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Bulletins and News Discussion from September 4th to September 10th, 2023 - You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Supply Chains - COTW: Libya

Image is of container ships waiting outside the canal. While there is usually some number of ships waiting for passage, the number has increased significantly lately.

In order to move ships through the Panama Canal, water is needed to fill the locks. The water comes from freshwater lakes, which are replenished by rainfall. This rainfall hasn't been coming, and Lake Gatun, the largest one, is at near record low levels.

Hundreds of ships are now in a maritime traffic jam, unable to cross the canal quickly. Panama is attempting to conserve water and have reduced the number of transits by 20% per day, among other measures. The Canal's adminstrators have warned that these drought conditions will remain for at least 10 months.

It is unlikely that global supply chains will be catastrophically affected, at least this year. Costs may increase for consumers in the coming months, especially for Christmas, but by and large goods will continue to flow, around South America if need be. Nonetheless, projecting trends over the coming years and decades, you can imagine how this is yet another nudge by climate change towards dramatic economic, environmental, and political impacts on the world at large. It also might prompt discussions inside various governments about nearshoring, and the general vulnerability of global supply chains - especially as the United States tries, bafflingly, to go to war with China.

After some discussion in the last megathread about building knowledge of geopolitics, some of us thought it might be an interesting idea to have a Country of the Week - essentially, I/we choose a country and then people can come in here and chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants, related to that country. More detail in this comment.

Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Okay, look, I got a little carried away. Monday's update usually covers the preceding Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but I went ahead and did all of last week. If people like a more weekly structure then I might try that instead, if not, then I'll go back to the Mon-Wed-Fri schedule.

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838 comments

  • Just wanted to share a funny Libya/Gaddafi/Green Book story from my Syrian-Lebanese communist uncle. When my uncle was studying engineering in the USSR in the 80s, his roommate and best friend was an Iraqi guy from a relatively poor family who also got a grant to go study in the USSR. The Iraqi government back under Baathism used to give thousands of grants to young Iraqis to go study in mainly Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. This guy was Shia muslim, from a religious family with secret Persian ancestry that my uncle only found out recently about, when talking to his old friend, who kept it hidden all this time.

    Anyway, this guy's family get into a conflict with a local Baath Party office because of some religious incident, which snowballs into this guy's brothers getting arrested. The Baath dudes also cancelled my uncle's friend's grant in the USSR, which was around 200 USD at that time. Suddenly he's dirt poor, with half his family in prison in Iraq. He decided to toughen up and survive the situation, as he needed to stay in the USSR to avoid going back to Iraq without a degree and then drafted for the Iraq-Iran War.

    When his situation worsens later and he starts to starve with no money, he comes up with a master plan. Libya had awful relations with Saddam's Iraq in the 80s, so this guy showed up at the Libyan Embassy in Moscow and presented himself as an Iraqi dissenter that likes the Libyan system. A week later they call him and tell him to come to the embassy. They give him nearly $1000 in cash and a whole box full with copies of Gaddafi's Green Book, on the condition that he promotes the book to other Iraqis. He accepts the offer of course and survives excellently on that money until the Iraqis reapprove his grant. He then actually worked in Libya for a few years, and he was directly contacted by his local Libyan embassy because his name had been registered as a "potential engineer" in a list somewhere.

838 comments