Bottom line is, people should be allowed to place themselves at risk - even in danger, if they chose.
I can't agree with this attitude. I agree adults should be adults, we agree that far, but that's not really the discussion here.
We are
not innocent bystanders. The risks they took were taken because of arbitrary rules
we all agreed to follow. And which we, the stay at homes, insist upon. If we wanted a different DXCC, and organized ourselves adequately, we could get it. Based on any grounds whatever.
So,
we dangle the risks and rewards out there for others to take. There are plenty of Godforsaken Rocks that nobody goes to because, for whatever arcane reason, they don't count separately and there are much safer options. DXpeditioners are not
intrinsically motivated by risk. When was the last time Everest or K2 was activated for SOTA?
We have already, as I have pointed out, long special cased Western Sahara and Spratley. I don't know if they quite qualify without that special, explicit permission. In any case, we specifically included them.
Well, we could specifically
exclude entities as well. There's nothing magic about the list we have. "The rules" have been changed many times. Maybe it's past time to consider whether we want to get practical about safety. . .or at least expense.
We, collectively, have a finite budget for DXing and DXpeditions. We particularly have a limited budget for big time expeditions like Bouvet. One, maybe two a year. Tops.
I know there's a lot of people out there that, because it's a hobby, resist thinking about this stuff.
But, we just spent something like 2.5 million dollars over three expeditions to get 20,000 QSOs out of Bouvet. Some of us contributed up-front, many of us did not. But, the ones that contribute
up front are the ones that make these expeditions
possible. The boat is paid for before it leaves the dock, among other things paid up front.
The DXpeditioners themselves put up a big fraction (40, 50 per cent of the budget), but we, individually and through foundations, put up the rest. Whether you contribute or not
that is financial reality. The budget just isn't unlimited.
And, despite big individual budgets, it is not clear to me, anymore, that we are spending
enough to actually reliably pull these things off. Costs keep rising, too. It wasn't that long ago that 350K US could activate anything. Not anymore. Million dollar expeditions are becoming commonplace. And, as we've seen, these are
not gold plated exercises. 3Y0J barely happened. The other two got us zero Qs.
Do we want to keep hitting our head against the wall for some of these places? We could have had four, five, six activations to some still very rare but still difficult places for that kind of money.
Maybe the program is
healthier in all respects if we look at some of these places and make the practical decision that we just don't have the wherewithal to activate them safely and for a price we really want to pay.