
A $100M U.S. Government Fish Farm Nobody Wants - JumpCrisscross
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-28/the-100-million-u-s-government-fish-farm-nobody-wants
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Bartweiss
This is an interesting piece, but it feels like there's a major gap in it:
what's NOAA's story?

The government does silly things, yes, but this isn't a bridge to nowhere.
It's an ongoing investment backed by scientists and politicians alike. It's
already seen repeated commercial failures, so that can't be an unexpected
result.

So is this mostly about investigating new technology, instead of starting
companies? Is it about driving down tech prices until companies are
profitable? Is the long game to push China on environmental regulations and
have something ready when US markets become more desirable?

Basically, I'm suspicious of an article that implies everyone involved is
setting money on fire for fun, or because they love environmental disasters.
We don't even get to see NOAA's nominal justification here, much less a deeper
analysis.

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maxerickson
They have a strategic plan:

[http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/aquaculture/docs/aquaculture_docs/n...](http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/aquaculture/docs/aquaculture_docs/noaa_fisheries_marine_aquaculture_strategic_plan_fy_2016-2020.pdf)

I suppose a good motivation for establishing the marine farms would be to
reduce pressure on natural fisheries.

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Retric
The government heavily subsidies food in the US, this innovation may be
misguided but innovation has risk. In that context this is significantly less
than 0.1% of the total subsidy and IMO completely reasonable.

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ars
Every time humanity has had a food supply issue, we solved it with farming.

Fish is no difference. Wild caught wish is rapidly becoming not just
unsustainable environmentally, but also, there simply isn't enough, even if we
didn't care about the environment.

Fish farming is the future, and I for one, and glad that there are people
spending money on it trying to make it work.

And doing it in the ocean vs land just makes sense - there more room, and it's
a lot easier to maintain water quality.

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csours
Question: Could foreign workers staff these farms legally? Ie, are they far
enough offshore that US immigration laws don't apply?

What if you called an aquaculture farm a "ship" instead and flagged it out of
Panama?

I bet any number of Chinese companies would jump to invest in that.

