I Am Completely Serious

Here is a story about his abilities that I think is pretty interesting! And also depressing. Also that.

( Warning for death. )

Bugs don't actually ever "develop a resistance" to pesticides, right? The fleas aren't actually "getting immune" to the old pet flea meds? These things aren't antibiotics, they're poisons that eat through the little things' chitin and eggshells and stuff. How exactly are you going to overcome that?

Bacteria are able to develop immunities to antibiotics that because their life-cycles are really, really short - they evolve really fast. Also, because huge populations of them are constantly being bomboarded with huge quantities of antibiotics due to Industrial Shit I Do Not Actually Understand, so there's plenty of opportunity for one bacteria to come up with a helpful mutation to resist a specific antibiotic and reproduce a lot.

Bugs don't live long, but they live at least a few days, which means population-wide genetic changes are going to take orders of magnitude longer than they do for bacteria. And they've got other places to live than on crops and domestic animals, and we're not spraying pesticides in the forest or giving flea pills to deer.

So I feel like if bugs are "learning" anything on a genetic level, the majority of survival-conducive mutations that actually get passed on are going to be the ones that tell them to stay away from humans and our stuff, rather than tiny changes that make their exoskeletons a little tougher in the face of something corrosive.

Evolution likes path-of-least-resistance shit like that, right? Even if a flea all of a suddem mutates up a total resistance to pesticide X, and that mutation doesn't impact them negatively otherwise, and that flea survives contact with said pesticide and breeds, it's not going to do as well reproductively as another flea on a deer in the forest that's got another mutation that tells fleas to slightly prefer deer/raccoons/bears/etc over dogs/cats/horses/etc. The forest flea has plenty of potential mates because no one's given its deer any Frontline-or-generic-equivalent-thereof; the house flea, in a house where most of the other fleas just got massacred, obviously has fewer opportunities.

(I feel bad for the mutant flea now...)

The only way I can see the "fleas get used to pesticides" narrative making sense is if some of the pesticides actually are antibiotics, and they function by messing up a symbiotic bacteria that lives on/in fleas, and that bacteria is actually the thing that mutates...?

But even then, it would have to be slower, because so few fleas ever come in contact with flea killer in the first place.

Anyway, I refuse to buy still-under-patent flea killer anymore because the generic stuff is fine.

I am naturally inclined to be a mean, judgmental jerk who writes people off entirely, which I do not like. I believe in the concept of a Bad Person fervently on an emotional level after about 11:00 PM, but not really in any other set of circumstances. So for the past few years, I've been trying to do like this:

If I find I'm thinking of someone as Bad, I try to nail down exactly what thing(s) they did that made me form that opinion.

And if they're justified, I go like, "okay, but what specific area of Badness is this?" And I try to recategorize the person, in my brain-spreadsheet, as "Cannot Presently Be Trusted To Make Decisions In This Area": and then there's a sub-table containing the list of things they are Bad at. If I have the mental energy for it, this table includes the dates of last observed failure of judgment, because maybe [name] has learned a valuable life lesson about [not hurting [category of person]] in between [date of last observed failure/defense of earlier failure matching category and] and [today's date].

(Spreadsheets obviously aren't the right format for this, maybe it'll get easier once I'm better at SQL.)

The Hamilton fandom is basically the American version of the Shinsengumi fandom.

Anyone have suggestions on getting (fairly deeply-inset) stripped screws out of the back of my laptop that don’t involve a soldering iron?

There is no way i can safely use a soldering iron in the vicinity of my laptop. My ordinary levels of hand-shakiness quadruple just thinking about it.

is not something I can do. I'm demonstrably okay with buying my own medications that way - though most kratom vendors prefer Papyrus or Lucida Handwriting - but I cannot do the same to the animals.