I remember having the shower thought that you could replace canals with railways by redesigning ships to automatically, rapidly offload containers directly onto some superfast maglev railway, effectively "shooting" the containers to the other side.
But running the numbers on it, you really can't compete on throughput, what with the truly massive capacity of cargo ships. Like, even if it had only 3000 conatiners, it only has to go at 1/1500th of the rail speed (assuming you can stack them two-high) to beat it. This page[1] says panamaxes have traditionally held 5000, with "New Panamax"es carrying 13,000.
(Edit: ChatGPT tells me that transit of the canal takes 10 hours on the high side, and it's 82 km long, so that's an effective ship speed of 8.2 km per hour, meaning the rail would have to go 20,000 km/h to compete on throughput.)
But yeah, the other advantages you mention would apply.
First: When the GP said 13,000 containers, I presume that's TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit). A double-stack rail car holds 4 TEU. That means that you only (!) need 3,250 cars to replace the ship. That's a really long train.
What's perhaps more reasonable is to replace it with maybe 20 trains. You could maybe run such trains on a 10-minute headway, so 6 trains an hour, so 3 1/3 hours.
That's to replace one ship.
But it's also if you only have a single track rail line. You could build N parallel tracks along the same route. (This is far more reasonable than trying to build something where you can stack the containers 10 high or something, and then wide enough that it would be stable, and then you have to worry about the load-bearing ability of the track.)
But even if you build all those tracks, then you have the problem of unloading the ship at one end, and reloading a different ship at the other end. You can build enough tracks to get any rate you need, but can you get the load/unload speed?
No I literally mean build a giant wide railroad and make something the size of a container ship, which has the capacity. That's what goes on the rails.
We should probably stick with trains, they can be several km long and it means we don't have to build an entirely new machine with all the new technical challenges that would entail.
Thanks for adding detail, but the idea would be to avoid having to group them into a trains at all -- the containers would powered (like a rail gun) and be "shot" straight through the rail system as they're placed on the track.
Look at some place North Carolina... 1000 calls a year. There is rail, truck and warehouse infrastructure to support that. It is highly optimized because of domestic transit by rail and truck, of imports and exports.
If you optimize your profit, by dropping imports closer to the point of consumption any extra profit you make will be consumed by rail and trucks getting exports to you in a non optimal way.
The smart choice is to sail to the port where the exports are. But because you can't take that domestic cargo you going in a non optimal state... that empty transit time just cost you money because you have a 2nd captain, crew, ship, insurance and moving an empty vessel is waste!
Basicity the limits the jones act imposes means that you can't fully optimize against the cost and structure of domestic transit.
The context here is bypassing the canal for a railroad across Mexico. While you have described the problem with the Jones act, the premises is we are loading/unloading in Mexico that changes a lot. Smaller ships can go to many different ports - large ones would probably still got to North Carolina, but we can sort in Mexico which means some (likely small) shipping company can run routes to smaller ports, they can take exports from those smaller ports and then sorting in Mexico can get it on/off the right ships. For US east coast to cargo that is crossing the pacific this makes sense (it doesn't make sense for cargo crossing the Atlantic though, so the Jones act is still a problem)
This is effectively what happens with air cargo in Anchorage. It's a nice mid-point between asia and north america. They can receive aircraft cargo from many different sources in asia and then shuffle it between aircraft to ship it to different destinations in north america.
Iceland Airlines kinda does the same shuffle for transatlantic flights and self-loading freight ;)
This sort of approach seems to lend itself very well to a tranship port similar to Singapore - you can async have pickups/deliveries - most cargo containers are fine sitting in a tranship port for a few days.
Is that different from purely-oceanic shipping? The Box says that Malcom McLean decided to run a container ship that only went east, and it was a miserable failure because a delay on any part of the route meant the same delay happened everywhere else in the route (because it was the same ship).
That tends to imply that what you want in shipping is a bunch of reliable legs, not one point-to-point transport?
An atlantic ship could immediately start unloading without waiting for their turn through the canal, it could be a speed advantage because that ship is now ready to turn around and get another load.
Those containers don't have to be loaded directly onto a train, they would likely get unloaded into a yard.
This sort of transport is used to complicated logistics, it wont' take long to get ironed out
No it doesn’t. One ship from Asia could be split up and resorted as part of this with some of it gojng on to New Orleans some to Newark some to Miami and so on.
The Japan Times article says they plan to initially carry 300,000 TEU per year in both directions, via three round-trip trains per day (~=137 TEU per train). That works out to 11.5 New Panamax ships per year in each direction.
It also says they eventually plan to increase the capacity to 1.4 million TEU per year, equivalent to 54 New Panamax container ships in each direction.
That's roughly 10x the traffic through the canal.[0]
The project goal of 1.4 million containers is 16% as much traffic as the canal. For comparison the existing Panama Canal railway has a capacity of 2 million TEU/year.
New Panamax ships can carry 13,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units. 13,000 * 20 ft = 260,000 ft = 49 miles. (You can stack containers on top of each other, so 25 miles. There also needs to be space between the containers on a train for the couplers, etc., though, so a real train would probably be longer than this.)
I am not sure how much the railway helps. There is already a railway across North America and it's still cheaper to go via Panama at this scale.
Not if you put it on some sort of rail system, and make sure each unit that's on the system has the capability to push/stop itself on this rail system.
Not sure if GP meant the math for just the trains bit. There is an increase in handling, and everytime the container changes hands, it's going to cost (assuming dearly). First the ship has to berth (cost), unloaded using QC gantry (cost) onto an ITV (cost) where it gets stacked using a stacker/gantry (cost) in a yard (cost) and then unstacked using a stacker/gantry (cost) onto a truck/ITV (cost) which takes it to a stacker/gantry (cost) which then stacks it onto a train (cost). This is then probably going to be reversed on the other side of the train destination assuming it's a port.
For 1000 containers of the 40 foot class (which are more widespread than the standard 20 foot class, the train would have to be about 14.5 km long. If you take 1/2 m distance between the wagons.
"
The Australian BHP Iron Ore is the longest train ever recorded in history at approximately 4.6 miles (7.353 km). In the Pilbara region of Western Australia, BHP owns and runs the Mount Newman railway. This is a private rail network designed to transport iron ore
"
In the U.S. they often double stack containers--so that would be half the distance if they could:
"Invented in the United States in 1984, it is now being used for nearly seventy percent of United States intermodal shipments. Using double stack technology, a freight train of a given length can carry roughly twice as many containers, sharply reducing transport costs per container."
why wouldn't it apply to electrified railways? I mean it's all energy in the end. I'm sure they make electric motors powerful enough and you can pull your own batteries as part of the load.
The clearance above the train. You have to rebuild every passenger transportation train to work with higher clearance or you build a dedicated railway system only for transportation. Neither financial nor ecologically sustainable.
I mean it would seem to be an innovation but "invention" seems like a stretch as there is nothing new about stacking stuff. I mean it should be a staightforward idea/extrapolation for any "good" mechanical engineer familiar with railroads and trains?
I wander if there are any publically available topographical maps along the roughly estimated region available to find an optimal path, even if it's a "as the crow flies" estimate.
Panamax ships can carry up to 5000 ISO containers, while Neopanamax (the ones using the new set of locks) carry up to 14000. No idea about LPG tankers, etc.
So much manufacturing is moving from China to Mexico that Mexico is now the US' biggest trading partner [1] [2] [3]. As China ages rapidly, labor costs rise, and deglobalization occurs, the future won't be the past of enormous container loads from China eastbound. North American infra is the new hotness [4] [5]. Tangentially, 40% of ship cargoes are fossil fuels [6] [7], consider how that reduces marine traffic volume with the global energy transition underway.
Not huge locomotives, more of them. BNSF regularly operates trains that carry nearly 1,000 containers at about 10,000 feet length on the transcon. I believe the configuration is three front, four center, three rear.
So.. 10 trains per ship then. With 38 ships per day, that's 380 trains.
Assuming 190 trains per direction, on a 24h/day schedule, that's 8 trains per hour, per direction. Or a 7.5 min block between trains 24 hours a day. That doesn't seem very realistic..
Not really that far from current transcon capacity, headways are routinely under ten minutes during busy hours. Doesn't seem hard to achieve on a dedicated route. Especially in a totally new installation that might be fully double-tracked and use a moving block system.
Especially when you consider the ship sizes are no longer constrained by the Panama Canal so they could double the size, you might need another 30 locomotives to pull that across mexico
Gulp: A fully loaded neo-Panamax ship is rated to carry 120,000 tons DWT (which excludes the weight of the ship itself). A train composed of heavy-axle rail cars has an upper limit of about 160 tons. Building bridges and a rail bed to carry a load 1,000 times larger than ever before is no small thing. Then you need to build drydocks to get a fully-loaded ship on and off a train. Building rail cars that would hold the thing ... I wonder if it's even possible in metallurgical terms ... I seriously doubt a rail-car wheel could carry 1,000 times as much load as it does currently.
Apparently some Australian ore trains are 43,000 tonnes (24000 tonnes of ore), according to Wikipedia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_trains) so we are within an order of magnitude
Canales origionly used mules to pull the boats. that today would avoid the props on ship digging up the bottom. Those land based trains can also be electric for environmental savings.
In the Panama Canal ships are pulled by locomotives on rails next to the canal. They have to do that because the canal is too narrow for ships to steer under their own power
Does it make sense to connect west and east coast via inland waterway e.g. Snake <-> Missouri river. Would it be too expensive? I assume nukes are out of the question.
> It does seem like it would make sense for solving water issues in the southwest, at the very least.
With apologies to those with real estate interests in large swathes of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, at some point you must understand the inherent absurdity of living in an increasingly-inhospitable desert climate, and that no amount of nuclear bombs with which to blast a saltwater canal through Mexico will change the fact that you should move to the Great Lakes if you want access to freshwater.
> at some point you must understand the inherent absurdity of living in an increasingly-inhospitable desert climate
As opposed to where, exactly?
The entire northern half of the United States can’t grow for shit because its summer growing season is a barely a few months long and the winters are inhospitable to everything except a winter squash or two. The center is a giant dust bowl because they tried to grow more than they could support. The East barely has any arable land without catastrophically deforesting the area.
That leaves the South which is either desert on the Western half or even more inhospitable swamp on the Eastern half. If the desert were really so bad, it wouldn’t be able to produce half the produce in the country plus extra for international export.
AFAIK The only desert state that produces a lot of produce is California and the southwest region by no means produces half of the nations produce (the Midwest is the nations breadbasket.)
My choice of words was imprecise. Produce as in stuff in the produce section of your supermarket (fruit and vegetables), not general agricultural products. Arizona produces a lot for its size too but California takes the cake:
> The Golden State’s agricultural abundance includes 400 different commodities. The state produces about half of U.S.-grown fruits, nuts and vegetables. With less than four percent of the nation’s farms
and ranches, California produces over 13 % percent of the nation’s agricultural production value. [1]
Most of the rest of the agricultural production in the country is animals and animal feed (and ethanol and biofuels), not produce people want to actually eat directly.
Well, wether it's colder, warmer, dryer, wetter, the same or different, at this point all possibilities are predicted by someone to be the consequence of human CO2 production at this point
Yes, but some more than others. A very zeitgeist example: warmer atmosphere stores more moisture and/or energy, thus causing more abrupt and violent changes of weather patterns - see the polar vortex breaking up and brining -40 degrees temperatures to unusual places in North America. This is something you can’t really negotiate about, it’s just applied thermodynamics.
The issue was clearly predicted. Even ignoring climate change it would have been a problem but they went ahead with the changes and now don't want to admit that the experts warned them.
Amusingly, the height the wheel lifts to is actually larger than the height the Panama Canal locks need to lift to. It's not got quite as much carrying capacity though.
I'm only roughly approximating here, but that could probably lift just a dozen 40ft shipping containers each swing-up (perhaps, this is a wild estimate based visually only).
Not even that, I suspect -- it'll hold four 66' boats, so maybe six containers in each caisson? The canals it joins are traditional British canals, they're quite restrictive. Scaling it up to cope with neo-panamax-sized ships is left as an exercise to the reader.
If you do try, remember that the Panama canal allows boats with a ~15m draft and just short of 60m height above the waterline, you're probably going to want more of a see-saw than a full wheel.
(Also: correcting my comment above, the wheel only lifts to 24m: there are locks to get the rest of the way up (another 11m), avoiding needing to demolish a section of the antonine wall. So the wheel itself lifts slightly less height than the 26m on the Panama canal)
I re-watched the video AFTER commenting (above); definitely wouldn't hold twelve 40ft containers (on each side)... plus it seems to have a 500Ton MAX (based on Tom's video about each side's perfectly-balanced weight, due to displacement).
Like, this paragraph at the end, without any context starts comparing two different systems without saying anything about which one is used how and where. Or adding anything to give some clue about how much water that is compared to the lake size and replenishing rates.
> "According to the PCA, it takes around 50 million gallons of fresh water to move a vessel through one of the locks. The Panamax locks lose more water compared to the Neo-Panamax lock. The Neo-Panamax locks have a water recovery system which can reclaim 60% of the water used during a vessel’s transit through the locks. The Panamax lanes do not have the water-recapturing ability of the Neo-Panamax locks. "
> without saying anything about which one is used how and where
I agree that it is strangely edited. But to help you out with the info: both are used on the Panama canal. There are two paralel sets of locks, the older ones and a more modern ones. The more modern ones can fit a bit bigger ships and they are more efficient with water.
Panamax is also a designation for the ships which can fit into the old locks, while Neopanamax means that the ship doesn't fit into the old locks, but fits into the new locks.
I'm still a little astounded no one has yet built seawater pipelines from coast to coast (65 km) to recharge the canal buffer dams with seawater rather than fresh water.
IIRC there was a major refurb to make the Panama system more water efficient with better recovery, some look ahead should have forseen fresh water supply becoming a a limiting factor.
The Panama canal is not really one canal. It's one canal from the east into a river and lake system and one canal from the west into the same river and lake system.
That would be an absolute disaster for the environment if you would do that. Also pumping up that much water would require an absolutely enormous amount of energy, and dozens of pumping stations.
Potential energy is actually pretty cheap. Which makes it unfortunately useless for energy storage (lifting 1 ton by 1m is about the same as an AAA battery)
Dam reservoirs can reach a pretty massive volume. The Hoover dam holds 35.000 km^2 of water (that's 35 billion tons if I'm not mistaken) according to Wikipedia. I'm not sure how much of that can be raised by how much.
And reducing local salinity by dumping so much fresh water isn't a complete environmental disaster? Megaprojects like this are gonna have a huge impact regardless of what you do.
"Absolute disaster" .. or "transform the canal side environment into similar to the seaside environment" ?
> Also pumping up that much water would require an absolutely enormous amount of energy, and dozens of pumping stations.
Similar to other water pumping projects about the globe that cover distances further than 65km across rises of a similar magnitude?
The canal system already has dozens of pumping stations, abd there's a regenerative energy recovery factor to the operation that makes the total energy required somewhat less than just a straight lift x tonnage.
>"transform the canal side environment into similar to the seaside environment"
That is one and the same, you are arguing for killing off the entire ecosphere near the canals.
And not of just the canal but also of the lakes it's connected to.
Sea water is heavier than fresh water and more corrosive. I don’t think it’s as simple as building the pipes, I imagine the locks themselves would also need to be retrofitted to account for that.
For the locks to work they need water. It does not matter if fresh or salty. The canal takes advantage of the natural store of fresh water on higher grounds.
If needed, it would obviously be easier to pump sea water than to desalinise sea water, then to pump it anyway.
That is only around 80 K$ per crossing using modern desalination plants. The internet says there are ~40 crossings per day resulting in ~14K crossings per year deriving ~3 G$ in fees for the Panama Canal Authority. At ~80 K$ per crossing that is ~1 G$ in drinkable water which is expensive, but not too onerous to be obviously economically non-viable.
Also, that is nowhere near the largest desalination plant. The really big ones like the Sorek plant [1] do ~6e5 per day which would support 3 ships per day. Still only 1/10 of what is needed to support the full container capacity, but quite doable if the economics work out to support fully scaling out.
But when a ship goes down in a lock, can't you push the water back in the lake instead of releasing it downstream? (ie you would pump fresh water, not seawater)
Maybe it should be too-expensive to achieve. I'm sitting her absolutely baffled at the scale of these numbers I'm seeing on this thread. I'd rather tell the other side of the world (both really) to just suck it up and pay for sustainable ways to transport this stuff. The era of "cheap" transport needs to stop and we absolutely have to find alternatives.
The Panama Canal was (and still is) an environmental disaster in itself, maybe this will be a good sign that using tropical marshlands in order to "help" with bringing even more plastic from China faster is not the way to go.
Does that work? The canal goes across a mountain range; you'd have to pump a lot of water uphill. It's probably cheaper to ship the goods by train instead.
> We will continue to support Maersk’s operations. ... We are focused on delivering both short- and long-term solutions for our customers, for when climate anomalies affect our operations
Very nice corporate speak understatement for what’s happening globally. Well done Panama Canal Authority.
What's happening globally? Presumably you mean the climate anomalies.
Presumably its when it says "for when". But this is another way of saying 'not now, perhaps in the future'. The words relate to the future, but you are applying them to the present.
I don’t understand what you’re getting at? How is their verbiage wrong or implying anything else? Sounds like you just want your marketing term used at all costs.
Due to the nature of LNG storage, a small amount of the gas “boils off” every day (fraction of a %). The longer a voyage, the more cargo is lost. So LNG carriers are incentivised to deliver cargo as quickly as possible so they can maximise the delivered value of the goods.
(Fortunately because these ships themselves are LNG powered, they are designed to recapture this boiled off fuel to operate the vessel)
Continental pipelines exist but need a significant amount of power to operate the compressors along the path.
As for subsea pipelines: it's hard enough to lay these alongside the same continent, i.e. in geologically stable and relatively flat areas such as the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico... but no one has even attempted to run anything larger than a fiber cable across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.
It's mind boggling to wrap your head around the sheer scale of modern shipping and logistics. I've seen visualizations before, but does anyone recommend any tools to visualize these shipping routes? Makes me want to fire up Factorio again.
I work in container shipping (in IT for a company), we obviously have internal mapping tools we can’t share but whenever anyone is interested in this stuff I just like to point them to:
I'm working on visualization of this kind of flow information. Can you point to any publicly available data sets? Several years out of date would be acceptable for present test and demo needs.
Just because ship can carry nominal value of 15K TEUs, it is very hard to estimate how many containers are currently on board. Also, empty container looks exactly like the full container from the outside, looking at the ship.
One very interesting aspect of ship operations is the art of stowage of containers. The complexity associated with it is substantial. 3D large scale Tetris. This is a good introductory article https://www.shippingandfreightresource.com/container-stowage...
All cargo/intermodal logistics stuff is measured in TEU’s, aka “Twenty foot Equivalent Units”, eg a standard shipping container. The sizes actually vary but for thinking about the numbers, pretend they’re all standard twenty foot containers that you see on trucks.
The average container ship can carry anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 TEU, with the newer VLCS and ULCS ships carrying up to 25,000 TEU.
That’s 5-25,000 containers on a single ship, and there’s estimated to be around 20,000 container ships currently operating.
Global container trade is somewhere near 1 Billion TEU per year currently.
All of that is ignoring Bulk Cargo such as oil/liquid tankers, dry goods (grains and ores, etc), and other non-containerised goods.
Every single number in this industry is mind boggling.
Might be useful to imagine all the stuff you buy in a year, even well packaged. And now multiply that by amount of people that aren't essentially sustenance farmers...
Now that I think of it, maybe 1 billion TEU is not that much. Single person does not even use full container...
I still don't get what prevents just pumping the seawater up the lake in sufficient quantities. Maybe using solar to power the pumps - intermittency won't be a problem. Lake will become brackish, but whatever.
The river used to create the lake isn't artificial. What's going to happen to everything down stream once the lake has become brackish? What happens to the people or farmers that depend on the lake for fresh water?
Why is there anything downstream? I mean, it shouldn't be the case because then the water which could be used for the channel locks, is wasted being sent there. If there is anything going downstream from the lake indeed, solution is even simpler - close it off with a dam - but i don't think it's the case. I can't see anything on the map that is being fed from the lake apart from channel locks.
And river that feeds the lake is of course, not artificial - Chagres river - but nothing is gonna happen to it.
Why seawater ? Just pump the released water back up. If the issue is contamination with brackish water from the lower part, I'm sure that could be handled by some clever valve management - eq. release water to a freshwater pond when lowering a ship, so you loose only the water in the lowered chamber & can pump the water in the pond back up. Given the ships going up might import some of the brackish water when rising up, I don't think contamination can be fully prevented anyway.
Sure, there will be power demand for all the pumping, but given how important this is I would think it would be economicaly sustainable- possibly with similar technology Japan uses for floodwater pumping in the GCANS project (gas turbine driven pumps).
I have understood that the bronze age collapse was a climate fluke that resulted into famine, which did lead to military power balance change which did lead into trade route collapse.
The Bronze Age Collapse is a very dark moment in history, both figuratively and literally.
We don't know much about what happened back then. Excavations can show you that palaces were abandoned, but there is an enormous dearth of written records which would help with understanding what happened.
In absence of such records, people of today will project their most favorite contemporary theory onto the ruins. On the right, I have certainly heard the idea that both the Bronze Age Collapse and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire were caused by too much immigration. On the left, climate is the word of the decade.
Now that is an idea that I could get behind. If the local cinema has "The Beast of Knossos XXXXIV", the natural reaction is just to burn it to the ground, and hey, once you start, why stop?
(From a slightly more serious angle: the Nika Rebellion in 6th century Constantinople is a fascinating piece of history, chariot racing intertwined with politics etc. Imagine if baseball or hockey teams had their political parties or vice versa.)
That is interesting. I've never heard that 'immigration' was a possible cause. I know 'sea people's as part of it, just hadn't heard that spun as an anti-immigration argument.
Didn't realize the 'right' had even managed to co-opt something like Bronze Age Collapse to promote anti-immigration. Since isn't a lot of studying history, about tracking 'immigration', the movement of peoples. People move around. It isn't bad, it is what actually happens.
What would the world look like if during all of history, there was never any immigration? Wouldn't humans have died out.
"If only they had built a wall to keep out those 'sea peoples', then today we would be living as good and just Hattusas".
If it hadn't happened, would there even be a Jesus? or Christianity?
Absolutely not. Without large scale immigration, a slightly important country you may be familiar with wouldn't exist at all. The one where so many of these absolutely rotten-brained zero tolerance takes on immigration become popular.
Can you snake a single significant figure in US politics who has actually advocated for zero immigration? Or are you saying zero-tolerance for illegal immigration? And if so, why would that be a bad thing?
How these arguments go is, I find a quote, then you say "not that person", or "that isn't what they meant", or "the law is wrong, it should be illegal".
If 'valid immigration' is a-ok, then why produce so much false information re-casting it as 'illegal' in order to advocate stopping immigration?
Who recasted legal immigration as illegal? Your “citation” is of Ron Desantis complaining about too many people illegally immigrating, nothing to do with what you call “valid immigration”.
What do you think is happening if he is using falsely inflated statistics?
What is the goal of drumming up hate using false data, to rile up his followers?
Is it really to promote 'valid' immigration? Wouldn't it be better to discuss 'valid' immigration, if that was in fact the goal?
You haven’t any provided evidence of your claim that people are calling legal immigration illegal, or that anyone wants to prevent legal immigration. Please do so, or stop claiming it.
“The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border—because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” the Republican governor told former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch on her radio show last week. (Check it out at the 11:45 mark.)
“I can’t believe I have to say ‘murdering people is unacceptable,'” wrote Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) in a post on X. “It’s language like yours that left 23 people dead and 22 others injured in El Paso,” she added, referring to the 2019 mass shooting in a Texas Walmart by an anti-immigrant killer.
I feel you cannot separate the two concepts. It is possible to support legal immigration but not illegal immigration, and remarks made against illegal immigrants cannot be used as evidence of any feelings towards legal immigrants. The two are, in every sense of the term, entirely disjoint sets.
If today, Republicans are against the number and type of immigrants that are allowed in under the current law, then they can change the law. They do not agree with current law, and feel that there are situations that should be illegal. So they want to change the law, thus changing what is legal now, to become illegal. So, 'calling todays legal immigration, illegal'.
I hate falling back on tropes, but this is the type of 'legal' maneuvering that was done in Germany. A lot of persecution was 'legal', once the laws were changed to make some 'people' illegal.
""The Republicans’ plan is similar to both a similar rule that the Department of Homeland Security adopted in 2019 and a policy that President Joe Biden is trying to push through.
I am an immigration professor and teach asylum law. I believe it’s important to understand what sets Republicans’ proposed law apart from previous iterations.
The president cannot change the law, but Congress can. If these lawmakers succeed in changing federal asylum law, the law would override the court decisions striking down previous versions. Because Congress has broad power over immigration, the new laws would likely be upheld if challenged in court.
""
So we started with “absolutely rotten-brained zero tolerance takes” and now we’re at “there exist congressional representatives performing their constitutionally-mandated job of reevaluating the specifics of what the immigration policies of the country should be going forward”. Interesting.
That is how the 'right' is winning, isn't it? Playing both sides of crazy and reasonable?
Dream up crazy situations, be intolerant, get everyone riled up and ready to riot and burn the constitution.
Then turn around and be "well, indubitably, my dear chap, lets discuss the matter". Then dance around in circles because they don't actually want anything solved, because then they wont have any issues to get their base angry.
Then anybody that tries to engage with them starts looking just as crazy. Seriously, these tactics are strait verbatim out of mein kampf.
I fell for it again, getting pulled into a seemingly innocent exchange, and it really is just trolling. You haven't provided any argument either way, just questions, to make me run around.
My argument is that there does not exist a public official pushing for any sort of “zero-tolerance” of any legal immigration. I cannot prove a negative (unless you want me to somehow iterate through every statement ever made by an elected official), but you cannot prove the positive. Your claim was the positive, you have not been able to provide any proof of it, therefore any logical analysis would be left with the negative.
Now I’m left to wonder why you made the claim in the first place, given you have no proof. Were you simply repeating what some liberal media narrative said the “big bad right” was plotting, without having attempted to find any proof of it until now?
You: ""My argument is that there does not exist a public official pushing for any sort of “zero-tolerance” of any legal immigration.""
I never said anything like that. I had to go back and re-read to figure out what argument you were talking about.
You kind of fantasized something I said, and all subsequent arguments didn't really make sense since I was never trying to prove that. I made a comment about 'sea peoples' in the bronze age. To then try and infer some stance on very specific legal standing today seems a stretch.
So to me, it seemed kind of crazy that someone is claiming the 'right' doesn't have some pretty radical views on immigration.
But yes, I do agree, the right is pretty awful. I don't need any media to tell me that, when I have my own eyes.
Get out of the bubble, I flip channels to conservative media now and then to see what they are being told, and it is full of lies. Like really blatant lies someone could debunk just by looking up the truth if they wanted to.
> [America is a country] where so many of these absolutely rotten-brained zero tolerance takes on immigration become popular.
Can you explain what you mean by that? Because it sounds to me like you believe there’s some sort of zero tolerance immigration policy that is popular in America, but you haven’t been able to produce evidence of it so far.
As for the left leaning and right leaning media, they both lie. And I was right there with you believing the left’s over the right’s up until 2020. Since then I don’t lean one way or the other, but I do demand every claim be accompanied with concrete evidence. This is the only way to find truth.
I didn't say that. It was someone else that replied first, and then you and I started replying to that reply. But I hadn't been directly arguing that persons post.
So guess we got off-track at the beginning.
Though, given that the Governor of Texas, someone that is significant in the republican party, has advocated shooting immigrants. I'm not sure the sentiment is wrong.
I also agree Left and Right Media, both 'skew' what they say. I find the left has less outright blatant lies. They certainly 'frame' what they say. The Left will be very careful in what words they choose. The right will actually just say 2+2=5, and trust nobody checks.
Throwing up your hands and saying “but I never even said that” 6 replies deep into debating a particular point is certainly… a socratic technique.
And you’re back to conflating illegal and legal immigration. I’ve never argued nobody is against illegal immigration, far from it.
To your point about media lies, the Left’s are less obvious yes, but that makes them much tricker to deal with. The Left will first convince you 3 and 4 are effectively the same, tell you 2+2 is pretty much 3, then have you laugh at the Right for being so far off base from reality when they say it’s 5. You can show someone on the Right a calculator and they’ll see they were mistaken, you show someone on the Left the calculator and they’ll tell you you’re in the wrong for thinking the difference between the answers matters. See: legal vs illegal immigration, “The Science” of COVID, approaches to crime, etc.
Not sure this is throwing up hands. I'm saying we were talking in circles, because you were the one that brought up the legal arguments based on a different comment, and I was not really sure how there is any legal framework for how immigration happens through history.
There was no legal/illegal basis for settling the Americas. There was no world court where Columbus could be charged with illegal immigration.
I do strongly disagree with your take on left/right reactions to media.
Typically those on the right subscribe to a more 'religious fundamentalism', and thus notions of right/wrong, true/false, are not based on any scientific findings. It is based on faith, a moral right granted by God to his chosen. So there is no arguing. No room for truth.
Hence, the truth can be spelled out clearly, and they will still not accept it. They will argue the sky isn't blue, if their leaders tell them it isn't. Religion has morphed the brain to the extent that reason is not allowed.
See: legal vs illegal immigration, “The Science” of COVID, approaches to crime, etc. Vaccinations, life, etc...
Science is not a substitute for morality, the two go hand in hand. The Left however invokes a powerful ploy to attempt to redefine their various preexisting perspectives on morality as being “Science”: they take questions of morality, cast them into questions of science (injecting their own moral bias in the process), and select those studies which answer those questions in ways which affirm their existing moral biases. They therefore always end up feeling they are on the side of “The Science”, while ignoring (willfully or not) that they have selected from the beginning that very science which was on their side.
This isn’t the place to keep going on the topic, but feel free to reach out “my username at outlook dot com” if you’d like to discuss further.
I agree. Science is not Morality. (see atom bomb).
But also, morality shouldn't over-rule science. If there is a hypothesis, and it can be tested, so you know what is true, then a religious belief shouldn't make you ignore it. The 'right' these days is anti-science to the extent that they are rejecting things that can be tested and shown to be true. Rejecting things that can be proven.
Agree, probably enough on this thread.
Later, bye, best of luck.
Probably wont e-mail, because I'm paranoid about anonymity.
I have understood, that this is the current most plausible theory, but not much is actually "understood" about that time and cultures. In most cases, we don't even know the name of the culture and they are named by the places where the first stuff has been found.
I'm bit confused, wonder why they don't just charge more. It seems like unloading/rail shipping, would be so expensive and they will do it. So during normal operating, there is enough 'profit' on the shippers side, that the canal could charge more.
But we don't talk about population. We can take their cars, meat, heating, and hope away, but we still need to keep breeding ever more people, in pursuit of endless growth on this finite planet...
I asked for that... I should have specified 'meaningful'.
The first sentence of your link:
"First opened in 1933, the White Sea-Baltic Canal was built on the backs of gulag prisoners. By the time it was done, more than 25,000 laborers had lost their lives."
It comprises a 300-kilometer railway line from the Pacific port of Salina Cruz to Coatzacoalcos on the other side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec…
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2023/11/16/mexico-rail...
Theoretically, the standardized nature of containers should make switching from ships to trains relatively efficient.