Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Piracy and second order impacts

By Dave Anderson:


The Somali pirates would have a hard time breaking into the Fortune 500 if all of their operations were aggregated into a single entity and all of the direct costs (ransom, increased insurance premiums, increased fuel bills as ships steam at non-optimal speeds and non-optimal routes) were counted as revenue streams for the pirates.  The Somali pirates are a billion dollar a year banditry problem.  However there are a couple of interesting second order impacts from piracy:


David Axe at War is Boring highlights one of these second order impacts:


Just this week, Taiwan admitted to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna that 66 of the country�s 141 tuna-fishing vessels in the Indian Ocean �have ceased their operations due to the escalating situation� off Somalia. Three Taiwanese fishing vessels have been captured by pirates. This at a time when world bodies are concerned that world tuna stocks might collapse from over-fishing.


A 2% loss rate has been sufficient to relocate a large fishing fleet from the northern Indian Ocean.  Taiwan's fishing fleet is most likely not the only fleet that is much more reluctant to fish in the northern Indian Ocean as the risks no longer justify the rewards.  EagleSpeaks has a great map of recent pirate activity and it is pervasive within one thousand miles of the central and northern Somali coast.


In this particular case, the diversion of large fishing fleets may be a net economic neutral as the tuna stocks may have a chance to regrow and repopulate (much like cod did in the North Atlantic from 1939 to 1945) for several years.  Higher fish prices in the short run may lead to a more sustainable industry in the long run (that is a big-if though.)


However, this is just an easy example of second order impacts.  The more likely and more visible impacts will be on tourism to the Maldives, Seychelles and the other Indian Ocean island nations if the risk of hi-jacking and piracy for ransom increases for the tourist ships and private recreational vessels.   At that point, economic disruption moves from an eight to low nine figure problem to a low ten figure problem.  



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