I don't think I'd ever considered prior to now how much more economic it would be to release "The one nuclear bomb [TerroristOrganisation] can afford to muster" in a shipping choke-point, rather than a city. So, another thing to worry about :)
They'd be crappy terrorists because shipping delays don't cause terror the way real terrorism does.
No they’d be geniuses because they would cause economic losses to powerful people a lot like how the good Friday agreement came about quite quickly after the IRA broke every office window in the finicial district of London with a truckload of fertiliser. No-one was killed and glaziers rates went up 10 times for a few months. It caused a big disruption to the financial district but most ordinary people weren’t that bothered by it. Actual terrorism, chopping peoples heads off or letting off bombs in the metro doesn’t acheive anything, it just pisses ordinary people off and makes them want the government to bomb you right back.
According to the Twitter feed there is now a excavator trying to dig out the bow. It really shows off the scale as the excavator looks like a tiny toy next to the massive container ship. https://twitter.com/jsrailton/status/1374468169784459267/pho...
I see a Pixar movie about an excavator being written..
Does anyone have some insight on how this could affect global supply chains, depending on how long the canal is blocked? It seems like it's been blocked for a day or so, and there's already a pretty big queue. I'd imagine that has to have some significant impacts already.
Global trade will probably only be significantly impacted if the canal stays blocked for more than 2 weeks, which is when it starts to become a reasonable option (time-wise) to go south instead and round the cape. A backlog of ships on both sides will start to be really significant after 4 days of blocking, with longer blockade implying ports increasingly further down the routes being impacted as well. Currently, the…
Add to the fact that we had equipment shortage for a while these months (hi from a shipping agency)...
a video from 4 months ago, what it normally looks like to transit the canal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwdU2cYRbnM
At the end of the video he says that he estimates the transit toll for his ship to be around 200,000$. Wow!
Some back-of-the-napkin calculations: The ship's got over 20k containers, so less than $10 per container. Shipping a container from Asia to Europe costs thousands of dollars, so passing through the canal is less than 1% of the cost. Sounds fair to me?
Can anyone familiar with shipping offer an explanation for this track other than the funny, obvious, and probably wrong one? https://twitter.com/KyeFox/status/1374513117326024705
It's the GPS position transmitted via AIS, it's like your phone while you are in a static position but on a bigger scale...
Three questions: 1. How easy would it be to pay a container ship’s captain to do that ? 2. Can you then bet on short term commodity futures to benefits from the event significantly? 3. Do you think this is what’s happening ?
It was caused by a power blackout meaning no-one was in control of the ship. It’s possible someone pulled a breaker or something but I don’t know how easy that would be to do in a way that would not look like sabotage.