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Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

wsj.com

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Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#81

Post by saintkaye »

lynx23 wrote: post #78
carlmr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good news reporting is an essential part of democracy. We don't have it anymore. Nobody wants to pay for it. We'll see how it goes.

Lamenting the unwillingness to pay for trash is a hopeless cause. The cat bites its own tale. Most news outlets I know have deteriorated so much in quality that I would never even think about paying for any of that propaganda. Give me a good, balanced, non-pliticized and honest news site, and I might consider supporting them.

You don’t actually want that or you’d be paying for it already. The problem is that most news doesn’t affect you and the majority that does only affects you in that it excites, scares or entertains you.

It wasn’t that news got bad or people got more evil, it’s that the value of information cratered and now it’s not even expensive enough to come with editors.

Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#82

Post by maratc »

lynx23 wrote: post #61
somethoughts wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely feels like there should be a "law of headlines" coined to effect of - something must always either be surging catastrophically or plummeting disatrously.

The truth is, journalism has cratered. However, most are not ready to accept the truth, since they still believe the media are an essential part of democracy.

> The truth is, journalism has cratered.

There's an old quote addressing exactly that:

   "When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth."
It's not that journalism has cratered, it only reached a level of what people are willing to consume.

Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#83

Post by Grimburger »

stonogo wrote: post #77
Grimburger wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> callous layoffs, unemployment, and misery for the workforce US unemployment is hovering around 50 years lows. Probably better to look at the actual stats rather than listen to the constant doom-peddling that comes from the media. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate

US labor force participation rate is also at historic lows. A low unemployment rate only considers the active labor force. There aren't as many people working as a fraction of population as you think. Doom peddling and stats can line up. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/labo...

An ageing population means that participation rate is always trending downwards.

People get strange about unemployment figures and how they are determined but the methodology hasn't changed in decades.

Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#84

Post by nologic01 »

eru wrote: post #52
nologic01 wrote: post #24

The shock of the onset and "anti"-shock of the fizzling of the pandemic must be the most dramatic economic experiment for some time. Its like throwing a stone in a stagnant pond and watching the waves go up and down. Except the economic fluid is far more complex, full of lags and hysteresis. E.g. shipping rates have gone down but not the costs (indicated as fuel and labor). Why not? Nobody wants to leave a crisis go…

> Except the economic fluid is far more complex, full of lags and hysteresis. E.g. shipping rates have gone down but not the costs (indicated as fuel and labor). Why not? It's much weirder. Economics is even fuller of anti-lags, ie clever economic actors are constantly planning for the future and anticipating. Eg if the Fed announces today, that they are going to run the printing presses red-hot next year, you'd alre…

> Contrary to popular opinion, investors are rather long sighted and forward looking

Contrary to popular opinion investors are a very inhomogeneous crowd: From real economy investors, like the shipping company that tries to anticipate long-term global economic supply and demand patterns and orders massively expensive ships that will only be delivered years down the line, to bloomberg types or crypto speculators or HFT algos, that basically just look at financial timeseries going up or down, detached from any economic, environmental or social reality.

To abuse the liquid analogy just bit more, the fluid is composed of all sorts of molecules. Heavy ones with lots of inertia but also lots of small scale noise. As things are, the incoherent noise sometimes turns coherent (hypes, manias and other delusions) and then the tail wags the dog (to finally switch metaphor :-)

Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#85

Post by lazyasciiart »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #50
somethoughts wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely feels like there should be a "law of headlines" coined to effect of - something must always either be surging catastrophically or plummeting disatrously.

Australian media uses the word horror in almost every tragedy story. Sometimes I feel like they need thesaurus’s explained to them.

thesaurus's what?

Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#87

Post by nologic01 »

peepeepoopoo6 wrote: post #80
visarga wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except the economic fluid is far more complex, full of lags and hysteresis. You mean it is learning? Hysteresis is "local learning".

That's not what that word means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteresis

There is probably some remote connection at the mathematical level but it is fair to say that the amount of "learning" happening in the economy is nowhere close to the amount of brain cells available.

Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#88

Post by lynx23 »

maratc wrote: post #82
lynx23 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is, journalism has cratered. However, most are not ready to accept the truth, since they still believe the media are an essential part of democracy.

> The truth is, journalism has cratered. There's an old quote addressing exactly that: "When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the…

Ahh, the good old "it is only for your good" argument. I don't buy it. There wouldn't be any unhappy media consumers if that statement were universally true. Everytime I read something which has been badly researched or which is blatantly trying to manipulate me and I feel like this is bad journalism, is the media givng me what I want right now? Nope.

Re: Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips

#89

Post by lazyasciiart »

eastbound wrote: post #75
eyelidlessness wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it is. Being aware of how the immediate future is shaped by already made decisions helps to inform people who wouldn’t otherwise know what’s pending. The contrary journalistic standard would be, well, the first chapter of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

No. It’s a journalism of building up expectations and hyping up the dopamine, ie it’s barely marketing. Journalism is about reporting information. Information about future events is not information.

Of course it is. I would be furious if my local news stopped informing me that the highway will be closed for maintenance on Saturday, elections are being held on Tuesday, public schools have the day off on Thursday and the local university will be playing a championship game on Sunday.
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