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Comment by jaqalopes | Hacker News Reader

This is upsetting. What can I, an ordinary civilian not involved with the shipping industry, do to help these people?

You could contact your lawmakers and ask for a crew bond escrow requirement for ships, insolvent companies forfeit the money and it pays to send the crew home with a year's pay.

I don't think any of the suggestions made thus far will do anything to help out.

I think that one of the only methods that has a chance is to go to the UN and work out a treaty on human rights for maritime workers with the stipulation that once a supermajority of nations ratify/adopt it, ships flying the flag of a nation that hasn't ratified it are not allowed in the ports of the nations that have.

For a start, buy goods and services from ultra-local sources, a boycott of shipped goods if you will. Know that your sources get their supplies shipped to them, but just go down the local-sourcing chain as far as you deem reasonable.

Do you know of any good ways to find these ultra-local sources of goods efficiently?

For food, farmer's markets usually work well; if you can't find one locally whose hours and sellers sync up with your food needs, look at all your local grocers - there should be at least one who gets a lot of local goods, and puts signs on the shelves proclaiming this.

Note that farmers markets don't guarantee that the produce is actually local. Realistically you'd need to camp out early enough to catch them shipping it on site to figure out where it's actually from.

Or you can talk to them, gauge their trustworthiness, and ask around about their reputation.

Usually its obvious that the heirloom produce they are selling would be impossible to ship long distances. an heirloom tomato is amazingly fragile compared to a roma bred for shipping.

Thanks. Any ideas about sourcing manufactured goods locally?

Go to the "bad side of the tracks" and walk in. All towns have a bunch of generic machine shops that can manufacture. Look for welders, machinists, sheet metal and that type of thing in the name. Then walk into the office.

Note that few of them will do the design/engineering work for you. But if you have a "blueprint" they will build it. Be prepared to pay - they are all making good wages for your city not third world step above slave wages.

I was thinking more finished goods made locally, rather than custom-made. I’m guessing the coverage will be pretty meager, though. But good advice for the next time I want something a bit more unique, thanks!

I don't think you'll find tomatoes and salad in these ships. Most of the poorly run ships will not go to first world harbors with safety controls etc.

>"boycott of shipped goods"

And all those poor sailors suddenly retire and live happily ever after, NOT. Buying local is not a solution to sailors and not a solution to buyers either as so many things are simply not being made locally.

What is needed is a control. If company does things like this then countries can start issuing huge fines should any ship of said company visit the their ports. That'll teach them proper.

Does that help them? It makes the trade that at sports the abuses less financially viable, but that might make the abuses worse. If the trade stops they lose their jobs and money stops flowing from wealthier regions to poorer regions.

Fair trade is better than no trade (other things being equal) if you want to support foreign workers.

Just global trade systems are a hard problem, as I see it, and really can't be organised from the consumer end (ie by simply choosing where/if to buy goods).

Local producers are still very likely to be making use of goods shipped from overseas. You can't boycott your way out of the global economy.

It’ll never be possible. Locally produced food/gadgets were made using raw materials and equipment that were likely imported.

The raw material was extracted and the equipment itself was produced by yet another layer of equipment. And so on, until you get to the iron ore and copper and so on. No way will all of that be local.

Problem: failing shipping companies are leaving their crews stuck on vessels abandoned in ports.

Solution: make more of these companies fail?

Buy less stuff, basically.

Think hard before buying something "new". You may not need it, or you may be able to find alternatives, such as hand-me-downs, secondhand, etc.

Local BuyNothing groups are great for this.

Just looked into Buy Nothing. What's the advantage of using this platform vs. second-hand/thrift shops?

I think it's an alternative to second-hand and thrift shops, and the biggest advantage is that it is available even in areas without thrift shops.

The second advantage is that you don't have to pay, so it is more likely that items will find a good home instead of being discarded.

The third advantage is non-participation in the money system, if you're into that sort of thing, and also the elimination of overhead for store and inventory upkeep.

One downside, of course, is that most people aren't willing to keep their "stock" around for too long, so there's limited inventory at any given time that you can browse.

It’s typically just a Facebook group of your neighbors, so “platform” might be a bit strong for what it is. Besides everything being free, I’ve found it helps build a bit of a sense of community for those who participate.

This is what their website [1] says:

> The most direct way to participate in this amazing experiment with us is to join the BuyNothing App.

[1] https://buynothingproject.org/find-a-group/

Ah gotcha, I heard about that, the founders sort of stepped back from the FB groups version and started trying to push a standalone app version. I'm guessing the FB groups version is still more popular/useful.

Oh, also, there're a lot of plants and things that get exchanged, another difference from second hand shops.

You can't "buy less stuff" when the things we're talking about are necessities, often times food and critical supplies like fuel. Container ships don't just ship you game consoles and televisions.

And even if you managed to reduce all private consumption to zero, commercial consumption probably makes up an order of magnitudes more than private does. It doesn't matter what YOU do, you can't change the scales that these ships operate.

The only thing that will fix this is government intervention and fines that make it less cost effective to abandon the ship than to deal with the consequences.

But you can "buy less stuff" in general. And that will reduce your impact.

Sure, but that has literally no impact on the incentives that created this problem in the first place. It's not related to volume or frequency, and if anything less frequent and smaller shipments might exacerbate this issue in the current system. Supply chains are counter-intuitive like that sometimes.

You can't "buy less stuff" when the things we're talking about are necessities, often times food and critical supplies like fuel.

This isn't really an excuse in e.g. USA, which produces surpluses in both of these commodities.

Those surpluses are mostly exported, and besides that you're missing the forest for the trees. Individual action, even if completely efficient and pervasive, would not be enough to fix this problem.

That is a related but distinct point. Solidarity and collective action are required, but when we accomplish those we'll be able to just eat and burn what is produced domestically.

I would hazard an eyeball guess that the overwhelming majority of container ships headed for the U.S. are carrying non-essentials.

I disagree with your statement that "it doesn't matter what you do". It is all that matters, because what everyone else does is beyond my control, and only what I do is under my control.

Individual action and its spread through word-of-mouth is pretty much the only way anything changes in this world.

It doesn't matter what you do, because it's not a problem you, the consumer, created.

It's a set of misaligned incentives that create a hole where ships like these fit. No amount of your individual do-gooding will fix that incentive misalignment.

How does that help the people in the shipping industry? Let's say you did reduce shipping and therefore there were fewer shipping jobs, the people currently doing this work would lose these jobs and have to find other work. Something which would be even less attractive than shipping. How's that help them?

It doesn't help them either way, whether you buy stuff or not.

However, it does help you not be comlicit to their treatment.

But clearly for many of them this bad choice is their best option (unfortunately). So the goal isn't to improve their lives but to assuage our guilt?

Companies that use these services could exert pressure for better conditions, just like some have done with other companies in their supply chain.

I think there is a difference between guilt and complicity, though they are related.

I have somewhat limited agency in this world, limited to the little bit of money I spend, the movement of my arms and legs, the words I speak, the things I look at, and my thoughts and intentions.

Except the companies are doing this because they are already strapped for cash.

Willingly trying to avoid global shipping would actually make you more complicit.

Not really, in a free market consumers directing their consumption away from a sector does not make them complicit in the abuses or bankruptcy of that sector.

They don't have direct relationship to that sector anymore, after all.

wouldn't that create a recession or depression?

We could go for ecological and climate collapse instead.

I hope there is a middle way.

Is an economic recession or depression necessarily bad, if everyone's basic needs are still accounted for?

If the economy is in a state of overproduction and extreme waste while the effects are the burn-up of our own habitat, shouldn't it tune down a bit anyway?

https://www.missiontoseafarers.org

Ask that your federal representative legislate against this sort of behaviour, and to give teeth to enforcement agencies.

Unscrupulous actors get away with this because there are few rules against it, and enforcement is non-existent. If a shipping company is sanctioned from entry into American ports based on misbehavior on the other side of the world, they'd have an incentive to clean up their act... Or at least, to subcontract everything to shell corporations.

Form a group of a few like minded people and pressure your representatives to do something.

I'm sorry but is this a template response? This kind of situation is a bureaucratic mess spanning an awful lot of jurisdictions. What "your representative" can possibly do to help abandoned crewmen on a ship in a forgotten port in whatever place in the world when the ships operator is a chain of shell companies to the point that's virtually impossible to pinpoint a single entity to blame. It has to be a better way.

Sure, it's not an easy way. But basically I can think of four things to do:

1. Complain on the internet. This is easy but utterly ineffectual.

2. Alter your buying behavior. Unless you are the purchasing director for a multinational conglomerate, also utterly ineffectual.

3. Do something stupid like trying to blow up a containership. Also ineffectual, will land you in jail and will almost certainly kill some innocent people.

4. Contact your local representatives and get them to do soemthing about it. This will be easier if you are part of a larger group. Then your group and your representative(s) can contact someone higher up and so on.

Yes this particular problem and many others relating to ship operations thrives because there is little direct control and everyone is from 20 different jurisdictions, but perhaps some of those jurisdictions can team up and tax those that don't follow their rules or whatever. I am not an expert in this but some people are and the most I can do is let my representatives know that I care about this stuff. Maybe I actually should go and do that.

there's also the news media.

(although I have noticed something unfortunate: I have a LOT of 5-star documentaries to watch, but rarely do, while I watch even 2-star scifi stuff almost immediately)

Which also does nothing unless combined with method 4.

I have noticed that a lot of the documentaries going up on streaming platforms these days are uncritically rehashing the past year's news in some kind of overt propaganda repetition.

Pressure politicians to implement covid rule exemptions/changes, budget hikes, and personnel bonuses to keep docks open. They are too often closed to incoming ships due to unreasonable requirements such as vaccine passports for all sailors and quarantines whenever there are mild/asymptomatic breakthrough infections among vaccinated dock staff.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-31/for-st...

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