Where's my stuff??


Posted On: Saturday - March 27th 2021 9:34PM MST
In Topics: 
  General Stupidity  Geography  Big-Biz Stupidity



Now for something completely different. It is kind of nice to write about this story. It's just that we have all been so overloaded with the government- or Establishment-generated politically-correct, anti-American, anti-White political stupidity continuously for years. Refreshingly, this story is about something real. I also like that it's about geography and economics, favorite topics of this blog. It's about a private shipping company doing real work in the transportation industry, with a huge container ship that has ended up completely blocking the Suez Canal. It was just a short ways in from the south end, heading north.

"High winds and sandstorms" are said to be the cause, but I don't know much about massive ships or the shipping business in general. That'd be forgivable for the writers of the non-technical or non-industry publications too, if it were not for some of the inconsistent simple facts that I noted when trying to find a good site on which to learn some details. Half the blurbs on the 1st page of the DuckDuckGo search results, most linking to TV stations sites, yahoo, etc, have the ship's name listed as the Ever Green. No, that is the shipping company. You see these green containers up and down the interstate highways*, right? Evergreen is not the name of the truck, so ...

Then, I was told that the ship was headed north through the canal, which is true, from Rotterdam, Holland to the far East (not true). No, the ship's origin was China**, and it was headed TO Rotterdam, which is the direction most containers seem to go anyway (Asia to Europe and the US).*** This was on the first page of blurbs, mind you. Couldn't the writer have spent 3 minutes pulling up bing maps to get an idea of the geography? Yeah, maybe he doesn't like geography, but see, they are PAYING him. OK, enough about the Lyin' (and incompetent) Press, as I wanted to get away from that for a while.

It's weird that the best thing to do is to just pick a blurb that's not one of the big LP ones, that just seems to not be written by a clueless moron. I try to avoid the TV stations' sites just due to their often having so much cluttered Mexican-jumping bean pop-up crap, but this page is from, of all random places, the web site of KCEN TV out of Temple, Waco, and Killeen, Texas. (That's a beautiful part of the country, BTW.) This article has the basics.

This beast of a vessel can hold 20,000 containers, and weigh up to 1/2 a BILLION pounds! Let me work something out quickly here: The standard 40-ft containers**** max out at 65,000 lb. from what I see written on the doors of them. The Ever Given obviously can't take 20,000 maxed-out containers, as that get your to 1.3 billion lb. I just figured out though, something that the article writer didn't bother with. The ship holds 20,124 (to be exact) TEU's. That stands for Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit. That makes more sense. The 20-footers can hold ~50,000 lb, but I doubt they get near that most times. (Maybe if you're shipping bowling balls ;-})

I imagine most of the containers are bulked out, rather than near the gross weight limit. I got the numbers I wanted to see elsewhere anyway. If you trust the wiki page:
With a length overall of 1,312 ft 2 in, it is one of the longest ships in service. Its hull has a beam of 192 ft 11 in, a depth of 107 ft 11 in, and a fully laden draft of 47 ft 7 in. Ever Given has a gross tonnage of 220,940; net tonnage of 99,155; and deadweight tonnage of 199,629 tons. The ship's container capacity is 20,124 TEU [Note: I wiped out SI units from wiki - sorry, I just wanted to stick with one set.]
What I'd like to know is how much fuel these things carry. I mean, do they bump extra fuel for cargo, or can they carry just plenty to divert a long, long way?

Back to the canal for a minute: The Suez Canal was opened over 150 years ago! The 120 mile-long (with the incorporation of 3 lakes) canal connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea to save many thousands of miles in a journey from origins in the south and east of Asia to ports anywhere in Europe by avoiding the whole route around Africa. It canal runs between the northeast corner of the continent of Africa and the Sinai Peninsula, which is officially in Asia with, like, "Asians" living there. (Actually it's pretty empty worthless desert.) The Suez Canal see 12% of the world's international trade.

Since this ship has backed up the canal, and it may be few more days before refloating efforts are successful (it may take the removal of containers - not an easy deal when not at the dock), a question I haven't found the answer to just yet is this: Are the vessels awaiting passage through the Suez Canal able to change to a much longer route, the southbound ones heading out to the Straits of Gibraltar to go around Africa counterclockwise and the northbound ones back to the mouth of the Red Sea to circumnavigate it clockwise, without refueling? I would think they carry a lot of extra fuel for all kinds of contingencies. If not, could they fuel up anywhere near where they are backed up?

The latest article I read, from Sunday morning Ireland time, said that it's gonna be a while yet, and there are 321 ships backed up as of their writing, I suppose somewhat equally for each direction. More on this huge ship:
Ever Given is a Golden-class***** container ship, one of the largest container ships in the world. The ship is owned by Shoei Kisen Kaisha (a shipowning and leasing subsidiary of the large Japanese shipbuilding company Imabari Shipbuilding), and time chartered and operated by Taiwanese container transportation and shipping company Evergreen Marine. Ever Given is registered in Panama, and its technical management is the responsibility of the German ship management company Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement (BSM).
The international shipping business takes advantage of cheap Philippine labor, (not described there), and, in this case, Japanese heavy manufacturing, Taiwanese corporate ownership, German management, and Panamanian registration. That's some Globalist stuff there...

The Ever Given on a better day:



Though there was likely some stupidity involved, this event is physically real rather than another piece of emotional political BS, so it is interesting to me. I had 2 other posts I was supposed to write today, but they'll have to be posted on Monday. Thanks for reading this week!



* I guess for those heading farther inland, they may be on rail cars, stacked 2-high, for much of their journeys.

** One article gave Malaysia as the origin, but a BBC one said China. Maybe the last stop, for more containers, was Malaysia.

*** I've seen containers for sale cheap at one of the west coast ports, because they pile up, with not many manufactured products going the other way.

**** as opposed to those 1/2 sized 20-footers and then the extended 53 foot-long "high-cube" containers.

***** All 11 of them are named "Ever" [something], the other 10 being the Ever Golden, Ever Gifted, Ever Genius, Ever Glory, Ever Globe, Ever Goods, Ever Grade, Ever Gentle, Ever Govern, and Ever Greet. For a huge project like this, I'd have hired a creative English-speaker for better names. How about the Ever Seen a Grown Man Naked?

Comments:
Adam Smith
Thursday - April 1st 2021 2:35PM MST
PS: Good afternoon everyone...

Mr. Moderator, “Adam, where did you get your number?”

http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-many-ping-pong-balls-in-cubic-foot.html

475 ping pong balls per cubic foot
2367.2 cubic foot in a 40 ft shipping container
1124420 ping pong balls in a 40 ft shipping container
907185 grams in a ton
2.7 grams per ping pong ball
335994.4444 ping pong balls per ton
3.34654342874 tons of ping pong balls per 40 ft container

Or something like that...

Now, if we could stand the container on end and jiggle it back and forth so the ping pong balls settled really well...

Well, you get the idea.

Adam Smith
Thursday - April 1st 2021 2:32PM MST
PS: Good afternoon everyone...

Mr. Moderator, “Adam, where did you get your number?”

http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-many-ping-pong-balls-in-cubic-foot.html

475 ping pong balls per cubic foot
2367.2 cubic foot in a 40 ft shipping container
1124420 ping pong balls in a 40 ft shipping container
907185 grams in a ton
2.7 grams per ping pong ball
335994.4444 ping pong balls per ton
3.34654342874 tons of ping pong balls per 40 ft container

Or something like that...

Now, if we could stand the container on end and jiggle it back and forth so the ping pong balls settled really well...

Well, you get the idea.


Adam Smith
Thursday - April 1st 2021 2:28PM MST
PS: Good afternoon everyone...

Mr. Moderator, “Adam, where did you get your number?”

http://pascals-puppy.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-many-ping-pong-balls-in-cubic-foot.html

475 ping pong balls per cubic foot
2367.2 cubic foot in a 40 ft shipping container
1124420 ping pong balls in a 40 ft shipping container
907185 grams in a ton
2.7 grams per ping pong ball
335994.4444 ping pong balls per ton
3.34654342874 tons of ping pong balls per 40 ft container

Or something like that...

Now, if we could stand the container on end and jiggle it back and forth so the ping pong balls settled really well...

Well, you get the idea.


Moderator
Tuesday - March 30th 2021 8:27PM MST
PS: Bill H, thank you for the trucking story. We thought you guys only talked about amping up your CB radios and crashing the toll gates doing 98. (I kid, I kid!) Regarding the loose ping-pong balls, that is a simple geometry problem that smacks of crystal structures in material science. The tricky part would be knowing how much they could be compressed, just the littlest amount to fit in with an integer number (of course) along each dimension.

One way to get a good rough idea is to just calculate how much of the volume of one ping-pong ball is material of whatever density that stuff is. Get a weight amount per volume, then multiply that by the volume of your container. That would be a maximum, impossible to do, amount, as if they were all cubes. You could take off 20% of that interstitial space out, but that's where the cool math comes in, if you want to do it.

Adam, where did you get your number? I just want to know if it one of those guesses like how many pieces of candy corn are in this jar? If you guess the closest, you get to bring them home.

Mr. Anon and PeterIke: That is raw Globalism there. Get the cheapest of everything you need, including the labor. Those numbers for the shipping industry in America are what I would have expected. We just don't DO real industry so much anymore, and hence, don't have so nearly so many good jobs. The Globalists have no problem with that and would ask why we think we are better than Africans, Chinese or .Indians. I guess you could say that's Global Libertarianism, but just in the economic sense.
Moderator
Tuesday - March 30th 2021 8:16PM MST
PS: I enjoyed reading this 19-post, un-moderator-interupted comment thread. I wish I could reply to all, but it's late in the game and the day, with a post to write still (I think).

Just a few thoughts back:

It's not like the airliners, it sounds like, in which cargo and fuel weight must be traded off carefully. Those number suggest these big ships could sail for over a month before getting too worried. That's a lot longer than a normal voyage. I bet it (was, now) a tough call for those shipping companies on whether to dawdle around in the Med. or Red Sea vs. just starting out around Africa. The ones that waited ended up "making the right decision" (Yeah, hindsight is great.)

That is flattering, Mr. Hail about a book. Peak Stupidity would require an army of editors to fix 1867 posts worth of typos, haha! Re Sailer's book, I wouldn't know where to start. Perhaps posts of his could just be organized in 15 or 20 chapters on his different favorite topics. (Gold course architecture could be in the collectors edition only. Please!). The hard work would be in sifting through all the (what, maybe 1,000 to 2,000 posts YEARLY) for the last decade to get the best. He could get readers to help on that.

Dieter, I'd have the same problem putting up iSteve posts here, that is, picking the best. I suppose I could start saving links to ones I like, but I'd have missed many hundreds.

I haven't read Adam's links yet on "storing the internet", but I will say that paper is pretty heavy. 2/3 the density of water is what I just calculated. That comes out to ~ 50,000 lb were they to fill up a 20 ft container with no space, 85% of their max cargo weight. One could quibble on how small a font size to use, for this information saved on a sort of Sailer's Ark (haha) to be read by aliens later. They would have invented microscopes, right, so use 2 point, and let them sort it all out when they show up in a few million years wondering "hey, how come we aren't receiving World Star Hip-Hop anymore from our planet orbiting Beta Centauri." (I'm assuming a bunch of Beta aliens.)

I could guess that the whole internet on hard drives, with the stuff they've got now, could maybe fit within ONE container of some sort. Yes, I pulled that number completely out of my ass and will read your links, Adam. I wonder if the least known part of an otherwise easy calculation of this is how much information is really out there?
PeterIke
Monday - March 29th 2021 11:57AM MST
PS
It floats!!

Crisis over. Back to work!
Adam Smith
Monday - March 29th 2021 11:53AM MST
PS: A little more info...

As with most large container ships, the Ever Given's main engine is a low-speed two-stroke diesel. It is an 11-cylinder straight engine, license-manufactured Mitsui–MAN B&W 11G95ME-C9. Coupled to a fixed-pitch propeller, it is rated at 59,300 kW (79,500 horsepower) at 79 rpm and gives the vessel a service speed of 22.8 knots (42.2 km/h; 26.2 mph). The vessel also has four straight-8 Yanmar 8EY33LW auxiliary diesel generators. For maneuvering in ports, Ever Given has two 2,500 kW (3,400 hp) bow thrusters.

http://www.dieselduck.info/machine/01 prime movers/2015 MAN G95ME-C9 Project Guide.pdf
https://www.marinelink.com/news/powerful-largest-engine400517
https://www.dieselgasturbine.com/news/Biggest-MAN-On-The-Sea/7001026.article
https://www.corporate.man.eu/en/press-and-media/presscenter/Record-Breaking-Engine-Enters-Service-252103.html

PeterIke
Monday - March 29th 2021 8:59AM MST
PS
Some numbers around American shipping.

"During the post-war year of 1950, for example, U.S. carriers represented about 43 percent of the world's shipping trade. By 1995, the American market share had plunged to 4 percent, according to a 1997 report by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. The report states, "the number of U.S.-flag vessels has dropped precipitously — from more than 2,000 in the 1940s and 850 in 1970 to about 320 in 1996."

Can you imagine going from 43% market share to 4%? And these are stats from 1997! It's only gotten worse. And it was all quite deliberately and easily avoided.
PeterIke
Monday - March 29th 2021 8:55AM MST
PS
Why did the ship run aground? Asian driver! Some things are so obvious you have to say them out loud.

On a larger note, the American Merchant Marine used to be thousands of ships and many, many thousands of good paying onboard jobs for American men, to say nothing of the good paying jobs in shipyards, building and repairing them. Like so much else, it was sold out to the lowest bidder so the GloboHomo class could get ever richer. A few simple Federal laws severely limiting non-American ships would have saved the entire industry. But who cares about the working man.

The lack of our own Merchant Marine is also a serious security gap. But GloboHomo don't care.
Adam Smith
Monday - March 29th 2021 8:49AM MST
PS: Good morning everyone...

Bill... Truck driving is a boring. I prefer flatbeds for obvious reasons, though I have no desire to work as a driver ever again. Driving is boring and bad for your health.

I guess 1124420 ping pong balls in a 40 ft container.


Bill H
Monday - March 29th 2021 8:28AM MST
PS I drove trucks before the container era, and since I worked for a steel company my trailer was almost always a flatbed rather than a box. Still, I did haul a box from time to time, and spent a lot of time chatting with other driver who hauled them regularly.

So, of course, at one point during a discussion about chicken coops the question arose as to how many ping pong balls would a 40' trailer hold, and how much would they weigh? (We would often tell the scale master that we were hauling ping pong balls, which annoyed him greatly and amused us. Truck driving is boring.)

The calculation for the ones packaged for sale was not difficult, but things got hairy when someone wanted to calculate the number of LOOSE ping pong balls. That took quite a while and a lot of yelling and cursing. I don't recall the answer, which was probably wrong anyway, but it was a lot of balls and very little weight.

We had a good time, anyway, and entertained an Alabama truck stop for a while.
The Alarmist
Monday - March 29th 2021 5:30AM MST
PS

@Mr. Hail, re the size of the internet, The IT Crowd did a wonderful send-up on this ... here are links to the highlights:

https://youtu.be/iDbyYGrswtg

https://youtu.be/Vywf48Dhyns


@Mr. Ganderson, re Why?

It’s like giving the middle finger before pushing the plunger on a detonator. A giant penis to the eyes in the sky, followed by ramming it uncomfortably up the backside or down the throat of Europe’s alimentary canal (your choice of which way this is going). IOW, this is terrorism with a sense of humor.
Dieter Kief
Monday - March 29th 2021 4:50AM MST
PS

PS

- sometimes things get done at offices - and sometimes they don't.
UNZ has no office and is not run like a magazine. It is in the new spirit of our times - as an extremely individualistic enterprise. Individualism has its fortunes but comes at a price.
Since none of Steve Sailer's articles disappears, the interested - individual - can manage to find what he (or she) is looking for.  So - the blog works. A book would serve the purpose to add contour to the writer for a wider public, which I too think would be a good thing. It's just the potential author of this book thinks otherwise.

 John Derbyshire did write about how he helped to get Steve Sailer's Obama-book written (with a little pressure and - a lot of humor too). And it is nice and all - but I think, it was a disappointment for Steve Sailer commercially.

I would find a best-of collection of Steve-Sailer-posts and Taki-Magazine-articles interesting. I do make remarks on iSteve  in my comments in this direction. The last time I did that was last week about his formidable article  "RNA and DNA: Jennifer Doudna and James D. Watson".

We could assemble - how many: 50 maybe of Steve Sailer's top articles here as a link-collection, if Mr. Mod. would like this idea.

My title idea would be : A Basket of Light, or: Hidden Traces in Plain Sight - How the Expert's Eye Notices (And Avoids Getting Confused)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuxq_J1VuA
Hail
Monday - March 29th 2021 4:07AM MST
PS

RE: "A book with Steve Sailers articles would be something not for popular success, but a slow burner for the ages and for the happy few."

I agree.

I also remember him asking for advice on what to include in a book and getting hundreds of comments (people said he needed to include a 'Sailerisms' section for the words/phrases/ideas he coined). But then the idea disappeared.

This is an advantage of working in person with other people. Imagine if there were an Unz Review Central Office and all its writers(/editors/staff/comment-moderators) had to report there, either daily or at least occasionally, like an old-style newsroom for a newspaper. I feel sure that y now SOMEone would have forced the issue on Sailer -- since it's such a good idea but has never quite made it "across the finish line" -- forced him to print a book. And if he said he was too shy, or too busy, or uninterested, or intimidated by such a big-seeming project, someone else at the Unz Review Office would have taken over the project with his permission and his being able to review the process and approve on it. This is how things work in offices and the purpose of having office staff, for no one is superhuman and can do everything!

Since there is no Unz Review Office, no conversations or social pressure like this has ever happened. Maybe some emails here and there, but they are easy to avoid. But it's NOT possible to avoid such pressure / initiative in-person, if someone with power or influence is pressing the issue. Eventually it gets done.

(And this is one reason why I say the mass exodus to work-from-home in Corona-era is a bad thing, even if that topic is a highly complex matter; even when a person prefers 100%-remote-work, or thinks they prefer it, it causes losses of unappreciated or unseen kinds, this Sailer Book thing occurring to me as being a hypothetical example.)
dieter kief
Monday - March 29th 2021 3:26AM MST
PS

Oh Mr. Hail, once Steve Sailer asked for help with the title of his next book - and I did make a number of suggestions. I said again and again that I'd love to read a new Steve-Sailer-book.
I think, he is not too lazy to compose one though.
I think, he does not like the publicity and even fears it. He hints at such fears every once in a while. It's good to live on a farm with a long driveway if you are as controversial as he is. Or in a skyscraper with entrance-codes and a doorman etc.. The farm with a few farmhands around, who know what to do if the lonesome weirdo for example does appear. Instead he seems to live in a house that offers little protection in a ho-hum neighborhood, if I understand the hints right that he occasionally gave.


That and there is one more little nagging thing: My- hehe - prediction is, that if it came out, such a book would not do much. It would sell in the tens of thousands and be shoveled aside by the market quite soon. A small splash only, not least cash-wise.
A book with Steve Sailers articles would be something not for popular success, but a slow burner for the ages and for the happy few.

As an aside: When in 2015 he happened to make me aware of himself by a short and sharp***** answer he gave to a comment of mine in comment-section of the magazine aeon, I was really astonished & delighted about the quality (and the amount too...) of the sociological and - may I say: diagnostic - work he had done on his blog. I did tell him that quite explicitly right away.

***** Joe Jackson

short ! sharp ! shocked ! - Sunday Papers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5r1ub00btE

"Mother's wheelchair stays out in the hall
Why should she go out when the TV's on"
Hail
Monday - March 29th 2021 2:44AM MST
PS

(This comment goes in several directions but the latter part is of interest to any UNZ / Steve Sailer readers, so those averse to reading through comments about cargo ships, physical space, and related topics -- skip to the fourth section if you must.)

Big the mega cargo ships may be, they are not THAT big (like some kind of sci-fi small planet-size spaceship like on Star Wars). At 400m in length, walking at an normal pace it would take you five minutes to walk from end to end.

An interesting fact I've often brought up to people since learning it is the "physical size of the Internet":

As of the mid-2010s, the entire "Internet" in physical terms (hard drives) would, if assembled all together in one place, fit inside ONE of those big cargo ships / oil tankers with some slack left over if it was the biggest of the ships. Looking at the pace of hard drive production since then, I don't think it would yet come close to filling up a second.

Behold, the mighty power of the Internet -- really a giant with feet of clay, with its users (everyone, whether they want to or not) eventually risking massive data loss because of how precarious it is to store everything on the globe in the physical space amounting to one-and-a-half cargo ships!

___________

A tangent:

A more interesting calculation would be how to hypothetically "put to paper" the entire Internet. Printing every webpage and image and bounding them in sturdy books that will last the test of time (it's not hard to find 19th century books which are still in good shape today).

How much space -- and money and human labor to do and oversee and manage and safeguard -- would THAT take up? And presumably we'd have to do it hundreds of times to house in different prestige libraries around the world in this hypothetical de-digitization civilizational project.

And if this WERE to be done, what of all the video? A much harder problem; in the event of a de-digitization mega-project we might have to lose 99.9% of all digital and audio hosted on the Internet today. (Sorry, cat fans, etc.)

___________

A tangent off the above tangent:

Has PEAK STUPIDITY ever thought of printing its entire oeuvre onto paper? Not necessarily out of fear of some kind of massive data loss scenario but for any reason at all, or just for fun. It's probably far too aggravating an undertaking, the kind of thing that if there were one or two PEAK STUPIDITY interns around give it to them as a week's project with a paid PEAK STUPIDITY employee supervising and quality-checking.

Would a BEST OF PEAK STUPIDITY paper-book sail past censors on Amazon?

_____________

A third tangent:

Has anyone at UNZ ever gotten around to getting him to publish serious books? It would flatter Ron Unz' vanity to get such a project done, but afaik he's never done it.

Mr Unz releases his own big writing projects as PDFs, inviting people to print them themselves, but why not do it himself and attach a publisher logo and get some skilled or careful eyes to look it all over for revision or editing? That means hiring someone to do it. This shouldn't be a problem for Unz, but still nothing. Amazon lists only one book from him directly, which is from 2012 and is his long "Myth of American Meritocracy" article (in expanded form?), a precursor to the Unz Review which was rolling by the mid-2010s.

Despite the predictions to the contrary current ten or more years ago, physical book publishing even is still a mark of prestige and seriousness. A certain kind of thinking person still very much prefers book-like content in book form, as it were. Handing a book to someone in physical form works better than pointing to a link -- people are suspicious of the Internet and not without reason. The exact same material in polished book form gets probably a much warmer reception than the same in digital/website form.

And then there is the matter of posterity and placing things in position to be "found" by people, both this year and next, and this decade and next, and even this century and next.

I wrote in a previous comment being surprised to find the Unz-backed LINH DINH's 2015 book "Postcards from the End of America" on the shelf of a public library. I wasn't even looking for it. I seldom read Linh Dinh despite it being free and theoretically accessible anywhere, on a smartphone in Timbuktu, anywhere, but I didn't. I read the entire book in paper form. PeterIke (I think) wrote that the only reason Linh Dinh's book slipped past the censor was he had some writing credentials from the 1990s and 2000s and had an overtly exotic name, "wise Asian man travels America and shows how bad the Bad People are," something like that; maybe even they reviewed some of the content, but missed what a look of his fundamental criticisms are, which they would have flagged had he been called Linus Dietrich, white male.

And finally: Whose arm would who have to twist to get someone to take charge and push to completion with a Best of Steve Sailer book? He himself has said he wants to do it but has suggested he is too lazy to get it done, and is of course quite addicted to the news-cycle. Besides his 2008 Obama biography, there is only one other result on AMAZON right now for Steve Sailer, which is:

"Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation," by Andrew Marantz (released Oct 2019).
Mr. Anon
Monday - March 29th 2021 12:10AM MST
PS

I should add - as you mentioned - that the Suez canal was opened nearly 150 years ago. It was built between 1859 and 1869, in a time when people rode in horse-drawn carriages, men wore top hats and frock coats, women wore petticoats, and Gilbert & Sullivan had yet to create their operettas. And yet this feat of civil engineering is still in operation today and still a vital part of international commerce.

Wild.
Mr. Anon
Monday - March 29th 2021 12:03AM MST
PS

This is an interesting story. What is almost most interesting to me is why this has never happened before. Perhaps it's because this is one of the largest container freighters ever built and it was only built a few years ago (launched in 2018). Perhaps that is the new thing here - the size of this beast. And it's size is remarkable: 1,200 feet long - as long as an 80 story building is tall.

The other thing that struck me is the fragmentation of modern shipping, like everything in the modern globo-cap world. The Ever Given was built in a Japanese ship yard, is owned by a Taiwanese shipping company, is flagged (of course) out of Panama, and is managed by a German firm. I don't know for sure, but the ship's complement probably consists of either American, British, or Chinese officers and Malay, Indonesian, or Phillipino crew-men, perhaps with the odd African or Latin American thrown in.
Genitalia GPS
Sunday - March 28th 2021 8:28PM MST
PS Confucius say-We pwn you now Baizuo, you ASO!
The average dullard Chiquitastan (USA) "citizen" won't get it until the PLA is marching down the street!
Cries of muh racism and the capitalist/imperialist oppression will be met with a spray of hot lead.
Ganderson
Sunday - March 28th 2021 5:24PM MST
PS

My brain is turning to mush after 3 days of the NCAA hockey tournament .

Re: the stuck freighter, my question for Mr Alarmist is “why?” Was it a goofy prank gone horribly wrong? I read somewhere that 3rd world maintenance standards have some bearing, but I have no way to evaluate. Anyone? Bueller?

In the 70s I worked for a company that did industrial roof repair- one of the jobs I worked on was a grain elevator overlooking Duluth-Superior harbor- we were 200 feet in the air, and could see all the freighters sailing in and out of the port. One ship, the Belle River, was over 1000 feet long. Really impressive, the things we used to be able to build!

On an unrelated note the commercials accompanying the NCAA hockey tournament are really annoying. One, from one of the oil companies, basically says , “ hey, we hate oil, too, be patient, we’ll become solar company as soon as we can”. Love to see an oil company ad say something like “we produce petroleum products. They make civilization possible. Bleep you if you don’t like it. “

And then there are the COVID commercials- all the cliches, “We’re all in this together.”; “Hurray for the first responders” and my favorite, “Hey, we bleeped you for the last year, and are going to continue to do so, so get your jab, wear your mask (all the time) and stay cowering in your houses forever, because VARIANTS! “ Pathetic. At least UMASS made he final 4! Pittsburgh here I come!
Sunday - March 28th 2021 2:43PM MST
PS: Good afternoon Mr. Alarmist...

“There was another piece of the story, the veracity of which I cannot confirm, but the radar track of this ship prior to entering the canal apparently sketched out a penis and testicles.”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/t5IKbYcLgQA?color=white&autoplay=1
https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdjzb/cargo-ship-suez-canal-dick-pic-ever-given

This piece of the story is apparently true...

“Tracking data from vesselfinder.com and myshiptracking.com websites clearly shows what resembles a giant dick pic...” “A spokesperson for vesselfinder.com confirmed the ship tracking data was accurate. "There is no room for some kind of conspiracies or false data,” Mihail Mitev told VICE World News over email.”


The Alarmist
Sunday - March 28th 2021 1:31PM MST
PS

I have little doubt that this was deliberate; this ship is too wedged in there for it to have been a mere accident.

There was another piece of the story, the veracity of which I cannot confirm, but the radar track of this ship prior to entering the canal apparently sketched out a penis and testicles.

Which immediately brings to mind the closing lines of Frank Zapoa’s “Broken Hearts are for A$*holes.”

🎶Don't fool yourself girl, it's blinkin' at you
🎶That's why I say, "I'm gonna ram it, ram it, ram it ram it up your poop chute" (Corn hole)


Yes, the world got corn-holed last week.

Adam Smith
Sunday - March 28th 2021 1:14PM MST
PS: Interesting article Mr. Moderator. Thank you...

“The 20-footers can hold ~50,000 lb, but I doubt they get near that most times. (Maybe if you're shipping bowling balls ;-})”

Once upon a time, when I was pulling containers in and out of Port Elizabeth, I moved a 20ft container that was loaded right to it's maximum weight. It was full of old motors, transmissions, and other heavy parts going to Asia for recycling. Usually the pups are nice, save on fuel and you can easily scoot up a grade because they weigh less. Not so with that load. It was as heavy as many a 40 or 53 footer.

“What I'd like to know is how much fuel these things carry. I mean, do they bump extra fuel for cargo, or can they carry just plenty to divert a long, long way?”

While I really don't know anything about this topic and I didn't find any info about how much fuel the Golden-Class container ships hold and use, I did find some info about some other large ships...

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/how-many-gallons-of-fuel-does-a-container-ship-carry

“One of the largest container ships to call on the U.S., the CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin, carries approximately 4.5 million gallons of fuel oil. Ship fuel capacity is generally converted to volumetric measurement. The equivalent on the Ben Franklin would be close to 16,000 cubic meters. The CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin is considered an ultra-large container ship, as it can carry the equivalent of 18,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in containers.”

And from this somewhat outdated article...

https://newatlas.com/shipping-pollution/11526/

“One of the eight longest container ships in the world, the 1,300 ft Emma Mærsk also has the world's largest reciprocating engine. At five storeys tall and weighing 2300 tonnes, this 14 cylinder turbocharged two-stroke monster puts out 84.4 MW (114,800 hp) - up to 90MW when the motor's waste heat recovery system is taken into account. These mammoth engines consume approx 16 tons of fuel per hour or 380 tons per day while at sea.”

1 ton bunker fuel = 300 gallons
16 tons of fuel per hour = 4800 gallons per hour
380 tons of fuel per day = 114000 gallons per day

I would imagine the Golden-Class container ships hold and use a similar amount of fuel, probably a little more as they're a little larger.

“Are the vessels awaiting passage through the Suez Canal able to change to a much longer route, the southbound ones heading out to the Straits of Gibraltar to go around Africa counterclockwise and the northbound ones back to the mouth of the Red Sea to circumnavigate it clockwise, without refueling? I would think they carry a lot of extra fuel for all kinds of contingencies. If not, could they fuel up anywhere near where they are backed up?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunkering
https://www.bunkeringatsea.com/
https://www.rt.com/business/519413-carriers-reroute-ships-suez-canal/

Apparently, some of the ships are waiting patiently for crews to remove the Ever Given while others are headed out to voyage around the cape. I don't know how much “extra fuel” these ships carry, but I'm sure they can get fuel for the trip somewhere along the way. Jeddah might be a convenient port for bunkering in this situation(?), though that's not the only fuel stop along the way.

https://www.oilmonster.com/bunker-fuel-prices/middle-east-and-africa/jeddah/106
https://blog.shipuwl.com/imo-2020-definitions
https://www.nicnewmanoxford.com/madagascar-oil-has-ambitions-to-turn-the-country-into-an-oil-hub-for-shipping-fuel/
https://shipandbunker.com/news/emea/308430-augusta-energy-opens-new-african-physical-bunker-supply-operation

MBlanc46
Sunday - March 28th 2021 8:20AM MST
PS Thanks for straightening all that out for us. It does bring a smile to the lips to see Globohomo discomfited, if only in such a minor way.
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