The Stuck Boat
Mar. 29th, 2021 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutAs the spring of 2020 was defined by lockdowns, the spring of 2021 is defined by a conspicuous avoidance of commemorating the one year mark. No one likes to think about how long we’ve been dealing with this, and a Golden-Glass Evergreen container ship named the Ever Given, stuck sideways in the Suez Canal has provided us with something else to talk about, think about and meme about.
It has also gotten people to put Marc Levinson, author of _The Box_ and, more recently, _Outside the Box_ on television to talk about the complex global supply chain and container shipping. In turn, that has caused me to read _Outside the Box_. I’m not done; it’s good; you probably won’t read it and that’s fine too.
For most people, The Stuck Boat is a simple thing, a respite from complexity and stress and anxiety. For me, it is a fascinating opportunity to finally get some really detailed information about parts of our reality that most people ignore All the Fucking Time. Secondarily, it is mildly concerning, simply because so many people are happy to find entertainment in The Stuck Boat, rather than actually think this through and maybe fix the problems that led to The Stock Boat. There are a few apocalyptic types — Civilization Is More Fragile Than We Thought articles a year into the pandemic prompted by a Stuck Boat seem a little off even for apocalyptic types, but they are very much a One Note Crew, everything is like the Roman Republic / Empire Collapse of some other Civilization. For them, everything is too complex, and that’s probably a valid observation but also fails to give any meaningful insight into any particular problem. They are hoping to be a Stuck Clock, and here they are stuck with a Stuck Boat.
One of my SILs has a phrase that really stuck in my mind: “Too Big to Sail”. Indeed, the thought process that went into the design of the Golden Class (and related classes like the Algeciras class) is a straightforward exercise in increasing efficiency. The end result, as she noted, is something that ran up against a risk that was manageable at a smaller scale, but not at the larger scale. Banks which are only kinda big can be bailed out; make a big enough bank, and you can’t any more. They are systemically dangerous; they are too big to fail.
And so, articles which note that huge boats are still being built are not wrong, but it is worth noting that even before this event, there had been some backing away from the 20XXX TEU boats, back down to 15XXX TEU give or take. Will this be enough of a reduction? Hard to say. We need the after-event analysis, to understand whether what went wrong with Ever Given is fixable with changes in how the canal is run, the shape of the canal, the management of the canal, the loading of the boat, or something else. I suspect, given what’s been going on worldwide with trade, that a factor with Ever Given will turn out to be it was loaded heavier than anything else that has ever gone through the canal with that kind of wind. It’ll likely be fixed with some combination of Gotta Wait Till the Wind Dies Down and/or Hey, Run It A Little Lighter. Either one will contribute to even less efficiency with 20XXX+ TEU class vessels, and discourage people from building them and perhaps encourage them to scrap them.
The insurance angle is an interesting one; I don’t really understand what’s going on there. No one uninvolved in doing boats insures them ... for very long (they run out of money!), so when the collective has to pay out for what happened here, that will be another form of pressure to adjust the risk / reward tradeoff.
My biggest lesson from this whole exercise was basically the shock I experienced when I found the calculator online for Suez canal crossing fees. They are _much_ _much_ lower than I would have imagined. That might change, and if they do not yet require bonding for very large vessels to cross, they might in the future. I’m not sure what the correct modification for “Picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer” might be, but I have been forcibly reminded of it here.
ETA:
A really nice description of some of the fluid effects that really big boats in canals experience. I think we’ll see really big boats not allowed into very narrow places during periods in which high winds are a risk. This will discourage making the boats quite that big. Which is already happening in other ways.
https://massivesci.com/articles/ever-given-suez-canal-physics-width/
It has also gotten people to put Marc Levinson, author of _The Box_ and, more recently, _Outside the Box_ on television to talk about the complex global supply chain and container shipping. In turn, that has caused me to read _Outside the Box_. I’m not done; it’s good; you probably won’t read it and that’s fine too.
For most people, The Stuck Boat is a simple thing, a respite from complexity and stress and anxiety. For me, it is a fascinating opportunity to finally get some really detailed information about parts of our reality that most people ignore All the Fucking Time. Secondarily, it is mildly concerning, simply because so many people are happy to find entertainment in The Stuck Boat, rather than actually think this through and maybe fix the problems that led to The Stock Boat. There are a few apocalyptic types — Civilization Is More Fragile Than We Thought articles a year into the pandemic prompted by a Stuck Boat seem a little off even for apocalyptic types, but they are very much a One Note Crew, everything is like the Roman Republic / Empire Collapse of some other Civilization. For them, everything is too complex, and that’s probably a valid observation but also fails to give any meaningful insight into any particular problem. They are hoping to be a Stuck Clock, and here they are stuck with a Stuck Boat.
One of my SILs has a phrase that really stuck in my mind: “Too Big to Sail”. Indeed, the thought process that went into the design of the Golden Class (and related classes like the Algeciras class) is a straightforward exercise in increasing efficiency. The end result, as she noted, is something that ran up against a risk that was manageable at a smaller scale, but not at the larger scale. Banks which are only kinda big can be bailed out; make a big enough bank, and you can’t any more. They are systemically dangerous; they are too big to fail.
And so, articles which note that huge boats are still being built are not wrong, but it is worth noting that even before this event, there had been some backing away from the 20XXX TEU boats, back down to 15XXX TEU give or take. Will this be enough of a reduction? Hard to say. We need the after-event analysis, to understand whether what went wrong with Ever Given is fixable with changes in how the canal is run, the shape of the canal, the management of the canal, the loading of the boat, or something else. I suspect, given what’s been going on worldwide with trade, that a factor with Ever Given will turn out to be it was loaded heavier than anything else that has ever gone through the canal with that kind of wind. It’ll likely be fixed with some combination of Gotta Wait Till the Wind Dies Down and/or Hey, Run It A Little Lighter. Either one will contribute to even less efficiency with 20XXX+ TEU class vessels, and discourage people from building them and perhaps encourage them to scrap them.
The insurance angle is an interesting one; I don’t really understand what’s going on there. No one uninvolved in doing boats insures them ... for very long (they run out of money!), so when the collective has to pay out for what happened here, that will be another form of pressure to adjust the risk / reward tradeoff.
My biggest lesson from this whole exercise was basically the shock I experienced when I found the calculator online for Suez canal crossing fees. They are _much_ _much_ lower than I would have imagined. That might change, and if they do not yet require bonding for very large vessels to cross, they might in the future. I’m not sure what the correct modification for “Picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer” might be, but I have been forcibly reminded of it here.
ETA:
A really nice description of some of the fluid effects that really big boats in canals experience. I think we’ll see really big boats not allowed into very narrow places during periods in which high winds are a risk. This will discourage making the boats quite that big. Which is already happening in other ways.
https://massivesci.com/articles/ever-given-suez-canal-physics-width/