I think a big part of it is a tendency of tech/engineering sorts to have an allergic reaction against any sort of tradition. Old fashioned is worse than uncool, it's dumb and outs you as an inferior mind to the engineering who is always rational and pragmatic and has no time for tradition.
There are plenty of communities in America that have professional fire departments. Particularly cities where there is actually a tax base to support it. You'll find volunteer fire departments in pretty much any working class town where the manpower is capable and willing but the money is lacking.
A truck being small is not incompatible with a truck being a beautiful shade of red polished to a shine. Just look at Japanese firetrucks. They have some very small trucks that look great.
In early 2001 the Taliban banned the growth of poppies and opium export plummeted to near zero.
>The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded that the movement's ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's largest crop in less than a year, officials said today. The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.
>But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming families, and experts say it will not be known until the fall planting season begins whether the Taliban can continue to enforce it.
I'm going to need a source on that. Fewer than 30 out of 3000 species of mosquito feed on humans. There is little reason for us to bother with the rest.
As I've stated throughout this threat, it isn't just about mosquitoes. Honestly I would not mourn mosquitoes if every last species was exterminated. What concerns me is the social impact of further establishing humanity as the arbitrators of which species get to live and which deserve to be exterminated. It won't stop at mosquitoes; the extermination of mosquitoes will be used to justify even more exterminations in the future.
(Furthermore exterminating a species just so the human population can grow even faster will lead to an incredible amount of additional extinctions due to habitat loss. Humanity is growing fast enough already; we don't need to optimize for this any further.)
It doesn't necessarily follow that preventing death would cause an increase in population. A high mortality rate is corelated with a high fertility rate so that population grows nevertheless. In fact, it is when the mortality rate is the lowest that the spread between mortality and fertility rate is the lowest, resulting in the smallest population growth.
Waiting for economic factors to suppress the birth rate is the milquetoast approach I described earlier in this thread that is causing incredible environmental destruction. It's nothing more than an excuse to turn a blind eye to the problem.
Just recruit a few of the millions of people whose lives will be saved as environmental activists to warn against the dangers of tampering with nature and the social effects will balance out.
> "Its important to differentiate b/w the plans of a politician and the plans of research scientists who have done actual work in this area."
Not really, because the general public won't take such care with the differentiating. The more scientists deliberately exterminate or cull animals, the more the public will grow accustomed to the idea of humanity taking such an active violent role in the environment. And the more the public grow accustomed to that idea, the more they'll be willing to fall in line behind politicians who try to do the same. Particularly when those politicians claim science as their justification (numerous disastrous examples in the 20th century.)
The ethical analysis performed by scientists looking to justify exterminations should include the social impact of their actions. Scientist and engineer sorts often loath considering such factors.
If you're going to weigh the social factors in wiping out the 20-something species of mosquitoes which feed on humans (out of > 3000), I think you need to factor in the possibility that malaria (and thus mosquitos) may be responsible for HALF of human deaths in our history.
At what point do you think we are ethically clear to take drastic action against another species? How many more human lives need to be lost before you think it's OK?
Half of human deaths isn't very significant considering that despite that the human population is still exploding at an unsustainable rate that will cause incredible environmental destruction if left unchecked. Far from being threatened with extinction, our present course will cause the extinction of countless other forms of life.
And in response to that, you propose that we deliberately drive even more species to extinction for the purpose of making the problem even worse?
> "How many more human lives need to be lost before you think it's OK?"
If they were a threat to the survival of our species, I would sign off on it. Plainly they are not.
How many more species must be exterminated before you decide the planet is safe enough for humanity? When will the Disney Worldification of the planet be sufficient for you? Maybe Disney World levels of safety from wildlife aren't even sufficient for you? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/animalia/wp/2017/11/03/d...
I think he's more concerned about not conceding is original point wasn't thought through; so rather than losing face, he advocates mass extinction of human beings, over mass extinction of a tiny number of mosquitoes.
That sort of trading genocide for one's own ego is Maoist and Stalinist, and it is really no different from their thought processes. Thankfully though stable political systems marginalize low-rank people like this. (Thus, be very afraid of revolutions).
Far from it, this is not even remotely a possibility. Mosquitoes are not threatening humanity with extinction in any conceivable way. As I stated elsewhere in this thread yesterday, if humanity were actually threatened by mosquitoes, I would support their eradication.
Humanity is important but humanity is not currently being threatened. If humanity were actually being threatened I would support the eradication of any species threatening it.
You lowered the discussion significantly by taking it in an inflammatory direction, yielding flamey responses, which you then fed. I don't think you were trolling on purpose, but it has much the same effect. We're trying to avoid that, please don't post that way here.
Imagine if half of all the humans who have died didn't.
How screwed would we all be right now.
Of course it doesn't work quite like that, but still. We might save enough humans to destroy the planet faster than we can fix it ... now solve that one without doing something "evil"!
The speed of "fixing" the planet scales faster than the human load on it due to economies of scale - imagine today's population with the agricultural techniques of antiquity. It would be complete global annihilation of us and everything else.
> "Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms."
More concerning than the ecological scar left behind by the eradication of some species of mosquito is the precedent that would be set. Once you've deliberately eradicated one pest species, people will incorporate the knowledge of that action into their image of how the world works and the sort of things we're willing to do. The next time somebody proposes that a species be eradicated, there will almost certainly be less debate.
I've heard people defend the deliberate eradication of mosquitoes by pointing out how we've already deliberately eradicated viruses like smallpox. This demonstrates my concern. What will the eradication of mosquitoes be used to justify? It's already the case in the modern era that angry mobs of idiots need to be restrained from emotional outbursts against animals (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Australian_shark_cull). Having scientists justify the extermination of mosquitoes will only make it harder to get these angry mobs to back down.
I don't really doubt that human-feeding mosquito species could be eradicated without much harm to the environment, but these social concerns remain unaddressed.
Eradicating pest and threat species is so very not new. Ask the wolves around centuries old ranching regions. Mosquitoes have indirectly the highest human body count in history and prehistory.
Even with reuse it is pretty mating strategy dependent. It isn't a dial an extinction. Trying that with say feral cats would be a miserable failure or at best the equivalent of releasing a bunch of teaser tomcats into an area having only the TNR occupying effect on inhibiting population growth by claiming territory until they die of natural causes.
I never said this was new. What concerns me is it being done in the modern era. And not just in the modern era, but backed up by scientists too, which lends it additional credibility. In general, people in this era trust science more than they trust politicians. If a politician tells them something is a good idea, they will distrust that politician if it goes against their gut instinct. But if a scientist tells them the same, many will make an active effort to overrule their gut instinct to the contrary. This is good when the scientists are acting ethically, and bad when the scientists are acting unethically. It's easy to make a first-order argument for the eradication of certain species of mosquitoes being ethical; you just point to how many human lives it will save. But as I previously explained that analysis is incomplete; it does not take into account how the act of eradicating mosquitoes will change how people perceive the relationship between humans and the environment.
In short; a scientist demanding a cull will have more social impact than a politician demanding a cull. The more culls scientists demand, the easier it will be for fear-mongering politicians to demand culls.
Eradicating an invasive species that we (inadvertently) introduced in the first place seems more similar to me to wolf rewilding/reintroduction programs than the opposite. We're trying to unwind an earlier intervention.
Those mosquitoes aren't invasive anywhere. Eradicating them means killing them wherever they're native as well, which is definitely what many people in this discussion are proposing.
Culling invasive species wherever they are invasive is something I support. But many people want to go a lot further than that.
Killing off wolves has had many unintended and unforeseen consequences. Just for one example, the lack of large predators such as wolves leads to uncontrolled population explosions of deer, which leads to a massive increase in the population and prevalence of deer ticks, and consequent tick borne diseases.
As a species we’re piss poor at calculating blowback in complicated systems, ranging from the deaths of animal species, to interventions in foreign lands. Is it really surprising? We have an incomplete picture of the systems we intervene in, so the outcomes surprise us, then we rationalize our next blunder with the old saw, “this time it will be different.”
This is an invasive species of mosquitos and this on one of many species. Scientist are not stupid and they are not gonna eradicate all mosquitos many non-harmful species will still thrive.
The fact that you cite past animal exterminations to justify additional animal exterminations proves my point. The more species are eradicated the more normal it becomes and the more people will be willing to do it again.
The normalization of extermination should be avoided, even if it comes at the costs of hundreds of millions of human lives per year. (There is no people shortage, but damage to the environment is often permanent. And not to put too fine a point on it, but human populations are growing too fast as it is which is a leading cause of environmental destruction. We should not be attacking the environment to encourage massive increases in human population growth; not unless we have very concrete and immediate plans on how to artificially retard the growth of human populations. Waiting for economic factors to suppress birth rates isn't good enough; that sort of milquetoast approach leads to extraordinary destruction of the environment. It's little more than an excuse to ignore the problem and do nothing.)
Let’s not, instead let’s help them with the many more pressing concerns such as homelessness, alcoholism, and mental health issues. No need to eradicate a species to improve their lives. For the record, screwflies were eliminated to save the livestock industry billions, not to help homeless people.
Trade-offs in ethics and effectiveness can be a subject of discussion, but it's hardly an "emotional outburst" to want to prevent swimmers from being eaten. Slippery-slope arguments seem to make sense when we're locked into one way of modeling the behavior of our fellow humans, but they're usually wrong anyway.
> "but it's hardly an "emotional outburst" to want to prevent swimmers from being eaten"
Considering...
> "Since 2000 there have been 15 fatal shark attacks along the West Australian coast.[9]"
Yes, it's an emotional outburst. Anybody who goes in the water should know the risks. If that's the problem, put up more signs warning people. Very few people are getting killed by sharks; the shark culls are totally unjustified. If you talk to your average Australian about the Chinese slaughtering sharks for soup, they'll condemn it. But a disturbing number will defend the slaughter of sharks for an infinitesimal chance of saving some surfer who knew the risks and chose to swim with them.
You're comparing 15 human lives against 50 sharks killed by this program? Wow. They're just sharks. The slavery boats from southeast Asia kill many more sharks every single day. The sharks they kill aren't menacing a beach. Many of the sharks they don't kill directly. They just chop off all the fins and then dump the shark back in the ocean...
Many sharks, plus bycatch, for no rational reason at all. Australian politicians vilify the animals and demand even more be killed. It's wholly irrational, as is your characterization of the sharks "menacing" the beach simply by living in their natural environment. Sharks aren't menacing the beach, the Australian government is menacing the sharks.
> "They're just sharks."
It is this sort of shitty attitude that will only become more prevalent when the eradication of animal species is further normalized.
Most people outside of Australia recognize that the Australian shark culls are dumb emotional reactions to a non-problem. Shark culls are an international embarrassment for Australia.
> "but you don't get to separate the two in the case of an OS or distribution."
Actually I do get to do that. It's an important distinction because if the software isn't at fault, then a technically competent user can safely use it by merely not being as dumb as the average user. But if the software itself is at fault, then the technically competent user should stay clear of it. Idiots will be idiots no matter the distribution. If it weren't arch, they might be downloading third party RPMs or debs from untrusted sources. Would that be reason for a technically competent person to avoid RHEL or Debian? Of course not.
> It's an important distinction because if the software isn't at fault, [...]
Though the software is at fault. It created a false sense of security,
misleading the users. What else in Arch just feels secure, but in fact is not?
And then, if the users around the software generally exhibit a jockey
attitude, you get the whole environment built in a similar manner, not
a robust one. The software may technically not be at fault and technically
could be used in a safe manner, but you won't get much exposure to that, any
such use will be cumbersome and difficult (because nobody uses it this way),
so you still should stay clear of the software. So no, you don't get to
separate the users and the OS/distribution.
> Though the software is at fault. It created a false sense of security, misleading the users. What else in Arch just feels secure, but in fact is not?
AUR never tried to pass false sense of security, it is explicitly declared as not supported everywhere.
> And then, if the users around the software generally exhibit a jockey attitude, you get the whole environment built in a similar manner, not a robust one. The software may technically not be at fault and technically could be used in a safe manner, but you won't get much exposure to that, any such use will be cumbersome and difficult (because nobody uses it this way), so you still should stay clear of the software. So no, you don't get to separate the users and the OS/distribution.
Except it is not, experienced users of Arch community vocally recommends new users to not blindly trust AUR, and the dangers of AUR is also documented everywhere. This is also one of the reasons that yaourt is shamed in public Arch communities like /r/archlinux, since it defaults to poor security behavior.
> AUR never tried to pass false sense of security, it is explicitly declared as not supported everywhere.
Funny that I only ever hear of this when talking about security aspects, not
when discussing available software. In the latter case I always hear how many
things are there in AUR, especially comparing to Debian. AUR must have failed
miserably in not trying to pass false sense of security.
> Funny that I only ever hear of this when talking about security aspects, not when discussing available software. In the latter case I always hear how many things are there in AUR, especially comparing to Debian. AUR must have failed miserably in not trying to pass false sense of security.
One argument does not invalidate the other. It is true that tons of software are available in AUR that is not easily available in other distros. It is also true that AUR is not supported.
A similar thing happens with PPAs in Ubuntu or even with Flatpak/Snaps: they brings tons of additional software to the distro, however they're unsupported and can be security nightmares [1].
[1]:Yeah, even when Flatpak/Snaps are properly sandbox (since some apps are not), they can include software to mine cryptocurrencies for example.
There is an expectation that projects dogfood their own software, but I really can't think of a rational reason for a production server not affiliated with the Arch project to be running Arch.
Rolling release is great for technically competent users to install on their workstations, but why would you ever want a rolling release on a production server?
Well, one thing which I know of several projects doing, is having an Arch server as one of the continuous testing servers. This way you can test against bleeding edge gcc/glibc/whatnot and catch bugs or breaking API changes long before they appear in major distros.
