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Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated

reuters.com

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

#351

Post by lukifer »

diegocg wrote: post #243
stcredzero wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to distort reality and craft narratives, including framing what is allowed to considered "real economics".

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

#352

Post by JxLS-cpgbe0 »

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.

Why wouldn't it be more cost-effective or unreasonable to destroy the ship?

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

#353

Post by creato »

iso1210 wrote: post #301
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…

The canal revenues were down about $15m/day. If it really cost $7b a day, then Egypt is massively undercharging.

Someone else in one of these canal threads said that Egypt charges slightly less than it would cost to sail around Africa. If that's true, that Egypt is probably capturing around as much value as is possible from the canal.

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

#354

Post by erostrate »

mrlonglong wrote: post #346

I was wondering about the sheer size of those ships. Could they get even bigger than 400 metres? Is there a limit?

From this (very good) FT article https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d...

"But the specific engineering of container ships mean that they can’t get longer; they have to get wider. An oil tanker is a shoe box with a lid: hull on the bottom, oil in the middle, deck on top. But a container ship is a shoebox without a lid: hull on the bottom, then containers all the way up. It’s not as strong without the lid.

There are definitely hydrodynamic forces in the open ocean, it’s just that the ocean is usually in charge of them. And the biggest stress on a ship’s hull in heavy weather happens along the longitudinal bending moment — lengthwise, between the bow and the stern. The longer a ship gets, the worse the stress gets when a wave pushes up in the wrong place. As far as length goes for container ships, “we are at the limitations of welding and steel quality,” says Lataire. “I will not say that it is impossible to weld thicker plates, but in a way this is the economic limit.”

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

#355

Post by throwawayfire »

chipsambos wrote: post #179
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…

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…

> The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals

In general, temporary disruption has some long-term positive economic effects (which is directly why 'disruption' is valued in Silicon Valley).

For example, during London Tube Strikes, commuters find different and more efficient routes and 5% ended up permanently changing their route on public transport: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tube-strike...

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

#356

Post by rsstack »

BurningFrog wrote: post #99
rodiger wrote: post #68

Does Evergreen get fined for something like this? Is there enforceable law here? Or just say sorry and life goes on?

Ships going through the canal are commanded by Egyption pilots, so it's doubtful that Evergreen has any responsibility. That would make the Egyptian government responsible. But I'd be stunned if it paid or apologized to anyone.

Suez Canal policy (enforced by contracts) removes liability from the Authority and its pilots. Also worth noting that the pilots don't control the helm directly. That doesn't mean it wasn't their fault :) We may never know.

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

#357

Post by Thrymr »

IgorPartola wrote: post #130
turing_complete wrote: post #117

Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering projects.

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.

I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service outage...

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

#358

Post by el_duderino »

vnxli wrote: post #36
Stormwalker wrote: post #30

Any info how it was freed? Article does not mention any solutions.

WSJ posted an article with some more detail. TLDR; high tide and dredging https://www.wsj.com/articles/ship-blocking-suez-canal-is-par...

https://archive.is/DD9PB

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

#359

Post by munificent »

dan-robertson wrote: post #333
munificent wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> I’d be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got stuck.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that after the ship got stuck, they certainly incorporated the tides into their plan for how to unstick it. If the tides had been less amenable, they would have come up with a different plan.

So their plan didn't get "lucky", their plan was predicated on the tides being part of the solution.

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

#360

Post by lukifer »

stcredzero wrote: post #286
impalallama wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just news to be. Random loose correlation of events plotted into a narrative.

Facts are supposed give rise to an emergent narrative. That is good journalism. What we have in 2021, are people curating facts and only including those that fit their pre-determined narrative.

While it would be naive to pretend that pre-determined narratives aren't a huge factor, I think that model leaves something out: that journalists and organizations are often incentivized to distort the facts into arbitrary narratives, based not on values or ideology, but on virality and cognitive/emotional stickiness. "Person X is a hero" and "Person X is a villain" will both tend to outcompete nuance ("Person X is flawed but well-intentioned and has done both good and bad things.").
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