[pjettter]

I also like that the boat is stuck, but not for the same reasons.

A stuck boat in general is not usually a big deal, but this particular stuck boat is giving visibility to how fragile and interconnected everything is. Of course we "know" that, but we often don't see the extent of it until a disaster happens.

A system's capacity got stretched. For a while this worked fine, but safety margins became smaller. It was just a matter of time before an accident like this would happen. And there is no redundancy (on this part of the canal).

So I like this stuck boat because it shows where "the system" has weaknesses. The system extends of course into many areas. Trade, finance, engineering, probably politics, etc.

Unfortunately, due to greed (oops, "efficiency") we will always be running systems at, or slightly beyond capacity so accidents/disasters like this will continue to happen.

I also like that the boat is stuck simply because it is an example of how quickly the world can "unite" in peaceful discussions around an absurd situation.

[PeterStuer]

"So I like this stuck boat because it shows where "the system" has weaknesses."

My father was a freight Sea Captain. We learned that lesson way back in the 70's when the Suez canal was closed and boats from east Africa to Europe had to take the long way round the southern cape. Everyone knows the canal is a potentially fragile bottleneck, but what can you do about it. It's not like there are many places where you can dig a sufficiently geographically distant backup option to cover most common threat scenarios.

[nicoburns]

I think the key is that supply chains need to be resilient to shipping delays. And once you factor this in you may end up reorganising things quite radically differently. For example, it may lead you to prefer local suppliers over otherwise cheaper suppliers from a different continent.

[tonyedgecombe]

but this particular stuck boat is giving visibility to how fragile and interconnected everything is

Interconnected but not really fragile. One of the things about the pandemic that I was surprised by is how little effect it had. I kept buying food at the supermarket yet the naysayers were telling us we would be eating each other by now.

[kbelder]

Right. My biggest fear during the pandemic was a supply chain collapse, which would be FAR more damaging than the disease itself. Pleasantly, it hasn't yet materialized.

I think the chain was fragile, in that we immediately saw disruptions and shortages... but also adaptable, in that people responded and corrected them. Few problems can stand against a million competent businesses all working to fix things.

I want to see a detailed, process-oriented documentary about how the toilet paper manufacturers and distributors responded during the first few weeks of the pandemic. I bet there were damn near heroic efforts put out by some individuals, just to keep the supply flowing.

[randomsearch]

Same. I did notice however that prices went up across the board, and some generic products appeared that I hadn’t seen before.

The biggest difference (in the U.K.) is that almost all offers, discounts, disappeared. Effectively a temporary price hike.

So I concluded that probably my mistake was to underestimate the power of the market to regulate demand through higher prices. I can imagine people who stockpiled initially wouldn’t have been so keen to fill the trolley once the prices of some products doubled.

[kaesar14]

Right, I don't understand the claims that COVID proved how fragile the global supply chain/capitalism have made our civilization. Despite lockdowns, millions of people getting sick and dying, and widespread panic, the food and goods never stopped moving. The interconnectedness makes us stronger, as we're able to marshal the resources of a global civilization to compensate for issues as they arise.

[tharkun__]

Just imagine if the border closure between the US and Canada actually applied to truck drivers the same way it applies to regular travel (say to see your parents that live right across the border).

There are many more examples all around the world like that. It's just that we don't apply the same rules in order to keep the supply chain going, which is needed to keep civilization going and not going into a SHTF scenario. At least here in Canada, meat processing plants is another one of those examples. They had a real issue with that in the beginning where too many plants were shut down due to infections. It's the same in Germany for example. It's low paid labour. Usually done by people from Eastern Europe and they live crammed together while in Germany and they have a steady flow of people coming and going to flout rules about paying for proper social insurance and such, so you have a steady exchange of potential Covid-19 carriers between countries that have lived and worked in ideal conditions for large outbreaks. But you know, people gotta eat and eat cheap!

[tonyedgecombe]

>Just imagine if the border closure between the US and Canada actually applied to truck drivers the same way it applies to regular travel

We did briefly have that with the border between the UK and the EU. It soon got resolved.

[Nasrudith]

To be frank a lot of the vague ill defined claims aboht "capitalism/fragile" appeared to be ideological whataboutism from both communists and antiglobalists respectively. The previous defensively about their infamous shortages but that fails with a nanosecond of thought because to get the lasting shortages took /a fucking global pandemic/ instead of business as usual being empty shelves and occassionally massive overclocking of one thing.

It strikes me as cognitive dissonance and rigid thinking that capitalism equals always bad ior global connections equals always bad and spitefully trying to find something to justify their dogma.

[estaseuropano]

Doea it show the fragility? To whom? And do you feel it in your daily life?

I feel the 'toilet paper shortage'- period of the pandemic provided a much more visceral idea of how fragile it all is. This ship we won't feel in our daily lives anytime soon.

[aeternum]

The toilet paper shortage was also pretty overblown. A quick 30-second shower (or bidet) is more sanitary than TP anyway.

If a dog poops on the floor, we generally do not just wipe it a few times with a dry paper towel. It's intriguing we humans find that an acceptable solve when it comes to our own body.

[stjohnswarts]

The other end of the spectrum of humanity are those who think it's actually healthy to sanitize everything to the point that it's obsessive and don't acknowledge that somehow our ancestors survived down through millions of years of evolution.

[yen223]

Honest question - is anyone reading this still facing a shortage of toilet paper right now?

[throwaway894345]

> So I like this stuck boat because it shows where "the system" has weaknesses.

I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems. Of course I would never say I'm glad that we had a pandemic considering the lives and livelihoods lost, including among my family.

[enjoy-your-stay]

>I felt similarly about the pandemic exposing the fragility of our economy and the cracks in our political systems.

I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well.

Of course for some it's been worse than for others, but on the whole the planet has coped not too badly. It has also flushed out at least one useless govt from power (US), is in the process of hopefully doing so with another (Brazil), and we can only hope that it will also hasten the departure of England's PM too.

We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.

[throwaway894345]

> I have to say I'm of the opposite view - all things considered systems and people have been pretty resilient and have coped quite well.

I mean, it's all relative, right? From my US perspective, I guess prior to the pandemic, I thought the CDC was one of the few federal agencies with a high degree of competence, but they didn't even have meaningful reserves of ventilators, masks, or other PPE nor any plans to procure the same (even though we've had several major respiratory epidemics). Similarly, there were apparently no plans to scale up PCR testing capacity, and the CDC rejected the WHO test in favor of its own tests which were problematic at the start, especially in that they were difficult to scale. The testing turned out to be an even bigger debacle because it left decision makers completely in the dark.

Even if you lay the blame at the hands of Congress for defunding them, that still indicates a problem with our political health.

So yeah, we didn't enter a dark age or anything, but it was far worse than I would have guessed. The death toll is still quite high, but to your point, it could have been higher.

> We have however been very very lucky this time in that the virus is not that serious. A repeat e.g. of the 1918 influenza would have been much much worse.

I guess my point is that prior to the pandemic, I expected that our advancements in science and technology (if not politics) would have left us much more capable of dealing with a disease like the 1918 influenza than we apparently are.

[manigandham]

How is this a weakness with "the system"? What's that even mean? What is strength supposed to look like?

If somebody bombed the canal or a ship sank at the entrance then it would be a similar situation. Sometimes it's just risk and crazy events, not some planned ineptitude.

The fact that the world continues just fine is actually evidence of how resilient everything is.

[madeofpalk]

I actually take the opposite view - that in spite of how big of a fuckup this is, and how much of an impact it has on global trade/shipping, the end impact to us will probably end up being relatively small.

Probably. Impacts wont be apparently for a while I guess.

[TheRealDunkirk]

But that's the point, isn't it? In the general sense, one stuck container ship in the world shouldn't have any impact on "us," except for the people whose "stuff" is on it.

[Nasrudith]

That sounds a bit too self-centered a viewpoint in that it is far too narrow and ignoring that there are knock on effects to everything in a general sense that while they fade into the ambient still have an impact. You may not notice say a banana blight in Ecuador and might ask "whatever what does that even mean to me"? Then you wonder why bananas went up fifty cents a piece.

[madeofpalk]

Well, it's not just one stuck ship. A major shipping route is now blocked, impacting many other ships.

[leetcrew]

I made a similar observation in april 2020. everyone was saying that covid was exposing the inherent fragility of JIT shipping or even the entire system of capitalism. in reality, the worst that happened was toilet paper was out of stock for a few weeks and I had to settle for my second-favorite shape of pasta a couple times.

[nicoburns]

Things clearly weren't that bad where you were. I had to settle for my 5th favourite pasta shape on a couple of occasions!

(true story, but to be taken in jest)

[cableshaft]

If you were into board games, you'd probably have felt it. Just about every board game release and reprint has had (and are still having) significant delays thanks to the pandemic.

[madeofpalk]

I think in terms of "how fragile the world is", board games don't really rank, respecfully. Minor inconvenience, but we carry on.

[tonyedgecombe]

This is the point though, having plenty of slack in the economy (board games, theme parks, etc) means that we would have to fall a long way before people started feeling hungry.

[Can_Not]

The number of homeless people I see in the streets has visibility doubled, but I'm sure the marginal availability of board games is a sign they aren't feeling any hungrier than usual.

[rdtwo]

Folks are also hording these for secondary market resell. Margins are good and a resellers can easily eat half the stock or more for secondary markets.

[sdeframond]

Well, I have been trying to find zero-drop trail shoes for almost a year now. The shops just don't have my size anymore. Shop owners tell me the logistic chain has been pretty impacted indeed.

Nothing vital of course, still.

[rdtwo]

The secondary market for shoes sweeps up all stock and resells. It’s gotten insanely competitive and bots are one-upping other bots for speed. If you want a desirable shoe just go ebay or stockx. You can’t compete as a manual buyer

[leetcrew]

there are some very specific items I am still having trouble finding. close substitutes are available, but I'm willing to wait for the exact thing I want. looks like the picture of graceful degradation to me.

[TheRealDunkirk]

Weeks? Around here, it was tough to find on the shelf for, like, 6 months, and I started to question my sanity.

[mikelward]

It also affected PSU availability, and auto chip availability.

[Toks]

The weakness of capitalism doesn't need to be exposed, it needs to be acknowledged. And since it's a system that is very profitable for a lot of very powerful people, it's going to take more than a simple pandemic for the status quo to change.

[mam2]

dropout for real life