"The exact cause of this breach is unclear but is most likely due to multiple factors, including interruptions in sterile fly production due to the COVID-19 pandemic and illegal cattle imports, as well as the challenges involved in surveillance of the (Darien) gap’s difficult geography."
There's currently only one plant in Panama running the sterile fly program, but both Mexico and the US are opening new plants to handle the issue.
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture is constructing a new $750 million facility nearby to breed sterile flies, though U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said it won’t be completed until late 2027. In the meantime, the agency is investing $21 million to transform a fruit fly breeding center in far southern Mexico into a screwworm fly production site, with operations set to begin this summer."
I first got it in 2015 after playing Fallout 4 almost nonstop for the entire weekend. The game ran poorly and the low stuttery fps caused a massive migraine in my head. I took Tylenol and went to sleep and woke up with it ringing in one of my ears which eventually moved to both. The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it.
My brain eventually figured out how to tune it out and now it associates the sound with silence.
Now I've developed it again after feeling depressed and blasting music in my car. The new version crackles and alternates tones in my left ear. I have a doctors appointment coming up to hopefully figure it out.
There is a new expensive treatment for it called Lenore which works by playing sounds and stimulating your tongue at the same time. Those pathways are located close together in the brain and by stimulating both at the same time, it's supposed to train it to filter out the noise.
> The doctors were pretty useless and said they couldn't see anything wrong and to just live with it.
Unfortunately that is the truth of it. Sometimes tinnitus can be traced to other parts of the body, but more often it seems to be caused by the brain acting up. And we just don't have enough knowledge about the brain to fix things like that, so all you can do is try to habituate.
Interesting fact. It reminds me of how K-Mart is apparently big in Australia despite having died a slow and pathetic death in the US. Or how Yahoo is still a thing in Japan.
Almost tells you that there is something wrong with the business incentives in the US; or perhaps sequences of activities like starting with a leveraged buyout, saddling the new company with debt, and subsequently gutting the company to make the huge interest payments, usually to the principals of the deal, are considered gross mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and breaches of fiduciary duty rather than good ways to "unlock value".
I think in the case of the two companies I mentioned, they were managed very differently in the other countries. K-Mart, for example, had fallen out of favor with shoppers well before it was bought by private equity.
IMO, saying something is was killed by private equity is almost always misattribution. Thriving companies rarely sell out to corporate vultures (the particular brand of PE that people tend to mean when they say "killed by private equity"). Instead, the company has something fundamentally wrong (sometimes it's the company's fault, sometimes the market has shifted, sometimes there are deeper issues in the economics), and it sells out to someone willing to make a buck driving the business into the ground.
Examples include: Family Dining (Red Lobster, Applebee's, etc) was a dying market segment. Millennials and younger tend to put less value on table service than their parents did, preferring food quality over table service when forced to choose. Fast-Casual took over the entire price segment, so the companies either pivoted (see Chili's takeout expansion), or sold out to PE to decompose.
Local Dentistry is getting bought out by PE because the economic conditions that traditionally granted junior dentists the capital to buy out their retiring seniors' practices have ceased. Now, in order to retire, dentists are forced to sell their practices to PE firms.
The main thing wrong with US capitalism is the fact that it is legal to buy a company with borrowed money and then put that debt on the company's books and force it to pay it.
Unfortunately we use the proprietary HD Radio spec in the US. The company requires paying a license to use it and so many stations and manufacturers don't support it.
I meant IBOCDAB which is the 47 CFR 73.402 (b) statute specifying HDR. You can thank corrupt politicians and their lobbyist buddies for mandating proprietary, pay-to-play shit. The whole thing is protectionist bullshit masquerading with an ostensible veneer of utility making homologation more expensive and complicated.
Also, do you speak for more than yourself or are you the royal "we"? Seems like pointless othering.
It's a common mistake that newcomers to the language make. You assume empty is an empty string check when it's really a falsy check that is equivalent to: (!isset($var) || !$var)
https://asm.org/articles/2025/september/new-word-screwworm-r...
There's currently only one plant in Panama running the sterile fly program, but both Mexico and the US are opening new plants to handle the issue.
"The U.S. Department of Agriculture is constructing a new $750 million facility nearby to breed sterile flies, though U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said it won’t be completed until late 2027. In the meantime, the agency is investing $21 million to transform a fruit fly breeding center in far southern Mexico into a screwworm fly production site, with operations set to begin this summer."
https://www.statesman.com/news/article/texas-possible-new-wo...
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