Open Thread: The Great Boat Heist
Amazon, you're in trouble
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Good morning to everyone except Jay Carney, the former Obama spokesman rumored to be responsible for the @AmazonNews twitter account that provided an excuse for every news outlet to publish a story yesterday about how Amazon makes its workers pee in bottles to meet their crushing performance targets. The Intercept has Amazon internal documents about the pee bottles. Motherboard has pictures of the actual pee bottles. Insider has lots of Amazon workers talking about the pee bottles. The Washington Post just recapped the whole thing. All of this traces back most recently to a Guardian story about the pee bottles that it’s possible you missed until Amazon chose to draw your attention back to it. Meanwhile, Pepsi announced a Peeps flavored cola in a pee-yellow can and managed to avoid calling it “Peepsi” so maybe Jay should give them a call for some Pee-R help?
But pee is not our true subject today! Friends, I come to you with a problem. As you may have heard, there’s a big boat stuck in the two hundred meter wide straw that we decided to funnel a hefty chunk of global trade through. Here’s a spooky satellite radar picture of the situation, where you can clearly see Ever Given’s immortal spirit, also completely wedged:
The BBC has a roundup of what we’ve tried so far, which includes some useful diagrams. Slate’s Dan Kois asked a bunch of kids what we should do, and I think they’re on the right track. We did some math on Garrett’s rocket idea from yesterday and determined that it would only take 2,800 Falcon Heavy rockets to lift the ship to low earth orbit, assuming we have enough strong space rope.
Reaching orbit is not technically required here (although extra credit if you can do it) but we do need to get the ship unstuck. Tabs subscribers are well known for being both smart and creative, so if anyone can do it, we can. No idea is too dumb! It is only getting boat unstuck, and you are a beautiful person. Hit the 💬 and let’s brainstorm our way out of this mess. The world needs us.
I'm taking this quiet to mean that nobody here is an expert on boats. I consider myself an expert on boats because my cousin's husband is a tugboat captain on the Mississippi and I've spent maybe 12 hours total in his presence so that has to count for something.
Have they considered trained dolphins?
How about we pull a Ship of Theseus: We dismantle the Ever Given piece by piece, replacing each part with a newer/better part that orients with the canal. Then, we take the parts we've removed and rebuild them in reverse order, in the nearby Alexandria Shipyard. Finally, we sit and argue about wether or not after replacing all the original parts, we can still call it the Ever Given, or if in fact the ship we rebuilt in Alexandria is the actual Ever Given. Problem solved, physically if not philosophically.