Socialize the costs, privatize the gains.
P.s. about the picture, I see a screw worm and a worm that screwed us. Which one do we combat first?
Put one in the ass of the other. I don’t care about the order.
Can’t wait to see how they turn this into another grift.
I’d bet a shiny nickel one of his cronies gets the contract to eradicate the screw worm where lip service is paid to solving the problem and a few people take in that sweet, sweet gov funding.
Also, I’d bet another shiny nickel this gets blamed on brown people and funding the wall gets pushed as a way to contain the screw worm.
I was on Fox News today and they are already blaming immigrants for this. Something about a liberal conspiracy to let immigrant’s cattle into the US to destroy our ranchers. It was really dumb.
1bn emergency to fund this, probably wont do much the screworm invasion anyways, its likely a slush fund.
And you can bet is made in most wasteful way possible trying to content the fly at Texas instead of Panama because they would not let that benefit central America for that even if it’s cheaper that way.
They’re blaming Biden.
It started while Biden was in office due to instability in the region of central America that functioned as a wall to the rest of North America, so there is some truth to it. Trump cutting funding was the wrong thing to do at the wrong time, but the problem was already well under way when he took office.
When you see an animal, there’s likely a bunch of the same species you didn’t see. Specially if it’s a small animal, with a fast lifecycle, and the animal burrows itself into something (like, dunno… the flesh of another animal?). And if the animal can live pretty much anywhere there’s another, warm-blooded, animal living. (Livestock? Wild fauna? Pets? Humans? Yes.)
So a dozen cases isn’t just “a dozen cases”, there’s likely millions of those flies in USA already. I’m taking a wild guess here and say a billion dollars won’t even scratch the surface of the problem there.
(Not that it changes things for me. Here in South America the fly in question goes from “present” to “present”. Just businesses as usual.)
So how nasty are these things to humans? They seem like body horror nightmare fuel.
(I think I live far enough north to not have to worry about them but thinking about them still makes me a bit queasy.)
In general humans are the least concern. We’re smart enough to know something is wrong with our bodies, and fix it before it gets worse; we wear clothes and bandage wounds so there’s less exposure of vulnerable areas; etc. It’s a bit more concerning because of children, since the flies can attack eyes and mouths, but as long as the parents actually do their job and take care of the kid, no issue. (Bug repellent, pay attention to small wounds, regular visits to the doc, this kind of stuff.)
Dogs and cats are another can of worms (or maggots). Specially urban strays; if anyone here wants some nightmare fuel, websearch images for [NSFL] miíase cachorro or miasis perro [/NSFL], apparently the flies (it isn’t just C. hominivorax) responsible for this sort of infestation will lay multiple eggs in the same wound, if they can; so it can get really nasty. Same deal with the fauna.
I should not have googled that, I should not have googled that…
Nope. Leaving that one alone. Not today.
Well, I told you guys it’s NSFL.
if you are infirmed, or unable to move its a problem for those people.
I agree that “a” billion isn’t even gonna start to cover it.
Will it even EVER be controlled down to Panama again?
It will take many years.
It was pushed back down to panama before but it took half a century (1950-2000) to do it. All that effort undone by some kid named big balls.
and many breeding facilities as well. it takes a very long time to just suppress the invasion. 1bn likely wont do anything AT ALL. since likely south american isnt able to control the infestations.
IMO controlling it “down to Panama” is part of what went wrong, I think. Pushing further into South America would’ve been costlier, but if people managed to get those flies completely extinct, the problem wouldn’t come back.
But that requires multiple governments working together with a “helping them out means less problems for me in the future” mindset, and that simply doesn’t roll with USA; USA’s external policy was always “I’m shitting my pants so others smell it”. And working together with a bunch of dictatorships can be a bit hard, specially when those dictatorships were supported by USA so they can’t trust the United-Statian government to die properly.
doubtful you can eradicate the species since the cows are still present, also screworms dont need to use cows, it can be almost any mammal it can get its eggs on.
The species actually got eradicated from both Mexico and USA, using sterile males, and almost eradicated from the southern tip of North America aka Central America.
So yes, it is possible. Regardless of presence or absence of cows. Because, like I already said and you repeated, they can infest any mammal.
The reason they stopped at Panama is simply because it’s a chokepoint; in the short term it’s cheaper to keep releasing sterile males in the Darién gap than to push further. It works until it doesn’t, like another poster highlighted once they stopped doing it in COVID times the flies re-invaded NA.
I’m criticising governments in the Americas (including but not exclusively USA) for not co-ordinating and pushing further, to get it extinct.
Does the worm have a moustache?
It’s from the darkest timeline.
I’m from the good timeline and I can confirm:
Don’t fuck with screw-worms. Eradicate them. They’re not “good for the ecology”.
Also hello neutral timeliners 👋
As all people and things with mustaches are
They must be Viltrimites!!
They will bemoan it and cry there is no money due to evil democrat fraud and the worm is a hoax.
And then give Iran another 50 billion.
Those two images are the same.
I love how the images of Trump trying to look “cool” always end up just adding more comic value whatever the headline or meme.
There is no “finding out”. No one will ever hold these deranged weirdos accountable.
Saving so much money, this asshole.
They can just engineer a virus to interfere with this creature’s metabolism or reproduction, right?
That’s more or less what we’ve been doing for decades - breeding, sterilizing and releasing screwworms by the million to curb the population. It works too - but Trump & Friends axed the program, and so now it’ll cost $1bil (more than was spent over the entire lifetime of the program previously) to start it back up again (to make the subtext clear it’s because that money will be stolen)
To make the subtext even clearer, it shouldn’t cost that much, but will end up costing even more than the number they say today as they find new opportunities to line their friend’s pockets with your money.
We should shame him into fixing it.
I bet Elon Musk couldn’t fix it! There’s no way he could figure out how to spend a billion dollars fixing it!
I thought they weren’t allowing immigration? Those screwworms must’ve paid a heavy bribe.
This is really good for the GDP
Imagine only creating a few millions of economic activity when you can instead create billions.
It’s almost as though DOGE was doing lots of shit the people involved knew fuck all about. ‘I don’t understand this or see the point, therefore it must be woke wastage.’
“What does this 400-room hotel need to employ a full-time plumber for? The pipes are all fine, and no one ever complains about a clogged toilet. Fire that lazy bum!”
Musk is the living embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and his wealth represents the exact monetary value delta of confident ignorance over intelligence.
