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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.


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @05:54PM (6 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @05:54PM (#570280)

    In my experience, the editors will usually do so if you don't. But apparently not in this case.

    Then maybe you should go complain to the editors instead of whining here where it's off-topic. Your beef is obviously with the way the site is run and the editors.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by NotSanguine on Tuesday September 19 2017, @07:12PM (5 children)

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Tuesday September 19 2017, @07:12PM (#570310) Homepage Journal

    I'm not whining about anything.

    Merely making a suggestion to Phoenix.

    As for complaining to the editors, I am an editor here [soylentnews.org], so there's no need for me to complain to anyone about it.

    As such, my statement wasn't a knock on the editors, rather it was to point out what normal practices are around here.

    Thanks very much for your opinion, I'll store it in a place especially desighed for it.

    --
    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 19 2017, @07:30PM (2 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday September 19 2017, @07:30PM (#570316)

      As for complaining to the editors, I am an editor here, so there's no need for me to complain to anyone about it.

      Well if you're the editor, then it's your own dumb fault for approving his submission as-is instead of correcting it to your editorial standards. So why are you bitching about it here? Go complain to your fellow editors.

      As such, my statement wasn't a knock on the editors, rather it was to point out what normal practices are around here.

      The normal practices that you apparently completely fail at doing your job to uphold. Once the story is accepted, the discussion is supposed to be about the story, not about editorial incompetence.

      Thanks very much for your opinion, I'll store it in a place especially desighed for it.

      Fuck you too. You're the one who's blatantly incompetent here, and you're complaining about someone doing a supposedly lousy job with their submission, when it's *your* job to exercise editorial control to make it conform to whatever editorial standards you may have. Instead, you fucked that up, and now you're bitching to the submitter about it in the comments? Take your shitty attitude and shove it.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:38AM (1 child)

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:38AM (#570483) Journal

      As such, my statement wasn't a knock on the editors, rather it was to point out what normal practices are around here.

      But they aren't 'normal practices' because the way I do it is the way it was done on Slashdot for 20 years. There's also an argument to be made that the way I do it is 'normal' on SN, too, given how many stories I've submitted.

      Grishnakh does rather have a point, though, that it's odd for an editor to knock a submitter for not doing better copy editing. If you guys don't like the job you're doing as editors, then change. Me, I think it's easier to modify the story submission form to require the story source in a separate box, and then output it as something like "From this source:" instead of "[submitter] writes:". But that's on you guys.

      What I'm not gonna do is worry about how I'm attributing the story, because I can't bring myself to care. A community site like Soylent is about the discussion anyway, so who gives a crap what the exact source of a particular story is? Nobody RTFA's the stories anyway, and anybody who doesn't know that must be new here, eh?

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:31AM

        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:31AM (#570502) Homepage Journal

        Me, I think it's easier to modify the story submission form to require the story source in a separate box, and then output it as something like "From this source:" instead of "[submitter] writes:". But that's on you guys.

        What I'm not gonna do is worry about how I'm attributing the story, because I can't bring myself to care. A community site like Soylent is about the discussion anyway, so who gives a crap what the exact source of a particular story is? Nobody RTFA's the stories anyway, and anybody who doesn't know that must be new here, eh?

        Let me clarify and be very direct. I tried to do so with Grishnakh, but he's apparently having a bad day and decided to take it out on me.

        My comments, specifically this:

        It's generally good practice to attribute your quotes.

        In my experience, the editors will usually do so if you don't. But apparently not in this case.

        I imagine it's confusing to some that the link attributing the quote is 3/4 of the way into the quoted material, especially since many folks don't read TFA (and some don't even read TFS either) anyway.

        were based on my thoughts and experiences. I wasn't telling you (or anyone else) what to do or say or how to do/say anything. They were (as I subsequently pointed out) suggestions. Use them, ignore them, create a powerpoint from them and teach a course. Print them out and put them on your dart board. It's all the same to me.

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr