Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Panama has a tiny railroad that follows the canal, if they thought this was a viable alternative they would expand it. I think they realize the labor cost on both ends would make this prohibitive + the time to unload and load up another ship would cause major bottlenecks.
A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
81–90 of 128 posts
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Prices rising due to longer shipping routes is not inflation. Just normal market dynamics. I think it is important to disambiguate prices rising from increased money supply, inflation, from other causes. One is fixable by policy. Everything else is just the way things work.
The connection is that aggregate supply and aggregate demand intersect at the current price and output levels of the economy. If aggregate supply contracts, this shifts the output level lower, and the price level higher to compensate. Basically, there is a shortage of basic goods & services needed for the economy to function, so the market price mechanism is trying to incentivize people to work on those sectors that are in shortage.
Drilling in a level, these aggregates are divided into consumption (current needs) + investment (production in expectation of future needs). A supply shock in a basic service like transportation means resources need to be reallocated to cover the increased cost. That means decreased investment, and all of the potential investment opportunities competing for a smaller pool of savings (which is just the excess of current production over current consumption). This drives up the "natural interest rate", the cost of capital in the absence of central bank interventions.
The central bank has a choice between feeling the impact as inflation (where prices rise) or recession (where output drops). If it holds policy rates below the natural interest rate, the money supply increases, and you get inflation. The economy remains out of balance; the market is trying to shift resources from investment to consumption, but if rates are artificially low, investment will be artificially cheap and too many people will be writing software we don't need while we don't have enough truck drivers. If it holds policy rates above the natural interest rate, the money supply shrinks, and you get recession. This is letting the economy come back into equilibrium, but it means that all those software engineers will be laid off and have to get jobs as truck drivers.
The Fed's choice is one of these. They can influence whether we feel the supply shock as a painful recession where lots of people lose their job and have to retrain, or whether we feel it as higher prices as the market tries to correct. But because a supply shock is a real drop in output, it means worsened standards of living regardless.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#83With Nicaragua, beyond the corruption and the instability of the government there, many had concerns about the ecological impact of it.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#84Done to death in this other thread 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38991317
There was another nicaraguan canal project that was floated maybe 10 years ago and supposedly financed by the Chinese government. The government officials involved all ended up charged with an assortment of graft surrounding the project.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Path-Between-Seas-Creation-1870-1914/... - it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It covers engineering, geography, 19th century stock market investing, medical advances, and the birth of US state capacity to run projects. Highly recommended!
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
No you can’t: locks need to open for ship to go through and pools mix when this happen. This is also true for lockTop and LockTopMinusOne. In Panama Canal, LockTop is the lake. It’s Lake Gatún and provide fresh water for Panama City as well as other life forms in this pristine region.
How it is pristine when major part of worldwide shipping has been going through it for more than a century I cannot fathom.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#86https://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: >…
"A canal on one side of the planet is broken? Just use the canal on the other side of the planet." 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).
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#87Normally 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.
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#88Normally 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?
(Also cloud seeding = more rain, drought = less rain)
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you consider the motion and weight, a large (very large) forge would fit in this category of 250000 to 1000000 in moving mass. Its definitely something we have in our grasp. Unfortunately, youd need not only multiple falkirk wheels, but wheels of varying size, and, there would be cases where a ship might have to wait a while, as theres no equally sized ship heading the other way. On the existing falkirk you dont h…
Re: A drought has forced authorities to further slash traffic in Panama Canal
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
There are no "global cloud seeding" projects. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/02/28/fac... anything like that would be trivially observed by layperson scientists. (Also cloud seeding = more rain, drought = less rain)
You don't think weather patterns could shift? It's not black-and-white as "clouds = more rain" - as there's obviously the question of distribution.
Likewise, water vapour in the atmosphere traps more heat - warming the planet; locally of course where there's cloud cover, at least initially, it will be cooler.