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posted by martyb on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the sanity-takes-flight dept.

The four-lane highway leading out of the Sri Lankan town of Hambantota gets so little traffic that it sometimes attracts more wild elephants than automobiles. The pachyderms are intelligent — they seem to use the road as a jungle shortcut — but not intelligent enough, alas, to appreciate the pun their course embodies: It links together a series of white elephants, i.e. boondoggles, built and financed by the Chinese. Beyond the lonely highway itself, there is a 35,000-seat cricket stadium, an almost vacant $1.5 billion deepwater port and, 16 miles inland, a $209 million jewel known as "the world's emptiest international airport."

Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport, the second-largest in Sri Lanka, is designed to handle a million passengers per year. It currently receives about a dozen passengers per day. Business is so slow that the airport has made more money from renting out the unused cargo terminals for rice storage than from flight-related activities. In one burst of activity last year, 350 security personnel armed with firecrackers were deployed to scare off wild animals, the airport's most common visitors.

Projects like Mattala are not driven by local economic needs but by remote stratagems. When Sri Lanka's 27-year civil war ended in 2009, the president at the time, Mahinda Rajapaksa, fixated on the idea of turning his poor home district into a world-class business and tourism hub to help its moribund economy. China, with a dream of its own, was happy to oblige. Hambantota sits in a very strategic location, just a few miles north of the vital Indian Ocean shipping lane over which more than 80 percent of China's imported oil travels. A port added luster to the "string of pearls" that China was starting to assemble all along the so-called Maritime Silk Road.

Sadly, no travelers came, only the bills. The Mattala airport has annual revenues of roughly $300,000, but now it must repay China $23.6 million a year for the next eight years, according to Sri Lanka's Transport and Civil Aviation Ministry. Over all, around 90 percent of the country's revenues goes to servicing debt. Even a new president who took office in 2015 on a promise to curb Chinese influence succumbed to financial reality.

Empire building is expensive, even when you're Chinese, and is especially expensive for the junior partners in the process.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Fluffeh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:34AM (4 children)

    by Fluffeh (954) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:34AM (#570089) Journal

    It's attributing the article submission to Phoenix666, not the actual article itself. All the submitted articles on the site do this.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Informative=2, Disagree=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Informative' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @07:04AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 19 2017, @07:04AM (#570094)

    No, as written it doesn't. And that many (not all!) of the articles here do that doesn't make it any better.

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:09PM (2 children)

      by tangomargarine (667) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:09PM (#570203)

      Especially annoying because Phoenix only ever copy-and-pastes the first 3 or 4 paragraphs verbatim.

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:15PM

        by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @06:15PM (#570291) Journal

        Especially annoying because Phoenix only ever copy-and-pastes the first 3 or 4 paragraphs verbatim.

        Which is infinity more original content that I ever post in my submissions....

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:55AM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:55AM (#570491) Journal

        It's the story's author's job to summarize the gist of the article in the opening paragraphs. They usually do an adequate job of that, so why re-process what they wrote at the risk of introducing errors or inaccuracies?

        Occasionally the first couple of paragraphs do not convey that, in which case I try to fold the article with ellipses to bring up paragraphs further down in the story that do contain the punchline, or material that I think would be of most interest to Soylentils like technical specs or somesuch. I might further link the source of the story to a relevant phrase in the article to draw the eye and make the gist clearer to the reader.

        That process takes me a couple of minutes per story and permits me to contribute to a healthy story pipeline for SoylentNews. If you are expecting knowledgeable chemists to munge stories in their subject area of expertise and dumb it down to laymen's terms for you, and so on, then SN's story queue will instantly dry up. Who would go to that level of effort for a story summary and subject line that most of the community would skim over and might not comment on? Nobody, that's who. What I do I can over my morning coffee, and sorry, but I have a job and a family and civic responsibilities and you're not getting any more of my time than that, and certainly not for free.

        The real answer for you, and those who don't like the story submissions on the site, is to jump right in and do a better job. Double the number of stories I have submitted. Surpass them by an order of magnitude. The editors can eschew the (apparent) dross I send in for your excellent work, and yours will become the new standard in the SN community.

        I'd be fine with that. I look forward to your superlative story submissions with anticipation.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.