But what if it has the next stock of PS5s? It’s all fun and games until same-delivery is put in jeopardy.
And to think, some people wanted to jettison said possible stock out into the desert. Yes the boat is stuck, but I need to know what’s on it before we do anything crazy. There’s a heroine cartel going nuts right now somewhere.
It’s time we move on to the next question: What’s on the boat?
Honestly the entertainment I've gotten from the media about the boat being stuck has exceeded that of the last few gaming sessions I've had, so I'm good.
Ps5? You can’t get a ps5 still the resell margins are still like 100-150$ so most in the primary market are gonna have a rough time. The new bots are really good at picking up 30+ at a time so until retailers catch up you are sol.
We can even engage in idle speculation; maybe the author uses “boat” to make the situation feel easier to grasp. A boat being stuck sounds like it has less consequences than a ship being stuck.
This is my position although instinctively I’d want to require the ability for a person to sit because I haven’t considered windsurfers or kite-boards to be boats.
Disclaimer: being subjective here and not too attached to the opinions, I waiver between words having independent meanings or defined by uses (a more Wittgenstein-esque approach, at least at my limited level of understanding)
I think that those could be grouped together but would require a new category that may or may not include water skis or wakeboards. Another condition i was thinking about placing on boat was a steering mechanism akin to a rudder but then realized rowing shells often don’t have those although I’d consider them boats.
This seems like it's probably one of those cases where there's so much regional and domain variation that a debate about it would only be useful as fodder for someone's weekend homework in an undergraduate level linguistics course.
it's a common pub quiz question, and the pub quiz answer is traditionally "a ship has lifeboats, whilst a boat does not". However I believe this is an oversimplification and a friend of mine in the merchant navy couldn't give me a fixed answer on the difference.
There are U-Schiffe too, which are larger than U-Boote, but the claustrophobia element wouldn't have been as intense in the film. On the other hand, an U-Schiff would have never become unstuck from the bottom of the Mediterranean. Another example of ships getting stuck where boats don't. (If you haven't seen the movie, this likely makes zero sense.)
Are we seriously not going to discuss the disproportionate impact on marginalised groups due to the inevitable price rises caused by supply chain disruption?
What about the potential increase in hate crimes against Indians from people blaming the situation on the crew?
Do we really not want to talk about how this the root cause of this is late stage capitalism driving container ship sizes up, in a never ending tradeoff between efficiency and resiliency. The billionaire class are privatising profits and socialising the losses!
I like the article, but nowadays it's totally feasible that the author is underestimating the amount of people thinking "The boat isn't really stuck it's a ruse by billionaires/politicians/MSM/liberals/oil companies/big logistics/*."
I’m hoping at some point QAnon theories all lead back to the island on Lost. We’re almost there, we have a giant boat at this point literally. If that thing is from an alternate timeline that is trying to head back to the island (stuck in a time loop, so it only appears stuck), then we could maybe go back and save everyone we left behind on the island.
only today my wife showed me a Qanon conspiracy post (the ones with the red circles and the various article screenshots) trying to link the boat's present situation with Hilary Clinton, human trafficking and The Plan to arrest the deep state.
Needless to say, we both had a good laugh at that one.
You make a good point: He’s discussing how pleasant it is to have fact-based facts. All the other facts are politicized, and require reverse-minding, and it’s tiring.
But the cognitive dissonance is entirely created by having people denying a fact. Some people say “Let’s take revenge on X because of ideology Y”, a person P says “I’m going to take revenge on X”, P commits planned murder, someone says “He did it because X” and the AFP (or AP) issues a fact-check saying it is not true (generally because the link between X, Y and P is not established, and sometimes using other arguments like statistical insignificance or because he’s himself a victim of Y, therefore Y made him do it involuntarily).
Other examples such as “Women are the primary victims of wars because men die a lot.” It takes a mental toll to accept both the idea that men are primary victims and not primary victims. Our world is full of this.
These sorts of shenanigans create side-effect that annoy you such as Facebook, Reddit and 4chan.
But you all agree around the same problem: The politicization of facts makes that they get twisted into their opposite, and cognitive dissonance is very tiring.
I was dumb enough to check, and there's plenty of conspiracy theories around this, the more common ones apparently being about this leading to "The Great Reset".
None seem to deny the fact that the ship is stuck though; they just claim it was done deliberately.
I must say, it is nice to have something that even the conspiracy nuts agree on. :D
But reducing it down to a basic fact exists in all of these. We agree the boat is stuck. We agree an election took place in the US. We agree there is an Earth.
I hate it. A massive amount of massive container ships is now heading to the 2-3 weeks longer route - and remember what fuel they use and how much of it...
> It's not stuck for mysterious reasons related to a long history of humans cruelly exploiting other humans.
It's not?
I thought the boat is stuck because it's too long and the canal is too narrow, and the boat is too long because people want to move more and more things by boat so they can sell more things, but they don't want to pay for more boats. So they kept making longer boats until they made one that's too long to fit sideways. (At least, that's what I heard.) And sometimes, in heavy winds and storms, boats turn sideways.
Even if this boat is unstuck, there's a good chance another boat will be stuck, soon.
Maybe this isn't directly about humans exploiting humans, but the motivation to build a boat that is too long because it is cheaper and hopefully won't get stuck seems like the same motivation for human exploitation - it's cheaper, and you can do it, and you can usually get away with it.
It would cost more to think in advance and say "Hey, we don't want any stuck boats here, the boats all need to be short enough that they won't get stuck. Come back with two boats." It would be safer, but people don't want safer, they want cheaper.
But yes, I like that the only thing hurt is the river bank. I am much happier that a boat is stuck than that, say, people who sew shirtwaists are stuck in a building on fire.
Saw this comment and expected the article to be an incoherent mess. I wasn't pleasantly surprised to find it was actually a just a playful, and very enjoyable, rant on the weariness of politics. Perfect coffee read for my Friday morning.
Wow, they seem to have bounced back from the conspicuous lack of a blood-tide of rural vengeance sweeping the nation on the heels of Trump's "true" election and revelation of the Democratic Satanic Marxist Pedophile Conspiracy on the 4th alright.
That's good, I know they were really emotionally invested in finally getting their revolution after botching the insurrection. QAnons on HN were like excited kids waiting for Christmas eve, making veiled threats here and there, so excited about finally getting their revenge against leftists and Democrats and BLM and effete city-dwellers. They probably stayed up all night polishing the poles of their racist flags and marching back and forth in their basements like little soldiers, visions of AOC dancing in their heads (from a gallows.) I was actually a little worried for them when reality crushed their febrile delusions yet again.
Good to see those crazy kids haven't lost their spunk.
>The baseless theory was given further credence — in the minds of QAnon followers at least — when it emerged that the ship’s call sign was “H3RC” which is close enough to Clinton’s own initials (HRC) for QAnon followers to make the link.
What's with conspiracy types thinking that an all-powerful organization is behind these conspiracies, yet they're incompetent enough to drop these clues so people would find out?
> What's with conspiracy types thinking that an all-powerful organization is behind these conspiracies, yet they're incompetent enough to drop these clues so people would find out?
In their mind they may see it as a malicious wink and a nod. "We know you know. Here's a little hint since you're powerless to stop us. No one will ever believe you."
> It's not stuck for mysterious reasons related to a long history of humans cruelly exploiting other humans.
That's not really true though, is it? Sure, the stuckness itself isn't mysterious. But the canal was built with deadly slave labor. The global shipping industry exists to facilitate exploitation of the developing areas of the world with manufacturing capacity. These monster cargo ships are an icon of the age of consumerism, which is largely responsible for the global pollution epidemic that will leave millions of unprivileged people underwater.
Sure, big stuck boat is as funny as it is true. But to be honest, I don't like that the boat even exists.
On the other hand, I do kind of like how wholesome of a disaster it is.
> Again, there's a vast and sprawling ecosystem of current and historical horrors that made this situation possible – but we can't say that it's a situation that could never occur in a just world, because even in just worlds, things get stuck. Ducklings get stuck. Winnie the Pooh gets stuck! And now, the big boat is stuck. And I like it. I like knowing that there can be a big problem that's caused by something as straightforward and comprehensible as a stuck boat.
I guess my assumption is that if you're constantly trying to find the injustice in the world, that must get you mad, because the world and history are so full of injustice.
I don't go looking for it, and usually I don't proselytize about it. I just like learning in general, and unfortunately that includes understanding the many problems that exist in the world. Mad? No, not really. Depressed, maybe, in an impersonal kind of way. I don't know how you can avoid that, if you understand the way the world works.
The stoic answer would be to not get emotionally affected by things you have no influence over. Overly focusing on the bad things you can't affect just leads to constant negative emotions without you being able to do anything about said bad things.
I mean... That's explicitly addressed in the article,and not to make it personal, but it feels like you're inadvertently and very ironically proving his exact point - finding a sentence, taking it out of context, and then working hard to disagree or go on a tangent to discuss your preferred topic / perspective.
"Again, there's a vast and sprawling ecosystem of current and historical horrors that made this situation possible – but we can't say that it's a situation that could never occur in a just world, because even in just worlds, things get stuck."
There's a million problems out there, but this one is a simple. And yet some will still find a way to ignore that particular simple yet important problem,to discuss their preferred problem.
This is not to say that your point isn't valid and important and crucial and worthy! But I'm a lefty pinky socialist liberal from Canada,and even *I am exhausted and daily rolling my eyes how we can't discuss the weather or paint of my kitchen or anything without going into... Other stuff.
(With that in mind I'm up voting your post as it definitely contributed to discussion,even if not in a way you maybe intended ; I don't like the habit of people down voting an opposing point of view ;-()
>The global shipping industry exists to facilitate exploitation of the developing areas of the world with manufacturing capacity.
You do realize the reason why people work in the sweatshops is because their previous situation (subsistence farming) was much worse? It's not like the sweatshop owner rolled in and forced everyone to work at gunpoint.
who stuck the boat and why. is there room for coincidence when it comes to 10% of world commerce? was it china? was it taiwan? some spy stuff going on? is this an indirect cause of global warming?
It's definitely captured my attention. It seems like the kind of thing that a) shouldn't happen or b) if it _does_ happen, should be resolved quickly. The fact that it _did_ happen and is taking much longer to resolve than I would have guessed is fascinating.
Was this article written with GPT3? It sure reads like it....
This is what Shortlyai spat out for me:
I like it that the boat in the Suez canal is stuck,
I really do. I can't help but feel good about this,
Not for myself or because I know someone aboard,
But just because it's so nice to see orders being reversed.
Such a long process for me to travel back and forth,
Sometimes with a visa and sometimes not. It would be great if they could shake things up back home.
I like it that the boat is stuck.
I like how the people onboard are still sending their messages,
And I'm sure many of them are thinking that if they wanted to,
They could get off the boat and walk around in Ismailia or Port Said, looking for a job. It'd be great to be able to find work in Egypt, but not everyone would think it's worth all that effort. Plus if they did go ashore there might be an investigation so even if they did a little work for someone on board they might still get into trouble. I know that things will eventually calm down back home but first we'll have a few good years where people can travel freely and without much hassle.
It kinda reads like the thing explainer, a book by the person who draws stick people and thinking machines, which only uses the ten hundred most common words.
I respectfully disagree. To me it is a good example of the style of the article reflecting its meaning. To me, the author says that this topic is a welcome relief in a world where every topic is conflictual and complicated. It is the only thing that currently makes the frontpage that is appeasing to the mind, because the mind can fully comprehend it. It is great because it is simple, and it is explained simply.
Your example is extremely convoluted and doesn't mean anything.
Once the article got into the fact it's not a political or ideological issue, I got the entire angle. It probably should have gotten to that point sooner, but I get the idea of the article. The boat is simply stuck. That's it. Nothing more. In an era of micro aggressions, politically charged everything and extreme sensitivities, this is the first world event in a long time that is just simple without being loaded... the boat is stuck. It's stupid how refreshing and novel that is.
I agree. I liked the article a lot from that point on, including (after that point) the first part of the article in retrospect. At first, though, it felt more like someone being silly for the sake of being silly, which can be also worthwhile but I'm glad I kept reading.
Edit: That article and the next most recent one (a short story, written by a different author)[1] were enough to make me subscribe.
Well, to be fair to a certain novel coronavirus, pandemics aren't inherently politically charged, it's just that people chose to make it that way in some countries.
That also isn't a new phenomenon which mostly says bad things about the people doing it from the antisemetic pogrum responses which in one notable case /poisened their own water supply/ to a more pedestrian anti mask league in tbe 1910s and related Black Death there were also some dim enough to think there was a choice of "skip measures for the economy".
Two kinds of choices - look for some scapegoat and manage to make things worse for themselves and far worse for their victims. The other is downright idiotic contrariness and the failure to understand that "normal" is not an option because epidemics alone cause others to stay away. It is like saying that you can ignore the blizzards and keep on making money growing tropical crops in open fields without wasting money on greenhouses that are redundant most of the year. The choice is between bad or worse because "trying to benefit from the status quo by when conditions won't return under the circumstances".
It's getting tougher and tougher for me to NOT believe that sites like, say, Popsugar won't be completely algorithmically generated in the very near future. I'm sure people are already trying this in limited capacity.
AFAIK most sports reporting are already automated.. "$TEAM won $GAME at $VENUE!". Maybe with extra logic like "if winning point scored at less than 5 minute before the end, change the heading to "$TEAM clinches victory against $OPPONENT in the last minutes of the game!".
I remember some famous star telling an interesting anecdote on a TV show I was watching live (so not on-demand). I googled to see if there's more to the anecdote online, but as soon as the TV show ended, I got hundreds of results about the anecdote from all the pop culture websites, but they were all referencing her telling of the anecdote from 15 minutes before.
Ah, Internet Content Farms... there was probably a time where people only put high quality content on the Internet. Nowadays content creators ask for comments on their YouTube video to get it "trending" in the hopes of making more money, contributing even more junk.
The writing is literary in style rather than the usual web standard marketing style. It is rather well done largely because it is only trying to be what it is.
I'm pretty sure that if the ship is stuck for a long enough time, conspiracies about it will start popping up and will lead to "alternative facts and truths".
You missed that boat. Already conspiracy theories floating around about the crew intentionally getting it stuck to protest poor conditions for maritime workers
If there wasn't a conspiracy theory that says the bot isn't actually stuck and its all being faked by (them), then after enough people read this, there sure will be one. There goes your wishful thinking that we all agree on one thing for once.
BTW the first time I read that "it was made on purpose and not an accident"-theory, was literally minutes after I head about the whole thing.
There is and never will be anything we humans all agree on. And quite frankly I dont see why anyone would strive to find something with universal agreement, if its so meaningless like this one. Its not like we could build common ground on this.
This is what I like about engineering... The problem is there, right in front of you. It can be a very difficult problem, but at least it's right there, you can see it and measure it and talk about it without debating the underlying facts of the problem.
Edit: I'll rephrase... I like that the problem is tangible. It may not always be obvious. :)
You should come to my introduction to engineering class.
Asking a group of 18 year olds to define the engineering problem they are given is an exercise that humbles me on a semesterly basis about how much development those at the beginning of adulthood still need to undergo.
Last fall I was asked if Chad was a real country or one I had invented for the purpose of our design project. Why? not because they didn't know geography, but because the student had never been given something 'real' to work on and brought their framing of 'course assignments are not real' to it by default. We'd been working on Chad research for 2 months at this point...but the 'this is school' fact underlying what I asked them to do overwhelmed everything else.
You aren't wrong, but reaching that level in engineering actually requires an enormous amount of expertise. That hard earned expertise often makes the surface level of agreeing on the problem seem simple.
I love your comment, because it is so true and yet so hard to grabble with the edges of the implications of what you are saying.
Is there anything about the boat being stuck that doesn't look like a cyber operation from Iran? The erratic steering, the drawing a dick on GPS, and plugging the most strategic international waterway during a rapidly heating conflict with the countries whose economies are most impacted by it?
This is a demonstration and a negotiation tactic, imo. That's not a conspiracy. Or maybe things just get stuck, in the precise place at the precise time, affecting the precise people.
I also like that the boat is stuck, but not for the same reasons.
A stuck boat in general is not usually a big deal, but this particular stuck boat is giving visibility to how fragile and interconnected everything is. Of course we "know" that, but we often don't see the extent of it until a disaster happens.
A system's capacity got stretched. For a while this worked fine, but safety margins became smaller. It was just a matter of time before an accident like this would happen. And there is no redundancy (on this part of the canal).
So I like this stuck boat because it shows where "the system" has weaknesses. The system extends of course into many areas. Trade, finance, engineering, probably politics, etc.
Unfortunately, due to greed (oops, "efficiency") we will always be running systems at, or slightly beyond capacity so accidents/disasters like this will continue to happen.
I also like that the boat is stuck simply because it is an example of how quickly the world can "unite" in peaceful discussions around an absurd situation.
I actually take the opposite view - that in spite of how big of a fuckup this is, and how much of an impact it has on global trade/shipping, the end impact to us will probably end up being relatively small.
Probably. Impacts wont be apparently for a while I guess.
I made a similar observation in april 2020. everyone was saying that covid was exposing the inherent fragility of JIT shipping or even the entire system of capitalism. in reality, the worst that happened was toilet paper was out of stock for a few weeks and I had to settle for my second-favorite shape of pasta a couple times.
Well, I have been trying to find zero-drop trail shoes for almost a year now. The shops just don't have my size anymore. Shop owners tell me the logistic chain has been pretty impacted indeed.
there are some very specific items I am still having trouble finding. close substitutes are available, but I'm willing to wait for the exact thing I want. looks like the picture of graceful degradation to me.
The secondary market for shoes sweeps up all stock and resells. It’s gotten insanely competitive and bots are one-upping other bots for speed. If you want a desirable shoe just go ebay or stockx. You can’t compete as a manual buyer
If you were into board games, you'd probably have felt it. Just about every board game release and reprint has had (and are still having) significant delays thanks to the pandemic.
This is the point though, having plenty of slack in the economy (board games, theme parks, etc) means that we would have to fall a long way before people started feeling hungry.
The number of homeless people I see in the streets has visibility doubled, but I'm sure the marginal availability of board games is a sign they aren't feeling any hungrier than usual.
Folks are also hording these for secondary market resell. Margins are good and a resellers can easily eat half the stock or more for secondary markets.
The weakness of capitalism doesn't need to be exposed, it needs to be acknowledged. And since it's a system that is very profitable for a lot of very powerful people, it's going to take more than a simple pandemic for the status quo to change.
But that's the point, isn't it? In the general sense, one stuck container ship in the world shouldn't have any impact on "us," except for the people whose "stuff" is on it.
That sounds a bit too self-centered a viewpoint in that it is far too narrow and ignoring that there are knock on effects to everything in a general sense that while they fade into the ambient still have an impact. You may not notice say a banana blight in Ecuador and might ask "whatever what does that even mean to me"? Then you wonder why bananas went up fifty cents a piece.
> So I like this stuck boat because it shows where "the system" has weaknesses.
I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems. Of course I would never say I'm glad that we had a pandemic considering the lives and livelihoods lost, including among my family.
>I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems.
I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well.
Of course for some it's been worse than for others, but on the whole the planet has coped not too badly. It has also flushed out at least one useless govt from power (US), is in the process of hopefully doing so with another (Brazil), and we can only hope that it will also hasten the departure of England's PM too.
We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.
> I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well.
I mean, it's all relative, right? From my US perspective, I guess prior to the pandemic, I thought the CDC was one of the few federal agencies with a high degree of competence, but they didn't even have meaningful reserves of ventilators, masks, or other PPE nor any plans to procure the same (even though we've had several major respiratory epidemics). Similarly, there were apparently no plans to scale up PCR testing capacity, and the CDC rejected the WHO test in favor of its own tests which were problematic at the start, especially in that they were difficult to scale. The testing turned out to be an even bigger debacle because it left decision makers completely in the dark.
Even if you lay the blame at the hands of Congress for defunding them, that still indicates a problem with our political health.
So yeah, we didn't enter a dark age or anything, but it was far worse than I would have guessed. The death toll is still quite high, but to your point, it could have been higher.
> We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.
I guess my point is that prior to the pandemic, I expected that our advancements in science and technology (if not politics) would have left us much more capable of dealing with a disease like the 1918 influenza than we apparently are.
"So I like this stuck boat because it shows where "the system" has weaknesses."
My father was a freight Sea Captain. We learned that lesson way back in the 70's when the Suez canal was closed and boats from east Africa to Europe had to take the long way round the southern cape. Everyone knows the canal is a potentially fragile bottleneck, but what can you do about it. It's not like there are many places where you can dig a sufficiently geographically distant backup option to cover most common threat scenarios.
I think the key is that supply chains need to be resilient to shipping delays. And once you factor this in you may end up reorganising things quite radically differently. For example, it may lead you to prefer local suppliers over otherwise cheaper suppliers from a different continent.
Doea it show the fragility? To whom? And do you feel it in your daily life?
I feel the 'toilet paper shortage'- period of the pandemic provided a much more visceral idea of how fragile it all is. This ship we won't feel in our daily lives anytime soon.
The toilet paper shortage was also pretty overblown. A quick 30-second shower (or bidet) is more sanitary than TP anyway.
If a dog poops on the floor, we generally do not just wipe it a few times with a dry paper towel. It's intriguing we humans find that an acceptable solve when it comes to our own body.
The other end of the spectrum of humanity are those who think it's actually healthy to sanitize everything to the point that it's obsessive and don't acknowledge that somehow our ancestors survived down through millions of years of evolution.
but this particular stuck boat is giving visibility to how fragile and interconnected everything is
Interconnected but not really fragile. One of the things about the pandemic that I was surprised by is how little effect it had. I kept buying food at the supermarket yet the naysayers were telling us we would be eating each other by now.
Right. My biggest fear during the pandemic was a supply chain collapse, which would be FAR more damaging than the disease itself. Pleasantly, it hasn't yet materialized.
I think the chain was fragile, in that we immediately saw disruptions and shortages... but also adaptable, in that people responded and corrected them. Few problems can stand against a million competent businesses all working to fix things.
I want to see a detailed, process-oriented documentary about how the toilet paper manufacturers and distributors responded during the first few weeks of the pandemic. I bet there were damn near heroic efforts put out by some individuals, just to keep the supply flowing.
Right, I don't understand the claims that COVID proved how fragile the global supply chain/capitalism have made our civilization. Despite lockdowns, millions of people getting sick and dying, and widespread panic, the food and goods never stopped moving. The interconnectedness makes us stronger, as we're able to marshal the resources of a global civilization to compensate for issues as they arise.
Just imagine if the border closure between the US and Canada actually applied to truck drivers the same way it applies to regular travel (say to see your parents that live right across the border).
There are many more examples all around the world like that. It's just that we don't apply the same rules in order to keep the supply chain going, which is needed to keep civilization going and not going into a SHTF scenario. At least here in Canada, meat processing plants is another one of those examples. They had a real issue with that in the beginning where too many plants were shut down due to infections. It's the same in Germany for example. It's low paid labour. Usually done by people from Eastern Europe and they live crammed together while in Germany and they have a steady flow of people coming and going to flout rules about paying for proper social insurance and such, so you have a steady exchange of potential Covid-19 carriers between countries that have lived and worked in ideal conditions for large outbreaks. But you know, people gotta eat and eat cheap!
To be frank a lot of the vague ill defined claims aboht "capitalism/fragile" appeared to be ideological whataboutism from both communists and antiglobalists respectively. The previous defensively about their infamous shortages but that fails with a nanosecond of thought because to get the lasting shortages took /a fucking global pandemic/ instead of business as usual being empty shelves and occassionally massive overclocking of one thing.
It strikes me as cognitive dissonance and rigid thinking that capitalism equals always bad ior global connections equals always bad and spitefully trying to find something to justify their dogma.
Same. I did notice however that prices went up across the board, and some generic products appeared that I hadn’t seen before.
The biggest difference (in the U.K.) is that almost all offers, discounts, disappeared. Effectively a temporary price hike.
So I concluded that probably my mistake was to underestimate the power of the market to regulate demand through higher prices. I can imagine people who stockpiled initially wouldn’t have been so keen to fill the trolley once the prices of some products doubled.
How is this a weakness with "the system"? What's that even mean? What is strength supposed to look like?
If somebody bombed the canal or a ship sank at the entrance then it would be a similar situation. Sometimes it's just risk and crazy events, not some planned ineptitude.
The fact that the world continues just fine is actually evidence of how resilient everything is.
The simplicity of the stuck big boat doesn't matter to some people. The schizos have already done their research and figured out that it's Hillary Clinton's boat, and that it was EMP'd in a show of force to metaphorically represent her imprisonment. And the fact that they don't just take a few tugs and pull it out is because they are doing it on purpose to disrupt world trade enough to justify the "great reset."
There's your look into the insanoverse that some of our compatriots live in.
Both the core problem and the solution will remain the same. The only one ITT peddling this insanoverse is you. Which is why I'm glad the big boat is stuck. I'll just read about how the boat was freed later on and dont have to consider the merits of other people's viewpoint. I'll just celebrate the efforts of people I dont know and move on.
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[ 370 ms ] story [ 4528 ms ] threadAnd to think, some people wanted to jettison said possible stock out into the desert. Yes the boat is stuck, but I need to know what’s on it before we do anything crazy. There’s a heroine cartel going nuts right now somewhere.
It’s time we move on to the next question: What’s on the boat?
There is no end to that game though, so perhaps it's not worth playing. "buffaloed boat is beached"
that blocks -> blocking
And a ship is a subclass of boat.
What would you call a surf or kiteboard instead?
I think that those could be grouped together but would require a new category that may or may not include water skis or wakeboards. Another condition i was thinking about placing on boat was a steering mechanism akin to a rudder but then realized rowing shells often don’t have those although I’d consider them boats.
Clearly, Arleigh Burkes are boats.
What about the potential increase in hate crimes against Indians from people blaming the situation on the crew?
Do we really not want to talk about how this the root cause of this is late stage capitalism driving container ship sizes up, in a never ending tradeoff between efficiency and resiliency. The billionaire class are privatising profits and socialising the losses!
I certainly hope not.
1: https://www.newsweek.com/qanon-ship-suez-canal-hillary-clint...
Needless to say, we both had a good laugh at that one.
As I type this people are probably out there on Facebook or Reddit or 4chan explaining the truth behind the 'Suez Canal Boat Hoax'
But the cognitive dissonance is entirely created by having people denying a fact. Some people say “Let’s take revenge on X because of ideology Y”, a person P says “I’m going to take revenge on X”, P commits planned murder, someone says “He did it because X” and the AFP (or AP) issues a fact-check saying it is not true (generally because the link between X, Y and P is not established, and sometimes using other arguments like statistical insignificance or because he’s himself a victim of Y, therefore Y made him do it involuntarily).
Other examples such as “Women are the primary victims of wars because men die a lot.” It takes a mental toll to accept both the idea that men are primary victims and not primary victims. Our world is full of this.
These sorts of shenanigans create side-effect that annoy you such as Facebook, Reddit and 4chan.
But you all agree around the same problem: The politicization of facts makes that they get twisted into their opposite, and cognitive dissonance is very tiring.
None seem to deny the fact that the ship is stuck though; they just claim it was done deliberately.
I must say, it is nice to have something that even the conspiracy nuts agree on. :D
But yes, regardless it is still nice to just say:
The boat is stuck.
And everyone agrees.
It's not?
I thought the boat is stuck because it's too long and the canal is too narrow, and the boat is too long because people want to move more and more things by boat so they can sell more things, but they don't want to pay for more boats. So they kept making longer boats until they made one that's too long to fit sideways. (At least, that's what I heard.) And sometimes, in heavy winds and storms, boats turn sideways.
Even if this boat is unstuck, there's a good chance another boat will be stuck, soon.
Maybe this isn't directly about humans exploiting humans, but the motivation to build a boat that is too long because it is cheaper and hopefully won't get stuck seems like the same motivation for human exploitation - it's cheaper, and you can do it, and you can usually get away with it.
It would cost more to think in advance and say "Hey, we don't want any stuck boats here, the boats all need to be short enough that they won't get stuck. Come back with two boats." It would be safer, but people don't want safer, they want cheaper.
But yes, I like that the only thing hurt is the river bank. I am much happier that a boat is stuck than that, say, people who sew shirtwaists are stuck in a building on fire.
edit: I'm curious if downvoters are qanon-subscribers or just people who don't think this contributes to the discussion.
That's good, I know they were really emotionally invested in finally getting their revolution after botching the insurrection. QAnons on HN were like excited kids waiting for Christmas eve, making veiled threats here and there, so excited about finally getting their revenge against leftists and Democrats and BLM and effete city-dwellers. They probably stayed up all night polishing the poles of their racist flags and marching back and forth in their basements like little soldiers, visions of AOC dancing in their heads (from a gallows.) I was actually a little worried for them when reality crushed their febrile delusions yet again.
Good to see those crazy kids haven't lost their spunk.
>The baseless theory was given further credence — in the minds of QAnon followers at least — when it emerged that the ship’s call sign was “H3RC” which is close enough to Clinton’s own initials (HRC) for QAnon followers to make the link.
What's with conspiracy types thinking that an all-powerful organization is behind these conspiracies, yet they're incompetent enough to drop these clues so people would find out?
In their mind they may see it as a malicious wink and a nod. "We know you know. Here's a little hint since you're powerless to stop us. No one will ever believe you."
That's not really true though, is it? Sure, the stuckness itself isn't mysterious. But the canal was built with deadly slave labor. The global shipping industry exists to facilitate exploitation of the developing areas of the world with manufacturing capacity. These monster cargo ships are an icon of the age of consumerism, which is largely responsible for the global pollution epidemic that will leave millions of unprivileged people underwater.
Sure, big stuck boat is as funny as it is true. But to be honest, I don't like that the boat even exists.
On the other hand, I do kind of like how wholesome of a disaster it is.
> Again, there's a vast and sprawling ecosystem of current and historical horrors that made this situation possible – but we can't say that it's a situation that could never occur in a just world, because even in just worlds, things get stuck. Ducklings get stuck. Winnie the Pooh gets stuck! And now, the big boat is stuck. And I like it. I like knowing that there can be a big problem that's caused by something as straightforward and comprehensible as a stuck boat.
There's no denying the shipping industry has a dark underbelly of exploitation.
Or in other words, "don't think about it".
"Again, there's a vast and sprawling ecosystem of current and historical horrors that made this situation possible – but we can't say that it's a situation that could never occur in a just world, because even in just worlds, things get stuck."
There's a million problems out there, but this one is a simple. And yet some will still find a way to ignore that particular simple yet important problem,to discuss their preferred problem.
This is not to say that your point isn't valid and important and crucial and worthy! But I'm a lefty pinky socialist liberal from Canada,and even *I am exhausted and daily rolling my eyes how we can't discuss the weather or paint of my kitchen or anything without going into... Other stuff.
(With that in mind I'm up voting your post as it definitely contributed to discussion,even if not in a way you maybe intended ; I don't like the habit of people down voting an opposing point of view ;-()
You do realize the reason why people work in the sweatshops is because their previous situation (subsistence farming) was much worse? It's not like the sweatshop owner rolled in and forced everyone to work at gunpoint.
That's a such a depressing way to frame it. Look at the billion plus people global trade has lifted out of poverty.
I'm aware the intention of outsourcing manufacturing was to save money, not be altruistic, but overall it's been amazing for the people of Earth.
This is what Shortlyai spat out for me:
I like it that the boat in the Suez canal is stuck, I really do. I can't help but feel good about this, Not for myself or because I know someone aboard, But just because it's so nice to see orders being reversed. Such a long process for me to travel back and forth, Sometimes with a visa and sometimes not. It would be great if they could shake things up back home. I like it that the boat is stuck.
I like how the people onboard are still sending their messages, And I'm sure many of them are thinking that if they wanted to, They could get off the boat and walk around in Ismailia or Port Said, looking for a job. It'd be great to be able to find work in Egypt, but not everyone would think it's worth all that effort. Plus if they did go ashore there might be an investigation so even if they did a little work for someone on board they might still get into trouble. I know that things will eventually calm down back home but first we'll have a few good years where people can travel freely and without much hassle.
HN thread where only like 4 comments recognised it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23894742
lukev 8 months ago [–]
> This is either something written by GPT-3, or the human equivalent. Zero substantive content, pure regurgitation.
--
jackkinsella 8 months ago [–]
> Maybe you're new here, but your comment punches below the belt and isn't acceptable in a community like this.
> If you disagree, be civil and give reasons rather than throw insults.
Your example is extremely convoluted and doesn't mean anything.
Edit: That article and the next most recent one (a short story, written by a different author)[1] were enough to make me subscribe.
1. https://stone-soup.ghost.io/archive/building-beyond-outside-...
Two kinds of choices - look for some scapegoat and manage to make things worse for themselves and far worse for their victims. The other is downright idiotic contrariness and the failure to understand that "normal" is not an option because epidemics alone cause others to stay away. It is like saying that you can ignore the blizzards and keep on making money growing tropical crops in open fields without wasting money on greenhouses that are redundant most of the year. The choice is between bad or worse because "trying to benefit from the status quo by when conditions won't return under the circumstances".
I remember some famous star telling an interesting anecdote on a TV show I was watching live (so not on-demand). I googled to see if there's more to the anecdote online, but as soon as the TV show ended, I got hundreds of results about the anecdote from all the pop culture websites, but they were all referencing her telling of the anecdote from 15 minutes before.
Ah, Internet Content Farms... there was probably a time where people only put high quality content on the Internet. Nowadays content creators ask for comments on their YouTube video to get it "trending" in the hopes of making more money, contributing even more junk.
I can understand why this is confusing to people.
BTW the first time I read that "it was made on purpose and not an accident"-theory, was literally minutes after I head about the whole thing. There is and never will be anything we humans all agree on. And quite frankly I dont see why anyone would strive to find something with universal agreement, if its so meaningless like this one. Its not like we could build common ground on this.
Nailed it right there
Edit: I'll rephrase... I like that the problem is tangible. It may not always be obvious. :)
Asking a group of 18 year olds to define the engineering problem they are given is an exercise that humbles me on a semesterly basis about how much development those at the beginning of adulthood still need to undergo.
Last fall I was asked if Chad was a real country or one I had invented for the purpose of our design project. Why? not because they didn't know geography, but because the student had never been given something 'real' to work on and brought their framing of 'course assignments are not real' to it by default. We'd been working on Chad research for 2 months at this point...but the 'this is school' fact underlying what I asked them to do overwhelmed everything else.
You aren't wrong, but reaching that level in engineering actually requires an enormous amount of expertise. That hard earned expertise often makes the surface level of agreeing on the problem seem simple.
I love your comment, because it is so true and yet so hard to grabble with the edges of the implications of what you are saying.
The bug is right there, here's what went wrong, here's how we fix it, `git push`, deploy. Everyone's lives just got better. LOVE IT.
This is a demonstration and a negotiation tactic, imo. That's not a conspiracy. Or maybe things just get stuck, in the precise place at the precise time, affecting the precise people.
A stuck boat in general is not usually a big deal, but this particular stuck boat is giving visibility to how fragile and interconnected everything is. Of course we "know" that, but we often don't see the extent of it until a disaster happens.
A system's capacity got stretched. For a while this worked fine, but safety margins became smaller. It was just a matter of time before an accident like this would happen. And there is no redundancy (on this part of the canal).
So I like this stuck boat because it shows where "the system" has weaknesses. The system extends of course into many areas. Trade, finance, engineering, probably politics, etc.
Unfortunately, due to greed (oops, "efficiency") we will always be running systems at, or slightly beyond capacity so accidents/disasters like this will continue to happen.
I also like that the boat is stuck simply because it is an example of how quickly the world can "unite" in peaceful discussions around an absurd situation.
Probably. Impacts wont be apparently for a while I guess.
(true story, but to be taken in jest)
Nothing vital of course, still.
I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems. Of course I would never say I'm glad that we had a pandemic considering the lives and livelihoods lost, including among my family.
I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well.
Of course for some it's been worse than for others, but on the whole the planet has coped not too badly. It has also flushed out at least one useless govt from power (US), is in the process of hopefully doing so with another (Brazil), and we can only hope that it will also hasten the departure of England's PM too.
We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.
I mean, it's all relative, right? From my US perspective, I guess prior to the pandemic, I thought the CDC was one of the few federal agencies with a high degree of competence, but they didn't even have meaningful reserves of ventilators, masks, or other PPE nor any plans to procure the same (even though we've had several major respiratory epidemics). Similarly, there were apparently no plans to scale up PCR testing capacity, and the CDC rejected the WHO test in favor of its own tests which were problematic at the start, especially in that they were difficult to scale. The testing turned out to be an even bigger debacle because it left decision makers completely in the dark.
Even if you lay the blame at the hands of Congress for defunding them, that still indicates a problem with our political health.
So yeah, we didn't enter a dark age or anything, but it was far worse than I would have guessed. The death toll is still quite high, but to your point, it could have been higher.
> We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.
I guess my point is that prior to the pandemic, I expected that our advancements in science and technology (if not politics) would have left us much more capable of dealing with a disease like the 1918 influenza than we apparently are.
My father was a freight Sea Captain. We learned that lesson way back in the 70's when the Suez canal was closed and boats from east Africa to Europe had to take the long way round the southern cape. Everyone knows the canal is a potentially fragile bottleneck, but what can you do about it. It's not like there are many places where you can dig a sufficiently geographically distant backup option to cover most common threat scenarios.
I feel the 'toilet paper shortage'- period of the pandemic provided a much more visceral idea of how fragile it all is. This ship we won't feel in our daily lives anytime soon.
If a dog poops on the floor, we generally do not just wipe it a few times with a dry paper towel. It's intriguing we humans find that an acceptable solve when it comes to our own body.
Interconnected but not really fragile. One of the things about the pandemic that I was surprised by is how little effect it had. I kept buying food at the supermarket yet the naysayers were telling us we would be eating each other by now.
I think the chain was fragile, in that we immediately saw disruptions and shortages... but also adaptable, in that people responded and corrected them. Few problems can stand against a million competent businesses all working to fix things.
I want to see a detailed, process-oriented documentary about how the toilet paper manufacturers and distributors responded during the first few weeks of the pandemic. I bet there were damn near heroic efforts put out by some individuals, just to keep the supply flowing.
There are many more examples all around the world like that. It's just that we don't apply the same rules in order to keep the supply chain going, which is needed to keep civilization going and not going into a SHTF scenario. At least here in Canada, meat processing plants is another one of those examples. They had a real issue with that in the beginning where too many plants were shut down due to infections. It's the same in Germany for example. It's low paid labour. Usually done by people from Eastern Europe and they live crammed together while in Germany and they have a steady flow of people coming and going to flout rules about paying for proper social insurance and such, so you have a steady exchange of potential Covid-19 carriers between countries that have lived and worked in ideal conditions for large outbreaks. But you know, people gotta eat and eat cheap!
We did briefly have that with the border between the UK and the EU. It soon got resolved.
It strikes me as cognitive dissonance and rigid thinking that capitalism equals always bad ior global connections equals always bad and spitefully trying to find something to justify their dogma.
The biggest difference (in the U.K.) is that almost all offers, discounts, disappeared. Effectively a temporary price hike.
So I concluded that probably my mistake was to underestimate the power of the market to regulate demand through higher prices. I can imagine people who stockpiled initially wouldn’t have been so keen to fill the trolley once the prices of some products doubled.
If somebody bombed the canal or a ship sank at the entrance then it would be a similar situation. Sometimes it's just risk and crazy events, not some planned ineptitude.
The fact that the world continues just fine is actually evidence of how resilient everything is.
There's your look into the insanoverse that some of our compatriots live in.