Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years • Hacker News Board

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#271

Post by csomar » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

hi41 wrote: post #226

mrb wrote: post #106

His ship has been sitting still for so long that you can see it on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86%D... Edit: a few more story details here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-giv... When he rows to shore to get supplies he can only stay for two hours at most as the area is a restricted military zone. Other crew members were repatriated in September 2019,…

The article says he swam ashore to buy supplies. Why can’t he simply walk away and not return to the ship. The article does not clarify that point. Anyone knows?

He'll probably get arrested. It's very hard, also, to smuggle himself. The options are Libya and Israel/Gaza.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#272

Post by gwright » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

cmeacham98 wrote: post #255

gwright wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like pretty important information if correct. A huge portion of the HN discussion is moot if the Mr. Aisha chose to remain. Seems like he could have continued his fight for the outstanding wages elsewhere.

I totally disagree. Based on sibling comments it seems like some people think this would have legally screwed up his claim to the lost wages, and even if not, giving up your only leverage in this situation is probably not the optimal strategy. I can see a parallel world where he decided to get off the boat and we're reading an article about how he lost all that time and won't be able to recover wages, and some HN com…

My point was that "I have no legal way to leave" is a different scenario than "I won't leave until I get paid".

Both situations have a tremendous unfairness about them but they aren't the same and I don't think it is unreasonable to think that those details are an important part of the story.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#273

Post by csomar » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #137

Ancapistani wrote: post #124

Is there something that could be done by people otherwise uninvolved - like myself, or my fellow HN readers - to help the other ~250 people who are currently stuck in similar situations? I don’t even know how to go about enumerating who those people are, their ships, or where they are anchored. With that information a well-organized and/or funded group could at least get someone out to these people to check on them,…

From reading the article, they just for some legal reason need a person on board the ship. So maybe people could volunteer to replace them on a rolling schedule.

> they just for some legal reason need a person on board the ship

So what if the guy in question doesn't show up?

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#274

Post by bluGill » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

mgolawala wrote: post #22

jandrese wrote: post #8

It is supremely unfair for the court to assign him full responsibility for the ship, but without any power over it. If the court were serious about the situation they should have handed the ship over to him entirely. He could then put the ship up on the market for whomever wanted to buy it or sell it to a scrapping company. If you think this would be unfair to the ships owners this is exactly the point. Force them to…

Yeah that is the part I do not understand. Isn't there a law at sea where if you find an abandoned ship, it is basically yours? Perhaps this law doesn't apply in Egyptian national waters? If he is the legal guardian of the ship, why wouldn't he be able to just sell it for profit and move on? Was it just that there would be no buyer for it, even to scrap it? Or could there have been fines/liens on that ship such that…

International salvage law is complex, but essentially no. The ship is stills owned.by someone even when at the bottom of the sea and if you take anything from the ship without permission that is theft.

Salvagers work on contract with the owners in most cases. When they don't there are generally big lawsuits because they are entitled for compensation for their work, but if they don't give anything brought up back the the owners they are in possession of stolen property, and the law around this is complex.

If the vessel is more than 1000 years old we probably can't trace an onwer anymore and you can get by with calling it abandoned in some cases. Though even here the country who's waters it is in might consider the wreck a treasure.

He is the guard, not the owner. As such he can't sell it. The owners are probably in complex bankruptcy court and the lien holders will eventually get to figure out what to do with it, but that will take years to resolve. Indeed the expense of resolving this might be more than the ship is worth so nobody actually wants to resolve it.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#275

Post by gwright » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #191

gwright wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like pretty important information if correct. A huge portion of the HN discussion is moot if the Mr. Aisha chose to remain. Seems like he could have continued his fight for the outstanding wages elsewhere.

If I understood that correctly, "chose to remain" because if he didn't, he would lose his claim for wages for the time he was stuck on the ship. That's a fair amount of money.

Sure if that is the case, it is not a good trade-off. But that is a much different situation than the one that was communicated by the reporting, which suggested he had no legal way to leave.

I'm still not sure I have an accurate picture of the situation.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#276

Post by irjustin » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:34 AM UTC

mrb wrote: post #106

His ship has been sitting still for so long that you can see it on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/%D8%B3%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86%D... Edit: a few more story details here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/19/ever-giv... When he rows to shore to get supplies he can only stay for two hours at most as the area is a restricted military zone. Other crew members were repatriated in September 2019,…

Man these details are important.

The BBC article makes it feel like he was alone for 4 years and somehow was able to stay alive with no food/water for 3 of them before the ship drifted closer to shore where he could now 'buy food and water'.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#277

Post by anigbrowl » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #179

jollybean wrote: post #130

Folks - this is what we are outsourcing and externalizing. When foreign entities are able to bid for a lot less, and pay a lot less, a lot of it has to do with the fact that they will not bother with 'end of life' for ships, or getting insurance, or worrying about the lives of people who are 'expendable'. Those very nice buildings in Dubai come from some nasty labour practices. If every piece of this puzzle from end-…

The fault here is ultimately with egypt. They were not letting him leave, they took his passport and not even letting him get 'deported' back to his home country. This is not from outsourcing, this is Kafkaesque bureaucracy created by Egypt itself.

You can find examples of such bad behavior in pretty much every state; it's by no means unique to Egypt.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#278

Post by bluGill » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

birktj wrote: post #195

I don't get it. I might be misunderstanding things, but my understanding is that here in Norway the owner of a vessel has the ultimate responsibility in cases like these. Why is the Egyptian law this way? It doesn't seem very practical to legally require this one guy to stay on board, what problem is that supposed to solve?

What can Egypt do to the owner? The owners are not in Egypt.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#279

Post by zoshi » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

labster wrote: post #267

andromeduck wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name me a country where logistics orgs never run out of money or resources.

The United Federation of Planets doesn’t even use money, and it’s post-scarcity so they don’t run out of resources.

Ships, planets, space, etc. are scarce and owned by various actors. The Federation is an interplanetary government made of sovereign member states, many of which do trade and use money. Even without the use of trade, there must be systems for determining who controls what.

Re: Stranded sailor allowed to leave abandoned ship after four years

#280

Post by Klinky » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 1:51 AM UTC

peteretep wrote: post #269

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Err here in the United States you have people pissing in bottles and bags because they can't take a break without missing targets. The West is not immune to predatory hiring and employment practices.

I have pissed in a bottle before out of expediency, but I've never spent several years stranded on a ship without power, company, etc, out of free will. Conflating the two seems weird.

Do you piss in a bottle on a daily basis as part of your job? Comparing peeing in a bottle [a few times in your life] for expediency compared to doing it on the daily, seems to be its own conflation.