117
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
117 points (100.0% liked)
chapotraphouse
13561 readers
629 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Gossip posts go in c/gossip. Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from c/gossip
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I don't think you need to rely on people to scuttle, if things get bad enough it will sink itself because it will melt a hole straight through the ship.
Potentially melting down in the middle of a shallow city harbour as an overworked skeleton crew is worried about their families back home getting evicted for not paying the rent all while the parent company does more layoffs and posts record profits in their quarterly reports.
As opposed to the mass extinctions caused by global warming going on right now??
What is your point that you are unwilling to hear safety concerns bc it's worse right now? That's why there is a mass extinction. We have to move away and address safety at the same time. If that means removing private companies from shipping, so be it.
Classic "letting perfect be the enemy of good" energy.
Which is an excellent argument for going back to wind powered ships. Who cares if the treats come a bit more slowly?
I'd love some engineers to do that, I think it'd be totally awesome. However, that hasn't been done and we can only compare proposed solutions to existing ones, not hypothetical ones.
Sailboats are hypothetical?
the best clippers were fractions of the size of the boats now, even if modern materials can make a more efficient one, we're talking a difference of 1780 tons --> 336000 tons here. to say nothing of how much more labor is involved on a rigged ship
But what if you replaced one boat with more than one boat?
about every cargo ship has a smaller crew than an old clipper. with central planning and a disregard for profit we could multiply the number of sailors in the world by a few x100 times, but there's no way a capitalist enterprise, or even state-run one that must compete with capitalists will do that.
That fundamentally is the core of the issue though, isn’t it? So long as profit is required we can only do completely batshit things like electric car charging stations in the middle of a 10 hectare surface parking lot and nuclear plants built into every rusty container ship. Stuff that has worked for centuries like trains and sailboats are just too radical and have too many fussy little problems.
so they've mounted some sails on the big cargo ships but all they do is reduce fuel use by 20-30%. if it's even feasible for ships larger than 30% the size of a modern bulk, they gotta be newly built, no retrofitting. rigging does have a bit of automation recently so the question of how much more labor is open, though smaller ships would necessarily mean more labor for the same amount of cargo.
like i endorse it if someone got this going in an mechanized, full-wind power way. it would be dope, but ironically a much larger project than this nuclear boat. which is just changing out the engine that drives the propellor
It's much better to just reduce shipping volume than dive into the unknown without considering safe guards. Your making dangerous arguments that are following the same reckless ideas that got us here.
Which would require a global revolution to accomplish, vs a solution that reduces real harms right now. I thought communists weren't supposed to be utopian?
Utopian is thinking that you just hope it all works out and roll forward ignoring risk again.
The thread is absolutely filled with people telling you there is little to fear. Nuclear isn't profitable, that is why capitalists have brainwashed you into believing it is dangerous. Even with the noted disasters, nuclear has still killed a fraction of the people coal has, per kilowatt hour created. Hell, coal plants are even more radioactive than nuclear ones. And this ship is safer still, because it quite literally can't catastrophically meltdown, as it is in the FUCKING OCEAN.
Such is true, and yet, it would be safer without the commercialization of shipping. What point do you make? None. Only suggesting that we just blindly accept. Not shipping is the best step today until we understand the risks of a new system. Think beyond tomorrow and go slow. We need not rush, only not be complacent. To rush to gain is the disease of the capitalist.
So wait until the oceans are dead already from global warming and acidification and the grand magical global socialist revolution that is coming "any day I swear guys any day" for the last 150 years to do anything about it?
I don't think capitalist globalism is good, I don't think the planet's resources should be being drained so that the treats keep flowing, but there will be megaships carrying goods globally for the foreseeable future, and this could actually, meaningfully reduce our harm done to the precious earth.
The question kind of is what's the other options. The organizational and economic pressure still applies to ICE ships. Not sure I'd be much happier about a normal tanker dumping a few thousand liters of crude oil on the coast.