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Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

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Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#381

Post by seppin »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #367
rainbowzootsuit wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We decidedly did not make it worse. The smaller ~20lbs dog was being courageously held onto by its owner underneath both dogs for the entire ~fight~ mauling to prevent it from being taken away and killed by the ~100lbs pit bull. I didn't see in that situation that I had time to consult with a respected behaviorist and get into the dog's upbringing, give it some positive reinforcement, tummy rubs, and treats, but I di…

Interesting that you and other comments took mine to mean how to train a dog, which is irrelevant to the situation under consideration. Did any of y'all mean that in good faith? No, it's about how to de-escalate a severe situation without loss of life. (Good) policemen don't break up a fight between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old by viciously beating and then stabbing the 18 yr old. My point was only that the instincts o…

> your only regret is not achieving your intent which was to kill the dog

You cannot ever know what his intentions were, and to accuse him of that is pretty disgusting.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#382

Post by exclusiv »

perl4ever wrote: post #370
Too wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there has been a high death rate in Sweden, especially in elderly homes which weren't isolated properly, you have to be careful when comparing stats between countries. Sweden seems to file more deaths as COVID, instead of just attributing it as death by age, heart attack, or some other unexplained reason, including those dying in elderly care and not only those in hospitals. Here is a more complete summary: htt…

Ranking countries is not the point; the point is that people who endlessly lecture on why the US is inferior have no particular preference for whether 30,000 more or fewer Americans die, so rhetoric pretending to be concerned about highway deaths seems vapid and insincere. You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inf…

Agreed. If you just believed it all, you'd think Nordic countries never do anything wrong and other countries should just do what they do. But they're in a league of their own. And sorry to say but it's minor leagues in the world stage. You can't just mimic what might work there if you're in a completely different league.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#383

Post by viburnum »

perl4ever wrote: post #298
viburnum wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American has three times the traffic death rate of the Britain and six times of Norway’s. What’s the benefit?

Based on the statistics I have seen, if the US took Sweden's approach to the current epidemic (which has been recently held up as a model on HN and elsewhere) and got similar results, an additional 30,000 people would have died thus far. I haven't seen anyone bring this up and ask for an accounting of the benefit that is greater.

Uh huh, I said Norway. The point is that not every cost has a benefit. If you're so offended by international comparisons, check out US states:

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/states/occupant_death...

I don't know that California (4.2 deaths per 100,000) would be somehow more productive if people died form cars at the rate of Missouri (10.2).

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#384

Post by thephyber »

bredren wrote: post #187
derefr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human category is limited, I believe, to intentional killing. Otherwise you open up a whole can of worms about macroeconomic trolley problems. (Am I killing people right now by making insufficiently-optimal donations to charity?)

It doesn’t have to be this abstract, though. This will likely change in the next 20 years. Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles. It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse. This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no r…

I feel like maybe I misread your post. Perhaps I didn't understand the larger point you were making.

> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.

There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.

> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”

It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.

Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.

> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.

I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#385

Post by erikpukinskis »

Koshkin wrote: post #18

To put this in a perspective, 1 Mosquito 1,000,000 2 Human 475,000 3 Snake 50,000 4 Dog 25,000 5 Tsetse Fly 10,000 6 Assassin Bug 10,000 7 Freshwater Snail 10,000 8 Ascaris Roundworm 2,500 9 Tapeworm 2,000 10 Crocodile 1,000 11 Hippopotamus 500 12 Elephant 100 13 Lion 100 14 Wolf 10 15 Shark 10 https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-animals-that-kill-mo...

If you include viruses the top 10 looks a bit different:

    1  Hepatitis    1,340,000
    2  Mosquito     1,000,000
    3  HIV            770,000
    4  Influenza      489,000
    5  Human          475,000
    6  Rotavirus      440,000
    7  Hantavirus     150,000
    8  Measles        140,000
    9  Rabies          69,000
    10 Snake           50,000
... although the Mosquito-related deaths due include a number of viruses, and all of these numbers are from different sources so should be taken with a grain of salt.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#386

Post by EL_Loco »

dota_fanatic wrote: post #367
rainbowzootsuit wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We decidedly did not make it worse. The smaller ~20lbs dog was being courageously held onto by its owner underneath both dogs for the entire ~fight~ mauling to prevent it from being taken away and killed by the ~100lbs pit bull. I didn't see in that situation that I had time to consult with a respected behaviorist and get into the dog's upbringing, give it some positive reinforcement, tummy rubs, and treats, but I di…

Interesting that you and other comments took mine to mean how to train a dog, which is irrelevant to the situation under consideration. Did any of y'all mean that in good faith? No, it's about how to de-escalate a severe situation without loss of life. (Good) policemen don't break up a fight between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old by viciously beating and then stabbing the 18 yr old. My point was only that the instincts o…

> between an 18 yr old and 10 yr old

Nope, this was more like a 10 year old being savagely beaten by a 30 year old very strong, very violent, out of his mind MMA fighter who wanted to kill the 10 year old.

What you're saying makes sense for some breeds. The whole point was that pitbulls are more agressive and violent than other breeds.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#387

Post by michaelmrose »

seppin wrote: post #380
whynaut wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a big strawman, percentages would only be true if every owner’s dog killed someone.

The numbers don't relate perfectly, but the point stands. By failing to address what i'm actually saying, it's your straw-man of "the math doesn't work" that is distracting the conversation. Bad pit owners exist. Pits have a dangerous combination of mentality and strength. You can use a gun as a can opener if you want to, that doesn't change the ability it has to remove a life.

Your logic is thus

1. 80% of fatal dog attacks are by pit bulls.

This is complete nonsense from dogsbite.org actually nobody tracks this. This "statistic" is at best comprised by trying to compile news articles that notoriously misidentify any large breed mutt responsible for attacks as pit bulls.

2. If 80% of fatal are attacks are caused by pit bulls and negligent owners were the cause of attacks then 80% of owners must be negligent.

3. 80% of owners being negligent is an absurd conclusion thus the conclusion that bites are largely caused by negligent owners must be false.

Premise 2 is the result of what I like to call number gluing. To explicate people have 2 entities which they can attach a numerical identity to that seem related so people just mentally stick them together instead of doing the mathematical reasoning to figure out how the 2 relate. It's not that they don't "exactly" relate how you said they do they don't relate AT ALL. With no other numbers its entirely impossible to reason about which portion of owners are negligent or even how their average negligence relates to owners of say rottweilers and dobermans. There are 3.6 million pit bulls in the US and 40 people are killed annually. Even if every fatality was caused by a pit bull we could conclude from that fact that 1 in a million pit bull owners are negligent. The prior poster wasn't distracting from your argument he demolished it like a bulldozer.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#388

Post by tempestn »

stellalo wrote: post #350
tempestn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but mosquitos kill that many every single year. Look at the reaction to COVID-19 compared to the amount of effort going into eliminating mosquito-borne disease. There's certainly some, but it's far from the mobilization we see when a calamity on this scale hits rich countries.

Then it is reasonable to assume that, without such effort, covid-19 numbers would be far worse than mosquitoes

Of course! I'm not arguing we shouldn't be making every possible effort against covid-19.

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#389

Post by xpe »

Koshkin wrote: post #374
sarabande wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should be more clear. I know how to add verbatim formatting. I'd like to know if the OP manually aligned the columns in the table, if they used a program to do so, or something els.

Yeah, I had to put some manual effort into this. (I wish I knew a program which could do this kind of thing.)

This might be along the lines of what you are looking for?

https://plaintexttools.github.io/plain-text-table/

Re: Mosquitoes kill more than 700k people every year (2017)

#390

Post by whynaut »

seppin wrote: post #380
whynaut wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a big strawman, percentages would only be true if every owner’s dog killed someone.

The numbers don't relate perfectly, but the point stands. By failing to address what i'm actually saying, it's your straw-man of "the math doesn't work" that is distracting the conversation. Bad pit owners exist. Pits have a dangerous combination of mentality and strength. You can use a gun as a can opener if you want to, that doesn't change the ability it has to remove a life.

We know they exist. The point of the conversation is how prevalent they are (what you’re inflating), and how much of the behavior is attributable to the dog’s nature (in my opinion, near none; pit bulls are naturally sweet and playful).
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