refuses to engage with reality is counterproductive. The jackasses campaigning against the ridiculously safe aedes egypti extermination proposal in Key West constitute one such example of this phenomenon, though I would of course make one last ditch attempt to educate any of them I personally talked to.
But if that fails, I'm just going to tell them that foodbabe recently discovered that hemlock prevents autism and walk away.
(It has to be 100% organic hemlock, though. None of this artificially fertilized crap.)
1. Or Hilary's. But I think I'll take a chance here that you're not one of the 7 people in this country who are very sensitive to environmental issues and think that Trump is a swell guy.
Kill all aedes egypti, yes. It is by far the most dangerous species and is non-native.
I would also support killing it in its native territory in Africa because of the tragic and massive cost in human misery that malaria has caused (and if there turns out to be an ecological hole, 'loan' them some of our mosquitoes instead.) We can argue about this if you wish and to a limited extent I can respect an extremely conservative attitude is against ever eliminating a native species.
What I cannot respect are arguments that we should stop or tone down spraying to reduce the Zika reservoir (a temporary measure that could nonetheless prevent this thing from going global), or that we shouldn't kill every single aedes egypti in the new world. I'm unfaimilar of the specifics that make a. egypti a dangerous vector for multiple diseases but I'm assuming it's a proclivity for humans (or larger mammals in general), a tendency to feed on multiple individuals, and/or a tendency to inject more anticoagulant fluids or filtered plasma than other species, but whatever the reason it's definitely the big one we have to worry about.
I don't know that the larger context is people trying to wipe out 12 species of mosquitoes. A few under-informed people on the internet are saying that, maybe, or saying "all mosquitoes" as a matter of laziness or hyperbole, but I've never heard a practical proposal. The only plausible extinction-level tools we currently possess have are species-specific, and there's no reason for us to use these to target the species of mosquito that aren't known to transmit disease. Many of them don't even feed on humans.
What I *have* seen in this discuss is that many people are arguing against both of those essential things (short term spraying to wipe out or at least contain the Zika reservoir, and then a long term eradication program of all a. egypti in the Americas), both on and off of slashdot, and I think that the situation has become dire enough that reasonable-minded people need to start talking tough because in a couple years we may not be able to contain it even if we wanted to.
If in a few years it turns out we have some native mosquitoes left that are carrying diseases then I'll be happy to have a civil debate with you about whether or not they should be eradicated but until then, I'm afraid this is a fairly black and white thing. The opposing side in this debate simply isn't one that I can respect.
Also, you seem to think I'm being deceptively magnanimous about the honeybee thing but I'm actually being fairly generous. You might want to shift your focus at this stage, but the points you were attempting to make in that post do NOT stand. The crux of your argument was that honeybees are keystone species due to their status as pollinators. And native pollinators are keystone species, fair enough. However:
1. We've no particular information that unusually large numbers of them were killed by recent mosquito spraying (which, in terms of square mileage, constitutes a pretty small fraction of vegetation-covered ground.
2. Native pollinators aren't "on their back leg" and "already stressed", unless you've been reading some disturbing new studies on bumblebees. In which case, the ones in my yard haven't heard the news; they're everywhere.
And once again, for a response to your new arguments please see https://slashdot.org/comments.... and/or https://slashdot.org/comments.... .
I'll settle for excessive or even "stupid" spraying over the "no spraying" that so many people around here seem to be advocating. This is a worldwide health crisis still in its early stages, with the very real potential to cause millions of cases of permanent and profound mental retardation.
If we can keep this disease at bay using chemical pesticides for just a few years while safe vaccines are developed and while we (hopefully) win the argument with the anti-science nutjobs who are against sterile insect technique or gene splicing ("because that's how you make superheroes and we don't want any super-mosquitoes, dummy") to kill off non-native fiends like aedes egypti, we could save so many people from a lifetime of misery and hundred billions of dollars we'll otherwise have to squander for decades and decades to come if this thing becomes established everywhere.
Did you actually read my alluded-to reply? Please look here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Short summary if you don't want to click through:
1. I believe your arguments are still misguided. We're talking about a short term effort using the tools at hand to eliminate the Zika reservoirs. Mass spraying does not blanket the countryside and regardless it's been used off and on in the southeast for decades now--a couple more years aren't going to cause any permanent damage that we haven't inflicted already. But people are still arguing against this completely sane effort to spare thousands of children and parents a lifetime of misery, and billions of dollars we'll otherwise have to spend combating the disease and taking care of the microcephalic or otherwise brain-damaged individuals for the rest of their lives.
2. Over the long term, more targeted tools like radiation-based sterile insect technique or a gene splicing scheme are likely to be safer and more effective for the complete eradication of, at minimum, all dangerous non-native species of mosquito like aedes egypti. But even this completely sane and ecologically friendly option is being demonized, even here on slashdot where I once saw some fearmongering modded up to +5 that had a comic book level understanding of science: "OMG what if we accidentally created the UBER MOSQUITO??!"
I'm not arguing for ecological destruction. I'm arguing for sane responses from what is supposed to be one of the more scientifically literate communities on the internet. There really needs to be some pushback against this nonsense. We might be able to have a reasonable disagreement with plausible arguments on both sides if you want to discuss the eradication of aedes egypti in, say, the Congo. But in Florida? No. It's obscene to suggest we should allow this species to continue thriving here, or that we should do nothing to wipe out the Zika reservoir in the short term, to buy us some time until a vaccine can be developed.
Also, as I've explained elsewhere, honeybees are not native to North America, the limited local killing of a few million honeybees is not likely to exacerbate the CCD problem among the billions of honeybees used nationwide, and if you're still REALLY concerned about collateral damage we could always switch to a larvacide which works only on mosquito larva (I don't think we have any other insect that lays eggs in standing water like that) or even better use the sterilize insect technique or genetically modified mosquitoes to kill off only the specific, invasive species of mosquito that are responsible for most of the disease scares here.
But for some curious reason, the doomsayers don't want to suggest any one of these sensible alternatives. In fact, they've protested on Key West about a proposal to eliminate dangerous, non-native mosquitoes using species-specific techniques and even here on slashdot I've seen laughable comic book level "what if we accidentally created a super-mosquito" arguments being modded up to +5.