Yeap, it's a bit strange, but the post was very well written, with a nice breakdown and easily understandable steps that can be followed by most software engineers.
There have been some sporadic posts from Skroutz in the past, but nothing that gained so much attention.
For those that don't know it, Skroutz is the biggest Greek online price aggregator/e-commerce market/price comparison site.
from ec.europa.eu: "Accession negotiations started in 2005, but until Turkey agrees to apply the Additional Protocol of the Ankara Association Agreement to Cyprus, eight negotiation chapters will not be opened and no chapter will be provisionally closed."
Yes, but even Cyprus wasn't an iron wall back then. Turkey signalled many times that they will do Cyprus, they had numerous talks over it, and French signalled they will not let them in anyways.
For a European the above statement sounds so strange, alsmost fictional like.
I thought that we have already established that a truly free market does not exist.
I've had similar emotional reactions to hearing about Europeans censoring/surveilling their citizens (openly, unlike in the US where it still happens but it's "secret" and illegal.)
Some feedback that will help better understanding of costs.
1. A medium size container vessel (10k TEUS) with abt 15kts speeds will cost the same as the canal transit cost now that the fuel is relatively cheap, compared to the Africa voyage. But you save time.
2. Major liners (APM, MSC, etc), enjoy significant discounts over face value for the canal transits as they commit volumes. The discounts could be north of 30%+, but not publicly available. WILHELMSEN has a nice calculator
3. There is no scenario that something cannot be monetized, either it will be fuel or time or both. As such any financial loss due to the canal clocking can be calculated. The vessel’s P&I will be very busy.
if this ship is purely wind powered and basis on the published info this seems to be the case, i.e. there is no main engine of any type/fuel for propulsion - commercially it’s not viable.
Shipping is highly optimized for arrival to a destination/port on a very narrow time window. Even delays of a couple of hours will be extremely expensive. For example, late arrival to SUEZ means that the vessel will join the end of the convoy at a premium rate costing hundreds of thousands of USD in additional fees. Not only that, Ports and Charterers (Liners) are working basis specific arrival times, you cannot simply arrival late because the wind was not favorable.
It could work as an assisting system, such as Flettner rotors , skysails ,etc
It has an ‘auxiliary engine’ for port manoeuvring and ‘emergency power’. This ship is being designed for the Atlantic route and I imagine will be sailing with the trade winds to get more consistent winds (Clockwise around the Atlantic). The reason this is being built for roro cars rather than traditional cargo is probably due to the logistics.
It seems pretty likely that this also has a significant amount of generator capacity on board. Even small sailboats often have to run their engine or generator during passages to top up their battery.
I understand what you say. But maybe it's time to forget about that kind of time optimization and replace it by an optimization for fuel efficiency... Else we'll be stuck in the past...
If fuel savings are great enough, this could be irrelevant, and planned around.
And there could be a premium for the service. I could see Tesla paying extra to ship electric cars with burning bunker fuel. As a customer I’d pay extra for that.
Well, their website claims "90% lower emissions than a vessel with a diesel engine" so evidently they use some form of engine, or they'd be claiming 100% lower! i would guess it's like most sailing boats, and it has a small(-ish) engine and prop for use when docking/maneuvering up close/no wind, and also a genset for onboard electrical power.
You'd probably do the same thing that powered ships do: build extra time into the schedule so that you never arrive late. This ship probably needs more padding because it relies on the wind, but the whole concept seems to be that that's an acceptable tradeoff for the environmental gains.
from a European point of view, the market belongs to the people, not Apple and thus they must play by the rules the State set, for and on the behalf of the people.
