Are we all fucked?

[Mooncat]

So Edmonton has been having raging storms the last few weeks, pretty much monsoon-like. Last night the rain was flying sidways into my window so hard that is started to seep through the frame and ran down my walls inside the apartment. Major flooding throughout the city with trees down and power out. The fork lightning here is intense, you can get hundreds of strikes in just a short space of time.

All this rain has led to an absolute plague of mosquitoes. They're saying it's one of the worst mosquito years on record. If you walk through even a small patch of grass an enormous cloud of them flies up and surrounds you.

Wildfire season means the city is filled with smoke most days. Sometimes so bad you can barely see 100 yards in front.

Flooding, fires, and insect plague. If someone calls in sick today and covers pestilence, it's the end of the world lads.

[Eoin McLove]

Sounds rough 

[John Kimble]

Could equally belong in the Crime thread but here's some scumminess of the lowest  order

Firefighters battling to extinguish fires on Slievenamon targeted by thieves https://share.google/Ak76CVE5DYVPMzfY1

[Bürggermeister]

Well worth a listen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw

[The Butcher]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/science/ai-viruses-bacteria-arc.html

Be grand 

[astfgyl]

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/science/in-1974-spain-imported-two-tons-of-american-red-crayfish-for-aquaculture-50-years-later-the-species-cannot-be-removed/articleshow/132840067.cms

We are
We aren't
We are
We aren't

[Pat Twisted Wrath]

[Bürggermeister]

Times of India, if their youtube channel is anything to go by, is Russian misinformation platform. You might as well read your own hole.

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

That is true. I've done some behavioral work on that crayfish species in lab though, and heard this story before...I'm just not sure what astfgyl is trying to say with the story. It's often bad when humans introduce invasive species..?

[The Butcher]

Don't worry, scientists will train artificial intelligence on libraries of crayfish species and then asked the model to create recipes for viral genomes to wipe them out.

[Bürggermeister]

When it comes to wiping species out, AI won't need to be asked 

[astfgyl]

That is true. I've done some behavioral work on that crayfish species in lab though, and heard this story before...I'm just not sure what astfgyl is trying to say with the story. It's often bad when humans introduce invasive species..?

I'm just looking at how initially it's the sort of thing that humans did that's bad for humans but then it became good for humans because of the human response to it but then became bad again for humans because of the human response to it but then some other humans had another response that made it good for humans again.

I mean, it's hard to say if we are fucked or not a lot of the time

[Barnacle Billy]

Good to see you posting again brah...

[Black Shepherd Carnage]

I see. Well, conceiving of "we" as exclusively "humans" is a large part of why we--humans plus those species we share our habitat niche with--are indeed fucked.

Speaking of dealing with invasive species, the documentary about Eoghan Daltun's Irish rainforest project is on limited release at the moment, I think.

[Barnacle Billy]

Ireland is literally a rainforest