[HN Gopher] Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after str...
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Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship
refloated
Author : WJW
Score : 902 points
Date : 2021-03-29 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| ldb wrote:
| Had to think of that Simpson's episode where MacGyver appears and
| says something like "Don't thank me, thank the gravitational pull
| of the moon". Well, it seems that that line wasn't complete
| nonsense at all :-)
| JosephRedfern wrote:
| Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but
| those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which,
| while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me.
|
| Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap",
| due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late
| deliveries, personnel/fuel costs?
| viztor wrote:
| I don't think there will be any spoilage, the goods travelled
| through sea are never fresh.
| spoonjim wrote:
| LOL. The fruits in American grocery stores are not airlifted
| in from Brazil.
| oasisbob wrote:
| There are probably better ways to say this. If you're
| familiar with the industry, perhaps you could better inform
| the conversation.
|
| Personally, I've always been surprised by the amount of
| fruit, flowers, and other perishables that do economically
| come in via air.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Flowers, yes. Fruits, short of the exotic, name them.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| .
| gambiting wrote:
| Ever Given is a container ship, containers don't carry live
| animals. Other ships that were stuck behind it have live
| animals(cattle mostly) but they are on ships specifically
| designed for animals.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No. It was _blocking_ ships with live animal cargo.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/26/at-
| least...
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| Agreed that just quoting the delayed value does not tell the
| whole story.
|
| But it could be a pretty good proxy: to some approximation,
| everything in the supply chain would be set up to work with the
| 9.6 Bn daily flow of value - everybody's financing payments,
| payroll, working capital, etc. The time is gone. Just like if
| you had to take two weeks off (unpaid) because you were sick,
| you could work more later to get that money back, and recover
| some of it if you work overtime, but you still missed that
| window to make money.
| mrb wrote:
| If we count _only_ missed revenues for Egypt, this incident
| cost them about US$100 million. Canal revenues were US$27.2
| billion in the last 5 years
| (https://www.reuters.com/article/egypt-economy-
| suezcanal/egyp...) which is US$15 million in revenues per day,
| and the canal was closed for 7 days.
| Reason077 wrote:
| It's probably less than that because many transits would have
| just been delayed, not entirely cancelled.
| foobarbaz33 wrote:
| They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely. Due to
| the lack of downtime, any delays are in effect the same
| thing as a cancel from the perspective of the canal owners.
| distrill wrote:
| > They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely
|
| We have to stop doing this with all of our critical
| systems, it causes hiccups to be so costly.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What is so critical about the Suez Canal. If it were down
| for a month/year. what do you think the impacts would be?
| Would most ship traffic simply go around Africa?
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Accepting that globalization wasn't such a big thing
| then, the closure between 1967 and 1975 would be a good
| source of objective 'what actually happened' data.
| anticristi wrote:
| Like having nurses and doctors idling around, just in
| case a pandemic appears out of nowhere?
| kccqzy wrote:
| Low utilization can be even more costly.
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| But building everything to have a higher capacity also
| wastes a lot of resources! It is a balancing game.
| Reason077 wrote:
| According to reports, the backlog of traffic should be
| cleared in about 10 days. They must have _some_ spare
| capacity available in order to do that.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Maybe backlog will be cleared as result of some ships
| taking route around Africa?
| signal11 wrote:
| I'd start by computing the number of ships that went around the
| Southern tip of Africa as a result of the stuck ship. I wonder
| how much the cost of extra fuel and food/pay for all of those
| ships doing additional miles will be? And the resulting
| increase in wholesale/retail costs?
|
| Regarding penalties re late delivery, I'm less worried about
| that. Cargo ships always have language about loss and force
| majeure. I think a stuck ship would qualify as force majeure.
| And a week _shouldn 't_ affect most perishables e.g. grain,
| that go into containers.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I believe that we can simply look at the channel fees lost
| due to the downtime - as far as I understand, the fee for
| using the channel is intentionally close to "the cost of
| extra fuel and food/pay for all of those ships doing
| additional miles", a bit lower but not much lower than the
| alternative of going around Africa.
| glenneroo wrote:
| As posted elsewhere in this thread, this guy debunks that
| theory:
|
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwOZOb90fM
| nradov wrote:
| Grain is usually carried by bulkers, not in containers.
| GordonS wrote:
| Container ships burn horrible, cheap bunker fuel, and the
| shipping industry is infamous for hiring crew from low-income
| countries like the Philippines, paying them a pittance, and
| treating them like modern-day slaves.
|
| I'd strongly suspect that the costs for spoilage and knock-on
| effects from late delivery etc would outstrip crew and fuel
| costs by a large margin.
| itismetheidiot wrote:
| Filipino Masters and Chief Engineers are being paid north
| of $8500/month. Evidently you are not well informed.
| GordonS wrote:
| I don't doubt a select few senior people are well paid -
| but there are many, _many_ more junior crew members that
| do not fit that description.
|
| Also - rude.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Late delivery penalties aren't really an economic loss, it is a
| wash mostly. Similarly loss of revenue is mostly a wash
|
| The freight costs are in the range of 0.6%-3% of the cost of
| the goods transported on average. This is for the amortized
| cost of purchasing the ships, maintenance, the labor and fuel
| costs. If you estimate the value of the delayed goods at $10b,
| and the freight costs at an extra 2% that's $200m in damages.
|
| Most food transported this way wouldn't be spoiled by a delay
| of a week. If 10% of the goods were food by value, and 15% of
| them were perishable, and they were worth half as much after
| being delayed delayed a week that is another $75m lost to
| spoilage. But it isn't always a one week delay, many ships are
| delayed less to start, and there will be increased congestion
| in the ports and ground transport for many of these ships.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Also, are there any paths for supply chain interruption
| insurance to kick in?
| tyingq wrote:
| Still not what you're asking for, but the analysis here looks
| like it's done by people who understand this sort of thing:
| https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL113622...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This seems to be the key bit:
|
| > If the canal does reopen quickly, vessels waiting now
| should be able to make up time without too much disruption to
| the supply chain, which is already weighed down by port
| congestion and inland transportation delays.
| ufmace wrote:
| Probably the actual cost will require an army of accountants
| and lawyers at a dozen major logistics corporations arguing
| with each other for months to even try to compute. I doubt us
| regular uninvolved people will ever get a "real" number.
|
| How do you even try to calculate and reveal the cost associated
| with say a manufacturer in the middle of a supply chain
| deciding to source their parts from a different vendor for this
| run because their usual source was delayed due to the Suez
| blockage and they didn't want to leave their factory idle?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Probably the actual "damage" that was caused will be given by
| the insurance companies as a sum of claims covered, but there
| will be a lot of companies that simply have to eat the loss
| incurred by idling factories and the likes because their
| supply contracts allow for delivery delays or because
| pursuing coverage isn't worth the effort (e.g. for those who
| still had sufficient stock to cover a week of delay and no
| "real" damage occurred).
|
| A many weeks long shutdown (in case they had to unload the
| Ever Given) would be many orders of magnitude more expensive.
| riverageraldo wrote:
| This makes me question that shouldn't we have another canal
| built? Like if so much of the world's economy depends on this
| route shouldn't we build an extra canal to speed up the
| transportation and also act as a redundancy
| rvp-x wrote:
| Israel at some point was considering setting up a rail
| track between Eilat and the rest of the country. The main
| benefit of doing so is that cargo ships could unload and
| Eilat (red sea) and have cargo transported to a port in the
| mediterranean sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| speed_railway_to_Eilat
|
| That plan was frozen after the Egypt-Israel peace
| agreement.
| azernik wrote:
| It's been floated after the peace treaty too; it's just
| unlikely to justify the massive cost, now that the
| strategic consideration of bypassing an Egyptian blockade
| is past.
| flatiron wrote:
| Where do you propose building this extra canal?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Cue Elon Musk promising to build a tunnel version of it
| for $5 million total cost, opening fall 2022.
| creaturemachine wrote:
| Of course everything has to be repacked into little tubes
| and back into containers on the other end, but let's not
| let these things get in the way of a solid plan. Elon
| Musk!
| onei wrote:
| It's a lot further to dig, but the next best thing would be
| to dig from the Persian gulf through Iraq, Syria and
| probably Lebanon. Not forgetting half the Persian Gulf is
| Iran. It's not exactly the most stable geopolitical area.
| dvirsky wrote:
| I'm not sure there's a path that's flat enough to make it
| practical even if everything else falls into place
| somehow.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| A quick look suggests that the Tigris is mostly navigable
| up to Baghdad, which would get you halfway there.
|
| As an alternative (and ignoring the obviously substantial
| geopolitical concerns), is there a geographic reason not
| to dig a canal on the other side of the Sinai from, say,
| Aqaba to Rafah? If you had to dig that far, it would seem
| to be the next best option.
| onei wrote:
| It's kind of hard to tell, but it looks like the Suez
| canal was on super flat land and I recall most of Sinai
| is desert. The Israel-Egypt border doesn't look that flat
| based on the colouring on the leading image of [1].
|
| 1. https://www.npr.org/2007/06/04/10619929/six-day-war-
| shaping-...
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I mean, the alternative proposal was a canal through the
| ~3rd most violent region on the planet.
| onei wrote:
| Absolutely, I imagine the insurance alone would make the
| Persian Gulf route unviable. Pirates is one thing, but
| governments confiscating boats would be a huge
| disincentive. The other side of the Sinai is probably
| much more palatable even if Egypt and Israel aren't best
| buddies.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Not to mention the terrorism/sabotage/non-state actor
| destruction opportunities that route would present that
| are moderately prevented on the Red Sea side (if you can
| get past the Horn of Africa).
|
| I can't see Egypt approving an alternate canal that
| Israel would have any control over, but I could
| absolutely see Israel going in on a chance to a) take
| business from Egypt and b) add a defensive feature along
| that border.
| azernik wrote:
| Both a) and b) would require a real increase in tensions.
| Israel and Egypt have a cold peace, with several common
| enemies/interests; the prospect of a direct military
| confrontation is nil, and neither side will go out of
| their way to harm the other economically.
| azernik wrote:
| The terrain along the Negev route is extremely hostile.
| Bypass proposals have mostly focused on rail lines from
| Eilat/Aqaba to the large and well-developed Israeli ports
| on the Mediterranean, but even constructing rail lines
| there is quite difficult.
|
| An underappreciated fact of Israeli and Palestinian
| geography is its mountains and hills; any major
| transportation project [1] requires extensive tunnel and
| bridge work.
|
| [1] Examples: the TLV/Jerusalem high speed rail, the
| Haifa highway bypass, or a proposed transportation
| corridor connecting the main West Bank population centers
| along the ridge of the Judean and Samarian mountain
| ranges.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| partially done already:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Bypass_expansion
| adamweld wrote:
| I think you massively underestimate the cost (land,
| machinery, labor, upkeep) of undertaking such a project.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| We did it with the Panama Canal a century ago. Granted,
| the Suez Canal is ~190km compared to the Panama Canal at
| ~80km, but it is possible.
| jandrese wrote:
| It should be pointed out that the northern part of the
| canal has a second canal running parallel. The southern
| portion is the only part that has only a single passage.
|
| Political instability is definitely a contributing factor
| to the fragility of the southern corridor.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I'm a layman, but it seems like there are probably other
| preventative measures that are way cheaper.
|
| A Bloomberg article
| (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-27/how-a-
| des...) says the speed limit was 7.6 to 8.6 knots but the
| Ever Given was traveling at 13.5 knots. So maybe they need
| to start enforcing that limit.
|
| Reportedly this was during high winds, so they could also
| reduce the speed limit even further in those conditions.
|
| Or they could have Suez specialists be the ones piloting
| large ships through the canal rather than the ship's normal
| crew. (As I understand it, that's pretty standard for
| harbors. Not sure if the Suez already does that.)
|
| Or maybe there's a technology solution, something like
| stability control for cars, except it's for ships in narrow
| canals.
| lolc wrote:
| As is standard for canal transit, the Evergiven was
| piloted by a Suez pilot at the time of the accident.
| Because this ship's main steering force comes from the
| rudder, it has more force when it goes faster. Maybe they
| even accelerated to counter the strong winds.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| From what I heard they've suffered a blackout which is an
| event when your power goes out.
|
| Friends scientific boat had a same thing in Kiel canal,
| but only 22 meter boat and under and hour.
| Gh0stRAT wrote:
| The slower the boat travels, the closer to the wind it
| has to point in order to avoid being pushed into the
| leeward shore. (assuming it doesn't have significant
| thrust-vectoring capabilities at both the bow and the
| stern which as far as I can tell seems to be the case for
| large cargo ships)
|
| Because the boat is longer than the canal is wide, for
| any nonzero perpendicular wind speed there is a minimum
| boat speed below which it would not be able to avoid
| running aground. The solution is to either not permit
| such large ships to transit the canal during high wind
| events or to send them with enough tugboats to counteract
| the force of the wind.
| tw04 wrote:
| I'm not sure the collective "we" will ever truly know. I'd
| imagine a LOT of that livestock died and they aren't going to
| be jumping up and down to volunteer how many/much given the
| negative PR. If they did divulge that would probably be the
| easiest jumping off point for hard losses.
| interestica wrote:
| So by attempting to calculate it, the cost goes up higher.
| dfsegoat wrote:
| For spoilage etc., most of it would be insured, I assume, so
| insurance claims would likely be a solid proxy for estimating
| one aspect of impact.
| ape4 wrote:
| Perhaps adding up all the penalties all the delayed ships
| have to pay could cover it.
| chipsambos wrote:
| Agree it's incalculable, I don't mean that in the "it's too
| big of a number" sort of way but in the "we can't possibly
| know" kind of way:
|
| 1) The scale and depth of the disruption makes it impractical
| to figure in any kind of accurate way and
|
| 2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that nay
| spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. some
| retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some
| supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere, etc
| lisper wrote:
| You can get a rough idea by thinking of this as if it were
| a natural disaster, and from that perspective I think the
| toll is probably not too bad. No casualties, very little
| property damage, and a week is not really all that long.
|
| However... that is no excuse to shrug this off. We were
| very, very lucky that it was only a week. The ship could
| easily have broken in two, which would have been a
| catastrophe of the first order and likely shut the canal
| down for a year. The world dodged a major bullet here.
| DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii wrote:
| After Egypt intentionally blocked the Suez Canal during
| the Six Day War and an operation was taken to reopen it
| after the Yom Kippur War it took around 7 months to clear
| the ships that were scuttled to block it[1]. I would
| think a cleanup with more modern technology dealing with
| a ship that wasn't scuttled for the purpose of blockage
| would take less time.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Suez_Canal_Clearan
| ce_Oper...
| lisper wrote:
| The 1974 operation involved ten ships, the largest of
| which was 6700 tons. The Ever Given displaces 220,000
| tons. It's an entirely different beast.
| fiedzia wrote:
| Its large, but its size is limited by sues canal. Ships
| could be much larger if they were designed for a
| different route.
| notyourday wrote:
| Only Qmax and Chinamax are higher.
| pixl97 wrote:
| While our ships have grown greatly, so has our ability to
| salvage them at the same time.
| Animats wrote:
| Worldwide salvage capacity isn't up much. Mammoet Salvage
| and Titan Salvage exited the business a few years ago.
| Smit is one of the few salvors with worldwide reach and
| their own heavy equipment. The business requires huge
| equipment on standby, and trained people waiting for the
| next crisis.
|
| Smit is now part of Boskalis, which is a big marine
| engineering firm. They have dredgers, heavy lift ships,
| tugs, and barges, which are useful both for marine
| construction and for salvage. So the fleet can do other
| things between crises.
| Uehreka wrote:
| That feels like the kind of non-obvious claim that should
| come with a source (even just a blog post by an analyst
| that lays out the relevant vocab terms and the general
| theory).
| nowandlater wrote:
| That's no joke. Salvage operations is such a fascinating
| topic, which I'm sure many (me included) found themselves
| quickly obsessed with. The sagging and hogging threshold
| of this ship is the critical key here. I'm curious how
| close/or not the hull came to being compromised.
| Animats wrote:
| That's why Smit has naval architects on staff, and the
| program Hecsalv.[1] They will have calculated the limits
| of how much the stern could be pushed without damaging
| the bow _before_ pushing it.
|
| [1] https://www.herbert-abs.com/hecsalv
| iso1210 wrote:
| The canal revenues were down about $15m/day. If it really
| cost $7b a day, then Egypt is massively undercharging.
| Taek wrote:
| Not necessarily. I pay only $1 a day for water, but if
| you stop giving me water for 7 days the damages are going
| to be a lot more than $7. That doesn't mean it's
| reasonable to charge me more than $1 per day for water.
|
| Obviously an extreme example, but the situation with this
| ship is likely similar. The damages probably far exceed
| the $15m/day in revenue (though I suspect they are far
| lower than $7b per day).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > That doesn't mean it's reasonable to charge me more
| than $1 per day for water.
|
| This is where someone steps in and says something to the
| tune of "Whatever price you're willing to pay is by
| definition reasonable" and completely ignore the
| ethical/moral issues with essentially holding someone's
| life for ransom by charging the maximum price they can
| get for something they need to survive.
| ksdale wrote:
| Looks like you stepped in to say it!
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| The reason water is cheap is because it's plentiful;
| there's a lot of competition to supply it. But there's
| only one Suez canal and sailing around Africa is much
| worse. So you would expect Egypt to be extracting a
| significant portion of the value the Suez canal adds.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| So... if somebody gets a monopoly on the water supply to
| an area, you think a price hike is reasonable?
|
| Oh, wait, water's already a monopoly:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
| lizknope wrote:
| The houses just 100 yards away from me have wells for
| water. There is a large upfront cost of making the well
| but after that you have "free" water other than the
| electricity for the pump.
| fest wrote:
| In some countries (Latvia being the example I'm familiar
| with), water from artesian wells is considered a limited
| resource and it's taxed.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| The subject was predicting the cost of the boat getting
| stuck by comparing to the known cost to Egypt. The moral
| aspects of the water situation don't transfer across the
| analogy unless you also think that Egypt are charging
| less than they could because they think they have a moral
| obligation to shipping companies.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| 1. We're not talking about what's reasonable, but what's
| expected.
|
| 2. This isn't like a monopoly on water supply, because
| the ships don't have to go this way. To make the analogy
| work you'd have to add something like "everybody already
| has a well, but supplying tap water is cheaper than using
| a well". In such a situation, a water company that's
| maximizing profits would charge just a little bit less
| than using a well, and while it would annoy people it
| wouldn't harm them.
|
| 3. The government stops water companies from gouging for
| the good of the citizens, which isn't a factor here.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Everybody has access to rainwater, except the people who
| don't. I think the analogy works quite well.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| There is no major city with two independant water
| supplies, with their own sets of pips, purification
| systems and suers. Thays what water supply means. So no,
| there is no competition, and a supermarket water bottle
| is not competition.
| mywittyname wrote:
| You're forgetting about the stick, namely, the literally
| armies backing these massive shipping companies.
|
| If you're going to run an extortion racket, you need the
| power to secure yourself against the inevitable
| challenges to your station. Egypt is in no position to
| handle and armed threat from the US, China, or even most
| European nations. Their government would be toppled and a
| sympathetic one would be installed who would lower
| shipping prices to something on the cheap side of fair.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Ha! I never thought I'd see a patio-style charge more to
| a govt. Only on hn...
| creato wrote:
| Someone else in one of these canal threads said that
| Egypt charges slightly less than it would cost to sail
| around Africa. If that's true, that Egypt is probably
| capturing around as much value as is possible from the
| canal.
| CalChris wrote:
| Quite a bit less.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwOZOb90fM
| creato wrote:
| That example was pretty idealized, starting and ending
| very close to the canal. Most voyages are probably not
| affected quite as starkly by the canal, and I doubt the
| canal can or does charge ships based on their overall
| itinerary.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| Depends.. their fees are likely based on the saved
| time/cost of circling Africa, and calculated so as not to
| encourage other nations to construct workarounds
| themselves (if that's even geographically feasible).. not
| on the cost of their service being down once people are
| already committed to it.
| tehjoker wrote:
| The suez is the site of massive imperial intervention.
| The Suez crisis was precipitated when Egypt nationalized
| the canal. Western militaries and economic leverage are
| deployed to keep the prices low for the benefit of those
| governments.
|
| It's a huge mistake to regard any international trade in
| the middle east as regulated by simple supply and demand
| curves. This is a site of world geostrategic focus,
| usually at the expense of the people that live there.
| azernik wrote:
| It's not 100% negative - clever Egyptian governments have
| managed to charge an extra "price" in diplomatic and
| geopolitical advantage. e.g. using selective closures as
| a weapon, selective opening to military traffic as an
| incentive. You just have to be careful not to take
| actions that affects _everyone_ , like a massive and
| "unreasonable" price hike; these invite the kind of
| great-power consensus against you that is very dangerous.
|
| (Interestingly, both have been practiced towards Israel
| at different times, as the countries have gone from
| bitter enemies to cautiously aligned against both Iran
| and Sunni Islamism of the Brotherhood/Hamas flavor.)
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Pretty sure there are literal treaties in place. It's not
| simple supply and demand.
| iso1210 wrote:
| > 2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that
| nay spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g.
| some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere,
| some supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere,
| etc
|
| And some retailers and suppliers may have gained customers
| throwawayfire wrote:
| > The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals
|
| In general, temporary disruption has some long-term
| positive economic effects (which is directly why
| 'disruption' is valued in Silicon Valley).
|
| For example, during London Tube Strikes, commuters find
| different and more efficient routes and 5% ended up
| permanently changing their route on public transport:
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tube-
| strike...
| mgfist wrote:
| Yup, just think of covid. It has accelerated digitization
| of the world in an unprecedented way, amongst the many
| other world changes it has caused.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| Think of the EverGiven as global shipping's chaos
| monkey....
| sidpatil wrote:
| This reminds me of annealing, and why it's implemented as
| a technique for finding optima.
| piyh wrote:
| I'm not blocking the canal, I'm testing robustness!
|
| Also in the big picture with covid not being as deadly as
| it could have been, could serve as a nice dress rehearsal
| for a captain trips.
| djhn wrote:
| We theoretically may have avoided, for the next few
| decades, the risk of a truly dangerous infectious disease
| being underestimated, something halfway between Covid and
| extinction-level threat.
| gt565k wrote:
| This happened with the bridge collapse on I-85 in Atlanta
| [1]
|
| I used to take the access road parallel to the bridge and
| avoid a lot of traffic that was south bound. When the
| bridge collapsed and I-85 was blocked off, everyone
| learned about the parallel access road, and it now became
| a cluster of a traffic hot zone too.
|
| Prior to that, a lot of people were not aware of the
| alternate route.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_co
| llapse
| playingchanges wrote:
| I've seen this happen to a lot of my favorite shortcuts
| in the east bay since the introduction of waze.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > some retailer may have lost a customer who went
| elsewhere, some supplier may have lost a retailer who went
| elsewhere, etc
|
| But then that also created profits for another supplier!
| slg wrote:
| And the increase in profits of that second supplier might
| surpass the losses of the first supplier if the customer
| made their original decision based on cost. You can frame
| this as increasing economic output. Let's break all the
| canals[1].
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken
| _window
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| But the customer will end up paying more! It's a never-
| ending problem!
|
| (Increasing economic outputs by breaking all canals is
| the perfect example of why I'm always worried about
| gradient descent)
| social_quotient wrote:
| I'm gonna assume the insurance companies will know by the
| time this is all over.
| ramblerman wrote:
| What does such a number mean without context?
|
| Imagine a toy example: 2 bakers in a street. John and Jill.
| John has a heart attack and his bakery is closed for the week.
|
| - John gets nothing that week, from his perspective you could
| say he lost a week of sales
|
| - The people in the street lose Johns cakes that week, but most
| are ok with going to Jill, as they are close enough. 50% go to
| jill, and the other 50 decide to save the money.
|
| - Jill gains 50% of johns customers for the week.
|
| How would would you even assess the "global damage" in such an
| example for 1 street. Let alone the global economy.
|
| The money is there to drive things, pulling it out from one
| perspective is like looking at one weight in a neural network.
| inetknght wrote:
| Not only does Jill gain 50% of John's customers _for the
| week_ , but let's say that 20% of those customers decide that
| they actually _prefer_ Jill 's goods and stay as customers of
| Jill even after John has re-opened.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Yes, but some of Jill's customers come at lunch and
| couldn't afford to wait in the longer lines. Those
| customers now go to John's having waited a few days to look
| for an alternative. Jill gets 20% of John's clientele, but
| John gets more [impatient] customers than ever!
|
| There will probably be some additional flow of customers as
| people realise they're too lazy to walk to Jill's/John's,
| Jill's was only better when they were doing the extra trade
| (freshness), or that Jill's is back to being quicker
| service (and then you have a chaotic effect as more people
| drift back the wait time gets longer).
|
| The potential complexities of such simple systems are
| fascinating.
| yrral wrote:
| But isn't "worth of goods delayed" a reasonable figure?
|
| For example, if there is a total of X shipping capacity a year,
| and no reasonably priced alternatives (or extra capacity
| available via rail/air/etc), then disrupting $Y worth of goods
| for D days reduces the total amount of goods that can be traded
| that year by $Y*D.
|
| Or is there something I'm missing here?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The part you are missing is that shipping capacity/year is
| not hard capped.
| Shivetya wrote:
| the livestock loss will be interesting to research as it was
| highlighted there was a significant number of ships carry live
| cargo.
|
| Odd, the Sun has a great article on this floating job
|
| https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14484562/suez-canal-ship-reflo...
| omarhaneef wrote:
| There is a term for the cost of just holding something you
| can't move: the carrying costs. Different commodities have
| different carrying costs, so you can look at the forward prices
| for wheat, oil, pork bellies and so on and get a sense for how
| much it costs to hold on to something for a week or a month
| etc.
|
| (On rare occasions the curve is inverted)
|
| It won't tell you how much it costs this tanker to delay
| delivery by a week but it will tell you on average how much
| "the market" values a week's delay.
|
| It is still a chore to go through and tally all the goods but I
| think a few main goods (oil, wheat, coffee etc) would account
| for a large chunk of it and if the carrying costs as a whole
| would give a sense of the order-of-magnitude of the economic
| loss.
|
| The loss itself may be distributed between various risk sharing
| parties like insurance companies and so forth.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which,
| while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me_
|
| Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over
| the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking
| heads are usually pushing some sort of _narrative_.
| Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things,
| and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes
| happens to the producers in a reality TV show. The aim of their
| manipulation and spin seems to be mainly to keep up the level
| of drama, just as in a reality TV show.
| dustingetz wrote:
| principle agent problem and always has been ... what's
| stunning is that civilization manages to create some amount
| of value despite this ... imagine what the world would be
| like if humans learned how to actually cooperate at scale and
| maximize long term in an antifragile way
| airstrike wrote:
| In my bedroom as a young teenager I used to think a
| worldwide event which affected every person equally, like
| finding life in another planet, would surely usher in a new
| era of common interest and a shared view that we're all but
| the same thing: human.
|
| I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed is as
| essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and without
| a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized for
| breaking it), selfishness wins.
|
| The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining
| expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.
| lukifer wrote:
| I had high hopes for a pro-social silver lining around
| the pandemic as well, but it's simply too distant and
| indirect (especially given that the outcomes ranged so
| widely to those infected: from death, to the worst flu
| ever, to no symptoms at all).
|
| What gives me hope is the fact that our species has
| altruism at all, even if it isn't as widespread as we
| would like; it's evidence that cooperation is at least
| _sometimes_ a competitive advantage. Looking at nature,
| we see both symbiosis and predation as successful
| survival strategies. The tension between Good and Evil we
| will have with us always; the bad news is that Good will
| never definitively win, but the good news is that neither
| will Evil.
| 1996 wrote:
| > I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed
| is as essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and
| without a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized
| for breaking it), selfishness wins.
|
| It's not the baker empathy that brings you bread, but his
| greed
|
| > The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining
| expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society.
|
| The pandemic makes me hope more people will see
| governments for what they are: restricting their freedoms
| for no good reasons, so it's better to starve the beast.
| rbobby wrote:
| They are amazing at knowing why the DJI moved up/down. Just
| for yesterday though. I think for tomorrow you have to
| subscribe.
| [deleted]
| diegocg wrote:
| Real economics is boring for most people and the only way to
| make it attractive to the masses is to be sensationalistic.
| Mainstream financial news has never been good and never will
| be.
| lukifer wrote:
| Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to
| distort reality and craft narratives, including framing
| what is allowed to considered "real economics".
| Judgmentality wrote:
| > Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to
| distort reality and craft narratives, including framing
| what is allowed to considered "real economics".
|
| You're not wrong, but you could replace "economics" with
| almost anything and it would still be a valid (and
| usually meaningful, although context matters) statement.
|
| > Real engineering includes game-theoretic incentives to
| distort reality and craft narratives, including framing
| what is allowed to [be] considered "real engineering"
|
| I mean how else are you going to push back against the
| clueless PMs who can't be bothered to learn how to code?
|
| > Real art includes game-theoretic incentives to distort
| reality and craft narratives, including framing what is
| allowed to be considered "real art"
|
| Of course, how else do you expect to create value for
| something unique that is not easily priced by the market?
|
| > Real science includes game-theoretic incentives to
| distort reality and craft narratives, including framing
| what is allowed to be considered "real science"
|
| I'd say this accurately describes academia. Honestly this
| last one is eerily insightful.
| impalallama wrote:
| That's just news to be. Random loose correlation of events
| plotted into a narrative.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Facts are supposed give rise to an emergent narrative. That
| is good journalism. What we have in 2021, are people
| curating facts and only including those that fit their pre-
| determined narrative.
| lukifer wrote:
| While it would be naive to pretend that pre-determined
| narratives aren't a huge factor, I think that model
| leaves something out: that journalists and organizations
| are often incentivized to distort the facts into
| _arbitrary_ narratives, based not on values or ideology,
| but on virality and cognitive /emotional stickiness.
| "Person X is a hero" and "Person X is a villain" will
| _both_ tend to outcompete nuance ( "Person X is flawed
| but well-intentioned and has done both good and bad
| things.").
| stcredzero wrote:
| _journalists and organizations are often incentivized to
| distort the facts into arbitrary narratives_
|
| Those aren't _arbitrary_. They are often pre-decided by
| higher ups in the company, or pre-decided as the
| prevailing groupthink in some forum or mailing list.
| People have been calling this stuff out online for
| _years_! Funnily enough, it stays out of the
| consciousness of normal people, because it 's never
| covered in the mainstream news. Invariably, the people
| doing the exposing are then labeled something unsavory,
| so very few people bother to look into it. Some of this
| stuff is bunk. However, some of it is clearly real, and
| kinda disgusting.
|
| Stuff like this has even been going on since the 80's:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
| WalterSear wrote:
| Worse: the narrative is curated to elicit pre-determined
| emotional reactions.
| stcredzero wrote:
| In other words: Reality TV!
| anticristi wrote:
| > Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news
| over the years taken on the feel of reality television?
|
| I like to look at the bright side: The world has caught up
| with Egyptian geography. :)
| lisper wrote:
| Drama sells better than facts.
| sharken wrote:
| I wish it wasn't so, but it is.
|
| Early on it was reported that it could take weeks to reopen
| the passage, with a cost of billions to the world trade.
| Now, just one week later it's open again, barely enough
| time to make the alternate route a good idea.
|
| These rather unrealistic projections seem to have started
| with the Coronavirus reporting and is an interesting
| phenomenon in itself.
| arwineap wrote:
| I don't think they had a previous sprint's velocity to
| base their estimates on; this was unprecedented.
|
| And honestly, had the ship still been stuck on wed, tide
| would not be as high for another moon cycle; further
| complicating.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I am not sure the projections were unrealistic. The full
| picture simply wasn't known or even knowable. The best
| likely scenario with the known information was a few
| hours; the worst likely scenario was weeks.
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| Boring, facts and research based industry/financial news
| exists. But it can cost upwards of a couple hundred
| thousand dollars per year. If you want real news, you'll
| have to pay for it.
| srverma wrote:
| What are your recommendations for real news? I've heard
| FT, WSJ, and the economist, and am looking to finally
| commit and sign up instead of relying on free. You get
| what you pay for is true in this case, and I don't wanna
| put drama based narratives in my head, which form my
| perception of the world.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The FT:
|
| - Good if you care about mostly business in the developed
| world (Europe and US). - Really, really, really good
| features, solid visualisation, and a fairly wide breath
| of writers in terms of opinions.
|
| The Economist:
|
| - Very opinionated, but extremely diverse coverage of
| lots of different parts of the world (I've never come
| across a better English language source on Africa, for
| example). - Weekly, so if you only want to read news
| occasionally, it may work for you
|
| WSJ:
|
| - Pretty good coverage overall, the US business/tech
| coverage is much better (in depth) than the FT's - Their
| opinion section is like the NYT in bizarro-world.
|
| In terms of price FT > Economist > WSJ.
|
| It really depends on what you're looking for, but the FT
| works for me as a daily driver (I ended my subscription
| to the Economist, and only signed up for the WSJ about a
| month ago).
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| I meant more industry specific news rather than general
| news. Organizations that cover niche topics, usually
| catering towards businesses or investors rather than the
| general public. In my case it's things like Covenant
| Review, Xtract Research, Debtwire, Reorg, etc. There are
| likely similar services catering to shipping and
| logistics that would provide better analysis on this
| situation than most general news organizations.
| rebuilder wrote:
| What kind of news publication costs several hundred K a
| year to subscribe to?
| TheSkyHasEyes wrote:
| It's too soon to determine this right now.
| craftinator wrote:
| According to this paper by the National Bureau of Economic
| Research, the average loss of value per day of delay from the
| cargo on these ships is between 0.6 and 2.2 percent [1].
| According to other research I've seen, somewhere between 12%
| and 30% of daily global sea trade goes through the Suez Canal.
| Anyone want to do the math?
|
| 1) https://www.nber.org/digest/jun12/time-trade-barrier
| skohan wrote:
| I work on an IoT product, and operations is already talking
| about potential production delays because of this. There's
| already a global plastic shortage, and this is only going to
| make things worse.
| oasisbob wrote:
| > There's already a global plastic shortage
|
| Whoa, bad time to be in IoT then, since they're pretty much
| entirely plastic and a few (also probably short) components!
|
| https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/plastic-scrap-
| demand-...
|
| https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2021/03/10/10615.
| ..
| hinkley wrote:
| The silver lining there is that more companies should be able
| to absorb a double delivery when three weeks of goods all
| show up at once.
|
| Most businesses can't just skip a week and then process twice
| as much raw goods to catch up.
| beansontoast wrote:
| boo!
| belinder wrote:
| Was it reported how it got stuck in the first place?
| sjm wrote:
| The ship's operators blamed a sandstorm and high winds.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| High winds + sandstorm reduced visibility.
| Pyrodogg wrote:
| This is a pretty good synopsis of the situation as of Sunday
|
| https://youtu.be/5iyn2q6s1Sk
| rjzzleep wrote:
| They blamed a sandstorm, but the Taiwanese operator blamed the
| Japanese owner for it. And the Japanese operator agrees.
| Basically, we're not getting the real answer to this question.
| Also, the following:
|
| > However, the chairman of Egypt's Suez Canal Authority said
| Saturday, without giving details, that weather conditions "were
| not the main reasons" for the grounding, and that "there may
| have been technical or human reasons," the BBC reported. An
| investigation is ongoing.
| navbaker wrote:
| If it turns out to be human error related, how much liability
| falls on the actual ship's captain versus the required canal
| pilot?
| unixhero wrote:
| It does not work like that on the seas. Maritime legal
| conventions are are ratified by 99% countries on the globe.
| A shipowner is alwayd insured against these things, and the
| i surance company is also insured (reinsurance). So nobody
| will end up in a lifetime of serfdom because of this.
|
| Shit hits the fan on the high seas all the time. We
| nornally don't hear about it in regular media.
| tc313 wrote:
| It matters whose insurance company pays, though.
| artursapek wrote:
| TIL about insurance insurance
| toxik wrote:
| Google "Costa Concordia" for a simulation of that scenario.
| dubbel wrote:
| Not at all comparable, because in this case as far as I
| know two pilots were on board. Pilots are required for
| the passage through the Suez Canal.
|
| Usually the pilots are giving steering commands to the
| helmsman, but the Captain still has the final
| responsibility for the ship.
| jowsie wrote:
| If you're up for a bit of a humorous take on the matter,
| this video is great;
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9KBwqGxTI
| gorkish wrote:
| Given that any human being crewing this ship or working in
| the Suez very likely lacks 59 billion dollars, the answer
| to this question is very probably "It doesn't matter."
| kuschku wrote:
| Technically the pilot is in control of the ship and bears
| all liability at that time (or rather, the canal
| authority).
|
| But it's an open secret the canal pilots are just slacking
| off, so a court may as well rule with the de facto
| situation and hold the captain and the operator
| responsible.
| polote wrote:
| There is no way the only reason was because of the wind. I
| mean if because of strong wind boats become uncontrollable we
| would have this kind of event pretty frequently. So it is
| clearly something else, (which may have been emphasized by a
| strong wind, or have been triggered by a strong wind)
| Symmetry wrote:
| High winds and the hydrodynamics of large boats in small
| channels.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The short version I got is that a sand storm threw them
| slightly of course, while reacting they oversteered a bit,
| becoming too fast, which then lead to different fluid dynamic
| processes, once they were out of the deep water they couldn't
| do anything anymore.
|
| But detailed analysis yet has to be done.
| doogerdog wrote:
| They got traffic flowing sooner than I guessed they could. Three
| container ships and a livestock carrier have left Bitter lake and
| are entering the channel right now, heading for Suez. The third
| one in the group is the Ever Globe, the same size as the stuck
| ship.
|
| I had thought it would take most of today to make sure the
| channel was clear for the deepest draught vessels. The dredge
| crews must have done a good job keeping their discharge out of
| the main channel.
|
| Vesselfinder.com is a hoot to follow for this kind of disaster.
| cybert00th wrote:
| Er, this party ain't over 'til the weight-challenged lady's
| cleared the exit door
| mckirk wrote:
| I suppose the Suez Canal is going to find out what rush-hour
| traffic is like.
| oftheoaks wrote:
| shame
| markherring wrote:
| has anyone done the analysis based on the backlog of ships
| waiting to pass whether it is worth going around Africa? ie. If
| you are #130+ in the backlog go around?
| Stormwalker wrote:
| Any info how it was freed? Article does not mention any
| solutions.
| vnxli wrote:
| WSJ posted an article with some more detail.
|
| TLDR; high tide and dredging
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/ship-blocking-suez-canal-is-par...
| el_duderino wrote:
| https://archive.is/DD9PB
| garaetjjte wrote:
| I'm somewhat disappointed we didn't get to observe huge container
| lifting operation. https://xkcd.com/611/
| pagade wrote:
| Nice gif showing the ship movement on FleetMon:
| https://twitter.com/yukihilog/status/1376377678626844676
| rodiger wrote:
| Does Evergreen get fined for something like this? Is there
| enforceable law here? Or just say sorry and life goes on?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Ships going through the canal are commanded by Egyption pilots,
| so it's doubtful that Evergreen has any responsibility.
|
| That would make the Egyptian government responsible. But I'd be
| stunned if it paid or apologized to anyone.
| rsstack wrote:
| Suez Canal policy (enforced by contracts) removes liability
| from the Authority and its pilots. Also worth noting that the
| pilots don't control the helm directly. That doesn't mean it
| wasn't their fault :) We may never know.
| kevstev wrote:
| Iirc, the actual captain does not pilot through the harbor,
| there are specific pilots that take your vessel through. So it
| seems unlikely that there would be any liability to the ship
| crew or owner.
| zeristor wrote:
| YouTube video by Cheif Makoi pointed out that the Master of
| the ship is responsible for any issue caused by the ship,
| even if commanded by a pilot.
|
| https://youtu.be/ltdHRdtEHE4
|
| Obviously I am not a legal expert
| [deleted]
| zeristor wrote:
| I do hope it tooted its horn to celebrate.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Now, understand all those ships will take a long time to pass the
| canal and then even longer time processing at their ports of
| destination which will also have their schedules completely
| disrupted.
|
| Does anybody know at what percentage of capacity the canal
| usually operates?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Apparently they are going to double throughput for the next few
| days compared to normal traffic, so they had some spare
| capacity.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Double throughput means it will still take about 4-5 days to
| clear the backlog (new ships are arriving and queuing up even
| as the backlog is being cleared).
| dksf wrote:
| Free as in beer?
| cwhiz wrote:
| That's too bad. Now the hysterical media will have to find
| something else to get worked up about.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Oh, this was actually a fun disaster compared to almost
| anything else!
|
| If only we could live in a world where the worst international
| news story is a big boat being temporarily stuck with people
| making silly memes about it.
| cwhiz wrote:
| It's not that it wasn't fun. It's that the media goes into
| absurd hyperbole on every subject.
|
| This boat was going to be stuck for weeks, and maybe forever!
|
| ...and now they'll shift to absurd hyperbole on some other
| topic that is potentially more damaging.
| krisoft wrote:
| The company tasked to salvage the ship said that they will
| use dredgers and tugs and will try to pull the ship free.
| They also said that if that doesn't work they will have to
| lighten the ship, which can take weeks.
|
| After that it was entirely fair and true to report that "it
| might take weeks to get the ship unstuck." Just because we
| got lucky and the simpler, faster, plan worked doesn't make
| such reporting hyperbolic.
| cwhiz wrote:
| The company said they could have it out within days, or
| it could take weeks. So what do media organizations
| report?
|
| "Suez Canal could be blocked for weeks."
|
| Always err on the side of hyperbole and extreme
| negativity.
| jasperry wrote:
| I, for one, was thankful that we had something relatively non-
| polarizing in the news to discuss. "Stuck boat needs to get
| unstuck" is the kind of practical problem that people on both
| sides of the fence can agree on :)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| My local newspaper's comments has people who think the boat's
| name is Evergreen, not Ever Given ("haha stupid media can't
| even get that right") and that it's a reference to Hillary
| Clinton's Secret Service code name and that Means
| Something(tm). (https://imgur.com/a/1CjsCsl)
|
| Nothing's non-polarizing anymore.
| cwhiz wrote:
| The word "EVERGREEN" is painted on the side of the boat
| about 400 feet long and maybe 60 feet tall. I think it's
| fair to misinterpret that as the name of the boat, and not
| the name of the company that owns the boat. Especially so
| because the two names are so similar.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's fair to be confused over the name a little.
|
| It's a bit less fair to think it's Hillary Clinton's
| Secret Service codeword painted on the side of the ship
| to advertise child trafficking.
| bnralt wrote:
| It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days
| ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true
| (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of
| using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a
| reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of
| salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will
| actually happen after the initial media storm passes.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282
| dentemple wrote:
| The HN crowd tends to be heavily bearish on pretty much
| everything here, and there's an ironic lack of respect for
| experts in fields beyond those few HN favorite topics (e.g.,
| low-level programming languages).
|
| So, the difference in the expected outcome here doesn't
| surprise me.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Tesla and SpaceX?
| Robotbeat wrote:
| HN tends to be pretty bearish on Tesla, although overall
| bullish on SpaceX.
| faefox wrote:
| Yeah, but sitting around and reserving judgement wouldn't make
| for a very interesting comment section. :)
| puddingnomeat wrote:
| I think this is wrong.
|
| Someone says "it COULD be stuck for weeks"
|
| It gets unstuck earlier, fine. Doesn't invalidate the
| possibility.
|
| The criticism is moot. If anyone had made bets, then I'd take
| both more seriously.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We see this all the time with political polling.
|
| "Oh, Nate Silver said Trump only had a 30% chance of winning
| the election, but he did, so Nate Silver is an idiot!"
| EricE wrote:
| Nate Silver wasn't just a little off - he was massively off
| outside of accepted norms for polling.
|
| Multiple times no less.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| No, he really wasn't. In 2016 he was one of the most
| optimistic of the major poll aggregators on Trump's
| chances; he had Trump at 30% when others had him at much
| lower odds.
|
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-
| gav...
|
| > Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had
| Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral
| College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New
| York Times put Trump's odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2
| percent and less than 1 percent.
|
| As for 2020:
|
| https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent-
| great-...
|
| > This year was definitely a little weird, given that the
| vote share margins were often fairly far off from the
| polls (including in some high-profile examples such as
| Wisconsin and Florida). But at the same time, a high
| percentage of states (likely 48 out of 50) were "called"
| correctly, as was the overall Electoral College and
| popular vote winner (Biden). And that's usually how polls
| are judged: Did they identify the right winner?
|
| (He also doesn't _do_ the _polling_. He 's an analyst,
| not a pollster.)
| EricE wrote:
| Lol - quoting himself to back up his performance?
|
| How about linking to others and not him defending his
| performance. Of course he's going to have excuses.
|
| Live a little and maybe even pick sources that might not
| align politically with you too for an alternate POV.
| Prevents "surprises". Because as someone with no love
| lost on either party the election results were not a
| surprise - you just have to look across all sources, not
| just the ones that tell you what you want to hear.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| You're most welcome to "link to others" so we can discuss
| their specific critiques.
|
| The "aggregate the polls" approach appears to have called
| 48/50 races correctly, so I'm fairly comfortable with it.
| keenreed wrote:
| We got lucky. But several weeks was real scenario. If this boat
| would leak, ruptured, broke in half...
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I think most people were reserving judgement.
|
| But judgement reservers aren't prone to jump on message boards
| and shout "guess we'll have to wait and see" to the world.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I think a lot of that is because of this one quote and how the
| news (and the public) handled it
| (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/24/ever-given-a-massive-
| cargo-s...):
|
| > _" We can't exclude it might take weeks, depending on the
| situation," said Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company
| Boskalis._
|
| Of course that message got oversimplified as it spread. "Can't
| exclude" is a pretty important qualifier that suggests that
| it's an unlikely worst case.
|
| But that nuance already was lost in the title of that same
| article: "Cargo ship blocking Suez Canal could take weeks to
| move". If you were to read only that title, you might think it
| is likely to take weeks.
|
| TLDR: People thought it would take weeks because that's what
| they were hearing from other people.
| jeremymcanally wrote:
| Also, if we're being honest, a pack of software nerds on a
| website don't have the deep expertise on every topic like they
| think they do (speaking as a software nerd on a website myself
| :)).
|
| The stuff that gets posted here sometimes is...fascinating.
| craftinator wrote:
| To be fair, there were a number of people chiming in who were
| claiming to be experienced in that area (ex Navy captains,
| people who did dredging ops, etc). One of the big things that
| changed the timeline was that the highest tide of the month
| occurred yesterday; if not, I imagine that ship would be
| stuck for another month!
| EricE wrote:
| Yes - Mother Nature deserves the lions share of credit for
| extraditing the ship!
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Being expert in adjacent domains is sometimes worse than
| being clueless. The ratio of actual to assumed expertise
| seems to get worse. Navy captains vs shipping boats,
| geologists vs climate scientists, programmers vs cpu
| design, etc etc. You can very easily not understand
| subtleties, comment on a thing, and then _people listen to
| you_.
| xxs wrote:
| >programmers vs cpu design
|
| You went a bit too far. I'd presume a lot of programmers
| do know CPU architecture well. While not common some of
| them to work on boring web platforms, some still do. Also
| most CPU architects would be decent programmers to begin
| with.
|
| Programming has not changed all that much and it was not
| so long time ago that programmers routinely knew assembly
| and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode took...
| Nowadays it might be regarded as an arcane art by most,
| of course.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| In all of those examples, its possible the person DOES
| have a good understanding of the adjacent domain. And in
| all examples, it is possible they will miss some
| subtleties, but people will give their opinions a lot of
| weight.
|
| Just as an example I see a lot: branch prediction. Some
| programmers don't know about it at all. Many do know
| about it, but think that it still works in some form like
| "assume the branch will go the same way it did last
| time". Which is how it worked in the 1990s. Then it
| evolved, and then it evolved two more times. Today there
| is something like a neural network that learns how the
| branches will go. (And careful, im a programmer so I may
| be communicating some subtleties wrong there!)
| xxs wrote:
| >Today there is something like a neural network that
| learns how the branches will go.
|
| More like history, where the call comes from. Oddly
| enough the price of branch misdirection has become lower
| as not the entire pipeline needs to be thrown away but
| also due to hyper threading taking the slack.
|
| Flip note: with 'recent' developments of Spectre, one'd
| think branch prediction got into the lime light. Truth be
| told, though, not many would be able to write constant
| time 'fizz buzz' (can try it on your own, bonus points to
| having constant time int->string conversion)
| lstamour wrote:
| > Programming has not changed all that much and it was
| not so long time ago that programmers routinely knew
| assembly and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode
| took...
|
| That statement partly highlights the problem. It assumes
| linear execution, when in reality, for most performance-
| critical products, out-of-order execution is the reality.
| For example:
| https://smist08.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/out-of-order-
| instru...
|
| Most programmers on Apple platforms don't actually think
| about execution order -- because they don't have to --
| but also because Apple is actively using Clang to
| discourage assembly and writing for specific CPU
| architectures. It makes Apple's job of releasing new
| silicon that much easier if they don't have to worry
| about breaking existing software custom written for a
| previous architecture.
|
| And this still assumes a one-to-one relationship between
| the code you're writing and the computer it's running on
| or designed for. When you get to the cloud, or cloud
| functions, that breaks down even further. If using
| Heroku, for example, you don't even have to consider how
| to deploy your code and you can make it pretty far
| running a production service.
|
| It's possible for closely related fields to still have
| very large differences. Consider drivers and cars: The
| more automation is introduced, the less we might need to
| know about what the automation is doing for us under the
| hood. Anti-Lock Breaking (ABS) in cars might be a simple
| example where folks know about it because there's a light
| on the dash and instructions in driver's ed. But if we
| didn't have those indicators, how often would anyone know
| about it and other such features? Some technologies
| remain undocumented until discovered later by
| experimentation, the VW diesels come to mind. Specific
| chip designers likely know more than your average
| programmer, just as specific car manufacturers likely
| know more about their products than drivers would.
| xxs wrote:
| > It assumes linear execution, when in reality
|
| This is quite a blatant assumption on its right own (and
| very far from the truth). The programming, itself, has
| not changed. But of course, modern hardware is not a von
| neumann machine. Writing lock-free datastructure is not
| that different programming, it requires a lot more
| attention and (possibly) experience but the basic premise
| is still the same.
|
| Understanding memory topology/hierarchy & latency,
| concurrency, branch (mis)prediction, cache coherency
| should be a minimum for anyone who comments on CPU
| architecture. I did mention Assembly and without some
| knowledge on the target architecture it's rather
| pointless to comment on, either.
|
| I encourage most developers to at least understand that
| memory is not actually 'random access', which makes
| derefernce not cheap - but accessing data placed together
| is next to free as it is likely to hit L1.
|
| > discourage assembly and writing for specific CPU
| architecture
|
| I found out that I could not reliably beat a standard
| compiler writing everyday Assembly around K6-2 years.
| Yet, still some inner loops can be carefully hand
| optimized. The point is that there are plenty of
| programmers who would be able to understand modern
| architecture and to me basic understanding is needed
| unless the job is just gluing code.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| And the aging of their experience matters. I mentioned
| upthread that I was trained as a merchant marine officer.
| However that was three decades ago and while a lot of my
| training will still apply, industry practices move on and
| a lot of the stuff I learned is long since outdated. A
| lot of times I start to type a reply to something
| relevant and have to smack myself into remembering that
| things are probably done differently in 2021 :-)
| maxerickson wrote:
| It took them a few days to dredge away meters of sand. Why
| would it take more than a few additional days to dredge
| away another couple meters of sand?
|
| Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but not
| that much harder.
| EricE wrote:
| >Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but
| not that much harder.
|
| lol - cut and fill on a slope is not trivial. It's more
| of an exponential function than a linear one for the
| amount of material removed the deeper you have to go
| down. They dodged a HUGE bullet with the highest tides
| happening this weekend. If they had gone beyond a Tuesday
| with the drop in tides each day as the moon got further
| away it would have been sketchy if they could have gotten
| ahead of the tide or not.
|
| The timing of this couldn't have been tighter. Thankfully
| they came out on the good side :)
| maxerickson wrote:
| The seasonal variation in the tides is like 20
| centimeters. The draft of the ship is more than 10 meters
| at the bow.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Yeah, but on ship this size 400x60x0.2=4800 tons of
| difference! I'm somewhat exaggerating because ship hull
| isn't cuboid, but it is still likely equivalent to
| removing around hundred containers.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Only a portion it was grounded, not the full length of
| the ship.
|
| Someone linked a BBC article stating that they shifted
| 27,000 cubic meters of sand, so there you go, they could
| likely remove a meter under the whole thing in a similar
| amount of time (probably longer to cover area instead of
| digging down, but that isn't what they would need to do).
| EricE wrote:
| Good thing we are talking normal monthly tidal variations
| (not seasonal) which vary by meters, not centimeters.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Not in Suez though.
|
| Yes, the high tide is a better opportunity to do it, the
| tides over the next couple of weeks are still within
| 20-30 cm. The worst day in the next 30 days is 60 cm
| below the highest.
|
| But maybe the dredge only made a few centimeters of
| difference running for 5 days, who knows.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| As someone who watches a few too many YouTube videos on all
| things space, I consider myself to be a leading cosmologist,
| astrophysicist, and rocket scientist. I can speak w/ great
| confidence to anyone who knows nothing about these subjects.
| patcon wrote:
| > I can speak w/ great confidence to anyone who knows
| nothing about these subjects.
|
| heh sorry, can't tell how serious you're being. but it
| tickles my brain that there's someone who would also vibe
| with that byline: _con artists_ :)
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I'm being serious if you know nothing about space :)
|
| Did you know my experimental observations of quantum
| gravity & string theory are as good, if not better, than
| the world's top scientists? If you print this comment on
| paper, I will have been published & peer reviewed, too!
| lstamour wrote:
| I see your tongue is still firmly in cheek here, as a
| brief Google Scholar search would reveal there are very
| few experiments available to observe quantum gravity and
| as far as I can tell, few studies of _mathematics_ ever
| bother considering the experimental observations that
| other scientists or engineers would require. In fact,
| another researcher wrote the following article in 2017 in
| plain language: https://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what-
| quantum-gravity-needs-... therefore what you're saying is
| roughly true if not exactly true? ;-)
|
| From that 2017 article:
|
| > You already know we haven't found anything yet--
| otherwise you'd have heard of it. But even null results
| are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us
| that some ideas--for example, that spacetime might be a
| regular lattice--are simply incompatible with
| observations.
|
| I would suggest that publishing and peer review requires
| an audience, therefore ... err, by publishing this I am
| actually peer-reviewing your work?! Drat! That makes me
| 0/2 then!
|
| To conclude my peer-review, I would like to see more
| details for reproduction, merely stating that you've
| performed experiments without providing the necessary
| observational data and steps to reproduce highlights the
| lack of originality in the paper you're proposing and
| therefore I would decline to publish. ;-)
| tomc1985 wrote:
| The Dunning-Kruger effect is real
| debaserab2 wrote:
| Ever since I discovered n-gate.com HN comments read a little
| different than they used to...
| thisistheend123 wrote:
| Yes, been following n-gate along with HN for years now ..
| n-gate gives a whole new perspective on HN comments and
| casts a light on dangers of taking an echo chamber too
| seriously ..
| lanstin wrote:
| Wow thanks for the link. That is too funny, a little.
| [deleted]
| DenisM wrote:
| Do tell?
| hartator wrote:
| This is some kind of weekly digest? I don't fully get it.
| acqq wrote:
| Never mind!
|
| Here
|
| https://www.patreon.com/ngate
|
| There's an offer of:
|
| Limited Series A (5 remaining) just EUR43.50 (+VAT) per
| month
|
| Limited Series B (7 remaining) just EUR431.50 (+VAT) per
| month
|
| or
|
| Limited Series C (1 remaining) just EUR862.50 (+VAT) per
| month
|
| Brilliant!
|
| (I must note that the circuit shown there is...
| somehow... inducing some negativity in me.... which
| probably isn't unintentional.)
|
| And the main site has an about page too, in all its
| glory:
|
| http://n-gate.com/about/
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| It's a weekly digest that makes fun of how absolutely
| full of shit (and themselves) HN posters are.
| polote wrote:
| Well the biggest luck event in this case, is that there was a
| dredger pretty close to the ship. If you dont have a dredger
| and you need to ship one there we would have wait much more
| time
| patentatt wrote:
| Knowing nothing about it, would it be safe to assume that the
| Suez Canal would always have a dredger around? Or is that not
| how that works?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I assume it's the same kind of luck that places gas
| stations near motorways.
| kparaju wrote:
| Yeah, they have dredgers around for maintenance of the
| canal. This clip was from at least 6 months ago.
| https://youtu.be/P6st0k7KJmk
|
| From the YouTube clip, it def seems like it's normal to see
| them when passing through the canal.
| pqb wrote:
| > A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck
| there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it
| out) didn't pan out as expected.
|
| That was what many investors thought - see crude oil market in
| last days. There were two tribes - one saying week and second
| month(s) to solve the problem with ship. One selling, because
| of optimistic perspective and obviously other buying for
| opposite reason. In the result the price was standing still on
| the "same" level.
| olalonde wrote:
| This happens a lot on HN. Another recent example which turned
| out to be dead wrong about Coinbase[0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459556
| prophesi wrote:
| Those comments were really helpful to me. HM did a great job at
| showing just how insanely large this ship is and why it will be
| difficult to get it unstuck. To a layman such as myself, a boat
| remaining stuck for almost an entire week sounds pretty absurd
| without that context.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| To the tinfoil layman it's funny, if I am not mistaken, that
| as soon as the President of Egypt ordered it to be unloaded
| they suddenly got it unstuck within the next 24 hours.
| mrfusion wrote:
| The media seems to exaggerate problems...
| malwarebytess wrote:
| Why do you say that? What was true is that if they couldn't
| get it out during the period surrounding king tide (which is
| now, peaking next high tide) then it would be a few weeks
| before conditions were as good.
|
| That's a factual take on things.
| Agentlien wrote:
| When this first got posted on HN I felt confident that I had
| absolutely no clue about the difficulties involved or how best
| to resolve the situation. I still stand by that assessment.
| politician wrote:
| On the other hand, they hired the best salvage company in the
| world to remove the ship, that company ran massive calculations
| on the loads in the ship, and then they determined the
| application of forces needed to dislodge the boat.
|
| I think the pendulum is swinging too far the other direction.
| "Look how easy it is. They just shook it loose" is the wrong
| lesson to take here, IMO.
| tomthe wrote:
| To be fair: Maersk, biggest shipping company in the world also
| came to the conclusion that it will take longer and sent their
| ships the way around africa. It's always a gamble and every
| outcome has it's probabilities.
| rantwasp wrote:
| that may still be the right choice given that now there is a
| huge backlog
| EricE wrote:
| Yes - just because they moved it that doesn't mean the
| delays instantly clear.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe
| weeks" scenerio. They were assembling the team for a litering
| operation (cranes etc) should the ship need to be partially
| unloaded. And a great many ships began to divert around africa,
| some of which may now be turning around. Certainly the shipping
| industry as a whole was headging against the "maybe weeks"
| option.
|
| Not everyone on HN is a software nerd. More than a few here
| have worked in the shipping and logistics industries.
| freeflight wrote:
| _> Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe
| weeks" scenerio._
|
| Which is the sensible thing to do in their position: Hope for
| the best, prepare for the worst.
| rini17 wrote:
| The canal has a limited capacity, so the backlog may go on
| for few weeks anyway.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| They've said they expect to clear it in 3-4 days.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I honestly love that it was freed using the "boring" solution. No
| need for any of the crazy solutions people proposed on the
| internet. Just careful and measured execution of proven
| techniques.
| tgv wrote:
| Not surprised. It's directly available, and there's a lot of
| experience. And the consequences and costs are known. But
| probably other companies were already working on alternatives.
| I wouldn't be surprised if Elon would send a small, custom
| built sub next week.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Is that before or after he tells the guy in charge of the
| salvage operation to shove the sub up his backside and go
| back to fiddling children?
| iab wrote:
| Precedent is after i believe
| hinkley wrote:
| On the down side, because the solution was so boring, they are
| likely to learn much less from this experience.
| [deleted]
| mildweed wrote:
| Choose Boring Technology
| ragebol wrote:
| Should make a company around that!
| mwgarcia wrote:
| It's the only practical solution really.
|
| Cranes - Likely on a barge, on a relatively narrow canal.
| That's quite precarious. And make that two for both sides
| (canal is impassable).
|
| Heavy lift helicopters - Even the few multiple automated cranes
| capable of handling a ship this size take days to unload it.
| Also these helicopters are quite expensive to operate.
|
| Floatation devices - See Costa Concordia salvage operations.
| Lots of consideration for structural stress. Lots of mounting
| points on the ship. Lots of actual engineering needed for the
| floatation devices themselves.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Cranes - the ones used in ports are absolutely massive. Not
| realistic.
|
| Helicopter not possible. Max lift is the M-26 at 44,000 lbs
| and containers are rated for about 60,000 loaded lbs.
|
| Flotation is unlikely due to lack of water depth. Bouyant
| force is based on displaced water.
|
| As long as the ship remained intact, dredging and tugging was
| almost certain to work. Ultimately a simple problem. Just a
| matter of time. Of course, keeping the ship intact wasn't a
| certainty, so even beyond economic pressures, moving quickly
| was important.
|
| They moved a bit slow at first before they realized how bad
| it really was. After that, it seemed like they did a great
| job getting the right experts involved and making it all
| happen about as quick as could be expected given all the
| logistics.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Heavy containers tend to be loaded further down in the
| ship.
| _ph_ wrote:
| Yes, this was what one would call the default approach of
| digging and tugging. I am very glad it worked. However, there
| was a distinct possibility, that this approach would not have
| worked, and I think all the discussions were about possible
| alternative approaches. If the high tide at full moon had not
| provided enough lift, then they would have had to figure out a
| way to unload the ship.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| Just yesterday they said it would take weeks. I feel like a lot
| of the messaging prior to it being unstuck might have
| been...constructed for financial reasons?
| [deleted]
| mrlonglong wrote:
| I was wondering about the sheer size of those ships. Could they
| get even bigger than 400 metres? Is there a limit?
| jokoon wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7r85ji/s...
| erostrate wrote:
| From this (very good) FT article
| https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...
|
| "But the specific engineering of container ships mean that they
| can't get longer; they have to get wider. An oil tanker is a
| shoe box with a lid: hull on the bottom, oil in the middle,
| deck on top. But a container ship is a shoebox without a lid:
| hull on the bottom, then containers all the way up. It's not as
| strong without the lid.
|
| There are definitely hydrodynamic forces in the open ocean,
| it's just that the ocean is usually in charge of them. And the
| biggest stress on a ship's hull in heavy weather happens along
| the longitudinal bending moment -- lengthwise, between the bow
| and the stern. The longer a ship gets, the worse the stress
| gets when a wave pushes up in the wrong place. As far as length
| goes for container ships, "we are at the limitations of welding
| and steel quality," says Lataire. "I will not say that it is
| impossible to weld thicker plates, but in a way this is the
| economic limit."
| Ansil849 wrote:
| So was the reason the ship became stuck because it was drawing a
| penis shape in its course path? Or was it getting stuck
| unrelated?
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Interesting. If I see correctly on https://www.vesselfinder.com/
| there are three big ships going into the canal north to south
| now. Seems a bit inefficient! To speak in TCP terms, they should
| increase their window size!
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I take that back, that was just for a couple of minutes. The
| windows size is actually huge!
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I do believe that this incident was a demonstration of how easy
| it would be to disrupt the world economy via terror.
| bArray wrote:
| It's not free yet [1]... Still time for something to go wrong.
| For example, it's entirely possible they did hull damage whilst
| dragging it out.
|
| [1] https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's free and has moved up the canal quite a bit now.
| bArray wrote:
| It seems to be out of immediate danger, but the canal is much
| longer after the rest-area. I imagine they'll pull it aside
| to inspect the hull in this area to ensure it won't sink
| further up the canal?
| cyberlab wrote:
| Looks like https://istheshipstillstuck.com/ has updated their
| message!
| politelemon wrote:
| And you get Rickrolled if you stay on the page long enough.
| loginatnine wrote:
| I got solidly caught as well. If you're lucky enough, you can
| also get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJIB1f7jk.
| Object(c.useEffect)((function() { var e =
| "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ";
| Math.random() > .999 && (e =
| "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJIB1f7jk"),
| setTimeout((function() { return
| window.location.href = e } ), 9e4) }
| pqdbr wrote:
| All of the sudden I had Rick Astley playing loudly in my
| computer and I was like "WTF?".
|
| Well played, well played.
| macintux wrote:
| Thank you, I was wondering how I ended up with two Ricks
| singing at me this morning.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| The real rickroll occurs after buying that page's NFT and
| realizing what they just did to you.
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| I wonder what their $59b cost is based on?
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| Me too! Seems quite excessive for such a simple website.
| mef wrote:
| I saw the figure "$400 million per hour" in some press
| coverage, probably that
| craftinator wrote:
| I've heard from multiple sources that about $9b per day in
| commerce goes through the Suez, so that's probably just $9b *
| number of days stuck. I imagine the cost is actually quite a
| bit more, as the ripple effect from this traffic jam will
| continue for at least another month while shipments are
| diverted or delayed until traffic pressure returns to normal.
| joosters wrote:
| It's not like the $9b of daily commerce that can't get
| through the canal is being set alight and tipped overboard,
| it will reach its destination in the end. _Some_ of that
| produce might have gone off, or the delay in its arrival
| causes knock-on costs, but the final cost is only going to
| be a fraction of that figure, not a large multiple!
| craftinator wrote:
| I agree that it won't be a large multiple, but, I do
| think it's naive to assume that it'll be a fraction of
| the cost. Consider the shear volume of stuff being
| transported. Millions of tons of goods across hundreds of
| delayed transports, some perishable, some with tight
| timeline requirements, some with tight contract
| requirements. And it's not like as soon as ships start
| moving again all of that cost will go away. Ships are
| still going to be diverted for weeks of not months to
| relieve traffic pressure.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| If it's _really_ time-critical, it 's shipped by air, not
| sea. Container ships being delayed by a few days by rough
| weather, port delays etc happens all the time, and we're
| looking at a week tops here even for directly impacted
| ships.
| skullx wrote:
| I would image the opposite tbh, that $9b of delayed goods
| per day is not lost, it's just delayed. Most of that goods,
| unless they are perishable goods, will sell like normal,
| just a bit later.
|
| There is obviously a loss here on increased costs and loss
| of sell opportunities due to the delay, but that figures
| are mega inflated IMO.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Also... ships are slow. The voyage from the Suez canal to
| Rotterdam or Hamburg is at least six days, so there was
| quite some time to prepare for a gap in supply.
| craftinator wrote:
| Well, this is a supply delay in hundreds of equally sized
| or larger ships. This is a delay in a majority of the
| global shipping industry of at LEAST a week, and shipping
| scheduling will be thrown off for months by this.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mf
| 705...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/meopv
| 9/s...
|
| That is a LOT of cargo that's suddenly going to arrive 2
| or 3 times later than expected. Huge economic impact. I
| really don't understand why people on HN are pushing so
| hard against the idea that this is just an economic blip.
|
| Is there anyone involved in the industry that can chime
| in?
| bombcar wrote:
| A better calculation is to see how much Egypt makes per day
| in Canal fees and use that as an estimate, as the canal
| fees are set to make it just a bit cheaper to use the canal
| vs the horn.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| $14M/day seems to be the usual media estimate. I think
| it's safe to say the knock-on effects of several hundred
| ships being delayed will be more than that.
| isolli wrote:
| Quick, time to buy the NFT they advertise at the bottom of
| their website before the excitement abates! /s
| [deleted]
| divbzero wrote:
| The website offers related book recommendations. I would also
| recommend Alex Madrigal's _Containers_ podcast series. [1] [2]
| [3]
|
| [1]:
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/containers/id120955917...
| "iTunes"
|
| [2]: https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg "SoundCloud"
|
| [3]: https://www.stitcher.com/show/containers "Stitcher"
| spiralx wrote:
| Somewhat related is the classic "How to Avoid Huge Ships":
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/Avoid-Huge-Ships-John-
| Trimmer/dp/08...
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Well, that was a really short few weeks.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I wonder how much the couple of excavators helped. I saw people
| on HN saying having two measly excavators was just to give the
| appearance of doing something and not an actual attempt to get
| the boat unstuck. But when I saw a photo of the digging, it
| looked like there was some serious progress made.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Measly in comparison to the ship, but by no means measly in an
| absolute sense. Those were pretty impressive excavators.
| codyb wrote:
| I read it was six, running 24 hours a day, which moved 27,000
| metric tons of sand.
|
| Which, sounds like a lot of sand to me. Seems like software
| engineers would have the best understanding of slowly but
| steadily working towards a goal since that's been my life since
| I started in this field!
|
| But, also, I admittedly bit the hype train too on how hard it
| was going to be to get this thing dislodged.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I think that number is from the dredgers rather than the
| excavators. Dredgers (ships) can shift sand faster than
| dozens of excavators.
| codyb wrote:
| It looks like you would be correct! Although the 27,000
| metric tons appears to have been on point.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56547383
| ziml77 wrote:
| Thanks for providing a source!
| thechao wrote:
| A cubic meter of wet sand weighs about 2 metric tons. 24/7
| excavation is easy to underestimate like sailing ship
| traversal under way: yes, a sailing ship only makes 4 knots
| (or whatever), but it dies so for 168 hours a week.
| faramarz wrote:
| Apparently the high tides were maximized and were a big factor.
| Credit to the Moon!
| graywh wrote:
| so you're saying wallstreetbets played a hand in this?
| Clewza313 wrote:
| Diamond hands on the dredgers. We like the ship!
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| One picture from very early on in the crisis (the one with the
| single excavator) was used as the mental model for the site
| long after pictures stopped being seen from there.
| auiya wrote:
| Aye by dredge boats running massively large slurry pumps. My
| partner works for a company that manufactures said pumps, they
| can MOVE SOME SLUDGE. Think the same sort of setup they use for
| underwater gold mining, but on a way way more massive scale.
| You can literally stand up inside some of the impellers they
| make.
| mhb wrote:
| I wonder how they think the canal was created.
| OskarS wrote:
| I'm actually really curious about this! It was built in the
| mid 19th century, was there excavators then? Or was it
| shovels and manpower? I looked on wikipedia hoping to find
| some info, but was sadly disappointed. I would TOTALLY read
| an in depth article on how, practically, the Suez canal was
| actually built.
| nicoburns wrote:
| "Construction began in April 1859, and at first digging was
| done by hand with picks and shovels wielded by forced
| laborers. Later, European workers with dredgers and steam
| shovels arrived"
|
| https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/suez-canal-
| opens
| herendin2 wrote:
| Depiction of a steam dregdger working on the Suez Canal
|
| https://www.alamy.com/suez-dredgers-canal-build-dig-
| excavate...
| SirLotsaLocks wrote:
| I'd imagine a lot of explosions too. Most big excavation
| back then used explosions but also a lot of individual
| manpower as well.
| emilssolmanis wrote:
| Slaves, lots and _lots_ of slaves, many of whom died.
| Exactly as you 'd imagine something of epic proportions
| being made in the 19th century.
| Clewza313 wrote:
| It was built with corvee labor, which is not quite the
| same thing: unpaid, yes, but done by farmers etc as a
| form of taxation in kind.
| arwineap wrote:
| Taxation imposed by the state, but I haven't been able to
| find any citation of a tax code so to speak.
|
| It seems like state sponsored slavery, without a trade.
| That is no persons are being sold because they are simply
| using citizens
|
| Brutal.
| EricE wrote:
| Oh come now, governments can't impose slavery - it was
| just taxation after all /s
| mannerheim wrote:
| Slavery doesn't have to do with whether it was paid or
| not (many slaves have historically been paid as well) but
| rather the voluntariness of their work.
| JimWestergren wrote:
| "Helped by the peak of high tide, the flotilla of tugboats
| managed to wrench the bow of the stranded Ever Given from the
| canal's sandy bank, where it had been firmly lodged since last
| Tuesday." - https://www.vesselfinder.com/news/20501-Ever-Given-
| is-Finall...
| rodiger wrote:
| Isn't it the Evergreen?
|
| Edit: Thank you for all the corrections, will leave this up for
| anyone else that's curious.
| kaybe wrote:
| A small addition: Here is the link to the wikipedia article
| that also tells you about their hotel and airline business.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Group
|
| (Cue jokes about earth (they have trucks) and water blockages
| soon to be followed by air. I haven't seen a good fire theory
| yet.)
| neogodless wrote:
| I spent the first half hour learning about all this being
| really confused when I kept seeing Evergreen written on the
| side of the ship (and not the much smaller Ever Given near
| the bow.)
| marcos100 wrote:
| Evergreen is the company, Ever given is the boat.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Evergreen is the name of the company, all of their ships have
| an Ever prefix. This one is called the Ever Given
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Evergreen is a huge Taiwanese shipping company, Ever Given is
| the name of this particular ship.
|
| There are probably several dozen ships around the world with
| the words "Evergreen" on its side.
| swader999 wrote:
| Evergreen is the shipping company, ever given is the name of
| the ship
| codevark wrote:
| Free? I'll take it!
| nindalf wrote:
| .
| rjtavares wrote:
| A part will also be lower profits > lower stock prices.
| brummm wrote:
| That's not true. $58B worth of goods were delayed for a few
| days. That definitely didn't cost anything even remotely that
| much.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Whenever you see such absurdly high numbers attached to cost
| estimates, always try to understand how they calculate it.
|
| This took the "$400 million / hour of shipped goods are being
| delayed" figure and ran with it by multiplying it, claiming
| that's the total damage cost.
|
| Now ask yourself: Let's say you're sending a parcel via UPS
| that contains an iphone, or simply $1000 worth of goods. At the
| last stopping point of the UPS truck, they get a flat tire
| before being able to deliver it. Your iphone delivery is
| unexpectedly delayed for a day.
|
| How much damage has been caused? What if it's two days? Six
| days?
|
| There's just a big fat "this isn't how it works" attached to
| this $58bn figure.
|
| Edit: For context since parent comment was deleted, this refers
| to istheshipstillstuck.com's estimate of $58bn worth of damages
| being caused by the ship being stuck.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Delivery to end customers is not equivalent to delivery as
| part of a supply chain. Instead of $1K of iPhones, think of
| it as $1Mn worth of components for a manufacturing process or
| items to be placed on a shelf. Many of those items' shipping
| timeframes are well-known and factored into calculations of
| supply and demand. If a customer wants to buy something from
| you and you're out of stock, they're generally not going to
| sit on their hands and wait patiently, they're going to buy
| from your competitors or not at all. That money is gone.
|
| Also, consider that we're at the end of a financial quarter,
| and this could also account for missed targets for all manner
| of industry.
| mindslight wrote:
| You've just gone up a level to draw the boundary at the
| wrong place. That money isn't "gone", because as you've
| said, the customer simply buys from a competitor.
|
| This is going to be bad for some individual businesses
| (imagine a small business buying a whole container of
| perishable goods), but systemically it's a blip. Delays are
| not destruction. Failure to make something is not the same
| as spending resources to make it only to have it destroyed.
|
| Money shifted around to different winners, but very little
| damage occurred.
| scrollaway wrote:
| So what you're saying is, "it's complicated"?
| lanstin wrote:
| It's not Just complicated but a ton of math has been used
| for the last fifty years to make it as cheap as possible
| at the cost of robustness. Removing stacks of supplies at
| factories and ware houses in favor of just in time
| deliveries. Consolidating redundant factories. That sort
| of thing. I am not in logistics but I worked I a factory
| as an intern with the operations research group in the
| 1980s.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Quite, but I'm also saying that your analogy was
| terminally flawed. Supply chain shipping != shipping your
| widget from Amazon.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Wasn't supposed to be an analogy but rather a
| simplification of the fact that delayed goods do not
| translate 1:1 to losses.
| randerson wrote:
| One impact I read about was that Egypt makes ~$300K per ship
| in tolls, which they won't make if ships take the long route
| around Africa instead.
| rantwasp wrote:
| or, they're gonna make more money with the "rush hour" that
| will follow and they will only lose a small fraction of
| what people think they're gonna lose
| bluehazed wrote:
| I still think they should have added another ship.
| sophacles wrote:
| Anyone got a contact there? https://suezcanal.statuspage.io/ is
| still showing down.
| divbzero wrote:
| A bit more detail here [1] and here [2]. A combination of
| vacuuming sand, high tide, and tugboats did the trick.
|
| [1]: https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-
| east/2021/03/29/Su...
|
| [2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/29/ever-given-
| turned-8...
| hinkley wrote:
| Is it just me or is the Evergiven listing to port?
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Entirely possible. The tugs are hooked up pretty high so that
| could be part of it.
|
| The other part is that they may have intentionally shifted
| ballast or fuel to induce a port list to assist the salvage.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There were reports I read earlier that part of the unsticking
| process was pumping fuel and ballast water around to remove
| as much weight as possible from the bow of the ship. It's
| probably unbalanced the ship a bit and they're just waiting
| to get to the lake to pause and fix it to allow shipping to
| resume as fast as possible.
| foxes wrote:
| What a surprise it didn't need nuclear ordinance or building
| giant elaborate dams or millions of helicopters.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I don't see the problem in guessing what approaches would have
| been possible in which situation and wondering about it.
| Learning something new about a topic you wouldn't encounter
| elsewhere in discussion. Because after all, isn't that why we
| are here in the first place?
|
| That aside, the idea of raising the water was valid and was (
| luckily) available though nature. It wasn't mentioned before it
| appeared here. See: High tides.
|
| And cofferdams could have been used when the situation was much
| worse. But the logistics of organizing it would have been
| painful ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587692 )
|
| Which is what followed when bringing up: "temporal dams"
| surrounding the ship. Which is obviously very different than
| "building giant elaborate dams".
|
| But ofc, not everyone actually reads the things that are said
| and some just interpret their own prejudice. Degrading the
| whole discussion.
| neogodless wrote:
| We wanted the hero to be a Death Star, but in the end it was
| just the moon.
| tdfirth wrote:
| This comment really made me chuckle. I did enjoy reading the
| suggestions on the other thread, but not many were entirely...
| practical (edit for spelling)
| T-hawk wrote:
| Just to be clear: The ship is still there and still stuck. They
| were just able to straighten it enough (parallel to the shore)
| to be out of the way and no longer blocking boat traffic.
|
| Edit: I think I saw an earlier article, other reports are now
| saying it's fully floating and moving.
| q3k wrote:
| Are you sure? It seems to be moving out of the channel now:
| https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000
| tarkin2 wrote:
| After all the crazy engineering ideas they used a load of
| tugboats when the tide was good? Not as sexy as a nuclear
| warhead though, eh.
|
| I feel like there's something to be learnt about computer
| engineering. We naturally go towards ego-massaging solutions.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| It's been blocked before but for a lot longer (from late 1956
| to early 1957--about five months) during the Suez Crisis:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
|
| That was a really big deal--more so than this one, I still
| remember the daily radio news reports and huge newspaper
| headlines from when I was a young kid. It was an international
| crisis that dragged on for months and months.
| acqq wrote:
| The "crisis" was actually a war in which the UK, France, and
| Israel invaded Egypt:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Suez_Crisis
|
| "To save the British from what he thought was a disastrous
| action and to stop the war from a possible escalation,
| Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B.
| Pearson proposed the creation of the first United Nations
| peacekeeping force to ensure access to the canal for all and
| an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. On 4 November
| 1956, a majority at the United Nations voted for Pearson's
| peacekeeping resolution, which mandated the UN peacekeepers
| to stay in Sinai unless both Egypt and Israel agreed to their
| withdrawal. The United States backed this proposal by putting
| pressure on the British government through the selling of
| sterling, which would cause it to depreciate. Britain then
| called a ceasefire, and later agreed to withdraw its troops
| by the end of the year. Pearson was later awarded the Nobel
| Peace Prize."
| Rendello wrote:
| Timeghost has a great series on this:
|
| https://youtu.be/3tnxiJ9n1c8
| pbourke wrote:
| It was closed for 8 years after the 6 day war.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Yeah, right. I recall that too, it got to the point where
| shipping had gotten used to taking the long way around.
| Towards the end, everyone had become so used to the fact
| (and the delays) that we'd almost forgotten the canal
| existed.
|
| Maybe there's now some virtue in dusting off the old
| proposal for second canal route via Israeli territory (of
| course, sans the nukes this time).
| koheripbal wrote:
| I think this incident really highlights how easily the Suez
| can be blocked.
|
| A well hidden explosive charge on a container ship in the
| canal could cause a multi-month blockage - perhaps longer.
|
| It would probably be smart to dig a 2nd channel.
| tim333 wrote:
| Then the terrorists would need two bombs! But I think they
| will extend the 2nd channel - some is done already.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| There is a second channel for most of its length already.
| I'm sure the plans to finish the work have gotten a higher
| priority in the past week.
| gerikson wrote:
| The canal was closed between 1967 and 1975, and some ships
| had bad timing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet
| faefox wrote:
| Pretty disappointing, honestly.
| turing_complete wrote:
| Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering
| projects.
| abhiminator wrote:
| That thread was a good chuckle though -- a bunch of _mostly_
| software devs brainstorming on freeing one of the biggest
| containers ships from their comfy armchairs. [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282
| rovr138 wrote:
| I learned how not to get rid of a whale at least.
|
| In case I'm ever asked about that...
| croutonwagon wrote:
| "The remaining chunks were of such a size, no respectable
| seagull would attempt to tackle anyway."
|
| This guy assume gull's are respectable.
|
| Man I hope this guy had an amazing career, because that was
| an awesome report.
| foxes wrote:
| Yes some of the options would have been fairly spectacular at
| least.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of
| the smartest people on the Internet. Don't get me wrong, there
| are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have
| learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind
| spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is
| the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship,
| look elsewhere.
| kibwen wrote:
| It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we
| see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that
| expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this
| is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent
| someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means
| every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every
| topic, and without information what you get is GIGO.
| hanche wrote:
| I suspect that many (but not all) of the "crazy"
| suggestions were a bit tongue-in-cheek.
| jsight wrote:
| Yeah, the part that is missing are the experts who can
| take those "crazy" suggestions and explain, in accurate
| detail, all of the reasons why there are better ideas.
|
| Along with detailed explanations of the better ideas.
|
| As it was, we kind of just got stuck on the jokes and
| random thoughts.
| justinator wrote:
| Which I think is fine? Isn't it fun to imagine how _you_
| would unstick a huge boat, even if your idea is totally
| off the mark due to a bad application of lateral
| thinking? Be it helium balloons or falcon heavy lifting
| rockets.
| hanche wrote:
| Oh yes, great fun to be had by all. You'll hear no
| complaints from me.
| arethuza wrote:
| Or repeatedly exploding nukes behind it to convert it
| into the first space going Orion container vessel....
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Or ramming another containership into it.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know
| how to do things like patch things back together with some
| light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the
| hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this
| is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a
| reef.
|
| Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time
| engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides
| waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law
| business going on where the captain and or insurance company
| have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage
| company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed
| on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract
| will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while
| the insurance company and salvage company have argued over
| whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide.
|
| I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting.
| Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is
| breaking up under them is really something else.
| BelmundoRegal wrote:
| Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of
| immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million
| contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to
| dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked
| was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011."
|
| Where: "years"=8
|
| "Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner
| since 2015, at which point the federal government took
| control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in
| the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the
| Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St.
| Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal."
|
| https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn-
| spir...
| vermontdevil wrote:
| I enjoy reading all the various ideas people come up to solve
| a complex issue. I know it's mostly not realistic but always
| good to see how imagination come forth.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| The way I look at it is, if I'm here, then there's a strong
| statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless
| superficially intelligent people like me found their way here
| too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| As correct as that is, I don't think anyone was actually
| thinking those were good ideas. There's something really
| innocently funny about this episode of history, and honestly
| it's fun to just think about what-ifs. Could you build surge
| walls all the way along and use some kind of dam? Combine all
| the power of every helicopter to lift the whole thing? Big
| ships are fun, unwieldy objects getting stuck are fun,
| sometimes it's just fun to mess around.
| Grakel wrote:
| HN is a lot of amazing experts in a particular subject mostly
| talking about something else. It's fascinating in this way.
| dkarl wrote:
| The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing
| suggestions?
|
| Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads
| for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to
| imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the
| professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the
| comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if
| you want, but I think most of the people here understand that
| they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN.
|
| In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make
| an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the
| actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted
| the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt
| to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions.
| runj__ wrote:
| I had great fun reading about the number of helicopters and
| starships needed to lift the ship and probably took
| something away from it for future endeavours. Really great
| for thinking about scale.
| test1235 wrote:
| some of the suggestions seemed borderline condescending
|
| e.g. "why don't they just do X"
|
| as tho' the actual experienced engineers working over there
| on the problem couldn't come up with better ideas than some
| guy who happens to spend a lot of their day on the
| internet.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| "Why don't they just do X" has two interpretations:
|
| 1. "This is such a simple solution and I think they're
| dumb for not doing it."
|
| 2. "X seems like a great and obvious idea, but they
| aren't doing it. Therefore, there must be something they
| know but I don't, and I'm interested in learning it."
|
| I try to take the second interpretation whenever I see
| someone posing solutions in that manner.
| BelmundoRegal wrote:
| It actually happens quite often and you can get
| handsomely rewarded for being that some guy ;
|
| https://www.innocentive.com/
|
| Have fun ! :D
| dkarl wrote:
| "why don't they just do X" can be a great question. Why
| not just use Riemann integrals for everything? Why not
| use timestamps as ids? Not knowing the answer is a good
| enough reason for asking, and I don't feel like I need to
| police people's feelings and decide if they were feeling
| curious or condescending when they asked. They'll learn
| either way, when the question is answered.
|
| I can imagine some people might have asked questions in a
| disingenuous or insinuating way ("why trust vaccines if
| the supposed experts can't get a ship unstuck") but I did
| not personally see any of that.
| Thrymr wrote:
| I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere
| speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service
| outage...
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I just re-read that old thread and to be honest, on the whole
| the advice there is sound. I saw comments discounting the
| fanciful speculation outnumbering the speculation by at least
| a multiple of two.
|
| There are silly ideas in every forum. I've been on plenty
| groups comprised entirely of tech experts and I can
| confidently say that foolish ideas will be proposed even in
| the most elite of circles, even in their areas of specialty.
| It happens, and as long as there are other reasonable voices
| it's fine.
| leereeves wrote:
| I remember people in that discussion saying the high tide might
| help and suggesting pumping water around the boat to remove the
| sand. The HN discussion included the right answer, among a lot
| of more entertaining ideas.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622120.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think a lot of the HN suggestions were for entertainment
| value really. Dredge and use tugs wasn't very exciting.
| divbzero wrote:
| With more robots and drones, only a matter of time before we
| have Twitch controlling atoms instead of bits? [1]
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477721 "Show HN:
| Twitch Installs Arch Linux"
| 0xcafecafe wrote:
| I wonder why the previous link to track it is not working again.
| Would have been cool to see it navigating the canal:
|
| https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000
| GreeningRun wrote:
| Is OK for me but maybe the web server is submerged under the
| load
| gorkish wrote:
| Unfortunately at 02:53:44 GMT a web request which, due to
| high botnet activity and a packet storm, experienced poor
| routing conditions and unfortunately became wedged in one of
| the major transatlantic fiber optic cables. Network operators
| are working to free the stuck request. It is estimated that
| 50 billion requests per minute are queueing in the cable
| which will soon become filled if the situation is not
| resolved quickly. Experts fear the effects to international
| browsing, and some requests have already begun to take "the
| long way around."
| [deleted]
| pfarrell wrote:
| I know we typically don't upvote humor here, but that was
| really good.
| [deleted]
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _imo=9811000_
|
| I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums:
|
| > _An IMO number is made of the three letters "IMO" followed by
| a seven-digit number. This consists of a six-digit sequential
| unique number followed by a check digit. The integrity of an
| IMO number can be verified using its check digit. This is done
| by multiplying each of the first six digits by a factor of 2 to
| 7 corresponding to their position from right to left. The
| rightmost digit of this sum is the check digit. For example,
| for IMO 9074729: (9x7) + (0x6) + (7x5) + (4x4) + (7x3) + (2x2)
| = 139.[10][11]_
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMO_number#Structure
|
| MMSI numbers do not:
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_Mobile_Service_Identi...
| teddyh wrote:
| > _I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums:_
|
| It's a relatively common feature of ID numbers:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Was this comment intended for a different thread?
| blfr wrote:
| Probably not. The site linked uses imo numbers for ship
| ids.
| johncessna wrote:
| So, did they let it into the Canal, or did it go to the back of
| the line?
| doogerdog wrote:
| The ever given was towed north to bitter lake and is anchored
| there with two other vessels attending it. The ever globe is
| the third vessel in the first convoy south from bitter lake to
| Suez. The first two vessels have passed the location of the
| accident. The ever globe is the same size as ever given and is
| right now very slowly passing the place where ever given was
| stuck.
| walrus01 wrote:
| https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/EVER-GIVEN-IMO-9811000-...
|
| https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:56...
| exikyut wrote:
| Oh hey, they fixed it,
|
| - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to
| any of the cargo
|
| - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to
| the ship
|
| - without taking multiple weeks
|
| - without needing to ship a trillion dollars'+ worth of equipment
| halfway around the world
|
| It's refreshing to see high-end engineering performed so
| competently.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| About the cargo part - it's entirely possible that some cargo
| is non-viable. It is going to be onboard days longer than
| predicted. Anything even faintly perishable may be degraded.
|
| But good news for sure!
| gambiting wrote:
| Container ships can easily have an unpredicted wait of 1-2
| weeks just entering port, happens all the time and isn't
| major news. Few days in the Suez canal isn't going to do
| anything to cargo.
| shagie wrote:
| While the Ever Given may not have an issue, the HAJH AMINA
| which is waiting in the Great Bitter Lake is a livestock
| carrier that should have been unloading in port yesterday.
| gambiting wrote:
| Sure but the same principles apply - delays happen, and
| livestock ships are equipped to keep livestock alive with
| food and water well stocked in case they can't enter port
| for days(which again, happens all the time, sometimes
| papers aren't exactly right and the livestock has to wait
| on the ship until cleared for offloading)
| lostlogin wrote:
| The shipping of livestock is controversial here in NZ and
| some (likely high) estimates suggest a death rate of as
| much as 1 in 10. The issues are pretty closely tied to
| conditions at the other end of shipping (feedlots,
| slaughterhouses etc) as well as the shipping though.
|
| https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-
| detail/story/2018765098...
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I've seen this ship mentioned a couple of times. I kind
| of assume the subtext is that we should stop sending live
| animals by ship (except for perhaps specialist and
| breading stock), which I totally agree with, as much for
| the dangers of spreading disease as for an ethical
| concern for the animals involved.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's already a trip halfway around the world at something
| like 30 km/h. If you're transporting goods that are that
| sensitive, you're likely doing it by air already. Ships get
| delayed all the time for various reasons.
| mwgarcia wrote:
| The ship will still likely be anchored for hull inspection,
| perhaps in Bitter Lake. That may take a couple of days at
| best, and an indefinite stranding if serious problems are
| discovered.
|
| Also crew change is likely because of on-going
| investigations, and that will be tricky with the on-going
| mariner crunch. There's not a lot who are qualified to run
| a ULCV, especially one straight out of an accident.
| m4rtink wrote:
| In the past ships already got stuck on the Bitter Lake -
| for quite some time!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet
| Someone wrote:
| I think those were unloaded during the 'delay'. If they
| weren't, I guess the Wikipedia page would have mentioned
| something about life on the Munsterland, carrying eggs
| and fruit.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > It's already a trip halfway around the world at something
| like 30 km/h
|
| This sounds slow at first, but, since you can drive pretty
| much 24/7, that's still 720km per day. If you're literally
| going halfway around the world (20.000km), you'll be there
| in 28 days. Since you drive on water, you'll do few small
| detours (I assume), so you can actually get those 700km a
| day.
|
| EU<->China even appears to be "only" 7000 km [0], so if you
| could drive in a straight line you could get there in 10
| days. 14 with usual delays and detours, maybe. That's a
| reasonable time span for a lot of perishable goods. With
| the blockage doubling that time, I can easily see how this
| would affect quite a few goods.
|
| [0] https://www.distancefromto.net/distance-
| from/Europe/to/China
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| If this happened on American soil, it'd be stuck for weeks.
| There'd be infighting over which private contractor the canal
| authority will pick. And when the excavation process starts,
| there'd be complaining from NIMBYs because of the disruption
| and noise. And in the end, there'd be multiple entities all
| suing each other because they can.
| EricE wrote:
| High tide did more than anything. If it had gone beyond
| Wednesday they likely would have been screwed as the high tide
| was set to start dropping each day after Tuesday. Good thing
| they started dredging right away.
| amenghra wrote:
| But there are two high tides and two low tides a day. Why did
| it take a week? /s
| Raineer wrote:
| I just adore that us little humans got our big boat stuck in
| the sand and uncle moon had to reach down and fix it for us.
| mgfist wrote:
| Auntie Luna
| munificent wrote:
| You say that like they just got unexpectedly lucky, but all
| mariners are well aware of and take tides into account in
| their planning.
| EricE wrote:
| So your saying they planned to only crash the ship during
| the high tide?
|
| You do realize the canal operates during all tides?
|
| So yes, it was absolute luck this accident happed right
| before the highest tides of the month.
| wussboy wrote:
| I think you and the other poster are saying different
| things. You are saying it's fortunate that a spring tide
| was coming and you are right. I think grand parent is
| saying that sailors are well aware of tides and as soon
| as the ship got stuck they would have been racing to meet
| the spring tide, which was planning and not luck.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I'd be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n
| days before the spring tide in case it got stuck. That just
| doesn't sound like an efficient operation. In this case the
| luck was that the high tides were relatively high when it
| was stuck. If we were in a neap tide, we might have had to
| wait longer for a high enough tide to get the ship out.
| (But maybe if tides were lower it wouldn't have gotten so
| stuck)
|
| P.S. it isn't exactly clear what you mean by mariner, but
| plenty of sailors in the Mediterranean don't really need to
| care about tides as they don't really get them there.
| Indeed, you shouldn't trust any of the early modern Greek
| or Italian treatises attempting to explain tides as their
| authors didn't really know how tides actually behaved
| outside the Med.
| lmilcin wrote:
| That's not what he said.
|
| Ship captains who sail on open ocean are well aware of
| tides. It is not too difficult to imagine somebody did
| 2+2 and figured out the tides are getting higher so in
| couple of days there is going to be better chance of
| freeing it.
|
| Obviously they did not plan it. It is just an opportunity
| they used.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I'd be surprised if they aimed for their ship to
| arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got
| stuck._
|
| That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that after the
| ship got stuck, they certainly incorporated the tides
| into their plan for how to unstick it. If the tides had
| been less amenable, they would have come up with a
| different plan.
|
| So their plan didn't get "lucky", their plan was
| predicated on the tides being part of the solution.
| EricE wrote:
| Without the high tides the amount of material needed to
| be removed would have been dramatically higher.
|
| That's the point and the absolute bit of luck. Without
| the high tides they likely wouldn't have been able to get
| it unstuck as quickly. Search for slope/fill volume
| calculation charts - the amount of fill required to be
| removed as you go deeper is logarithmic, NOT linear.
|
| It was VERY lucky they had the highest tides possible.
| ce4 wrote:
| Did the ship crash during high tide or low tide? The tide
| 6 days ago when it got stuck compared to today is more
| important.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Sure but the luck here is the number of days until a
| sufficiently high tide. Imagine a simple model where
| every 28 days you get a sufficiently high tide and every
| other day is not sufficiently high, and the ship gets
| stuck (after high tide) on a uniformly random day. Then
| the expected time until the ship is unstuck is 14.5 days
| and the luck is how close you are to the time the ship
| can get free.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| It's even shorter timing than that. Spring tides occur at
| the full moon AND the new moon. So you get two chances
| every lunar cycle.
| Vvector wrote:
| The "spring tide", the highest of the high tides,
| naturally occurs twice every 28 days. This is when the
| Sun, Earth and Moon are in a line. So the average wait
| would have been ~7 days.
| flatiron wrote:
| You talk about planning about an article about a container
| ship piloted by professionals ran aground.
| aden1ne wrote:
| Some tug boats did sail in from far away places.
| hinkley wrote:
| Keeping in mind that the tugs on each side had to come from
| opposite directions because the canal is blocked, I expect
| there was a bit of a commute.
| [deleted]
| superjan wrote:
| What I wonder about: how is such a rescue contract negotiated?
| There is likely willingness to pay, but it is difficult to
| judge what a reasonable price is, and it may not even be clear
| who is culpable in advance. Do they have contracts in advance
| with the shipping companies?
| Aperocky wrote:
| I would imagine a cost plus contract?
| ghouse wrote:
| So, like paying for emergency healthcare in the United
| States.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| I would assume that Egypt paid. They have by far the biggest
| incentive to clear the canal asap. They will presumably now
| enter a lengthy legal dispute to try and get their money back
| from the shipping company.
| tmathmeyer wrote:
| My understanding is that the Suez Canal Authority will have
| to pay, but also that the SCA requires the use of "pilot"
| captains that maneuver the boats through the canal, which
| means that the issue was squarely the fault of the SCA.
| Someone wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage#Types_of_salvag.
| ..:
|
| _In contract salvage the owner of the property and salvor
| enter into a salvage contract prior to the commencement of
| salvage operations and the amount that the salvor is paid is
| determined by the contract. This can be a fixed amount, based
| on a "time and materials" basis, or any other terms that both
| parties agree to. The contract may also state that payment is
| only due if the salvage operation is successful (a.k.a. "No
| Cure, No Pay"), or that payment is due even if the operation
| is not successful. By far the commonest single form of
| salvage contract internationally is Lloyd's Standard Form of
| Salvage Agreement (2011), an English law arbitration
| agreement administered by the Council of Lloyd's, London._
|
| That Lloyd's contract (https://www.lloyds.com/~/media/files/t
| he%20market/tools%20an...) is concise (2 pages).
|
| It may incorporate the SCOPIC clause
| (https://www.lloyds.com/resources-and-services/lloyds-
| agency/...), but that doesn't seem long, either, even
| including its appendices.
| superjan wrote:
| Thanks!
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| Why wouldn't it be more cost-effective or unreasonable to
| destroy the ship?
| stevula wrote:
| They would still be cleaning up the debris to unblock the
| canal, shipping would still be blocked.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Have you ever tried to cut tires of the car that blocked your
| driveway? Did it help to clear the blockage faster or exactly
| the opposite?
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Problems with destroying the ship:
|
| - A sunken super container ship in the canal, rather than a
| floating one. Removing the wreckage would be at least an
| order of magnitude more work than floating the thing away.
|
| - Thousands of containers floating / sunk in the canal. How
| much damage can one of those do to the propeller of a ship?
| leoh wrote:
| There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high
| tide and a bunch of tug boats.
| baq wrote:
| anyone can build a bridge that stands. only an engineer can
| build a bridge that barely stands.
| hderms wrote:
| A high tide and some tug boats becomes 'high-end engineering'
| if it works
| hinkley wrote:
| Have you looked at tug boat propulsion units lately? Those
| things look like black magic.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| You are right, these things are nuts:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voith_Schneider_Propeller
| _ah wrote:
| Wow this is the coolest thing I've learned this week.
| zelos wrote:
| I'd guess figuring out where you can safely attach the tug
| boats, monitoring stability and stresses on the container
| ship and so on is non-trivial, too.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you fuck up bad enough those containers end up landing
| on the tugs, killing the crews. Not to mention increasing
| the quantity of stuff blocking the canal.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| They built a computer model to try and manage the stress on
| the ship as they worked to free it. It was not
| straightforward as the ship could have broken if they weren't
| extremely careful. They also had divers inspecting the hull
| for signs of stress. This was a massive, complex operation.
| jacobreg wrote:
| That sounds terrifying for the divers
| Genghis_Dong wrote:
| Boskalis Peter Berdowski said it wans't a very hard job
| technically on Dutch television. Just the scale and impact
| were huge.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| It's like the guy at a bar who tells you he knows how to
| swordfight after doing fencing. I'm sure he's right but
| it just funny from an official with experience basically
| saying "it wasn't that hard."
| berkes wrote:
| Boskalis is the company who brought the tugboats,
| engineers, diggers and whatnot over there in days. This
| is not a random guy commenting. This is an end-boss in
| charge of the entire operation.
| dmalvarado wrote:
| Can you image if the hull did weaken to the point of near
| failure? They might have needed to offload everything right
| there where it ran aground, lest it completely fail
| uncontrolled. The canal would be closed for a very long
| time. Luckily they didn't have to make that call.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| Luckily, indeed -- but they were already planning for
| this contingency. Apparently (and unsurprisingly) it was
| going to be hard to find a large enough crane to move the
| containers.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| The beauty of steel is that it will yield plastically
| beyond its normal design stress. It would have been
| possible for them to damage the ship to the point where
| it required significant repairs but still be capable of
| exiting the canal.
| sjaak wrote:
| This reminds me of a former boss who told me to "just add
| some if statements, how long can it take?"
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| High end engineering uses the simplest and most cost
| effective solution to get the job done right.
|
| It would have been a mistake to throw expensive, complicated
| solutions at a problem that had a relatively simple solution.
| afterburner wrote:
| So just "engineering" then
| Aperocky wrote:
| simple is better than complex!
| [deleted]
| arethuza wrote:
| Pretty sure I've seen a definition of engineering that was
| "Solve the problem by doing as little new as possible".
| temp0826 wrote:
| Sometimes the safest way to deal with the so-called legacy
| systems we all know and love
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Wow. People here still criticising the solutions the
| engineers on the scene used?
| hinkley wrote:
| r/iamverysmart here we come.
| F_J_H wrote:
| All jobs are easy to the person who doesn't have to do them.
| ~Hold's Law
|
| ;-)
| mwgarcia wrote:
| You forgot dredging tons of material. And dredgers have some
| of the more complex naval engineering out there with all its
| moving parts.
| megous wrote:
| I hope they'll give priority to ships with living animals that
| reported that they have feed just for a few days, and not just to
| whoever pays the most. Backlog will probably still take some time
| to clear.
| fblp wrote:
| Some videos of boats celebrating by honking their horns here. You
| can't really see the boat moving, but I hope someone's filmed a
| timelapse!
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/suez-ca...
| mwgarcia wrote:
| Here's a somewhat good compilation:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovWoznPIBhw
| EricE wrote:
| " Oil prices remained volatile, however, amid concerns to the
| time it may take to clear the almost 500 ship backlog and
| expectations that OPEC members will hold their production cut
| agreement in place following their monthly meeting in Vienna
| later this week." Such a perfect time for Democrats to play
| politics with energy. Wheee! Everyone get ready to bend over.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26621850.
| lostcolony wrote:
| I mean...the largest increase, and the longest year-to-year
| increase of gas prices in the past 30 years happened 2002-2008,
| which was hardly Democrat controlled. Prior to that they were
| basically flat since 1990. The past two presidents saw an
| increase the first half of their years in office (4 years for
| Obama, 2 years for Trump), and a drop the last half.
|
| Not really sure a political conclusion is warranted here.
| pradn wrote:
| A great Twitter thread with many articles/resources if you want a
| critical lens at the global logistics supply chain.
|
| https://twitter.com/CharmaineSChua/status/137586855212986368...
|
| I found this article on the impact on super-sized ships on
| logistical infrastructure useful and fascinating. It describes
| how the creation of ships too big to fit in the Panama canal
| (post-PANAMAX ships) was received by 1) Panamanians 2) East Coast
| / Gulf Coast ports 3) West Coast ports. The Panamanians spent
| billions expanding their channel to bring port fees and promote
| attendant value-add services. Ports across the East and Gulf
| coasts overinvested in trying to make their port the preferred
| one for these new ships. Clearly, not every port can recoup
| investments in higher cranes and deeper harbors. There was an
| irrational optimism on the East Coast, as they sought to take
| business away from West Coast transhippers (dock in Southern
| California and ship to the east by train.) In response, the West
| Coast logistics industry sought and received a series of
| infrastructure improvements to make transshipment from their
| ports viable. So, just a few shipping companies are able to
| increase the size of their ships (for economies of scale) and end
| up having a major impact on billions of investment dollars in
| more than a dozen cities. Policy makers in the US aren't able to
| pick just a few cities to focus investment in. How can you tell a
| city that they aren't going to get those jobs? Perhaps the US
| should set a maximum ship size to prevent this wastage of
| resources; but one could argue the efficiencies for consumers
| could be worth it.
|
| https://www.ijurr.org/article/fungible-space-competition-and...
|
| The size of these ships keeps increasing at an astonishing rate.
| See the chart in this excellent talk:
| https://youtu.be/gdkvAXcZD7U?t=892
|
| Moreover, the hydrodynamic effects of these large ships in
| relatively shallow and narrow canals is underappreciated. We're
| liable to see more such incidents as ships get bigger and bigger.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| The Suez canal has also increased in size over time, it's cross
| sectional area has steadily increased.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| >the hydrodynamic effects of these large ships in relatively
| shallow and narrow canals is underappreciated
|
| I'm really surprised I haven't seen this mentioned. A long time
| ago, I was trained as a merchant ship's navigation officer. One
| of the things we were taught (but unfortunately had few
| opportunities to practice), was using "bank cushion" or "bank
| suction" to use the hydraulic interaction between the hull and
| a narrow body of water like a river to navigate tight curves.
| These days, there are simulations that I'm sure capture these
| effects to it's easier to get some experience with them.
|
| Of course, in the case of the _Ever Given_ it seems that the
| grounding was mainly due to not compensating for the strong
| cross winds.
| EricE wrote:
| That and going ridiculously fast during a sandstorm.
|
| Juan Brown/Blancolirio channel has a good overview and he
| touches on hydronic interactions you reference too:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5iyn2q6s1Sk
| beastialityking wrote:
| You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Maybe it's easier to read that Twitter thread here:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1375868552129863681.html
| jacquesm wrote:
| Score one for Boskalis. Those tugs are very impressive.
| ocschwar wrote:
| I'm brushing up my Arabic so I can understand the interview with
| that excavator's operator.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Link to the interview?
| bruiseralmighty wrote:
| Guess I was wrong. Glad that didn't become a bigger issue.
| dang wrote:
| The major threads appear to be:
|
| _Giant Ship Is Moved To and Fro to Break Suction: Suez Update_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26617430 - March 2021 (229
| comments)
|
| _Ever Given Everywhere_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26617081 - March 2021 (63
| comments)
|
| _Ever Given Ships Erratic Route into Suez Canal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603778 - March 2021 (37
| comments)
|
| _Ever Given Container Ship Fan Fiction_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593708 - March 2021 (33
| comments)
|
| _HMM Rotterdam appears to be diverting to avoid congestion at
| Suez_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590105 - March
| 2021 (49 comments)
|
| _The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586866 - March 2021 (92
| comments)
|
| _Suez Canal: How are they trying to free the Ever Given?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (83
| comments)
|
| _It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585480 - March 2021 (51
| comments)
|
| _Is that ship still stuck?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 - March 2021 (1229
| comments)
|
| _Suez canal blocked by a massive ship_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 - March 2021 (426
| comments)
|
| Others?
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| _Is that ship still stuck?_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 - March 2021
| (1230 comments)
| dang wrote:
| Ah thanks! Inserted.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| For those who are wondering.
|
| The canal is shallow at the sides, for a ship as this, this
| creates a suction when it's not in the middle.
|
| The captain wasn't going straight ( zigzag) and while he wanted
| to get out of the suction on the left side, the ship turned way
| too much to the right.
|
| There's a really good animation here at 1:03 in the video (
| dutch): https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/03/29/zeevaartschool-
| maakt...
|
| Video is talking about a "sea driving school" that simulated the
| incident in their simulator.
|
| My info above is the Dutch information required to see the video
| from 1:03 till after the animation.
| pqb wrote:
| I wish to see a satellite photos to see a traffic jam from the
| above. It is definitely not too common to see that many ships
| waiting in queue to entry the Suez canal [0].
|
| [0]:
| https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:32.3/cente...
| ZeKZ wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mf705...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/meopv9/s...
| zodiakzz wrote:
| That's Bay of Bengal, not Suez.
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sujeeva-
| salwatura-49341a36_fa...
| scumcity wrote:
| Fortunately TWTR's market cap is worth more than a solution to
| problems like this because...
| TedShiller wrote:
| Funny how all the HN armchair experts kept telling everyone that
| the difficulty of this is vastly underestimated, and how people
| don't understand "scale".
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