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Why force businesses to waste money on advertising to and interviewing people they don't want to hire?

At the end of the day, some person will get a job. Why is it better if a woman or old person gets the job? Enforcing diversity hiring practices is not creating more jobs for anyone (except diversity advisors, granted). On the contrary, it increases the cost of doing business, which is likely to reduce demand for employees.


most studies show that diversity leads to increased productivity and innovation. it actually reduces the cost of doing business significantly. this is the only reason big corporates are doing it as they are purely driven by their bottom line


If it reduces fuel consumption by 30%, wouldn't all ships want to have it? Is it too expensive, or what is the problem?


In shipping the cost is transferred easily down the line; capital investment in new vessels and new technologies is pretty slim because of that.

Also the time spent in dry dock might as well cost you more than what you’ll gain through the service time of the vessel since many of these vessels change hands frequently sometimes even several times a year.

Also because how risk is managed in the shipping industry none of these companies is exposed to any actual action, the vessels would almost never be owned by an entity with actual assets and they would essentially be registered to shells holding only debt.

This is done to protect shipping companies from damages in case of accidents but it’s also very convenient to avoid any regulation since if they are caught there will be no legal entity to pay the fine.


Hm, really stupid naive question here. What happens if violating ships were basically seized


"Ship arrest" is a legal concept:

https://www.marineinsight.com/maritime-law/ship-arrest-under...

And no, I don't know much about it beyond the term and what's at the link above, but failure to abide by regulations is an allowable condition of arrest.


Well they don’t have a strong basis to seize the vessels, right of passage is tricky and the vessels don’t turn those on while in territorial waters.

Open systems have a sufficiently large capacity to store the contaminated water so they essentially only open the loop in international waters where no one can do anything about it.

But in general it depends on who does it, for the most part if it’s a western country the country would loose in court since it will he sued by multiple parties with interest in the cargo but no actual liability.

If it’s not then it’s either going to be a political waltz or just another act of piracy.

The ship and cargo are insured some parties might make more money on losing the ship than if it had completed its transit including quite possibly its operator.


>Open systems have a sufficiently large capacity to store the contaminated water so they essentially only open the loop in international waters where no one can do anything about it.

What about enacting a law that says "if you use cheating devices at all, you can't dock in our ports"?


>What about enacting a law that says "if you use cheating devices at all, you can't dock in our ports"?

When 99.9% of vessels are doing the cheating, the shipping companies would say you would really like your people to go on a diet don’t you?


You are making it harder than it is. You can't pump any oil overboard anywhere, well above about 1 ppm if I remember correctly. In the industry you hear all the time about magic pipes being found during port state control and other inspections leading to extremely high fines and prison time. For reference, a magic pipe bypasses the oil separator making you able to discharge anything.

Simply add another annex to MARPOL regarding discharge of sulfur and the industry will follow, penalties for breaking MARPOL are usually personal and not on the shipping company. Though, as always with the maritime industry the international manner makes any change slow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARPOL_73/78


MARPOL is utterly toothless and not enforced, and also only really covers 12 nautical miles from land.


12 nm is enough, as most inspections occur close to shore.


Cool.. let's enforce it.


That's not going to happen. For example London is basically setting cycling safety regs for lorries [1], or in the US, California is basically setting the emissions limits for vehicles.

All it takes is for the US/Europe/China to take a stand. No shipping company is going to ignore those markets.

[1] https://road.cc/content/news/142312-london-ban-hgvs-without-...


So give it a several year phase-in period, and provide mechanisms to remove/permanently disable the systems.


I feel like I’ve seen this basic plot line before, once or twice.

Ending 1: the deadline approaches and nothing has been done, so the deadline is extended, or additional clauses are written to grandfather in the non compliant offenders (who are of course too big to fail).

Ending 2: they find a port that is near the port they want to visit, in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care, and then ship the last mile to the actual destination via other means. More costly and more pollution but technically in compliance with every law.

Ending 3: they learn to game the tests, so they meet the letter of the regulation but not the spirit of it. Much cheaper than actually reducing emissions.


So countries need to pressure each other’s neighbors into agreements where all of them refuse business with ships that do not follow such regulations?


This was a good strategy, but the US used it up with its idiotic War on Drugs.


That’s what has been done in this case which lead to cheating devices to be installed in the first place.

It’s very hard to near impossible to do or enforce all it takes is a country just by you that is willing to accept them.

People aren’t going to take a huge price hike and countries that are dependent on imports won’t ever enforce such requirements which would leave these vessels out there.

At the end of the day unless you are willing to fund a fleet of 1000’s of new vessels and or pay to upgrade existing ones the shipping companies won’t budge and you won’t ever be able to push them into a corner since the economic fallout would be catastrophic for you but not much for them.


>It’s very hard to near impossible to do or enforce all it takes is a country just by you that is willing to accept them.

You can set up treaties with your neighbors to enforce the same regulations. Also, if your country is sufficiently large enough, it's not really a concern because any savings from not having to follow the regulations will be wiped out by the increased cost in transporting the goods across the border.

You could also impose a tariff/charge on goods that transit through a neighboring country for no apparent reason (eg. China -> Mexico -> LA rather than China -> LA).

>People aren’t going to take a huge price hike

Source on the huge price hike? According to http://www.worldshipping.org/benefits-of-liner-shipping/glob..., the shipping industry contributes 183.3B to global GDP, and transports more than 4T worth of goods. Based on that, shipping accounts for approximately 4.5% of the cost of goods. Therefore, a 50% increase in cost because of emissions controls (very generous estimate) would only cause a 2.2% increase in the price of goods.

>and countries that are dependent on imports won’t ever enforce such requirements which would leave these vessels out there.

If it's announced years in advance, either shipping companies would adapt and get the vessels ready before the regulations take effect, or local manufacturers come online now that they're more competitive. No ships is ever going to be "stuck".


I don't buy your defeatism at all. The US certainly has the economic clout to make progress, and there's certainly a middle ground between doing nothing and expecting that every attempt to regulate externalities must be 100% effective and 100% enforced on every economic actor. At some (usually reasonably achievable) point, compliance becomes cheaper, or substitution occurs.


Shipping to/from/through the waters of whosoever is doing the seizing is going to get a lot more expensive.


Or, you know, the shipping companies could address that risk by complying with the relevant regulations.


> In shipping the cost is transferred easily down the line;

Would there not be a competitive advantage in being able to offer a lower price than your competitors to these customers "down the line" or is there some facet of the pricing practices that I'm missing?


How does this ownership structure still survive today?


It's a free market. International treaties evolve slowly, so regulation is non-existent, and shipping is a race to the bottom industry.

Ships are flagged and "regulated" in Liberia, Panama or wherever, crews are Filipino or Indonesian, and the officers are from another country (Greece, UK, US, etc). The ownership is always murky and unknown.

The only exceptions are some intra-national shipping. US carriers are required if you're shipping from Alaska to California, for example.


Shipping is a very conservative industry and hesitant to new things.

Time to investment payback was longer than many companies were willing to stomach, which was shortened thanks to Norway subsidies.

That said, they’re growing quickly, have a look!


It might be worth finding more detail, preferably externally verified, than a vague "up to 30%" claim before judging it as a no-brainer.

Also from what I know of the shipping industry I would only expect it to be seen on new ships as the cost of retro-fitting would be high even without considering the opportunity cost of the ship needing to be in dry-dock for the operation (and needing to get to and from the dock, if there is not one where the work can be done along its owner's normal routes).

And given ships change hands surprisingly often, how long it takes to hit break even (i.e when the cost of the fuel saved, less any extra maintenance costs the tech may be subject to in that time, equals extra initial outlay) will have a massive effect on whether it is worth it to the initial owner of a new ship.

And a new ship is a huge capital expenditure, with a long lead time from plan to implementation. If the tech is relatively new it may not have existed at all when ships currently rolling into service were conceived, and with that level of capital involved designers are going to be pretty conservative about the risk of trying relatively new tech, so maybe it will become common but at a much later time.


There are still flats with lead pipes in Germany.


It shouldn't be a human right. It doesn't make sense. TO say it is a human right would mean if somebody would build a hut in the desert, the world would have to build a water pipeline for them. That would be very ineffective.

I only know about Nestle, there often is the story about them supposedly depleting water in dry regions (I think Afghanistan or Pakistan). But if you look it up, they take the water from a very water rich region in that country.

Next time you read that Nestle story, look it up. I don't have time to Google right now.


> TO say it is a human right would mean if somebody would build a hut in the desert,

You use the most idiotic interpretation you can imagine and then stating it as a fact. I'm sure that you are not doing this in bad faith, but your thinking is missing basic common sense that cripples you ability to understand society. Human right to water and sanitation (HRWS) is very reasonable right. It means that HRWS rules over other concerns in legal disputes and affects policy priorities.

This paper has real world legal cases and interpretations: https://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/pdf/human_right_to_wat...


The quotation is from a movie that literally shows people living in a desert like environment, implying they should be given water. It's not my idiotic interpretation, it is what the quotation refers to.

They should move somewhere where they can get water. UN may pay for it or whatever. But to show people in some rotten place and complain that they don't get their human right to water makes no sense.

Also, the point of finding "most idiotic interpretations" is to make it obvious if something makes no sense. You are just not used to logical thinking (here, finding trivial counter examples).


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