[geofft]

A little tangential, but having just been in an argument here with someone who advocated a "nightwatchman state," I wonder what they'd think of the USDA's efforts here (as well as the other governments'). It seems almost impossible that this could have been coordinated by private industry alone: while there's an obvious benefit to the cattle industry, it seems hardly likely that they would have sponsored the years of investment in basic research that led to this, let alone successfully negotiated with Panama for the rights to dump irradiated bugs from coast to coast. Could it have been done?

It's also striking how much these efforts were made harder by US foreign policy and involvement in the wars of Central America, and are still made hard because of our poor relationship with Cuba.

[jtolmar]

There's significant cattle industry in South America too, and they still have screw worms. So private industry has not accomplished it there.

[tomohawk]

> US foreign policy in the wars

Cuba and the Soviet Union started insurgencies in several countries in Central America. Blaming the US for its attempts to counter this is disingenuous.

[roenxi]

> ...it seems hardly likely that they would have sponsored the years of investment in basic research...

That is the easy part. There is a good model for shared infrastructure - a private corporation is established, all the local companies buy a share then the shared company builds, owns and operates the actual infrastructure. The same thing works for funding long-term research in everyone's best interest. A shared research corporation that all the local businesses can buy into. They can be guilted in to a small contribution and the research can happen at a slow-burn to generate results over time.

To me the bigger challenge is who would pay for dumping large numbers of irradiated bugs.

[pjc50]

But this never happens?

[roenxi]

I didn't come up with the idea, I saw it in action in a mining context.

Besides, how you can be sure it does or doesn't happen? The world is large and complicated; and basic research gets nearly no press and is very hard to statistically quantify. Where would you look for proof in the positive or negative?

[eythian]

Fonterra, New Zealand's largest company runs along these lines. It's a dairy company, so basically gets milk from dairy farmers and puts it on the market. It is a co-op owned by those farmers.

[pnutjam]

My guess is the mining companies do this more for liability then shared cost. I wonder what the churn is in this group of companies?

[Spooky23]

An example in semiconductors would be Sematech.