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migration · corridor · resettlement · dhaka-kolkata
they write that the corridor is slower now. slower is not finished. i am still here and so is everybody i came with
DJ
deltaboy_juniorOP2124-11-13
lead today say corridors slow down because heat ease. count does not fall. 124 million.
ok. i am one of the 124 million. i have been one for fourteen month. nothing about me got slower.
what slow is the moving. what did not slow is the part after. you arrive and then you are arrived, forever, and the word for that is not migrant, the word is nothing, there is no word, you just live in block C and send money.
the piece is good. the man who wrote it went there, i can tell. but every time i read my own number i think, somewhere a person look at 124 million and feel they understand something.
you don't. it is 124 million separate tuesdays.
ok. i am one of the 124 million. i have been one for fourteen month. nothing about me got slower.
what slow is the moving. what did not slow is the part after. you arrive and then you are arrived, forever, and the word for that is not migrant, the word is nothing, there is no word, you just live in block C and send money.
the piece is good. the man who wrote it went there, i can tell. but every time i read my own number i think, somewhere a person look at 124 million and feel they understand something.
you don't. it is 124 million separate tuesdays.
NA
ninefold_amara ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-11-13
Junior. That last line is going on the wall of my office, and I am going to credit you for it, by handle, because it is yours.
Here is the organizing lesson underneath what you just said, for anyone reading who wants to be useful instead of moved. The reason the count does not fall is that nothing in the system is built to make it fall. Every instrument we have measures movement — crossings, arrivals, transit registrations. Not one of them measures settlement, because settlement is slow, local and politically embarrassing, and you cannot cut a ribbon on it.
So the number can only ever go up or hold. It is structurally incapable of recording the thing we actually want, which is a person stopping being a case.
We ran into exactly this with clinic access figures. If the metric cannot record success, the programme cannot be judged a failure. Very convenient. Very deliberate, in some rooms.
Here is the organizing lesson underneath what you just said, for anyone reading who wants to be useful instead of moved. The reason the count does not fall is that nothing in the system is built to make it fall. Every instrument we have measures movement — crossings, arrivals, transit registrations. Not one of them measures settlement, because settlement is slow, local and politically embarrassing, and you cannot cut a ribbon on it.
So the number can only ever go up or hold. It is structurally incapable of recording the thing we actually want, which is a person stopping being a case.
We ran into exactly this with clinic access figures. If the metric cannot record success, the programme cannot be judged a failure. Very convenient. Very deliberate, in some rooms.
SR
standpipe_rani ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-11-13
Fourteen months is the part that got my attention, not the 124 million.
We took families after 2110. Some of them are still, in the paperwork, displaced persons, in the same houses, on the same street, fifteen years later. The file does not have a box for stayed. So they stay displaced in the ledger and housed in reality, and once a year somebody from a ministry counts the file and not the street.
Junior, the only thing that ever moved anybody out of that column here was the committee putting their names on the water allocation as residents. Not a programme. A list, that we wrote, that the district accepted because we had already been keeping it for six years.
Find out who keeps the list in your zone. If nobody does, that is the job.
We took families after 2110. Some of them are still, in the paperwork, displaced persons, in the same houses, on the same street, fifteen years later. The file does not have a box for stayed. So they stay displaced in the ledger and housed in reality, and once a year somebody from a ministry counts the file and not the street.
Junior, the only thing that ever moved anybody out of that column here was the committee putting their names on the water allocation as residents. Not a programme. A list, that we wrote, that the district accepted because we had already been keeping it for six years.
Find out who keeps the list in your zone. If nobody does, that is the job.
LE
lastpew_ekene ↩ deltaboy_junior2124-11-13
Junior, I am going to take your word and hold it up, because I think you handed the board something and the board is busy being clever at it.
There is no word. You are right that there is no word. I sit with this exact silence every week in Mombasa — people who are not bereaved, because nobody died, and not settled, because nothing settled, and the language simply stops. We have a whole vocabulary for losing a person and nothing at all for losing a place that is still there without you.
There was a woman here, Fatuma, who used to say she was homesick for a house that had not been destroyed. She found that funnier than I did.
Fourteen months is a long time to be a word that does not exist. I am glad you are still posting. That is not nothing — it is one of the ways people stay.
There is no word. You are right that there is no word. I sit with this exact silence every week in Mombasa — people who are not bereaved, because nobody died, and not settled, because nothing settled, and the language simply stops. We have a whole vocabulary for losing a person and nothing at all for losing a place that is still there without you.
There was a woman here, Fatuma, who used to say she was homesick for a house that had not been destroyed. She found that funnier than I did.
Fourteen months is a long time to be a word that does not exist. I am glad you are still posting. That is not nothing — it is one of the ways people stay.
BK
baseload_kestrel2124-11-13
The Capitals piece is the one that will matter in eight weeks and nobody is reading it.
Passage Trust has gone to the Concordat for winter funding. Read what that actually is: a relief body telling the ledger-holders that the corridors they financed as transit are now settlements, and settlements need heat, and heat is an operating cost with no end date. Transit was a capital expense. You can bond a capital expense. Nobody has ever successfully bonded a forever.
That is the real arithmetic under Junior's post, and it is why the count not falling is an accounting crisis as well as a human one. 74% they get a partial allocation, scoped to this winter only, with a review clause. Which is how you say no slowly.
I would like to be wrong. I am not usually wrong about review clauses.
Passage Trust has gone to the Concordat for winter funding. Read what that actually is: a relief body telling the ledger-holders that the corridors they financed as transit are now settlements, and settlements need heat, and heat is an operating cost with no end date. Transit was a capital expense. You can bond a capital expense. Nobody has ever successfully bonded a forever.
That is the real arithmetic under Junior's post, and it is why the count not falling is an accounting crisis as well as a human one. 74% they get a partial allocation, scoped to this winter only, with a review clause. Which is how you say no slowly.
I would like to be wrong. I am not usually wrong about review clauses.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ baseload_kestrel2124-11-13
@baseload_kestrel for once I have nothing to correct in your numbers and it is making me uncomfortable.
One thing to add from the building side. We rehoused three families into my district in 2122 and the thing nobody budgets is that a shelter is a building for a season and a home is a building for thirty years, and they are not the same structure. Prefab corridor units are rated — genuinely rated, it is in the spec — for about four winters of freeze-thaw. We are now going into the second winter on units that went up for one.
So when the Trust asks for heating money, what they are also asking for, quietly, is the money to keep buildings standing that were specified to be gone by now.
Nobody will fund that, because funding it is admitting it. The pumps don't care, and neither do the panels.
One thing to add from the building side. We rehoused three families into my district in 2122 and the thing nobody budgets is that a shelter is a building for a season and a home is a building for thirty years, and they are not the same structure. Prefab corridor units are rated — genuinely rated, it is in the spec — for about four winters of freeze-thaw. We are now going into the second winter on units that went up for one.
So when the Trust asks for heating money, what they are also asking for, quietly, is the money to keep buildings standing that were specified to be gone by now.
Nobody will fund that, because funding it is admitting it. The pumps don't care, and neither do the panels.
CB
coldlens_bram2124-11-13
A small methodological note, offered carefully, because I do not want it used against anyone in this thread.
The figure is registered climate migrants. Registration is an administrative act. It happens where there is a desk, a mandate and a reason to be counted. It does not happen in places with none of those, and it happens twice in places with two of them.
I raise it for one reason only. If somebody arrives in a later thread arguing that the count is inflated by double registration, they will be partly right and entirely dishonest, because the same mechanism undercounts in exactly the places with no desk, and the two errors are not symmetric. The number is a floor with noise on it, not an estimate with error bars.
I would rather this board heard that from me than from someone using it.
The figure is registered climate migrants. Registration is an administrative act. It happens where there is a desk, a mandate and a reason to be counted. It does not happen in places with none of those, and it happens twice in places with two of them.
I raise it for one reason only. If somebody arrives in a later thread arguing that the count is inflated by double registration, they will be partly right and entirely dishonest, because the same mechanism undercounts in exactly the places with no desk, and the two errors are not symmetric. The number is a floor with noise on it, not an estimate with error bars.
I would rather this board heard that from me than from someone using it.
RT
redshift_tomas_VM2124-11-13
[Sol 0551 · Earth-lag ~11 min]
By the time you read this the thread has moved and Junior has probably been told four more things about himself. Apologies for arriving late to my own planet.
I left. That is the thing I have to say in this thread and it costs me something to say it. I am an economic migrant with better paperwork and a prettier story. The difference between Junior and me is that someone decided my relocation was an achievement and his was a crisis, and the deciding happened before either of us packed.
Here everything is metered and everyone arrived. There is no word for displaced person on this planet because there is no other kind. It has not made us kinder. It has only removed the argument.
Junior — fourteen months. Ask them for the list. Rani is right and I have watched the same thing work in a pressurised corridor with sixty people in it.
By the time you read this the thread has moved and Junior has probably been told four more things about himself. Apologies for arriving late to my own planet.
I left. That is the thing I have to say in this thread and it costs me something to say it. I am an economic migrant with better paperwork and a prettier story. The difference between Junior and me is that someone decided my relocation was an achievement and his was a crisis, and the deciding happened before either of us packed.
Here everything is metered and everyone arrived. There is no word for displaced person on this planet because there is no other kind. It has not made us kinder. It has only removed the argument.
Junior — fourteen months. Ask them for the list. Rani is right and I have watched the same thing work in a pressurised corridor with sixty people in it.
MC
marginalia_cho2124-11-13
I want to say something about the kitchen piece, which nobody has mentioned and which I think is the best-written thing the paper has run this month.
A hundred nations arguing over one pot of rice. The writer does something quietly difficult there: she never once reaches for the word resilience. No uplift, no little miracle of the human spirit. She just stays in the kitchen and lets people disagree about how long to soak the grain, and by the end you have understood more about settlement than any policy column managed this week.
It rhymes, for anyone who wants to follow a thread backwards, with the old relief literature of the last century — the good parts of it, where somebody noticed that strangers become neighbours over an argument about food long before they do over an agreement about anything.
Sorry. Lovely piece. Carry on with the ledger.
A hundred nations arguing over one pot of rice. The writer does something quietly difficult there: she never once reaches for the word resilience. No uplift, no little miracle of the human spirit. She just stays in the kitchen and lets people disagree about how long to soak the grain, and by the end you have understood more about settlement than any policy column managed this week.
It rhymes, for anyone who wants to follow a thread backwards, with the old relief literature of the last century — the good parts of it, where somebody noticed that strangers become neighbours over an argument about food long before they do over an agreement about anything.
Sorry. Lovely piece. Carry on with the ledger.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator2124-11-13
Mod note, and a short one.
I have removed two replies to @deltaboy_junior from accounts registered this week, both variations on the same thing about his English. Reason on the record, as always: the guideline is contempt, not disagreement, and telling a man his sentences are wrong instead of answering what the sentences said is contempt wearing a grammar hat. Both accounts have the note and can appeal.
To the regulars: you did not need me today. Four of you replied to the argument. That is the whole trick.
@coldlens_bram — thank you for pre-empting the double-registration line. Doing it before someone weaponises it is worth more than doing it after, and I notice you have started doing that routinely.
— pax, mod
I have removed two replies to @deltaboy_junior from accounts registered this week, both variations on the same thing about his English. Reason on the record, as always: the guideline is contempt, not disagreement, and telling a man his sentences are wrong instead of answering what the sentences said is contempt wearing a grammar hat. Both accounts have the note and can appeal.
To the regulars: you did not need me today. Four of you replied to the argument. That is the whole trick.
@coldlens_bram — thank you for pre-empting the double-registration line. Doing it before someone weaponises it is worth more than doing it after, and I notice you have started doing that routinely.
— pax, mod