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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

how do we know that the Florida python bounty doesnt repeat the Cobra effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

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It’s an hourly wage and the pay isn’t high enough to cover costs of breeding pythons.

A python can weigh over 200lb. It takes a lot to support a snake that big and they monitor sizes to ensure the catch matches what you would expect from a wild population.

It’s an hourly wage and the pay isn’t high enough to cover costs of breeding pythons.

"Allow me to introduce myself," says the VC.

I was thinking the same thing. However the article says they are only letting in select people and they are getting paid close to minimum wage.

I imagine it would not be worth the hassle of breeding and releasing pythons, and the character of the people they bring in to help is vetted as well.

You have to be licensed/hired for it

That means there's a licensing department somewhere that wouldn't have jobs if the pythons went away completely.

It's usually a part of the local (town, county, state) wildlife management department, who are usually overworked as it is; and would welcome one job less to do - they'd probably love to go back to just being 'the dog catcher' like 100 years ago.

One would hope but you're still relying on the 1-N layers of management above that person to not try and hold onto the irrelevant workload for fiefdom size reasons. Also depends a lot on if the rule writing organization is the one actually paying to enforce it.

It's not a given that the maximally cynical answer is always the correct one.

This is probably one of many different types of surveys and other activities that DNR(or DNR adjacent departments) coordinates, it's fairly common to have volunteer lead programs like this for surveys or other activities. As others mentioned there's no shortage of work in understanding and managing a regional ecosystem, the people who take these jobs usually care deeply about the ecosystems and are not doing the job for financial reasons.

Rather than being cynical maybe it would be worth your time to consider volunteering and better understanding how these things are managed. You might be surprised to find it's usually fairly educated folks who care about making sure what we have today is around for the next generation.

if you read the article you'll see it's two existing departments that are tasked with broader ecological goals. If they have perverse incentives licensing snake hunters is not one of them.

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