Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated • Hacker News Board

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#331

Post by dghlsakjg » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #318

divbzero wrote: post #46

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...

Is it just me or is the Evergiven listing to port?

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.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#332

Post by interestica » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

ufmace wrote: post #141

JosephRedfern wrote: post #62

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?

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…

So by attempting to calculate it, the cost goes up higher.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#333

Post by dan-robertson » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #322

EricE wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You say that like they just got unexpectedly lucky, but all mariners are well aware of and take tides into account in their planning.

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.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#334

Post by onei » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

riverageraldo wrote: post #328

ufmace wrote: post #141

Earlier 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…

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

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.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#335

Post by matkoniecz » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

riverageraldo wrote: post #328

ufmace wrote: post #141

Earlier 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…

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

partially done already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Bypass_expansion

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#336

Post by adamweld » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

riverageraldo wrote: post #328

ufmace wrote: post #141

Earlier 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…

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

I think you massively underestimate the cost (land, machinery, labor, upkeep) of undertaking such a project.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#337

Post by matkoniecz » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #304

foobarbaz33 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Maybe backlog will be cleared as result of some ships taking route around Africa?

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#338

Post by lisper » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii wrote: post #327

lisper wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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_Clearance_Op…

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.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#339

Post by xxs » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

lstamour wrote: post #209

xxs wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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... Mos…

> 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.

Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

#340

Post by F_J_H » Mon, Mar 29, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

leoh wrote: post #157

exikyut wrote: post #90

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.

There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high tide and a bunch of tug boats.

All jobs are easy to the person who doesn't have to do them. ~Hold's Law

;-)