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> which is a good thing - you want them to be permitted to do that without going bankrupt, because otherwise there is no motivation to save the half that can be saved

You also don’t want them to have any incentive to treat one customer’s cargo more carefully than another’s. You want them to jettison cargo indiscriminately with the only incentive being to save the ship.

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There is some incentive to discriminate - it is advantageous to everyone to jettison the cheapest cargo in order to save the more valuable cargo, no matter to whom which cargo belongs.

For some ratio of cost to weight, with consideration as to where on the ship it is... if you have time to calculate such things. In this case they probably do, if they really care to.

At the scale of these ships, though, if you have to jettison cargo you're probably looking at hundreds of containers or more. At that point it probably doesn't make that much difference which containers you jettison, it'll mostly average out.

If you have a container of iPhones, you might want to save those.

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