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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

#141

Post by otikik »

ehvatum wrote: post #102
maratc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Vice News used to be great and essentially apolitical. They went to interesting, dangerous places and reported what they saw by showing you what they saw. Their viewership grew rapidly. Fast-forward. All new Vice productions are deeply and uniformly opinionated. Comparatively few people care to watch. Relative to their previous work, this later work received no significant attention and generated no revenue. There is…

Nothing is apolitical.

If you don’t talk about politics then your position is “I am fine with the way things are now”, which is political.

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

#142

Post by the_gastropod »

golergka wrote: post #126
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vice News used to be great and essentially apolitical. One of the founders founded the proud boys. >They went to interesting, dangerous places and reported what they saw by showing you what they saw. They were rich nepo kids going into places and doing a ton of poverty porn. Seeing the inside of a favela on the eyes of a brooklyn kids whose dad makes pharma patents was edgy in 2000s but boy does it not hold up. > A…

> One of the founders founded the proud boys. That's ad hominem, not a counter argument about Vice's content. > They were rich nepo kids going into places and doing a ton of poverty porn. Seeing the inside of a favela on the eyes of a brooklyn kids whose dad makes pharma patents was edgy in 2000s but boy does it not hold up. Yes, so? This description is good journalism. You're just trying to come up with derogatory t…

That is not what ad hominem means. Responding to the claim that Vice used to be unbiased by pointing out the cofounder of Vice also happened to found an extremist right wing organization—some might call it a terrorist organization—is perfectly fair game.

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

#143

Post by prng2021 »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #8

> The rates for both trade lanes are hovering around 2019 levels, but fuel and labor expenses are higher now than before the pandemic. Hard to really feel like this is a crisis, since all of the reporting is how there was a brief, glorious period (for the companies) of 10x prices, and the crisis is that the period is ended.

"fuel and labor expenses are higher now than before the pandemic. “Spot rates are at a level that in the long run are not sustainable, with costs up by 25% to 30% since 2019"

We all speak English here and read the same article right? Shipping fees are back to prepandemic levels but operating costs are much higher.

Why doesn't that count as a crisis or as something worth reporting?

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

#144

Post by tedivm »

prng2021 wrote: post #143
CGamesPlay wrote: post #8

> The rates for both trade lanes are hovering around 2019 levels, but fuel and labor expenses are higher now than before the pandemic. Hard to really feel like this is a crisis, since all of the reporting is how there was a brief, glorious period (for the companies) of 10x prices, and the crisis is that the period is ended.

"fuel and labor expenses are higher now than before the pandemic. “Spot rates are at a level that in the long run are not sustainable, with costs up by 25% to 30% since 2019" We all speak English here and read the same article right? Shipping fees are back to prepandemic levels but operating costs are much higher. Why doesn't that count as a crisis or as something worth reporting?

Companies reach records profits: invisible hand of the market.

Wages go up: crisis that could destroy our economy.

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

#145

Post by fluidcruft »

prox wrote: post #139
csunbird wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am looking for a neutral, down to the earth style newspaper, focused on world news, not only west/USA. I can definitely pay for that!

https://ground.news/ It gives ratings on headlines and it helps to get an overview of the news.

I truly love ground news, but it constantly forgets where you are in the feed when you open an item so you'll be reading down fifty items or so and open one then go back to the list and have to start scrolling from the top again. It really, really wears on you. I wish they would finally fix it. Despite that major annoyance (it really makes me wonder whether they even dogfood), the Blindspot is so interesting I still power through.

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

#146

Post by prox »

fluidcruft wrote: post #145
prox wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://ground.news/ It gives ratings on headlines and it helps to get an overview of the news.

I truly love ground news, but it constantly forgets where you are in the feed when you open an item so you'll be reading down fifty items or so and open one then go back to the list and have to start scrolling from the top again. It really, really wears on you. I wish they would finally fix it. Despite that major annoyance (it really makes me wonder whether they even dogfood), the Blindspot is so interesting I still…

Hopefully we have one of the devs reading hackernews :)

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

#147

Post by neilv »

prox wrote: post #140
neilv wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody wants to pay for it Spoken on a popular site that routinely uses pirate mirrors to circumvent news site paywalls. :)

The thing is that news has an utilitarian function : we should be able to debate what is going in the world around us. What’s going on in the world is another word for news. News should be free in a way.

I agree that news/journalism should be accessible to everyone.

But piracy of paywalled content just provides a relief valve for whatever demand there is for accessibility, and keeps the 'news' a property of parties like Rupert Murdoch (in the case of WSJ).

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

#148

Post by dpflan »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #8

> The rates for both trade lanes are hovering around 2019 levels, but fuel and labor expenses are higher now than before the pandemic. Hard to really feel like this is a crisis, since all of the reporting is how there was a brief, glorious period (for the companies) of 10x prices, and the crisis is that the period is ended.

I agree here, some of these headlines are based upon the outlier effect of economic whiplash stemming from the pandemic -- hard to have economic models keep up. Now companies are returning to pre-pandemic activity, and apparently, it's a catastrophe... We should try postulating what was economically forecast prior to the pandemic boom-bust-whiplash.

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

#149

Post by sixstringtheory »

mschuster91 wrote: post #118
wazoox wrote: post #111

Cry me a river. CMA-CGM has made 40 billion € of profit in the past three years. I suppose Maersk and other large shipping companies are on the same boat (uh uh).

> CMA-CGM has made 40 billion € of profit in the past three years. And it seems like they didn't do the responsible thing and set it aside in a rainy-day fund, but instead they and their competitors went on a shopping spree. Honestly, the way things have went in the past, I'd say a maximum of three years before the first one whines and calls for government subsidies.

What'd they purchase? It's arguably better for some of that money to continue circulating in the economy vs being parked in investments and savings that essentially create money out of nothing, accruing interest or profiting from speculation. Of course it does make sense to do that with a portion, perhaps, but I wouldn't say "all". And I do share your disdain with government bailouts.

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

#150

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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…

Maybe superficially (as the market molds tastes as much as it caters to them), but there's a third option between conspiracy and a bad market, and it comes straight out of Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent"[0]. According to Chomsky, there are five filters "that determine what information and ideas tend to be conveyed through mass media and how they are presented":

1. "the ownership of the media";

2. "advertising as the primary source of the income of media companies";

3. "the sources of the information and opinions that are propagated by mass media, which are primarily government officials, business interests, and the experts who are approved of and often funded by government and business";

4. "the negative feedback that mass media companies get when their content conflicts with these common interests";

5. fear, i.e., "mass media have an interest in selecting and conveying information, and in molding what counts as a respectable range of opinion, in a manner that is conducive to generating fear and hostility toward anyone who would challenge the shared basic ideological presuppositions of the overall government-corporate-media complex".

In other words, the media is a propaganda machine that reflects and reinforces the narrative of the regime. It involves no conspiracy, only dependence and coincidence of interest. As Chomsky would say, the media is to democracy what the police baton is to more overtly aggressive regimes.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/03/chomskys-propaganda...

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