There’s a refugee crisis going on. Desperate people are struggling to reach Europe, crossing the ocean in leaky rafts and boats with their families.
Desperate is not stupid, though, so there’s a booming market in Turkey for life jackets.
A market. People willing to pay for a little safety. You know what this means, right?
Turkish police have uncovered a factory producing fake lifejackets, shining a light on a booming cottage industry that has emerged as a byproduct of the refugee crisis and heightened the risks for those hoping to reach Europe by sea.
Police allegedly seized 1,263 lifejackets filled with non-buoyant materials from an illegal workshop in Izmir that employed two Syrian children, according to Agence France-Presse and Dogan news agencies.
The raid came in the same week that the bodies of more than 30 people washed up on Turkish beaches, having drowned in their attempt to reach Greece. Some of the dead were pictured wearing lifejackets, leading to suspicions that they may have been fake.
I think I need a stronger word than “suck”.
I was wondering why so many people wearing life jackets seem to have died crossing the Aegean, hypothermia seemed a possible explanation. Even a few miles out from the shore in summer the sea can be numbingly cold. It never occurred to me that some human vermin would actually be selling fake life jackets.
Now I know.
Laissez-faire capitalism at work.
PZ:
Yeah. Beneath contempt barely seems adequate.
In two visits last year to Izmir, a major smuggling hub on the Turkish coast, the Guardian was repeatedly offered counterfeit lifejackets by salespeople openly touting their wares on a prominent shopping street close to two police stations.
Sounds like it’s an ongoing problem. Maybe this mob didn’t the bribe money so the coppers put them out of business – everybody else is OK to continue.
The owners of this factory went home and had a nice evening with their families and slept, dreamless.
After their factory shut-down, they should apply for a job with TrumpCo.
They’ll fit right in.
Some people suck. I may suck a bit, but I don’t suck that much.
seems like the sort of thing racist US richies would be paying for behind the scenes. or maybe an intelligence org from some place like france or italy, modelling their brand of ghoulish hijinks off of the CIA’s heyday. (for the record not saying people of those countries would endorse that at all, just that spy agencies are fucking evil.) i can’t imagine this was very profitable since you do have to manufacture the fakes in order to sell them, and that’s overhead. this was designed to kill people.
Another example of where a lack of empathy leads. Or is it greed trumping caring about others? “My money is more important than your life.”
Maybe that should have been “Trumping?”
Are buoyant materials particularly expensive? I mean, surely there are a lot of materials that are buoyant, and they can’t all be more expensive than whatever the hell they’re using, right? It could be that I just don’t know enough – to be fair, I’ve never been in charge of purchasing buoyant materials so I’ve never needed to do that particular research – but in my head, this seems an awful lot like someone’s deliberately selling something designed to not work? Or is this just a case of not even giving enough of a shit that they’d bother checking their materials first? I suppose it’s probably unwise to attribute to malicious ill-intent that which can be put down to malicious disinterest.
This really is hard to understand. Timber floats, and could have been sewn in a dodgy lifefjacket, yes? And surely packing foam isn’t that hard to come by….
I would guess without checking that hay or straw is probably cheaper than the water proof flotation material that is normally used in life vest construction. a little more profit the users will never be coming back regardless if they even use the vests or not so what could go wrong? no one will know anyway.
fits right in with people smuggling in the first place. This kinds of stuff is always happening, like people left to cross the desert with no guide and not enough water after paying through the nose for trip from Mexico.
uncle frogy
Fuck.
Pun intended?
And I had sort of wondered previously if there was any operation to send the abandoned life jackets littering the coasts back to somewhere they might be of use. (Though i am sure there are many difficulties with that.) Last I saw, some had been used in a bit of vaguely artistic symbolism.
More expensive than straw or sawdust, certainly.
Here is an article on how to best help,in a global crisis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/your-money/how-to-help-in-a-global-refugee-crisis.html?_r=0
And here is a link to a charity, Hope For Syria, which acts as sort of central clearing house and send money to the best places based on the rapidly changing needs.
http://www.kintera.org/site/c.afLIINPoF6KSF/b.9351703/k.BD62/Home.htm
Sent from my iPad
Less talk, moe action. Or more talk more action.
Indeed, “suck” is wholly inadequate.
It looks like the ingenious quality control like I saw in the army’s jump school at Ft. Benning could work here. There some (“riggers”) had the job of packing parachutes. Every once in a while an inspector would stop by, pick out one of their chutes at random, and that rigger would have to make a jump with that chute. This technique is readily adaptable to life-jacket manufactures (apply the test to the owners, not the children doing the labor.)
Great American Satan, #7
You can’t possibly know this was designed to kill. It could have been a pure profit motive with indifference to the consequences (which I am not saying lessens their guilt in any way). I can easily imagine that the proper materials would have to be purchased from a supplier, while the crap they actually used was available at little or no cost. It seems like you are hell-bent on making a gratuitous ideological statement. You want to make references to racism and intelligence agencies when, given the information provided, the parsimonious explanation is unscrupulous, immoral scumbags out to make a buck.
How about “entrepreneur”, or possibly “job creator”. I mean Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, but that’s some awful shit.
The free market will fix it.
“Evil.” I think “evil” is the word you’re looking for. Whether intended to kill or simply uncaring whether people will die because of their fake life jackets, the people who designed and sold those life jackets are evil.
bill buckner – hell bent? not exactly. it’s very easy to make a political statement, so effort doesn’t factor into it. it’s also very easy to believe that the kind of people who did creepy medical experiments on impoverished non-whites, helped cocaine get to US ghettos, supported death squads and slavery in countries that swore to oppose communism, etc. would engineer circumstances to make “potential terrorists” die at sea. that’s on the intelligence agency side, for US richies exporting homicidal prejudice see the people who engineered the kill the gays law in Uganda. i concede others might be right about the profitability of fake life vests and you might be right about what’s most likely, but i don’t consider my theories at all unlikely.
People are garbage maybe? That’s my go to nowadays.
Now, now. We wouldn’t want to OTHER worthless pieces of rat shit with no redeeming value, would we?
@11: permanganater said:
Timber is not much less dense than water, and can with sufficient time become waterlogged enough to get roughly neutrally buoyant (not sure how much time that takes). Packing foam isn’t usually closed cell, so it will get waterlogged quickly and can even break apart. You need strong closed cell foams with very low density for lifejackets/PFDs, which costs much more.
@19: Bill Buckner said:
If a life jacket isn’t designed to float, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to assume the designers were aiming for some other purpose, and with something like a life jacket, that’s synonymous with being designed to kill. “Pure profit motive” and “actively avoiding designing something helpful” are not mutually exclusive.
That sounds similar to what my father told me was the scheme used on the US Navy carrier he served on (1950s): There were specialist parachute packers. If one of the flight crew didn’t like the parachute he was given, then the packer who packed it had to jump with that ‘chute, without repacking.
This is, perhaps, the single type of instance in which I would find the notion of “hell” to be comforting. As in: whoever is making and selling these deserves to roast in his own special corner of hell.
@19 That’s what I was thinking too. Which only compounds the suckery.
The Code of Hammurabi talks about punishment for people who sell substandard goods. In the code’s case, it’s specifically about houses, but clearly people willing to make a cheap buck/lira/shekel by fraudulently selling dangerous products have been around for a long time.