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Comment by jacob2484 | Hacker News Reader

Quite the arrogance here of mostly software devs trying to out -solutionize marine/shipping experts who undoubtedly have been consulted and are already looking for the quickest way to resolve the situation. With billions of dollars in stake, I'm sure even the most expensive experts are involved.

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Maybe people just find it to be an interesting problem and are having fun thinking out loud about it.

I'm not even commenting and enjoying reading these ideas.

Looks to me like everyone here is just having fun theorizing about it, I don’t see much, if any, real arrogance.

I'm not sure it's arrogance. I'm reading these theories and suggestions as a fun thought experiment. I also like comparing the real solution, whatever it is, with my memory of the arm-chair solutions to see how far off the mark they are.

Better than the coronavirus takes I've seen from software devs...

Characteristic of any forum. We're nuanced wikipedia experts on every conceivable topic under the sun.

Like that guy who wrote a blog post about not waiting around after taking a COVID vaccine because it's a much greater risk than checking for an allergic reaction?

... but I think we've also identified a market for a Poly Bridge style game where you try to unstuck a containers ship from the canal in increasingly absurd ways.

How soon will this be standard in SV interviews?

I think the people chatting would have to be involved in some way for amateur theories to be problematic.

Yeah they flew in a 10 man team from Netherlands pretty much immediately

Bikeshedding can look like that sometimes.

No need to leave a comment then.

Kind of like geohot fixing covid

Kubernetes memes we got out of this are pure gold though.

Yeah it was a cluster fuck

It’s damn fun and I’m looking forward to the n-gate analysis of this thread. In the mean time nuke that ship! Or more seriously what creating a parallel canal around that but for now. With dynamite.

We're kind of like physicists: https://xkcd.com/793/

“Now consider a spherical ship…”

I don't like the spherical cow meme because it misses the point. The assumption isn't that the cow is a sphere but rather that all cows have 4 legs, all cows give milk, there are lots of cows, etc. From a cursory glance these may look completely reasonable, until they aren't. Some cows injured their legs and can't walk. There are male "cows" that don't give milk. Sometimes there is only one cow. Meanwhile the spherical cow meme implies that there was never any truth to it in the first place.

The complexity of life throws a wrench into everything.

Is it totally implausible that ordinary intelligent people might have some ideas better than "put some tug boats on one end, and a single backhoe on the other end"? Because that's what your expensive experts have come up with so far.

For my brilliant idea: Announce that everything on the ship is free, including the ship itself, and watch all the ragamuffins of Egypt strip it to nothing in a day.

as an Arab myself, I've done a fair bit of ship stripping and this may be a great idea. I may have enough tools in my backyard to strip a container ship and so does my neighbour Abdul Mohamed.

Ah yes, the solution isn't to consult experts, but to step back and expect racist stereotypes to solve the problem!

Brilliant!

I can understand your reaction, but the commenter might not have been thinking about racism that way. It's not crazy to think that poor people near a waterway might know a thing or two about strip salvaging. It was just phrased poorly, I think.

You are a total imbecile, Sir.

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