The W.H.O. director said 4 days ago "Covid-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22488862). So, I'm also confused and unsure how to rectify this.
That's an impressive and surprising stat I've never heard before, and really puts the prospect of nuclear energy in perspective. Can you provide a source for this?
My understanding is that out of 3,500 mosquito species, only about 40 transmit malaria. Most of what I've read from experts implies they're not sure that mosquitoes play any biologically important role at all, and it seems like if there is some role (other than killing humans), the other 99% of non-eradicated mosquito species could fill in that gap.
In my (decidedly non-expert) opinion, that's good enough to start making moves towards eradicating the mosquito-causing species.
Obscurity seems like useful security here. IIUC it shouldn't be possible to e.g. trick self-driving cars with noisy signs, unless you have a copy of the classifier to train against. Thinking about ATMs, you could train against it as a black box, repeatedly inserting different patterns of noise? But it seems probably infeasible if you need to do a lot of iterations.
It also suggests that people concerned about adversarial attacks shouldn't use off-the-shelf pretrained classifiers, where attacks can be trained offline in advance. Similar to hashing algorithms and rainbow tables, maybe a practice of "salting" an off-the-shelf classifier could be effective in dodging attacks.
To make that more concrete, there are environmental externalities that no one is paying on gas, but whose cost is real. The first recent source I found on google [1] pegs the externalities at $3.80 per gallon of gas, which would more than double the cost of gas (in the US) if factored in.
More directly, if you drive your vehicle 100k miles at 20 MPG, that's $20,000 in environmental harm you're creating and passing on to be someone else's problem. To me, that makes electric cars (and other alternatives) seem more attractive.