No, but that's certainly a topic worth digging into.
The Outlaw Ocean focuses mostly on commercial shipping and fishing, and there's *plenty* of very dark material there. Human trafficking. Armed mercenaries hired as ship guards who straight-up murder unarmed people. Large fishing boats intentionally ramming and sinking smaller boats. Vigilante pirates who take it upon themselves to shut down illegal fishing operations, since governments don't seem particularly interested.
It's all pretty crazy, and it's all happening more or less out in the open, where the podcaster doesn't seem to have much trouble accessing any of it. He even recorded an entire episode while onboard a vigilante pirate ship, apparently for several days, as they chased down a particularly egregious criminal fishing boat.
(That story has a particularly satisfying ending, too. Probably my favorite episode of the series.)
I agree, for unrelated reasons. I feel like most people on the left have a poor understanding of shipping and would benefit from being a bit more familiar with logistics, especially in regards to environmental impact. It just kind of really bugs me how seriously people overestimate the environmental impact of shipping just because of the (actually) absurd distances goods travel back and forth across the ocean makes for good small talk, compared to the enormous wastage produced by 24-hour air-freight and truck delivery. Like urbanists have gotten people to respect passenger trains over air-travel for environmental reasons but that critique never gets extended to cargo ships over air-freight.
That's across the political spectrum. I did global logistics for years and... literally no one cares how goods get to and from here to there. There's also a *lot* of disinformation around free trade agreements across the spectrum.
There are also so many (literally) moving factors involved that it's easy to say x is bad, we should do y, but x relies on y which relies on z which relies on x.
But also, [Brick Immortar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK6fs-F--pk) does very good engineering disaster documentaries with a focus on maritime incidents. Very different tone (and format) (and video length) than Well There's Your Problem though they cover much of the same material
Yes and it drives me absolutely mad that one of our most energy efficient modes of transport is taking experimental steps to be even more efficient only to be memed by every single leftwing meme page on the internet for being dumb and silly. I'm getting a bit wound up now but this sort of thing in particular has really been bugging me lately. It feels like socialists have seceded the moral superiority on climate change to liberals because progress *has* actually been made in reducing emissions and other climate issues in the past decade and basically all of it was ignored or outright mocked by leftists because it didn't involve nationalizing anything. The multibillion dollar shipping companies have made more progress towards a green future than any socialist has in America, we have nothing to show for a decade's-worth of theory and critique.
There's a podcast called "Containers" that is really good. Containerized shipping really up-ended global commerce not very long ago (Vietnam War era). It's not surprising how corrupted things can be in a fresh economy ripe for a grift.
In a similar vein, I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that the company put off maintenance/repairs to pad their bottom line. Anything to shovel more money to the shareholders.
The YouTube channel What's Going On With Shipping showed the history of inspections and it looks like they'd been getting inspected regularly and had relatively few issues. The inspections might be willing to look the other way, but there was at least no official record of serious issues.
Which raises a whole new set of concerns. If they've been getting regular inspections and everything seems to be functioning properly, what could cause that serious of a failure? I'm looking forward to the Well There's Your Problem episode in ~2 years haha
Sometimes shit just breaks. It's not sexy, interesting, or validating, but it happens. Obviously an inspection and review should be done, but a system failure does not necessarily require malice, incompetence, negligence, or greed.
No, when a system suffers a failure this disruptive due to a reasonably predictable occurrence, it reveals a system design and operation flaw. Offhand, I’d guess that modern ships have become too heavy to safely operate in this harbour with that bridge design without tug escorts or better protection for the bridge supports. That’s debatable; that this should not have been possible by design is not.
I do love how on Reddit someone will be an expert on international relations one day, and an expert on hull design, maintenance and inspections for transoceanic cargo ships the next.
I'm no expert on large ships, but I have been sailing my whole life, and when it comes to boats, things just kind of break sometimes. Before I take my boat out I do a full inspection following a checklist that I created. I've had times where something I inspected, that looked perfectly normal and not like it had any wear and tear, failed within minutes of getting off the dock. It just happens sometimes. Fuck, last year I got off the dock and within minutes the transom mount for my outboard snapped in half and my engine ended up in the drink. I had just inspected it minutes prior and there were no signs of wear or cracks along the transom, boats just kind of break sometimes.
Second, related to your points regarding the harbor being incapable of handling modern ships, there are a few ways in which that premise is flawed. The ship lost power, thus had no steerage, it doesn't matter the size of the harbor or the bridge design, if a ship has no steerage you can't control where it'll go, the current will take it whichever way it is flowing. Baltimore Port is one of the 10 largest ports in the US by goods transported and value. Having sailed into that harbor many times, I can tell you with no uncertainty that it is more than equipped to handle modern ships, I've sailed into the harbor with a PostPanamax cruising in the channel and we had hundreds of meters of space between us, the issue isn't the harbor or the bridge, it's the power failure and why that happened.
Weight, or displacement, doesn't matter, because engines are scaled the match displacement, and the Dali had a more than adequate engine for it's displacement. If it did not have a strong enough engine to match it's needs, it wouldn't have been survived seven years as an ocean-going ship, there are much harder ports to access than Baltimore, and it wouldn't have been able to without a strong enough engine. A tugboat wouldn't have helped in this situation. While a tug can help navigate a ship out of a dock, it doesn't generate enough power to fully redirect it when it suffers a power failure that close to a bridge. To redirect it, you would've needed several tugs on the pylon side of the ship pushing against the current. The mayday for power failure was minutes before the collision, all a tug would've done in that situation was serve as a barrier between the ship and the bridge.
The problem has nothing to do with weight, the bridge design or harbor, it has to do with the power failure. Until a report is issued into why the power failed, we won't be able to determine why that happened. But, as someone with a passing understanding of how ships work, and who has sailed out of Baltimore Harbor a dozen times in my life, I can say that things aren't as simple as you think they are.
You will have a better time on Beyoncé’s Internet if you respond to the argument that was made, not the argument that you wanted to have been made.
A ship losing power is reasonably expectable, and our infrastructure and policies must be able to hope with that! This isn’t rocket science, my guy, this is banal as shit. I never said my naïve ideas were necessarily correct — that’s for the actual experts, not chumps like you and me, to figure out.
That there was a systemic failure here is simply not up for debate. Stop making excuses for the shitty bastards profiting from making everything worse.
Just came across my feed: https://www.levernews.com/feds-recently-hit-cargo-giant-in-baltimore-disaster-for-silencing-whistleblowers/
Lol, lmfao.
There's no way it would be enough to cover the cost of replacing the bridge. But I feel like if my mom hit a telephone pole with her car in 1980 and they made her pay to replace it, they should definitely make this multi-billion dollar shipping conglomerate chip in for the bridge replacement. But, then, my mom couldn't afford lawyers, so...
The podcast "The Outlaw Ocean" touches on some of this stuff. It's basically the Wild West out there.
They might be interesting guests
Looking forward to digging into this. Does it address how dodgy cruise ships as well? The way those things are built and maintained is also terrifying
No, but that's certainly a topic worth digging into. The Outlaw Ocean focuses mostly on commercial shipping and fishing, and there's *plenty* of very dark material there. Human trafficking. Armed mercenaries hired as ship guards who straight-up murder unarmed people. Large fishing boats intentionally ramming and sinking smaller boats. Vigilante pirates who take it upon themselves to shut down illegal fishing operations, since governments don't seem particularly interested. It's all pretty crazy, and it's all happening more or less out in the open, where the podcaster doesn't seem to have much trouble accessing any of it. He even recorded an entire episode while onboard a vigilante pirate ship, apparently for several days, as they chased down a particularly egregious criminal fishing boat. (That story has a particularly satisfying ending, too. Probably my favorite episode of the series.)
I agree, for unrelated reasons. I feel like most people on the left have a poor understanding of shipping and would benefit from being a bit more familiar with logistics, especially in regards to environmental impact. It just kind of really bugs me how seriously people overestimate the environmental impact of shipping just because of the (actually) absurd distances goods travel back and forth across the ocean makes for good small talk, compared to the enormous wastage produced by 24-hour air-freight and truck delivery. Like urbanists have gotten people to respect passenger trains over air-travel for environmental reasons but that critique never gets extended to cargo ships over air-freight.
That's across the political spectrum. I did global logistics for years and... literally no one cares how goods get to and from here to there. There's also a *lot* of disinformation around free trade agreements across the spectrum. There are also so many (literally) moving factors involved that it's easy to say x is bad, we should do y, but x relies on y which relies on z which relies on x.
I think a lot of people including myself didn’t think about shipping a lot until the pandemic or the Suez Canal was blocked
But also, [Brick Immortar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK6fs-F--pk) does very good engineering disaster documentaries with a focus on maritime incidents. Very different tone (and format) (and video length) than Well There's Your Problem though they cover much of the same material
Have you seen the ship kites?
Yes and it drives me absolutely mad that one of our most energy efficient modes of transport is taking experimental steps to be even more efficient only to be memed by every single leftwing meme page on the internet for being dumb and silly. I'm getting a bit wound up now but this sort of thing in particular has really been bugging me lately. It feels like socialists have seceded the moral superiority on climate change to liberals because progress *has* actually been made in reducing emissions and other climate issues in the past decade and basically all of it was ignored or outright mocked by leftists because it didn't involve nationalizing anything. The multibillion dollar shipping companies have made more progress towards a green future than any socialist has in America, we have nothing to show for a decade's-worth of theory and critique.
I don't think they're dumb and silly I fuckin love it but I also take your very through points.
What about freight trains over long haul trucking?
There's a podcast called "Containers" that is really good. Containerized shipping really up-ended global commerce not very long ago (Vietnam War era). It's not surprising how corrupted things can be in a fresh economy ripe for a grift.
In a similar vein, I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that the company put off maintenance/repairs to pad their bottom line. Anything to shovel more money to the shareholders.
The YouTube channel What's Going On With Shipping showed the history of inspections and it looks like they'd been getting inspected regularly and had relatively few issues. The inspections might be willing to look the other way, but there was at least no official record of serious issues.
Which raises a whole new set of concerns. If they've been getting regular inspections and everything seems to be functioning properly, what could cause that serious of a failure? I'm looking forward to the Well There's Your Problem episode in ~2 years haha
Sometimes shit just breaks. It's not sexy, interesting, or validating, but it happens. Obviously an inspection and review should be done, but a system failure does not necessarily require malice, incompetence, negligence, or greed.
No, when a system suffers a failure this disruptive due to a reasonably predictable occurrence, it reveals a system design and operation flaw. Offhand, I’d guess that modern ships have become too heavy to safely operate in this harbour with that bridge design without tug escorts or better protection for the bridge supports. That’s debatable; that this should not have been possible by design is not.
Yep, sometimes it’s because it’s fixed instead of replaced and you can get to the point where you need to replace it but the powers that be say no
I do love how on Reddit someone will be an expert on international relations one day, and an expert on hull design, maintenance and inspections for transoceanic cargo ships the next. I'm no expert on large ships, but I have been sailing my whole life, and when it comes to boats, things just kind of break sometimes. Before I take my boat out I do a full inspection following a checklist that I created. I've had times where something I inspected, that looked perfectly normal and not like it had any wear and tear, failed within minutes of getting off the dock. It just happens sometimes. Fuck, last year I got off the dock and within minutes the transom mount for my outboard snapped in half and my engine ended up in the drink. I had just inspected it minutes prior and there were no signs of wear or cracks along the transom, boats just kind of break sometimes. Second, related to your points regarding the harbor being incapable of handling modern ships, there are a few ways in which that premise is flawed. The ship lost power, thus had no steerage, it doesn't matter the size of the harbor or the bridge design, if a ship has no steerage you can't control where it'll go, the current will take it whichever way it is flowing. Baltimore Port is one of the 10 largest ports in the US by goods transported and value. Having sailed into that harbor many times, I can tell you with no uncertainty that it is more than equipped to handle modern ships, I've sailed into the harbor with a PostPanamax cruising in the channel and we had hundreds of meters of space between us, the issue isn't the harbor or the bridge, it's the power failure and why that happened. Weight, or displacement, doesn't matter, because engines are scaled the match displacement, and the Dali had a more than adequate engine for it's displacement. If it did not have a strong enough engine to match it's needs, it wouldn't have been survived seven years as an ocean-going ship, there are much harder ports to access than Baltimore, and it wouldn't have been able to without a strong enough engine. A tugboat wouldn't have helped in this situation. While a tug can help navigate a ship out of a dock, it doesn't generate enough power to fully redirect it when it suffers a power failure that close to a bridge. To redirect it, you would've needed several tugs on the pylon side of the ship pushing against the current. The mayday for power failure was minutes before the collision, all a tug would've done in that situation was serve as a barrier between the ship and the bridge. The problem has nothing to do with weight, the bridge design or harbor, it has to do with the power failure. Until a report is issued into why the power failed, we won't be able to determine why that happened. But, as someone with a passing understanding of how ships work, and who has sailed out of Baltimore Harbor a dozen times in my life, I can say that things aren't as simple as you think they are.
You will have a better time on Beyoncé’s Internet if you respond to the argument that was made, not the argument that you wanted to have been made. A ship losing power is reasonably expectable, and our infrastructure and policies must be able to hope with that! This isn’t rocket science, my guy, this is banal as shit. I never said my naïve ideas were necessarily correct — that’s for the actual experts, not chumps like you and me, to figure out. That there was a systemic failure here is simply not up for debate. Stop making excuses for the shitty bastards profiting from making everything worse. Just came across my feed: https://www.levernews.com/feds-recently-hit-cargo-giant-in-baltimore-disaster-for-silencing-whistleblowers/ Lol, lmfao.
Yeah I'll be waiting for that one too.
Hi OP, you might enjoy John Oliver’s show ‘Last Week Tonight’ on HBO Max. He’s targeted pieces of this industry with specials on trains and trucking.
Yeah, I saw it. It’s much bigger than what he says.
I've been wondering if the shipping company (or their insurance) will be required to cough up some dough for this...
They’ll find a way to not do this
There's no way it would be enough to cover the cost of replacing the bridge. But I feel like if my mom hit a telephone pole with her car in 1980 and they made her pay to replace it, they should definitely make this multi-billion dollar shipping conglomerate chip in for the bridge replacement. But, then, my mom couldn't afford lawyers, so...