Right, absolutely brilliant idea. You live prudently, save some money every month and invest it (stocks, bonds, whatever). Due to factors entirely outside your control like a stock market bubble or an interest rate drop, the $50k portfolio you built over 30 years is now worth $70k. Your unrealized $20k gain is taxed at 10% for easier math. You don't have $2k cash on hand and are forced to sell some of your portfolio to pay the tax.
Next year, there is a crash. You now have just $40k in assets. But there is a gradual recovery, and the year after it's back to $50k. You now owe another $1k. Sound good?
On the move 20% picaridin repellent works well to almost completely prevent bites. It's also slightly more long-lasting than DEET and doesn't destroy plastics. It will still need re-application if you're sweating. Otherwise long sleeves, repellent on hands and a net over your head work well. The general rule is to not stand still for more than a minute - CO2 accumulation will draw in exponentially more of them. If you have to stop, look for a place that is naturally windy like ridge or a forest cutting.
At home / in camp, obviosuly put nets everywhere and turn off interior lights when opening doors. If there aren't too many mosquitoes UV traps can make things bearable, but if you're near standing water at dusk you'll still get eaten alive.
I take it you have never spent any time outside where there's lots of them. If you go out without protection, they'll mercilessly sting every bit of exposed skin. Depending on your genes and the mosquitoes', the stings can swell heavily. Some of them sting so deep that you cannot get rid of the itching and inflammation with a heat pen.
As soon as you stand still, you'll find yourself in thick cloud of the bastards within 20 seconds. If you use repellent (picaridine does work to keep them from stining but isn't exactly healthy), they will still buzz around you and slowly drive you mad. If you use netting, some get through the inevitable gaps and some will obviously get inside your tent/car/house when you open them.
The sound of thousands of them flying around you just triggers some primal revulsion. Around sundown, their activity gets so intense that it literally sounds like a drone, if they're a large variety it even sounds a bit like a distant hornet swarm.
All in all, I don't think we can become friends. But at least they're more pleasant than black flies and deer flies.
There are few things that set me off like hearing that telltale Doppler effect buzz whizz by my ear. Not as bad as those flies you mention for sure but still awful.
I wonder if the unintended consequences would be tame enough to justify using a gene drive to breed human predation out of mosquitos.
If I could get a vaccine or some other treatment that got my body to not itch from their saliva, or even to just itch for a more limited amount of time, I could handle the rest (deadly disease excepted).
Sure, they're annoying, but I don't actually care about them sucking my blood that much. I have plenty of the stuff, they only take a tiny amount, and they feed birds and bats with it.
Having to spend hours afterward physically uncomfortable certainly tempers my magnanimity.
Have you ever considered an electrified paddle? I’d recommend the kind without a guard, just bare wires… the SNAP! when you contact a mosquito is both humane (instantaneous explosion!) and extremely satisfying, as these things go…
Not useful for meaningful control in the kind of swarm situation you describe, but cathartic! And useful for the stragglers who sneak into your shelter behind you…
The business model is essentially the same as credit cards, but with "fees" instead of interest payments. That is to say, Klarna takes a commission from merchants and the rest of their income is from people who didn't pay on time.
It's much better to buy Puts (limited downside). The problem with buying them now is that you're way too late. By now the premiums are quite high, even for huge declines. If you bought a few batches at different strike prices expiring 2026 in 2021 you would be sitting on some serious profit now.
There has been tremendous progress in terms of available calories, malnutrition and deaths to starvation globally [0]. I'd say opaque indices and relative measures are now gaining adoption by certain parties to help conceal that fact. Of course anyone suffering hunger is tragic, but things have decidedly improved (although sadly it has plateaued in Africa since 2010).
I can't really comment on the situation in India specifically, but just for some global context around stunted development, look at a chart of men's height [1]. Not having half your population stunted by malnutrition is a recent phenomenon.
Your first link says that it measures calories available and not calories consumed. It links to an undernourishment metric instead the world average for it has remained about the same for about a decade. I am not expert and I am probably cherry picking the page that matches my bias but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
> but I disagree that the progress has been tremendous.
There really is no argument that it hasn't. If we take a year between 1950 and 1970 as a baseline, there was a significant reduction in chronic malnutrition and the number and severity of famines -- both in absolute numbers as well as per capita.
> it has remained about the same for about a decade
If your time horizon is the last 10 years then the picture is more mixed, yea.
It's not just the OS itself, where some of the slowness can at least be explained by the silo-ed nature of development and the large amount of moving parts. But even when MS gives a small-ish team free reign and a fresh start, the software is just agonizingly slow and buggy.
The FancyZones "window snap" UI takes upwards of half a second to activate when dragging a window and the Zone Editor is at around 5s. All in all it is only very slightly less buggy than 3rd party tiling WMs like komorebic.
The PowerToysRun utility input is extremely variable, takes between 1 and 20(!) seconds. A lot of the plugins shipped with it simply don't work or have no suggestions/hints once you enter their prefix. The search relies on WindowsSearch, which is about 500x slower than https://github.com/sharkdp/fd and has not improved since Win7. Who cares, nobody ever searches for files, right? As a whole, PTRun is simply worse than https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher which uses the same UI kit as far as I can see. WTF?
The most frustrating thing with PowerToys is trying to remap keys (like caps lock to Ctrl). It feels like it's done by intercepting the keypress at runtime in the app rather than being configured at the system level, so if you happen to, say, hit your new Ctrl key when the CPU is pegged, it'll revert back to caps lock and then also get stuck. So you have to go into PowerToys to unbind the key, turn off caps lock, then rebind it.
There's another app that does this in the registry I think, but I keep forgetting the name of it.
We do have the technology to build HVDC cables from Iceland to Britain / Norway and we can expect the loss of this grid-to-grid interconnect to be < 5%. It's a different question entirely if it is feasible. It would be the longest sub-sea power cable ever, and the projected cost of $4 billion might be much too low.
In the current situation Europe would profit immensely by sending excess renewable energy to Iceland's pumped hydro and Aluminium smelters while using their geothermal baseload capacity. But in 15 years that might no longer be the case and by then the investment would not have paid off and there might be regret that the money wasn't spent on a different HVDC line like another North Africa - Europe link or Bulgaria - Caucasus (which has a lot of undeveloped hydro potential).
