Surely it is anchored, and drifting about its anchor. Not aimlessly burning fuel sailing in circles. Minor point to the story I guess, but it would be an immense waste of fuel to be underway for no good reason.
I suppose that could be caused by an anchor and drifting but it seems more likely to me (as an uninformed idiot, though I've been in anchored boats before and don't remember them moving in circles because of it) that it is under power (albeit not very much).
I see it like big rig trucks who don't want to stop at stop signs since the need a lot of energy and rowing through gears to get back up to speed.
Just my wild Saturday morning pre-coffee theory.
Eddies are a thing.
You can keep a ships main engines at various notice levels. For example:
Immediate Notice - Engines should be ready to start immediately from the bridge when required.
5 Minutes Notice - Usually
- Indicator cocks are open. - Fuel pumps are on. - Lube oil pumps are on.
Starting sequence : - Turn the engines on compressed air - Close indicator cocks - Engines ready to start
30 Minutes Notice - Usually - Indicator cocks are open - Fuel pumps are off - Lube oil pumps are off
Start sequence: - Start Lube oil pumps - Turn engines on turning gear for 10 minutes - Turn engines on compressed air - Turn fuels pumps on - Close indicator cocks - Engine ready to go
2 Hours:
You can do minor maintenance on the engines. For example, swapping out injectors. Engines are warm. Starting sequence is similar to the 30 minute starting sequence.
24 Hours:
Some larger maintenance can be done. Like changing a cylinder head.
48 Hours:
Engines can be completely cool. Jacket water drained. Usually for major maintenance. Like changing a cylinder liner.
These timings can vary between ships/companies. But generally they operate with similar ideas.
Source: I was a marine engineering officer working at sea for 5 years.
I saw an old documentary following a big cargo ship who was anchored with others waiting to get in to the suez.
Another ship broke free of its anchor and was having trouble starting their engines and were drifting toward the ship in the documentary.
The captain was doing the math on how quickly they could start their engines to try to get out of the way and it would have to be an emergency start that they thought might result in damage.... particularly upsetting as this was their first voyage on a new ship, new engines... they didn't want to start them.
Some ships have a direct drive. So the moment the engines start, the prop shaft is turning. These ships will control thrust via Controlled Pitch Propellers. Basically the pitch of the propeller blades are controlled hydraulically and the steeper the pitch, the more the blades cut through the water and the more thrust generated. CPP systems allow ships to use shaft generators for electrical power at sea. The engine's revs are constant (to keep the electrical frequency the same) and power is changed via setting the propellers pitch.
Some ships have drive trains which let you clutch engines in and out, but you wouldn't run them for long periods of time de-clutched.
The engines do not like being run at an idle load for long periods of time (whether direct drive or clutched), you get loads of crud building up as they don't properly warm up. Also you are burning fuel and increasing their hours (planned maintenance is usually based around running hours). So you wouldn't generally drift and idle. You would shut the engines down and keep them on immediate notice.
A lot of modern ships are diesel electric. So the props are driven by large electric motors. So in this case, you can stop and start propulsion instantly (as long as you have enough generators running and connected to the switchboard)
The proper term in windmills and airplanes is 'feathered', I don't know what to call that state in a boat.
For safety purposes 'coarse' is not always the best position because if the wind is heavy enough it will have a lot of torque to work with, 'flat' is much easier to hold down with a brake.
so if someone makes 25 Talos Power9 computers and the market would support 25 of them, but there is a tarriff that discourages one from being sold, then you have 1 machine sitting there, essentially on a proverbial virtual boat. Maybe its not burning fuel, but its taking up space somewhere, costing rent and overhead. Not much but a little. Now multiply that tiny amount times a billion other products ...
just a thought experiment...
Profit margins are set by competition. The customer might pay $5 except that your competitors are charging $1 so you can't even charge $1.10 or the customer buys from a competitor. If everybody's costs increase by 25% then everybody can increase their prices by 25%, because you can't profit at $1 anymore but neither can your competitors. Unless your competitors aren't subject to the tariff, which is kind of the point.
Meanwhile the revenue the tariff generates offsets some tax that now doesn't need to be collected somewhere else and would have caused a similar inefficiency or cost increase in some other place.
Tariffs suck because taxes suck and tariffs are taxes. But for a given amount of revenue generated, it's better to tax somebody else's economy than yours.
Different forms of taxation can have different economic consequences.
it's better to tax somebody else's economy than yours
Thinking of tariffs as "taxing somebody else's economy" betrays a misunderstanding of the concept of incidence (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence), since you're raising prices for your own imports.
Yes, of course. Car tax has different economic consequences than [real] property tax. But a tariff on cars looks a lot more like a tax on cars than it does a tariff on real property.
Actually "tariff on real property" (meaning [high] property tax owed only by foreign nationals and corporations with foreign ownership) might be one of the best possible methods of generating government revenue.
> Thinking of tariffs as "taxing somebody else's economy" betrays a misunderstanding of the concept of incidence (as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence), since you're raising prices for your own imports.
It's not misunderstanding it, it's understanding it perfectly well. It's not that exactly 0% of the burden falls on the domestic economy, it's that it disproportionately falls outside of it.
When you have a tariff, there are two ways for a foreign supplier to lose.
The first is that there is a competitive domestic market for the same product. In that case the price won't change much if at all (minimal impact on consumers), the production will just shift to domestic suppliers who hire domestic workers. Then the tariff doesn't generate much if any direct government revenue, but it shifts a bunch of domestic citizens from collecting unemployment to earning taxable income, which is great in a different way.
The second is any case where the producer has to eat a tax in general, e.g. because there are substitute goods preventing the producer from raising prices, so they can't pass the burden on to the customer.
The domestic market only pays if domestic producers can't make [more of] that product and consumers are still willing to pay the higher price for it. But even then, it's not worse than generating government revenue from a purely domestic tax, it's just not any better in that unusual case.
And in practice it will typically be some combination -- domestic producers will appear charging slightly higher prices (but more than making up for it by creating domestic jobs), and then the foreign producers have to compete with them (and other substitutes) so they have to eat most of the tariff but not all of it. So the burden falls disproportionately on someone else's economy, as opposed to domestic taxes that fall primarily on your economy.
No, profit margins are the end result of all factors that go into a products manufacture and transportation until it reaches the next drop-off in the value chain or the end user.
They can even be negative. Competition aka the race to the bottom is what puts an upper bound on profit margins (absent price fixing and cartels). Without competition that upper bound disappears and then you can charge whatever the consumers are willing to pay.
Is your point that they aren't set by competition in uncompetitive markets? Because in that case the margins would typically be more than 25% to begin with and taxing monopolies and price-fixing cartels is something most people can get behind.
What you could be alluding to is that imposing tariffs could reduce competition from foreign suppliers, allowing domestic suppliers to sustain higher margins if there isn't sufficient domestic competition to keep them down. But high margins should attract new domestic competitors absent some high barrier to entry, higher margins for domestic companies is not hard to classify as "benefit" rather than "disaster" anyway, and the maximum increase is still capped at the amount of the tariff or people would go back to the foreign supplier(s).
No, I did not say that.
I said that competition is in some cases a factor but definitely not the major ingredient. Profit margins are not an input into some calculation, they are the result of a calculation.
Sure, competition isn't the only factor in margins. But it is a major determinant of how much of the total surplus goes to the consumer rather than the producer.
And the point was that if you raise costs for all competitors, it isn't necessarily fatal to the market that the amount is larger than their original margins, as long as it isn't larger than the total producer+consumer surplus. Because when everyone's costs increase by the same amount, the producers may be able to pass some of the cost on to the consumers.
decades -> centuries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo#Comparative_adva...
Like all things, there are trade offs.
Edit: saving ~3t/hr of oil per ship
But, given the parties involved, I would not put it past them.