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This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important. Screwworm is really easy to eliminate by flooding their population with males sterilized
by throwup238 1y ago
This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important. Screwworm is really easy to eliminate by flooding their population with males sterilized by radiation (females only mate once in their lifetime so their population falls off fast). There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states.
Edit: Hah, I get to eat my words. Turns out USDA and APHIS have been trying to fly planes over Mexico to release the sterile flies, but the Mexican government has been restricting the flight days and denying landing permission, which has hampered the program. Looks like the Mexican bureaucracy is the one failing here, and USDA/APHIS might be running pre-emptive releases in the US (but I can't find a source on that). They just agreed to lift those restrictions and cooperate more at the end of April.
- andsoitis 1y ago> There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states. According to the article the cases are in Mexico, so I don’t know that “Latin American origin” is a silver bullet.
- slicktux 1y agoMexico is just a small portion of Latin America; A few places I can think of is Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil which have huge stockyards…
- bastawhiz 1y agoWhy wouldn't the USDA pay to eliminate pests in another country if it meant preventing those pests from reaching US farmers?
- creato 1y agoThey did exactly that for decades.
- dessimus 1y ago> Why wouldn't the USDA pay... Maybe because there is an executive body hell-bent on the slashing expenditures regardless of any perceived benefit?
- tomrod 1y agoPerhaps their supporters should reconsider the burn-the-world-despite-who-it-hurts philosophy.
- zamalek 1y agoHatred is a more powerful emotion than desperacy. Votes will continue to flow towards the man, even in the face of their very own livestock being decimated.
- pfdietz 1y agoIt's not like the alternative worked very well.
- margalabargala 1y agoIt clearly did, evidence: the exact situation we are discussing. Other evidence includes the worst measles outbreak of the last 30 years and the second largest three-month economic contraction since WWII only topped by the last iteration of this administration.
- pfdietz 1y agoI mean, it's not like the alternative got out of control spending under control. We wouldn't be having Trump had that happened.
- margalabargala 1y agoWhat were some specific problems caused by this spending? Seemed to work quite well. Up until our international image was destroyed two months ago, we were in a privileged position allowing deficit spending while the rest of the world absorbed the negatives. Trump certainly doesn't have a solution, but I'm also not convinced he has correctly identified a problem. Nation-state debt from the country whose currency is the de-facto international standard for the world, is categorically different than your mortgage or your credit card debt.
- ikiris 1y agoDoge probably saw it as anti male propoganda. THEYRE STERALIZIN OUR FLIES
- giardini 1y agoBetter if all parties who benefit also pay.
- krunck 1y ago> This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important. Try: "This is why a competent and well staffed science institute is so important." Bureaucracy not required.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoWho exactly do you think staffs this part of a science institute? Bureaucracy is just another word for the kind of well-staffed administrative system that can handle these tasks.
- 8note 1y agothe administrative parts - managers and approvers, aren't doing the science or the application thereof. a couple university students in a van going around releasing flies every 10 miles is not a bureaucracy, nor a stand in for a bureaucracy
- ryandamm 1y agoYou think that would be sufficient? Did you read the article? I did, and I have previously read an article in (iirc) The Atlantic about the screwfly program when it was working. It was a monumental effort to push screwflies back to the Darien Gap, involving widespread coordination of cattle ranchers and government workers, constant flyovers of planes dropping huge numbers of sterile flies, and a massive breeding program. Two university students in a van can get about as much done as it sounds like. Some problems require coordination, government involvement, and yes, the organization — i.e., bureaucracy — that implies. (Edit: it was The Atlantic, not The New Yorker. Comment further down has the link, but here it is: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-eating-worms-disease-containment-america-panama/611026/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...)
- fallingknife 1y agoI think a lot of the objections here aren't really bureaucracy in terms of government employees doing things. A lot of what people mean when they complain about "government bureaucracy" is really that it often seems to be 20 people taking 6 months to do something that should take 5 people 6 weeks. So discussions on this tend to get confusing.
- stevenwoo 1y agoIt was partially the new tariffs that put a stop to the program and the April 30 agreement puts an end to tariffs on equipment associated with screwworm treatment program.
- jimnotgym 1y agoGood job the US is on such good terms with Latin America at the moment
- drivingmenuts 1y agoThat competent and well-staffed bureaucracy is important also because they patiently work through these problems with their counterparts on the other side of the the Rio Grande. Except they got fired, so now there's no one to do that work. We got what we wanted. God help us all 'cause no one else is.
- dmckeon 1y agoAnd now those positions are listed as open. Disruption, but to what end. Sigh. https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5384961 https://text.npr.org/nx-s1-5384961
- tomohawk 1y ago[dead]
- pfdietz 1y ago> their population falls off fast Superexponentially fast.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]