Good point. Thing is, novelizing incitements to WW3 are dangerous right now.
If you want to find a conspiracy, point at the extremist cult of Mammonism, whose drive to fiscalize everything more likely actually contributed to the crash. Maybe have your Jack Ryan clone give them the ISIL treatment.
And, to stop the anti-Semitism that's a fellow-traveler with rich illuminati conspiracy stories, have a plot about how the apocalyptic cult of Mammon has infiltrated and subverted every institution, every religion, music, art, the internet, relationships...It's far worse than even ISIL, because it's so good at forcing everyone to become complicit with it as its basic protection scheme.
]]>GASI == generalized artificial superior intelligence
why build something only as smart as a human? semi-demi-deity would be better especially if it came with mercy, patience and justice
...and was assign monitoring every piece of complex machinery to spot problems prior to epic fails
problem would be in keeping it from getting bored...
if not cat videos what then!?
]]>Good lead for a journalist: find the ship's officer(s) who presented the 'ship's been repaired' papers and the navy officer(s) who checked that the repairs had in fact been done. (Also check their bank transactions.)
Meanwhile ... you're welcome to wade through this 106 page doc to see how Chile is supposed to run their ports. Looking forward to your 8-slide PowerPoint summary presentation. :)
https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/ports-policy-review-chile.pdf
]]>$52 million in aid for civilians primarily through legit international aid orgs.
]]>First: All shipping companies have that policy, because all harbors are /very/ corrupt, so revealing anything which could give a corrupt harbor masters any leverage over the ship would become very expensive, very quickly.
Second, as far as I can tell, Mærsk is not in control of this ship: It is not their ship, it is not their crew, it is not their captain.
That's not to say that Mærsk's performance concerns will not have had (undue) influence, I'm sure there are very tangible economic incentives involved, but the blame lies with the company in control of the ship, and that does not seem to be Mærsk.
]]>Wonder if that's in response to their increased mining*. Their geography - 4,000 mile long coastline vs. 61 mile depth into the Andes - complicates logistics.
The Chilean gov't is explicitly pursuing open-market policies - ports are considered part of the 'export' industry therefore most are privately owned and operated. BTW - there's some mention about increasing rail.
https://boris.unibe.ch/97919/1/working_paper_no_14_2016_garcia_and_quindimil.pdf
*The only Chilean products I'm familiar with are wines. :)
]]>an unnecessary allocation of resources not used oft... maybe once every three years for heavy driving along poorly maintained roads... with most drivers never ever using it in ten years
but...
you want one... the sense of having a 'margin of safety' and some control over your fate
problem has been megacorps having their own agenda have whittled away at those things that provide a 'margin of safety' and not just those 'donut spares' now standard in most cars
by reducing the numbers of quality assurance checks and eliminating inventory of spare parts idling in warehouses and firing anyone too focused upon detailed inspections it is possible to lower costs... increase profits... and much of that newly sourced profit ends up as executive bonuses
so long as nobody important dies, there will be executives at every megacorp urging the narrowing of every 'margin of safety'
problem?
we are all important
]]>Nope. It is all about meeting CAFE standards for MPG. If the "standard" package doesn't have an extra 30 pounds then it adds a fraction to the MPG rating. For most cars you can buy it as an option.
And to be honest, modern tubeless tires don't go flat all that often. AAA is a better investment.
I know a bit about this. I've manually changed tires on rims (what fun), spent a summer in a tire store with the special machine. And dealt with flats in all kinds of odd spaces. Water filled tires in fields for one. I've changed a tire once on my passenger things in the last 20 years. I curbed a truck tire and 99% of the people in the US would NOT have been able to change it. For various reasons.
]]>I drove over a bolt last year that flattened the tire. I then called then, a truck was there within the hour and it was all resolved. Presumably this is cheaper than supplying spare tires and jacks in every new vehicle.
The cynic in me also notes that it provides their service departments with steady trade.
]]>I strongly suspect that when Steve Bannon said his strategy was to "flood the zone with shit" he was parroting a line he'd been fed by Vlad's KGB homies.
While Bannon is NOT averse to using disinformation provided by Russia et al, I'm pretty sure he's a home grown shit stirrer. The KGB didn't set him on that path, they just found him useful (found each other mutually useful???).
Bannon's perfidy traces back to the days when Putin was still in knee pants to the days of "Tail-gunner Joe" McCarthy and Roy Cohn, as "refined" by Lee Atwater & Karl Rove ...
In fact, I'm pretty sure THEY got the idea from Goebbels.
]]>In US politics, our Speaker has a one seat Republican majority, and Marjorie Taylor Greene just us in a motion to unseat him. If one more Republican steps down prematurely, the house goes democratic, along with the senate. Johnson may well switch his working loyalties to the democrats sooner, simply to keep his job.
I'm not sure that's correct. If ONE more RepubliQan steps down that would leave the house evenly split. Neither side would have a majority & I just don't know what happens then.
I think NOTHING! Everything comes to a screeching halt until one side or the other manages to acquire a majority. It's not entirely impossible this could become the MOST "Do Nothing" Congress in our nation's history.
You better hope if one more RepubliQan decides to call it quits it pushes another one over the edge into deciding the same thing.
]]>Yes. And compared to the containerships I worked with upon getting into the transportation industry over 40 years ago, modern equivalents typically have half the crew size, for a vessel with 10x to 20x the TEU carrying capacity. The engineering crew members can and do still handle a wide range of relatively minor problems with the equipment (including propulsion and electrical / electronic), but major issues get addressed in port -- preferably during one of the regularly scheduled maintenance layups.
Much more problematic than the crew size, however, is the triage to distinguish between: 1. Minor issues which can be handled routinely by the crew. 2. Major issues which can be effectively dealt with by either a regularly scheduled or an emergency maintenance port call, typically requiring heavy and/or specialist repair capabilities (both people and equipment). 3. The grey area in between, which includes things which are somewhat beyond the usual scope of the issues the engineering crew members would normally handle, but individually difficult to justify an emergency port call (or extended port stay) to fully resolve immediately.
As a result, that middle range of problems tends to make "band-aid and baling wire" type temporary fixes an attractive compromise. Which typically kicks the issue an indeterminate distance down the road ... with nobody really knowing whether that (temporal) distance is closer to five minutes, or five years.
We don't yet know whether something like this happened with some critical part(s) of the vessel's electrical systems, but the bow-on video of the last few minutes before impact appears (at a minimum) to be "not inconsistent" with such a hypothesis. And of course, nobody here might have encountered similar maddeningly persistent but transient fluctuations in any kind of electrical / electronic gear, would they?
]]>"how the hell do you run a ship this huge with a crew of 23 (the Edmund Fitzgerald had 29)"
The EF was lost 48 years ago. And launched in the later 50s. Long before automation was normal.
Big ships now require someone to read the gauges 24/7, point it where it needs to go, man handle the deck ropes and anchors when needed, and do light repairs to machinery. Those huge single diesel engines are very reliable when maintained. Maybe this one wasn't maintained. Or just had a cylinder rod or fuel line fail at the wrong time in a one in a million thing. We'll know more in a month or so. First they have to untangle the ship, tow it to a dock and unload it.
Cargo ship had engine maintenance in port before it collided with Baltimore bridge, officials say [The New Indian Express]
]]>