Hacker News Reader

Comment by Edinburger | Hacker News Reader

Very sad. When I read the headline I thought they might be going after _real_ pirates like the ones off the coast of Somalia. Seems like that would be a more worthwhile use of taxpayer's money.

View on HN

Seems like we should wait till we have some kind of actual confirmation of whether the UK government is planning on doing something like this before we jump to conclusions. Actual confirmation, not just someone on the internet syaing they know someone who says they're planning something. I don't think this would pass muster with Labour back benches.

Somalian pirates have to play a careful game with opportunity cost: the ransoms they demand have to be less than the cost of eliminating them, and on top of that they have to not kill people. As long as they stay "reasonable", there's no reason for national governments to actually do anything about them.

The days of "millions for defense, but not a penny for tribute" are long gone.

I doubt anything is really going to happen. This is a typical "anonymous source" article. Low-quality newspapers have been using those for a while to create a controversy where none exists. When the plans don't happen, they can claim "well, we called it and thereby averted it", or - if that's too obvious - that they misjudged their source.

But those pirates are actually killing people and holding British citizens hostage, as opposed to reducing the profits of dinosaur vested interests, so obviously going after them isn't going to be a priority for Her Majesty's Government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com