hm indeed, according to
some comments elsewhere, a large amount of the "dead" ships are simply waiting until there's place for them to dock and unload.
a lot of the ones in the zerohedge link, that is. however in the DailyMail pics we can see the ships near Singapore floating high above the waterline. So they are empty, but as long as we don't have pics of the others, they might just be waiting in line.
another comment, seemingly confirming my doubts:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/thousands-rusting-ship-hulls-are-fitting-tribute-speculative-market-bubble#comment-73186Another commenter at geenstijl.nl did some calculations (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_merchant_marine_capacity_by_country) to estimate a lowerbound on the global cargo fleet and came up with at least 34,822 ships in 2007 (if we are to believe the DailyMail article this number could have only grown since then).
Now if we were gonna believe DailyMail's article--that was just about the Singapore ghostfleet, mind you--12% of this number means about 4,200 ships laying still. Was it that many in front of Singapore? I got the impression they were talking about a few hundred or so?
(Also, (from the zerohedge article) "Most shocking is the situation around the Bosporus: the transit corridor between Russia and the rest of the world is
orders of magnitude worse than even the Singapore case.", I hate hate HATE it when people fucking do that. An order of magnitude is an exponential measure, doubling or usually 10-fold. If you say order
s of magnitude, plural, we're talking about 100 or 1000 times, which is bullshit. You could say "about an order of magnitude" but it wouldnt sound as scary? hrmzzfrg)