JackCh

The only genocide being proposed in this thread is the mass extermination of mosquitoes.

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.

It's easy to ignore the destruction of the environment if all you care about is optimizing for the human race at the expense of all other species.

> "he advocates mass extinction of human beings"

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.

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.

Asbestos is rock.

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.

In other words, it's a social disorder.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/world/taliban-s-ban-on-po...

Later that year America invaded and poppy production soon exceeded historic numbers by a significant margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...

Make of this what you will.

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.)

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...

As far as I can tell, the eradication of hundreds of species of mosquitoes is being suggested by many.

> "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.

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.)

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.

> "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.

> "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.

> "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.

That's a problem with Arch users, not with Arch. It's unfortunately common that fanboys undermine the reputation of reasonable software.

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?

I'm pretty sure he knows. Hence "My superpower: Taking things literally."

Incidentally I'm pretty sure water snake oil is not actually a cure-all anymore than rattlesnake oil is.

Sure, but in practice it seems to work pretty well.

What are they actually going to call it? Bis-isoxazole is a mouthful. If people are afraid to talk about it for fear of mispronouncing it and looking foolish, will it see commercial success?

I don't know anything about rocks, but it's very hard for me to take this website seriously when their FAQ repeats several times word for word (https://i.imgur.com/B0VojAZ.png):

>If it is not convincing enough: Recent scientific studies using very powerful and modern equipment found the ultimate evidence that the pyramids stones are synthetic. Believing in the artificial stone theory, or countering it, is simply no longer relevant. It has become a fact, a truth.

https://www.geopolymer.org/faq/faq-for-artificial-stone-supp...

In my experience, people who use repetition like this are not to be taken very seriously. It's a blunt persuasion tactic employed by the likes of used car salesmen and cult leaders.

OsmAnd has a counterintuive UI, it have been the case that you didn't have the right map layers enabled.

The only thing it's really missing is comments, but some people consider this a feature. (Honestly though, on high quality small channels the comments will often be worth reading, so I do miss it sometimes.)