71–80 of 128 posts
Done to death in this other thread 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991317
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Yep, but those two routes around capes can be disrupted too, which may cause advantage for those, who are not using them. Then it will be easy to plant the message into brains of those 50% who have less than average IQ: "Blame your government for this sudden spike in prices! Vote for those, who want to protect us, not foreigners!"
aside because everyone who makes that comment seems to get it wrong: 50% of the population has less than the median IQ, not the average!
What's the mistake? It's a normal distribution; the average is equal to the median.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sorry, how?!
Gravity is a conservative force, so if you raise something up really high, dropping it will recover the energy used to pull it up. Of course in practice there's a lot of other things that cause energy loss, but there are lot of dams in the world that exist as "stored power", by pumping water uphill, then getting energy back as the water goes through the dam later. Big bucket high up is basically a battery. The questi…
Reminds me of this lesson in gravity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFUj6LH4FSI
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Rail/Road doesn't compare to ships in terms of throughput by weight so the land route to China from Russia, even if the freight train system were robust, would not handle the same amounts that a trans-oceanic route like China to the Americas could handle (or even China to St. Petersburg if that were needed)
The simple railroad idea is “big ship comes to west Panama, unloads onto trains, which load into big ship in east Panama” but that avoids the strength of railroads. You have to unload the ship eventually anyway, so you instead have it load into rail and disperse to final destination more directly. You’d need a heat map of where everything ends up that is going through Panama, but if you’re dumping to rail many of tho…
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I had to check if that realistic. 40 million gallons at 85 feet is 11MWh of potential energy. At 70% efficiency it would take 16MWh to pump that. That has to be a small amount of energy compared to what ships take for traveling the detour.
But if it is not pumped back it is free electricity
Panama Canal at reduced capacity. Suez Canal at reduced capacity (for very different reasons). Therefore shipping costs and delays are rising. Could this be a trigger for the recession everyone seems to be predicting?
Isn't it more likely to be a trigger for continued/increasing inflation? I.e., the goods still need to get where they're going, but it's going to cost more, either through longer routes or more expensive means (rail/truck).
Panama Canal at reduced capacity. Suez Canal at reduced capacity (for very different reasons). Therefore shipping costs and delays are rising. Could this be a trigger for the recession everyone seems to be predicting?
Isn't it more likely to be a trigger for continued/increasing inflation? I.e., the goods still need to get where they're going, but it's going to cost more, either through longer routes or more expensive means (rail/truck).
Can't the canal authorities reduce the water used somehow? If you paired up ships so that one going up the lock system is matched with one going down you could just pump the water back and forth from one lock to the other and back. Then way less water would be lost from the system. The Falkirk wheel in Scotland can move boats with minimal electricity usage. Could a bigger one be built?
The Falkirk wheel is quite an immense structure, but each one of it's basins is only 80m long and 6.5m wide. It's moving 500 tonnes of weight each rotation (split between the two basins to keep it balanced). To service the Panama Canal, you'd need basins 370m long and 50m wide. The new Panamax ships are apparently capable of carrying 120,000 tonnes of weight (no idea what they weigh themselves), but we're talking abo…
One note - they don’t pump water out and back into the locks from a neighboring storage. They flush the water. Each ship needs like 40 million gallons? Maybe title should be insane wastes of water forces authorities…. :)
https://www.dw.com/en/will-climate-change-cut-off-the-panama... discusses some possible solutions: > solutions [...] include water-saving sluices that would collect freshwater in basins so it can be reused. To this end, possibilities are being examined to develop and exploit other water sources near the canal. The construction of reservoirs and saltwater desalination plants are also being considered. There's also: >…
I'm enjoying that sentiment very much. I wonder if there's a mileage breakdown of China -> US (around South America) versus China -> US (through the Suez Canal).