Ship scrapping accelerates ahead of Panama Canal launch
theloadstar.co.uk
theloadstar.co.uk
TIL you can rent a Panamax cargo ship for $5,400 a day! That's definitely cheaper than I would have expected. Someone should park one of those in the San Francisco bay and convert it into apartments.
1. A landlord who doesn't have to obey any laws regarding rent and terms?
2. The Farallon Islands are offshore from SF, so the 11 mile limit is actually much further than BlueSeed acknowledges.
3. The "Potato Patch" shoal offshore from the Golden Gate makes for nasty waves for many miles in every direction. Guaranteed sea-sickness on every Ferry.
4. If you think SF is cold in Summer, try offshore. The heating costs alone will be astronomical. Fog and fog-colored water is all you will see for most of the year.
5. It's going to stay offshore when we get Tropical Storm-level winds in Winter?
6. One Ferry doesn't cut it -- you need a Plan B for when the Ferry needs maintenance. Ferries are incredibly expensive to operate, which is why there are so few on the Bay.
7. Surely that's a commercial use, and subject to the 200-mile economic exclusion zone?
8. High speed internet? Not when the Fog is drizzling.
9. Presumably it will have to have generators. If you had to rent generators for your businesses and run them 24/7, how much would that cost you in fuel alone?
10. Your generator will also be powering a desalination plant.
11. Nuclear waste? Yep, you'll be parked where the nuclear waste was dumped.
Other issues:
The location proposed was offshore of Half Moon Bay. This presents a few problems:
1. Half Moon Bay has Pillar Point Harbor, but no facilities for cargo vessels, lighters, or ferries. It's a small boat harbor, run by the County of San Mateo, which probably isn't going to let you build a big dock for large workboats and ferries.
2. West of Pillar Point Harbor is Mavericks, where surfers fight 100 foot waves. Not a good area for boating when there's a small craft advisory.
3. The whole point of Blueseed is that it's not in the US. Half Moon Bay isn't a port of entry to the US. You'd have to go up to SF and pass through customs and border protection to go ashore. Every time.
4. If your startup is losing money, you're not paying taxes anyway. If your startup is successful, you probably need more space than Blueseed could provide.
This of course gets you US law and the US navy, for better and worse. (taxes, environmental regulations, etc.) It doesn't actually put you in the US though, since you're 11 miles out, so the people shouldn't be affected by immigration law.
I think a bigger problem is just the poor value. The ship presumes that people can't work from the other side of the world, but somehow they can work if they are only an annoying ferry ride or an expensive helicopter ride away. Who are the users who need to be close, but not really close?
You need everyone in a room, and that room needs to be somewhere your venture capitalists are willing to visit every few months?
I really appreciate that you recognized that. Great list, too.
But for the first couple it's worth nothing that if you park somewhere between 3 and 12 nautical miles out you are in US territory but you avoid being in California territory. I think.
Half seriously, you can get all that stuff in Chicago or LA without the water part.
See also: http://www.sealandgov.org/
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/view_climplot.php?station=46026&mea...
TEU: Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit is the unit of the capacity of a container ship, a container terminal and the statistics of the container transit in a port. The two most common international standardised containers are those of twenty and forty foot.
LDT: Light displacement ton, the weight of a ship without anything on board, used to determine the value of a ship which is to be scrapped
Removing these ships saves money on crews, taxes, maintenance, and more. Throw in sharing capacity with other similar minded players and removing this excess capacity could raise rates.
Of course the downside is less independent players mean shipping prices could rise for non competitive ports
Of course, due to labor cost and environmental law and so many other things, we can't replicate that method in a first-world nation. I wonder if we could automate it. I think the ships are mostly just going to be melted down. That should be easy: put a dry dock next to a really big furnace that can consume the whole ship in one go. NOM NOM NOM!
https://vimeo.com/88162472 from 1:21:00. The entire film is quite beautifully photographed. Too bad it has not been released in an HD format yet.
Workingman's Death is probably my favorite Michael Glawogger film. It feels less staged and fake than "Megacities".
It's amazing what sorts of things can happen when strong, dedicated, and intelligent people will work for 250 rupees per day and be happy about it.
To me the amazing thing about this article is that owners can afford to scrap their ships after only a couple of decades in service. I guess nothing's built to last.
Not that surprising really that the outcome is very different if the crew point the ship directly at the beach, try to arrive with as much momentum as possible and keep the engines at full power throughout while ignoring the various bumps and thumps.
All together that means the ship could potentially be significantly lighter than its usual unloaded weight let alone its weight when loaded.
Scrapping your capacity could be taken as an indicator as well.
Panamax is an "artificially constrained" size class
Also, not all the ships are being scrapped, but there will be lower demand for Panamax sized ships once New Panamax capacity comes online.
For an eye opener into the horrid industry of ship scapping google "Chitagong Ship Breaking." Basically they hall them into a ship yard in Bangladesh and pay people peanuts to risk their lives dismantling this tonnage by hand. People die all the time. Its a disaster in many different ways. It's everything that's bad about globalization.