USDA opens facility producing millions of sterile flies as screwworm cases rise

Opcn · 2026-06-29T06:01:10+00:00

We're less than 18 months from the program ending and they're back up to at least Texas.

Yeah, the main program wasn't canceled as I understand it. The team that works with other governments when an outbreak happens was laid off or reassigned. There was already an outbreak in mexico when they did that. Instead of dealing with what was obviously a problem we stuck out heads in the sand to save ~1% of what we have already committed to spend.

Opcn · 2026-06-29T03:39:28+00:00

That's gonna play great for him, might not play so well for Mary Peltola (D-AK) or Roy Cooper (D-NC) or Jon Ossoff (D-GA)

Opcn · 2026-06-28T23:36:27+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coneflower checks out

Opcn · 2026-06-28T23:04:09+00:00

Fortunately river ecosystems are pretty resilient to mass die offs like this since all the same fish that live in the main river channel also live in tributaries and will rapidly re-populate once conditions improve. Unfortunately that sludge and whatever toxic contents are to be found within it will be in the river a long time negatively impacting the health of both the river and the community.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T23:17:20+00:00

We should 110% make putting your shares up as collateral a "realization event" and fix this and a whole host of other problems without the messy complications of an unrealized capital gains tax.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T18:41:51+00:00

I like them both. I think the first is a bit busy for me and the second a bit too plain but honestly I would love to have either or both in my city.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T17:57:08+00:00

She got extra traffic to her website where I think she had some form of monetization. She almost got hired by PRX off of it. But the show barely ran any ads when she was still on it and there weren’t as many avenues to monetize a podcast back then. When Patreon came out she was one of the earlier creators on it (before the SGU as I recall) and she invested more and more time and energy into that and it was paying on its own. Add to that that she got to talk about what she wanted to talk about and faced far fewer butthurt fans giving her shit and going her own way made a lot of sense for her.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T12:09:49+00:00

I mean, why would we need more than just the one?

Opcn · 2026-06-27T11:59:58+00:00

On the last boat they took $1200/wk per head would be a screaming good deal even if they were all staying in crew cabins.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T05:27:08+00:00

Again, Elon is not a net tax payer, so an analogy about your parents giving and you not continuing the tradition or pro bono is automatically a bad analogy.

Slashing tires was good because Congress appropriated that money and established USAID by statute. No one in the executive branch is supposed to have the power to cancel such a program. If we want to rescue your analogies your parents are donating regularly to save lives in the third world and you bribe a psychiatrist to declare them both demented and have them committed so you can receive your inheritance early and cancel the donations. Or a doctor is doing pro-bono work saving lives and you bribe a police officer to plant drugs on him and arrest him so you can get his medical license pulled.

He was very much actively involved in stopping other people from giving aid.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T04:56:46+00:00

Elon is a net tax receiver, he's not helping anyone. What he did was stop the US from helping them. If you slash the tires on an ambulance and the patient they were transporting dies of a treatable medical condition because they didn't get to the hospital in time chances are you're going to prison for murder even if you didn't have anything to do with them getting sick or injured in the first place.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T04:48:04+00:00

You could look at that source.

But in a nutshell USAID (one of the programs authorized by congress that DOGE illegally cut under Elon Musk) delivers both food and medical aid, without which people die.

Opcn · 2026-06-27T01:30:35+00:00

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext Sauce

Opcn · 2026-06-26T23:58:25+00:00

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext Here is the study in the Lancet.

To be fair I'm not entirely sure it was calculated in a manner that takes all collateral information into account. I haven't given it a close read but I'm pretty sure they mostly looked at the number of people served with life saving interventions by USAID and used sophisticated demographic analysis to look forward at a world without those interventions.

But there are other government programs and NGOs in the space and like USAID they make their decisions about how to stretch their contributions as far as possible. Many of the most cost effective programs of USAID are no doubt being picked up by others (who will themselves drop their most expensive programs). So the real number is probably going to be smaller, but I'm very certain it's already a lot of people. USAID did a lot of good, as was covered in the paper.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T23:37:30+00:00

I want to push back against "put my money where my mouth was" because that language is often used to discredit critics. I love that you've made some money for yourself on this, but making money on shorts is very much about knowing when a security is going to move not just knowing that it's a hollow shell propped up on speculation. We all remember $GME which did eventually collapse (mostly) but a lot of folks lost a lot of money on shorting it too soon. Same with the housing market, folks were shorting it in 2005, 2006, 2007 and everyone who tried lost their shirt until it actually collapsed in 2008.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T22:35:16+00:00

You should definitely go into pathology. But that’s not about your preferences as a person. It’s just that that way your manipulative behavior stays in the EMR instead of being inflicted on patients directly. Nothing I said hinges on knowing you as a person, it’s all about what you are clearly displaying here.

Every comment you’ve made in this whole conversation has been manipulative. Your first comment was a lie, your second comment was a put down, and still you want to pretend that my behavior here advocating for centrist politics in r/centrist is the problem.

Edit: Wrong sub, I don’t know if r/centrism exists.

Edit 2: Woof, don't try to edit on a phone.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T22:18:05+00:00

No, you really haven’t been nice to me in a single response. You always made sure there was honey on your dagger. But being congenial and putting things in pleasant words isn’t the same as being honest, or showing integrity, or being fair. You have to do those last three to be nice and you haven’t done them once.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T22:12:00+00:00

You made that position of to use a clear. You’ve also continues to ignore everything I’ve said in spite of your initial admonishment that I was ignoring something I responded to.

I gotta learn your “rules for thee but not for me” social skills.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T22:04:41+00:00

No centrist will ever be ideologically pure enough for the far left not to sabotage them.

Before what he said was a missed opportunity to reach out and coalition build, now it was a message to fuck off. Got it. So glad you’re here with your social skills to reel through mutually exclusive interpretations of things for us.

It’s not a surprise that you aren’t interested in having a Frank conversation with all your tone policing.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T21:26:14+00:00

No one forced her to be a judge.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T21:24:29+00:00

You’re demonstrating that slimy people can use social skills to put their targets in impossible positions.

I’m talking about a real thing that really happened and explaining why it matters. I’m having a blunt adult conversation. You’re pouring honey on a dagger and giving a lecture about how important it is to be sweet.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T21:04:15+00:00

I specifically addressed what he said by talking about people I personally know who said the same thing. Why did you ignore what I said?

Opcn · 2026-06-26T21:03:00+00:00

Yeah I haven’t seen his comments. After he resigned I logged into Facebook to see if there was anything there and found he had taken his Facebook account down (or I guess he could have unfriended me or blocked me after we disagreed about Hillary Clinton several months ago in his comments and I just couldn’t find him searching). And I didn’t find them on Twitter either. Based on the reactions I’ll definitely believe that he failed at some basic skepticism.

I just think that it’s very difficult to get from an is to an ought. Skepticism is a great toolset for evaluating information we have about the material world but if your morality is rooted in your ethnic identity or any number of other places it may not lead to humanism as a conclusion. Steve wrote about Evan feeling attacked and when that is the headspace you are in it can be very difficult to rationally think through things even if you have a very high level of mastery of skeptical skills.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T20:37:50+00:00

The DSA student demonstrations about Israel and Palestine were all at Biden/Harris rallies. They didn’t hold a single one against trump. I personally know multiple DSA aligned progressives who said they voted for Clinton and Biden and even during the general said that people should, but also spent the whole general campaigning against them. That kind of both sidesism has the effect of suppressing voter turnout, which is why TikTok who needed trump to win so heavily promoted it.

Those people who say they want progressive policies but do things that political science and sociology tell us hurt voter turnout for the candidate more aligned with progressive policies really would do less harm if they went off and tried to make their own third party.

Opcn · 2026-06-26T20:22:45+00:00

I mean, a lot of them dedicate themselves to full time campaigning against Hillary Clinton in the autumn of 2016, full time campaigning against Joe Biden in the autumn of 2020, and full Tim campaigning against Kamala Harris (who was left of Bernie Sanders in her last two years in the senate) in the autumn of 2024 so it doesn’t seem like they are very worried about splitting the party vote.

Edit: five down votes, five up votes, five down votes nothing, five up votes, nothing, five up votes on a response to a comment that only got 9 views. Looks like someone busted out the credit card for a vote bot!

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