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Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

As the countries are very friendly and work together in almost anything, this is not a big problem in practice. Presumably some very small scale hustling is tolerated as no government official really cares. When there is an actual problem, the two governments arrange another land swap. There is one every few years. Nobody cares, it gives both our monarchs something to sign on an official visit and gets another sheer for international cooperation from the press.

If you want to have some fun, you can smoke pot while standing on the border and holding it in your left, Dutch hand. If you're really daring you swap it over to your right, Belgian hand, and congrats, you're an international drug smuggler. If a cop sees it and you're unlucky, I suppose he'll ask a few puffs from you - Yeah I saw that happen in real life, and that was in Brussels a.k.a Belgium and as far from the boundary as you can get.

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> If you want to have some fun, you can smoke pot while standing on the border and holding it in your left, Dutch hand.

Hence the song “Pass the Dutchie on the left-hand side” :D

This, once in a while a land swap if needed. Else no one cares. The Dutch are fun neighbours.

Land swaps can be a royal PITA; the highest point in Finland is most of the way up a mountainside; the peak is just across (as in, within a stone throw) the border, in Norway.

To mark the centennial of Finnish independence, there was a campaign in Norway to give the Finns a few hundred square metres of Norway, so that they could get a highest point which was indeed a local maximum.

Too bad the Norwegian constitution says you cannot give away bits of the country; a land swap was suggested to ensure both countries remained the same size afterwards, but apparently this, too, would violate the constitution...

I wonder if they could both agree to wage a fake war for an hour, then sign a peace treaty detailing the new border.

A couple of Norwegian conscripts technically invaded Finland earlier this year; while patrolling the border, they accidentally strayed onto the other side.

(Not as hard as it may sound; the border isn’t marked as such, only with the occasional pole here and there.)

invading requires intent to occupy

I guess it depends on whose definition you use; Norwegian papers at the time quoted experts (presumably a professor of international law, though I can’t remember) who claimed that legally speaking, having troops in uniform venturing into another country counted as an invasion.

Considering all the notes being passed back and forth afterwards, the conscripts must be kicking themselves for not keeping quiet about it; they weren’t observed by Finnish border guards; rather, they notified their officers when returning to base that they’d crossed the border; the army notified the DoD, which notified the Foreign Department, which notified the Finns, who said ‘Huh?’

That depends on each countries' laws.

No, it doesn't.

The Dutch actually have a continuing conflict with Germany about a maritime area: the Dollard/Dollart. Not that it's an actual problem: all practical affairs have been arranged in harmony, but still both countries' claims overlap, and in fact the last few metres of the pier of Delfzijl are in Germany according to their interpretation...

>If you want to have some fun, you can smoke pot while standing on the border and holding it in your left, Dutch hand. If you're really daring you swap it over to your right, Belgian hand, and congrats, you're an international drug smuggler.

-The problem with trying to outwit the police is that they can be creative, too. If I were a sufficiently annoyed Belgian police officer, I’d just grab you on suspicion of being under the influence of a controlled substance, take a blood sample to prove it and throw the book at you. (Assuming that not just smoking, but also being intoxicated on herbs is illegal in Belgium...)

Having fun with the police is never a good idea, but they'll have to grab you for something other than cannabis, as Belgium has a 'gedoogbeleid' (policy of tolerance) concerning soft drugs.

If :

* You are adult i.e. 18 or more

* You own at most 3 grams or 1 plant

* You don't deal

* You don't cause minors to use drugs

* You aren't high in a car

then your usage of cannabis has the lowest priority, which basically means you're not getting prosecuted. In practice, they don't do anything against non-dealing non-annoying usage even if you are severely above these limitations.

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