Belgian farmer accidentally moves French border (opens in new tab)

I was born in Switzerland. I was smuggled to France when I was a few days old so my parents could take me home. I got a passport a few months later, with a baby photo. I went to school in Switzerland, 20 minutes from the house. I had to take my passport to school, though we had a "frontalier" card that we'd show in the car windscreen so we'd rarely be stopped by border guards. It was a Schengen external border until 2007, though!

There are many stories of people getting stuck at that border for forgetting their ID, or phones connecting to the wrong transmitter causing people to get 3000 EUR phone bills for roaming data. My first kiss was on that border though, so I have quite fond memories of it!

The problem of growing up there is that I can't be Swiss - my parents weren't resident. I can't be French either - I wasn't born there. So my passport is British by descent. Children cannot be British from me, because I wasn't born in the UK. If I wanted to continue living in Geneva, children would be stateless.

That started me on a long journey of trying to find a new country. I went off to university, and proceeded to live in the UK, USA, Switzerland, Taiwan, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, Austria, Netherlands, China, and India. In 2013 I decided that I wanted to move to New Zealand, but the process of moving here has been so slow (getting work experience in Taiwan, waiting 2 years for a case officer to evaluate my SMC visa, finding a new job that pays enough to satisfy Immigration), means that I only just got residency at age 31. (Children born in NZ can now be citizens, which will allow me to get married in future). Hopefully by age 36 I'll finally have a passport and a country to really call home.

I've never heard that word till I started playing GeoGuessr.

However India-Bangladesh has enclaves of a higher nesting order.

Once Britishers came, Bengal was separated from the rest of India along their borders of their territories.

It looks like a very French first name and a very Dutch last name. Is that common in Belgium? Is there a significant overlap between the linguistic communities of Belgium?

> Man Bites Dog is an intensely disturbing movie that, despite having frequent moments of dark humor, is shockingly violent and very difficult to watch.

With 74% on RT, which is pretty good. I already have conflicting emotions from this. The descriptions evoke the spirit of Bret Easton Ellis' stuff.

What I've seen of French film violence tends to be cinematic in an off-putting way, but perhaps that's only post-2000s explosion of movie tricks.

Despite not having lived on the farm for 25 year my mom and dad are often brought out to help settle dispute regarding property lines.

Technically everything is mapped out and moving a post or plowing a wrong part of the field doesn’t change ownership, but some of the maps are old and reference point are no longer where they once where.

(This is getting complicated and challenged due to the fact suburbs are popping up nearly everywhere and totally useless land may now be worth money.)

In the case above simply demolish whatever the guy built. He tries to sue in civil court and fails because he had no right to build there.

https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/GkGJm/nabotvist-paa-ne...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisky_War

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/36230/201...

What was happening was that the cigarettes were being sold as export items (so little/no Canadian tax paid), exported to the American side, then smuggled back into Canada via the Canadian side.

Now I'm sure if you landed and somehow were talked to by the border police and didn't have a passport you'd be pretty screwed, but honestly thats pretty unlikely to happen. I know an old couple set in their ways who to this day just boat across the river sans passport for a favourite restaurant.

I tried this at home and it turns out that easily available GPS devices have huge amounts of error, especially without unobstructed line of sight like in woods. I left a phone on a stump recording a walking trail, and it wandered around multiple tens of meters. There is value in what the surveyors do :) Although I guess they would use markers like this as references, so unless they crosscheck with multiple markers and fancy GPS they could make mistakes too.

Edit: and the whole while the GPS receiver is reporting a misleading "5ft" or similar accuracy.

This is probably my favorite story to date of how a squabble over where to temporarily store some cut lumber escalated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProRevenge/comments/djci7p/how_i_go...

Be sure to read all 4 parts!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivenza#Claims_of_sovereignty

Likewise, the exact location of borders between properties is usually ill-defined. Only borders that have gone through a painstaking process of surveying and registering (usually after a dispute or on a new build) are exactly defined. Usually, when you move into a new house, you have a fence around your property, and the boundary is generally assumed to be inside the fence (with conventions for whose land the fence sits on that aren't always followed).

Adverse possession makes it more complicated. A neighbour decided to put up a new fence, and weren't nice about it. I stipulated (in line with the law) that no part of the new fence could be placed on my property (except parts under the ground surface). They decided to put the fence in the "wrong" way round, with the vertical posts on their property, and the fence attached on their side of the posts, effectively giving me sole access to the area of land in-between their fence posts. If I were to sell my house, the new owner would be quite reasonable in assuming that that land was theirs. After the requisite time, I could apply to have the land legally registered as mine, although the new laws mean that the neighbour would be informed and given a chance to "evict" me from the land - they would have to tear down their fence and rebuild it the right way round so that I don't have sole access to it any more. In this way, adverse possession effectively resets the boundary to where the actual fence is in practice every now and again, which means that the land registry doesn't need to store exact boundary locations.

https://imgur.com/cX2Seow.png

The white area being roads and non-registered land (mainly stuff that hasn't sold for decades and roads).

It's great, I can find a unique owner for any bit of field I have a question about, the size of the plot, etc.

The downside is that to get a copy of the actual entry in the register (to see who owns it and any covenants on the property there are), you have to pay £3. The entire process is digital and automated, IMO it should be free, but I suppose it's not a terrible price.

You'd think location via GPS or similar framework was easy but it's not nearly as easy as you'd think. Among other things, the land is moving. Both continental plates and then also local features like river beds. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TX--Fku9NQ

“Follow river such and so, then on that one field of farmer Jones turn left until the tree, turn right and walk in a straight line to that pointy rock, then walk back to the river etc. etc.”?