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.
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I worked at a single-screen movie theater when I was in grad school. It was an old building that the owner had spent years renovating. We were opening in June, and in late-May, the stage we called "final touches" was in process. A plumber came to do the final plumbing check. He was in there for a long time, but hey, he's a plumber! He's doing his work! Twenty minutes later, he emerged. He talked to my boss for a few minutes, and it was clear they didn't get along very well. As he left, my boss muttered something under his breath.
A few minutes later, our own Evergreen moment.
Sarah went to clean the women's bathroom. We had customers coming soon! We were excited. She was gone just a moment and then we heard the scream. We waited.
She emerged. "You have to see this," she said. She looked like she'd been punched in the throat.
We walked in and the smell was enough. The plumber had left a giant turd in one of the toilets. I say this at the vantage of a man who has raised four children: reader, it was the biggest log I've ever seen in my life. The smell wasn't the worst (that was an overnight Dodge Caravan ride from Chicago to Orlando with four kids from 3 to 11, two of them with stomach flu), but the sight...
"Flush it!" Sarah yelled at me. I used my foot. It wouldn't flush.
"Flush it again!"
I flushed again. It didn't budge.
"ZACH FLUSH IT!"
The water was at the top of the bowl. "I can't flush it again, it'll end up on the floor!"
Our solution: my boss grabbed a crowbar. He told me he would pay me an extra hour if I broke it up in pieces so it would flush. Reader, I did it. That's my solution. Large crowbar, tiny pieces, flush them one at a time.
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.