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Comment by oneshtein | Hacker News Reader

This may create a window of opportunity for Russia, because Russia communicates with China and NK via land routes, while Western allies are separated by ocean.

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An 'average' panamax container ship carries 4,200 lorries/train carriages of goods. The infrastructure to move 100K of those a day 1000s of miles on land would be enourmous and make global trade prohibitively expensive - far cheaper to sail for longer around the capes.

Yep, but those two routes around capes can be disrupted too, which may cause advantage for those, who are not using them. Then it will be easy to plant the message into brains of those 50% who have less than average IQ: "Blame your government for this sudden spike in prices! Vote for those, who want to protect us, not foreigners!"

aside because everyone who makes that comment seems to get it wrong: 50% of the population has less than the median IQ, not the average!

We cannot rank all the people and put their IQ into a sorted array to calculate median, so some of us accept loss of precision when we use average numbers.

> because everyone who makes that comment seems to get it wrong: 50% of the population has less than the median IQ, not the average!

What's the mistake? It's a normal distribution; the average is equal to the median.

The median itself is a type of an average, too, regardless of the distribution. We have many averages to choose from

TIL that people talk about the median as a kind of average. Guess I’ll stop making the remark then!

Mean, median and mode are the three most commonly used averages. Mean itself can be of various types, such as arithmetic, geometric, harmonic and others. Median is a pretty good average because it excludes the extremes. Its 'superiority' compared to the arithmetic mean is can be easily explained by a hypothetical situation where you have 100 people and 99 of them are making $1000 a month while only one making $100000. The arithmetic average salary of this whole group is $1990 a month which is clearly not what most people would intuitively consider as the 'proper' average.

You know what they mean.

Rail/Road doesn't compare to ships in terms of throughput by weight so the land route to China from Russia, even if the freight train system were robust, would not handle the same amounts that a trans-oceanic route like China to the Americas could handle (or even China to St. Petersburg if that were needed)

The simple railroad idea is “big ship comes to west Panama, unloads onto trains, which load into big ship in east Panama” but that avoids the strength of railroads.

You have to unload the ship eventually anyway, so you instead have it load into rail and disperse to final destination more directly.

You’d need a heat map of where everything ends up that is going through Panama, but if you’re dumping to rail many of those ships would unload elsewhere.

Or in other words, Europe will be hit much harder by this than the USA will.

Panama has a tiny railroad that follows the canal, if they thought this was a viable alternative they would expand it. I think they realize the labor cost on both ends would make this prohibitive + the time to unload and load up another ship would cause major bottlenecks.

The problem for Panama is that the cost of rail transport is dominated by the time for loading and unloading; once you've gotten to the point that loading/unloading on trains makes sense, suddenly many more countries in that area are competitive; if I recall correctly Mexico is building a rail line across their narrowest part.

Opportunity to do what?

To disrupt supply routes and perform whatever they have in their mind. Russia switched to war-time mode, so they think that they can win the war with NATO. Massive disruption in trade routes may shift balance of powers in democratic countries, which Russians may want to exploit. Russians are strong at informational front, they are strong liars and shadow players.

Whatever, but moving a significant part of all the freight from China to Europe through Russia would probably require quite an improvement on the current railway infrastructure.

It's probably a multi track system going all the way through China, Russia (with maybe Kazakhstan or Mongolia in between if they care about shortcuts), Belarus and finally to Poland. Then maybe upgrades to the European railways too to handle the excess traffic coming from the wrong direction (EU harbors are not in the East.) It's not something they can do in a short time and it takes a lot of political collaboration. I think that it's easier for them to win the war, if they can win it, and start buying Western Europe politicians again. Or just start buying them again while the war goes on.

Russians will not supply EU in case of war with NATO. :-/

And no port that is constantly free from ice

Yet.

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