Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

One would imagine that anyone desperate enough to do something with a 75% fatality rate and hide in the wheel well of a plane would also research which wheel wells have space for a person and exactly how to tie oneself on to prevent falls...

View on HN

I think the key to doing this is not knowing about the 75% fatality rate

Yes, probably if this person has access to Internet and has knowledge of the specialized vocabulary in aviation in a foreign language.

Yet I can't imagine myself being able to find the necessary information to hide safely inside a plane doing a long distance flight (and to survive -40° for several hours).

Yeah I guess someone capable of that would also be capable of earning a bit of money and buying a ticket.

For many people even millions of dollars wouldn't be sufficient.

Citizenship in many cases can't be bought. (No birth/id records, criminal past, unlucky country of birth, etc)

Citizenship may take longer but you can for sure buy investor visas

It depends where you want to go and what you want to spend. Peter Thiel circumvented a few of New Zealand’s rules in a very short time frame. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/revealed-how-peter-thiel...

It can be with millions of dollars.

With millions of dollars, you can buy convenience passports in e.g. Kazakhstan or Bulgaria.

Not the most powerful passports in the world, but enough to get visas for a lot of Western places.

You could get a substantially more useful passport and citizenship (Canadian) by investing $800K CAN in Quebec, not sure why you’d spend millions in Eastern Europe or Central Asia.

I may be wrong, but something tells me that Canada must be much more demanding on the provenance and destinations of these 800k$.

Several Caribbean Commonwealth nations are selling citizenship for around $300k USD. Typically this gives you visa on arrival access to western nations.

Looks like Dominica reduced costs to 100k or 200k in real estate.

Indeed. However it can be bought in many other cases. Malta (full eu member) essentially sells citizenship for about 600keur.

"What price would you put on a passport? - BBC News" https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41013873.amp

"Everything you need to know about the Malta Passport" https://www.globalcitizensolutions.com/malta-passport/amp/

Since Malta is part of shengen space, a Maltese passport is highly valuable.

The Maltese citizenship is very difficult to buy since a few years ago.

Stowing away wouldn't give you citizenship either. The key objective here seems to be physical access to the target country (to then remain illegally) which should be doable on touristic visas?

Most embassies don't give tourist visas to the jobless poor, because they're aware of the high chance of abuse.

Mobile Internet access/usage is very common in Kenya now but it wasn't in 2009 when this happened.

One would imagine that anyone desperate enough to do something with a 75% fatality rate would be indifferent to the outcome.

You're asking a lot of someone dumb enough to try something with a 75% fatality rate. This is not an activity done by those who do their research.

Nobody is "dumb" enough to knowingly try something with a 75% fatality rate.

Some people are desperate enough to do it.

The point still stands that most of these people probably don’t know about the fatality rates.

Tell that to the people who used to go over Niagara falls in a barrel.

But these people are apparently dumb enough to not spend five minutes googling it before putting their life on the line. And before you say they don't have access to the internet, almost everyone does even if it is through a friend or internet cafe - even in subsaharan Africa. Also, while politically incorrect to say, being dumb and being poor are strongly correlated. Things like education, educated parents, good nutrition etc are quite important to developing intelligence.

I agree they're desperate, but they're also dumb. No matter how you slice it, these are Darwin award winners at their finest.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com