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A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

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Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#101

Post by kwhitefoot »

elif wrote: post #55
aidenn0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; at some point you're going to lift the water up. That requires pumping.

Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand. Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together. If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.

Some lock flights have pumps to keep the ponds at the top full of water because they are near the highest point in the area so they can't refill naturally fast enough or simply to avoid depleting the upstream water source. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caen_Hill_Locks

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#102

Post by alephnerd »

bobthepanda wrote: post #92
alephnerd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high value items Medium value parts actually (eg. OEM). And it's the same specialization that Mexico has had since the late 1990s and early 2000s when their factories left for China [0][1][2]. That's why Mexican manufacturing has started growing again - costs have equalized between CN and MX manufacturing for intermediate parts. For example, take apart a Sony PS2, Compaq workstation, or a Toshiba DVD Player from th…

IIRC the big anxiety in China is not really that manufacturing is disappearing, but it’s not clear what comes next. China has started running into the problems that South Korea and Japan have, where they produce a large amount of university graduates not willing to do blue collar work.

> but it’s not clear what comes next Yep!

The same thing happened in Mexico, Thailand, Turkiye, Malaysia etc.

Skilled manufacturing continues to grow within China and these countries, but skilled manufacturing requires a high amount of human capital, which means your average Joe ain't getting retrained.

Imo, now is the best time for China to expand it's horrible social safety net. Thailand, Turkey, and Malaysia all did a similar expansion of their social safety net when they were at China's level decades ago.

There's a reason why Turkey today has living standards comparable to Central Europe versus in 1990 when it was comparable to Algeria and Phillipines. And why China didn't catch up to Mexico's HDI until COVID happened, which contracted the Mexican economy to a level unseen anywhere else other than India.

> graduates not willing to do blue collar work

People are willing if you pay them enough. The issue is the pay is relatively low, but CoL has gotten very high.

This happens to all countries. Go read older news articles about Turkiye in the 2000s, Malaysia/Thailand in the 1990s, Mexico in the 1990s, etc.

They all developed rapidly and then stagnated.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#103

Post by alephnerd »

biotopia wrote: post #95
bobthepanda wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC the big anxiety in China is not really that manufacturing is disappearing, but it’s not clear what comes next. China has started running into the problems that South Korea and Japan have, where they produce a large amount of university graduates not willing to do blue collar work.

No, the big anxiety in China is that the manufacturing is disappearing, especially to developed world like Europe and US. With real estate and consumer spending - the 2 of 3 economic engines - in the dumps, China has switched focus back to manufacturing - the other engine. However... China's annual exports drop for first time in seven years. Among key trading partners, exports to the U.S. led the decline, down 13% fr…

> that the manufacturing is disappearing

Manufacturing is not disappearing in China yet. Or at least not skilled manufacturing.

Any deindustrialization that is happening is in the low margins space like Textiles, plastic crap, and the likes, which have begun moving to Vietnam, Bangladesh and India - but that was always going to happen. There's a reason why those textile factories in Tijuana or Ciudad Juarez in the 1980s shut down by the early 2000s.

For higher value intermediate parts, the manufacturing base continues to exist in China, but is now competing at the same price point as an OEM in Thailand, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Russia before the war, etc.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#104

Post by ianburrell »

elif wrote: post #55
aidenn0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; at some point you're going to lift the water up. That requires pumping.

Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand. Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together. If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.

I think the thing you are missing is that raising the low side means that the next boat to use the lock going up has to drain the high water into the low canal. The Panama Canal has system to conserve that water but some water still moves down the locks both for raising and lowering.

The British locks depend on a source of water at the top of the canal. I watched a video recently about Canal Trust rebuilding lock reservoir. The water levels definitely can limit if locks and canals are usable.

The Panama Canal has a reservoir at the top, Gatan Lake, but the water is low. Sea level is never the high side, it is always the low side.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#105

Post by ok_dad »

nashashmi wrote: post #68
ok_dad wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would take a long time to pump that amount of water out of the lock that you’re lowering, and over time you’ll be pumping saltwater into a freshwater system, which isn’t good. You’d have to do filtering or something, at great expense. Currently it takes a short time to drain the lock, so ships transit faster. It’s pretty fun to do that transit, but I was amazed that the pilot let me conn the ship the whole time in…

Saltwater mixing is a good point. But the canal has two lanes. One lane is for one direction. The other lane is for the other direction. I can imagine cases where the saltwater is never used.

The way locks work you can save some by using extra storage ponds but you can’t save it all. You have to move some water into the ocean, because that’s the cost for the physics that move giant ships up and down as easily as this.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#106

Post by ianburrell »

bombcar wrote: post #62
elif wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? Britain is covered with a preindustrial canal network with thousands of locks which use nothing but channels doors and gravity. Literally made of wood and operated by hand. Raising water on the low side to the level on the high side simply requires joining the two sides together. If sea level is their high side, I don't understand why they can't use this supply forever.

The sea level is the low side. The lake is the high side - which works great until the supply of lake water dries up. The obvious solution is a sea-level tunnel a hundred miles long. Probably cheap. ;)

There has been proposed canal in Nicaragua. It would be 170 miles long and have locks to reach Lake Nicaragua.

Chinese company got concession to build decade ago, but didn't do anything and then went out of business.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#107

Post by tomjakubowski »

rtpg wrote: post #51
oneshtein wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You know what they mean.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#108

Post by s1artibartfast »

loceng wrote: post #87
lgleason wrote: post #83

Normally this area gets a lot of rain and there is not an issue which is how they planned for it. We are in a drought cycle which happens from time to time, but this is obviously a rare set of two events happening at the same time. With Nicaragua, beyond the corruption and the instability of the government there, many had concerns about the ecological impact of it.

And how is the seed clouding that's occurring globally impacting this [it's very obvious now, for those unaware, there is GeoengineeringWatch.org and their documentary free on YouTube called "The Dimming"], as well as perhaps hurting crops and those local economies enough to shift power-buying power away from those food producers?

I would guess that cloud seeding and Rain making has pretty minimal impact on Panama due to its proximity to large bodies of water. This is in comparison to continental climates where the atmospheric moisture is passing over arid land and different nations.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#109

Post by rjmunro »

actionfromafar wrote: post #34
londons_explore wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And remember each ship goes up as well as down - so you can theoretically recoup all the energy you used pumping.

I am sorry, how?!

One way is like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falkirk_Wheel No water is used up. Virtually no energy is needed either, except to overcome friction. But scaling it up to the size of the locks on the Panama canal would be huge.

Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal

#110

Post by dumbo-octopus »

pchristensen wrote: post #85
lstodd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How it is pristine when major part of worldwide shipping has been going through it for more than a century I cannot fathom.

Much of the watershed has been protected from development in order to ensure the water supply for the canal. Also, no matter the current level of pristineness/pollution, there's no way pumping millions of gallons of seawater per day would help.

Unless of course it prevented the draining of millions of gallons of freshwater.

No matter what there is some amount of mixing with the sea. The question is at which lock should that happen. Currently it's at lock 1, everyone here is arguing it'd be absolutely impossible for it to happen at any other lock, without providing any justification.

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