In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other over strips of land | Hacker News Reader

In a remote corner of Romania, neighbours kill each other over strips of land

theguardian.com

46 pointsyitchelle50 comments

> In the poor and remote province of Maramureş in the northern Carpathians, cut off by bad mountain roads from the rest of Romania to the south...

Sadly, even from the first sentence, this article is full of sensationalist, incorrect and exaggerated information.

I lived 20 years of my life in Maramureș - albeit in the city - and it is neither a poor region, nor remote, nor cut off by mountain roads from anything [1]. It's very hard to take anything in this article seriously.

It was a very sad and disappointing thing to read this morning about a beautiful region with friendly people and old traditions...

[1] http://tinyurl.com/q98g9g5 (google maps)

I like how the article start with making fun of ancient body measures, but then uses feet to compare.

I'm currently working on a (very very basic) knitting app. Proof reading text is awful. Patterns use skeins, yards, metres, mm, cm, inches, gauge (arbitrary units) etc all interchangeably. It is kind of impressive how the units coexists. It pains me.

Orwell would love the more rustic and humanistic imperial measures over the sterile metric system.

http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml

Owell's complaint that it's hard to estimate sizes in cm is debatable.

As a tourist in Europe, I had plenty of people quote cm for various things that I would measure in feet and inches. It didn't seem hard for them.

His argument around literary value is interesting. There are many languages which may be superior in those respects.

English excels at being precise and scientific.

Of course. We can all get used to whatever measures one has to use in daily life. Still, I think because many of the imperial units did actually come from human physical bases, they are intrinsically humanistic, whereas the metric system simply took arbitrary measures and divided and multiplied in powers of ten --leaving very large gaps.

Kind of the same thing in architecture, when they talk about human scale vs more modernist epic architecture which lacks human scale (Brasilia, for example)

There are no gaps between metric measures, especially not "very large" ones. It happens that people used to the metric system take full advantage of it by using decimals, whereas people raised using the imperial system don't. In the metric system you have much bigger units than with imperial, much smaller too and all the needed ones in between.

A good example is height. It is much more precise and easy to use the metric system to say I'm 1'87 meters than saying 5 feet 11 inches, which mixes units. If you want to be more precise you could say 1'871 in metric and 5 feet 11 inches and something like "a sixteenth of an inch" (sorry I'm not being accurate, I didn't even look up). Or human weight? Don't get me started with stone and pounds. A stone is something more than 6kg and a pound is about 400g or 0'4kg. Good luck with that.

The imperial system might have an aura of romanticism for those of you raised on countries that still use it, but the metric system is one of the most elegant solutions civilisation has invented. It works in every case better than any other system and it is easy to teach to kids. 10/10 would measure again ;)

I guess, after all there's a reason the international science community adopted the metric system.

> I guess, after all there's a reason the international science community adopted the metric system.

There are a few big exceptions - physics with eV, astronomy with just about a whole new imperial system, warts and all, and the most brazen is chemists who've managed to squeeze the mole in to the SI system despite its being entirely redundant and depending on two (2!) different mass units - the kg and the amu. So I'd say some big subgroups of the science community really haven't adopted the metric system.

1.87m is around 6ft2, actually :) I see that imperial units are still used because for many people it is too late to change (or they are just too stubborn). Teaching imperial units to kids, though, should be considered a crime.

Imperial units should be continued to be taught in English class as an interesting and archaic linguistic quirk that you need to be aware of as it will show up in a lot of older writings.

> Teaching imperial units to kids, though, should be considered a crime.

THIS. as for curiosity, why not, but we can say something similar about nordic runes or egyptian writings. But this is more of an ego challenge, when one should accept that what they grown up with is inferior (sorry to our english-native friends, but imperial system is really, really archaic & inferior).

And yes, we in europe regularly measure in metres+centimetres, we use decimetres quite regularly, and it feels natural having bigger part divided into 10 or 100, or 1000 subparts. On the other hand, feets are nightmare (30,5cm), and 6"2 - what the heck is that 2? is it 2/10 of the foot? or 2 inches which are TOTALLY different measure compared to feet without any easy translation? mess...

Bah. first off you write it as 6'2" 6 ft, 2 inches. when you're doing practical applications of this, running around with your tape measure and cutting wood to fit, you dont' want to start mixing in percentages. It gets more comfortable the more you use a tape measure because you're not using tenths. You're using quarters, eighths and 16ths. Need more precise? Haha, I don't want to say because it's vulgar but fits well on a job site.

It may seem like an extra pain in the neck but I think it just has to do with a personal aesthetic scale, one that can grow on you quickly.

I like to divide and multiply by 2 and 3 and 4, it keeps the numbers around me simple and. And doing that with inches, you have 12, 24, 48. Other things scale-wise to people ends up being kind of nice.

Door widths at 30" Sheets of plywood and drywall at 4'x 8'. Heavy to handle but cover a lot of area. These template defaults just kind of become aesthetically pleasing to work with after I'd say a short time, one can appreciate the units of measurements and how we manufacture to suit them and ourselves best.

I had an old Triumph Which some genius had been maintaining in metric. All the exhaust was metric, the rest imperial. Whatever your hatred level of imperial is, a blend of both systems is worse.

What feels right is mostly determined by what you grew up with. I grew up with the metric system, and imperial is basically meaningless to me, and I know people the other way round.

> English excels at being precise and scientific.

That's false. Today English is the biggest language in terms of dictionary weight. English is the universal language, borrows terminology from other languages and modern sciences, which grow exponentially, use primarily English. Especially computer science.

That said, English tends to be less precise and hence less complex compared to other languages. For example 'love' vs 'in love' are used interchangeably and their meaning is not as precise as in other languages. Greek has totally different words to convey the meaning 'ΑΓΑΠΗ' (love) vs 'ΕΡΩΤΑΣ' (in love). Italian like English uses 'innamorato' vs 'amore', which again blurs the difference between the two.

Greek and Russian I believe are way more precise as languages than English will ever be. That's not to that a language is superior or inferior than the other. It's a matter of language design, I guess. I don't know about Japanese, Chinese, African and Arabic languages/dialects.

Bulgarian for example is a rather modern language, derives from Cyrillic and is grammatically very simple. Much simpler than Russian. But it's a complete language by all means.

Crap, I'm not a linguist. I was just trying to find some redeeming feature of the language ;)

Now, since I assume we both support metric, we have to partner to change the default language of the world.

He might have a point with other units, but when it comes to temperature, Celsius strikes me as more humanistic and intuitive. Zero as the freezing point of water, and 100 as the boiling point is easy for any human to relate to since we interact with water every day.

Fahrenheit is fairly humanistic as well: 0 is very roughly as cold as you'll ever see, and 100 is about as hot as you'll ever see.

That may be true where you live. Try explaining it to somebody from Kuwait or Yakutsk, though.

0 is about as cold as you'll ever see? Except in half of the world?

I'm not generally interested in the temperature when it is 'normal'. However when it is unusually hot or cold I might check.

One the one hand, yes, (freezing and boiling) but on the other hand, 1 degree C is not always fine enough to describe a temperature. I know, one could use fractions.

Basically, the jump from 37C to 38C is noticeable, whereas something similar like a jump from 98F to 99F, feels more graduated.

Fahrenheit originally had the freezing point of water at 30 degrees, and body temperature at 90 degrees (can't get much more humanistic than that :-)).

Then he fudged the scale to 32 and 96, so there would be 64 intervals between the two. Probably no one here needs to have it explained why 64 equal intervals was a convenient number for the task of marking the thermometer (compass and straight edge would be enough).

Unfortunately it turned out that his number for the average body temperature was a little bit off. So it goes...

I can see where the writer of that article is coming from, having been born in 1950, Canada would've started its "metrification" in his/her 20s. Arguably a very late time to switch your mode of thought from imperial to metric.

However, the key point Orwell makes: "But I have never heard a Frenchman say, ‘He is a hundred and forty-two centimetres high’" is, quite simply, false. To my Dutch ears, hearing about a 1.42m high man does bring up a vivid image of a very short person who'd have problems grabbing anything from a kitchen counter. Thus, it seems more like a legacy problem, rather than the imperial system being intrinsically more relatable than the metric system.

A better test would be to see how long it would take someone who is unfamiliar with either systems, to pick up either. Does it take kids longer to learn metric than imperial? I doubt that..

I'm French but I can make the conversions of feet, pounds etc in my head quite easily (divide by 3 and 2 respectively to get a good enough approximation). But I'm at loss with Fahrenheit though.

The point is not really about the difficulty of conversion, but about having to do it at all. Whether hearing about a 1.42m high man brings up a vivid image immediately, or only after conversion to imperial measures. Not unlike how becoming fluent in a given second language means there are no longer any intermediates. Rather than having to think consciously of a certain sentence in your own native language and then converting that consciously to a sentence in the given second language, you can just immediately think of the sentence in the given second language.

This happens gradually of course, there are a few length measurements in feet & inches that immediately give me a clear/rich image of the intended length: 6 feet, my own height in feet/inches, etc. However, the set of imperial length measures for which this happens is much, much smaller than that for metric length measures. For instance, I have absolutely no clue how long a yard is, let alone a hundred yards, and how that relates to a mile. Only after conversion, and doing the conversion enough times, will it become clear(er) to me.

Considering I respect Orwell's insights about lot of things this passage is especially dim:

"There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimetre, which is less than half an inch"

Between the metre (100 centimetres) and the centimetre there is the "ten centimetres" - which we use extensively.

Human hand is pretty good even in metric system. My thumb is 2 cm wide, and if I extend my hand the distance between the tops of my thumb and pinky is roughly 20 cm.

The 10cm unit actually even has a name - a decimetre :)

Yes, but that's not what we use in vernacular (in finnish, that is) :)

The imperial system is better positioned for those who are not exposed to maths. These systems developed before literacy and don't require literacy for its fundamentals.

Of course it's a moot point these days, but this is why it's a more humanist system of weights and measures.

The imperial system gives you more humanist whole units. Inches, yards, furlongs, miles, leagues, not to mention the less usual (today) digit, finger, palm, barleycorn, etc. Pounds, stone, hundredweight, woolsack, tonne, etc.

It's probably a matter of familiarity rather than of humanity. I fail to see how numerically illiterate would fair better using rulers with imperial units rather than metric ones.

True but it's familiarity with oneself, one's own human dimensions.

The biggest thief of land in that region (and in most of the rest of Romania) is the Romanian state itself. Land that was confiscated under communist rule is only given back or compensated for after many years of lawsuits against the state (in some cases decades), which drags her heels in an attempt to outlive the bringers of these suits.

The state has enormous resources compared to the people involved and so they tend to either lose or fail to collect if and when there finally is a judgment. During my time there I learned of two families in this situation and it is not as if I know a whole lot of Romanians.

Quite possibly the land-grab under the communists is yet another (direct or indirect) factor in driving land-scarcity for extremely poor, small-time farmers like this. Unfortunately they are so poor that if that's the case they are not going to be able to get the state to give back any land. That's mostly reserved to those that are wealthy enough to see that whole process through and then wealthy enough to force the state to pay up or give back their possession.

Quite a few people simply die waiting for a resolution of these cases.

Well but palinca that was mentioned in passing doesn't help either... with killing, anger and then regret later next day.

In the village I grew up, in a forested and mountainous area of western Europe, there were a pair of farmers who lived quite apart from the main part of the town. They were house-to-house neighbors, and were the only humans who lived in several km around. One of them had a vegetable garden as secondary means of sustenance, while the other had a herd of goats.

A single month would not go by without the people of the town talking about their last argument, sometimes involving gunshots, maybe a dead goat and, in the right time of the year, viciously defended mushrooms. I regret not knowing what finally happened to them, but the point is that little towns will be little towns, everywhere. When the only human contact you have is the neighbor you don't get along with, and you are not precisely in the top percentile of cultural and social graces, the results are consistent in every small town I have ever seen.

>He had been sitting on the river bank across from his house, just at the spot where a favourite cousin of his had died years before, accidentally electrocuted when illegally electrofishing in the river.

That sounds like something out of Borat.

Did you know that the Kazakhstan scenes in Borat were actually shot in Romania? The villagers are speaking Romanian, the car drawn by oxen is the Communist-era Romanian car, etc.

All the ghetto stuff the first world scoffs at is pretty commonplace.

here's a summary of a conversation about fishing my friend had with a group of school children when he went to India

friend: so how do you guys catch fish?

kid: (indicating order of preference) explosives, electricity, bleaching powder and nets

friend: beaching powder?!?!

kid: yup

At face value it sounds like bleaching powder would contaminate the meat but my friend and I figure that the bleaching powder chemically burns their gills causing them to suffocate.

He said he saw some fish markets disturbingly far from water considering the lack of refrigeration. The electrical grid was beyond horrible and there was tons of smog in the city.

He saw two guys welding hand rails in a stairwell by jumper cabling the welder to the railing at the bottom and attaching the leads to the railing at the top. To change between which rail they were working on they'd yell down and have someone flip the cables. Technically safe but not OSHA approved.

Now that I think about it, I really gotta try fishing with my stick welder...

I know but it's still (morbidly) hilarious.

Also are you sure bleaching powder is used for burning gills ? When I was a kid my grandfather took me fishing for eels after tides were high enough that they could get from sea to small ponds on the shore. We would drop this plant that secreted white liquid and supposedly blind them then they would swim a shore and you could just pick them up in the morning - I'm thinking maybe bleaching powder is for the same purpose ?

IIRC it was illegal because it killed tadpoles and tiny fish that would eat mosquitoes eggs (the entire village used to do it regularly before).

> That sounds like something out of Borat.

It is.

My uncle in Eastern Europe used to do it. He was saying he's going "fishing". Wondering why he needed the extra car battery... Came back in the morning with a mountain of fish. Dumped it in the middle of his yard, then called his whole neighbourhood to get free fish.

Sometimes visiting him involves pulling out an illegal to own Soviet sniper rifle and shooting rounds in the air, in the middle of the village.

But nobody does anything. Why? Well, because he is friends with the head of local police...

That kind of describes how things are done there.

I really don't like the Hollywood-style of describing the work on the fields: "But then, in another light, you see the tools of violence being carried into the fields: the steel crowbar, the ranga, for making holes in the earth, the axe with its bright and burnished edge, the cleft oak posts, the hoes, the hedge slashers – all the instruments with which management can be imposed. Cutting, controlling, slicing, hacking, killing: these are aspects of everyday existence". This is hardly a "Texas chainsaw massacre" pre/sequel.

Most of the people lack proper education. Everything "higher" as 4 school years is a "gift". The majority were children when WW2 broke out and saw their parents being striped of possession, such as lands. After the war came the communists, which did the same thing, again. These are people which have a deeply rooted passion for their ancestral land. The have, unfortunately, never learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they haven't seen that in practice. They've mostly seen abuse and react the same way...

> never learned to solve their problems in a civilized manner, because they haven't seen that in practice

Oh they have. They've observed that the people with the most power (legal or otherwise), force, or money get what they want.

They've observed that the only way to not lose their land is to stand on it with weapons and physically confront those who would take it away from them.

It really depends on how far the physical confrontation goes. You can't farm the land from prison. That's the "best case", when they go to prison. If they're wounded, for example, and can't move, they become a burden for the remaining family members.

I do agree that they are filled with hopelessness with regards to the legal process of solving problems. This falls into the same abuse category of loosing their lands, with the exception that it's not by force, but by law...

In the Denver suburbs about 35 years ago, two neighbors had a dispute about a small strip of property. These were not subsistence farmers. They were not unschooled; one had a Ph.D. in the sciences. It got to the point that the Ph.D. was mowing his lawn with a firearm strapped to his hip. The local police were called repeatedly. I don't think that I ever heard how it was resolved, but it must have been.

All over the world, neighbours kill each other over strips of land

Wouldn't be the first time a different land made a different people in modern times. The Pirahã in the Amazon killed a sick infant with alcohol. Why? I'd let Daniel Everett explain... http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386...

The real cause is geometry. They have narrow strips of land because they were divided this way when inherited.

In Poland, the government has been joining farmland since 1919: they give you the same area you had scattered into strips or even a bit larger one, but in one squarish piece. Win-win.

I wonder how this plays out when the consolidated land you get sits on less farmable earth than the fragmented one you had.

So in the West we have kids shooting each other over the colours of the clothes they wear but in Romania you have adults killing each other over land rights.

so hn is just reddit now?

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