itismetheidiot

how odd to see a write up from skroutz.gr blog being at the first page of HN...

from ec.europa.eu: "Accession negotiations started in 2005, but until Turkey agrees to apply the Additional Protocol of the Ankara Association Agreement to Cyprus, eight negotiation chapters will not be opened and no chapter will be provisionally closed."

For a European the above statement sounds so strange, alsmost fictional like. I thought that we have already established that a truly free market does not exist.

Some feedback that will help better understanding of costs.

1. A medium size container vessel (10k TEUS) with abt 15kts speeds will cost the same as the canal transit cost now that the fuel is relatively cheap, compared to the Africa voyage. But you save time.

2. Major liners (APM, MSC, etc), enjoy significant discounts over face value for the canal transits as they commit volumes. The discounts could be north of 30%+, but not publicly available. WILHELMSEN has a nice calculator

3. There is no scenario that something cannot be monetized, either it will be fuel or time or both. As such any financial loss due to the canal clocking can be calculated. The vessel’s P&I will be very busy.

Filipino Masters and Chief Engineers are being paid north of $8500/month. Evidently you are not well informed.

if this ship is purely wind powered and basis on the published info this seems to be the case, i.e. there is no main engine of any type/fuel for propulsion - commercially it’s not viable. Shipping is highly optimized for arrival to a destination/port on a very narrow time window. Even delays of a couple of hours will be extremely expensive. For example, late arrival to SUEZ means that the vessel will join the end of the convoy at a premium rate costing hundreds of thousands of USD in additional fees. Not only that, Ports and Charterers (Liners) are working basis specific arrival times, you cannot simply arrival late because the wind was not favorable. It could work as an assisting system, such as Flettner rotors , skysails ,etc

FYR Amazon has the AWS Snow Family with the largest being a 45ft TEU, while Microsoft does Azure Data Boxes that are somewhat smaller.

from a European point of view, the market belongs to the people, not Apple and thus they must play by the rules the State set, for and on the behalf of the people.

this was delightful to read !

Byzantines were in fact well known for their diplomacy.

this was resolved mostly after the PRESTIGE incident and now shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries. The Flag Administrations have records of the beneficiary Owners and you can go to http://www.equasis.org/ and get plenty of information about the Owners of the vessel.

the permit to build might allow you a building with three floors at given/approved surface. You dont have to build 3 floors now, you can build 2 or 1 and later you can build up to the allowed limit.

all above 70 are exempted

The parliamentary financial evaluation committee has already declared it as unconstitutional.

For those that still manage to save some of their income – a luxury for very few nowadays – the plans to tackle this were already though out. For example, a large purchase of a high end tv at the last day of the year, which then would be returned a couple days unopened. The ministry would be “happy” and your savings would not really have exchanged hands permanently.

It mostly illustrates the inability of the government to be effective.