[HN Gopher] The World the Suez Canal Made
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The World the Suez Canal Made
Author : no_kill_i
Score : 52 points
Date : 2021-04-29 06:02 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (publicseminar.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (publicseminar.org)
| jhallenworld wrote:
| It will be interesting if the Danube to Mediterranean canal is
| constructed. Balkan states do not agree with each other on much,
| but depriving the Turks of toll money could be the one thing.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/k37f9f/china_p...
|
| Proposed new Istanbul Canal:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_Canal
| input_sh wrote:
| > Danube to Mediterranean canal
|
| For the curious, it'd follow a river in Serbia and connect to a
| river in North Macedonia. Approximately 100 kilometres apart,
| assuming a straight line. That means about half the length of
| Suez (193 kilometres) and slightly longer than the length of
| the Panama canal (82 kilometres), though I'm assuming riverbeds
| would have to be expanded in some places.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 17 billion Euros and 6 months construction sounds very cheap
| and simple.
| dmurray wrote:
| 6 years. But that still seems feasible.
|
| The Danube can't take anywhere near the throughput of the
| Suez Canal, though. The Rhein-Main-Donau canal, one of the
| bottlenecks on the route, sees about 6 million tons of
| shipping a year and can handle boats with a draft of 2
| metres.[0] The Suez Canal handles the same tonnage every
| _day_ and handles ships up to 20m draft. So this would not
| make a dent in shipping from Suez to Rotterdam, it would just
| be a nice bonus for anyone delivering from the Med to, say,
| Belgrade.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhine%E2%80%93Main%E2%80%93
| Dan...
| polytely wrote:
| Just a sidenote, but I really like the yellow background, it
| makes (similarly to hackernews) reading the text more pleasant
| and it's kinda weird that on average white seems to be the
| default.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| White gives you the highest contrast ratio, which continually
| ranks as one of the best ways to make text more readable.
| polytely wrote:
| That is absolutely the case, but because most screens emit
| light and white is the brightest colour possible it also
| makes the eyes more tired (in my experience, not sure if this
| is actually the case). So you have to find a balance between
| readability and comfort. I personally think that #000 on #FFF
| is too harsh (for the purposes of reading large texts) and
| think that slightly less than maximum contrast would be
| preferable in most circumstances.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| One of the interesting facts I leaned about the Suez canal is how
| container ships have grown in size with time and how the canal
| also widened gradually with time to accomodate them.
|
| Another interesting fact was that Egypt, like the USA was on the
| point of industrialising in the 19th century but was prevented
| from doing so by its British rulers.
| detritus wrote:
| Curious about your Britain-bashing last line, I had a quick
| gander.
|
| https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-6-the...
|
| Seems to suggest that Britain may well have meddled in Egypt's
| industrialisation, but is by no means absolutely to blame.
| There's a myriad of reasons Egypt didn't industrialise, as
| you'd expect from history - nothing's quite so simple.
|
| In fact, it could be argued that Britain did more to raise
| Egypt up than any other country playing the game at that point
| in time, of which the UK was just one actor.
|
| People tend to forget that one of the main reasons Britain
| herself industrialised early and comprehensively was simply
| thet fact it sits on vast amounts of coal. Egypt does not.
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I wonder if it's really some conspiracy from a far away
| foreign power or local customs that prevented the emergence
| of a stable industrialized state [0] [1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baksheesh
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26588272
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Well the article you cited has a really important piece: the
| British simply blocked Egpytian and Ottoman empire imports.
| They had tremendous control over the seas and Egypt was
| virtually a colony of the British.
|
| Preventing IP from reaching Egypt was a big deal. The US had
| to pirate a lot of intellectual property from the British in
| order to develop their industry.
|
| Japan also didn't have coal.
| detritus wrote:
| Yes, I read that line, the third suggestion after
| leadership woes and a lack of local resources, and one that
| points at European protectionism generally.
|
| Elsewhere in the article in mentions that Egypt herself
| didn't have an entirely unified stance about embracing
| industrialisation and it doesn't take much to note a vast
| gulf between the national psyches of Japan and Egypt, Japan
| also having been treated somewhat shoddily by Western
| powers.
| scythe wrote:
| >Japan also didn't have coal.
|
| Hm? Japan does (or rather _did_ ) have coal and mined it
| extensively during their industrialization. Since coal can
| come from peat bogs, rainy islands often have some. They
| also somewhat famously developed cars that ran on coal when
| their oil supply was cut off in WWII.
|
| http://www.japansmeijiindustrialrevolution.com/en/site/coal
| m...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > The US had to pirate a lot of intellectual property from
| the British in order to develop their industry.
|
| Citation needed.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| May be later than desired but the thread reminded me of
| this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_technological_cooper
| ati...
| scythe wrote:
| >Egypt, like the USA was on the point of industrialising in the
| 19th century but was prevented from doing so by its British
| rulers.
|
| It seems a little selective to blame the British when Egypt
| contemporaneously suffered an invasion by Napoleon and a
| contested political status under the Ottomans. If the French or
| Turks had won the game of empires, would they be to blame
| instead?
| amoitnga wrote:
| don't want to sound harsh, but articles like this are the reason
| I don't read much. Maybe it's because English is my second
| language, so it's on me, but why such epic journey to seemingly
| say so little. I only read half of it, couldn't go through more.
| Interesting topic but to me personally, delivery is quite
| difficult.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| That's where we differ. I enjoy reading a longer form article
| like this. Lot's of interesting details and well written. Not
| everything writer needs to cater to those with shorter
| attention spans ;-)
| elchief wrote:
| Needs an editor, for sure
| yosito wrote:
| I really don't understand people's eager desire to condemn
| capitalism. It's like they think human life would require no
| resources if we simply abolish capitalism. We'd still need
| shipping routes even if we lived under global communism.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| I too feel like a lot of people confuse Capitalism with
| Commerce. It doesn't matter what "ism" society operates under
| people will buy and sell and trade. The "ism" just describes
| how and where the bulk of the money ends up.
| NoSorryCannot wrote:
| I'd agree there's something you don't understand if you think
| the response being advocated for is generally Soviet-style
| communism with zero of the properties of capitalism and no
| shipping lanes for some reason.
| yosito wrote:
| I didn't say any of that.
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