Hacker News Reader

Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com