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Comment by jpfr | Hacker News Reader

Everybody will try to get as much food over the border as possible. Everybody will work together. The EU, the UK, the US, everybody. But this could still go very very bad.

What do you think "chaos at the border" means? Every truck, train and ship has to get the papers checked where they could just drive through before. But there are not enough qualified officers to actually check all the papers.

So goods will come in at a trickle.

This is the UK governments own statement. Chaos at the border for six months:

> Britain’s government has revised its worst-case Brexit scenario estimates for chaos at the country’s borders, which it now expects to last for six months rather than six weeks, the political editor of The Sun newspaper said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-eu-borders/uk-now...

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These comments read like some of the best Y2K and peak oil fanfic.

> What do you think “chaos at the border” means?

Probably not the UK self-imposing a famine on its people in favour of establishing a permit Raj. It sounds a lot more like government officials trying to get attention through hyperbole and extra funding for their departments than anything else. There’s nothing stopping the UK from declaring no duties on all imports and liberalizing incoming trade from Europe and elsewhere even more than it is now if it’s in their interests to do so. A lot of trade policy is unilateral when it comes down to it.

I hate when people use Y2K as some sort of evidence of trumped up claims.

Y2K could have been really bad. The reason it wasn’t as bad was because people took the threat seriously and spent nearly the last 5-10 years in the 90s spending billions of dollars, and many millions of man hours preventing the worst case scenarios.

That doesn’t change my point. Regardless of how serious of an issue Y2K actually was, the level of alarmism from armchair observers was still ridiculous, as was the notion that the problems wouldn’t get addressed.

OP literally predicted corpses on the street because of paperwork issues.

> But there are not enough qualified officers to actually check all the papers.

Starve (and therefore internal anarchy) versus upholding a paperwork check?

The papers won't be checked.

This isn't how things play out. The papers will stop being checked after the riots have started. But will continue to be checked when there are just long lines. Bureaucracies react to things that are actually occurring, not things that will occur.

The government has already announced the paperwork checks will be suspended at the start.

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