Pay transparency. The WhatsApp and Instagram decision. Our beef with screwworms.

Ah.

Oh, absolute here for indicators of the week.

And we have a man eater.

A flesh eater. A surprising reason that beef is more expensive these days.

Sure.

Foreign

Oh, so this is how recently employers have had to, because of various laws, post salary ranges on their job postings. Is that what's going on here?

I'm going to go with up. Transparency increases wages.

Huh, why?

All right, but you have new research. What does it say?

Yay.

Right?

Love it. All right, Waylon, what do you got for us?

First of all, that's a terrible wage, but I think I would take it to use Instagra. Remind us what this case was all about.

I don't know John List. Super famous economist. He's been on both of our shows. He's worked for rideshare companies and Walmart as an economist.

This is a huge deal, right? This was the highest profile antitrust case going through the courts right now.

Yeah, my indicator is 16.6%. That's the percentage increase in the price of steak over the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And there's a lot of causes for the increase in beef prices, but the one I'm going to focus on today has to do with a secret war that we've been fighting with an insect, a fly known as man eater.

Yes, it's the Latin name translated to English. Some backstory here in the US There used to be this terrible scourge on cows. It's called the screw worm. It's a fly that deposits its larvae onto the wounded flesh of cows and basically destroys them. It can kill them. This was terrible for the beef industry, as you can imagine. But some scientists figured out that if you bred the flies and sterilize the males, they could eradicate screwworm, because females only reproduce once. So when they got with these sterilized flies and things didn't work out, that was sort of the end of the family name, so to speak.

Exactly. And in this amazing feat of international coordination, we. We started literally dropping these flies from planes, first in the U.S. then in Mexico, then further and further south down into Central America until we eradicated the screwworm north of Panama.

It's fascinating to me. We were winning this war until a couple of years ago when the flies started making their way north. Now they have been spotted in Mexico, and this is bad. The USDA estimates that if there was an infestation that broke out, it would cost the economy of Texas alone $1.8 billion a year.

The US Government says they have a big plan. They halted imports from Mexican cattle. That's one reason the prices of beef are going up. They've also employed so called tick riders, which are these guys that like, ride on horseback along the US Mexico border and try to make sure that infected livestock don't cross the border seems like an amazing job.

No, it's a guy on a horseback, a cowboy of ticks. And they are just going to pump out way more flies. So they've just opened a new sterilized fly factory in Mexico last week and

And they're gonna open up another one in Texas next year. There's gonna be sterilized screwworm flies all over the place.

Would be sick, right?

Hopefully not a sterile.