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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

> the average person here is probably a lot closer to taking a holiday trip in a submersible than to taking a refugee boat across the Mediterranean

There is no way in hell I would pay $250k to board a janky-ass sub going deep into the ocean.

For $250k, I could buy a nice house for me, my girlfriend and our future family.

And even that is not possible yet. Because I don’t have that kind of money.

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Reminder too that literally everyone is one country-ending catastrophic event away from being on a refugee boat

The difference is when Libya collapses into civil war (or 3 governments or whatever) Libyan refugees migrate to other countries that are stable.

When China, Western Europe, or the US collapses into civil war refugees from those countries do indeed migrate. The problem is other countries start collapsing as well because they were dependent on some form of trade with those regions. As a result its unlikely there will ever be a large scale exodus of people from the US. We'll all just be survivors in the wasteland at that point.

This is something of a false equivalence - yes, "everyone" is at risk from a country ending event, but not all countries are equally at risk.

You must live on the coast. There's plenty of us in the midwestern US that could never make it to a coast before the boats were all gone.

Not that it involved a catastrophe but most of those people had been traveling dangerously for months to make it to Libya (or Egypt?)

Go down the Mississippi :-)

Also going on a boat to leave the US would be very stupid.

There's a reason migrants take the Mediterranean route, instead of the Atlantic route.

> Also going on a boat to leave the US would be very stupid.

Why? As a Minnesotan, the first thing I'm doing is hopping on my boat and heading north to Canada.

I think they meant trying to cross the ocean as opposed to one of the great lakes. crossing either ocean in a shoddy boat is much more dangerous than going across the Mediterranean.

Nicely played I didn't think of those!

What kind of single events could destroy most countries without taking out half the world or all of the world?

Not all countries at the same time. But one country at random which would affect that random person. The rest of the world would watch and think that it never could have happened to them, just as that random person may have thought not long before.

Just listening to ‘Fukushima’ on BBC World Service podcasts and ‘major nuclear incident’ is definitely one that springs to mind.

Wat?

Fukushima a) happened and b) Japan and the world are still there

A coup that splits the nation into warring factions.

Really, anything where the government response makes things worse and spirals out of control.

A lot of the Central American refugees are fleeing very sharp increases in gang violence.

Only those near a coast, actually

Many people are walking for months to reach the coast to escape on these refugee boats.

So that's at least two things between them and the boat, then

It depends how you frame it. I'd consider the walk to the boat part of the journey.

> For $250k, I could buy a nice house for me, my girlfriend and our future family.

That's not even enough of down payment for a tear down where I live!

Relocate :D In the city I was born I don’t think there is room for a couple with kids anywhere near $250k. Probably I’d need $400k or more there for any kind of suitable housing. In the city where I rent currently, maybe just barely. But my hope is to scrape together enough savings and then buy a house or flat for us somewhere in the world where $250k or thereabouts would be sufficient.

maybe so but a lot of contributors here are pretty loaded and could def drop $250k on something on a whim

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