The Mississippi River Is Drying Up, Disrupting a Vital Supply Lane | Hacker News Reader

The Mississippi River Is Drying Up, Disrupting a Vital Supply Lane

wsj.com

22 pointsJumpCrisscross23 comments

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This is going to be great for the economy. Think of all the new trucking jobs and infrastructure projects./s

Capitalism will innovate and solve the issue /s

Buffet's BNSF only covers the waterways Mississippi west. Will this mean further rail buys?

https://einvestingforbeginners.com/warren-buffetts-railroad-...

https://www.bnsf.com/bnsf-resources/pdf/ship-with-bnsf/maps-...

Cameron McWhirter (the narrator of video and a WSJ reporter) is great with words, spoken or written).

Too bad that there aren't enough citations.

Cameron McWhirter is not the narrator. He is the interviewee. The narrator is Josephine Chu I think (according to the credits at the end.)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephine-chu/

This is a freaking temporary thing. The Mississippi has always ebbed and flowed. A few years ago it was threating to top the levees. This is a non-story unless I'm missing something.

You're missing the fact that temporary things can still have a huge impact on individuals and populations.

This ebb and flow has been happening for thousands if not TENS of thousands of years and if populations are surprised by it....they should have built some redundancy or alternatives.

Tens of thousands of years? That's nothing, volcanos have been erupting for billions of years. Why do those keep making the news?

Do you think the height of the Mississippi changes once every 10,000 years? This happens every few years.

In 2019 there was the longest flood in Mississippi river history literally 3 years ago.

https://www.weather.gov/lix/ms_flood_history

Now a three years later it's at one of lowest in history.

It shouldn't make the news but it's easy to alarm influenceable people.

> This is a freaking temporary thing.

Why introduce this? No one else is suggesting the levels could be here forever.

> The Mississippi has always ebbed and flowed.

If your inference is that these historic drought levels are a regular occurrence, you may want to reconsider what historic means.

> A few years ago it was threating to top the levees.

Is your point here that extremes cancel each other out? How is that logical?

The clickbait, alarmist title of the article definitely seems to be suggesting this is not temporary.

"Is drying up" means that it's currently taking place. "Disrupting" means that it's currently wrecking the status quo. Neither implies permanence.

You're trying to manipulate language.

"Is drying up" is way different than "levels are low". Drying up is as permanent as something can get.

> Drying up is as permanent as something can get.

Until it gets wet again, right? Both droughts and floods can have disastrous consequences. They're always news. If you're upset because you're seeing increasingly frequent reports of increasingly drastic weather extremes, it might be because the frequency and extremity of weather events are increasing. And even if we knew this was going to be happening for several decades, the fact that it's happening today, and the impacts of those events, are news.

Dry up - v. - to become completely or excessively dry; to decrease and stop; to cut off the supply of

Come on. No one uses the term 'dry up' for a temporary condition.

The money dried up

the aquifer dried up

the relationship dried up

the oil dried up....

People use 'levels are low' or something similar for temporary conditions.

I'm not really going to debate this anymore.

Curious that you put all of those examples in the past tense.

The only thing that's increasing in frequency is sensationalist news coverage and people who are easily influenced by it.

https://www.weather.gov/lix/ms_flood_history

Whats logical is that this has been happening for tens of thousands of years and if this is surprise to anyone they're not paying attention.

You might want to consider how the U.S. manages waterways to ensure the viability of shipping. The fact this is a surprise is the news here - it's not like we don't have decades of experience planning for these events and putting the proper mechanisms in place to handle low flow situations.

I don't think anyone is surprised except the people who get easily influenced by alarmist news journalism.

Yeah. Everything is fine. This is obvious.

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