201–210 of 593 posts
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There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high tide and a bunch of tug boats.
A high tide and some tug boats becomes 'high-end engineering' if it works
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Drama sells better than facts.
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.
And honestly, had the ship still been stuck on wed, tide would not be as high for another moon cycle; further complicating.
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?
I don't think there will be any spoilage, the goods travelled through sea are never fresh.
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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.
I suspect that many (but not all) of the “crazy” suggestions were a bit tongue-in-cheek.
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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 .
>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…
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!)
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...
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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.
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 tha…
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.
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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 .
>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…
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.
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I don't think there will be any spoilage, the goods travelled through sea are never fresh.
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