[HN Gopher] Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after str... ___________________________________________________________________ Suez Canal says traffic in channel resumes after stranded ship refloated Author : WJW Score : 902 points Date : 2021-03-29 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.reuters.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com) | ldb wrote: | Had to think of that Simpson's episode where MacGyver appears and | says something like "Don't thank me, thank the gravitational pull | of the moon". Well, it seems that that line wasn't complete | nonsense at all :-) | JosephRedfern wrote: | Lots of articles quote a $XXX billion dollars per day figure, but | those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, | while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me. | | Are there any estimates as to the actual cost of this "mishap", | due to e.g. spoilage, financial/contractual repercussions of late | deliveries, personnel/fuel costs? | viztor wrote: | I don't think there will be any spoilage, the goods travelled | through sea are never fresh. | spoonjim wrote: | LOL. The fruits in American grocery stores are not airlifted | in from Brazil. | oasisbob wrote: | There are probably better ways to say this. If you're | familiar with the industry, perhaps you could better inform | the conversation. | | Personally, I've always been surprised by the amount of | fruit, flowers, and other perishables that do economically | come in via air. | spoonjim wrote: | Flowers, yes. Fruits, short of the exotic, name them. | ericbarrett wrote: | . | gambiting wrote: | Ever Given is a container ship, containers don't carry live | animals. Other ships that were stuck behind it have live | animals(cattle mostly) but they are on ships specifically | designed for animals. | [deleted] | ceejayoz wrote: | No. It was _blocking_ ships with live animal cargo. | | https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/26/at- | least... | iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote: | Agreed that just quoting the delayed value does not tell the | whole story. | | But it could be a pretty good proxy: to some approximation, | everything in the supply chain would be set up to work with the | 9.6 Bn daily flow of value - everybody's financing payments, | payroll, working capital, etc. The time is gone. Just like if | you had to take two weeks off (unpaid) because you were sick, | you could work more later to get that money back, and recover | some of it if you work overtime, but you still missed that | window to make money. | mrb wrote: | If we count _only_ missed revenues for Egypt, this incident | cost them about US$100 million. Canal revenues were US$27.2 | billion in the last 5 years | (https://www.reuters.com/article/egypt-economy- | suezcanal/egyp...) which is US$15 million in revenues per day, | and the canal was closed for 7 days. | Reason077 wrote: | It's probably less than that because many transits would have | just been delayed, not entirely cancelled. | foobarbaz33 wrote: | They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely. Due to | the lack of downtime, any delays are in effect the same | thing as a cancel from the perspective of the canal owners. | distrill wrote: | > They run the canal at maximum capacity indefinitely | | We have to stop doing this with all of our critical | systems, it causes hiccups to be so costly. | s1artibartfast wrote: | What is so critical about the Suez Canal. If it were down | for a month/year. what do you think the impacts would be? | Would most ship traffic simply go around Africa? | KineticLensman wrote: | Accepting that globalization wasn't such a big thing | then, the closure between 1967 and 1975 would be a good | source of objective 'what actually happened' data. | anticristi wrote: | Like having nurses and doctors idling around, just in | case a pandemic appears out of nowhere? | kccqzy wrote: | Low utilization can be even more costly. | faeyanpiraat wrote: | But building everything to have a higher capacity also | wastes a lot of resources! It is a balancing game. | Reason077 wrote: | According to reports, the backlog of traffic should be | cleared in about 10 days. They must have _some_ spare | capacity available in order to do that. | matkoniecz wrote: | Maybe backlog will be cleared as result of some ships | taking route around Africa? | signal11 wrote: | I'd start by computing the number of ships that went around the | Southern tip of Africa as a result of the stuck ship. I wonder | how much the cost of extra fuel and food/pay for all of those | ships doing additional miles will be? And the resulting | increase in wholesale/retail costs? | | Regarding penalties re late delivery, I'm less worried about | that. Cargo ships always have language about loss and force | majeure. I think a stuck ship would qualify as force majeure. | And a week _shouldn 't_ affect most perishables e.g. grain, | that go into containers. | PeterisP wrote: | I believe that we can simply look at the channel fees lost | due to the downtime - as far as I understand, the fee for | using the channel is intentionally close to "the cost of | extra fuel and food/pay for all of those ships doing | additional miles", a bit lower but not much lower than the | alternative of going around Africa. | glenneroo wrote: | As posted elsewhere in this thread, this guy debunks that | theory: | | > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwOZOb90fM | nradov wrote: | Grain is usually carried by bulkers, not in containers. | GordonS wrote: | Container ships burn horrible, cheap bunker fuel, and the | shipping industry is infamous for hiring crew from low-income | countries like the Philippines, paying them a pittance, and | treating them like modern-day slaves. | | I'd strongly suspect that the costs for spoilage and knock-on | effects from late delivery etc would outstrip crew and fuel | costs by a large margin. | itismetheidiot wrote: | Filipino Masters and Chief Engineers are being paid north | of $8500/month. Evidently you are not well informed. | GordonS wrote: | I don't doubt a select few senior people are well paid - | but there are many, _many_ more junior crew members that | do not fit that description. | | Also - rude. | gnopgnip wrote: | Late delivery penalties aren't really an economic loss, it is a | wash mostly. Similarly loss of revenue is mostly a wash | | The freight costs are in the range of 0.6%-3% of the cost of | the goods transported on average. This is for the amortized | cost of purchasing the ships, maintenance, the labor and fuel | costs. If you estimate the value of the delayed goods at $10b, | and the freight costs at an extra 2% that's $200m in damages. | | Most food transported this way wouldn't be spoiled by a delay | of a week. If 10% of the goods were food by value, and 15% of | them were perishable, and they were worth half as much after | being delayed delayed a week that is another $75m lost to | spoilage. But it isn't always a one week delay, many ships are | delayed less to start, and there will be increased congestion | in the ports and ground transport for many of these ships. | philip1209 wrote: | Also, are there any paths for supply chain interruption | insurance to kick in? | tyingq wrote: | Still not what you're asking for, but the analysis here looks | like it's done by people who understand this sort of thing: | https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL113622... | ceejayoz wrote: | This seems to be the key bit: | | > If the canal does reopen quickly, vessels waiting now | should be able to make up time without too much disruption to | the supply chain, which is already weighed down by port | congestion and inland transportation delays. | ufmace wrote: | Probably the actual cost will require an army of accountants | and lawyers at a dozen major logistics corporations arguing | with each other for months to even try to compute. I doubt us | regular uninvolved people will ever get a "real" number. | | How do you even try to calculate and reveal the cost associated | with say a manufacturer in the middle of a supply chain | deciding to source their parts from a different vendor for this | run because their usual source was delayed due to the Suez | blockage and they didn't want to leave their factory idle? | mschuster91 wrote: | Probably the actual "damage" that was caused will be given by | the insurance companies as a sum of claims covered, but there | will be a lot of companies that simply have to eat the loss | incurred by idling factories and the likes because their | supply contracts allow for delivery delays or because | pursuing coverage isn't worth the effort (e.g. for those who | still had sufficient stock to cover a week of delay and no | "real" damage occurred). | | A many weeks long shutdown (in case they had to unload the | Ever Given) would be many orders of magnitude more expensive. | riverageraldo wrote: | This makes me question that shouldn't we have another canal | built? Like if so much of the world's economy depends on this | route shouldn't we build an extra canal to speed up the | transportation and also act as a redundancy | rvp-x wrote: | Israel at some point was considering setting up a rail | track between Eilat and the rest of the country. The main | benefit of doing so is that cargo ships could unload and | Eilat (red sea) and have cargo transported to a port in the | mediterranean sea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- | speed_railway_to_Eilat | | That plan was frozen after the Egypt-Israel peace | agreement. | azernik wrote: | It's been floated after the peace treaty too; it's just | unlikely to justify the massive cost, now that the | strategic consideration of bypassing an Egyptian blockade | is past. | flatiron wrote: | Where do you propose building this extra canal? | adrianmonk wrote: | Cue Elon Musk promising to build a tunnel version of it | for $5 million total cost, opening fall 2022. | creaturemachine wrote: | Of course everything has to be repacked into little tubes | and back into containers on the other end, but let's not | let these things get in the way of a solid plan. Elon | Musk! | onei wrote: | It's a lot further to dig, but the next best thing would be | to dig from the Persian gulf through Iraq, Syria and | probably Lebanon. Not forgetting half the Persian Gulf is | Iran. It's not exactly the most stable geopolitical area. | dvirsky wrote: | I'm not sure there's a path that's flat enough to make it | practical even if everything else falls into place | somehow. | InitialLastName wrote: | A quick look suggests that the Tigris is mostly navigable | up to Baghdad, which would get you halfway there. | | As an alternative (and ignoring the obviously substantial | geopolitical concerns), is there a geographic reason not | to dig a canal on the other side of the Sinai from, say, | Aqaba to Rafah? If you had to dig that far, it would seem | to be the next best option. | onei wrote: | It's kind of hard to tell, but it looks like the Suez | canal was on super flat land and I recall most of Sinai | is desert. The Israel-Egypt border doesn't look that flat | based on the colouring on the leading image of [1]. | | 1. https://www.npr.org/2007/06/04/10619929/six-day-war- | shaping-... | InitialLastName wrote: | I mean, the alternative proposal was a canal through the | ~3rd most violent region on the planet. | onei wrote: | Absolutely, I imagine the insurance alone would make the | Persian Gulf route unviable. Pirates is one thing, but | governments confiscating boats would be a huge | disincentive. The other side of the Sinai is probably | much more palatable even if Egypt and Israel aren't best | buddies. | InitialLastName wrote: | Not to mention the terrorism/sabotage/non-state actor | destruction opportunities that route would present that | are moderately prevented on the Red Sea side (if you can | get past the Horn of Africa). | | I can't see Egypt approving an alternate canal that | Israel would have any control over, but I could | absolutely see Israel going in on a chance to a) take | business from Egypt and b) add a defensive feature along | that border. | azernik wrote: | Both a) and b) would require a real increase in tensions. | Israel and Egypt have a cold peace, with several common | enemies/interests; the prospect of a direct military | confrontation is nil, and neither side will go out of | their way to harm the other economically. | azernik wrote: | The terrain along the Negev route is extremely hostile. | Bypass proposals have mostly focused on rail lines from | Eilat/Aqaba to the large and well-developed Israeli ports | on the Mediterranean, but even constructing rail lines | there is quite difficult. | | An underappreciated fact of Israeli and Palestinian | geography is its mountains and hills; any major | transportation project [1] requires extensive tunnel and | bridge work. | | [1] Examples: the TLV/Jerusalem high speed rail, the | Haifa highway bypass, or a proposed transportation | corridor connecting the main West Bank population centers | along the ridge of the Judean and Samarian mountain | ranges. | matkoniecz wrote: | partially done already: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Bypass_expansion | adamweld wrote: | I think you massively underestimate the cost (land, | machinery, labor, upkeep) of undertaking such a project. | colejohnson66 wrote: | We did it with the Panama Canal a century ago. Granted, | the Suez Canal is ~190km compared to the Panama Canal at | ~80km, but it is possible. | jandrese wrote: | It should be pointed out that the northern part of the | canal has a second canal running parallel. The southern | portion is the only part that has only a single passage. | | Political instability is definitely a contributing factor | to the fragility of the southern corridor. | adrianmonk wrote: | I'm a layman, but it seems like there are probably other | preventative measures that are way cheaper. | | A Bloomberg article | (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-27/how-a- | des...) says the speed limit was 7.6 to 8.6 knots but the | Ever Given was traveling at 13.5 knots. So maybe they need | to start enforcing that limit. | | Reportedly this was during high winds, so they could also | reduce the speed limit even further in those conditions. | | Or they could have Suez specialists be the ones piloting | large ships through the canal rather than the ship's normal | crew. (As I understand it, that's pretty standard for | harbors. Not sure if the Suez already does that.) | | Or maybe there's a technology solution, something like | stability control for cars, except it's for ships in narrow | canals. | lolc wrote: | As is standard for canal transit, the Evergiven was | piloted by a Suez pilot at the time of the accident. | Because this ship's main steering force comes from the | rudder, it has more force when it goes faster. Maybe they | even accelerated to counter the strong winds. | dzhiurgis wrote: | From what I heard they've suffered a blackout which is an | event when your power goes out. | | Friends scientific boat had a same thing in Kiel canal, | but only 22 meter boat and under and hour. | Gh0stRAT wrote: | The slower the boat travels, the closer to the wind it | has to point in order to avoid being pushed into the | leeward shore. (assuming it doesn't have significant | thrust-vectoring capabilities at both the bow and the | stern which as far as I can tell seems to be the case for | large cargo ships) | | Because the boat is longer than the canal is wide, for | any nonzero perpendicular wind speed there is a minimum | boat speed below which it would not be able to avoid | running aground. The solution is to either not permit | such large ships to transit the canal during high wind | events or to send them with enough tugboats to counteract | the force of the wind. | tw04 wrote: | I'm not sure the collective "we" will ever truly know. I'd | imagine a LOT of that livestock died and they aren't going to | be jumping up and down to volunteer how many/much given the | negative PR. If they did divulge that would probably be the | easiest jumping off point for hard losses. | interestica wrote: | So by attempting to calculate it, the cost goes up higher. | dfsegoat wrote: | For spoilage etc., most of it would be insured, I assume, so | insurance claims would likely be a solid proxy for estimating | one aspect of impact. | ape4 wrote: | Perhaps adding up all the penalties all the delayed ships | have to pay could cover it. | chipsambos wrote: | Agree it's incalculable, I don't mean that in the "it's too | big of a number" sort of way but in the "we can't possibly | know" kind of way: | | 1) The scale and depth of the disruption makes it impractical | to figure in any kind of accurate way and | | 2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that nay | spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. some | retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, some | supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere, etc | lisper wrote: | You can get a rough idea by thinking of this as if it were | a natural disaster, and from that perspective I think the | toll is probably not too bad. No casualties, very little | property damage, and a week is not really all that long. | | However... that is no excuse to shrug this off. We were | very, very lucky that it was only a week. The ship could | easily have broken in two, which would have been a | catastrophe of the first order and likely shut the canal | down for a year. The world dodged a major bullet here. | DVk6dqsfyx5i3ii wrote: | After Egypt intentionally blocked the Suez Canal during | the Six Day War and an operation was taken to reopen it | after the Yom Kippur War it took around 7 months to clear | the ships that were scuttled to block it[1]. I would | think a cleanup with more modern technology dealing with | a ship that wasn't scuttled for the purpose of blockage | would take less time. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Suez_Canal_Clearan | ce_Oper... | lisper wrote: | The 1974 operation involved ten ships, the largest of | which was 6700 tons. The Ever Given displaces 220,000 | tons. It's an entirely different beast. | fiedzia wrote: | Its large, but its size is limited by sues canal. Ships | could be much larger if they were designed for a | different route. | notyourday wrote: | Only Qmax and Chinamax are higher. | pixl97 wrote: | While our ships have grown greatly, so has our ability to | salvage them at the same time. | Animats wrote: | Worldwide salvage capacity isn't up much. Mammoet Salvage | and Titan Salvage exited the business a few years ago. | Smit is one of the few salvors with worldwide reach and | their own heavy equipment. The business requires huge | equipment on standby, and trained people waiting for the | next crisis. | | Smit is now part of Boskalis, which is a big marine | engineering firm. They have dredgers, heavy lift ships, | tugs, and barges, which are useful both for marine | construction and for salvage. So the fleet can do other | things between crises. | Uehreka wrote: | That feels like the kind of non-obvious claim that should | come with a source (even just a blog post by an analyst | that lays out the relevant vocab terms and the general | theory). | nowandlater wrote: | That's no joke. Salvage operations is such a fascinating | topic, which I'm sure many (me included) found themselves | quickly obsessed with. The sagging and hogging threshold | of this ship is the critical key here. I'm curious how | close/or not the hull came to being compromised. | Animats wrote: | That's why Smit has naval architects on staff, and the | program Hecsalv.[1] They will have calculated the limits | of how much the stern could be pushed without damaging | the bow _before_ pushing it. | | [1] https://www.herbert-abs.com/hecsalv | iso1210 wrote: | The canal revenues were down about $15m/day. If it really | cost $7b a day, then Egypt is massively undercharging. | Taek wrote: | Not necessarily. I pay only $1 a day for water, but if | you stop giving me water for 7 days the damages are going | to be a lot more than $7. That doesn't mean it's | reasonable to charge me more than $1 per day for water. | | Obviously an extreme example, but the situation with this | ship is likely similar. The damages probably far exceed | the $15m/day in revenue (though I suspect they are far | lower than $7b per day). | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | > That doesn't mean it's reasonable to charge me more | than $1 per day for water. | | This is where someone steps in and says something to the | tune of "Whatever price you're willing to pay is by | definition reasonable" and completely ignore the | ethical/moral issues with essentially holding someone's | life for ransom by charging the maximum price they can | get for something they need to survive. | ksdale wrote: | Looks like you stepped in to say it! | OscarCunningham wrote: | The reason water is cheap is because it's plentiful; | there's a lot of competition to supply it. But there's | only one Suez canal and sailing around Africa is much | worse. So you would expect Egypt to be extracting a | significant portion of the value the Suez canal adds. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | So... if somebody gets a monopoly on the water supply to | an area, you think a price hike is reasonable? | | Oh, wait, water's already a monopoly: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly | lizknope wrote: | The houses just 100 yards away from me have wells for | water. There is a large upfront cost of making the well | but after that you have "free" water other than the | electricity for the pump. | fest wrote: | In some countries (Latvia being the example I'm familiar | with), water from artesian wells is considered a limited | resource and it's taxed. | OscarCunningham wrote: | The subject was predicting the cost of the boat getting | stuck by comparing to the known cost to Egypt. The moral | aspects of the water situation don't transfer across the | analogy unless you also think that Egypt are charging | less than they could because they think they have a moral | obligation to shipping companies. | Dylan16807 wrote: | 1. We're not talking about what's reasonable, but what's | expected. | | 2. This isn't like a monopoly on water supply, because | the ships don't have to go this way. To make the analogy | work you'd have to add something like "everybody already | has a well, but supplying tap water is cheaper than using | a well". In such a situation, a water company that's | maximizing profits would charge just a little bit less | than using a well, and while it would annoy people it | wouldn't harm them. | | 3. The government stops water companies from gouging for | the good of the citizens, which isn't a factor here. | wizzwizz4 wrote: | Everybody has access to rainwater, except the people who | don't. I think the analogy works quite well. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | There is no major city with two independant water | supplies, with their own sets of pips, purification | systems and suers. Thays what water supply means. So no, | there is no competition, and a supermarket water bottle | is not competition. | mywittyname wrote: | You're forgetting about the stick, namely, the literally | armies backing these massive shipping companies. | | If you're going to run an extortion racket, you need the | power to secure yourself against the inevitable | challenges to your station. Egypt is in no position to | handle and armed threat from the US, China, or even most | European nations. Their government would be toppled and a | sympathetic one would be installed who would lower | shipping prices to something on the cheap side of fair. | iudqnolq wrote: | Ha! I never thought I'd see a patio-style charge more to | a govt. Only on hn... | creato wrote: | Someone else in one of these canal threads said that | Egypt charges slightly less than it would cost to sail | around Africa. If that's true, that Egypt is probably | capturing around as much value as is possible from the | canal. | CalChris wrote: | Quite a bit less. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iwOZOb90fM | creato wrote: | That example was pretty idealized, starting and ending | very close to the canal. Most voyages are probably not | affected quite as starkly by the canal, and I doubt the | canal can or does charge ships based on their overall | itinerary. | plaidfuji wrote: | Depends.. their fees are likely based on the saved | time/cost of circling Africa, and calculated so as not to | encourage other nations to construct workarounds | themselves (if that's even geographically feasible).. not | on the cost of their service being down once people are | already committed to it. | tehjoker wrote: | The suez is the site of massive imperial intervention. | The Suez crisis was precipitated when Egypt nationalized | the canal. Western militaries and economic leverage are | deployed to keep the prices low for the benefit of those | governments. | | It's a huge mistake to regard any international trade in | the middle east as regulated by simple supply and demand | curves. This is a site of world geostrategic focus, | usually at the expense of the people that live there. | azernik wrote: | It's not 100% negative - clever Egyptian governments have | managed to charge an extra "price" in diplomatic and | geopolitical advantage. e.g. using selective closures as | a weapon, selective opening to military traffic as an | incentive. You just have to be careful not to take | actions that affects _everyone_ , like a massive and | "unreasonable" price hike; these invite the kind of | great-power consensus against you that is very dangerous. | | (Interestingly, both have been practiced towards Israel | at different times, as the countries have gone from | bitter enemies to cautiously aligned against both Iran | and Sunni Islamism of the Brotherhood/Hamas flavor.) | throwaway1777 wrote: | Pretty sure there are literal treaties in place. It's not | simple supply and demand. | iso1210 wrote: | > 2) The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals that | nay spiral out themselves (butterfly effect style) e.g. | some retailer may have lost a customer who went elsewhere, | some supplier may have lost a retailer who went elsewhere, | etc | | And some retailers and suppliers may have gained customers | throwawayfire wrote: | > The disruption will have introduced hypotheticals | | In general, temporary disruption has some long-term | positive economic effects (which is directly why | 'disruption' is valued in Silicon Valley). | | For example, during London Tube Strikes, commuters find | different and more efficient routes and 5% ended up | permanently changing their route on public transport: | https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/tube- | strike... | mgfist wrote: | Yup, just think of covid. It has accelerated digitization | of the world in an unprecedented way, amongst the many | other world changes it has caused. | SkipperCat wrote: | Think of the EverGiven as global shipping's chaos | monkey.... | sidpatil wrote: | This reminds me of annealing, and why it's implemented as | a technique for finding optima. | piyh wrote: | I'm not blocking the canal, I'm testing robustness! | | Also in the big picture with covid not being as deadly as | it could have been, could serve as a nice dress rehearsal | for a captain trips. | djhn wrote: | We theoretically may have avoided, for the next few | decades, the risk of a truly dangerous infectious disease | being underestimated, something halfway between Covid and | extinction-level threat. | gt565k wrote: | This happened with the bridge collapse on I-85 in Atlanta | [1] | | I used to take the access road parallel to the bridge and | avoid a lot of traffic that was south bound. When the | bridge collapsed and I-85 was blocked off, everyone | learned about the parallel access road, and it now became | a cluster of a traffic hot zone too. | | Prior to that, a lot of people were not aware of the | alternate route. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_co | llapse | playingchanges wrote: | I've seen this happen to a lot of my favorite shortcuts | in the east bay since the introduction of waze. | 908B64B197 wrote: | > some retailer may have lost a customer who went | elsewhere, some supplier may have lost a retailer who went | elsewhere, etc | | But then that also created profits for another supplier! | slg wrote: | And the increase in profits of that second supplier might | surpass the losses of the first supplier if the customer | made their original decision based on cost. You can frame | this as increasing economic output. Let's break all the | canals[1]. | | [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken | _window | 908B64B197 wrote: | But the customer will end up paying more! It's a never- | ending problem! | | (Increasing economic outputs by breaking all canals is | the perfect example of why I'm always worried about | gradient descent) | social_quotient wrote: | I'm gonna assume the insurance companies will know by the | time this is all over. | ramblerman wrote: | What does such a number mean without context? | | Imagine a toy example: 2 bakers in a street. John and Jill. | John has a heart attack and his bakery is closed for the week. | | - John gets nothing that week, from his perspective you could | say he lost a week of sales | | - The people in the street lose Johns cakes that week, but most | are ok with going to Jill, as they are close enough. 50% go to | jill, and the other 50 decide to save the money. | | - Jill gains 50% of johns customers for the week. | | How would would you even assess the "global damage" in such an | example for 1 street. Let alone the global economy. | | The money is there to drive things, pulling it out from one | perspective is like looking at one weight in a neural network. | inetknght wrote: | Not only does Jill gain 50% of John's customers _for the | week_ , but let's say that 20% of those customers decide that | they actually _prefer_ Jill 's goods and stay as customers of | Jill even after John has re-opened. | pbhjpbhj wrote: | Yes, but some of Jill's customers come at lunch and | couldn't afford to wait in the longer lines. Those | customers now go to John's having waited a few days to look | for an alternative. Jill gets 20% of John's clientele, but | John gets more [impatient] customers than ever! | | There will probably be some additional flow of customers as | people realise they're too lazy to walk to Jill's/John's, | Jill's was only better when they were doing the extra trade | (freshness), or that Jill's is back to being quicker | service (and then you have a chaotic effect as more people | drift back the wait time gets longer). | | The potential complexities of such simple systems are | fascinating. | yrral wrote: | But isn't "worth of goods delayed" a reasonable figure? | | For example, if there is a total of X shipping capacity a year, | and no reasonably priced alternatives (or extra capacity | available via rail/air/etc), then disrupting $Y worth of goods | for D days reduces the total amount of goods that can be traded | that year by $Y*D. | | Or is there something I'm missing here? | s1artibartfast wrote: | The part you are missing is that shipping capacity/year is | not hard capped. | Shivetya wrote: | the livestock loss will be interesting to research as it was | highlighted there was a significant number of ships carry live | cargo. | | Odd, the Sun has a great article on this floating job | | https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14484562/suez-canal-ship-reflo... | omarhaneef wrote: | There is a term for the cost of just holding something you | can't move: the carrying costs. Different commodities have | different carrying costs, so you can look at the forward prices | for wheat, oil, pork bellies and so on and get a sense for how | much it costs to hold on to something for a week or a month | etc. | | (On rare occasions the curve is inverted) | | It won't tell you how much it costs this tanker to delay | delivery by a week but it will tell you on average how much | "the market" values a week's delay. | | It is still a chore to go through and tally all the goods but I | think a few main goods (oil, wheat, coffee etc) would account | for a large chunk of it and if the carrying costs as a whole | would give a sense of the order-of-magnitude of the economic | loss. | | The loss itself may be distributed between various risk sharing | parties like insurance companies and so forth. | stcredzero wrote: | _those numbers are normally for "worth of goods delayed" which, | while interesting, doesn't tell the story to me_ | | Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news over | the years taken on the feel of reality television? The talking | heads are usually pushing some sort of _narrative_. | Occasionally, reality overwhelms their ability to spin things, | and they have to readjust and do damage control, as sometimes | happens to the producers in a reality TV show. The aim of their | manipulation and spin seems to be mainly to keep up the level | of drama, just as in a reality TV show. | dustingetz wrote: | principle agent problem and always has been ... what's | stunning is that civilization manages to create some amount | of value despite this ... imagine what the world would be | like if humans learned how to actually cooperate at scale and | maximize long term in an antifragile way | airstrike wrote: | In my bedroom as a young teenager I used to think a | worldwide event which affected every person equally, like | finding life in another planet, would surely usher in a new | era of common interest and a shared view that we're all but | the same thing: human. | | I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed is as | essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and without | a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized for | breaking it), selfishness wins. | | The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining | expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society. | lukifer wrote: | I had high hopes for a pro-social silver lining around | the pandemic as well, but it's simply too distant and | indirect (especially given that the outcomes ranged so | widely to those infected: from death, to the worst flu | ever, to no symptoms at all). | | What gives me hope is the fact that our species has | altruism at all, even if it isn't as widespread as we | would like; it's evidence that cooperation is at least | _sometimes_ a competitive advantage. Looking at nature, | we see both symbiosis and predation as successful | survival strategies. The tension between Good and Evil we | will have with us always; the bad news is that Good will | never definitively win, but the good news is that neither | will Evil. | 1996 wrote: | > I've since turned more cynical and believe that greed | is as essential to humanness as empathy, if not more, and | without a strong moral code (and fear of being ostracized | for breaking it), selfishness wins. | | It's not the baker empathy that brings you bread, but his | greed | | > The pandemic has violently dispelled any remaining | expectation I had for a future cosmopolitan society. | | The pandemic makes me hope more people will see | governments for what they are: restricting their freedoms | for no good reasons, so it's better to starve the beast. | rbobby wrote: | They are amazing at knowing why the DJI moved up/down. Just | for yesterday though. I think for tomorrow you have to | subscribe. | [deleted] | diegocg wrote: | Real economics is boring for most people and the only way to | make it attractive to the masses is to be sensationalistic. | Mainstream financial news has never been good and never will | be. | lukifer wrote: | Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to | distort reality and craft narratives, including framing | what is allowed to considered "real economics". | Judgmentality wrote: | > Real economics includes game-theoretic incentives to | distort reality and craft narratives, including framing | what is allowed to considered "real economics". | | You're not wrong, but you could replace "economics" with | almost anything and it would still be a valid (and | usually meaningful, although context matters) statement. | | > Real engineering includes game-theoretic incentives to | distort reality and craft narratives, including framing | what is allowed to [be] considered "real engineering" | | I mean how else are you going to push back against the | clueless PMs who can't be bothered to learn how to code? | | > Real art includes game-theoretic incentives to distort | reality and craft narratives, including framing what is | allowed to be considered "real art" | | Of course, how else do you expect to create value for | something unique that is not easily priced by the market? | | > Real science includes game-theoretic incentives to | distort reality and craft narratives, including framing | what is allowed to be considered "real science" | | I'd say this accurately describes academia. Honestly this | last one is eerily insightful. | impalallama wrote: | That's just news to be. Random loose correlation of events | plotted into a narrative. | stcredzero wrote: | Facts are supposed give rise to an emergent narrative. That | is good journalism. What we have in 2021, are people | curating facts and only including those that fit their pre- | determined narrative. | lukifer wrote: | While it would be naive to pretend that pre-determined | narratives aren't a huge factor, I think that model | leaves something out: that journalists and organizations | are often incentivized to distort the facts into | _arbitrary_ narratives, based not on values or ideology, | but on virality and cognitive /emotional stickiness. | "Person X is a hero" and "Person X is a villain" will | _both_ tend to outcompete nuance ( "Person X is flawed | but well-intentioned and has done both good and bad | things."). | stcredzero wrote: | _journalists and organizations are often incentivized to | distort the facts into arbitrary narratives_ | | Those aren't _arbitrary_. They are often pre-decided by | higher ups in the company, or pre-decided as the | prevailing groupthink in some forum or mailing list. | People have been calling this stuff out online for | _years_! Funnily enough, it stays out of the | consciousness of normal people, because it 's never | covered in the mainstream news. Invariably, the people | doing the exposing are then labeled something unsavory, | so very few people bother to look into it. Some of this | stuff is bunk. However, some of it is clearly real, and | kinda disgusting. | | Stuff like this has even been going on since the 80's: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent | WalterSear wrote: | Worse: the narrative is curated to elicit pre-determined | emotional reactions. | stcredzero wrote: | In other words: Reality TV! | anticristi wrote: | > Is it just me, but hasn't the mainstream financial news | over the years taken on the feel of reality television? | | I like to look at the bright side: The world has caught up | with Egyptian geography. :) | lisper wrote: | Drama sells better than facts. | sharken wrote: | I wish it wasn't so, but it is. | | Early on it was reported that it could take weeks to reopen | the passage, with a cost of billions to the world trade. | Now, just one week later it's open again, barely enough | time to make the alternate route a good idea. | | These rather unrealistic projections seem to have started | with the Coronavirus reporting and is an interesting | phenomenon in itself. | arwineap wrote: | I don't think they had a previous sprint's velocity to | base their estimates on; this was unprecedented. | | And honestly, had the ship still been stuck on wed, tide | would not be as high for another moon cycle; further | complicating. | goodcanadian wrote: | I am not sure the projections were unrealistic. The full | picture simply wasn't known or even knowable. The best | likely scenario with the known information was a few | hours; the worst likely scenario was weeks. | merely-unlikely wrote: | Boring, facts and research based industry/financial news | exists. But it can cost upwards of a couple hundred | thousand dollars per year. If you want real news, you'll | have to pay for it. | srverma wrote: | What are your recommendations for real news? I've heard | FT, WSJ, and the economist, and am looking to finally | commit and sign up instead of relying on free. You get | what you pay for is true in this case, and I don't wanna | put drama based narratives in my head, which form my | perception of the world. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | The FT: | | - Good if you care about mostly business in the developed | world (Europe and US). - Really, really, really good | features, solid visualisation, and a fairly wide breath | of writers in terms of opinions. | | The Economist: | | - Very opinionated, but extremely diverse coverage of | lots of different parts of the world (I've never come | across a better English language source on Africa, for | example). - Weekly, so if you only want to read news | occasionally, it may work for you | | WSJ: | | - Pretty good coverage overall, the US business/tech | coverage is much better (in depth) than the FT's - Their | opinion section is like the NYT in bizarro-world. | | In terms of price FT > Economist > WSJ. | | It really depends on what you're looking for, but the FT | works for me as a daily driver (I ended my subscription | to the Economist, and only signed up for the WSJ about a | month ago). | merely-unlikely wrote: | I meant more industry specific news rather than general | news. Organizations that cover niche topics, usually | catering towards businesses or investors rather than the | general public. In my case it's things like Covenant | Review, Xtract Research, Debtwire, Reorg, etc. There are | likely similar services catering to shipping and | logistics that would provide better analysis on this | situation than most general news organizations. | rebuilder wrote: | What kind of news publication costs several hundred K a | year to subscribe to? | TheSkyHasEyes wrote: | It's too soon to determine this right now. | craftinator wrote: | According to this paper by the National Bureau of Economic | Research, the average loss of value per day of delay from the | cargo on these ships is between 0.6 and 2.2 percent [1]. | According to other research I've seen, somewhere between 12% | and 30% of daily global sea trade goes through the Suez Canal. | Anyone want to do the math? | | 1) https://www.nber.org/digest/jun12/time-trade-barrier | skohan wrote: | I work on an IoT product, and operations is already talking | about potential production delays because of this. There's | already a global plastic shortage, and this is only going to | make things worse. | oasisbob wrote: | > There's already a global plastic shortage | | Whoa, bad time to be in IoT then, since they're pretty much | entirely plastic and a few (also probably short) components! | | https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/plastic-scrap- | demand-... | | https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2021/03/10/10615. | .. | hinkley wrote: | The silver lining there is that more companies should be able | to absorb a double delivery when three weeks of goods all | show up at once. | | Most businesses can't just skip a week and then process twice | as much raw goods to catch up. | beansontoast wrote: | boo! | belinder wrote: | Was it reported how it got stuck in the first place? | sjm wrote: | The ship's operators blamed a sandstorm and high winds. | richrichardsson wrote: | High winds + sandstorm reduced visibility. | Pyrodogg wrote: | This is a pretty good synopsis of the situation as of Sunday | | https://youtu.be/5iyn2q6s1Sk | rjzzleep wrote: | They blamed a sandstorm, but the Taiwanese operator blamed the | Japanese owner for it. And the Japanese operator agrees. | Basically, we're not getting the real answer to this question. | Also, the following: | | > However, the chairman of Egypt's Suez Canal Authority said | Saturday, without giving details, that weather conditions "were | not the main reasons" for the grounding, and that "there may | have been technical or human reasons," the BBC reported. An | investigation is ongoing. | navbaker wrote: | If it turns out to be human error related, how much liability | falls on the actual ship's captain versus the required canal | pilot? | unixhero wrote: | It does not work like that on the seas. Maritime legal | conventions are are ratified by 99% countries on the globe. | A shipowner is alwayd insured against these things, and the | i surance company is also insured (reinsurance). So nobody | will end up in a lifetime of serfdom because of this. | | Shit hits the fan on the high seas all the time. We | nornally don't hear about it in regular media. | tc313 wrote: | It matters whose insurance company pays, though. | artursapek wrote: | TIL about insurance insurance | toxik wrote: | Google "Costa Concordia" for a simulation of that scenario. | dubbel wrote: | Not at all comparable, because in this case as far as I | know two pilots were on board. Pilots are required for | the passage through the Suez Canal. | | Usually the pilots are giving steering commands to the | helmsman, but the Captain still has the final | responsibility for the ship. | jowsie wrote: | If you're up for a bit of a humorous take on the matter, | this video is great; | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9KBwqGxTI | gorkish wrote: | Given that any human being crewing this ship or working in | the Suez very likely lacks 59 billion dollars, the answer | to this question is very probably "It doesn't matter." | kuschku wrote: | Technically the pilot is in control of the ship and bears | all liability at that time (or rather, the canal | authority). | | But it's an open secret the canal pilots are just slacking | off, so a court may as well rule with the de facto | situation and hold the captain and the operator | responsible. | polote wrote: | There is no way the only reason was because of the wind. I | mean if because of strong wind boats become uncontrollable we | would have this kind of event pretty frequently. So it is | clearly something else, (which may have been emphasized by a | strong wind, or have been triggered by a strong wind) | Symmetry wrote: | High winds and the hydrodynamics of large boats in small | channels. | | https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d... | johannes1234321 wrote: | The short version I got is that a sand storm threw them | slightly of course, while reacting they oversteered a bit, | becoming too fast, which then lead to different fluid dynamic | processes, once they were out of the deep water they couldn't | do anything anymore. | | But detailed analysis yet has to be done. | doogerdog wrote: | They got traffic flowing sooner than I guessed they could. Three | container ships and a livestock carrier have left Bitter lake and | are entering the channel right now, heading for Suez. The third | one in the group is the Ever Globe, the same size as the stuck | ship. | | I had thought it would take most of today to make sure the | channel was clear for the deepest draught vessels. The dredge | crews must have done a good job keeping their discharge out of | the main channel. | | Vesselfinder.com is a hoot to follow for this kind of disaster. | cybert00th wrote: | Er, this party ain't over 'til the weight-challenged lady's | cleared the exit door | mckirk wrote: | I suppose the Suez Canal is going to find out what rush-hour | traffic is like. | oftheoaks wrote: | shame | markherring wrote: | has anyone done the analysis based on the backlog of ships | waiting to pass whether it is worth going around Africa? ie. If | you are #130+ in the backlog go around? | Stormwalker wrote: | Any info how it was freed? Article does not mention any | solutions. | vnxli wrote: | WSJ posted an article with some more detail. | | TLDR; high tide and dredging | | https://www.wsj.com/articles/ship-blocking-suez-canal-is-par... | el_duderino wrote: | https://archive.is/DD9PB | garaetjjte wrote: | I'm somewhat disappointed we didn't get to observe huge container | lifting operation. https://xkcd.com/611/ | pagade wrote: | Nice gif showing the ship movement on FleetMon: | https://twitter.com/yukihilog/status/1376377678626844676 | rodiger wrote: | Does Evergreen get fined for something like this? Is there | enforceable law here? Or just say sorry and life goes on? | BurningFrog wrote: | Ships going through the canal are commanded by Egyption pilots, | so it's doubtful that Evergreen has any responsibility. | | That would make the Egyptian government responsible. But I'd be | stunned if it paid or apologized to anyone. | rsstack wrote: | Suez Canal policy (enforced by contracts) removes liability | from the Authority and its pilots. Also worth noting that the | pilots don't control the helm directly. That doesn't mean it | wasn't their fault :) We may never know. | kevstev wrote: | Iirc, the actual captain does not pilot through the harbor, | there are specific pilots that take your vessel through. So it | seems unlikely that there would be any liability to the ship | crew or owner. | zeristor wrote: | YouTube video by Cheif Makoi pointed out that the Master of | the ship is responsible for any issue caused by the ship, | even if commanded by a pilot. | | https://youtu.be/ltdHRdtEHE4 | | Obviously I am not a legal expert | [deleted] | zeristor wrote: | I do hope it tooted its horn to celebrate. | lmilcin wrote: | Now, understand all those ships will take a long time to pass the | canal and then even longer time processing at their ports of | destination which will also have their schedules completely | disrupted. | | Does anybody know at what percentage of capacity the canal | usually operates? | kzrdude wrote: | Apparently they are going to double throughput for the next few | days compared to normal traffic, so they had some spare | capacity. | lmilcin wrote: | Double throughput means it will still take about 4-5 days to | clear the backlog (new ships are arriving and queuing up even | as the backlog is being cleared). | dksf wrote: | Free as in beer? | cwhiz wrote: | That's too bad. Now the hysterical media will have to find | something else to get worked up about. | Robotbeat wrote: | Oh, this was actually a fun disaster compared to almost | anything else! | | If only we could live in a world where the worst international | news story is a big boat being temporarily stuck with people | making silly memes about it. | cwhiz wrote: | It's not that it wasn't fun. It's that the media goes into | absurd hyperbole on every subject. | | This boat was going to be stuck for weeks, and maybe forever! | | ...and now they'll shift to absurd hyperbole on some other | topic that is potentially more damaging. | krisoft wrote: | The company tasked to salvage the ship said that they will | use dredgers and tugs and will try to pull the ship free. | They also said that if that doesn't work they will have to | lighten the ship, which can take weeks. | | After that it was entirely fair and true to report that "it | might take weeks to get the ship unstuck." Just because we | got lucky and the simpler, faster, plan worked doesn't make | such reporting hyperbolic. | cwhiz wrote: | The company said they could have it out within days, or | it could take weeks. So what do media organizations | report? | | "Suez Canal could be blocked for weeks." | | Always err on the side of hyperbole and extreme | negativity. | jasperry wrote: | I, for one, was thankful that we had something relatively non- | polarizing in the news to discuss. "Stuck boat needs to get | unstuck" is the kind of practical problem that people on both | sides of the fence can agree on :) | ceejayoz wrote: | My local newspaper's comments has people who think the boat's | name is Evergreen, not Ever Given ("haha stupid media can't | even get that right") and that it's a reference to Hillary | Clinton's Secret Service code name and that Means | Something(tm). (https://imgur.com/a/1CjsCsl) | | Nothing's non-polarizing anymore. | cwhiz wrote: | The word "EVERGREEN" is painted on the side of the boat | about 400 feet long and maybe 60 feet tall. I think it's | fair to misinterpret that as the name of the boat, and not | the name of the company that owns the boat. Especially so | because the two names are so similar. | ceejayoz wrote: | It's fair to be confused over the name a little. | | It's a bit less fair to think it's Hillary Clinton's | Secret Service codeword painted on the side of the ship | to advertise child trafficking. | bnralt wrote: | It's worth looking at the discussion of the ship just three days | ago on Hacker News[1]. A lot of what people thought was true | (that it would be stuck there for weeks, being dismissive of | using tugboats to pull it out) didn't pan out as expected. Just a | reminder that we should always take what we read with a grain of | salt, and that it's fine to reserve judgement and see what will | actually happen after the initial media storm passes. | | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 | dentemple wrote: | The HN crowd tends to be heavily bearish on pretty much | everything here, and there's an ironic lack of respect for | experts in fields beyond those few HN favorite topics (e.g., | low-level programming languages). | | So, the difference in the expected outcome here doesn't | surprise me. | ethbr0 wrote: | Tesla and SpaceX? | Robotbeat wrote: | HN tends to be pretty bearish on Tesla, although overall | bullish on SpaceX. | faefox wrote: | Yeah, but sitting around and reserving judgement wouldn't make | for a very interesting comment section. :) | puddingnomeat wrote: | I think this is wrong. | | Someone says "it COULD be stuck for weeks" | | It gets unstuck earlier, fine. Doesn't invalidate the | possibility. | | The criticism is moot. If anyone had made bets, then I'd take | both more seriously. | ceejayoz wrote: | We see this all the time with political polling. | | "Oh, Nate Silver said Trump only had a 30% chance of winning | the election, but he did, so Nate Silver is an idiot!" | EricE wrote: | Nate Silver wasn't just a little off - he was massively off | outside of accepted norms for polling. | | Multiple times no less. | ceejayoz wrote: | No, he really wasn't. In 2016 he was one of the most | optimistic of the major poll aggregators on Trump's | chances; he had Trump at 30% when others had him at much | lower odds. | | https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight- | gav... | | > Our final forecast, issued early Tuesday evening, had | Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral | College.1 By comparison, other models tracked by The New | York Times put Trump's odds at: 15 percent, 8 percent, 2 | percent and less than 1 percent. | | As for 2020: | | https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-werent- | great-... | | > This year was definitely a little weird, given that the | vote share margins were often fairly far off from the | polls (including in some high-profile examples such as | Wisconsin and Florida). But at the same time, a high | percentage of states (likely 48 out of 50) were "called" | correctly, as was the overall Electoral College and | popular vote winner (Biden). And that's usually how polls | are judged: Did they identify the right winner? | | (He also doesn't _do_ the _polling_. He 's an analyst, | not a pollster.) | EricE wrote: | Lol - quoting himself to back up his performance? | | How about linking to others and not him defending his | performance. Of course he's going to have excuses. | | Live a little and maybe even pick sources that might not | align politically with you too for an alternate POV. | Prevents "surprises". Because as someone with no love | lost on either party the election results were not a | surprise - you just have to look across all sources, not | just the ones that tell you what you want to hear. | ceejayoz wrote: | You're most welcome to "link to others" so we can discuss | their specific critiques. | | The "aggregate the polls" approach appears to have called | 48/50 races correctly, so I'm fairly comfortable with it. | keenreed wrote: | We got lucky. But several weeks was real scenario. If this boat | would leak, ruptured, broke in half... | BurningFrog wrote: | I think most people were reserving judgement. | | But judgement reservers aren't prone to jump on message boards | and shout "guess we'll have to wait and see" to the world. | adrianmonk wrote: | I think a lot of that is because of this one quote and how the | news (and the public) handled it | (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/24/ever-given-a-massive- | cargo-s...): | | > _" We can't exclude it might take weeks, depending on the | situation," said Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company | Boskalis._ | | Of course that message got oversimplified as it spread. "Can't | exclude" is a pretty important qualifier that suggests that | it's an unlikely worst case. | | But that nuance already was lost in the title of that same | article: "Cargo ship blocking Suez Canal could take weeks to | move". If you were to read only that title, you might think it | is likely to take weeks. | | TLDR: People thought it would take weeks because that's what | they were hearing from other people. | jeremymcanally wrote: | Also, if we're being honest, a pack of software nerds on a | website don't have the deep expertise on every topic like they | think they do (speaking as a software nerd on a website myself | :)). | | The stuff that gets posted here sometimes is...fascinating. | craftinator wrote: | To be fair, there were a number of people chiming in who were | claiming to be experienced in that area (ex Navy captains, | people who did dredging ops, etc). One of the big things that | changed the timeline was that the highest tide of the month | occurred yesterday; if not, I imagine that ship would be | stuck for another month! | EricE wrote: | Yes - Mother Nature deserves the lions share of credit for | extraditing the ship! | gameswithgo wrote: | Being expert in adjacent domains is sometimes worse than | being clueless. The ratio of actual to assumed expertise | seems to get worse. Navy captains vs shipping boats, | geologists vs climate scientists, programmers vs cpu | design, etc etc. You can very easily not understand | subtleties, comment on a thing, and then _people listen to | you_. | xxs wrote: | >programmers vs cpu design | | You went a bit too far. I'd presume a lot of programmers | do know CPU architecture well. While not common some of | them to work on boring web platforms, some still do. Also | most CPU architects would be decent programmers to begin | with. | | Programming has not changed all that much and it was not | so long time ago that programmers routinely knew assembly | and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode took... | Nowadays it might be regarded as an arcane art by most, | of course. | gameswithgo wrote: | In all of those examples, its possible the person DOES | have a good understanding of the adjacent domain. And in | all examples, it is possible they will miss some | subtleties, but people will give their opinions a lot of | weight. | | Just as an example I see a lot: branch prediction. Some | programmers don't know about it at all. Many do know | about it, but think that it still works in some form like | "assume the branch will go the same way it did last | time". Which is how it worked in the 1990s. Then it | evolved, and then it evolved two more times. Today there | is something like a neural network that learns how the | branches will go. (And careful, im a programmer so I may | be communicating some subtleties wrong there!) | xxs wrote: | >Today there is something like a neural network that | learns how the branches will go. | | More like history, where the call comes from. Oddly | enough the price of branch misdirection has become lower | as not the entire pipeline needs to be thrown away but | also due to hyper threading taking the slack. | | Flip note: with 'recent' developments of Spectre, one'd | think branch prediction got into the lime light. Truth be | told, though, not many would be able to write constant | time 'fizz buzz' (can try it on your own, bonus points to | having constant time int->string conversion) | lstamour wrote: | > Programming has not changed all that much and it was | not so long time ago that programmers routinely knew | assembly and how many cycles (and bytes) each opcode | took... | | That statement partly highlights the problem. It assumes | linear execution, when in reality, for most performance- | critical products, out-of-order execution is the reality. | For example: | https://smist08.wordpress.com/2019/11/15/out-of-order- | instru... | | Most programmers on Apple platforms don't actually think | about execution order -- because they don't have to -- | but also because Apple is actively using Clang to | discourage assembly and writing for specific CPU | architectures. It makes Apple's job of releasing new | silicon that much easier if they don't have to worry | about breaking existing software custom written for a | previous architecture. | | And this still assumes a one-to-one relationship between | the code you're writing and the computer it's running on | or designed for. When you get to the cloud, or cloud | functions, that breaks down even further. If using | Heroku, for example, you don't even have to consider how | to deploy your code and you can make it pretty far | running a production service. | | It's possible for closely related fields to still have | very large differences. Consider drivers and cars: The | more automation is introduced, the less we might need to | know about what the automation is doing for us under the | hood. Anti-Lock Breaking (ABS) in cars might be a simple | example where folks know about it because there's a light | on the dash and instructions in driver's ed. But if we | didn't have those indicators, how often would anyone know | about it and other such features? Some technologies | remain undocumented until discovered later by | experimentation, the VW diesels come to mind. Specific | chip designers likely know more than your average | programmer, just as specific car manufacturers likely | know more about their products than drivers would. | xxs wrote: | > It assumes linear execution, when in reality | | This is quite a blatant assumption on its right own (and | very far from the truth). The programming, itself, has | not changed. But of course, modern hardware is not a von | neumann machine. Writing lock-free datastructure is not | that different programming, it requires a lot more | attention and (possibly) experience but the basic premise | is still the same. | | Understanding memory topology/hierarchy & latency, | concurrency, branch (mis)prediction, cache coherency | should be a minimum for anyone who comments on CPU | architecture. I did mention Assembly and without some | knowledge on the target architecture it's rather | pointless to comment on, either. | | I encourage most developers to at least understand that | memory is not actually 'random access', which makes | derefernce not cheap - but accessing data placed together | is next to free as it is likely to hit L1. | | > discourage assembly and writing for specific CPU | architecture | | I found out that I could not reliably beat a standard | compiler writing everyday Assembly around K6-2 years. | Yet, still some inner loops can be carefully hand | optimized. The point is that there are plenty of | programmers who would be able to understand modern | architecture and to me basic understanding is needed | unless the job is just gluing code. | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | And the aging of their experience matters. I mentioned | upthread that I was trained as a merchant marine officer. | However that was three decades ago and while a lot of my | training will still apply, industry practices move on and | a lot of the stuff I learned is long since outdated. A | lot of times I start to type a reply to something | relevant and have to smack myself into remembering that | things are probably done differently in 2021 :-) | maxerickson wrote: | It took them a few days to dredge away meters of sand. Why | would it take more than a few additional days to dredge | away another couple meters of sand? | | Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but not | that much harder. | EricE wrote: | >Of course each meter of depth is a little harder, but | not that much harder. | | lol - cut and fill on a slope is not trivial. It's more | of an exponential function than a linear one for the | amount of material removed the deeper you have to go | down. They dodged a HUGE bullet with the highest tides | happening this weekend. If they had gone beyond a Tuesday | with the drop in tides each day as the moon got further | away it would have been sketchy if they could have gotten | ahead of the tide or not. | | The timing of this couldn't have been tighter. Thankfully | they came out on the good side :) | maxerickson wrote: | The seasonal variation in the tides is like 20 | centimeters. The draft of the ship is more than 10 meters | at the bow. | garaetjjte wrote: | Yeah, but on ship this size 400x60x0.2=4800 tons of | difference! I'm somewhat exaggerating because ship hull | isn't cuboid, but it is still likely equivalent to | removing around hundred containers. | maxerickson wrote: | Only a portion it was grounded, not the full length of | the ship. | | Someone linked a BBC article stating that they shifted | 27,000 cubic meters of sand, so there you go, they could | likely remove a meter under the whole thing in a similar | amount of time (probably longer to cover area instead of | digging down, but that isn't what they would need to do). | EricE wrote: | Good thing we are talking normal monthly tidal variations | (not seasonal) which vary by meters, not centimeters. | maxerickson wrote: | Not in Suez though. | | Yes, the high tide is a better opportunity to do it, the | tides over the next couple of weeks are still within | 20-30 cm. The worst day in the next 30 days is 60 cm | below the highest. | | But maybe the dredge only made a few centimeters of | difference running for 5 days, who knows. | devoutsalsa wrote: | As someone who watches a few too many YouTube videos on all | things space, I consider myself to be a leading cosmologist, | astrophysicist, and rocket scientist. I can speak w/ great | confidence to anyone who knows nothing about these subjects. | patcon wrote: | > I can speak w/ great confidence to anyone who knows | nothing about these subjects. | | heh sorry, can't tell how serious you're being. but it | tickles my brain that there's someone who would also vibe | with that byline: _con artists_ :) | devoutsalsa wrote: | I'm being serious if you know nothing about space :) | | Did you know my experimental observations of quantum | gravity & string theory are as good, if not better, than | the world's top scientists? If you print this comment on | paper, I will have been published & peer reviewed, too! | lstamour wrote: | I see your tongue is still firmly in cheek here, as a | brief Google Scholar search would reveal there are very | few experiments available to observe quantum gravity and | as far as I can tell, few studies of _mathematics_ ever | bother considering the experimental observations that | other scientists or engineers would require. In fact, | another researcher wrote the following article in 2017 in | plain language: https://nautil.us/issue/45/power/what- | quantum-gravity-needs-... therefore what you're saying is | roughly true if not exactly true? ;-) | | From that 2017 article: | | > You already know we haven't found anything yet-- | otherwise you'd have heard of it. But even null results | are valuable guides for theory development. They teach us | that some ideas--for example, that spacetime might be a | regular lattice--are simply incompatible with | observations. | | I would suggest that publishing and peer review requires | an audience, therefore ... err, by publishing this I am | actually peer-reviewing your work?! Drat! That makes me | 0/2 then! | | To conclude my peer-review, I would like to see more | details for reproduction, merely stating that you've | performed experiments without providing the necessary | observational data and steps to reproduce highlights the | lack of originality in the paper you're proposing and | therefore I would decline to publish. ;-) | tomc1985 wrote: | The Dunning-Kruger effect is real | debaserab2 wrote: | Ever since I discovered n-gate.com HN comments read a little | different than they used to... | thisistheend123 wrote: | Yes, been following n-gate along with HN for years now .. | n-gate gives a whole new perspective on HN comments and | casts a light on dangers of taking an echo chamber too | seriously .. | lanstin wrote: | Wow thanks for the link. That is too funny, a little. | [deleted] | DenisM wrote: | Do tell? | hartator wrote: | This is some kind of weekly digest? I don't fully get it. | acqq wrote: | Never mind! | | Here | | https://www.patreon.com/ngate | | There's an offer of: | | Limited Series A (5 remaining) just EUR43.50 (+VAT) per | month | | Limited Series B (7 remaining) just EUR431.50 (+VAT) per | month | | or | | Limited Series C (1 remaining) just EUR862.50 (+VAT) per | month | | Brilliant! | | (I must note that the circuit shown there is... | somehow... inducing some negativity in me.... which | probably isn't unintentional.) | | And the main site has an about page too, in all its | glory: | | http://n-gate.com/about/ | ohgodplsno wrote: | It's a weekly digest that makes fun of how absolutely | full of shit (and themselves) HN posters are. | polote wrote: | Well the biggest luck event in this case, is that there was a | dredger pretty close to the ship. If you dont have a dredger | and you need to ship one there we would have wait much more | time | patentatt wrote: | Knowing nothing about it, would it be safe to assume that the | Suez Canal would always have a dredger around? Or is that not | how that works? | BurningFrog wrote: | I assume it's the same kind of luck that places gas | stations near motorways. | kparaju wrote: | Yeah, they have dredgers around for maintenance of the | canal. This clip was from at least 6 months ago. | https://youtu.be/P6st0k7KJmk | | From the YouTube clip, it def seems like it's normal to see | them when passing through the canal. | pqb wrote: | > A lot of what people thought was true (that it would be stuck | there for weeks, being dismissive of using tugboats to pull it | out) didn't pan out as expected. | | That was what many investors thought - see crude oil market in | last days. There were two tribes - one saying week and second | month(s) to solve the problem with ship. One selling, because | of optimistic perspective and obviously other buying for | opposite reason. In the result the price was standing still on | the "same" level. | olalonde wrote: | This happens a lot on HN. Another recent example which turned | out to be dead wrong about Coinbase[0]. | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459556 | prophesi wrote: | Those comments were really helpful to me. HM did a great job at | showing just how insanely large this ship is and why it will be | difficult to get it unstuck. To a layman such as myself, a boat | remaining stuck for almost an entire week sounds pretty absurd | without that context. | luxuryballs wrote: | To the tinfoil layman it's funny, if I am not mistaken, that | as soon as the President of Egypt ordered it to be unloaded | they suddenly got it unstuck within the next 24 hours. | mrfusion wrote: | The media seems to exaggerate problems... | malwarebytess wrote: | Why do you say that? What was true is that if they couldn't | get it out during the period surrounding king tide (which is | now, peaking next high tide) then it would be a few weeks | before conditions were as good. | | That's a factual take on things. | Agentlien wrote: | When this first got posted on HN I felt confident that I had | absolutely no clue about the difficulties involved or how best | to resolve the situation. I still stand by that assessment. | politician wrote: | On the other hand, they hired the best salvage company in the | world to remove the ship, that company ran massive calculations | on the loads in the ship, and then they determined the | application of forces needed to dislodge the boat. | | I think the pendulum is swinging too far the other direction. | "Look how easy it is. They just shook it loose" is the wrong | lesson to take here, IMO. | tomthe wrote: | To be fair: Maersk, biggest shipping company in the world also | came to the conclusion that it will take longer and sent their | ships the way around africa. It's always a gamble and every | outcome has it's probabilities. | rantwasp wrote: | that may still be the right choice given that now there is a | huge backlog | EricE wrote: | Yes - just because they moved it that doesn't mean the | delays instantly clear. | sandworm101 wrote: | Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe | weeks" scenerio. They were assembling the team for a litering | operation (cranes etc) should the ship need to be partially | unloaded. And a great many ships began to divert around africa, | some of which may now be turning around. Certainly the shipping | industry as a whole was headging against the "maybe weeks" | option. | | Not everyone on HN is a software nerd. More than a few here | have worked in the shipping and logistics industries. | freeflight wrote: | _> Note that the egyptians were also planning for the "maybe | weeks" scenerio._ | | Which is the sensible thing to do in their position: Hope for | the best, prepare for the worst. | rini17 wrote: | The canal has a limited capacity, so the backlog may go on | for few weeks anyway. | Clewza313 wrote: | They've said they expect to clear it in 3-4 days. | Trasmatta wrote: | I honestly love that it was freed using the "boring" solution. No | need for any of the crazy solutions people proposed on the | internet. Just careful and measured execution of proven | techniques. | tgv wrote: | Not surprised. It's directly available, and there's a lot of | experience. And the consequences and costs are known. But | probably other companies were already working on alternatives. | I wouldn't be surprised if Elon would send a small, custom | built sub next week. | VBprogrammer wrote: | Is that before or after he tells the guy in charge of the | salvage operation to shove the sub up his backside and go | back to fiddling children? | iab wrote: | Precedent is after i believe | hinkley wrote: | On the down side, because the solution was so boring, they are | likely to learn much less from this experience. | [deleted] | mildweed wrote: | Choose Boring Technology | ragebol wrote: | Should make a company around that! | mwgarcia wrote: | It's the only practical solution really. | | Cranes - Likely on a barge, on a relatively narrow canal. | That's quite precarious. And make that two for both sides | (canal is impassable). | | Heavy lift helicopters - Even the few multiple automated cranes | capable of handling a ship this size take days to unload it. | Also these helicopters are quite expensive to operate. | | Floatation devices - See Costa Concordia salvage operations. | Lots of consideration for structural stress. Lots of mounting | points on the ship. Lots of actual engineering needed for the | floatation devices themselves. | dev_tty01 wrote: | Agreed. | | Cranes - the ones used in ports are absolutely massive. Not | realistic. | | Helicopter not possible. Max lift is the M-26 at 44,000 lbs | and containers are rated for about 60,000 loaded lbs. | | Flotation is unlikely due to lack of water depth. Bouyant | force is based on displaced water. | | As long as the ship remained intact, dredging and tugging was | almost certain to work. Ultimately a simple problem. Just a | matter of time. Of course, keeping the ship intact wasn't a | certainty, so even beyond economic pressures, moving quickly | was important. | | They moved a bit slow at first before they realized how bad | it really was. After that, it seemed like they did a great | job getting the right experts involved and making it all | happen about as quick as could be expected given all the | logistics. | jacquesm wrote: | Heavy containers tend to be loaded further down in the | ship. | _ph_ wrote: | Yes, this was what one would call the default approach of | digging and tugging. I am very glad it worked. However, there | was a distinct possibility, that this approach would not have | worked, and I think all the discussions were about possible | alternative approaches. If the high tide at full moon had not | provided enough lift, then they would have had to figure out a | way to unload the ship. | GoodJokes wrote: | Just yesterday they said it would take weeks. I feel like a lot | of the messaging prior to it being unstuck might have | been...constructed for financial reasons? | [deleted] | mrlonglong wrote: | I was wondering about the sheer size of those ships. Could they | get even bigger than 400 metres? Is there a limit? | jokoon wrote: | https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/7r85ji/s... | erostrate wrote: | From this (very good) FT article | https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d... | | "But the specific engineering of container ships mean that they | can't get longer; they have to get wider. An oil tanker is a | shoe box with a lid: hull on the bottom, oil in the middle, | deck on top. But a container ship is a shoebox without a lid: | hull on the bottom, then containers all the way up. It's not as | strong without the lid. | | There are definitely hydrodynamic forces in the open ocean, | it's just that the ocean is usually in charge of them. And the | biggest stress on a ship's hull in heavy weather happens along | the longitudinal bending moment -- lengthwise, between the bow | and the stern. The longer a ship gets, the worse the stress | gets when a wave pushes up in the wrong place. As far as length | goes for container ships, "we are at the limitations of welding | and steel quality," says Lataire. "I will not say that it is | impossible to weld thicker plates, but in a way this is the | economic limit." | Ansil849 wrote: | So was the reason the ship became stuck because it was drawing a | penis shape in its course path? Or was it getting stuck | unrelated? | jtwaleson wrote: | Interesting. If I see correctly on https://www.vesselfinder.com/ | there are three big ships going into the canal north to south | now. Seems a bit inefficient! To speak in TCP terms, they should | increase their window size! | jtwaleson wrote: | I take that back, that was just for a couple of minutes. The | windows size is actually huge! | SubiculumCode wrote: | I do believe that this incident was a demonstration of how easy | it would be to disrupt the world economy via terror. | bArray wrote: | It's not free yet [1]... Still time for something to go wrong. | For example, it's entirely possible they did hull damage whilst | dragging it out. | | [1] https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 | ceejayoz wrote: | It's free and has moved up the canal quite a bit now. | bArray wrote: | It seems to be out of immediate danger, but the canal is much | longer after the rest-area. I imagine they'll pull it aside | to inspect the hull in this area to ensure it won't sink | further up the canal? | cyberlab wrote: | Looks like https://istheshipstillstuck.com/ has updated their | message! | politelemon wrote: | And you get Rickrolled if you stay on the page long enough. | loginatnine wrote: | I got solidly caught as well. If you're lucky enough, you can | also get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJIB1f7jk. | Object(c.useEffect)((function() { var e = | "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"; | Math.random() > .999 && (e = | "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJIB1f7jk"), | setTimeout((function() { return | window.location.href = e } ), 9e4) } | pqdbr wrote: | All of the sudden I had Rick Astley playing loudly in my | computer and I was like "WTF?". | | Well played, well played. | macintux wrote: | Thank you, I was wondering how I ended up with two Ricks | singing at me this morning. | dna_polymerase wrote: | The real rickroll occurs after buying that page's NFT and | realizing what they just did to you. | postingawayonhn wrote: | I wonder what their $59b cost is based on? | prof-dr-ir wrote: | Me too! Seems quite excessive for such a simple website. | mef wrote: | I saw the figure "$400 million per hour" in some press | coverage, probably that | craftinator wrote: | I've heard from multiple sources that about $9b per day in | commerce goes through the Suez, so that's probably just $9b * | number of days stuck. I imagine the cost is actually quite a | bit more, as the ripple effect from this traffic jam will | continue for at least another month while shipments are | diverted or delayed until traffic pressure returns to normal. | joosters wrote: | It's not like the $9b of daily commerce that can't get | through the canal is being set alight and tipped overboard, | it will reach its destination in the end. _Some_ of that | produce might have gone off, or the delay in its arrival | causes knock-on costs, but the final cost is only going to | be a fraction of that figure, not a large multiple! | craftinator wrote: | I agree that it won't be a large multiple, but, I do | think it's naive to assume that it'll be a fraction of | the cost. Consider the shear volume of stuff being | transported. Millions of tons of goods across hundreds of | delayed transports, some perishable, some with tight | timeline requirements, some with tight contract | requirements. And it's not like as soon as ships start | moving again all of that cost will go away. Ships are | still going to be diverted for weeks of not months to | relieve traffic pressure. | Clewza313 wrote: | If it's _really_ time-critical, it 's shipped by air, not | sea. Container ships being delayed by a few days by rough | weather, port delays etc happens all the time, and we're | looking at a week tops here even for directly impacted | ships. | skullx wrote: | I would image the opposite tbh, that $9b of delayed goods | per day is not lost, it's just delayed. Most of that goods, | unless they are perishable goods, will sell like normal, | just a bit later. | | There is obviously a loss here on increased costs and loss | of sell opportunities due to the delay, but that figures | are mega inflated IMO. | formerly_proven wrote: | Also... ships are slow. The voyage from the Suez canal to | Rotterdam or Hamburg is at least six days, so there was | quite some time to prepare for a gap in supply. | craftinator wrote: | Well, this is a supply delay in hundreds of equally sized | or larger ships. This is a delay in a majority of the | global shipping industry of at LEAST a week, and shipping | scheduling will be thrown off for months by this. | | https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mf | 705... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/meopv | 9/s... | | That is a LOT of cargo that's suddenly going to arrive 2 | or 3 times later than expected. Huge economic impact. I | really don't understand why people on HN are pushing so | hard against the idea that this is just an economic blip. | | Is there anyone involved in the industry that can chime | in? | bombcar wrote: | A better calculation is to see how much Egypt makes per day | in Canal fees and use that as an estimate, as the canal | fees are set to make it just a bit cheaper to use the canal | vs the horn. | Clewza313 wrote: | $14M/day seems to be the usual media estimate. I think | it's safe to say the knock-on effects of several hundred | ships being delayed will be more than that. | isolli wrote: | Quick, time to buy the NFT they advertise at the bottom of | their website before the excitement abates! /s | [deleted] | divbzero wrote: | The website offers related book recommendations. I would also | recommend Alex Madrigal's _Containers_ podcast series. [1] [2] | [3] | | [1]: | https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/containers/id120955917... | "iTunes" | | [2]: https://soundcloud.com/containersfmg "SoundCloud" | | [3]: https://www.stitcher.com/show/containers "Stitcher" | spiralx wrote: | Somewhat related is the classic "How to Avoid Huge Ships": | | https://www.amazon.co.uk/Avoid-Huge-Ships-John- | Trimmer/dp/08... | pmiller2 wrote: | Well, that was a really short few weeks. | ziml77 wrote: | I wonder how much the couple of excavators helped. I saw people | on HN saying having two measly excavators was just to give the | appearance of doing something and not an actual attempt to get | the boat unstuck. But when I saw a photo of the digging, it | looked like there was some serious progress made. | jacquesm wrote: | Measly in comparison to the ship, but by no means measly in an | absolute sense. Those were pretty impressive excavators. | codyb wrote: | I read it was six, running 24 hours a day, which moved 27,000 | metric tons of sand. | | Which, sounds like a lot of sand to me. Seems like software | engineers would have the best understanding of slowly but | steadily working towards a goal since that's been my life since | I started in this field! | | But, also, I admittedly bit the hype train too on how hard it | was going to be to get this thing dislodged. | sandworm101 wrote: | I think that number is from the dredgers rather than the | excavators. Dredgers (ships) can shift sand faster than | dozens of excavators. | codyb wrote: | It looks like you would be correct! Although the 27,000 | metric tons appears to have been on point. | | https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-56547383 | ziml77 wrote: | Thanks for providing a source! | thechao wrote: | A cubic meter of wet sand weighs about 2 metric tons. 24/7 | excavation is easy to underestimate like sailing ship | traversal under way: yes, a sailing ship only makes 4 knots | (or whatever), but it dies so for 168 hours a week. | faramarz wrote: | Apparently the high tides were maximized and were a big factor. | Credit to the Moon! | graywh wrote: | so you're saying wallstreetbets played a hand in this? | Clewza313 wrote: | Diamond hands on the dredgers. We like the ship! | thrwyoilarticle wrote: | One picture from very early on in the crisis (the one with the | single excavator) was used as the mental model for the site | long after pictures stopped being seen from there. | auiya wrote: | Aye by dredge boats running massively large slurry pumps. My | partner works for a company that manufactures said pumps, they | can MOVE SOME SLUDGE. Think the same sort of setup they use for | underwater gold mining, but on a way way more massive scale. | You can literally stand up inside some of the impellers they | make. | mhb wrote: | I wonder how they think the canal was created. | OskarS wrote: | I'm actually really curious about this! It was built in the | mid 19th century, was there excavators then? Or was it | shovels and manpower? I looked on wikipedia hoping to find | some info, but was sadly disappointed. I would TOTALLY read | an in depth article on how, practically, the Suez canal was | actually built. | nicoburns wrote: | "Construction began in April 1859, and at first digging was | done by hand with picks and shovels wielded by forced | laborers. Later, European workers with dredgers and steam | shovels arrived" | | https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/suez-canal- | opens | herendin2 wrote: | Depiction of a steam dregdger working on the Suez Canal | | https://www.alamy.com/suez-dredgers-canal-build-dig- | excavate... | SirLotsaLocks wrote: | I'd imagine a lot of explosions too. Most big excavation | back then used explosions but also a lot of individual | manpower as well. | emilssolmanis wrote: | Slaves, lots and _lots_ of slaves, many of whom died. | Exactly as you 'd imagine something of epic proportions | being made in the 19th century. | Clewza313 wrote: | It was built with corvee labor, which is not quite the | same thing: unpaid, yes, but done by farmers etc as a | form of taxation in kind. | arwineap wrote: | Taxation imposed by the state, but I haven't been able to | find any citation of a tax code so to speak. | | It seems like state sponsored slavery, without a trade. | That is no persons are being sold because they are simply | using citizens | | Brutal. | EricE wrote: | Oh come now, governments can't impose slavery - it was | just taxation after all /s | mannerheim wrote: | Slavery doesn't have to do with whether it was paid or | not (many slaves have historically been paid as well) but | rather the voluntariness of their work. | JimWestergren wrote: | "Helped by the peak of high tide, the flotilla of tugboats | managed to wrench the bow of the stranded Ever Given from the | canal's sandy bank, where it had been firmly lodged since last | Tuesday." - https://www.vesselfinder.com/news/20501-Ever-Given- | is-Finall... | rodiger wrote: | Isn't it the Evergreen? | | Edit: Thank you for all the corrections, will leave this up for | anyone else that's curious. | kaybe wrote: | A small addition: Here is the link to the wikipedia article | that also tells you about their hotel and airline business. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Group | | (Cue jokes about earth (they have trucks) and water blockages | soon to be followed by air. I haven't seen a good fire theory | yet.) | neogodless wrote: | I spent the first half hour learning about all this being | really confused when I kept seeing Evergreen written on the | side of the ship (and not the much smaller Ever Given near | the bow.) | marcos100 wrote: | Evergreen is the company, Ever given is the boat. | arthurcolle wrote: | Evergreen is the name of the company, all of their ships have | an Ever prefix. This one is called the Ever Given | [deleted] | [deleted] | bellyfullofbac wrote: | Evergreen is a huge Taiwanese shipping company, Ever Given is | the name of this particular ship. | | There are probably several dozen ships around the world with | the words "Evergreen" on its side. | swader999 wrote: | Evergreen is the shipping company, ever given is the name of | the ship | codevark wrote: | Free? I'll take it! | nindalf wrote: | . | rjtavares wrote: | A part will also be lower profits > lower stock prices. | brummm wrote: | That's not true. $58B worth of goods were delayed for a few | days. That definitely didn't cost anything even remotely that | much. | scrollaway wrote: | Whenever you see such absurdly high numbers attached to cost | estimates, always try to understand how they calculate it. | | This took the "$400 million / hour of shipped goods are being | delayed" figure and ran with it by multiplying it, claiming | that's the total damage cost. | | Now ask yourself: Let's say you're sending a parcel via UPS | that contains an iphone, or simply $1000 worth of goods. At the | last stopping point of the UPS truck, they get a flat tire | before being able to deliver it. Your iphone delivery is | unexpectedly delayed for a day. | | How much damage has been caused? What if it's two days? Six | days? | | There's just a big fat "this isn't how it works" attached to | this $58bn figure. | | Edit: For context since parent comment was deleted, this refers | to istheshipstillstuck.com's estimate of $58bn worth of damages | being caused by the ship being stuck. | Karunamon wrote: | Delivery to end customers is not equivalent to delivery as | part of a supply chain. Instead of $1K of iPhones, think of | it as $1Mn worth of components for a manufacturing process or | items to be placed on a shelf. Many of those items' shipping | timeframes are well-known and factored into calculations of | supply and demand. If a customer wants to buy something from | you and you're out of stock, they're generally not going to | sit on their hands and wait patiently, they're going to buy | from your competitors or not at all. That money is gone. | | Also, consider that we're at the end of a financial quarter, | and this could also account for missed targets for all manner | of industry. | mindslight wrote: | You've just gone up a level to draw the boundary at the | wrong place. That money isn't "gone", because as you've | said, the customer simply buys from a competitor. | | This is going to be bad for some individual businesses | (imagine a small business buying a whole container of | perishable goods), but systemically it's a blip. Delays are | not destruction. Failure to make something is not the same | as spending resources to make it only to have it destroyed. | | Money shifted around to different winners, but very little | damage occurred. | scrollaway wrote: | So what you're saying is, "it's complicated"? | lanstin wrote: | It's not Just complicated but a ton of math has been used | for the last fifty years to make it as cheap as possible | at the cost of robustness. Removing stacks of supplies at | factories and ware houses in favor of just in time | deliveries. Consolidating redundant factories. That sort | of thing. I am not in logistics but I worked I a factory | as an intern with the operations research group in the | 1980s. | Karunamon wrote: | Quite, but I'm also saying that your analogy was | terminally flawed. Supply chain shipping != shipping your | widget from Amazon. | scrollaway wrote: | Wasn't supposed to be an analogy but rather a | simplification of the fact that delayed goods do not | translate 1:1 to losses. | randerson wrote: | One impact I read about was that Egypt makes ~$300K per ship | in tolls, which they won't make if ships take the long route | around Africa instead. | rantwasp wrote: | or, they're gonna make more money with the "rush hour" that | will follow and they will only lose a small fraction of | what people think they're gonna lose | bluehazed wrote: | I still think they should have added another ship. | sophacles wrote: | Anyone got a contact there? https://suezcanal.statuspage.io/ is | still showing down. | divbzero wrote: | A bit more detail here [1] and here [2]. A combination of | vacuuming sand, high tide, and tugboats did the trick. | | [1]: https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle- | east/2021/03/29/Su... | | [2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/29/ever-given- | turned-8... | hinkley wrote: | Is it just me or is the Evergiven listing to port? | dghlsakjg wrote: | Entirely possible. The tugs are hooked up pretty high so that | could be part of it. | | The other part is that they may have intentionally shifted | ballast or fuel to induce a port list to assist the salvage. | rtkwe wrote: | There were reports I read earlier that part of the unsticking | process was pumping fuel and ballast water around to remove | as much weight as possible from the bow of the ship. It's | probably unbalanced the ship a bit and they're just waiting | to get to the lake to pause and fix it to allow shipping to | resume as fast as possible. | foxes wrote: | What a surprise it didn't need nuclear ordinance or building | giant elaborate dams or millions of helicopters. | NicoJuicy wrote: | I don't see the problem in guessing what approaches would have | been possible in which situation and wondering about it. | Learning something new about a topic you wouldn't encounter | elsewhere in discussion. Because after all, isn't that why we | are here in the first place? | | That aside, the idea of raising the water was valid and was ( | luckily) available though nature. It wasn't mentioned before it | appeared here. See: High tides. | | And cofferdams could have been used when the situation was much | worse. But the logistics of organizing it would have been | painful ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26587692 ) | | Which is what followed when bringing up: "temporal dams" | surrounding the ship. Which is obviously very different than | "building giant elaborate dams". | | But ofc, not everyone actually reads the things that are said | and some just interpret their own prejudice. Degrading the | whole discussion. | neogodless wrote: | We wanted the hero to be a Death Star, but in the end it was | just the moon. | tdfirth wrote: | This comment really made me chuckle. I did enjoy reading the | suggestions on the other thread, but not many were entirely... | practical (edit for spelling) | T-hawk wrote: | Just to be clear: The ship is still there and still stuck. They | were just able to straighten it enough (parallel to the shore) | to be out of the way and no longer blocking boat traffic. | | Edit: I think I saw an earlier article, other reports are now | saying it's fully floating and moving. | q3k wrote: | Are you sure? It seems to be moving out of the channel now: | https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 | tarkin2 wrote: | After all the crazy engineering ideas they used a load of | tugboats when the tide was good? Not as sexy as a nuclear | warhead though, eh. | | I feel like there's something to be learnt about computer | engineering. We naturally go towards ego-massaging solutions. | hilbert42 wrote: | It's been blocked before but for a lot longer (from late 1956 | to early 1957--about five months) during the Suez Crisis: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis | | That was a really big deal--more so than this one, I still | remember the daily radio news reports and huge newspaper | headlines from when I was a young kid. It was an international | crisis that dragged on for months and months. | acqq wrote: | The "crisis" was actually a war in which the UK, France, and | Israel invaded Egypt: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal#Suez_Crisis | | "To save the British from what he thought was a disastrous | action and to stop the war from a possible escalation, | Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester B. | Pearson proposed the creation of the first United Nations | peacekeeping force to ensure access to the canal for all and | an Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula. On 4 November | 1956, a majority at the United Nations voted for Pearson's | peacekeeping resolution, which mandated the UN peacekeepers | to stay in Sinai unless both Egypt and Israel agreed to their | withdrawal. The United States backed this proposal by putting | pressure on the British government through the selling of | sterling, which would cause it to depreciate. Britain then | called a ceasefire, and later agreed to withdraw its troops | by the end of the year. Pearson was later awarded the Nobel | Peace Prize." | Rendello wrote: | Timeghost has a great series on this: | | https://youtu.be/3tnxiJ9n1c8 | pbourke wrote: | It was closed for 8 years after the 6 day war. | hilbert42 wrote: | Yeah, right. I recall that too, it got to the point where | shipping had gotten used to taking the long way around. | Towards the end, everyone had become so used to the fact | (and the delays) that we'd almost forgotten the canal | existed. | | Maybe there's now some virtue in dusting off the old | proposal for second canal route via Israeli territory (of | course, sans the nukes this time). | koheripbal wrote: | I think this incident really highlights how easily the Suez | can be blocked. | | A well hidden explosive charge on a container ship in the | canal could cause a multi-month blockage - perhaps longer. | | It would probably be smart to dig a 2nd channel. | tim333 wrote: | Then the terrorists would need two bombs! But I think they | will extend the 2nd channel - some is done already. | syncsynchalt wrote: | There is a second channel for most of its length already. | I'm sure the plans to finish the work have gotten a higher | priority in the past week. | gerikson wrote: | The canal was closed between 1967 and 1975, and some ships | had bad timing: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet | faefox wrote: | Pretty disappointing, honestly. | turing_complete wrote: | Good thing hacker news doesn't run large civil engineering | projects. | abhiminator wrote: | That thread was a good chuckle though -- a bunch of _mostly_ | software devs brainstorming on freeing one of the biggest | containers ships from their comfy armchairs. [0] | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 | rovr138 wrote: | I learned how not to get rid of a whale at least. | | In case I'm ever asked about that... | croutonwagon wrote: | "The remaining chunks were of such a size, no respectable | seagull would attempt to tackle anyway." | | This guy assume gull's are respectable. | | Man I hope this guy had an amazing career, because that was | an awesome report. | foxes wrote: | Yes some of the options would have been fairly spectacular at | least. | IgorPartola wrote: | You know, I used to think that HN was a collection of some of | the smartest people on the Internet. Don't get me wrong, there | are some incredible people here. But I guess what I have | learned over the past 10 years is that HN has as many blind | spots as any other online forum. If you want SV advice, this is | the place to be. If you want to dislodge a stuck mega ship, | look elsewhere. | kibwen wrote: | It's the classic "expertise is universal" fallacy. When we | see someone who is an expert in their field, we assume that | expertise carries over to totally unrelated fields, when this | is emphatically not the case. Being a genius does not prevent | someone from being ignorant; the finite nature of time means | every genius is almost completely uninformed on almost every | topic, and without information what you get is GIGO. | hanche wrote: | I suspect that many (but not all) of the "crazy" | suggestions were a bit tongue-in-cheek. | jsight wrote: | Yeah, the part that is missing are the experts who can | take those "crazy" suggestions and explain, in accurate | detail, all of the reasons why there are better ideas. | | Along with detailed explanations of the better ideas. | | As it was, we kind of just got stuck on the jokes and | random thoughts. | justinator wrote: | Which I think is fine? Isn't it fun to imagine how _you_ | would unstick a huge boat, even if your idea is totally | off the mark due to a bad application of lateral | thinking? Be it helium balloons or falcon heavy lifting | rockets. | hanche wrote: | Oh yes, great fun to be had by all. You'll hear no | complaints from me. | arethuza wrote: | Or repeatedly exploding nukes behind it to convert it | into the first space going Orion container vessel.... | SubiculumCode wrote: | Or ramming another containership into it. | jethro_tell wrote: | There's a whole industry around ship recovery and they know | how to do things like patch things back together with some | light underwater welding and then pump the water back out the | hole in the bottom with compressed air. Lots of times, this | is done while the ship is busy worrying itself to death on a | reef. | | Ship salvage is a combination of batshit crazy and real-time | engineering marvel with a healthy dose of understanding tides | waves and currents. There's also a strange maritime law | business going on where the captain and or insurance company | have to sign a contract. IF the ship is a 'wreck' the salvage | company gets what ever they can save or whatever it's agreed | on in the contract. If it just needs some help, the contract | will be lighter. But many ships have sunk completely while | the insurance company and salvage company have argued over | whether it was a total loss or just suck in a low tide. | | I always find the salvage stories to be super interesting. | Seeing people do hard ball business while the ship is | breaking up under them is really something else. | BelmundoRegal wrote: | Reminded me of the Kathryn Spirit ; "After years of | immobility, the federal government awarded an $11-million | contract last year to a conglomeration of businesses to | dismantle the ship. Ironically, one of the companies picked | was the same one that abandoned the wreck in 2011." | | Where: "years"=8 | | "Built in 1967, the Kathryn Spirit has not had an owner | since 2015, at which point the federal government took | control. The ship, which had been used as a cargo ship in | the past, had been towed to Beauharnois in 2011 by the | Groupe St-Pierre, which wanted to dismantle it in the St. | Lawrence River to then sell the scrap metal." | | https://www.westislandblog.com/abandoned-vessel-kathryn- | spir... | vermontdevil wrote: | I enjoy reading all the various ideas people come up to solve | a complex issue. I know it's mostly not realistic but always | good to see how imagination come forth. | steve_adams_86 wrote: | The way I look at it is, if I'm here, then there's a strong | statistical probability that a bunch of other clueless | superficially intelligent people like me found their way here | too. I just hope anyone I encounter is smarter than I am. | ravi-delia wrote: | As correct as that is, I don't think anyone was actually | thinking those were good ideas. There's something really | innocently funny about this episode of history, and honestly | it's fun to just think about what-ifs. Could you build surge | walls all the way along and use some kind of dam? Combine all | the power of every helicopter to lift the whole thing? Big | ships are fun, unwieldy objects getting stuck are fun, | sometimes it's just fun to mess around. | Grakel wrote: | HN is a lot of amazing experts in a particular subject mostly | talking about something else. It's fascinating in this way. | dkarl wrote: | The smartest ones are maybe not the ones providing | suggestions? | | Then again, it's fun to speculate, and what are these threads | for if not to provoke thought? Maybe it's fine for people to | imagine and try to put themselves in the place of the | professionals working on the problem. You can interpret the | comments here as an indicator of dangerous human hubris if | you want, but I think most of the people here understand that | they can't do any harm by posting naive speculations on HN. | | In my opinion, we should save our outrage for people who make | an active attempt to be taken seriously and affect the | actions of more qualified people, such as the guy who posted | the bizarre (and possibly satirical?) account of his attempt | to build a system for guiding doctors' treatment decisions. | runj__ wrote: | I had great fun reading about the number of helicopters and | starships needed to lift the ship and probably took | something away from it for future endeavours. Really great | for thinking about scale. | test1235 wrote: | some of the suggestions seemed borderline condescending | | e.g. "why don't they just do X" | | as tho' the actual experienced engineers working over there | on the problem couldn't come up with better ideas than some | guy who happens to spend a lot of their day on the | internet. | Sohcahtoa82 wrote: | "Why don't they just do X" has two interpretations: | | 1. "This is such a simple solution and I think they're | dumb for not doing it." | | 2. "X seems like a great and obvious idea, but they | aren't doing it. Therefore, there must be something they | know but I don't, and I'm interested in learning it." | | I try to take the second interpretation whenever I see | someone posing solutions in that manner. | BelmundoRegal wrote: | It actually happens quite often and you can get | handsomely rewarded for being that some guy ; | | https://www.innocentive.com/ | | Have fun ! :D | dkarl wrote: | "why don't they just do X" can be a great question. Why | not just use Riemann integrals for everything? Why not | use timestamps as ids? Not knowing the answer is a good | enough reason for asking, and I don't feel like I need to | police people's feelings and decide if they were feeling | curious or condescending when they asked. They'll learn | either way, when the question is answered. | | I can imagine some people might have asked questions in a | disingenuous or insinuating way ("why trust vaccines if | the supposed experts can't get a ship unstuck") but I did | not personally see any of that. | Thrymr wrote: | I wonder if there is a forum of marine engineers somewhere | speculating on how Google (or whoever) should fix a service | outage... | throwaway09223 wrote: | I just re-read that old thread and to be honest, on the whole | the advice there is sound. I saw comments discounting the | fanciful speculation outnumbering the speculation by at least | a multiple of two. | | There are silly ideas in every forum. I've been on plenty | groups comprised entirely of tech experts and I can | confidently say that foolish ideas will be proposed even in | the most elite of circles, even in their areas of specialty. | It happens, and as long as there are other reasonable voices | it's fine. | leereeves wrote: | I remember people in that discussion saying the high tide might | help and suggesting pumping water around the boat to remove the | sand. The HN discussion included the right answer, among a lot | of more entertaining ideas. | dang wrote: | We detached this subthread from | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26622120. | tim333 wrote: | I think a lot of the HN suggestions were for entertainment | value really. Dredge and use tugs wasn't very exciting. | divbzero wrote: | With more robots and drones, only a matter of time before we | have Twitch controlling atoms instead of bits? [1] | | [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10477721 "Show HN: | Twitch Installs Arch Linux" | 0xcafecafe wrote: | I wonder why the previous link to track it is not working again. | Would have been cool to see it navigating the canal: | | https://www.vesselfinder.com/?imo=9811000 | GreeningRun wrote: | Is OK for me but maybe the web server is submerged under the | load | gorkish wrote: | Unfortunately at 02:53:44 GMT a web request which, due to | high botnet activity and a packet storm, experienced poor | routing conditions and unfortunately became wedged in one of | the major transatlantic fiber optic cables. Network operators | are working to free the stuck request. It is estimated that | 50 billion requests per minute are queueing in the cable | which will soon become filled if the situation is not | resolved quickly. Experts fear the effects to international | browsing, and some requests have already begun to take "the | long way around." | [deleted] | pfarrell wrote: | I know we typically don't upvote humor here, but that was | really good. | [deleted] | throw0101a wrote: | > _imo=9811000_ | | I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums: | | > _An IMO number is made of the three letters "IMO" followed by | a seven-digit number. This consists of a six-digit sequential | unique number followed by a check digit. The integrity of an | IMO number can be verified using its check digit. This is done | by multiplying each of the first six digits by a factor of 2 to | 7 corresponding to their position from right to left. The | rightmost digit of this sum is the check digit. For example, | for IMO 9074729: (9x7) + (0x6) + (7x5) + (4x4) + (7x3) + (2x2) | = 139.[10][11]_ | | * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMO_number#Structure | | MMSI numbers do not: | | * | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_Mobile_Service_Identi... | teddyh wrote: | > _I find it neat? strange? that IMO numbers have checksums:_ | | It's a relatively common feature of ID numbers: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm | geoduck14 wrote: | Was this comment intended for a different thread? | blfr wrote: | Probably not. The site linked uses imo numbers for ship | ids. | johncessna wrote: | So, did they let it into the Canal, or did it go to the back of | the line? | doogerdog wrote: | The ever given was towed north to bitter lake and is anchored | there with two other vessels attending it. The ever globe is | the third vessel in the first convoy south from bitter lake to | Suez. The first two vessels have passed the location of the | accident. The ever globe is the same size as ever given and is | right now very slowly passing the place where ever given was | stuck. | walrus01 wrote: | https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/EVER-GIVEN-IMO-9811000-... | | https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:56... | exikyut wrote: | Oh hey, they fixed it, | | - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to | any of the cargo | | - without destroying or imposing significant additional damage to | the ship | | - without taking multiple weeks | | - without needing to ship a trillion dollars'+ worth of equipment | halfway around the world | | It's refreshing to see high-end engineering performed so | competently. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | About the cargo part - it's entirely possible that some cargo | is non-viable. It is going to be onboard days longer than | predicted. Anything even faintly perishable may be degraded. | | But good news for sure! | gambiting wrote: | Container ships can easily have an unpredicted wait of 1-2 | weeks just entering port, happens all the time and isn't | major news. Few days in the Suez canal isn't going to do | anything to cargo. | shagie wrote: | While the Ever Given may not have an issue, the HAJH AMINA | which is waiting in the Great Bitter Lake is a livestock | carrier that should have been unloading in port yesterday. | gambiting wrote: | Sure but the same principles apply - delays happen, and | livestock ships are equipped to keep livestock alive with | food and water well stocked in case they can't enter port | for days(which again, happens all the time, sometimes | papers aren't exactly right and the livestock has to wait | on the ship until cleared for offloading) | lostlogin wrote: | The shipping of livestock is controversial here in NZ and | some (likely high) estimates suggest a death rate of as | much as 1 in 10. The issues are pretty closely tied to | conditions at the other end of shipping (feedlots, | slaughterhouses etc) as well as the shipping though. | | https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the- | detail/story/2018765098... | VBprogrammer wrote: | I've seen this ship mentioned a couple of times. I kind | of assume the subtext is that we should stop sending live | animals by ship (except for perhaps specialist and | breading stock), which I totally agree with, as much for | the dangers of spreading disease as for an ethical | concern for the animals involved. | ceejayoz wrote: | It's already a trip halfway around the world at something | like 30 km/h. If you're transporting goods that are that | sensitive, you're likely doing it by air already. Ships get | delayed all the time for various reasons. | mwgarcia wrote: | The ship will still likely be anchored for hull inspection, | perhaps in Bitter Lake. That may take a couple of days at | best, and an indefinite stranding if serious problems are | discovered. | | Also crew change is likely because of on-going | investigations, and that will be tricky with the on-going | mariner crunch. There's not a lot who are qualified to run | a ULCV, especially one straight out of an accident. | m4rtink wrote: | In the past ships already got stuck on the Bitter Lake - | for quite some time! | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Fleet | Someone wrote: | I think those were unloaded during the 'delay'. If they | weren't, I guess the Wikipedia page would have mentioned | something about life on the Munsterland, carrying eggs | and fruit. | Sebb767 wrote: | > It's already a trip halfway around the world at something | like 30 km/h | | This sounds slow at first, but, since you can drive pretty | much 24/7, that's still 720km per day. If you're literally | going halfway around the world (20.000km), you'll be there | in 28 days. Since you drive on water, you'll do few small | detours (I assume), so you can actually get those 700km a | day. | | EU<->China even appears to be "only" 7000 km [0], so if you | could drive in a straight line you could get there in 10 | days. 14 with usual delays and detours, maybe. That's a | reasonable time span for a lot of perishable goods. With | the blockage doubling that time, I can easily see how this | would affect quite a few goods. | | [0] https://www.distancefromto.net/distance- | from/Europe/to/China | Dirlewanger wrote: | If this happened on American soil, it'd be stuck for weeks. | There'd be infighting over which private contractor the canal | authority will pick. And when the excavation process starts, | there'd be complaining from NIMBYs because of the disruption | and noise. And in the end, there'd be multiple entities all | suing each other because they can. | EricE wrote: | High tide did more than anything. If it had gone beyond | Wednesday they likely would have been screwed as the high tide | was set to start dropping each day after Tuesday. Good thing | they started dredging right away. | amenghra wrote: | But there are two high tides and two low tides a day. Why did | it take a week? /s | Raineer wrote: | I just adore that us little humans got our big boat stuck in | the sand and uncle moon had to reach down and fix it for us. | mgfist wrote: | Auntie Luna | munificent wrote: | You say that like they just got unexpectedly lucky, but all | mariners are well aware of and take tides into account in | their planning. | EricE wrote: | So your saying they planned to only crash the ship during | the high tide? | | You do realize the canal operates during all tides? | | So yes, it was absolute luck this accident happed right | before the highest tides of the month. | wussboy wrote: | I think you and the other poster are saying different | things. You are saying it's fortunate that a spring tide | was coming and you are right. I think grand parent is | saying that sailors are well aware of tides and as soon | as the ship got stuck they would have been racing to meet | the spring tide, which was planning and not luck. | dan-robertson wrote: | I'd be surprised if they aimed for their ship to arrive n | days before the spring tide in case it got stuck. That just | doesn't sound like an efficient operation. In this case the | luck was that the high tides were relatively high when it | was stuck. If we were in a neap tide, we might have had to | wait longer for a high enough tide to get the ship out. | (But maybe if tides were lower it wouldn't have gotten so | stuck) | | P.S. it isn't exactly clear what you mean by mariner, but | plenty of sailors in the Mediterranean don't really need to | care about tides as they don't really get them there. | Indeed, you shouldn't trust any of the early modern Greek | or Italian treatises attempting to explain tides as their | authors didn't really know how tides actually behaved | outside the Med. | lmilcin wrote: | That's not what he said. | | Ship captains who sail on open ocean are well aware of | tides. It is not too difficult to imagine somebody did | 2+2 and figured out the tides are getting higher so in | couple of days there is going to be better chance of | freeing it. | | Obviously they did not plan it. It is just an opportunity | they used. | munificent wrote: | _> I'd be surprised if they aimed for their ship to | arrive n days before the spring tide in case it got | stuck._ | | That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that after the | ship got stuck, they certainly incorporated the tides | into their plan for how to unstick it. If the tides had | been less amenable, they would have come up with a | different plan. | | So their plan didn't get "lucky", their plan was | predicated on the tides being part of the solution. | EricE wrote: | Without the high tides the amount of material needed to | be removed would have been dramatically higher. | | That's the point and the absolute bit of luck. Without | the high tides they likely wouldn't have been able to get | it unstuck as quickly. Search for slope/fill volume | calculation charts - the amount of fill required to be | removed as you go deeper is logarithmic, NOT linear. | | It was VERY lucky they had the highest tides possible. | ce4 wrote: | Did the ship crash during high tide or low tide? The tide | 6 days ago when it got stuck compared to today is more | important. | dan-robertson wrote: | Sure but the luck here is the number of days until a | sufficiently high tide. Imagine a simple model where | every 28 days you get a sufficiently high tide and every | other day is not sufficiently high, and the ship gets | stuck (after high tide) on a uniformly random day. Then | the expected time until the ship is unstuck is 14.5 days | and the luck is how close you are to the time the ship | can get free. | dghlsakjg wrote: | It's even shorter timing than that. Spring tides occur at | the full moon AND the new moon. So you get two chances | every lunar cycle. | Vvector wrote: | The "spring tide", the highest of the high tides, | naturally occurs twice every 28 days. This is when the | Sun, Earth and Moon are in a line. So the average wait | would have been ~7 days. | flatiron wrote: | You talk about planning about an article about a container | ship piloted by professionals ran aground. | aden1ne wrote: | Some tug boats did sail in from far away places. | hinkley wrote: | Keeping in mind that the tugs on each side had to come from | opposite directions because the canal is blocked, I expect | there was a bit of a commute. | [deleted] | superjan wrote: | What I wonder about: how is such a rescue contract negotiated? | There is likely willingness to pay, but it is difficult to | judge what a reasonable price is, and it may not even be clear | who is culpable in advance. Do they have contracts in advance | with the shipping companies? | Aperocky wrote: | I would imagine a cost plus contract? | ghouse wrote: | So, like paying for emergency healthcare in the United | States. | DangerousPie wrote: | I would assume that Egypt paid. They have by far the biggest | incentive to clear the canal asap. They will presumably now | enter a lengthy legal dispute to try and get their money back | from the shipping company. | tmathmeyer wrote: | My understanding is that the Suez Canal Authority will have | to pay, but also that the SCA requires the use of "pilot" | captains that maneuver the boats through the canal, which | means that the issue was squarely the fault of the SCA. | Someone wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_salvage#Types_of_salvag. | ..: | | _In contract salvage the owner of the property and salvor | enter into a salvage contract prior to the commencement of | salvage operations and the amount that the salvor is paid is | determined by the contract. This can be a fixed amount, based | on a "time and materials" basis, or any other terms that both | parties agree to. The contract may also state that payment is | only due if the salvage operation is successful (a.k.a. "No | Cure, No Pay"), or that payment is due even if the operation | is not successful. By far the commonest single form of | salvage contract internationally is Lloyd's Standard Form of | Salvage Agreement (2011), an English law arbitration | agreement administered by the Council of Lloyd's, London._ | | That Lloyd's contract (https://www.lloyds.com/~/media/files/t | he%20market/tools%20an...) is concise (2 pages). | | It may incorporate the SCOPIC clause | (https://www.lloyds.com/resources-and-services/lloyds- | agency/...), but that doesn't seem long, either, even | including its appendices. | superjan wrote: | Thanks! | JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote: | Why wouldn't it be more cost-effective or unreasonable to | destroy the ship? | stevula wrote: | They would still be cleaning up the debris to unblock the | canal, shipping would still be blocked. | lmilcin wrote: | Have you ever tried to cut tires of the car that blocked your | driveway? Did it help to clear the blockage faster or exactly | the opposite? | clarkmoody wrote: | Problems with destroying the ship: | | - A sunken super container ship in the canal, rather than a | floating one. Removing the wreckage would be at least an | order of magnitude more work than floating the thing away. | | - Thousands of containers floating / sunk in the canal. How | much damage can one of those do to the propeller of a ship? | leoh wrote: | There appears to be little "high-end engineering." Just a high | tide and a bunch of tug boats. | baq wrote: | anyone can build a bridge that stands. only an engineer can | build a bridge that barely stands. | hderms wrote: | A high tide and some tug boats becomes 'high-end engineering' | if it works | hinkley wrote: | Have you looked at tug boat propulsion units lately? Those | things look like black magic. | thisisbrians wrote: | You are right, these things are nuts: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voith_Schneider_Propeller | _ah wrote: | Wow this is the coolest thing I've learned this week. | zelos wrote: | I'd guess figuring out where you can safely attach the tug | boats, monitoring stability and stresses on the container | ship and so on is non-trivial, too. | hinkley wrote: | If you fuck up bad enough those containers end up landing | on the tugs, killing the crews. Not to mention increasing | the quantity of stuff blocking the canal. | thisisbrians wrote: | They built a computer model to try and manage the stress on | the ship as they worked to free it. It was not | straightforward as the ship could have broken if they weren't | extremely careful. They also had divers inspecting the hull | for signs of stress. This was a massive, complex operation. | jacobreg wrote: | That sounds terrifying for the divers | Genghis_Dong wrote: | Boskalis Peter Berdowski said it wans't a very hard job | technically on Dutch television. Just the scale and impact | were huge. | MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: | It's like the guy at a bar who tells you he knows how to | swordfight after doing fencing. I'm sure he's right but | it just funny from an official with experience basically | saying "it wasn't that hard." | berkes wrote: | Boskalis is the company who brought the tugboats, | engineers, diggers and whatnot over there in days. This | is not a random guy commenting. This is an end-boss in | charge of the entire operation. | dmalvarado wrote: | Can you image if the hull did weaken to the point of near | failure? They might have needed to offload everything right | there where it ran aground, lest it completely fail | uncontrolled. The canal would be closed for a very long | time. Luckily they didn't have to make that call. | thisisbrians wrote: | Luckily, indeed -- but they were already planning for | this contingency. Apparently (and unsurprisingly) it was | going to be hard to find a large enough crane to move the | containers. | VBprogrammer wrote: | The beauty of steel is that it will yield plastically | beyond its normal design stress. It would have been | possible for them to damage the ship to the point where | it required significant repairs but still be capable of | exiting the canal. | sjaak wrote: | This reminds me of a former boss who told me to "just add | some if statements, how long can it take?" | PragmaticPulp wrote: | High end engineering uses the simplest and most cost | effective solution to get the job done right. | | It would have been a mistake to throw expensive, complicated | solutions at a problem that had a relatively simple solution. | afterburner wrote: | So just "engineering" then | Aperocky wrote: | simple is better than complex! | [deleted] | arethuza wrote: | Pretty sure I've seen a definition of engineering that was | "Solve the problem by doing as little new as possible". | temp0826 wrote: | Sometimes the safest way to deal with the so-called legacy | systems we all know and love | chrisseaton wrote: | Wow. People here still criticising the solutions the | engineers on the scene used? | hinkley wrote: | r/iamverysmart here we come. | F_J_H wrote: | All jobs are easy to the person who doesn't have to do them. | ~Hold's Law | | ;-) | mwgarcia wrote: | You forgot dredging tons of material. And dredgers have some | of the more complex naval engineering out there with all its | moving parts. | megous wrote: | I hope they'll give priority to ships with living animals that | reported that they have feed just for a few days, and not just to | whoever pays the most. Backlog will probably still take some time | to clear. | fblp wrote: | Some videos of boats celebrating by honking their horns here. You | can't really see the boat moving, but I hope someone's filmed a | timelapse! | | https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.businessinsider.com/suez-ca... | mwgarcia wrote: | Here's a somewhat good compilation: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovWoznPIBhw | EricE wrote: | " Oil prices remained volatile, however, amid concerns to the | time it may take to clear the almost 500 ship backlog and | expectations that OPEC members will hold their production cut | agreement in place following their monthly meeting in Vienna | later this week." Such a perfect time for Democrats to play | politics with energy. Wheee! Everyone get ready to bend over. | dang wrote: | Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. | | We detached this subthread from | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26621850. | lostcolony wrote: | I mean...the largest increase, and the longest year-to-year | increase of gas prices in the past 30 years happened 2002-2008, | which was hardly Democrat controlled. Prior to that they were | basically flat since 1990. The past two presidents saw an | increase the first half of their years in office (4 years for | Obama, 2 years for Trump), and a drop the last half. | | Not really sure a political conclusion is warranted here. | pradn wrote: | A great Twitter thread with many articles/resources if you want a | critical lens at the global logistics supply chain. | | https://twitter.com/CharmaineSChua/status/137586855212986368... | | I found this article on the impact on super-sized ships on | logistical infrastructure useful and fascinating. It describes | how the creation of ships too big to fit in the Panama canal | (post-PANAMAX ships) was received by 1) Panamanians 2) East Coast | / Gulf Coast ports 3) West Coast ports. The Panamanians spent | billions expanding their channel to bring port fees and promote | attendant value-add services. Ports across the East and Gulf | coasts overinvested in trying to make their port the preferred | one for these new ships. Clearly, not every port can recoup | investments in higher cranes and deeper harbors. There was an | irrational optimism on the East Coast, as they sought to take | business away from West Coast transhippers (dock in Southern | California and ship to the east by train.) In response, the West | Coast logistics industry sought and received a series of | infrastructure improvements to make transshipment from their | ports viable. So, just a few shipping companies are able to | increase the size of their ships (for economies of scale) and end | up having a major impact on billions of investment dollars in | more than a dozen cities. Policy makers in the US aren't able to | pick just a few cities to focus investment in. How can you tell a | city that they aren't going to get those jobs? Perhaps the US | should set a maximum ship size to prevent this wastage of | resources; but one could argue the efficiencies for consumers | could be worth it. | | https://www.ijurr.org/article/fungible-space-competition-and... | | The size of these ships keeps increasing at an astonishing rate. | See the chart in this excellent talk: | https://youtu.be/gdkvAXcZD7U?t=892 | | Moreover, the hydrodynamic effects of these large ships in | relatively shallow and narrow canals is underappreciated. We're | liable to see more such incidents as ships get bigger and bigger. | | https://www.ft.com/content/171c92ec-0a44-4dc5-acab-81ee2620d... | Synaesthesia wrote: | The Suez canal has also increased in size over time, it's cross | sectional area has steadily increased. | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | >the hydrodynamic effects of these large ships in relatively | shallow and narrow canals is underappreciated | | I'm really surprised I haven't seen this mentioned. A long time | ago, I was trained as a merchant ship's navigation officer. One | of the things we were taught (but unfortunately had few | opportunities to practice), was using "bank cushion" or "bank | suction" to use the hydraulic interaction between the hull and | a narrow body of water like a river to navigate tight curves. | These days, there are simulations that I'm sure capture these | effects to it's easier to get some experience with them. | | Of course, in the case of the _Ever Given_ it seems that the | grounding was mainly due to not compensating for the strong | cross winds. | EricE wrote: | That and going ridiculously fast during a sandstorm. | | Juan Brown/Blancolirio channel has a good overview and he | touches on hydronic interactions you reference too: | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5iyn2q6s1Sk | beastialityking wrote: | You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. | behnamoh wrote: | Maybe it's easier to read that Twitter thread here: | https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1375868552129863681.html | jacquesm wrote: | Score one for Boskalis. Those tugs are very impressive. | ocschwar wrote: | I'm brushing up my Arabic so I can understand the interview with | that excavator's operator. | selimthegrim wrote: | Link to the interview? | bruiseralmighty wrote: | Guess I was wrong. Glad that didn't become a bigger issue. | dang wrote: | The major threads appear to be: | | _Giant Ship Is Moved To and Fro to Break Suction: Suez Update_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26617430 - March 2021 (229 | comments) | | _Ever Given Everywhere_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26617081 - March 2021 (63 | comments) | | _Ever Given Ships Erratic Route into Suez Canal_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603778 - March 2021 (37 | comments) | | _Ever Given Container Ship Fan Fiction_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26593708 - March 2021 (33 | comments) | | _HMM Rotterdam appears to be diverting to avoid congestion at | Suez_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590105 - March | 2021 (49 comments) | | _The bank effect and the big boat blocking the Suez_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586866 - March 2021 (92 | comments) | | _Suez Canal: How are they trying to free the Ever Given?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26586278 - March 2021 (83 | comments) | | _It 'Might Take Weeks' to Free Ship Stuck in Suez Canal_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585480 - March 2021 (51 | comments) | | _Is that ship still stuck?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 - March 2021 (1229 | comments) | | _Suez canal blocked by a massive ship_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26560319 - March 2021 (426 | comments) | | Others? | Denvercoder9 wrote: | _Is that ship still stuck?_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26585282 - March 2021 | (1230 comments) | dang wrote: | Ah thanks! Inserted. | NicoJuicy wrote: | For those who are wondering. | | The canal is shallow at the sides, for a ship as this, this | creates a suction when it's not in the middle. | | The captain wasn't going straight ( zigzag) and while he wanted | to get out of the suction on the left side, the ship turned way | too much to the right. | | There's a really good animation here at 1:03 in the video ( | dutch): https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/03/29/zeevaartschool- | maakt... | | Video is talking about a "sea driving school" that simulated the | incident in their simulator. | | My info above is the Dutch information required to see the video | from 1:03 till after the animation. | pqb wrote: | I wish to see a satellite photos to see a traffic jam from the | above. It is definitely not too common to see that many ships | waiting in queue to entry the Suez canal [0]. | | [0]: | https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:32.3/cente... | ZeKZ wrote: | https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mf705... | | https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/meopv9/s... | zodiakzz wrote: | That's Bay of Bengal, not Suez. | https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sujeeva- | salwatura-49341a36_fa... | scumcity wrote: | Fortunately TWTR's market cap is worth more than a solution to | problems like this because... | TedShiller wrote: | Funny how all the HN armchair experts kept telling everyone that | the difficulty of this is vastly underestimated, and how people | don't understand "scale". ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-29 23:00 UTC)