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Wooo, finally an article about how hosed up shipbuilding is in China that's not behind a paywall: Deadbeat Chinese Shipyards Stick Banks With Default Bill quote:Chinese bankers rushed to finance shipbuilding after the 2008 global financial crisis as Beijing pushed easy credit and tax incentives to lift the industry and sustain industrial employment levels in the face of collapsing exports.
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Apr 8, 2014 18:24
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There's no way that's not a ponzi scheme.
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May 8, 2014 17:11
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computer parts posted:It is sort of a chicken-egg thing but I don't think even in China you can live that well on $5k USD/month. Are you saying that the average household income in Chian is one hundred and twenty thousands United States Dollars per year? Because I don't think that's right.
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May 8, 2014 17:31
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If their actual CPI is high enough that a 20% APR return is low, you still shouldn't invest because that economy is about to loving explode.
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May 9, 2014 01:54
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Install Windows posted:You're making the unfounded assumption that they will care about there being more unemployed people than there are now. You're assuming the massive amount of starving unemployed won't start poo poo. China doesn't have nearly the welfare programs western countries do; an unemployed populace is likely to grow restless really fast.
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May 10, 2014 05:21
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Accretionist posted:And while this is being presented as a serious proposal, should it be taken seriously? No. I'm sure it'll be in Popular Mechanic though.
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May 12, 2014 00:01
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computer parts posted:Note that while rail transport will be faster than ships the vast majority of freight will still go by ships because they're really loving big. Bingo. An 8000 TEU ship can carry 8000 twenty feet containers, or 4000 forty feet containers. Realistically, it's going to be in the middle if it's fully loaded; and it can haul all that poo poo at 21 knots, or 24 MPH. That's a lotsa ton-miles per day. Your train is going to carry, realistically, 2 forty feet containers per car. That's 2000 cars to carry the equivalent of a single container ship; now those cars have to go up North to Russia, across to Alaska, down the coast through the Rockies... And you have to recover the cost of all the infrastructure that implies, which is going to be significant to say the least. Further, you have to have Russia, Canada and the US on board. All the time. Borders are really easy to close. Accretionist posted:Also, if the Arctic Circle is going to be as big a deal as I've seen suggested, could this project be thought of as less connecting china to the world than connecting Arctic-adjacent Sino-Russian rail infrastructure to the world? The Arctic circle is not going to be as big a deal as you've heard; it's entirely a bunch of consultants and policy science people circlejerking via interposed articles. The Arctic is an ocean; there's resources to be pulled out of there - assuming their price justifies the technical challenges and the environmental headaches - and they're going to come out by ship to wherever they're going to be processed. Once they're processed, they'll just piggy back onto the existing transportation network. If you enjoy watching overschooled bulllshitters eat their socks, watch your favorite "THE ARCTIC IS THE WAY OF THE FUTURE!" and "THE NORTH WEST PASSAGE IS GOING TO BE THE WORLD'S HIGHWAY!" writer this summer. They'll probably be pretty quiet, because a cold winter and a slow spring... The ice cover up there is going to be far from 2012. I was gonna segue into a rant about how the North West and North East passages won't be economically viable sea routes any time soon, but that's getting off topic and I think the issue's been covered well enough in the technical press.
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May 12, 2014 00:46
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Install Windows posted:Yeah but air cargo is even worse for price and ability to carry but it still gets used. Air cargo gets used for high value or perishable cargo. Light stuff, small stuff, really expensive stuff - We're talking either stuff that gets Fedexed or time-critical spare parts and race horses, that kind of stuff. Air freight is a tiny rear end part of the total cargo carried worldwide, and it's a pretty niche case - Stuff that needs to get there in days or it's going to be more expensive than shipping it by plane. The middle-of-the-way case for rail isn't there. Rail is a *shitload* more expensive, because it's not as fuel-efficient as shipping, and you have to pay for the tracks. Or in this case, the ridiculous trans-pacific tunnel, that needs to be built and maintained. A Shanghai to LA container voyage by sea is ballpark 11 days. Obviously I don't have the rail distances and speed for the same trip, and I assume the US logistic hub would shift to the Pacific Northwest in that situation (There's an expense) but say it's a 7 days trip. I don't think that's too ridiculous considering the distances invovled, and note that I'm abstracting other points of friction such as turnaround times. For a cargo of the same value, you can afford a 47% freight rate increase to shift to trains. Seems like a lot? You're looking at $1200 per container by sea. That means train would have to come in under $1764. As to the political aspect, I don't doubt that Canada and the US would be onboard... To an extent. You're still going to have to find easements for the tracks, quiet down the environmentalists and locals that are going to lose their poo poo (Canadians don't like trains these days), the port workers and shipping companies that are going to do everything they can to stop the whole thing... And from a shipper's perspective, you're looking to stabilize your supply chain for years at a time. All it takes is a disagreement over locomotive exhaust emissions, or natives in BC blocking the track, and the system is disrupted - We gotta get 20 000 rail cars a day through this thing, remember? Now of course if there's a shift to rail, the container ship capacity is going to be reduced. Shipping lines aren't going to keep ships around if they're sitting empty. So now XYZ Logistics has a bunch of containers sitting in Tsingtao that gotta get to LA/LB, there's been a landslide in Alaska and it's going to be a week before the trains can go through again (And then a week before the backlog clears). So now they have to hustle to get space on container ships, which they have to pay a premium for because everyone's trying to do the same thing... Or they could have just avoided the whole headache by booking on container ships in the first place. The good thing about the marine industry is that if a ship fucks up, you're down a ship. If a train fucks up, you're down a track. Took what, ten months to get the Lac-Megantic spur back in operation? Predictability is extremely valuable in logistics. Dusseldorf posted:Is it actually that much faster? Freight trains don't run that much faster than cargo ships and over a much longer distance. Freight trains run at 60 MPH in flat, open area; ships run at 25 MPH or so. If you're looking at ton-miles per day, though, the ship probably wins. I can't speak as to handling and turnaround times, though; I'm not familiar enough with rail operations. caberham posted:Isn't most of China's high speed rail network mostly for passengers? Do they actually slap freight on it at night? The time-value of freight isn't enough to justify using HSR; if you have a cargo that's high value enough you're going to want the added flexibility of trucks or you'll use a train. Plus passengers are self-loading; you'd lose a lot of the advantage on turnaround. No sense having the cargo travel at 500 MPH if it's going to sit in a warehouse for eight hours first. FrozenVent fucked around with this message at 01:26 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 01:24
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Do you know of any track anywhere that isn't just sitting unprotected? It's what tracks do; they sit there. At the end of the day, no matter how over-engineered it is, any rail system is dependent on the infrastructure being intact over a long linear distance. You have a break anywhere, and assuming the system is at full utilization, everything stops. If they don't pass off the cost of the infrastructure to the customer, then they have to subsidize the ever loving poo poo out of it. I have a feeling Panama, the Marshall Island and Liberia are going to have something to say about that at the WTO, (And they'll suddenly have all sorts of resources to start poo poo over there!) amongst other concerned stakeholders. The charge would be ridiculous because the cost of the system would be ridiculous. Sea shipping is way cheaper and more flexible (The capacity is more elastic and there's little infrastructure required), there's no way a solution involving a 120 mile undersea tunnel is going to be viable for the foreseeable future.
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May 12, 2014 01:41
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I was operating under the assumption that the proposed trans-pacific rail system wouldn't be HSR; if the intent was for it to be HSR, I'd like to edit my previous posts in the following manner: FOR (All text) READ "LOL".
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May 12, 2014 04:06
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Jagchosis posted:Yeah the whole thing is a HSR passenger train, but don't edit your posts, they're pretty educational about transcontinental logistics. I for one can't wait to take a four days train voyage instead of a 12 hour plane ride.
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May 12, 2014 04:17
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You'd need a second siding just for the HSR trains, or have the HSR slaloming between the freight trains. Or you schedule your freight trains so the HSR has a clear shot through the line, but then your utilization is going to be atrocious.
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May 12, 2014 05:19
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Export companies might not get paid on order. They get the order, go to their bank with the order, get credit, use that credit to pay for raw materials, employees and what not, produce, ship, get paid, repay the bank. If the bank is no longer around to give you credit... You need customers who pay upfront, so you need customers who have access to credit. Even if that customer is in a country with a solid economy, when they go to their bank and go "I need a loan in RMB so I can pay this Chinese company in advance to produce some widgets...", if the Chinese economy is shitfucked... Credit isn't just mortgages and credit cards, it's an important part of international trade.
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Jun 2, 2014 01:57
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CNN posted:In the latest move in China's anti-corruption campaign, more than 1,000 people in Guangdong Province have been marked as "naked officials" -- those suspected of storing graft gains with overseas family members. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/09/world/asia/china-naked-officials/index.html Not that it means much of anything on a grander scale, but hey, at least they're pretending to do something about it.
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Jun 9, 2014 14:49
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dr_rat posted:Even better The port of Duluth is something like 184 meters above sea level.
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Jun 30, 2014 17:50
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dr_rat posted:Unless I'm missing something its just on natural lakes, with upstream river flow into it meaning the elevation isn't a factor. Yeah ships drive right over Niagara Falls, no big deal. I agree that they would need a significant quantity of water to flood the upper part, but there's no need to have it flow out all that quick. Oh and a 3000 ton ship is tiny, that-number-is-missing-a-zero tiny.
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Jul 1, 2014 04:30
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Arglebargle III posted:Canal more like anal can! Panama's an inter oceanic canal though, it's just built with locks because it was easier to do it that way. Compare to Suez. The Beijing canal idea is pretty dumb, but not because of the scale of the project - it's just pointless.
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Jul 7, 2014 00:35
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Crap in grain loads is pretty much standards though, I had stevedores pull a cat out of a hold once. Pigeons and rats you don't even notice... Rust flakes never happen  How much crap there is depends on where you loaded it and how it was inspected, of course.Human consumption stuff is usually inspected to a much higher standard.
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Aug 13, 2014 17:55
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computer parts posted:That's not padding employment, that's doing what's traditionally been the cheapest way to make a product. Automation is actually really really expensive and annoying (especially when major infrastructure like the internet didn't really exist in large parts of the country 7 years ago) and commonly it's actually cheaper to just stick with people. It's like saying that the US pads employment statistics by using wait staff instead of tablets for order processing/payment. Plus the cost of labor is so cheap in China that it doesn't make sense to automate. Why would you buy a $350 Roomba if you could hire a maid for $20 a month?
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Sep 25, 2014 05:02
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India's basically China without the veneer of propaganda, and the ridiculous growth rate fueled by a command economy.
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Sep 27, 2014 03:26
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Continued government propping of the shipbuilding industry: Reuter posted:SHANGHAI, Sept 30 (Reuters) – China has given four shipping lines including China Cosco 1.8 billion yuan ($293.3 million) in subsidies to encourage them to retire and upgrade their vessels, the four companies said. The thing with shipbuilding is that demand fluctuates naturally depending on demand for ocean transportation at any given time, with some amount of lag (because shipbuilding is a somewhat long term investment). Ships themselves are a commodity, and to an extent so is shipbuilding capacity. China had cheap steel and cheap labor, so for a while they were building cheap ships... And business was good so everyone was building new ships to increase capacity. Then 2009 happened and the market contracted, so people kept using the new boats and scrapped the old poo poo... But they also stopped ordering new ships. So the shipyards ran out of work, and when there's nothing on the slips, you lay off the shipwrights and welders and whatnot. China does not like unemployment, so the government decided that part of their energy policy was to have domestic crude oil shipping capability. They ordered a poo poo ton of oil tankers; this sudden capacity increase decreased the worldwide charter rates, which lowered the value of tankers themselves, which makes them less attractive to build... tl;dr, China's trying to prop up its shipbuilding industry at the expense of the global shipping industry. It won't work eternally.
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Oct 1, 2014 04:26
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Increased shipping capacity doesn't mean you have to ship more, it just means that you can ship more and it's cheaper to do so. But otherwise yeah that sounds right to me.
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Nov 3, 2014 23:09
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My Imaginary GF posted:There is an ongoing purge, no matter what PRC deigns to call it. I'm expecting it to hit Macau soon. The Chinese government built too many tankers, the poo poo coming out of china gets shipped in container ships. The tanker and bulk markets are cratered, it will take years for the rates to recover. It's very cheap to move stuff right now for the people doing the shipping, it's not profitable for the carrier. Nobody is subsidizing poo poo (except in the case of Chinese carriers but then China subsidizes everything). Carriers are underbidding one another to try to recoup some of their investment, that's all it is. That being said, very little cargo coming out of China gets moved on Chinese flag ships. And the cost of shipping is a tiny tiny part of the cost if goods on the shelf. Cheap bunker's going to be great for carrier's margins though.
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Dec 14, 2014 06:17
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I don think those huge infrastructure projects are intended to turn a profit. They're intended to keep people employed.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:53
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Coal prices are pretty close or are at an all time low, china has lax environmental standards, and they burn he shittiest thermal coal possible. There's no way nuclear can compete with coal in China. They're going to get their lunch eaten.
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Apr 17, 2015 12:25
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Couple of years back China was about to start building an alternative to the Panama Canal through Nicaragua. Any day now.
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May 21, 2015 02:57
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Chinese coal imports for the month of May are down over 40% year on year... So I don't know how the gently caress they're growing. Source: somewhere on Bloomberg earlier this week, I'm on my tablet.
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Jun 10, 2015 00:16
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z0glin Warchief posted:You assume China has sane laws in place regulating this stuff. maybe they do I dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me if this wasn't actually illegal "Illegal" in China is a much more fluid concept than westerners are used to.
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Jul 4, 2015 15:23
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A container port that doesn't handle IMDG cargo is, in a way, the most Chinese thing ever.
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Aug 31, 2015 03:51
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Artificer posted:Where are you basing the "demonstrably awful in practice" education systems from? Are there studies on it? I'm curious because I would hate to be in that system because of the high stress, emphasis on memorization, etc. parts of it but obviously that isn't enough to convince people that math score ratings internationally aren't the end all be all. I spent some time at a university in China. Students would hand in copy pasted Wikipedia pages, [citation needed] and all. They'd get A's. I've heard enough stories about Ph.D advisors straight up writing their student's thesis that I'd be leery of hiring anyone with a degree from a Chinese institution.
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Sep 9, 2015 02:45
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Shifty Pony posted:The dimensions of the Panama Canal locks is one of the major limitations for the size of cargo ships. For a certain class of ships, yes, but as fishmech said the canal is being expended. In practice, it wouldn't be such a huge deal because there's a limit to how big you can make canals anyway, and... Shifty Pony posted:Wasn't one of the make work programs China did to dump ton of new cargo ships on the market? A new canal would create more reason for companies to buy bigger newer ships. They sure did! And then their economy shat the bed and they stopped buying so much raw materials, so these ships are now sitting idle or desperate for work. So nobody is buying new ships, because why would you spend fifty millions on a boat that's going to sit collecting ~$8,000* a day in freight, after fuel? Now if you're the guy doing the renting, you don't give a poo poo that your hundred and fifty thousand tons of dirt are going to get here twenty days later because that'll cost you a whooping $160,000 extra, as opposed to paying for canal fee on the two boats you'd need otherwise and warehousing for all that raw material that showed up early. Fun facts: ships make for great warehouses when they're cheap. Anyone investing money in shipping right now is loving up. It's going to take years for the market to recover. And I recall reading an article recently where some reporters went to Nicaragua to look for the canal... Apparently there's not a lot going on there. *of course that's not profitable.
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Oct 5, 2015 05:17
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SDR's are also used to set the liability limit for ship owners or carriers in various international conventions (Hague-Visby, civil liability convention, hazardous and noxious substances are the three that come to mind). I'm sure other industries do similar things. To the average Joe, though, it's completely meaningless.
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Dec 3, 2015 06:07
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As I said in the GBS thread, if you show up to meet a supplier and check out their production line and the supplier offer to send you on a vacation on their dime instead? You should not take the vacation.
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Mar 22, 2016 23:37
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 10:37 |
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waitwhatno posted:I don't know that much about the inner workings of bitcoin, but my guess is that there are ten thousand ways to solve that problem by, for example, periodically pruning the blockchain or resetting it or something. You can't prune the blockchain because it doesn't store account balances anywhere. So if someone hasn't used their bitcoins in five years, and you prune that... Welp those bitcoins are gone forever. Bitcoin isn't badly designed, it's hilariously badly designed.
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Aug 15, 2016 20:40
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