Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Sure but the luck here is the number of days until a sufficiently high tide. Imagine a simple model where every 28 days you get a sufficiently high tide and every other day is not sufficiently high, and the ship gets stuck (after high tide) on a uniformly random day. Then the expected time until the ship is unstuck is 14.5 days and the luck is how close you are to the time the ship can get free.
Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
461–470 of 593 posts
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Sure but the luck here is the number of days until a sufficiently high tide. Imagine a simple model where every 28 days you get a sufficiently high tide and every other day is not sufficiently high, and the ship gets stuck (after high tide) on a uniformly random day. Then the expected time until the ship is unstuck is 14.5 days and the luck is how close you are to the time the ship can get free.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
I, for one, was thankful that we had something relatively non-polarizing in the news to discuss. "Stuck boat needs to get unstuck" is the kind of practical problem that people on both sides of the fence can agree on :)
My local newspaper's comments has people who think the boat's name is Evergreen, not Ever Given ("haha stupid media can't even get that right") and that it's a reference to Hillary Clinton's Secret Service code name and that Means Something™. ( https://imgur.com/a/1CjsCsl ) Nothing's non-polarizing anymore.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of annealing, and why it's implemented as a technique for finding optima.
I'm not blocking the canal, I'm testing robustness! Also in the big picture with covid not being as deadly as it could have been, could serve as a nice dress rehearsal for a captain trips.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I wonder about: how is such a rescue contract negotiated? There is likely willingness to pay, but it is difficult to judge what a reasonable price is, and it may not even be clear who is culpable in advance. Do they have contracts in advance with the shipping companies?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage#Types_of_salvag... : In contract salvage the owner of the property and salvor enter into a salvage contract prior to the commencement of salvage operations and the amount that the salvor is paid is determined by the contract. This can be a fixed amount, based on a "time and materials" basis, or any other terms that both parties agree to. The contract may also state that pa…
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#466It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will actually happen after the initial medi…
I think the pendulum is swinging too far the other direction. "Look how easy it is. They just shook it loose" is the wrong lesson to take here, IMO.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason water is cheap is because it's plentiful; there's a lot of competition to supply it. But there's only one Suez canal and sailing around Africa is much worse. So you would expect Egypt to be extracting a significant portion of the value the Suez canal adds.
So… if somebody gets a monopoly on the water supply to an area, you think a price hike is reasonable? Oh, wait, water's already a monopoly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd start by computing the number of ships that went around the Southern tip of Africa as a result of the stuck ship. I wonder how much the cost of extra fuel and food/pay for all of those ships doing additional miles will be? And the resulting increase in wholesale/retail costs? Regarding penalties re late delivery, I'm less worried about that. Cargo ships always have language about loss and force majeure. I think a…
Container ships burn horrible, cheap bunker fuel, and the shipping industry is infamous for hiring crew from low-income countries like the Philippines, paying them a pittance, and treating them like modern-day slaves. I'd strongly suspect that the costs for spoilage and knock-on effects from late delivery etc would outstrip crew and fuel costs by a large margin.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
My local newspaper's comments has people who think the boat's name is Evergreen, not Ever Given ("haha stupid media can't even get that right") and that it's a reference to Hillary Clinton's Secret Service code name and that Means Something™. ( https://imgur.com/a/1CjsCsl ) Nothing's non-polarizing anymore.
The word "EVERGREEN" is painted on the side of the boat about 400 feet long and maybe 60 feet tall. I think it's fair to misinterpret that as the name of the boat, and not the name of the company that owns the boat. Especially so because the two names are so similar.
It's a bit less fair to think it's Hillary Clinton's Secret Service codeword painted on the side of the ship to advertise child trafficking.
Re: Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated
#470Earlier 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
That plan was frozen after the Egypt-Israel peace agreement.