Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering projects.
I think a lot of the HN suggestions were for entertainment value really. Dredge and use tugs wasn't very exciting.
Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
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Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
Timeghost has a great series on this:
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#243Lots 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?
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 t…
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.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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…
> 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!
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
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.
>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 :)
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
"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.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#247Lots 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 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.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#248Some 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...
Here's a somewhat good compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovWoznPIBhw
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#249I 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.
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.
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?
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#250Er, this party ain't over 'til the weight-challenged lady's cleared the exit door