"Last night we flew at 5000 feet over the foreign fishing fleet that preys on our seas, causing ecological disasters. They weren't at mile 201, they were well in our territorial waters."
Didn’t know who this was, so I looked him up. Who has a personal 787? Turns out he’s an Argentine actor and film magnate who is an ex-commercial pilot. I guess that’s one way to come to own your own ~$122m aircraft.
I'm not a fan of Iron Maiden's music but from all I read they sound like absolute top blokes. They also licensed "Eddie" to Robinsons Brewery, a smallish company based in Stockport, to produce their "Trooper" beer - which is actually pretty fine.
Spent some time in Brimingham. Worked crazy hours, but would wander at night.
Local beer was a little rare in the places around our hotel (probably because we were near Broad Street), but they had "Trooper" at Malt House. It was actually really great.
That may also be influenced by the fact that I mostly only could get foreign light lagers everywhere else, and Malt House was a great place to relax on the canal a little away from the Hen Party craziness.
The owners of the now defunct Fry's Electronics also owned the Arena Football team the San Jose SaberCats and additionally owned/leased/rented/sponsored various aircraft including a 747 SP.
1968 GULFSTREAM G1159B N24YS (still owned by the Fry family)
1976 ROCKWELL NA-265-60 N607CF (now owned by an airshow)
1955 PIPER PA-23 N3494B (owned by someone else)
1971 GULFSTREAM G1159B N44YS (still owned by the Fry family)
1976 ROCKWELL NA-265-60 N39CB (now owned by an airshow)
1977 DEHAVILLAND CANADA DHC-6-300 N814BC (still owned by the Fry family)
1978 BOEING 727-281(A)(RE) N724YS (now registered to a UK blind trust)
1980 BOEING 747SP-27 N747A (now owned by NASA)
1981 ROCKWELL NA-265-65 N88BF (still owned by the Fry family)
1981 ROCKWELL NA-265-65 N654YS (still owned by the Fry family)
1992 BEECH B300 N4YS (still owned by the Fry family)
2011 GULFSTREAM G280 N38GL (now owned by a casino corporation)
Would have been easier to ship by boat, even without dismounting it, since it’s the cheapest transportation. But it seems I’m wrong, since they didn’t do it.
A person’s hypocrisy has nothing to do with the validity of the complaints they make. A given complaint is valid/invalid on its own merits and the fact that the person making the complaint is a hypocrite does not invalidate the legitimacy of the complaint.
I know u jest. fwiw at least he's an Argentine pot; maybe he was saying 'if we're to have ecological disasters in Argentina it should at least benefit Argentines'
According to [1], it costs United about $15,000 an hour to run their 787. Of that, $7,371 finances the plane ("ac cost"), $786 for maintenance ("mx"), $5,259 for fuel, and $1,335 for crew. I'm assuming industry average utilization of roughly ~4000 hours a year of flight time so that works out to about $3 million in maintenance and $28 million in loan repayments per year.
Thing is, you have to keep the 787 flying - they're not designed to be parked for weeks or months at a time. Normally that'd be a problem for a business jet since they're little more than toys for rich people but the 787 is up to 20% more fuel efficient than comparable older models. As long as its set up for cargo, the owner can just rent it out and have someone else cover the majority of the maintenance burden. It wouldn't be profitable, but if you need (or want) a brand new commercial jet, it's an easy way to subsidize that cost.
> Enrique Piñeyro (born 1956 in Genoa, Italy) is an Argentine-Italian ex air line pilot turned film actor, producer, crash analyst, aeronautical physician, film director, and screenplay writer, working partly in Argentina.
The question is have they replaced/maintained everything since then.
The problem with a lot of navies is that if you refuse to decommission old rust buckets you end up with an navy that looks impressive on paper but rarely makes it out of port and i suspect this is the case for the Argentinian navy.
you don't need dozens of blue water warships to patrol against pirate fishing, you need a few patrol boats and a few long range maritime surveillance planes.
This wouldn't be a navy issue. This is illegal fishing, a matter for a coast guard (law enforcement) rather than a navy. The navy guards the sea against other navies. A coast guard arrests criminals.
Very few countries other then the us and Canada actually maintain a blue/green water coast guard i.e. a lot of navies around the world does a lot of law enforcement doing peace time. This is the case for most European nations where almost anything bigger then a launch is classed as a navel vessel and potentially armed.
And then there is the oddities like japan who theoretically do not have an navy but who's cost guard(or self defense force) operate carriers.
The nature of the boats is beside the point. Navy vessels can be used, but they will usually carry law enforcement people. It is like using an army to arrest drug dealers. While it is physically possible, nearly every nation would only deploy military assets "in aid of" local police. Very few nations would tolerate their militaries enforcing local laws, especially when that would mean those militaries also spying on citizens. Police are allowed to do that, not soldiers. By that same token, just as a cop can be aided by a navy destroyer they could be supported by a foreign navy vessel too.
It may be more that police is trained to do that compared to soldiers, as in order to be effective in what they supposed to do, they all should be specialized. And yes, when it comes to fighting drug dealers and all around looks more like a war zone instead of a "misbehaving civilians" affair, then a more appropriate tool use gets warranted.
That is how the US organizes its two navies, but that doesn't means that all countries need to have two different navies - most don't, they just have a coast guard, with enough ships that could cross the ocean to put on a show of having that ability, but in practice those ships stay in port all the time.
In all of those cases there is one or more nations with an much stronger claim to victory then the US.
The cold war was an implosion by economics and the vast bulk of the preasure came from western europe who alost harvested nearly all of the victory gains, and that happened years before the first gulf war.
The US Acted as a poorly paid mercenary force for the houses of Said doing the first and second gulf war and the long term strategic goal went in Iran's favor when the US/Saudi backed puppet government of Iraq imploded and someone else had to step in and deal with ISIS(that someone else originally turned out to be Iran's republican guard backed by Russian advisors and hardware).
Kosovo again had Europe playing they leading role in the diplomacy both post and doing the war and harvesting most of the benefits.
Outside of late western Roman empire, i can think of few nations where the army was as impotent in terms of actually backing the diplomatic game or rather where the diplomats where as incompetent that despite having the best trained/funded army no tactical victory was too great to turn into an strategic defeat.
Iraq was concurred in 2 months the 2nd time. That was the war. If the leader of an enemy was hiding in a dirt hole in the ground and then hanged and that isnt a win to you then your definition is wrong. You are confusing nation building with war.
I can tell you about one thing that I didn't find mentioned. Argentina's Naval Prefecture is using a product called Galatea Watcher from Ascentio Technologies (they are the main contractor for Argentina's Space Agency and have developed the ground segment and done operations for them). This product does pretty much the same as in the article: it takes satellite imagery from several sources, does image processing and detection on them and cross-references it with AIS reports from vessels and alerts all the suspicious activity. One could see all the ships getting positioned just in the international border and then disappear by night. This is a well known issue.
The big question is what can a nation do to stop this? The normal diplomatic and legal avenues don't seem to do much. A ship here and there can be seized but much like fines that are slaps on the wrist for large corporations, there's too much economic value in violating the rules. A seized ship now and then is a small price to pay for access to everyone else's fishing areas. There don't seem to be any good escalation paths that aren't morally unconscionable.
The crew will likely be desperate and / or slaves.
So how about:
Sell the ship, let the crew live in a nice hotel, book them a 1st class flight back home, then bill the country under who's flag the ship was operating. If they can't / refuse to pay, import sanctions.
That way, you're not punishing the crew, yet making such behavior financially uninteresting. That's the only way because the person who decided to send that ship there is probably far away and busy counting profits.
Also, it's a lot easier to capture the boat if that's a positive experience for the crew. They might flee from a trip to prison but few people run from a paid vacation offer.
After you sink the boat you can pick the crew up and give them free tickets to Disney Land or throw them in jail it doesn't matter when it comes to dissuading illegal fishing.
The point is to make the expected ROI of trespassing in other nations' territorial waters negative. The crew is cheap and easy to replace relative to the boat. So you have to make the boat go away (sink it or impound it) to make the corporate owner back on land feel the heat.
Imprison them and give them back to their home country ASAP is probably the right way to handle the crew.
There's the large assumption that the flag carrier country will pay.
Realistically, once this becomes a strategem, and a known one, anyone with a boat can enter your waters, hoist the jolly roger, then say "Yeah, take me into asylum." And poof, your immigration procedures evaporate.
You should do some reading up on what is involved in applying for and receiving asylum in the US. Your post indicates an inaccurate understanding of what is involved and required for an asylum seeker to receive legal asylum.
I assume it is like immigration. In one sense, it is a long legal process with a variety of steps to ensure this person is serious. But in a more practical sense, it just involves crossing a border and having the phase "illegal immigrant" removed from the vocabulary.
I appreciate the cleverness, but no: trying to solve too many problems at once ends up with no problem being solved at all.
Want to get rid of the fishing fleet? Make a credible offer of residency and amnesty to all their crews - no strings attached, no continued use as pawns in politics. Simple trade: they bring in and surrender their vessel, you give each a green card, a key to a room, some starting cash, and a "thank you for your service", and forget about them.
International travel is already so easy these days that spies and saboteurs have no trouble entering any country they want.
But OK, so let's scratch the "and forget about them" part. Have the counterintelligence agency keep their details in their database, and warn them that they won't get security clearance in the next decade or three. This won't discourage anyone who's eager to escape their home country.
Both easy and hard. When I've traveled to Europe I often find the the door for non-EU citizens leads to exactly the same place as the one for EU, and nobody is even watching to check passports. India was a lot more careful about verifying my VISA, which I needed to get in advance. India has more reason to fear than the EU in general.
At least for the US, any spy or saboteur who wants to enter can do so on a student visa, I am sure. Just have to pony up for tuition at any of a number of schools who are desperately looking for students who will pay.
There is more time for a background check that way. There are many ways to work around the difficult US entry requirements if an attacker is determined, but if something like this bypasses the process attackers will go for that: boats are cheap.
It's not clear to me that an ocean-going fishing boat would be cheaper than college tuition. Is it? Would love to see some data. https://horizonship.com/ship-category/commercial-fishing-ves... has prices a good bit about even 4-year tuition for all the things that list actual prices.
The nice hotel is called prison and the Chinese Embassy should handle their release. If they work as slaves, they should testify doing so and maybe ask for political asylum. I know it's complicated with Chinese citizens being blackmailed by the PRC with their families at home, but it only takes a few to do so
You don't even need to sink the ship doing the "trawler wars" of the 1970ies when British pirate trawlers were plying Icelandic water(with the protection of the royal navy) Iceland manage to destroy enough trawls by dragging wires though them that the Brit's eventually gave up trying to fish in Icelandic waters.
A few trawlers got boarded but no shots were fired.
Yes, I’m surprised at how little the Western countries use their military (and police) when facing an obvious act of territorial dispute. The border police’s role now seems to be to prepare meals for immigrants rather than turning them back, just as it is common to let the fishers fish for 10 years (the problem clearly isn’t new) until the population starts noticing that our ecosystems are destroyed, rather than arresting/sinking ships.
Democracies do tend to have rules preventing military action at home, yes. And they also tend to sign on to things like human rights treaties, that say arbitrarily killing people (even foreigners breaking the law) is not ok.
> The border police’s role now seems to be to prepare meals for immigrants rather than turning them back
Nations like ours with low birth rates and aging workforces depend on immigrants to maintain vibrant economies. The alternative is to become like Japan, where the economy stagnates and abandoned houses litter the countryside.
At least in European context, many migrants who cross the border illegally lack sufficient education to do well in modern labour market, and end up having a very low employment rate & high dependency on welfare. Even those who do find employment are likely to have low salary that doesn't bring much tax income.
Thus uncontrolled migration can never be a solution to our population issues. Instead effort should be put into attracting more skilled workforce that is in demand, and they should come in legally.
So why not selectively import the people (workers, professions) the country needs?
There are competent engineers "waiting in line" for years, while illegals are allowed to stay... it's basically rewarding the criminals and punishing the honest ones.
You’re talking to much sense. Fact is, a portion of the people advocating for not enforcing immigration laws profit from the off-the-books labor. The greater portion are useful idealists. The difference between the two is that the latter imagine a world that concurrently has an endless supply of low skill laborers and a meaningfully high minimum wage law that would be respected. Perhaps there’s another fraction that believe in growing minimum wage for citizens and (as today) no such law for black market labor pools of non-citizens, but I like to think that level of maliciousness is not as common as hapless idealism.
We can do both. We don't have to choose between welcoming the many highly skilled professionals who want to work here, and welcoming the asylum seekers and economic refugees who are fleeing violence or poverty and eager to build a better future here. We can do both, and we would benefit from both.
Maybe the solution should be to work on the big problem that is male-female resentment. One resents the other because of 2000 years of domination, the other for being in social priority and not being effectively competent in the same position despite 60 years of fight for equality, and instead of working on bringing our citizen together, we bring new ones. I don’t know to what problem this is the solution.
Long story short, many people still want to have children, and not having fertility should be the problem that is getting addressed.
> Maybe the solution should be to work on the big problem that is male-female resentment.
Male-female resentment is not the reason fertility rates around the globe have fallen precipitously over the past century. That's a bizarre idea.
When women have access to contraception and opportunities to participate in the workforce and pursue higher education, it turns out they are less interested in raising large families.
There are tools we could be using to encourage people to have more children, such as universal childcare and pre-K, generous financial support for low-income families, and high quality public schools. Unfortunately, opponents to immigration typically also oppose these policies, too.
Our lazze-faire(sp?) attitude towards who can have children will come back to bite us, someday. The most "successful" parents are those who invest very little into their offspring.
> Yes, I’m surprised at how little the Western countries use their military (and police) when facing an obvious act of territorial dispute.
Immigration is generally not territorial dispute, indeed, its far more often voting for an alternate regime with one’s feet than asserting a hostile territorial claim.
Letters of Marque and Reprisal.[1] This is how the early U.S fought the Barbary pirates in the Barbary Wars[2] in the early days of the republic. This power is actually authorized explicitly in the U.S Constitution.
And abolished since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, if memory serves well. And thus illegal.
It would be better to fight the defacto slavery of the crews (agencies, owners and so on), the abysmal conditions in these crews home countries and sanction the hell out the owners of these ships and the people / companies making a healthy profit from them. But why bother, because you would just end up with more expensive shipping im general and more expensive fish.
The 1856 Paris Declaration, in fact. Also the 1907 Hague Convention. The US was not a signatory to the former, and did not agree to the provision against privateering in the latter, so for the US, at least, privateering is still on the table. Argentina, however, was a signatory to the Paris Declaration. Perhaps they can change their minds, but probably they won't for something like this.
And Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia... The list is long. Western democracies don't seem to care of all the sweet dollar that is to be made in these countries. At least Russia used to pretend to play by established rules.
The problem with these rules, IMHO, is that they were created to serve the interests of western powers. Hard to force other countries to play by them, then.
The very reason you're downvoted is the reason you're right. People have their heads in the sand. They don't realize that there's no political will to oppose China because China has already bought the needed to control to tamp down on any efforts to oppose them.
Hell, we're witnessing in-your-face genocide of the Uighurs, takeover of Hong Kong, imminent takeover of Taiwan, support of North Korea's psychopathic regime, destruction of the environment in every way possible (as in this story), etc... and the rest of the world sits on its collective hands. China knows how to boil frogs nice and slowly.
The rules of engagement are such that killing usually isn't required. They would announce who they are and tell the boats to turn around and exit territorial waters. Those who do not comply, or repeat or suspicious offenders, might get stopped, boarded, and their cargo confiscated, perhaps even their boats sold at auction. Any sailors aboard could request amnesty if they are truly in an effective-slave situation.
The only way it turns to shoot-and-sink is if the boats flagrantly disregard orders through multiple points of escalation. Even then the attempt would be to disable the ship, not destroy it (by shooting out the engine or rudder, for example).
You’d probably have to offer the sailors a ride before the sinking the ship to be humane. Odds are not good the average crew member has much control of the fact they are fishing somewhere illegally.
Indonesia has sunk more than 550 vessels related to illegal fishing between October 2014 to 2020. And all crews has been arrested and deported, none were killed. If Indonesia can do it, why other countries can't?
I honestly don't know what it'd take to re-home them. But the first time you sunk a fishing vessel with 20 kids on it, you'd have a global PR disaster.
This video claims to show the Russian navy firing on Somali pirates.
One narrative concerning piracy off the coast of Somalia is that incursion of foreign fishing fleets took away the opportunity for lawful livelihoods for those living in Somalia. Which in the context of this post is ... troublingly ironic.
They were attacking fishing boats (they didn't have a navy because there was no real government, so these attackers were pirates). The Somali pirates should get more respect from most hardliners. This is basically people grabbing guns to protect their land and create a livelihood instead of lying down to die.
Somalia shows nicely why we, as the West, has a hard time combating illegal fishing. We ignore large scale illegal fishing in Somali waters, ruining the local economy. We also ignore that our fishing fleets aren't that innocent.
When the locals, for lack of a standing Navy, defend their waters, we call them pirates and send our Navy to fight them. No surprise, that these pirates went after bigger ships, realizing that being more profitable than fishing.
Now imagine a world, in which our Navies would defend Somali waters against these intrusions. While at the same time, we did some real, like non-military, backes nation building through the UN. I guess that would have been a much better way to combat piracy there. But who gives a shit about some poor bastards in a failed state somewhere in Africa?
The sad thing is the people out there on the boats are in all likelihood just trying to scrape a living and the people who deserve to be in harm's way are higher up the economic ladder. There are a lot of world problems that amount to "no one holds China accountable" (and to a lesser extent, first world nations don't do enough to hold themselves accountable), and I would really like for countries to tax and/or sanction China for their negative externalities (e.g., pollution, overfishing) it would make the world a much better place--either China starts to compete fairly or else they lose the wealthiest markets to the advantage of the whole world and especially countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and South America who would fill the manufacturing void.
Mandatory disclaimer for the pro-China accounts: I'm very much not interested in deflecting to the West's problems--they exist, but they don't excuse China (nor does China's bad behavior excuse that of the West's). This kind of deflection is just a race to the bottom.
"Desperate" doesn't imply "legally innocent". In particular, China has an abundance of desperate people (I won't remark on its political system), so punishing the desperate in this case probably won't move the needle.
Further, and I say this as someone who prefers to err on the tough-on-crime side, it's unjust to punish the desperate when the wealthy are pulling the strings, raking in the profit, and bearing none of the risk.
Europe lost a lot, if not all, soft power during the Arabic Spring and the subsequent refugee crisis. There, we showed to the world that we outsourced border protection to people like Gadhafi. And that we really didn't give a fuck about human rights. The vile of human rights having been the moral source of Europes soft power, flanked by its economic power. The former was thrown out of the window, the latter then easily used against us by rich totalitarian countries (pick your favourite). The US witnessed something similar under Trump. Important to note, that it took almost 80-odd years since WW2 to build that power, but only a couple years to throw it out of the window.
Europe is very capable of border protection - but because of the human right thing, it is not seen as good, if the border police just shoots illegal trespassers.
So people do care about human rights.
But of course with hypocrisy - so we are quite nice - but we paid Gaddafi and now ergogan and morocco to do the dirty work to keep them away, so we can have more or less clean hands.
FWIW, this was nothing but a media circus. Trump largely continued immigration practices that existed under Obama and indeed Trump deported fewer undocumented immigrants than Obama did in his first term, but under Obama everything was great and then under Trump they were “concentration camps” and kids were in cages and being separated from their family and America is a white supremacist hellscape and etc.
This doesn’t mean that the Us didn’t deserve its immigration-policy reckoning; only that Trump didn’t do anything to cause it except offend the media.
(for the rabid partisans out there, this one particular defense of Trump doesn’t imply that I’m a Trump supporter or that he doesn’t deserve criticism for other things, etc)
>Therefore, the concept of people's war was applied to the sea with fishermen and other nautical laborers being drafted into a maritime militia.
>Most vessels are issued with navigation and communication equipment while some are also issuedsmallarms. The communications systems can be used both for communication and espionage. Often fishermen supply their own vessels, however, there are also core contingents of the maritime militia who operate vessels fitted out for militia work instead of fishing; thesevesselsfeaturereinforcedbowsforramming and high powered water cannons. The increasing sophistication of militia vessels' communication equipment is a double-edged sword for Chinese authorities. New equipment, as well as training in its use, has substantially improved command, control, and coordination of militia units. However, the vessels' resulting professionalism and sophisticated maneuvers make them more identifiable as government-sponsored actors, dampening their ability to function as a gray-zone force.
I've been following the situation in Argentina for some years, and it seems that their military is tired of fighting with the political class for the appropriate resources. They seem to be technically competent, but the resource allocation is a joke.
Piñeyro's own documentary, "Fuerza Aérea S.A." ("Air Force Inc") showed otherwise: our military is incompetent, reckless & corrupt. Their handling of commercial airports, until taken from them by the government, was so terrible and reckless you really didn't want to fly in Argentina. Any mistake was covered up because that's how our military is used to behaving.
Also remember we Argentinians suffered a bloody dictatorship in the 70s, complete with illegal detentions, torture and executions, and while of course the military renews itself with new people, some sectors of it still haven't come to terms with their past (some remain who actually sympathize with the dictatorship or were involved in it).
So no, what you're describing is not the full picture.
Was surprised to learn some years ago that in Brazil the military was responsible for civilian air traffic management. That seemed so wild at the time. Don't know if it's still the case...
Still is the case. But here they take that job very seriously.
I even saw a higher up personally helping once, I was in an open source tech conference, and a colonel was present to show the air force work using Ubuntu and Debian, while chatting with him he got a phone call about a radar issue, he immediately picked up a laptop and started to fire up some domestic made tech and started helping the operators directly.
If the timing wasn't seemly so random I would think they did it on purpose just to show off the cool tech.
I don't know how to reconcile the safety culture of 'telling the truth no matter what' and not blaming, with the chain-of-command, authority and obeying orders sir-yes-sir of the military. I probably have a very warped view of military leaders, but I know which customers ask for the 'safety override' button...
Yes, I see. What I mean is that in civilian systems I designed (or helped design) the focus is on redundancy, safety and personel safety. I've felt for a long time the 'for the military' design was quick to forgo redundancies and failsafes, for better 'performance' (my vocabulary is lacking there, sorry).
The mentality is changing a lot and I'm starting to see safety requirements in contracts and more and more frequent audits from customers on the topic (even though it wasn't in the spirit of things or the contract when system was designed, ugh...) and it's very, very hard to retrofit safety and personel safety in a product line, codebase, system design, and especially in the daily reflexes of systems or sw engineers. Everyone seems to overshoot ("safety says we must do X" - well no it's still an engineering compromise you still have choices and trade-offs - "but safety!" - yes, let's go back to the safety plan, what are the critical elements, what are the failure modes, what are the chances, what is the expected system response?...)
It's particularly tough for those teams that have to swallow the double firehose of safety and "cyber"-security :-D
Argentinian military, like in most of south America, is completely corrupt and should really stop existing for the good of its people. Whenever they have resources they use it to fuel military dictatorships.
Check out the Turbot War when we in Canada sent Navy ships to confront Spanish fishing vessesls in international waters illegally overfishing. Spain and Germany also sent warships. But Ireland and the UK didnt (foreshadowing the biggest gripe of Brexit?) Turbot/halibut is a type of fish.
International water is a somewhat different situation, this is within Argentina's exclusive economic zone.
Also
> But Ireland and the UK didnt
Yes one can only wonder why the UK would side with Canada over the EU.
> foreshadowing the biggest gripe of Brexit?
Only the biggest nonense of the brexit nonsenses.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cod_Wars. In fact, the UK's hypocritical support of Canada in the conflict led Iceland to declare for Spain / the EU.
I find this part so telling : ... domestic and foreign overfishing had taken its toll. In the end, stocks of cod in and around Canada's EEZ were severely depleted. Reluctant to act at a time of declining political popularity, the federal government was finally forced to take drastic action in 1992 and a total moratorium was declared indefinitely for the Northern Cod. The TAC for both the Canadian EEZ and NAFO regulated area was based on Canadian scientific advice. This turned out to be wrong and the Northern cod stock collapsed in 1992, and has never recovered.[5]
[5] Rose, Alex (2008). Who Killed the Grand Banks?. Toronto: Wiley. pp. 53–71. ISBN 978-0-470-15387-1.
You mean, Turbot is a delicious type of fish. I'd understand sending in the navy. Especially since it is (iirc) a fish that stays down near the 'ground' so to fish them properly you need some specific kind of equipment or you destroy ecosystems?
You'd have better luck getting the British to send their OPV based in the Falklands over than get any meaningful response from what little of the Argentine armed forces or other authorities have.
Yeah, but if a hobby pilot can fly over the area and find dozens of ships, the Navy/Coast Guard could do the same - send out an airplane to check, and then send a few boats over if it finds something?
Radar on an oceanic buoy is probably more efficient. Ocean buoys are giant metal spheres with some concrete ballast to add stability, attached via steel cable to an old train freight car used as an anchor. You can throw a couple hundred watts of solar and electronics on there no problem. There's hundreds of these things scattered about in the ocean for oceanic research/weather forecasting, not a new technology. Modern, consumer-grade solid state radar ($1200, off the shelf at Amazon or West Marine, google "4G radar") can pick up seagulls sitting on the water at 500 feet, or track a tiny ski 4 person boat at 10 miles.
Before you ask, no, there is no such thing as a stealth radar fishing boat.
We're talking about a vast area of ocean. Each buoy would only be able to monitor a small circle. There are limits to anchoring depth so they can usually only be used close to score. And marine electronics require frequent maintenance due to the harsh environment.
On page 42 they talk about two different mooring systems for buoys up to 6000m in depth. Average ocean depth is approx 3000m. Marine electronics are considerably more robust than you give them credit. All my consumer grade electronics on my boat were installed in 2001 and with the exception of one LCD display are all in perfect working order.
Drones are perfect for this use case, as they have long loiter abilities at higher altitudes. Low single digit Global Hawk fleets can provide high availability over large amounts of geography.
Probably best for the job at night would be SAR? A bit more costly than photography though I guess... Coastal radar, with range up to 100 Nmi might also do the job. But what's the use if you're not sending in the cavalry?
Problem is that over engineered stuff like the global hawk actually have an higher pr hour cost then a converted business jet which is what most countries use.
Maybe US could help Argentina enforce its fishing rights, in return for a lease of port space. The sort of win-win arrangement that builds mutual good will.
Being scared of the bully is how we got here. This behaviour is happing all over the pacific, and due to dependence on Chinese money, China gets away with it.
China seems to get away with whatever they want lately. When are "we" going to stop tolerating their wanton disregard for global ecological and human rights standards?
Maybe if (when) they get aggressive with Taiwain, TSMC.
Or if lab leak was proven, or lab leak + it was a product GOF deliberately created to infect humans it could provide enough public support to back it. I think there are enough hawks in government. Good or bad, a hot or 'warm' war is a huge and devastating step without huge public support across many nation coalitions. Don't want iraq 2.0 with weapons of mass infection that turn out to not be true.
China and Taiwan are the same situation we have with the Baltic States and Russia. And I have the impression both, China and Russia, are that emboldened right now that they might just call NATO and the US on these countries.
Yeah Russia is definitely already testing NATO in Ukraine, though they aren't actually in NATO.
Personally I think Trump emboldened this behavior with his child-like understanding of the politics and singular focus on 'they will pay for the wall' attitude towards NATO.
Honestly, probably nothing. There is no will to do anything about increasing Chinese belligerence and I suspect a fair amount of perks offered by China to keep it that way. Look at the silence about the Uyghurs. Nobody cares about them. Why would they care about some fish? (Granted, people often care more about fish than human beings.)
Uyghurs is an internal affair and they brought Beijing pressure on themselves by making terrorism acts. Fishing in other nations' waters, bullying Taiwan, leaking virus are international acts that are serious enough for retaliation from the international community, if they wanted to do something about it.
List of incidents covered within this general Wikipedia article [1].
A factor I haven't seen discussed much in non-Chinese press is that the Xinjiang region was one of the last (if not the very last) to resist the CCP in the Chinese Civil War [2] [3], with some relatively non-trivial, remotely-originated clandestine support by both the (by then) Taiwan-based KMT and CIA until well after (around 1953) the generally-recognized end of the civil war (around 1949).
I'd like to hear the perspective of native-born Chinese "CCP-ologist" and "CIA-ologist" HN readers on how this historical background might color the CCP's current handling of the region. IMHO, both the CCP and CIA have long memories, but I could be off base.
The CCP is not going to publicly get behind illegal fishing operations. Perhaps they tolerate it behind closed doors, but taking a stance that violating another countries sovereign waters is OK would be politically insane.
That's China claiming sovereignty over that particular sea though. China publicly taking the stance that all waters were international would be the opposite of that
Good question. How much leverage does China have over Argentina? It seems unlikely that Argentina exports much to China. It surely imports a lot but China doesn't seem to punish anyone by limiting its own exports.
Wow! And most of that is agriculture.
And perhaps ironically, about 6% of Argentine exports to China are "Fish, crustaceans, molluscs, aquatics invertebrates".
The World Bank says[2] that exports make up 14.25% of Argentine GDP. Assuming no substitution, if China cut off all Argentine exports, it would therefore reduce Argentine GDP by 1.56% -- a very big deal. There would of course be substitution, so that's a weak upper bound.
And maybe an extremely weak one. According to this[3] (apparently Australian news outlet which I admit I've never heard of), China's trade sanctions against Australia following the latter's suggestion that the world look more into the origins of the coronavirus only reduced Australian exports to China by 2%.
Ah yes the doctrine used to justify things like training and arming right wing death squads to put down popular uprisings because it might introduce communism into the Americas...
WOW! that looks like an invading army or something. What country's flags are those ships flying? So are those ships like sending off stealth rowboats or something into the dark past mile 201 to hall in seafood from Argentinian waters? This is nuts.
Norway just launched the satellite NorSat-3 with the purpose of locating boats that turn off AIS. I see that it passes over this area in Agentina several times each day.
So either the satellite will soon experience unexplained technical difficulties or China will be deploying fishing submarines soon.
No, I kid. What will actually happen is China will get caught red handed again and they'll perform the diplomatic equivalent of "So what are you gonna do about it" while pumping more jingoistic lies to their population.
I don’t understand why people are so surprised... socialism doesn’t really accept the premise of private property, private land ownership, etc. Why are we surprised when they ignore international views of land, sea and intellectual property rights?
I'd like to know when was China actually Socialist?
It moved from Communism to a form of Capitalism where the single party is basically in control of who is allowed to make money; something that can be taken away by the party at any time.
In just a few decades, China managed to have nearly has many billionaires as the US and it won't be long before the US is left in the dust (not that it's a particularly great metric, just shows capitalistic opportunities).
China has no respect for boundaries but demands others to respect theirs so it's not like they don't care. They do care all right, a bit too much actually if you ask Vietnam and the Philippines...
It's just a matter of what they can get away with. China is flexing its power and it will fill any void (ie Africa) where it can see an opportunity to exploit. It's not like other countries haven't done that before but China is now eager for resources and influence and they are big...
> I'd like to know when was China actually Socialist.
China has been socialist since the communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949.
China employs capitalist methods in order to further its productive capabilities in order to complete it socialist revolution. Ultimately the Chinese communist party has full and final control of all property. In other words Chinese “capitalism” does not entail private property rights as are guarded in constitutions in other countries.
That's just a propaganda of the CCP to hide the fact that Communism has failed their people and now they need to adopt a certain degree of Capitalism with free market to boost the economy. Same thing with the Vietnamese, an attempt to rebrand their Communism.
Actually the propaganda is that China is just a capitalist democratic country that is no longer socialist.
From the article:
> in July 2011 President Hu Jintao stressed that ‘China is still in the primary stage of socialism and will remain so for a long time to come’ (Xinhua, 2011)
China is very very interested in progressing the socialist and finally communist agenda. Believing otherwise is ignorance.
Show me the equivalent of the 5th amendment in Chinese law protecting private property rights. And please don’t forget... Chinese courts do not have the power of judicial review and cannot invalidate a statute on the grounds that it violates the constitution... ie China is a totalitarian system.
And READ the educational material before commenting!
>The highly symbolic law - which also removed preferential tax rates for foreign companies operating in China - was overwhelmingly passed by the National People's Congress (NPC) on the final day of its annual two-week session in Beijing.
Again, there’s no judicial review. If you take the communist government to court because they violated the law, the court can’t make the government do anything.
The laws are only to promote production to increase the country's productive output. At any time the government can strip you of your property and redistribute it... which HAS happened numerous times already, without recourse, not appropriate compensation.
How can you possibly argue that faux property laws mean the country is not socialist??
The sooner the wider community accepts that China is a totalitarian regime with a long term communist agenda, the sooner we can stop allowing them to take advantage of the international community.
Property theft, land and sea right violation... corporate espionage. All are part of the official Chinese communist party aims.
> Yet China’s courts cannot invoke the constitution in rulings, so such a change will offer limited legal protection to peasants
What I got from your reply is that your samples of socialism are only confined to China. I don't recognize it to be the same as for something like European socialism, China's "socialism" just a name that the CCP would like call themselves ( and this by definition is a propaganda ).
>And READ the educational material before commenting!
You keep using that word Socialism, but I don’t think it means what you think it means. If you want to let ok at true socialism, look to Scandinavia. China might call what they are doing socialism, but come on, they could call it anything they want and it would still be whatever they want it to be.
Europe's socialism (for example) is very different from the Chinese one and does not suppress its citizen's private property rights. The generalization you made about socialism is not accurate outside China.
While Chinese communism is different than European, they both stem from Marxist socialism.
Private property rights are only for the good of the state. What laws exist, are for the good of the socialist system, and can be amended by the communist party at any time. Chinese courts do not have the power of judicial review and cannot invalidate a statute on the grounds that it violates the constitution... ie China is a totalitarian system.
“Private property” in China is for the benefit of the state. The basic tenant of Chinese government... “From each according to their ability, to each according to his needs” means redistribution is always in the hands of the state.
Socialism != totalitarianism yet you keep saying this.
China is socialist under their own definition of socialism. Yet they have heard the siren song and have been steadily marching closer to a state-aided crony capitalist system that resembles Russia's current system, but much better managed.
> Socialism != totalitarianism yet you keep saying this.
When did I say that? I never did. China is Socialist AND Totalitarian.
> China is socialist under their own definition of socialism
"Socialism:
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
I’m not implying they are the same. I’m saying it’s still socialism.
Private property under China is fundamentally different. The communist party can redistribute it any time. You can’t sue the Chinese government to get your property back, as they can amend any laws at will.
So it being different than European communism doesn’t meant it’s not socialism.
What types of socialist theory are Chinese youth taught? Many people argue that China is no longer a socialist economy. They have investments and lots of private ownership.
The lack of education or at least lack of willingness to read and educate oneself in this thread shouldn’t surprise me yet again.
I can only come to the conclusion that social media is a net negative on society, since I can’t help educate ignorance, and people are unwilling to educate themselves when they have firmly held beliefs.
Social media simply allows people to become more entrenched. And some people will view this comment as the same, a form of relativism. The difference that social media comments gloss over, is there are often truths vs falsehoods. Facts vs prejudice. Social media makes it too easy to confuse the two.
HN... you are more of the same. Like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc etc. Unless these websites take measures to actively mod dis-information, they will be a net negative.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s definitely debatable how China’s socialism has evolved, what elements of Capitalism it now uses. What it’s future path holds. But no textbook, no Encyclopedia will claim that China is not socialist. To do so is not only ignorant, but in the current climate aids a propaganda narrative that continues to allow massive human rights violations.
It’s time social media sites say that user base size, absolute profits, etc are not more important than facts. More people get their information from social media than textbooks, educational systems, and primary sources than ever before.
Democracies which require informed citizenship cannot survive in such circumstances.
The writing is on the wall all around us. Let’s educate ourselves before we fall into darkness
“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.” — Carl Sagan
How do you get to work for something like this? Become a software dev for the UN? Vulcan itself are based in Seattle it appears: https://vulcan.com/Careers.aspx
Generally most remote sensing companies work on projects like this (often grant funded PoCs that never see widespread adoption...), since environmental crime is one of the easiest things to identify using satellite imagery and tracking data.
EARSC.org would be a good starting point for some European companies.
As an Argentinian, I can add that sadly this has been happening for years, and it appears on the news for time to time. The vessels are mainly from China, in addition to South Korea, Japan, and Spain.
The economic situation of Argentina means that there are not enough funds to control de coast. So these ships go in and out at the 200 miles that limit the international waters. It’s easy to see by satellite, but hard to control with a small and under equipped coast patrol.
It's a sad situation not only for us, but for anyone interested in preserving marine life. These ships are destroying the ecosystems in that whole maritime area and all we can do is watch and ask them to stop. If we continue to be powerless to stop that (which sadly we are unless some country steps up and helps by financing the navy) all wildlife in the ocean will be permanently and irreversibly affected.
I sometimes hate humanity as a species. How can a living thing be purposefully so destructive towards it's own planet? The only one it has and will ever have (at least for now we haven't infested any other planet). This is one of the many things that makes me angry knowing there is nothing that will realistically be done to stop it. We will suffer the consequences and these people will then go and fuck up some other sea area until there is nothing left anywhere in the world.
All of it? I mean hate towards globalization that helped China and other hegemonic dictators with no regards for rule of law continue to do what it does is one thing. Blatant hate for humanity is another.
Well that statement may have been a little too aggressive and come off the wrong way. I was quite pissed when wrote that comment. I believe humans can do great things, we really do. I wouldn't have chosen to be born as any other living thing (not that I had a choice anyways lol). It's just the selfishness of some people that results in massive damages that ruins it for the rest of us.
That said we have to realize as a whole that our current way of living is not sustainable and will result is us screwing over future generations that will have to live in an incredibly polluted, and ecologically damaged planet. We have to use our intellect and capacity of achieving anything we put our mind towards and take real, meaningful steps to solve this problem. Before it's too late. There are also many other important global issues that need our attention as a society but that's past the scope of this comment.
> That said we have to realize as a whole that our current way of living is not sustainable and will result is us screwing over future generations that will have to live in an incredibly polluted, and ecologically damaged planet. We have to use our intellect and capacity of achieving anything we put our mind towards and take real, meaningful steps to solve this problem. Before it's too late.
This is what humans have been doing for a long time. The problems were just much more acute for the next generations. Until very recently, most humans were born into scenarios without good shelter, solid water supplies, solid food supplies, general safety, or any medical protection from trivial things like infection let alone anything more complicated.
What’s happening here is this poor Chinese fisherman are still dealing with the acute issues (feeding existing family, etc) so the trade of returning home empty handed vs breaking boundaries is too difficult for them to come out on the right side of.
It's not only globalization though. It's mankind's inability to both understand and prioritize long term consequences and to govern the commons properly. The same thing manifests on local levels as well.
Blaming this on inability to understand is a mistake. Many people, perhaps even most, just don't care that they are doing something collectively long term destructive. In the short term, they are benefiting, and they can move on to the next country incapable of defending its territory when they are done with Argentina's fish.
Yes but all of humanity? All? It’s like looking at murder rates and hating Humanity because it murders despite the majority of the global population having not even touch a Gun before.
Without humanity there would be nobody to witness the fish. The earth doesn't care which species live or die or go extinct. No matter how bad humanity is, the world is a more beautiful place with us in it, because "beauty" as a concept would not exist if we were not here. Mass extinction events happen without human contribution. Is it bad when we make it happen? Yes. But humans are also the only thing around that can help stop extinction events from happening in a universe which doesn't give a shit about any of us.
One of the unattractive human attributes is our self-centered arrogance. And unfortunately, combine with our other traits this results in some pretty bad behaviors that have a terrible impact on other species. The question of whether the planet would be better off without humans is not so obviously answered in the negative.
But arrogance lifted to these levels would probably not exist if we weren't here.
You'd have to explain that. I specifically provided a couple of sources as counterexamples. It seems to me you're underscoring the point about arrogance, though.
I'm talking about the concept of beauty. Yes animals and various natural things are "beautiful", but what does that mean without humans to define/identify/catalogue/etc that beauty. Animals don't appreciate beauty for beauty, they see something that we call beautiful and say to themselves "wow those colors are bright I want to have sex with that" – that's it.
The universe doesn't care about us. The universe doesn't care about the things you think are "beautiful". Tomorrow a planet-busting asteroid could collide with the earth and destroy every last bit of life on it (except maybe Tardigrades). The only thing that could possibly ameliorate that is humanity continuing to expand and grow, being a space-faring species, etc. That way some life (and therefore beauty) could be saved when we take those things with us into the stars.
Unless and until we find other intelligent species that are better stewards than us, we're all the universe has got, no matter how shit we are at the job.
I definitely want to preserve the beauty for our offspring, but that isn't really in keeping with the statement "I sometimes hate humanity as a species."
If you hate humanity then beauty is pointless, because humans are the only ones who appreciate beauty for beauty, rather than "beauty" just being an evolutionary signal to fuck.
Given that I was responding directly to a comment that explicitly said "sometimes I hate humanity as a species", I obviously disagree with the straw-man characterization.
Every person didn't author themselves. They're all driven by innate greed and desire and suffering. The fishermen, the Chinese oligarchs, the Chinese communist party - they're all the center of their own consciousness, each person trying from moment to moment. I pity people, I don't hate them. I may dislike the capitalist system that leads to environmental destruction, but no individual authored our global society.
So, I do see your viewpoint, but looking at individuals is one small slice of the problem, not the whole by any means. We can't count on individual goodness, not when greed or desire is allowed to motivate our leaders so heavily.
I'm confused about this part: "the capitalist system that leads to environmental destruction". Are you aware of the Aral Sea environmental disaster?
To quote Wiki: <<Formerly the fourth largest lake in the world with an area of 68,000 km2 (26,300 sq mi), the Aral Sea began shrinking in the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects.>>
As I understand, most of the diverted water was used to grow cotton.
That harm was done during the Soviet Union. Most would agree, the Soviet system was less capitalistic than the current Mainland Chinese system.
All types of governments can cause environmental ruin, and all types of governments can clean it up. Also, not all environmental ruin is permanent. The United States, UK, and Japan had extensive, wide-spread industrial pollution in the 1960s and 1970s. They spent the next 30 years cleaning up, and did a pretty good job.
it’s weird because it is wrong: the capitalism vs communism narrative you are referring to doesn’t exist in this globalized world, is just an oversimplification for the masses - of you prefer just propaganda.
Do keep in mind that there is no other species on the planet that is capable of protecting the ecosystem from the eventual and inevitable asteroid impact.
We might not be there yet but we are going to be the first species in the history of the planet capable of protecting the biosphere from the inevitable assault from the cosmos.
“Someday we might do something meaningful so bear that in mind when observing the reckless, sadistic and destructive present day behavior” is comic book movie reasoning.
Everyone that talks about how horrific a cancer the human race is on the planet is a hypocrite because they are still alive themselves. If they really meant it they would take action by ending their own lives. They don't because what they really mean is everyone else is a cancer on the planet except for them. It's a selfish and narcissistic attitude.
Careful, you're pointing out the hypocrisy on display. People don't like that. They prefer to wallow in their virtue signaling about how bad the rest of mankind is for surviving and thriving.
The cognitive dissonance they feel turns into downvotes rather than deeper thoughts on why they aren't an integral part of the "problem" they complain about.
Some of us are doing meaningful things to push towards the future. If you feel that there is only reckless, sadistic, and destructive behavior going on, that says more about what you and the people who surround you are doing to help.
This is nonsensical extrapolation probably hundreds of years into an ideal future. We aren't there yet and we won't be there for a long time at the current rate of things. Diverting an asteroid of any significant mass is functionally impossible even given years notice today.
Huh? Radiation pressure alone is enough to divert an asteroid if you spot it in time. You don't need nukes, just a rocket and enough paint to change the albedo on one side.
You need a strong military to enforce rules between countries. Bodies such as the UN and WTO just aren't strong enough to do much if anything beyond a press release. Even if those international bodies were strong enough, I do not feel that they are immune to corruption.
In reality, Argentina would either need to buy or build a respectable navy (too poor), OR publicly ally with the US AND petition that the US Navy enforce Argentina's territorial rights (the US military and its navy are overstretched already).
Based just on the Wikipedia pages for both the Indonesian Navy and the Argentine, it appears the Indonesian Navy is much much larger (74k vs 18k active) and has vastly superior equipment to the Argentines.
Argentina's GDP is less than half of Indonesia's. Argentina's EEZ waters generally have more extreme weather conditions and thus require larger vessels to patrol.
It would be great if there where a way to ask “why don’t they just...”, with an emphasis on the “why” so rather than coming off as an uniformed blowhard one could inform themselves. I suppose a more circumspect way to ask might be “is there a reason they don’t ...?”
China will retaliate. China sends naval escorts with its fishing fleet when it goes to Indonesia and countries fear this happening. Chinaa is not shy of threatening economic sanctions either.
The disputes China is having with its neighbors are different. China's official position is that a large part of the South China Sea is their territory, a view that isn't exactly shared by the other nations of the region or most of the international community.
Sending the Chinese Navy into territorial waters off of South America to secure theft of Argentinian natural resources would be a completely different move, and arguably an act of war.
I don't know the details but if private citizens can find these fishing boats, surely the AR Navy could. AR has 3 full-size destroyers, I imagine sailing one through a fishing fleet and even firing a couple shots could chase them off for good?
Unless people are getting paid off to look the other way?
They are. There's also a very high political cost of going against China, even illegal Chinese boats, in a country such as Argentina with a high dependence on Chinese relationships, poor sovereignty enforcement, poor military might, massive debt and inflation. There's just not enough of anything to do something about it.
I don’t understand this perspective. It’s getting clearer by the day that trying to appease China will come at a far greater cost than virtually any other approach.
Destroyers require a whole crew. Why not get a handful of WW2 era planes with machine guns to patrol the coast? Would be cheap and should be enough firepower to scare off fishing boats.
Firing on them could be problematic - at least if you actually sink one. I suspect seizing the vessels and keeping them (returning after payment of ruinous fines) would be more effective.
It's not China that would be (re)purchasing it, it's almost certainly a private entity. Seizing vessels and levying fines are fully within the normal activities and responsibilities of governments, and civil actions plus maybe a few relatively minor criminal charges are much less likely to draw public condemnation and retaliation from the Chinese government.
Which makes a lot of sense if you don't have anything better to do with it... just make sure you're selling it back for enough money to make a good profit.
Wouldn't that cost them too much in administrative costs? Impounding a vessel is fairly cumbersome, let alone 100 plus crew.
Game-theoretically, it seems preferable to sink them without any warning.
Consider: the fines would only be paid if they are less than the cost of acquiring a new ship. So if they have to pay fines of 90% of the value, you're still saving them 10% compared to getting a new ship. And if the fines are >100%, they would just ignore it and leave Argentina with the ship.
Unless Argentina can turn it into a revenue stream, sinking them unconditionally seems preferable. The Chinese fishing boats don't have anything to give them in a negotiation. All they have to give them is leaving the area, and that is accomplished by sinking the boats too.
Firing on and sinking a flagged vessel and possibly killing crew (also, how do you then prove that you DIDN'T kill anyone?) is exactly the kind of thing that gets governments openly involved. Seizing a private vessel and fining the owners? That's a civil matter and while there may be backroom discussions everything stays civil.
"The military of Country X is firing on and sinking our country's vessels" is much more likely to lead to retaliation. China may not have the navy or willingness to project power across the Pacific, but I guarantee they have the capability if focused to utterly destroy the computing infrastructure of the country - and while enthusiastic private parties may not get involved in civil penalties, "Argentina just declared war on us!" is a hell of a rallying cry.
Edit: also keep in mind that even governments are not monolithic entities with a single mind. Those costs are coming out of someone's budget.
Will China bother to defend their fishing boats, though? Are they that entrenched in the governmental structure, or are they basically just petty thugs?
It would probably chase a few of them off that day. And then they come back the next. There would likely need to be much more concrete repercussions (imprisonment, fines, asset seizures) for it to actually matter...
And that South Korea, Japan and Spain are involved too, makes it impossible to confront China about it. Greed for a quick buck again bite us im the back.
My 2020 prediction that there will be no more wild caught fish in markets by 2030 seems ever closer...
The truth is, Argentina knows what’s happened but is likely powerless to stop it. If they acted to curb the issue, China would stop bribes to the Argentina leadership and likely impose sanctions of some kinda.
I'm genuinely curious when all of this will catch up to us. I spend a relatively large amount of my spare time keeping up with myriad of ways we are destroying our environment, the fact that our ecosystem is in deep danger is without question.
At the same time, while I am anecdotally aware we are experiencing a range of shortages right now, it never seems to quite show up in our economic data.
Take for example the FRED data on global fish prices [0]. When you look at that chart you see nothing particularly interesting. You can pore over all of the commodities charts and if that was all the data you had you would soon come to the conclusion that nothing obvious is wrong with our environment (at least from an economic standpoint).
To be absolutely clear, I'm not questioning that something is wrong, I think we're in major trouble. But I am still genuinely surprised that this peril doesn't present itself in any economic data I can find. Any insights into when we will feel this our how/when this environmental destruction will become visible in our economic data would be appreciated.
It reminds me of the national debt/fiscal gap discussion. Everyone will agree you can't owe a million times GDP, but no one can describe the "limit". Every year and decade you have people crying out that it's unsustainable and will result in collapse, and you have people saying "nah, more". You have examples of countries imploding, and you have the USA with doubles down every X years.
Surely you can't parlay indefinitely, but there hasn't been an implosion yet... until there is... but then everyone who enjoyed the political and financial benefits of parlaying is long dead, their inheritors heavily insulated... or there isn't a financial implosion... or there's some other disaster rendering this disaster moot... or something else (free energy? Second Coming?) appears and fixes it, allowing the reckless to get away with it... if we ever agree on who the reckless were...
We could just follow Taleb's warnings (the precautionary principle, antifragility, black swan events), but we can't even agree on basic reality, and the people who are greatly benefiting off their version of reality will never budge, and the people who might suffer aren't yet born (probably).
> Everyone will agree you can't owe a million times GDP, but no one can describe the "limit".
I’ve heard the limit described as “when the nation can only afford the interest payments on the principal” which means the nation can never pay back the principal itself. I heard that 10 years ago
I’d guess given technology advances you’d expect prices to go down, so the fact that they stay flat is actually indicating that fish are becoming harder to find. Similar to how if the price of something stays the same then it’s becoming cheaper because of inflation.
Also, fish are not a long term investment. The price only depends on how hard they are to find combined with demand to eat them sometime soon. If you could buy a fish now with the expectation of selling it later when stocks dry up then I think you’d see a lot more upward pressure.
Another thing cold be if costs for transportation and preparing the fish, storing it etc, grocery store salaries, as of now outweighs the cost of fishing it up from the ocean? (But if so, maybe not much longer.) (I don't know, just wondering.)
> To be absolutely clear, I'm not questioning that something is wrong, I think we're in major trouble. But I am still genuinely surprised that this peril doesn't present itself in any economic data I can find. Any insights into when we will feel this our how/when this environmental destruction will become visible in our economic data would be appreciated.
Simply put, The environmental destruction isn’t what you think. For instance, Based on my experience climate modeling and working with environmental papers - I don’t believe carbon emissions has a meaningful impact on global warming.
Further, and in way of example: the warming should lead to increased food production (they often say as much in their papers). What will happen is greater soil erosion, so we have to protect against that (or we will long-term) have crop problems.
The general point, is the system is more complex than we realize. There are no one-off answers because the system will always be adjusting to try to keep an equilibrium AND so will humans. Farm Fishing is on the rise, protection zones are being setup, global fishing rules have been ignored, but local ones have not, etc etc
I worked with several academics and corporations as a contractor building their simulations. I’ve also read a lot of papers as well, etc.
Like most simulations, they pretty much only can match reality so closely. for instance, we don’t have many long term measurements, so we make (educated-ish) guesses. Academics also repeatedly run their models, tweaking parameters to get the results they want. Frankly, I don’t trust any research using simulations, after being paid to work on environmental, biological systems, simulations for drones and machines (trucks, construction, etc). (Drones and other machines at least had a way to quickly test).
Funny that's contrary to the experience of > 95% of climate scientists. I would trust that over an unsupported reference to your experience, whatever that is.
We generally expect models to have predictive value, at least through a set of historic data, before we lens them much credence. We have made an exception for climate models. I believe following basic scientific procedures is a better plan than listening to what amounts to a widely-hekd belief structure. It is particularly galling when we could be using time and effort to combat the proven environmental catastrophes such as air and water qualities, deforestation, and issues such as the one that started this thread.
> Funny that's contrary to the experience of > 95% of climate scientists.
That’s an appeal to authority though. What’s wrong with the following statement?
“95% of numerologists strongly believe in the predictive power of numerology so therefore we should trust them.”
When people question the foundations of an entire field, presenting a giant sample of people who work in said field an implicitly agree with the foundation by labeling themselves as such isn’t really a compelling argument?
Guess what percentage of catholic priests think faith in Jesus is important?
That's a fair point if you're going to question an entire field.
I think the difference in this case is the arguments and evidence presented by climate science is generally accepted by experts and policy makers outside of the field.
I’m fairly certain I’ve commented about this on HN before but when I went to Antarctica (via ship from Argentina) in 2018 we saw tons of these vessels because the ships fishing for squid use huge bright lights to attract them at night. They looked like UFOs on the horizon. It was a really strange sight.
It was definitely well-known amongst the scientists on the ship that the operations were illegal. I know they made an effort to report as many as they could but my impression was that officials were overwhelmed by complaints and the illegal ships would work together to avoid detection/quickly move to international water so, since it was a losing battle, the government didn’t put forth too much effort.
Whether that’s the real reason nothing is done or just the good reason used to justify their inaction is anyone’s guess. I will say there were a shocking number of ships that I could see and I wouldn’t be surprised if they outnumbered the Argentinian navy.
It seems they outnumber the Argentinian fishing fleet 4 to 1, just counting the Chinese vessels which make up only 66% of the total intruders. So probably they outnumber the navy by quite a bit more. Impounding all these vessels would probably not make economic sense. They cant utilize that many vehicles and the people that might buy them would be the people they took them from. They would have to escort each one back to harbor and what do they do with the sailors? Feed and house them for free? Sinking these vessels with all hands with no warning would be the most effective way to handle it, no time wasted escorting and the impact psychologically would be outsized to the vessels sunk. Of course, that would gain them a great deal of negative publicity.
> Of course, that would gain them a great deal of negative publicity.
Negative publicity where? I’m sure within Argentina this would be very popular and if China protests it’ll have to own up that these illegal boats are coming from there, which it may not want to do.
Since we are talking about Chinese ships, it is useful to remember the words of those who have led the party for a long time: "strike one to educate a hundred." Although, when you are as dependent as Argentina is on other countries, including China, to survive, there are few opportunities to educate others.
Not without warning, no. You wouldn't have to learn much Chinese to announce "we're scuttling this ship in 2 minutes. If you wish to live, you may board this freely provided inflatable."
Their other boats will take them home. Probably have to toss over some of their illegal catch to make room, though.
Sinking a few and then maintaining that threat is likely the only way (as in, if they come back, sink a few more).
Obviously the crews should be taken off first, then returned to land and then deported as soon as possible. There's not much point in punishing them any further.
If you are only doing a few, might as well take the boats and use them. There are so many I was thinking you'd need to sink a couple hundred. In which case saving the fishermen is prohibitively expensive.
I wonder, isn't it 1) obvious for the CCP what this amount of overfishing will do?
And, 2)
> These distant-water fleets mainly fish for shortfin squid, which are vital to Argentina’s economy
1 and 2 combined make me wonder if destroying the ocean ecosystem, and damaging Argentina's economy could be a goal in itself, somehow.
Maybe to (now I'm guessing), in the future, get to lend out money to the government in Argentina, if they're in a bad economic situation -- and make the country depend on the CCP or something like that?
I'm just guessing and wondering. However it'd be weird to me if the CCP hadn't thought about what'll happen, because of the overfishing, and they said that, yes this is good for us; it's something we want (the party, probably not the people).
I read a lot of Chinese fantasy fiction (xianxia and wuxia) online and its extremely common for the heroes of the stories to use potions or herbs or magical ingredients to increase their powers and abilities. Something unique about them though is it seems super widespread in these stories for the main character, neutral factions, and enemies / evil factions alike to exhaust discovered resources to extinction, with the main ethical / moral crisis being whether to distribute them according to power or according to fairness. Fights over how big one's share of the pie is are common, and 'evil' characters are often those that express greed by demanding an unfair share. But the question of whether it's a good idea or a moral choice to harvest an entire field of 1000 year old ginseng or stealing all of some rare previously thought to be extinct Phoenix's eggs vs tending to the field and harvesting only a small crop or only taking the resources of older birds rarely comes up.
There are plenty of other cultural differences in these stories but overall I'm always left wondering whether some of these reflect broader cultural attitudes or if this is like if someone tried to get a deep understanding of western culture by reading Spiderman comics and that's it.
I'd think the culture of games and MMORPG had more influence.
I've seen multiple spins on the scenario you've described, in which some scenarios the exhaustive approach
is justified (the half-D world is on the verge of collapse, or about to fall to a corrupting force which will decay the resources, etc.);
is reasoned (if the protag leave the sustainable portion, their opponent or enemy will plunder the rest, basically 0-sum game);
is sustained (instead of harvesting everything, they transfer the resource to their own half-D, or if it's non-competitive, they do leave sustainable parts).
Then other genres of the wuxia and xianxia type where the protag is the leader of a faction, and have the faction resources (garden, mines, etc.).
I think you are thinking too deep into this. Reading a popular novel doesn't mean the readers agree with every action or idea the protag or the author take/presents, popular novel are more like fast food, maybe this fry is a bit too salty, maybe that fry is not salty enough, maybe the cola is lacking ice, etc.
Yeah it's true they don't always fully exhaust resources, but I wonder if the fact that such a large percentage of these worlds (comparatively to western fantasy worlds) are seen as 'well this is all gonna be gone soon anyway whether through natural effects or the actions of another bad actor so we may as well just abuse these resources anyway' doesn't reveal a slight bias compared to western attitudes.
But it's just a curiosity since as you say, it's not a representative sample and it's just a genre of fiction, not some real psychological / sociological study.
I've also heard the explanation that this particular behavior could be a reaction to recent history - in particular the famines that China went through in the 20th century. People still have through direct experience or through their recent parents of grandparents that experience of literally starving.
half-d? = half dimension / pocket dimension? don't know what half-d is.
It is an interesting phenomenon, but I'd say how different genres and how the Chinese novelist approach these genres has a greater effect on the outcome. Most times you reason from effect to cause to see why.
So typical Chinese fantasy/ high-level Wuxia/ Xianxia goes
protag need resources -> need lots with no strings -> a failing pocket dimension to exploit! -> maybe discovered through conflict / treasure map / etc.
Why though? Think of them as a one-time map in an RPG or something, where you access once for some material/etc. but can never revisit.
As for the behavior of that bunch of Chinese tourists, I would say that wasting was an issue in the recent generations (but won't be in the next generation), due to a number of factors such as the abundance of food on the market and in restaurant, hospitality (by providing more-than-can-eat), showoff (by providing extraordinary amount of food), corruption (government paid for, no need to hold back), etc.
However, the fight against corruption in recent years and recently passed laws that prohibit display in public and in video of wasting food would mean that the next generation growing up would have a different standard of what should be considered as waste.
Similarly, those growing up in the 70s-90s that had experience of a lack of food variety and amount, would either be very harsh on any waste of food, or would be overly lenient on wasting food.
As to the theory that this behavior came from memories of grandparents that experienced the famines, I'd say it's stretching it. There's too many variables that would affect the amount of influence, especially if the grandparents weren't around to educate about not wasting food. And if the grandparents didn't educate correctly, it could even cause a backlash.
It might be an error to attribute this to centralised planning. While that is eminently possible (and much easier for the CCP than other governments) this also could just be someone min/maxing their little slice of the pie or anything in between.
Agents of the imperial European powers used to act in the "interests of the empire" abroad without significant oversight ~200 years ago so this situation could be similar with the Chinese fleet being paid with incentives that encourage bending of the rules.
isn't it 1) obvious for the CCP what this amount of overfishing will do?
It's not in their territory, they likely don't give a rat's ass. Ecosystem damage in the western hemisphere might actually be a good aspect for some of those who might crack down on this.
I suspect we're all well aware that vessels and crews of any nation pulling this in China's territorial waters would not be treated kindly.
> China would stop bribes to the Argentina leadership
No need to inject unsubstantiable allegations in an otherwise sensible comment.
The power imbalance between a small country with long-standing financial issues and a history of inability in enforcing its complex borders, and a rising global superpower, is quite evident.
> South Korean, Spanish, and Taiwanese vessels conducted 26 percent of estimated fishing activity in the study with nearly 200 vessels. Almost “90 percent of the Spanish vessels that fished along Argentina’s national waters appeared to turn off their public tracking devices at least once, and Spanish vessels spent nearly twice as much time with AIS devices off as they did visibly fishing,” according to the report.
If power imbalance is the main issue here, surely something can be done about the other 1/3 at least?
In a quick read, I don't see anything in there that could be qualified as "bribe to the leadership". The Chinese finance a lot of countries to ingratiate themselves, but outright bribes to this or that person is another thing. It might well be happening, but stating it with certainty when there is no proof just comes off as a conspiracy theory.
>[Argentine journalist Roberto Maturana] says that in Argentina, these arrangements are facilitated by corrupt officials at the government sub-department of fishing, responsible for granting fishing licenses. ‘Often officials will issue an Argentine license to two different Chinese boats. So whilst one is in port, the other will be out fishing’.
In a world of continent-sized superpowers, any country with less than 100m people is objectively small; and Argentina definitely does not compensate for that with high per-capita GDP (they are not even in the top 50).
There's probably only three large countries in the world by your definition then: the USA, China, and Japan. (India, Brazil and Russia's economies are probably too small to meet your standard, all being smaller than the UK's or Germany's.)
Nations in the far east already have have vast fish farms in the ocean (along the coasts). They are huge and produce huge quantities of fish -- a substantial percentage of fish consumed. But there are species that people like to eat that cannot be farmed economically or at all. So they are caught in the wild.
There are already many aquaculture pens in the ocean near Port Lincoln, South Australia, often for tuna. You see them from the air when flying over. Here's a photo of what they look like:
The issue is that many of the desirable farmed fish like tuna and salmon are carnivores. Farming them still requires catching mass quantities of less-commercially-useful fish along with the issues that has.
Edit: I should say part of the issue. There are other ecological concerns with farmed fish.
Ya, no. Nothing wrong with hunting straight from nature. The key word is sustainable.
If you live on the ocean, you have every human right to fish fo nourishment. The issue here is militarized mass scale industrial fishing, illegally raping reassures to feed foreign people, mostly landlocked people sushi rolls and fish fillet.
What we need is a culture that eats local. Its a consumption issue. Farmed fish are most of the time also destructive to the environment, they are fed less than ideal and sustainable feeds, are not as healthy to eat, and most importantly are not healthy and happy fish, they are slaves in horrible life cycles.
I would tend to agree. Cities breed lots of problems. Social, economic, environmental, every kind you can imagine. And it creates very very small communities outside those cities which comes with its own problems too (think small town sheriff's tyranny type stuff - yes there's racial profiling etc in big cities as well, didn't say it was a unique problem). Bigger numbers do have an advantage but there is definitely a number that is too large.
I would advocate for lots of intermediate size cities but that doesn't seem to be what anyone in power wants.
Also, are you advocating for Thanos like mercy here? ;)
Not just that the settlement size is not right, but that the planet can only support so many people. Sure, they estimate it can support up to 11 billion. But that assumes increases in technology and commercial agricultural as well as consumer changes (like little meat). This also doesn't take into account it being sustainable or not.
We need a shrinking population and less consumerism. We are not currently sustainable (and unlikely to become so anytime soon).
I think this is a big, and very sad misunderstanding.
Back in humanity's hunter gatherer days, we truly lived off what the planet spontaneously produces, and that sustained world population of something like 50 million people.
The we invented farming, and all sorts of technology, and now we're 7000 million.
So how do those 6950 extra millions survive?
I think the best way to think of it is that they (we) produce their (our) own food!
Each mouth to feed also comes with two hands to produce food. The planet doesn't have to do the work. We make our own food.
This is wrong. By this logic the planet could support infinite people, which is clearly impossible.
> The planet doesn't have to do the work. We make our own food.
We don't just conjure food from the ether, it requires space and resources, both of which are finite. We're already using half of the world's habitable land for farming, and we need to retain some wild spaces to perform all of the ecological functions that farmland can't. There's a limited amount of fresh water, etc.
And food isn't the only bottleneck. If the current population all lived a modern western lifestyle, we'd be emitting an even more unsustainable amount of carbon.
The planet is a closed, finite system, so by definition there must be some upper limit to what it can support.
So why do the experts estimate the planet can support between 8 and 11 billion people?
2 hands to produce it? No. Modern agriculture relies on machines for most things. The high yield monocrop pattern is how we feed so many already. I firmly believe that increasing people will decrease suitability.
If they have such a high population and low production that they have to steal other peoples food sources, they're an existential threat to everyone else. What they will eat has been determined, and it's not likely to make the transition to local. So other people's starvation and the mass destruction of habitat will continue to be their externalities.
Do me a favor and post the latest figures on US domestic fish vs imports, where the imports break out to on a country-by-country basis, along with separating out US domestic fish that are exported to and then imported from China in a processing loop (used for cheaper processing, not actually caught or farmed by China).
That way we can better analyze the context of what "much" actually means.
Farmed animals have a tendency to be a mono culture that is housed on way too little space which is a breeding ground for problems that then need to be controlled by heavy use of pharmaceuticals which is detrimental to human survival.
Think anti biotic use in chickens for example. And the resistances that come with it. And fish tanks that do exist already have some of these issues already as well. How expanding that even more is a good thing is nebolous to me.
Fishing is really barbaric. It's fairly bloodless since we suffocate all the creatures but it's like going to Yosemite and just cutting the throats open of the animals you find, tossing then in a bag and taking them off to sell on the market.
Also awful. It's not about an individual fish, many people don't understand this.
It's about disruption of an ecosystem that material reality demonstrates we still very poorly understand.
There's exactly zero evidence that anyone other than very specific tribes of indigenous peoples who sustained thousands of years, that humans writ large know how to maintain ecosystems.
All evidence points to our current practices having massive deleterious consequences and that we are already a few decades into a mass extinction event.
If that's not enough evidence to harbor every ship (or at least 95%) until we figure out what the fuck we're doing, there's no hope.
That's the truly repulsive aspects of barbarism, it's about the combination of ignorance and indifference as to the consequences of our actions
Some areas are getting destroyed but other countries are very good at managing their fisheries, England, Norway, Australia, Canada and more will be producing wild fish ongoing I would expect.
There definitely seems the need for some international waters rules to be agreed on, but given today's politics it seems unlikely the major powers would approach that with goodwill.
The thing with all those areas is that those countries have the resources to police their waters and would absolutely seize vessels that were in breach of their or international laws.
And if an illegal fishing armada turned up would very likely sink a few vessels to send a message.
The fascinating question is what happens if China tries to back this up with force. The US would probably feel the need to intervene, but I’m sure most of South America would be more than a bit wary having American war ships in the area given what we’ve done down there. On the other hand, better than Chinese warships perhaps?
Isn't it pretty unlikely for them to try to use force to back up fishing boats secretly popping into Argentina's waters? That would be making a big noise to continue doing something that the fishing fleet was trying to do quietly, basically calling attention to their shady behavior. And wouldn't using force there be close to an invasion over one source of cheaper fish? That would be a really aggressive escalation, might alienate many countries, etc.
Surely China has bigger fish to fry (rimshot) with its foreign relations.
Argentina is a signatory of the Rio Treaty, as such any attack against Argentina would we considered an attack against the United States and most of the rest of South America.
That treaty is not worth much of anything these days, too much history has happened since then.
It's true that the US consider South America "their own backyard", but there is a web of complex relationships which makes it unlikely they would blindly help this or that country retaliate against actions from superpowers - short of somebody establishing permanent strategic bases that are direct threats to the US mainland.
Exactly. This very same treaty was invoked by Argentina when the Falklands/Malvinas war broke out to ask US for assistance against England, and it revealed as wet paper against real geopolitical alliances / calculations.
So mostly safe from violent retaliation. How important is their trade with China? If they impound Chinese fishing vessels (assuming they have a coast guard capaple of keeping up with this many intruders?) a loss of trade mught occur.
It's a yearly naval exercise conducted by many countries in the Pacific. In the event of a naval war with China, they would have to fight not only the US but Australia, Canada, Japan, Philippines, and countless other countries.
I was never questioning who would win a shooting war, I was questioning how the Argentinians would feel about it.
But if China did decide to project power, the question is not "would the US and its allies win a shooting war", the question is "will the US push back at all?"
No, it does not. Treaties require that the parties involved enforce them; like laws they become scraps of paper unless they’re backed up by the sovereign.
Which again returns to the original question; would the US push back, and how far would they go?
The US has many overseas bases in Latin America already... including a few of them in Argentina.
The Rio Pact, the yearly naval exercises, the overseas bases... and the historical precedent of the Monroe doctrine makes it very clear that the US doesn't want any outsiders messing around.
> Nobody in Argentina would buy Chinese products again, probably.
Sure, but would that really affect Chinese decision making? I imagine that a partial US boycott would have a much larger impact than a full boycott in Argentina. Their GDP is 32nd in the world according to Wikipedia.
> Among the assessed stocks in the database, the average fishing pressure increased and the biomass declined on average until 1995, when fishing pressure began to decrease. By 2005, average biomass had started to increase (Fig. 1B). Averaged across all stocks in the database, biomass in 2016 was higher than BMSY, and fishing pressure was lower than UMSY. However, improvement is still needed for 24% of stocks, accounting for 19% of potential catch, which still have low biomass and high fishing pressure compared with MSY-based targets
> Since the mid-1990s, catch has generally declined in proportion to decreases in fishing pressure and was, in 2016, at 54% of where it was in 1989 for assessed stocks (Fig. 1B). This pattern is also observed at the regional level, where the correlation between exploitation rate and catch is generally >0.8 (Fig. 2). Global catch as reported by the FAO also declined during that period, but less so than for the assessed stocks reported here, likely because fishing effort in the parts of the world without assessment has not declined (18).
> Regions that have average biomass near or above BMSY are Australia, Atlantic Ocean tunas, Canada West Coast, European Union non-Mediterranean, Indian Ocean tunas, Norway/Iceland/Faroes, New Zealand, Pacific Ocean tunas, Alaska, the US Southeast and Gulf, and the US West Coast. Although these regions have not avoided the overfishing of all stocks, conservative management has kept most stocks at high biomass. Many areas where biomass was below BMSY in 2000 have seen reductions in fishing pressure and stock increases, including the Atlantic Ocean tunas; the East, Southeast, and Gulf coasts of the United States; the Canada East Coast; and the Northwest Pacific Ocean (Japan and Russia). Tuna stocks in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which were well above BMSY in 1970, were near BMSY in 2016.
> Stocks in the Mediterranean-Black Sea have low biomass and continue to decline, whereas stocks in South America have declined considerably in the last 20 y and were below target levels in 2016. Fishing pressure in South America has been dropping since the early 2000s. Only 4 of 36 stocks in NW Africa have MSY-based reference points for biomass estimated, all of which are large-volume, small-pelagic fisheries and are therefore unrepresentative of the many demersal fisheries in the region. The stock abundance for those small-pelagic stocks is above MSY targets, but exploitation rates were high (2.5 times UMSY) for the 6 NW African stocks for which exploitation rate reference points exist. Regional assessments (19) estimated that most demersal stocks were overexploited by 2008 and recommended reductions in fishing pressure.
It is of course difficult to create and enforce a regulatory regime to prevent overfishing, but there tends to be buy-in among fisherman once their fisheries collapse.
> Oceana documented over 800 foreign vessels logging more than 900,000 total hours of apparent fishing. The analysis also revealed that 69% of this fishing activity was conducted by more than 400 Chinese vessels.
...
> As part of this analysis, Oceana documented more than 6,000 gap events, instances where AIS transmissions are not detected for more than 24 hours, which potentially indicates vessels are disabling their public tracking devices. These vessels were invisible for more than 600,000 total hours, hiding fishing vessel locations and masking potentially illegal behavior, such as crossing into Argentina’s national waters to fish. The Chinese fleet was responsible for 66% of these incidents.
It appears that Chinese vessels are actually slightly less likely to disable AIS than others?
Edit: from the actual report at the end of the article, which I missed at first:
> While China had the highest total number of gaps, the Spanish fleet appeared to have the
worst AIS compliance on a per-vessel basis. Nine out of the 10 fishing vessels that spent
the most time with their AIS off were flagged to Spain, despite constant AIS operation
being mandatory under European Union law.
I wonder whether that means they can be sued, or whether the responsible regulatory agency would have to take the initiative.
I was basing it on 69% of fishing time vs. 66% of gaps. Of course it could just be that their average gap is longer. That statistic is unfortunately missing even from the full report, although they must have it if they were able to identify the ten vessels with the longest gaps.
That’s kind of missing the point. There were 400 Chinese vessels turning off their AIS to illegally fish. Even if they were turning them off less frequently, the sheer numbers are far more damaging than 9 Spanish ships.
When you have that many vessels you don’t need to turn them off as much because you’re catching everything that moves in a far shorter period of time.
The relative prevalence is relevant if you want effective regulations. If the EU requirement for constant AIS transmissions is ineffective, then it's unlikely that political pressure on the Chinese government would result in a more effective policy. If, however, the owners of those Spanish vessels are fined enough to force them to end their illegal fishing, then there's hope that introducing similar regulations in China would also effectively curb illegal fishing by Chinese vessels.
Aside: There were actually 316 Chinese vessels with gaps in AIS transmission, 71 Taiwanese, 36 South Korean, 27 Spanish, 5 Argentine and 5 unknown ones.
The best thing that 'documentary' highlighted was that fishing isn't necessarily just for human consumption, there's likely a large portion of fishing that's done for feedstock of fish farms.
It's a global problem but there's one bad/reckless actor (China) that needs to better police the issue internally.
To be honest, I don't know if a 'global' effort of physically policing the oceans is possible (given they cover 2/3rds of the Earth). I do think it in the short term it will eventually come down to fishing crew being arrested and boats confiscated and sunk, with the crew being given one way flights back to their home country.
It might be watching as entertainment, but it's not really worth watching if you're looking for objective analysis. ie. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26749401 (or the rest of the thread)
* The documentary distorts facts and in some cases even outright lies:
1. They claim that the oceans will be empty by 2048, but that claim is based off widely refuted (by even the original authors!) paper from 2006. A 2020 update says the global fish stocks are improving.
2. They claim that 40% of seafood caught is "bycatch", but they define bycatch as "anything that's not sustainably managed". No reputable scientific organization uses that definition for bycatch.
3. They claim 250k sea turtles are killed per year as a result of bycatch, but the source cited for this is some random blog post. Actual studies show the number is closer to 4600.
5. They claim that 46% of plastic in the ocean is from fishing nets, but that's based off a study that shows that in a specific area of the ocean (great pacific garbage patch), fishing nets make up 46% of the floating plastic.
* The documentary allege corruption but their evidence amounts to "well they could be faking the numbers". A company could be cooking the books (it happens all the time, eg. wirecard), but that doesn't mean it's a widespread practice. Independent studies have verified that msc certification is a reliable and overall beneficial program.
* The documentary's interviews are misleading because they ask simplified questions to complex problems, then play them back out of context in an attempt to create gotcha moments. The movie has received criticism from the people interviewed, even the ones that were portrayed positively.
* The creator doesn't seem to be interested in sustainability at all. In one segment he visits a bunch of whale fisherman. He concludes that the practice is totally sustainable, but he still doesn't like it and goes on to say that sustainability is not how we should care for our oceans. The documentary doesn't end with ways on how to make fishing more sustainable, it instead lists reasons why you should go vegan.
Who are they? What do they do? What will my money be used for? Being a 'non-profit' doesn't at all make them good actors. Someone's description of themselves isn't a reliable source.
I recently worked as drone photographer on a cruise along remote Australian coastline. One of the guest lecturers on board worked for decades with/alongside the navy, apprehending or fending off illegal fishing boats entering protected waters on AU's NW Kimberley coast.
Back in the 1700s, there were Indonesians coming down to collect sea cucumbers for the Chinese market:
Not sure if it's current policy, but the guest lecturer described an assessment process for boats they apprehended. A vintage all-wooden boat with no electricity/etc was allowed to continue their traditional fishing practices in the area. A modern boat with powered outboard, metal/fibreglass hull, etc was seized and destroyed. There was a third class I can't recall that was somewhere in between.
I can see something like this being a way forward, where you can fish smallscale for personal use (yacht crew subsisting on whatever they can catch) or small commercial use with a certain style of boat and catching method. Any bigger operations would be restricted to specific zones, or captured and destroyed with little warning.
Until the rest of the world diversifies its manufacturing to lessen the power of China, and then regulates it, they will continue to do whatever they want with impunity.
When we visited South Africa, locals made a point of showing the Chinese fishing vessels that had mechanical troubles and were forced to dock in Cape Town. The locals refused to service them, and the anglers lived on their boats in drydock.
This is well known throughout the world, but my suspicion is that governments receive enough Chinese investment (personal or otherwise) that they turn the other cheek. SA in particular had whole quarters of industrial areas that had only Chinese signage, and were wholly owned by China / Chinese businesses.
> U.S. Navy Arrest and Sink 300 Chinese Fishing Ships Off South America Coast
The video is fake. It's based on real events but congrats, you just fell for fake news and then helped spread it. I can't find any info that the US sunk Chinese fishing boats. That would be headline news if it actually happened.
Maybe the title is bad written, because you may understand that U.S Navy arrested and sunk the 300 ships, but actually the story isn't fake. The video is probably just trying to monetize it.
If the story is that China is operating vast fishing fleets which trespass, fish illegally and violate territorial claims then sure, it's true. That's not what the video is saying.
The video clearly claims the USN sunk the ships and uses video footage to support the lie. Please stop supporting fake news.
The only take away that I have is that the Chinese would have a serious issue, if any nation was caught in their territorial waters, especially on this scale. You have to remember that this article is focused on Argentina, but PRC has signficant and large global fleets roaming the seven seas causing havoc in many maritime zones. Like I said before imagine Japan doing this to the PRC. Significant punitive military and diplomatic action would have been taken. The PRC has to stop this kind of hypocritical behavior.
Which maritime zones do you mean? From what I’ve read China is only in maritime zones directly around it, with some ships as far west as Iran to protect trade routes from pirates.
It's long past time for the US to put the Monroe Doctrine to some actual good use and put an end to the illegal Chinese fishing - plundering, theft - going on in Latin American waters. We can trivially put a stop to it, and quick. It'd be simultaneously in our own self-interest to stand up to China on this matter, and be a positive favor to Latin America.
This also happened in Chile, although from the article it seems it was not as prevalent as in our neighboring country. (In Spanish) 11 chinese fishing ships spotted in chilean waters, 70 (!!!) of them made it to the Atlantic through the Magellan Strait [0], [1], [2].
Exploiting protected fish stocks and ecosystems happens far too often with minimal consequences... and the knock-on effects of this trend are terrible for everyone. Would love to see someone do a full breakdown on courses of action here that might actually be effective.. along with pros/cons/costs and analysis of why they haven't been pursued already.
Courses of action are plenty. These are foreign fleets illegally fishing territorial waters, so there's no real reason for authorities to object to enforcement.
In this case, the problem is enforcement, which locals on here seem to think is related to coast guard resources and/or corruption. I would hazard that its an issue of will and/or competency, in this case.
Overharvesting in international waters and overharvesting legally within territorial waters is a different issue. The actual solution, IMO, is a blanket ban with certain exemptions. Fishing is very political thought, and constantly underestimated by politicians and MOPs who naively wade in. Financially, fishing is not that big an industry. It does represent a livelihood for a lot of people. It also has huge cultural significance, literally an ancient way of life. For everyone else, it has some cultural significance, culinary significance... so a touches a lot of people. It's genuinely a big ask. I support a ban, but underestimating effects on people is a recipe for failure, and bad blood.
Commercial, terrestrial wild harvests at industrial scale famously wiped out US bison herds very quickly. One notable example of many. Inland fisheries, especially salmon, faired similarly. Bans have been far more effective than controlled harvests. Two big examples are Cod and whaling. Cod fishing is one of the oldest modern regulatory history in fishing... but Cod never recovered. Whaling OTOH, most species that were not depleted entirely have recovered. The ban worked.
Oceanic fishing is similar to terrestrial harvests and inland fisheries , just bigger and with the added difficulty of requiring international coordination. We can't harvest wild stock sustainably at a commercial scale. Perhaps it's possible in theory, but theory has rarely proven out in practice.
Why not create a specialized pirate fleet which would base in the international waters, enter Argentina waters as long as Argentina doesn't mind and prey on the "invisible" illegal fishing boats nobody would protect?
I always imagined fishing vessels doing fairly short range trips to get their catch back to shore maximally fresh. Are there really ships long-hauling round the Cape all the way from China?
On the press release link (idk why it's like the same page but basically longer) there's some more highlights. It seems that there are friendly ports:
>Of the vessels with AIS gaps, 31% of them visited the Port of Montevideo, Uruguay at the end of their trip. This port has allegedly been favored by vessels engaging in illegal activity.
I don't think violence is a good option. Also consider there are likely the working poor on the boats, even systems of slave labour.
Far better would be to catch them, fly the crew home and and auction the vessels.
In Australia they do similar but burn the boats as these tend to be smaller vessels made of wood. The thought that you'll lose your boat for a catch if fish is a huge deterrent.
Violence is never a “good” option but to paraphrase Winston Churchill: you don’t negotiate with a dragon while your head is in its mouth.
Sinking some of these vessels would attract the right amount of international attention and force action. Seizing and destroying is a worth while risk and a “cost of doing business”.
You want to play a game of cat and mouse? You’re one cat they’re many many more mice.
Nice quote but does Argentina have their head in a dragons mouth? Its not even a negotiation.
China wont strongly protest seizure of illegal fishing boats if they are fishing in another countries waters. They would if you start gunning citizens down, because in what civilized world is the death penalty an appropriate punishment for theft, not least having no due process
etc.
As for cat an mouse, you dont have to catch them all, a few seizures will 1) Scare vessels so they look for lower risk waters and 2) They may well keep fishing the fringes, but are less likely to go blatantly deep into territorial waters.
And if they sweep in for the largest modern boats it might even be a profitable exercise.
A vessel without a working tracker is either non-existent or broken.
Broken vessels should be taken to port and kept there until repairs AND said repairs are verified. Verification should consists of "the tracker was on continuously for a week."
If there's no vessel at a given location, it's clearly safe for live-fire targetted at said location.
How long until this headline means what I considered it might, being already familiar with the backstory?
That an earth first movement decides a line has now been crossed and the gloves are coming off, and e.g. uses a swarm of cheap disposable kamikaze drones to sink a few hundred ships in one 3:10am coordinated unattributed assault?
KSR's The Ministry for the Future evokes this scenario, and makes plain the ethical reasoning behind it...
...we are all just waiting for someone with the resources to e.g. fly their personal 787-8 overhead, to decide that watching from the sidelines is not patriotic, for some value of patriotism.
I don't think it is useless to say that. I don't think you should hold back from saying that.
I think we should recognize it and raise awareness to it as much as possible. I don't advocate for veganism, either. I advocate that fish and other food that is so hard to replenish be used and treated like a delicacy.
Today by luck we caught an octopus and by luck I was at the market when the ship came in with the catch. Instead of an octopus everyday for every meal. That is not going to sustain. Same for other foods.
But the downside of making octopus and other food a delicacy is that that is the reason why everybody wants it soo which creates the demand causing this.
"Vanishing" seems a misleading headline. This isn't a case where Argentinean boats are mysteriously lost at sea and their crews are sadly never heard from again. This is illegal fishing from other countries.
In my opinion, Argentina should announce that, after $DATE, they will seize such ships and auction them off. Any amount of enforcement afterward should be enough to significantly deter violation of their waters by these fleets.
This reminds me of Nelsons famous "I see no ships" quote. Everyone in power knows what's happening, everyone in power agrees not to prevent it, everyone in power pretends they haven't.
Cases like this are just proof decentralised/deregulation argument would destroy the earth. Governments and international agencies need more power to control these behaviors.
Did some reading on the Argentine Naval Prefecture (their version of a coast guard) and they seem very much under-equipped for the job. Argentina's EEZ is really big, and they've got 5 small maritime patrol aircraft (couldn't find any info on what optics or radar they are equipped with) along with a handful of aircraft with the Naval Aviation force. To patrol a large area like this aggressively you need a large fleet of capable maritime patrol aircraft. A P-3 Orion would be very useful (Argentine navy has 4 of the older B variant but they are apparently non-functional) though probably overkill. Ideally you want a MALE UAV with a good surface search radar (IR sensors are cheaper, but don't have the detection range of a radar and have degraded performance under cloud cover), off the top of my head the only one available for this would be a naval variant of the IAI Heron. Another option would be using over-the-horizon radars, but that's expensive and you'd need quite a few of them. You can supplement that data with radar and ESM from offshore patrol craft and maritime helicopters (either land-based of ship-based).
Coordinating multiple UAV patrols across a wide area and cross-referencing that with other data is a nontrivial task, and because of the distances involved most of that will have to be through satellite. You'll want multiple command centers with the ground control stations for those UAVs, a data processing center, and operators who can identify suspicious craft and coordinate an interception. Because of the distances and numbers involved, you probably won't be able to have enough vessels on station and ready to intercept ships quickly. Better to use helicopters. You want a decent radius of action (over 100 nmi) and equipped with a surface search radar, FLIR, satellite data link and target sharing, room for a boarding team, plus sufficient armament to support the boarding team against small arms fire and the capability to shoot out the rudder if needed (a 20mm autocannon would work well for both, alternatively a machine gun on the door and a hellfire-type missile). Good candidates would be Seahawk or Lynx helicopters. Land-based helicopters won't have the range to reach targets in a large portion of the EEZ, which is where cutter-class ships would come in to play. A more exotic option would be to convert a cargo ship into a helicopter carrier, but to my knowledge no coast guard has done anything like that.
Anyway, that's a rough sketch of what you would need to make illegal fishing operations extremely risky. As you can see, it is expensive (multibillion just for acquisitions, and maintenance and sustainment would probably be in the hundreds of millions annually) and requires a lot of work to get right.
The Chinese government will be worse than the German government of WW2 and far more difficult to beat since they are far smarter.
The CCP does not care about human rights. It does not care about territorial sovereignty. It does not even possess any true allies. The only thing that matters to them is the Power Equation - do you have the power and will to oppose them. If you do not, you will be rolled over and exploited.
Huh??? These ships aren't "vanishing", they are simply turning off their transponders. It's quite clear where these ships are and why they are switching their transponders off: they are fishing in Argentine territorial waters without permission.
Strange way of making that point. Usually when people talk about ships "vanishing" they're talking about something more like the Bermuda Triangle or rogue waves or something like that, i.e. ships actually, you know, vanishing, not turning off their tracking devices so they can fish illegally.
This is out of nowhere but how much of a piracy opportunity is this for someone wanting to acquire a few dozen fishing vessels? It sounds like Argentina wouldn’t do anything about it.
I have to wonder sometimes, what if the West finally has enough and shuts China off from all its trade? Sure, prices will rise, but that's the cost of staying alive anyway—I'm convinced we'll have to scale consumption back at some point unless we want to all die among barren wasteland and landfills (or at least if we don't want to live among wasteland with some hydroponics and farms).
So, let's say the West relocates production to India, dozen other neighboring countries and Africa, and gives China the finger. Will China go on fine and dandy with just Middle-East customers and whatnot? Will it turn to blocking and pillaging traffic on the seas from those other countries? Will it turn to terrorism, something like torturing Uyghurs until the US gives in and turns off the sanctions? Will it go to war with all the neighbors, beginning with Taiwan? Will it fire the nukes, and/or have NK fire the nukes?
I've heard that Western politics, including international politics, are a product of popular demand, even if people won't say they like what the government does. Well, either people are fine with China's hijinks while all the tsatskes are cheap, or there's some complications to the idea that the West might want to do something.
aaaand again China doing whatever it wants and nobody doing anything about it. When will this stop?
Personally i'm boycotting their product and services as much as possible.
All it takes is a little research. You can find a US manufacturer for almost anything if you look hard enough. Most people don't want to pay the higher prices that sometimes come with many of the products.
Made in USA != all parts made in the USA. Kinda like how "Made in the USA" cars/trucks are often 90% made overseas then sent to the US for final assembly to earn that sticker.
I'll ignore the fact that the very first link in your computer URL is Apple, which does not have a 100% made in the USA product.
The second computer company in your link is Digital Storm. They use MSI boards which are made in Taiwan and China.
No, I didn't miss your point. The link I posted has computer manufacturers that say they can use US based components, including in-house engineered parts. I also showed that components are made in the US and that the DOD contracts will require that Chinese parts not be used.
There are items made in China by Taiwan-based companies, which are marked as such, but stuff actually manufactured in Taiwan is marked as made in Taiwan
Unless you’re very rich or living like a monk, boycotting Chinese made products is not an easy task. Go to any American supermarket and look at the labels, I bet a majority of them are made in China.
Voting with wallet only works when there are options. I bet the devices that you and I used to write these very comments are highly likely made in China too, at least partly
Fishery regulation cheating is pervasive everywhere, almost none of these rules have working teeth. Every ocean species for which there is a market anywhere is being catastrophically overexploited, regardless of what regulations say.
That said, I guess... I'm actually OK with jingoist anti-China hatred in this particular case if it helps drive attention to a genuine ecological catastrophe? The woke hippies welcome you aboard, mate.
I was going to make a similar point - this is a persistent problem anywhere there are profitable fish stocks, and absolutely not just by the Chinese - the French, Spanish, whoever, there are plenty of people at it.
Nobody has yet mentioned the UK, but: reduced regulation on fishing was a big motivator for Brexit, where the campaign had its roots deep in coastal towns.
Well, British fishermen thought we'd be "taking back control of our waters", and wouldn't be in the situation where they have smaller quotas that the large Spanish and French vessels that fish British waters do.
The purpose of the military is to maintain the territorial sovereignty of the nation, against illegal entry from migrants/smugglers or chinese fishermen.
If the military cannot perform this task then why does Argentina spend $3billion on them?
The obvious answer is that Argentina is a failed state, incapable of defending itself.
Sovereignty is a slippery abstraction. What we’re talking about here is doing violence against someone on a boat who has directly harmed no one, whose only crime is crossing an invisible line and perhaps stealing some food.
Now, I’m not going to get down in to the weeds about fishing property rights, but it looks like you’re trying to climb up this abstraction layer (“territorial sovereignty”) to justify violence against the peaceful.
If indeed they are stealing from someone under the law, I don’t think violent action via a national military is in any way whatsoever a proportionate response. You seem to be advocating for collective guilt because there are so many, and collective guilt or group punishment is a violation of human rights.
I mean you can say this same thing about several countries. USA, Russia, China all come to mind. Turns out countries with power often act similarly as people with power, unethically in order to advance their own interests. It's not just a "someone needs to stop china" problem, it's more systemic. Stopping china from doing this one thing is just treating symptoms, not the underlying cause.
The US has overthrown multiple democratic governments to get what it wants. I personally prefer China's blatant disregard for the rules over the United State's efforts to forcibly rewrite the rules in their favor.
That’s like people who preferred Donald trump. Indications from other areas showed he was going to be worse, but he hadn’t already had an actual history in office so many former supporters were unable to extrapolate.
Xinjiang, Tibet, and events in Hong Hong don’t bode well. Trends in the South China Sea show that China doesn’t respect its neighboring countries claims either. So the external events that do exist are not promising that China will be better.
And in internal politics and equality, we haven’t yet forced academics and professionals into labor camps but it may be trending that way.
Edit: I’m by no means downplaying the terribleness the USA did in South America, the Middle East or elsewhere nor our own internal discriminations and worse, I’m pointing out that given the limited information we have, it does not give any confidence that China will be an improvement. My own feel given my fairly limited understanding is that overall it will be worse for the environment and justice globally and at the very best essentially the same but with a new face.
Rules are a way for whichever party is more powerful at the time of rule writing to lock in advantages in their favor. Take a look at any US election cycle, each parties tries to create laws that it knows will be difficult to overturn even if they get voted out in 4 years.
Is it any wonder a rising power chafes at rules that it didn't get same amount of influence over at the time of writing because it was weaker? Our entire structure of international law is based on decisions made in those first few years after WW2. It's been 70+ years since then and the world has changed dramatically. I'm quite concerned that if the current international structure isn't flexible enough to bend and accommodate the pressure those changes, its going to break like an earthquake fault and we could very well have a WW3 scenario on our hands.
Looks like you are being downvoted for no good reason. Comments like this always seem to go down after the sun rises across the Atlantic
“I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”
What was the point of all of the globalist nonsense that The United States has been up to for the last 40+ years?
It appears to have done nothing to stop China, which, just off of the top of my head:
1) Is by far the largest industrial polluter in the world
2) Seems hell bent on completely fishing all of the fish out of the ocean
3) Makes absurd territorial claims to places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea, then acts indignant when these absurd territorial claims are questioned.
4) Is currently engaged in an active genocide
5) Perpetrated the deadliest industrial disaster so far (the wuhan lab leak)
6) Does all of this, in the rest of the world's face, and barely even bothers to lie about it. Then plays the victim if it is brought up.
I mean what the hell? What are we even doing? Is this seriously how the global order collapses? What does the world look like with a hegemonic China?
It is seriously the most depressing thing to me that the world appears to just be rolling over to allow a genocidal dictatorship to take over. Where does that leave humanity in 1000 years?
The WEF websites generally outline the Davos globalist agendas. I critical reading of some of their documents might better answer some of your questions than a comment.
https://twitter.com/epineyro_ok/status/1378112721628114947
ADS-B track: https://i.imgur.com/1wxAkK2.jpg
"Last night we flew at 5000 feet over the foreign fishing fleet that preys on our seas, causing ecological disasters. They weren't at mile 201, they were well in our territorial waters."
(courtesy /r/aviation and gTranslate)