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Season passes are rarely worth it. Often you'll get a bunch of meaningless content when you could have paid less and gotten the expansions you wanted (if there are any). The only recent game where the season pass was a good deal was Arkham Knight.

I just made all of that up. See how easy it is to "discuss" linguistics?

Rash? "Rash" comes from "rush", which is Celtic in origin. People used it to refer to skin irritations because you would rapidly scratch your skin, "rushing" it. When it came to the Americas, accents turned the word into "rash".

Absolutely. The biggest obstacle is that these things take a lot of time and effort. Look at the Gates foundation - amazing work, eradicating multiple diseases all over the world, but it's not just because they have a lot of money, but because they work smart and know what they're doing. If we...

Back when the Panama Canal was being constructed, one of the most extensive sanitary campaigns in history was conducted in order to prevent mosquitoes from depositing their eggs, vastly reducing malaria and eradicating yellow fever from the region. That's the biggest example I can think of.

... any other species - animals that have them as part of their diet, like bats, mostly eat flies and other, harmless mosquito types. The two genres I mentioned are some of the few species that could go extinct with literally no negative ecological impact, and MASSIVE benefits to human society.

Also. Mosquitoes don't really interact with the ecosystem by pollinating or anything like that. They don't control another species population. And their biomass is so small they really aren't sustaining...

Second, this HAS been tried, and *it works*. It's just not been done on a larger scale because it's expensive to make those mosquitoes (and thus takes more time) but if there was an international investment into it, that would quickly become a non-issue.

Wrong on both accounts. First, this isn't the 1970s where we can only spray pesticides and hope it works - nowadays, we have genetic engineering, and VERY effective techniques like releasing sterile males of the species in question, and since females only mate with them once they end up not...

... malaria, which kills 0.6 - 1.2 million people per year. Aedes aegypti transmit zika virus, dengue fever, and yellow fever. There are some very promising proposals out there to eradicate those two while leaving other mosquitoes alone. The other mosquitoes would fill the gap, and all animals...

... pandemics. We can, however, make it permanently less likely that we will be infected by many of those pathogens in the future. I am obviously not talking about all mosquitoes - that level of extinction would have unpredictable consequences. But there are two genres of mosquito (out of the...

... available, if ever. And of course, this isn't the last surprise epidemic the world will face. But mosquito eradication can begin *today*. It may seem like a drastic step to some, but selecting certain species of disease carrying mosquitoes for total eradication will save MILLIONS of lives in...

So you know, considering how people in general react to whatever surprise outbreak is latest, I'm thinking it's a great time to start spreading the idea that public health officials need to be focusing on vectors of disease and not just developing cures and vaccines. For many diseases (including...

You do realize a vaccine for the Zika virus does not exist, right?

... difficult considering how potent of a vector they are, but through modern biological technologies, it needs to be done as quickly as possible.

... completely eradicate the mosquito. I'm not joking. Their ability to spread disease is unmatched and through that, they have killed millions of people. It's the one case where we SHOULD be using all our resources to intentionally drive a species into extinction. It's very...

Personally, I'm looking at the bigger picture - yes, the average person can do a LOT to help prevent the spread of this and other diseases by eliminating places the mosquitoes can reproduce in. But the one thing that will really solve the issues of zika, dengue, malaria, etc., is a large scale...