Yes?

Oh, I don't know. It's kind of fun to compete with your friends on how many minutes into the movie you can accurately guess what the tweeest will be.

Need to qualify that a bit I think. I mean, it certainly does not need to be someone Indian, but I think most people do tend to blame their employer when they, out of the blue, decide to replace you when someone they think is better comes along. Clearly one can question if the feeling is justified, but many people certainly feel this way. As it stands, many people feel like companies are absolutely full of crap when they do all that team building stuff and talk about loyalty, etc. but then turn around and discard people the moment it's even slightly convenient.

Of course, from a practical point of view, employees, especially longer-term ones, also recognize it as a really stupid move when companies do this. I mean, it depends on the job but, in many places of employment, regardless of how attractive their resume looks, most employees take years to actually become good at their jobs. Not to mention all the costs of onboarding, etc. So employees often are actually correct to think that their employers are idiots for simply replacing employees with the next shiny object to come along. Especially when the paradigm the employers are encouraging is one where that shiny new employee is probably angling to leave for the very next available slightly better job.

Speaking of "mentally sick"...

You really must be new here if you think rsilvergun is MAGA.

Technically, preventing people from leaving the country like that would be a violation of basic human rights. Of course, the loophole to that is that you can obviously imprison people or keep them on home confinement, etc. as a punishment for a crime. Still, you're talking about a decade long prison term for littering.

Eliminating the species entirely might be environmentally catastrophic. Ultimately, it's really malaria-causing Plasmodium we need to eliminate or control. Mosquitoes are the carriers of course, so they are a logical target, but we don't need to eliminate them. Modifying them to reduce or eliminate their bites would be enough. Mosquitoes utilize an r-selected reproduction strategy. That means a large number of eggs (hundreds) produced by female mosquitoes. Male mosquitoes are purely herbivorous, but female mosquitoes need blood for the nutrients they need to produce their eggs. Some ideas that first come to mind is modifying mosquitoes so that the females can't bite humans, but the requirement for blood to produce eggs means that they have to be able to bite and modifying them behaviorally so that they avoid just humans would be an extreme challenge. Another possibility is to modify them so that the females can manage to get the nutrition they need to make eggs without blood would also be too much of a challenge. Bio-engineering plants with nectar that gives them the nutrition they need (with nectar packed with haeme and protein) and modifying the mosquitoes so the females seek out those plants... too many moving plants as well as being too ambitious in terms of what we can achieve with genetic engineering. Simply shifting the current approximate 50/50 ratio of male to female mosquitoes to be predominantly male could reduce bites enough, but that might mean too few eggs produced, but there is something there that I'll come back to.

One modification to seriously consider though ties into the parasitic lifecycle of Plasmodium variants. Mosquitoes are carriers because they're resistant. Plasmodium infection doesn't kill them. If we could genetically modify them so that they lose their resistance, mosquitoes would get sick and die after biting an infectious host. That theoretically could be relatively easily done with knockouts to their DNA to remove factors that grant them immunity. The mosquitoes would not die off from that since, even in areas with lots of malaria, if would be atypical for more than 10% or fewer of the mosquito population to be carrying it. Of course, just knocking out the immunity would reduce spread, maybe enough to eventually stop Plasmodium, but it still might not be deadly enough to kill the female mosquitoes before they bite something else. Possibly we could go further and introduce something that would be very quickly fatal to a mosquito as soon as it comes into contact with Plasmodium. Something like a severe allergic reaction or maybe that goes even beyond that and causes a chain reaction with the immune system that leads to widespread cellular apoptosis.

Of course, such genetic changes obviously need to spread through the population, but we have existing techniques that can be adapted for that employing gene drive and deliberate breeding of mosquitoes to overtake the natural population. This also opens the door for another technique where female mosquitoes could be produced that are not able to bite animals, but also only produce male offspring. The females could be produced and fertilized in captivity and provided a food source with sufficient nutrition that they can produce their eggs, then they could be released into the wild to lay the eggs. Mosquitoes do typically produce multiple clutches of eggs though, whereas modified mosquitoes that can not bite animals would not be likely to get enough nutrition after release for more than one clutch of eggs. Using a technique like this could allow both for introducing the genetics that force mosquitoes to only produce male offspring and any other genetic modifications into the wild. The male mosquitoes mating with wild female mosquitoes would lead to future female mosquitoes only producing male offspring. Essentially it would drive female mosquitoes to near extinction in the wild in any areas where humans keep up the breeding program while allowing for natural mosquito populations to be restored if the breeding programs stop.

So, it seems like a combination of those methods could work. A wide scale program to introduce modified mosquitoes that both do not produce females in the wild (only in the breeding labs) and also die on contact with Plasmodium. Spread wide enough, that could systematically eliminate Plasmodium. There is a question of how long to keep up such a program. Plasmodium can survive for a long time in animals. However, if the self-destruct genes for exposure to Plasmodium can spread widely enough, the gradual elimination of Plasmodium would go on well after female mosquito replacement stopped, so it might only take a matter of a few years in any region. Of course, there are other benefits to preventing mosquito bites. Beyond the simple annoyance, there are other diseases that can spread from mosquitoes. Perhaps self-destruct for exposure to those other diseases could be engineered in as well. Beyond that, maybe experiments could be done regionally to find out how important mosquitoes actually are to the ecosystem and if other organisms would take over their niche as a food supply.

Ultimately though, modification seems more appropriate than outright elimination. One the problems with outright elimination is that it probably can't be done. Covering every possible niche they would hang on in is virtually impossible. The methods that breed mosquitoes to eliminate mosquitoes entirely would probably work for a few years, then they would come back. Using methods that simply introduce genes to their population that do not seriously impact their survival (deaths from Plasmodium would have some selection pressure, but it would dwindle over time as Plasmodium dwindles) will make the modified mosquitoes competitive with unmodified populations whereas mosquitoes that just die off can't compete with unmodified mosquitoes that are still alive and can just move back into their niche. So, it seems to me that modifying mosquitoes to eliminate Plasmodium would be the way to go in order to get rid of Malaria.

Of course, the unasked and unanswered question here is if Plasmodium itself serves any vital ecological purpose. That seems difficult to answer. Most of the arguments for parasites seem to fall under either: they make things sick and die, which is good for the cycle of life or: they provide natural selection pressure that drives development of immune defenses. Of course, for the first one, there are plenty of things out there that cause sickness and death, so it's not clear that we need Malaria for that. For the second one, the argument seems pretty circular: we need X so that we can develop defenses to protect ourselves against X... Seems a bit pointless if we really can eliminate X. I mean, whatever we throw in for X, it seems like a bad argument: We need Kaiju that regularly attack our cities because it prompts us to build giant mechs which we need because they protect our cities from Kaiju; We need a zombie apocalypse because it helps our population to develop the vital scavenging, sleeping with one eye open, and efficient beheading skills needed to survive a zombie apocalypse. I mean, sure, if we have no challenges we stagnate but I would still rather not have zombie Kaiju stomping through our zombie-infested cities while they fight mechs piloted by zombies we trained to fight Kaiju. It might make a great (in the - wow, we really jumped the sharknado on this one, but still - sense) movie, but the starving, terrified, almost squashed, zombie fleeing survivors scrambling through the smoking, stinking rubble probably would not be elated about how distant future generations might be more able to deal with constant, horrific threats because of it. Anyway, plenty of areas of Earth seem to do quite well without any malaria at all, so I am fairly comfortable with eliminating Plasmodium.

Clearly you have no idea whatsoever about that poem and what the term actually means.

Curious. What is it exactly that makes you think it's all yours?

Infectious diseases are everyone's situation. People who smugly watch their neighbor's house burn without lifting a finger to help because it's the neighbors problem tend to end up a little less smug when the fire spreads to their own home.

You know that we're going to end up spending more on refurbishing the plane Trump got from Qatar than that 37% of yearly Malaria funding, right?

I would think the vast majority of us on Slashdot would actually respond to that with: Yes, yes we thought this was possible back then. However, we would have to admit that we anticipated systems that were a lot less terrible than the ones we've ended up with.

But the great-grandparent to your post specifically mentioned a situation where the number of uses of the same card per day for fares is capped. They did not mention what the cap is exactly and probably you won't hit it with yourself, your partner (who may be on a joint card with therefore a shared cap) and a couple of kids. What if you have five kids though, or seven? Or, what if, as that poster mentioned, you are transporting a field trip? In other words, like that poster mentioned, what about the edge cases?

Even better, that relationship with the corporation includes a contract of adhesion that can have an arbitrary number of pages of terms for you to agree with. So, to park for those two hours, you can be giving up tons of rights, including your constitutional right to sue, probably in perpetuity and not just for matters related to that parking spot. Thanks Judge Easterbrook.

If that happens, then the buses and trains are being used that way out of necessity. It means that there either aren't shelters, or there are obstacles to using the shelters that make the buses and trains more functional as shelters than the designated shelters. Also, many homeless will use the buses and trains as shelters even if it does cost money.

As for places being used as toilets, the obvious problem there is the lack of actual toilets. This is not a problem just for the homeless. Most cities just don't have toilets available anywhere for visitors. Not even pay toilets. You have to have a nearby hotel room or find a business where you can use one. It's a basic human necessity, but so many cities just seem actively hostile to it.

Honestly, your bit at the end is basically just calling homeless people vermin, so I'm not sure why I am even responding to your disgusting post.