Fourteen days across the Atlantic, perched on a ship’s rudder
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
These men survived fourteen days clinging to the rudder of a ship as it crossed an entire ocean. I can't imagine how difficult, unpleasant and horrifying an experience that would be. And I doubt that, if I'd been in that situation, I'd have made it through alive. What an unbelievable story.
This really was an incredible journey. I hope each of the men goes on to prosper and have families-- what a story to tell!
In any case, looks like this is the maritime version of the airplane wheel-well stowaway:
But those are usually submerged full time.
Our generation deserves to be described badly by future generations, for the issues we systematically ignore.
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...
Keep in mind that if the richest countries opened their borders for everyone in the world, at least hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people from the world's poor countries would immediately immigrate there, causing the rich countries to collapse, which would be no good for anyone.
In what way?
You can't just increase the population of a country and assume everything will continue to work: many parts of the economy have momentum and need time to adapt, and a sudden change may break down existing balances.
I don't think there's any formal understanding of such mechanics (or concerns)? Seems like personal conjecture.
We're basically past post-scarcity by every conceivable measure, current allocation structures can quickly be adjusted -- we even saw this happen with COVID. We saw it in the U.S. with 9/11.
A woman can birth a normal baby in 9 months, but no matter how many women you assign to this you won't be able to reduct that time to 1 day. Same with education (teaching capacity is limited), building buildings (incl. factories), etc. A given number of medical specialists can only treat so many patients and train so many new specialists. A population's growth whilst keeping the current quality of life is thus limited by several factors, including construction (for new housing, facilities for new jobs), education, and healthcare.
> current allocation structures can quickly be adjusted -- we even saw this happen with COVID
And the impact of these sudden adjustments to the allocation schedules are still felt across the world.
Chip scarcity due to bulk order changes/cancellations took a long time to ebb (assuming it has subsided by now, I haven't checked recently), health services are still not back to the levels they were before COVID, shipping prices across the atlantic doubled, etc. And that is with only a temporary change in local supply/demand. I'd expect permanent changes in supply/demand to have much more severe and long-lasting effect.
Note that post-scarcity is only applicable assuming the current population of the country. Adding 700 million population across EU/CA/USA (the equivalent of ~50% of the population of Africa) will eclipse the local food production capacities, re-introducing food scarcity.
Note that production existing somewhere on earth doesn't mean everyone on earth has access to that, not in the least due logistics. As an example: Ukrainian grain is having trouble with getting to Africa in the high volumes from before Feb. '22.
Migration is a big political issue not just because of bigotry, but because population is growing and infrastructure capacity isn't close to keeping up.
Also because it can be seen as being used by government as a tool to drive wages down.
It's not a real problem so much as an artificial one.
The increasingly ridiculous cost of housing is at the core of the UKs problems, but nobody in power even wants to solve that, as so many wealthy people, politicians included, are making so much money out of property.
And solving the transport problem is deeply 'uncool' for environmental reasons. Roads are obviously seen as bad, but even attempts to build railways will be heavily protested. Meanwhile they won't even decriminalise electric scooters.
Same applies to the US if we're being fair. However both places were still quite sparsely populated in the late 1800s and the demand for low-skilled labour was significantly higher than now (the situation now is very different).
Why do you believe this would happen, given that internal migration between rich and poor parts of counties without internal travel restrictions is nowhere near that significant?
It's not like NYC collapsed from all the people leaving Detroit.
Why do you think so few other British people did what I did, despite this economic incentive?
Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache.
Kuma a cewar abokin aikina na Najeriya, yaren de-facto a Najeriya Ingilishi ne, ba Hausa/Igbo/Yoruba ba.
>Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache.
So what? Where I live you can get by just fine if you speak turkish or arabic.
Why not? Is there a "benefits trap" here in Germany, like in the UK, where working makes you worse off?
> So what? Where I live you can get by just fine if you speak turkish or arabic.
Have you tried living without the local language?
As an outsider, first few times at the supermarket checkout was mortifying, just because there's three different common ways people ask if you want a receipt.
The government bureaucracy? Getting my Anmeldebestätigung sorted was intimidating (in the UK, the equivalent is posted through your letterbox and you fill it out and post it).
Mandatory health etc. insurance? I misunderstood, picked an irrelevant kind of insurance instead of what I needed, only found out when I got a job and HR told me and sorted it for me.
No.
Almost every single Nigerian has a direct economic interest to get a job in Germany.
Hard figures demonstrate that immigrants frequently work harder and deliver more than many of those in the country they immigrate to.
over 50% of syrians do not work at all.
>Having a job in Germany earns you vastly more monsy than being a welfare recipient in Germany.
Not really. You just need to have a couple of kids.
Would those by any chance be either (1) asylum seekers who are banned by law from working, or (2) children or spouses?
> You just need to have a couple of kids.
Child benefits come with the rather high expense of looking after kids.
Also, while Germany has excellent child benefits, they not that high.
Also also, the UK says much the same thing even with much worse benefits.
>or spouses?
Women can work too, you know?
>asylum seekers who are banned by law from working
No such law exists in Germany. You are explicitly allowed to work even while waiting for the decision for being granted asylum is being made.
> You are explicitly allowed to work even while waiting for the decision for being granted asylum is being made
Only three months after applying for asylum, with the permission of the Federal Employment Agency, and not if they live in a reception facility.
Germany Is Short of Workers, but Its Migrants Are Struggling to Find Jobs https://archive.md/ucnQD
Germany need to up its game then.
Which game? The jobs Germany needs are in highly skilled industries. Those were you need years of training to do well.
Because quality of life in Detroit is miles ahead quality of life in Nigeria, Gabon, rural Russia and countless other poor places with no good opportunities.
I posit that we don't because humans are not primarily focusing on economic opportunities, but rather on social ones. That's certainly why my relatives have so many Philippine in-laws back in the UK: they all wanted to be with each other when they moved.
Know what's really hard to do when you move? Social opportunities. Especially when you have to… использовать другой язык.
Likewise from Gabon: Le français est romantique et tout, mais pas beaucoup d'opportunités aux États-Unis si vous êtes du Gabon et c'est tout ce avec quoi vous avez grandi grâce au colonialisme. Canada might have Francophone job opportunities, but I can't imagine Quebec being much fun to move to if you're used to the sub-Saharan climate.
However 214 million people live in Nigeria alone. If all of them had the right to move to Europe it would not at all be unreasonable that say 30-50 million would do that (just look at what happened in the Eastern European countries which joined the EU in 2004 and the disparity between those countries and WE wasn't even close to being as big as between Nigeria and the richer EU countries today).
That's just one country. I would say that 100-200 million Africans moving into the EU over say 10 years if they could would be a pretty conservative estimate. Only around 450 million people live in the European Union and relatively few immigrants would probably move to Eastern Poland or Bulgaria so the immigrants would be concentrated in a few areas where they would quickly outnumber the local population.
> because humans are not primarily focusing on economic opportunities
I don't think this is true at all in general, especially longterm.
> but I can't imagine Quebec being much fun to move to if you're used to the sub-Saharan climate.
Have you heard about a country called Sweden? It's cold, dark and damp..
and has a national population of two Berlins or half a Lagos, and a total (from everywhere including the EU) net immigration level of [edit: was "about half a million, or 5%." but I now have conflicting citations…]
And even in Quebec, 3% or so of the all the people living there were born in Africa, the Middle East or the Caribbean. So they don't seem to mind the weather that much...
> [edit: was "about half a million, or 5%." but I now have conflicting citations…]
> Sweden, 2,752,572 (26%) inhabitants of Sweden were of a foreign background in 2021, defined as being born abroad or born in Sweden with both foreign-born parents.[290] Of these inhabitants, 2,090,503 persons were born abroad and 662,069 persons were born in Sweden to parents born abroad. In addition, 805,340 persons had one parent born abroad with the other parent born in Sweden.[290]
So ~18.8% of people living in Sweden haven't been born in Sweden.
About 2.2% of people in Sweden were born in Africa. Which is quite high for a a non colonial country. And I'm pretty sure you could rustle up another 10 million or so people throughout Africa who wouldn't at all mind moving to Sweden..
If there were any risk of collapse at all from immigration, we have never even gotten anywhere near approaching it. A gradual loosening of border barriers down to nothing would get rid of any "sudden shock" effect.
If anything, america has exclusively benefited from immigration historically, providing a constant supply of talent (immigrants to a richer country tend to be the best, and not just because of border constraints), labor and population.
Mass immigration is a weapon of war throughout all history and on all continents. When immigrant numbers are large enough, war ensues as they will try to drive out the natives.
That's tricky because North America for instance was already half empty by the point Europeans started settling because to old world diseases killing up to 80-90% of the population in many areas.
Without that gaining a foothold would've been much more difficult. It's not obvious the Spanish would've been able to subjugate all of the native civilizations they encountered that 'easily' either. Chances are Mexico etc. would've looked much closer to India or Indonesia for instance.
Since I'm not a true hacker, I won't pretend that the people living in America today have any blame for that. But it doesn't mean that we have to let that be repeated. Mass migration with the goal to colonize and replace natives is an act of war, and it is being conducted in many places around the world right now, fueled by an ideology of hatred.
Because it's significantly easier for high-skilled/educated/well-off people to immigrate to most countries.
It is so profitable it has managed to accumulate 200 billion in cash, that it doesnt know what do with. It could reduce prices, but why do that when you can increase the size of your cash mountain.
Thats value system dominates the thinking of the luxury class across the entire developed world.
How do you change that value system? And how do you measure that its changing. Because it has to change or nothing is sustainable.
This isn't new. You seem to forget about the infamous "boat people", or forget how some Jewish refugees were denied asylum in US or Canada at the dawn of World War II.
> Our generation deserves to be described badly by future generations, for the issues we systematically ignore.
No, the mafia who put these people on these "rafts" and exploit their dreams, rob them, assault the women and sell some of them into slavery are the ones to blame. The US, UK, French leaders who made a mess in Libya without thinking about the consequences of their action are also to blame. Libya has literally turned into a giant open air black slave market.
https://time.com/longform/african-slave-trade/
"our generation" isn't to blame, I didn't vote for western armies to topple Gadhafi, no matter how bad he was, and then try to pull the exact same stunt in Syria, which became infested by terrorists who then perpetrated terrorist attacks on European soil that made hundreds of victims, because western leaders decided to finance "freedom fighters" that turned out to be allied with extremists.
Gadhafi was a bloody dictator, yet Libya was one of the richest nation in Africa and provided 10s of millions of jobs to sub Saharan Africans, which helped feed even more people. The western leaders that decided that chaos would be better than order and stability are the one that needs to be "described badly" now and not in the future, not me, not the common folk that didn't agree with all this.
In other words: "don't fuck with me, I have powerful friends."
Only for western troops and their allies to overstep the very mandate the UN gave them. It's well documented. Denying that fact is a big lie, your own link says so. So much for that "no-fly zone"...
> On 24 August, it was acknowledged for the first time that special forces troops from Britain,[15] Italy, France, Jordan, Qatar,[16] and the UAE[16] had intervened on the ground in Libyan territory, stepping up operations in Tripoli and other cities.[17] This has been questioned as a possible violation of Resolution 1973[18] although the use of special forces is not prohibited by the resolution.
You will stay in your assigned district of your '15 minute city', and if you complain, your social credit score will take a hit.
We already have plenty of 15 minute cities in the world, and living in them is great.
Living within a 15min walk of a decent job is always likely to remain a luxury. The best chance we had to seriously reduce commuting was Covid and WFH, but that didn't last long for many people/companies.
Yet all recent trends have been going in the exactly opposite direction. Air travel has never been more accessible throughout much of the developed world.
e.g. "Boomers ruined our economy and our environment".
When is the last time you actually had power to make material change in the world? Even if you did, most people are just trying to survive - don't blame a generation, that's misdirection.
Instead, hold specific people in power accountable. There are individuals whose names we know that are running most of this the world and know very well what they are doing. Don't relieve them of their agency.
Not saying it's a ton of the generational blame, but if you have wealth, you have power and you can sway things. And if you would advocate for the right stuff, then I don't consider you part of the generational problem. It's just a pretty accurate numbers game that most of the boomers I see aren't helping out with a lot of the decisions that were made 30 years ago that proved to be bad...
Edit: Even the boomers I know who are trying their best acknowledge that their generation made some mistakes (my generation will make mistakes too). Getting defensive about it misses the point.
I don't think so, especially not with ever accelerating climate-change forcing people to move to richer more, developed areas.
Even in a one-world-government scenario, there are countries with restrictions on internal migration.
The usual arguments about migration are "crime, language, culture, jobs".
Crime: AI can already give us trivial cost total surveillance that would make the literal Stasi feel you'd gone too far
Language: AI translation is pretty good, just not real time and speech recognition is still kinda meh
Culture: internet is a giant melting-pot even without migration, and also there's cultural assortive behaviour even within borders over things like "democrat or republican"* or "Red Sox vs… Yankees"** or "Catholic vs. Baptist"
Jobs: offshoring, remote work, and automation are all bigger issues… or should be, at least from an economic POV when the dichotomy (to use an American perspective for illustration but there's also an equivalent one in Mexico) is "Mexicans move to San Diego and take American jobs" vs. "The factory moves from San Diego to Tijuana and Americans are no longer allowed to work there", and the fact this counterpoint never comes up is really just evidence that it's not actually about the economics.
* both big and small R/D, in different contexts; I was born in a kingdom not a republic.
** I had to google that, I'm not into sports.
EDIT: yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friday_(Robinson_Crusoe)
Anyway I was just curious.
I agree it's stupid. But how do you look at someone who did this and send them back to where they came from, the place they were so desperate to leave?
https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t... (disable JS to bypass paywall)
I understand why one wouldn't want to accept them despite their predicament; these stowaways are generally unskilled and don't speak the language of their host country. There's social integration and investment to consider and inviting even one sets a precedence for others to follow.
So you're fine if by doing this you encourage another N people to try and do the same and a non insignificant proportion are guaranteed to die while trying?
To you below
https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/15priu2/germany_...
:)
As it should be.
I don't know aboit Brazil. But in Europe that usually does not happen.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/697824/rejected-asylum-a...
> this is an incredibly stupid policy.
Encouraging people to risk their lives to enter a country illegally (by giving them an impression that they'll be allowed to stay) instead of having a transparent and clearly defined process which would allow people to immigrate legally is an incredibly stupid (and cruel) policy.
Why should we?
The latter is even more perplexing. People are risking their lives to leave a safe country, France, to get into the UK.
Until recently, most of those making the asylum boat journey from France to the UK, were actually from Albania. They were being sent over to work in gangs involved in drug and human trafficking. It's all coordinated.
Why would you think outsourcing your immigration policy to people's smugglers could ever be a good idea? Forcing people to risk their lives by giving them the impression that they will be allowed to stay if they give up all of their (and possibly their extended family's saving to people smugglers who are just likely to literally sell them so slavery) just seems extremely cruel..
Rich Western countries poaching skilled workers from poor countries make those countries even poorer.
There is nothing straightforward about any of this stuff.
There are significantly easier way for them to do that already than hitchhiking on a cargo ship's rudder.
So survival of the fittest? You only get a chance if you're brave enough to risk your life by crossing an ocean on top of a rudder or a non sea-worth dinghy/overcrowded boat?
Seems like a very cruel and inhumane policy...
Much more prominent on the Mediterranean though. Governments set up schemes where everyone who manages to enter the country gets free money/housing/food, but, after having invited billions of people in that way, set up no actual routes to enter their countries. Leaving the creation of the routes to human trafficers and NGOs for extremely dangerous trips across the Mediterranean.
Over 50% of Syrians who have come to Germany are welfare recipients, the migrant crisis came in 2016.
I also do not get why anyone in Germany would work minimum wage, seems really dumb. You can just get the state to pay for everything.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-t... (disable JS to bypass paywall)
For every 1000 of people who get to stay a significant proportion drown in the Mediterranean, end up being slaves in North Africa, are outright murder or die due to other reason while try to take this extremely dangerous trip.
Supporting a system like this just because you can ignore the people who didn't make seems quite perverse?