71–74 of 74 posts
I wonder if anyone ever did the math on whether trying to maintain a barrier at the Darian Gap with occasional failures was really a better financial choice than teaming up with South American countries to drive screwworms to extinction.
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You are blaming Trump for the failure of the Mexican government to act in its own self interest during the Biden administration?
The Biden admin followed on the first Trump admin, member the "build the wall" crap?
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DOGE probably didn’t help matters but the problem started to rise in 2023. My gut reaction was “damn that DOGE!” too but they didn’t start with cuts until 2025. So it likely just exasperated an already growing concern. This is the same kind of stuff anti-vaxers don’t get. We left South America out of the equation so when the circumstances of migration and feeding changed so did the status quo of a “screwworm free” li…
That's worse though. Cutting a program that had been successful for decades is short sighted, but people tend to begin focusing on the cost of prevention after so long. Memories fade and the question starts to become, "Why are we still spending so much?" That's not what happened. DOGE carelessly cut a program in the middle of fighting a crisis.
I wonder if anyone ever did the math on whether trying to maintain a barrier at the Darian Gap with occasional failures was really a better financial choice than teaming up with South American countries to drive screwworms to extinction.
Releasing the steriles blindly is not enough, you gotta monitor the pest too. This is prohibitively expensive in rainforests and other areas with poor infrastructure. Okay, maybe you could release the flies in large enough numbers not to need monitoring but I guess it would also be prohibitively expensive.