ganafagol

> Could you imagine ants finding a method to annihilate themselves?

It's not very hard for ants to collectively commit suicide.

Exactly. These are social and political problems. They won't be solved by expanding. On the contrary, expanding makes them worse.

There are other alternatives beyond "spreading out" and "sitting on our hands".

Solving world hunger does not need expansion. Stopping climate change does not need expansion. Preventing the upcoming antibiotics crisis does not need expansion. To the contrary, expansion makes all those things worse or has even started them in the first place.

Maybe it's being downvoted because it is simply wrong?

If tomorrow all ants disappear then most land-oriented ecosystems would just collapse.

We humans are having so egoistically anthropocentrical world views that it's not even funny anymore.

I'm confused. Do you mean the millions of "long covid" cases which already exist today? Or the estimate that about 70% of all people who got the vaccine will be dead within 3 years?

I know which of these two I consider gaslighting.

Your parent comment was written in a way to discredit vaccinations as a concept and insinuate that it is cult-like. You may want to double-check your understanding of sarcasm. It works exactly the other way around.

> you would treat it with antibiotics and be fine.

Funny how you are confirming the sentiment in the article. I'd suggest you read it.

You are welcome to compare the number of cases of suspected-but-not-confirmed side effects with the number of people getting Lyme every year.

You may find a difference of a few orders of magnitude.

Why don't they just solve world peace and faster-than-light travel?

Because these things are hard. Lacking the ultimate solution, a small step is better than nothing.

Or do you only walk because cars and trains are too slow to get you to the next solar system so why bother ...?

If you consider enjoying nature as "reckless behavior" then the shared understanding needed as a basis for a conversation may be missing. Lying in the grass looking at sky and stars, running through the forest with your dog, go pick mushrooms. That's very natural behaviour, not "reckless". Of course you can sit indoors all day, but I prefer a vaccine and enjoy nature instead.

Not sure this is meaningful. It's similar to asking "I wonder if the stock market could cope with Elon Musk dumping all his Tesla shares at once. Do it!" Of course the stock would crash. Of course it would create a panic among not just Tesla shareholders but investors across the board. Of course the FTC would go and try countermeasures. And similarly, of course BTC would crash, at least temporarily. It's still a market with human actors in it.

Gnome Shell anybody? I'm surprised nobody brought it up yet.

About 10 years ago I switched from Gnome 2 to 3. Because my distro did. It was a huge drop in features. Over the years I had tuned my desktop experience on Gnome 2 with different panel apps, layouts, some custom hacks. It worked great. Gnome 3 ended all this. It was really simple, so that it was almost dysfunctional. It was new so I thought the community would soon catch up. But it never did. The experience is still much worse that in the Gnome 2 days. Even a few extensions that try to mimic the Gnome 2 experience can't really compensate, and many of them break with every other update. It's such a shame.

"We thank the anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback that we used to improve the article." Standard phrase, credit where credit is due, no need to make some definition worse just to not trip off a plagiarism filter.

Unless this very phrase does the tripping off. Having to rephrase it would be pretty ridiculous though (and illustrates your point).

I'm fully on board with fighting plagiarism down to that level.

But that said, I've often times wondered if this requirement of having to "rewrite in your own words" may do a lot of harm too. It obfuscates that things that people are talking about are actually exactly the same, or make it fuzzy what the exact differences are.

In a particular academic CS area I've witnessed people reproduce again and again the essentially identical description of setting and assumptions, but in being afraid of plagiarism accusations, they over and over re-formulate things which made it nonobvious that things are the same as from other authors or even from their own earlier work.

How about the common daily anxieties "Will I ever find true love?" and "Damn poop stinks"?