[extropy-chat] Extinctions

Rik van Riel riel at surriel.com
Sun Jun 18 20:31:24 UTC 2006


On Sat, 17 Jun 2006, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 05:12:12PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> > Smuggling operations only need to outgun (or outsmart)
> > the government in *one* place.
> 
> Conversely if they get detected and heavy forces get brought in they're
> dead.  I'd think border patrol would want easy detection and targetting,
> with mobile force called in, vs. a "solid" wall.

OK, so a band of smugglers is detected and the border
patrol radios for help, because the local forces are
not strong enough.

An hour later, there's a helicopter overhead.

... now, where did the bad guys go?

> > It's especially difficult when you factor in that most
> > of the area (1.5 to 2 times the size of Alaska) is
> > covered by trees and has no roads...
> 
> If we're talking about preventing illegal logging and farming then
> that's a plus; deforestation follows roads.  (And rivers, I guess, but
> then you patrol the rivers.)  Trees block rich corporations just as well
> as governments.  And activity can be detectable by satellite.

Deforestation is indeed easier to deal with, though
even here the lack of realtime enforcement is an
issue.

Satellite and military aircraft are the main ways
the Amazon area gets patrolled.

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan



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