The hunt for the fish pirates who exploit the sea | Hacker News Reader

The hunt for the fish pirates who exploit the sea

bbc.com

82 pointsforkLding18 comments

"The captain, a Russian citizen named as Aleksandr Matveev, was later sentenced to four months in prison and fined Rp200 million (£10,800) after being found guilty of illegal fishing. The other Russian and Ukranian offers were deported to their home countries."

That seems an extraordinarily light punishment for an operation that looted tens of millions of dollars worth of fish and caused untold harm along the way. I can't imagine would-be pirates being much deterred.

The situation won’t change until perpetrators are charged in the country they’re looting fish stocks from, jailed for a significant amount of time, and their vessels seized and broken down for scrap.

And the foreign companies that employ them bombarded from space with a mass driver.

Just passing the buck up and jailing the executive would likely be enough, but mass drivers are cool too.

Or just sunk.

Sign me up, I'll take that offer for millions and only 4 months of prison. He's probably just one of dozens who hasn't been caught yet.

The WWF has estimated that, barring dramatic change, the stock of fish for food will collapse by 2048: http://www.wwf.org.pe/en/how_you_can_help/faq/sea/

Hmmm... I wonder if "scientists predict that..." refers to my supervisor at university who did simulations in the late 80s that made this same prediction. I really wish environmental groups would add citations to their "scientists predict that..." claims.

Not disputing the claim (and I think my supervisor was brilliant), just griping that I can't do anything to follow up on what they are actually talking about.

For natural resources like fish I think there's a good case to be made for cartel style control. Consider the Maine lobster industry where Fishermen strictly adhere to and enforce conservation guidelines with the hopes of leaving a healthy lobster population for future generations to live off.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2018/0625/For-Maine-lo...

That's pretty much exactly what the Tragedy of the Commons holds; that some form of collective and controlled ownership in which both benefits and costs are collectively shared, rather than privatising benefits and socialising costs.

https://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of...

The New York Times did a fascinating series of long articles that are similar: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/24/world/the-out...

Even in the US, still a full third of fish is illegally caught. I'm really surprised in 2019 there is no crackdown on this.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140409-ille...

Support https://globalfishingwatch.org/ if you can, they visualize, track and share data about global fishing activity in near real-time for free to stop illegal fishing.

I remember that they organized several online hackathons around their data that I participated in before.

Why can't I be applying my skills to help with stuff like this, full time?

What's stopping you?

No funding and no supporting organization? I'm not able to work for free, and I don't think this is something that can be done by 100s of hackers in their spare time with loose coordination.

I'm still grappling with this question.

The web of corruption described in the article was the type of thing that Wikileaks was purportedly intended for. Pity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com