The average age of retirement is 66. The average life span is 78.
The idea of doing all this for 12 years of elderly leisure is.... bleak.
And it's so intensely obvious that they'll try to increase the age of retirement. PLUS the life expectancy is dropping. PLUS it's so clear that MOST people can't make ends meet on Social Security alone and that's IF you paid into it. PLUS you have to buy supplemental Medicare.
AND if you are not white the average life expectancy is even lower.
We need to understand that shipping is such a purposefully complicated array of liability, insurance, laws, and responsibilities that it's likely no one is going to be rendered irreparably harmed by this directly.
Indirectly, however, working people of the world will suffer.
The vessel itself, Container Ship, M/V Ever Given, is flagged under Panamanian jurisdiction for its favorable [read: minimal responsibilities] maritime laws.
The vessel itself is operated by Evergreen Line (Taiwan).
However, the actual financing (loosely said, ownership) of the vessel could be an obscure array of financiers.
In shipping, each vessel they set up essentially as its own company. So that if it goes down, it doesn't (pardon the pun) sink the rest of the financial ship with it.
I wonder if the recent anti-Chinese rhetoric coming from our Democrats and Republicans alike has anything to do with the fact that China has overtaken the USA by GDP in terms of Purchasing Power Parity.
America cannot exist without an unbeatable foe.
China, USSR, Taliban, Al Qaeda, "radical Islamic terrorism," Communism in general, etc. etc. etc..
Absolute trillions wasted on these attempts to reign supreme have only enriched multinational conglomerates.
In the past EIGHT years (from 2012-2020) Chinese wages have DOUBLED.
The average Chinese worker has TWICE the income they did eight years ago.
In USA the MINIMUM wage has not even kept up with inflation and has remained unchanged since 2009.
It's going to take years, maybe generations, for us to truly understand the devastating impact that COVID-19 has had on us even beyond the ~538,000 Americans that have died.
Our social threads have frayed in ways that can't possibly be re-assembled back to he way it was before we were all fractured.
Distance, silence, isolation, and downright loneliness are in themselves risk factors that greatly impact our physical and mental health.
In fact, some non-pharmaceutical treatments for conditions such as depression involve socialization and the breaking of patterns including solitude.
Our socialization has been limited to things we have to do out of necessity, most poignantly in America, the workplace.