441–450 of 593 posts
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I don't think there will be any spoilage, the goods travelled through sea are never fresh.
LOL. The fruits in American grocery stores are not airlifted in from Brazil.
Personally, I've always been surprised by the amount of fruit, flowers, and other perishables that do economically come in via air.
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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…
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Not necessarily. I pay only $1 a day for water, but if you stop giving me water for 7 days the damages are going to be a lot more than $7. That doesn't mean it's reasonable to charge me more than $1 per day for water. Obviously an extreme example, but the situation with this ship is likely similar. The damages probably far exceed the $15m/day in revenue (though I suspect they are far lower than $7b per day).
> That doesn't mean it's reasonable to charge me more than $1 per day for water. This is where someone steps in and says something to the tune of "Whatever price you're willing to pay is by definition reasonable" and completely ignore the ethical/moral issues with essentially holding someone's life for ransom by charging the maximum price they can get for something they need to survive.
So, did they let it into the Canal, or did it go to the back of the line?
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A quick look suggests that the Tigris is mostly navigable up to Baghdad, which would get you halfway there. As an alternative (and ignoring the obviously substantial geopolitical concerns), is there a geographic reason not to dig a canal on the other side of the Sinai from, say, Aqaba to Rafah? If you had to dig that far, it would seem to be the next best option.
It's kind of hard to tell, but it looks like the Suez canal was on super flat land and I recall most of Sinai is desert. The Israel-Egypt border doesn't look that flat based on the colouring on the leading image of [1]. 1. https://www.npr.org/2007/06/04/10619929/six-day-war-shaping-...
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It's the only practical solution really. Cranes - Likely on a barge, on a relatively narrow canal. That's quite precarious. And make that two for both sides (canal is impassable). Heavy lift helicopters - Even the few multiple automated cranes capable of handling a ship this size take days to unload it. Also these helicopters are quite expensive to operate. Floatation devices - See Costa Concordia salvage operations.…
Agreed. Cranes - the ones used in ports are absolutely massive. Not realistic. Helicopter not possible. Max lift is the M-26 at 44,000 lbs and containers are rated for about 60,000 loaded lbs. Flotation is unlikely due to lack of water depth. Bouyant force is based on displaced water. As long as the ship remained intact, dredging and tugging was almost certain to work. Ultimately a simple problem. Just a matter of ti…
I wonder how much the couple of excavators helped. I saw people on HN saying having two measly excavators was just to give the appearance of doing something and not an actual attempt to get the boat unstuck. But when I saw a photo of the digging, it looked like there was some serious progress made.
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Where do you propose building this extra canal?
Cue Elon Musk promising to build a tunnel version of it for $5 million total cost, opening fall 2022.
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It's kind of hard to tell, but it looks like the Suez canal was on super flat land and I recall most of Sinai is desert. The Israel-Egypt border doesn't look that flat based on the colouring on the leading image of [1]. 1. https://www.npr.org/2007/06/04/10619929/six-day-war-shaping-...
I mean, the alternative proposal was a canal through the ~3rd most violent region on the planet.
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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 f…
Those aren't arbitrary. They are often pre-decided by higher ups in the company, or pre-decided as the prevailing groupthink in some forum or mailing list. People have been calling this stuff out online for years! Funnily enough, it stays out of the consciousness of normal people, because it's never covered in the mainstream news. Invariably, the people doing the exposing are then labeled something unsavory, so very few people bother to look into it. Some of this stuff is bunk. However, some of it is clearly real, and kinda disgusting.
Stuff like this has even been going on since the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent