I Like That the Boat Is Stuck
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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.
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
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.
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.
I was just trying to do regular stuff, and then some external nonsense caused me to get stuck. I am stuck in my house rather than the suez canal, and despite the best efforts of many capable people it's taking a long time to get unstuck.
I am the boat.
We are all 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.
There's no debate over whether or not the big boat is stuck
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.
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?
Absurdist beliefs are a strong social signal. It seems like a deep feature of human wetware. It's probably how facebook is so effective at incubating distributed cults. (Search hn archives for the essay on 'crony beliefs' for an excellent dissertation.)
To be fair, it's probably the case that both facets of the republicrat party believe false or useless things that serve as signals. (e.g. University for everyone is good. Electric cars save the environment. etc)
As a formerly religious person, I now assume some of my beliefs are nonsense and that I can't tell which ones. I try to engage with people whose political views are way outside my own just as a safety check on my own though processes.
Are you sure you’re talking about COVID-19? Or politicians?
* The EU bureaucrats did this to make Brexit less awesome. Britain is now being forced to trade a bit more with the EU now a major shipping lane is blocked.
* the boat isn't really stuck, it was smuggling children from the middle east and was going to be raided, so they faked this to unload the kids and cover their tracks. Here is the satellite image showing where the sickos are taking the poor, innocent babies. The Ever Given has a Call Sign of H3RC. Or Hillary Rodham Clinton?[1]
* Israel did it to block Iranian oil exports and sink any chances of Biden reviving the JCPOA
1. This is an actual tweet I found by searching for "clinton ever given": https://twitter.com/BrassBallsBlog/status/137538252246974873...
1: https://www.newsweek.com/qanon-ship-suez-canal-hillary-clint...
Needless to say, we both had a good laugh at that one.
Either way, the sentiment that we should stop making everything about whatever perspective we're currently invested in is extremely welcome. Sometimes a boat is a boat and sometimes it's stuck.
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'm curious if downvoters are qanon-subscribers or just people who don't think this contributes to the discussion.
>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."
1. Written by GPT-3
2. Satire
3. A riff on how SEO'd articles have become nowadays
>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." Not only that but it's become a nexus for all kinds of bigotry. Basic misapprehensions likes "oh wow, those idiots only sent one excavator!" become pyres for racial hatred (i.e. of course they can't figure it out, they're middle eastern).
>There's your look into the insanoverse that some of our compatriots live in.
Don't stick your head in the sand. The problems that affect all of the rest of our worlds understanding of events are also at play here.
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.
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.