I didn't say that builders didn't use F-150s, just that a monster truck with a 6 liter diesel isn't necessary. It's far more a macho thing than anything else. If you need to haul a horse trailer or an excavator or something, then yes, otherwise it's excessive.

It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

My, we are an aggressively stupid dipshit today.

The only thing that meaningfully matters to a cargo ship is size.
Vessels are already slow sailing to artificially constrain bandwidth and prop up rates, and have been since COVID.

Nobody on earth is trying to build FASTER cargo ships, and haven't for 50 years. Jesus Christ. If only slashdot had a "doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about" filter.

Hee, hee. My dad was a fanatical fisherman on the Great Lakes. I remember looking out on the whitefish grounds on Grand Traverse Bay one winter and seeing one black dot on the ice, which we knew was Dad, and an ice breaker with the oil company ship behind it. The reason that I had looked is because the ships were blasting their horns at him to get out of their way. Stubborn bugger that he was, he didn't and eventually the ships had to go around him. When we asked him about it he said, "The fish were biting, and I'll be damned if I'm going to move when they're biting!"

Really? That's the opposite of what I thought it would be. Thanks.

Well, no, there's no law against shipping single containers at a time either. It just means a banana costs $100,000.

We have an entire thread here where you have ecological doomsayers are telling the world's most efficient transport industry how they can do things better. Sure.

Half the size? By what math?

It can carry 5300t. That's 215x 20t containers.

The largest container ships today are in the 23000 teu range which even if we assume they can't all max out at 20t... Let's assume 10t.... Is still 230,000t or 43x larger.

Modern freighters can go through a force 12. Good luck doing that in a sailing ship from any era.

Amazon has had to pay employees for the time it takes for them to go through the security process at their warehouses, as do gemstone processing facilities. This is no different. It's disappointing that these people have to waste time and money in court, once the precedent has been established enforcement should be automatic.

Actually the Russian Coast Guard also has extensive experience managing nuclear powered ice breakers (they run all of the largest ice breakers in the world.) Russian sailors are probably a lot cheaper than American ones. :-)

The Fitzgerald had to change course because of the waves, they wouldn't have wanted the waves, coming out of the north, on their port side. Taconite pellets (partly processed iron ore) can shift in the holds, and if part of the cargo moves and the other doesn't on a 1000 foot ore boat it could twist the hull (that may have actually contributed to the breakup, it's unknown). They knew they were near Whitefish Bay, but needed to head into the storm for stability.

Depends on crewing and the availability of customers who aren't in a hurry for delivery. One savings over a Panamax right off the top is the 40,000 or more gallons of fuel that it won't be burning every day. Another is that these ships apparently are exceedingly automated (in part because that's the only way to deal with sails that size), if they can reduce the crew size so that they're only paying 10% as many crew per ship as the Panamax it's break-even.

Ah. I grew up on the Great Lakes, where they're 'pilots'.

The kinds of foods that trash your LDL predate the FDA and the United States.

Yes, or a rowboat, or drifting debris, or . . .

The only thing that I can agree with in your entire post is the last line. It's pretty much a given that if they win employees will get pennies on the dollar, and the leeches will get millions.