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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

Banning is just setting a quota of zero, which you've already agreed is effectively unenforceable.

Obviously control has to be on the demand and not the supply side. Banning the sale of fish, or punitively taxing it, would be two options to make commercial fishing economically unattractive.

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A full ban, or "a quota of zero" is much more observable and enforcable than keeping track of individuals' permits and catch limits. Not here for enabling more violence on behalf of the enforcer class, but this argument didnt make much sense to me

A full ban would be much much easier to enforce. You see a fishing boat? It gets a military escort out of your national waters. You see the same boat again? It gets blown up.

Compare with having to board a random sample of boats (and there'd be a lot, because a lot of them would be legitimate), check documents, check catch totals etc.

Yes, because blowing up a boat crewed by poor third world sailors trying to make some money to feed their families back home is a truly proportionate response.

You should remove the people aboard before blowing up the fishing vessel :)

The comment I was replying to proposed blowing up the boat as an alternative to "having to board a random sample of boats (and there'd be a lot, because a lot of them would be legitimate), check documents"

Yes, it is. Because these people think that destroying the entire ocean is their right, and they're basically cutting throats to get ahead, and they'll never be on the hook for all the nets they cut and dump in the ocean, all the vulnerable fish they ravage and all the other damage they do.

Perhaps a fair comment about the boats owners or the fishing company's shareholders.

Not so much about the poor saps that crew it.

Bit hard to escort when most illegal fishing happens in international waters.

Most fishing happens in economic Exclusion zones (200 miles out), over which states have souvereignty

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_economic_zone

Yes but I said illegal fishing.

I think indoor/raceway farmed fish is the future, once we work out sustainable food sources, eg insects.

I'm not sure how credible that is for marine species, but I'm sure it's possible for some, and we don't have to completely cut fish from our diets.

In the meantime, I agree, we should be banning the sale/import of some species of fish.

Why insects? Tilapia eat plants, and other fish eat tilapia.

Then that should work too. I think current practice is often to feed larger carnivorous fish with smaller wild-caught fish, which doesn't really solve the problem.

Wow a vegetarian fish, I never contemplated such a thing. What kind of plants do they eat anyways?

They eat basically anything. They are a very non picky fish. Algae is a favorite.

Black soldier flies harvest themselves. The omega 3 fatty acids in fish come from algae. Duckweed is one of the fastest growing plants out there and is protein packed.

The above is the combo I think would be the path to support such a raceway system. One of many crazy dreams I have is to start a trout farm based on that.

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