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Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

economist.com

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Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#201

Post by bkor »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #119
bkor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They arrested the vessel on order of a bunker supply company at Panama Canal. See http://www.maritimelawcenter.com/html/arrest_of_vessel.html .

Does this mean the ship received fuel oil that isn't paid for? Like tackling a shoplifter on a grand scale?

A 10.000+ container vessel uses 100-120 tons of fuel per day (see https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/fuel_c...). Bigger ones are more efficient per container, but it'll still be more than 120 tons of fuel. If you fuel up, that's a lot of bunkers to take in. That's not paid in cash. Credit is used.

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#202

Post by bkor »

x1798DE wrote: post #116

You occasionally hear about immigrants being smuggled into (a) country in shipping containers. Is that common enough that it's likely that one or more of the stalled containers has a bunch of people stuck in it? That seems like a really unfortunate scenario...

That doesn't happen on container vessels, but shipping containers on trucks. On a container vessel you might have a stowaway. Meaning: someone sneaking onboard. They usually run out of food and are then discovered.

Due to all the anti terrorist rules, it's not easy getting onboard of a container vessel.

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#203

Post by bkor »

clock_tower wrote: post #89
bkor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's much easier to ship it via air. If this is for some assembly line you'd have weekly shipments by container vessel. Instead of putting it into a container vessel to arrive 4+ weeks later, just air it and have it in a 1-2 days at most.

Easier, but more expensive and much more polluting.

This was about a factory line possibly shutting down. In those cases it'll be shipped via air.

To be clear: I work in this industry. In case of an (factory) assembly line shutting down they'll resort to airfreight. I noticed people downvoting my reply, while it is entirely factual.

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#204

Post by bkor »

ethanbond wrote: post #200
astrodust wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unloading these ships with state of the art equipment takes upwards of twelve hours. Many of those containers have GPS tracking devices embedded in them. The sorts of ships routinely subjected to piracy are those carrying an easily transportable commodity (e.g. oil) that can be pumped out or stolen quickly and offloaded on a market without arousing suspicion. You'd spend weeks going through all those containers to lo…

Very interesting! That's actually pretty shocking that they can be unloaded in 12 hours. I would've expected far longer than that, though now thinking about it I suppose it seems reasonable with all those crazy crane systems that industrial docks have.

Hanjin has max 13.000 TEU vessels. That's maybe 8000 containers. One crane can unload at around 30 containers per hour. You might be able to use 6 cranes on such a vessel. It works out to 45 hours to unload such a vessel if completely full. I might be off a bit in some of the calculations, but 12 vs 45 hours is quite a big difference.

There's various physical limitations. You cannot have too many cranes working on a vessel (need to have space between cranes). Further, most cranes aren't that quick. Depending on a region you might hit 45 containers per hour, but that's pretty high (usually only seen in Asia).

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#205

Post by pbhjpbhj »

PeterisP wrote: post #176
superuser2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens to the crews of these ships? Can they leave? How? Who pays to transport them to shore? Under what authority are they permitted to walk on shore? Office and factory workers of a suddenly-derelict company can walk off the premises and go home. Imagine finding out that not only will the paychecks stop, you also can't leave your desk.

They may have problems in leaving, but that's not as big issue because they generally anyway had been contracted to stay there for many more months. On the other hand, unlike factory workers in a totally bankrupt organization, the ship crews will get paid - they get "priority" on the ship and cargo; if the ship gets sold in some auction or restructuring, the new owner can't take possession until the previous crew get…

I think lack of basic supplies, and wages, now isn't really remedied by getting a share of monies from a sale at some point in the far future.

1: "I need water"

2: "Don't worry, next year you'll (probably) have enough money to buy some"

Surely there are international agreements with remedies for such situations? When do the coastguard step in and save the crew from dehydration/starvation?

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#206

Post by ceejayoz »

bkor wrote: post #202
x1798DE wrote: post #116

You occasionally hear about immigrants being smuggled into (a) country in shipping containers. Is that common enough that it's likely that one or more of the stalled containers has a bunch of people stuck in it? That seems like a really unfortunate scenario...

That doesn't happen on container vessels, but shipping containers on trucks. On a container vessel you might have a stowaway. Meaning: someone sneaking onboard. They usually run out of food and are then discovered. Due to all the anti terrorist rules, it's not easy getting onboard of a container vessel.

It very much happens on ships.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/16/world/europe/london-shipyard-s...

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28827133

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/02/nyregion/11-stowaways-foun...

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93659

http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/12/news/mn-53272

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#207

Post by ChristianGeek »

woodandsteel wrote: post #120
Animats wrote: post #59

This is a mess because Hanjin's top management was in denial about the possibility of bankruptcy. Just like the typical startup. They've been trying for months to get a bailout deal from somebody, anybody - a merger, loans, their parent chaebol, their stockholders (Korean Air is the largest), or the S. Korean government. Everybody turned them down. There's too much container ship capacity right now; nobody needed Han…

This is one thing I love about HN. Whenever there is something big going on in some industry, there will be people posting comments here who work in the industry and will explain what is happening, and usually in very clear terms. I guess this is because every big industry runs on commuters nowadays, so there are all these people who both are in the industry and read HN.

>I guess this is because every big industry runs on commuters nowadays...

My favorite typo of the week!

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#208

Post by tptacek »

grapehut wrote: post #143

FWIW the person you're replying to represents everything that is bad about HN. If you read his post history you'd be lead to believe he's an industry insider in: Shipping, Irrigation, Crypto Currencies, Genetics, Nano Technology, Manufacturing, Microkernels and a lot more if you keep going back. There was a time I believed his posts, until I read one of his mini-essays on a topic I happened to know about (cryptograph…

I read every comment 'Animats writes --- he's probably forgotten more about computing than I'll ever learn --- and while I've disagreed with a lot of things he's said, I've never come across a crypto comment that made me feel he was channeling Wikipedia. I think I'd have noticed.

That aside: comments like this are extremely inappropriate for Hacker News. We don't write comments whose sole purpose is to take down other commenters.

I'd be embarrassed to have written something like this in public. Maybe you were just having a bad night or something.

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#209

Post by sctb »

grapehut wrote: post #143

FWIW the person you're replying to represents everything that is bad about HN. If you read his post history you'd be lead to believe he's an industry insider in: Shipping, Irrigation, Crypto Currencies, Genetics, Nano Technology, Manufacturing, Microkernels and a lot more if you keep going back. There was a time I believed his posts, until I read one of his mini-essays on a topic I happened to know about (cryptograph…

This is a personal attack, and is not OK on Hacker News. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12561364 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Why billions of dollars of goods are stuck at sea

#210

Post by mjevans »

michaelt wrote: post #185
mjevans wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious solution is to agree that any receiving containers from the ship owe an equitable sized fee based on their fraction of all the containers. Also to charge creditors that 'arrest' a ship the mooring fee for the port (since they're the ones demanding it stays there). The ship, any unclaimed cargo, and any unclaimed containers, would then be fire-sold with the base price of the remaining debt for that ship an…

If it's allowed to sell unclaimed cargo, doesn't that create an incentive to jack up all the unloading fees? I mean, if I pay $1,000 to ship my $30,000 car, what's stopping the port from saying they want $20,000 to give it to me?

The one doing the sale isn't the company, it's the government overseeing the bankruptcy of the fragment they're handling (the vessel).

As for the input costs, they'd probably (and should) enforce the standard market rate of processing fee.

The idea isn't that the company is bidding on the value of their cargo; it's that the companies FIRST get to declare if they're writing off their cargo or paying whatever their split of the loading fee is (possibly a maximum value they'd claim at) and THEN anything left is sold off (to get rid of it).

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