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Somali Pirates Open Up a "Stock Exchange"
reginaldo writes to clue us that pirates in Somalia have opened up a cooperative in Haradheere, where investors can pay money or guns to help their favorite pirate crew for a share of the piracy profits. "'Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 "maritime companies" and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking,' Mohammed [a wealthy former pirate who took a Reuters reporter to the facility] said. ... Piracy investor Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, was lined up with others waiting for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel. 'I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation,' she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. 'I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the "company."'"
Just a brief read of the article about the Dutch East India Company makes me wonder just how different the two really are.
Legitimacy as a company seems to be determined by how well you succeed and how long you've been around, more than your morals or ethics.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I think you miss the point. They're not rogues; it's a lucrative business that is the most profitable job out there.
They've been doing this for a while, and by now there has to be an infrastructure supporting this. The pirates have to have ports, ships, backers.
It's just come out into the open.
Understand Africa; a couple of US$ will buy a Kalashnikov. A $75,000 payday is a fortune that is more than most Somalis will see in a lifetime.
You can bet this will succeed, until something better (more profitable) comes along.
Remember that archelogists pay the going exchange in gold to their workers if they find any artifacts. Same thing; shipping companies will pay this as long as it's cheaper than the alternatives. As long as the Somalis charge 95% of the other routes, it will prosper.
Consider it an investment with the intent to sell short.
This has always puzzled me about lie-bertarians. To a dispassionate eye, the line appears to be so random and convenient only for the small-medium capitalists who incidentally provide the basis for this ideology to begin with. Why is it government function to protect only property, and human rights (which conveniently exclude the rights to basic food, shelter, job, and health care) ? And why the property is so sacred, of all the things a human being needs, such as "true" freedom (not just freedom to die from hunger), good health, or a family?
do ports allow you to dock if your ship is armed? (im asking because i heard that generally they wont).
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
That’s an interesting thought. So the woman gets paid and then the next day is robbed and killed by a roving gang or a warlord’s hunt and terminate party. The other investors complain to the Somalian Stock Exchange that they don’t feel safe investing because their money can’t be guaranteed. Business suffers as a result until the Stock Exchange or some other business springs up and offers protection for that money. For only a few percentage points off the top they can keep you safe. And hey, now that you have all that money and you are safe you might want to spend it and get the good things in life. Right? So you start to make purchases and start to acquire things. New businesses have to come into being to supply you with the food and housing and coca cola that you lust for. Given a long enough time a middle class emerges that begins to demand not only protection but running water, electricity, communications, etc. It wouldn’t be the first time that a group of criminals have created a society.
The shipping companies(not to mention the boys at Lloyd's) would kick up a hell of a fuss if that plan were adopted.
The shippers aren't there to achieve foreign policy objectives, satisfy Law and Order enthusiasts, or even coddle bleeding hearts. They are there to make money by shipping stuff. The reason that they aren't bothering to do all that much about piracy is that, at least at present, it is cheaper to just suck it up, pay the occasional ransom, and carry on with business than it would be to do anything terribly aggressive.
A plan that involves blowing up entire ships(not cheap to replace) and their cargoes(also not cheap, and you'd better believe that whoever paid the shipper to have that stuff shipped would be pissed if it got lost) would be, from the shippers' perspective, vastly more expensive than just ignoring the problem.
Some insurance companies will not insure ships that have armed personnel aboard. They believe that it gives an incentive to fight, which may increase the damage to the vessel and result in additional (insured) lives being lost, increasing the payouts required if the ship escapes the pirates.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
A Saudi super-tanker was released a little while back for about $2 million. It carried 2 million barrels of oil. The market value at the time was around $100 million. Replacing the cargo and the vessel would have cost a quarter-billion dollars.
Which is more cost effective?
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I'm not sure that's the main thing stopping them. The cost of arming merchant ships would be far higher than just losing/ransoming a few of them--- piracy rates are extremely low as a percentage of total shipping, so small as to be more or less in the noise on companies' balance sheets. Arming ships has other risks, also; for example, one reason ships are typically kept unarmed is that there's a risk that armed crew would hijack their own ship for random/profit.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I am an importer in Ireland and my shipping invoices now have a "Gulf of Aden Surcharge" on them, so I pass this on to my customers and so on so the good news is that we ALL pay of the pirates.
Oh, considering that unlike anywhere else along trade routes there is no fine for cleaning the cargo bays and tanks from all the (often poisonous) stuff, yes, they are. So you've been transporting 5000 tons of mazut. Now you've got a contract for half a million ton of high-quality gasoline. Except mazut is sticky and there's about 80 tons of mazut residue on walls of your tanks, that will pollute the fuel. You have a choice to stop for a few days at a port, pay several thousands dollars for cleaning and disposal, or just get your crew to flush the junk to the sea with hi-pressure hoses, while traveling full ahead to where the fuel awaits. No delay, no extra cost (included in salary), no waste disposal fees - and several square miles of sea life getting killed is none of your business.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
While you were aware of the current wars in Africa, most of the rest of the students in your class probably weren't and this lady's talk was eyeopening for them. How many African students at the time of WWII knew what was happening in the concentration camps? Most African wars don't make it to Western media; that's no reason to assume the lady didn't care about people in Africa or wouldn't have mentioned the wars if she knew about them. Why are you attacking someone (who had actually lived through) an ethnic slaughter and was trying to raise awareness of it?
I asked her why she hadn't even mentioned the millions of people currently dieing in Africa in similar or worse conditions than her own people.
Millions of Jews died in the Holocaust. Millions of Africans died and are dying in wars and genocides. How can you say one atrocity is worse than the other, as though it negated the "lesser" atrocity? This lady, after surviving an ethnic slaughter, was going around speaking about her experiences (which can't have been easy) to try to raise awareness and warn people living in a comfortable Western society about the dangers of racism. That took a lot of courage and compassion for others.
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7