Eels are fish

Incredibly, I actually did learn this today because it was in the NYT crossword and I went down a very similar rabbit hole. I never made it to Freud, though, after I discovered and got sucked into the European Union Eel Regulation Framework[1].

If you, like me, are masochistically fascinated by this kind of “I can’t believe this is a real thing that the government actually does” documentation I recommend giving it a once-over.

1. https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/ocean/marine-biodi...

I mean, in this case who else should do it? If a fish in your local waters goes from relative abundance to critically endangered, who else but the government is supposed to step in?

I don’t mean to suggest that governments shouldn’t do things like this, I’m just abnormally delighted when I find them.

A multinational framework explicitly for the protection and restoration of eels would never have occurred to me (or most of the rest of humanity, I’d imagine) but nevertheless it occurred to someone and now there are civil servants who are paid real money to design and implement it.

To put it another way, I’m less interested in the policy than I am in the mechanics of governance that enable it to exist. One of my favorites is the National Cemetary Administration Operational Standards and Measures[1] program, which basically defines OKRs for U.S. veterans cemeteries.

1. https://imlive.s3.amazonaws.com/Federal%20Government/ID25151...