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]
]]>*The only Chilean products I'm familiar with are wines. :)
"Wild caught" Salmon, grapes, produce and citrus fruits ...
]]>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.
Pick-em-up Truck or BIG** truck? FWIW, 99% of Truck Drivers in the U.S. wouldn't be able to change a tire on the BIG truck ... especially if it's on the inside. 😏
**Semi in the U.S. (and maybe Canada), HGV in the rest of the world.
]]>He absolutely buys into the idea that he is not a billionaire because HE is lazy. In religious terms, sure he's guilty of SOMETHING, because that's better than thinking the universe is meaningless. (See Elaine Pagels on St Augustine. Google Adam-Eve-Serpent-Politics-Christianity)
That can lead to a bunch of different extremes. If really not successful, eg laid off from offshored job, injured on job, no insurance, chronic pain etc = risk for drug addiction, possible suicide.
Other direction - realizes the game IS rigged. (All I got for my admission is some watery lemonade and some jelly beans) = ripe for a messiah/grifter to point this out and mobilize him to take down his least favorite elite.
There is a method to the madness, but it's still madness.
]]>mentioning spare tire as an example of "margin of safety" which has been trimmed 'n trimmed yet more
done to maximize executive bonuses and a process repeated 'n repeated without regulatory interference going unnoticed by the public...
...until trains derail, freighters wreck bridges and aircraft suddenly get drafty
we need industry to be more inspected by regulators
]]>To be fair, that's a list with more than 10 spots in it! Iran and Iraq both got revolutions thanks to the CIA (both of which installed dictatorships). Almost the whole of south and central America got gaslit by Operation Condor, leading to stuff like General Pinoshet's fascist dictatorship in Chile, the military junta in Argentina (and the Falklands war), the dirty wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador, repeated attempts to overthrow or assassinate Fidel Castro, the destabilization of Afghanistan in the 1970s (leading to the Soviet invasion in 1978), all sorts of fuckery in Africa (including the alleged murder of a UN Secretary General), and so on.
To be fair, a lot of this shit happened because the USA unwittingly picked up the White Man's Burden crap that the British and French empires had been handling by means of the noose and the gun for decades in the wake of WW2/Suez. But the CIA was no better than it should have been; and the USA has structural obstacles to running a colonial empire (namely: complete change of policy from the top down every 4 or 8 years, and a national mythology that defines its existence in terms of opposition to empire, rather than as being an imperial hub).
]]>it was an example in laying out an argument not the focus of the post...
...and now I'm in the midst of a fracking argument
{ sigh }
]]>they've got the same grasp of real world conditions in far off lands as a gaggle of Harvard economists have of genuine motivations of consumers and the schemes of megacorp executives
...which is to say little approaching none
]]>Same as we're doing to help Australian Aborigines: offering condolences as they sadly pass into the history books.
Tony Burke is a fairly senior federal MP and also my local MP. One of his staffers asked whether I was one of the people donating to UNWRA on his behalf and I said "someone has to do it, and he obviously wont". As with many US politicians, his private thoughts and willingness to be bound by party discipline count against him rather than for him when he does the wrong thing in public.
He's in a bit of a tricky position, because being "unconditionally support Israel" and "Palestine must be punished" during Ramadan in a very Muslim part of Australia is his current job. There doesn't seem to be any recent mention of him appearing at Ramadan events so I suspect he's keeping his head down (in past years he's visited the night markets and gone to mosques). The Gaza stuff I'm seeing locally is in vigorous disagreement with both the ALP and official government positions.
But that's unrelated to your suggestion that countries have gone to war over minor provocations.
]]>At least the local news reports say the construction crew (7 of them) and one person working for the state government (unclear if govt employee or contractor) were on break and were in their trucks (it was cold that night). 2 survived. 2 bodies of the deceased have been recovered from a pickup truck. With immediate warning they could have just barely made it if they were near one end or the other. The others were probably in something like a dump truck (don't know the translation into non-US English). The trucks were likely running to keep the heat on.
]]>Remember that the CIA was originally a Cold War organization, and the KGB was trying to "help the proletariat shake off their chains" at the same time that the CIA was making the world "Safe for democracy." That they were using the same strategies and tactics, some looted from WW2 fascists, is just one of those little ironies.
If you're still into spy stuff, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes history of the CIA is still worth reading. So is Enemies, his history of the FBI.
As for imperial America, I'd date that back to good old Manifest Destiny really.
]]>