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Comment by david_b | Hacker News Reader

Much as I want to, DDT isn't the wonder-pesticide it is sometimes seen as (it affects not only birds - the german article has more info on wildlife, the english more on human health effects): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT Also, I want to see how you drain Florida :-)

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It doesn't seem anywhere near as bad as malaria or dengue. It does seem to disproportionately affect children, but doing something like spraying border areas with low population density would probably still be a win.

I think in the US we could afford to just use malathion.

Draining Florida would best be accomplished by just declaring it an exclusion zone from human habitation :) (Florida basically terrifies me more than any other state in the US, even California)

Yeah, I never understood why people want to live in Florida. It gets unbearably hot, you get hurricanes every year, and you're susceptible to tropical diseases. Seems to me that there are a lot better places to live in the US, where you don't have a tropical climate.

Strictly speaking, Florida is unfit for human occupation. Even when hurricanes aren't blowing, it's the thunderstorm capital of the country. Runner-up in the uninhabitable sweepstakes is New Orleans, which is mostly below sea level and only "dry land" because of unreliable dikes that periodically fail. Over time, because of land subsidence in New Orleans itself, and because of a gradual increase in worldwide sea level, New Orleans becomes more and more dangerous.

When you perform an economic analysis, you discover it would be cheaper to pay everyone in New Orleans to move away, than to let them live there and pay for the disasters that inevitably blow in from the sea. Florida is only slightly safer on average, and that only because the northern reaches are sufficiently above sea level.

Oh, my problems with Florida are the crime rates and percentage of fraudulent businesses based there, plus huge number of retirees and associated transfer payments.

New Orleans (and Florida) both are necessary port logistics areas, but shouldn't be heavily populated. New Orleans is gateway to the Mississippi which is basically the industrial/agricultural 60% center of the country.

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