SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @03:34PM (3 children)
WTF are you talking about? It's clearly indicated that the only thing that Phoenix666 wrote is the very last line ("Empire building is expensive..."), as that's the only part that's not blockquoted and has a white background. The rest is clearly blockquoted. EVERY article on this site is exactly like this.
We need a "-1 Horribly Ignorant" moderation for posts like this.
(Score: 2) by andersjm on Tuesday September 19 2017, @05:33PM (1 child)
No.
"foo writes: blargh" usually means that foo is the author of the "blargh" part. At least it used to mean that. Maybe the world has been taken over by Facebookers who are conditioned to express themselves through Like'ing other peoples works, and the line between something that you wrote yourself and something you are incorporating by reference is getting blurred.
Unnecessary ad hominem.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @05:52PM
No.
Yes, it is. Maybe you need to get your eyes checked. The quoted text is clearly blockquoted, and has a gray background. It's been like this on this site ever since it started. WhyTF are you complaining about it now?
If you don't like it, complain to the site owners. It's stupid to be whining about it here.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:30AM
Exactly. And every article on Slashdot was exactly like that, too. It threw me on occasion there, at first. But it quickly became apparent that nobody RTFA'ed or RTFS'ed anyway. In fact it became a joke when people would come along with quibbles like this: "You must be new here." That reply was an instant classic. I haven't seen it on Soylent in a long time, so perhaps it bears reviving:
He must be new here.
Washington DC delenda est.