BOW WAVE 573

Bow Wave Issue 573--Air Cargo Edition

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

Bow Wave homepage
Previous issue (572) / Current issue / Next issue (574)

Wavy Line	sam@wavyline.com
(c)2010 WavyLine.com	Issue No 573 15 Nov 10
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
Subscribe	Unsubscribe

In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. Lloyd's List Opinion Piece
3. Air Cargo Security
4. More Entrepreneurs Needed for NYC
5. Skuld 1897 Launches
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

Poem of the Week

November, 1967

Dr. Zhivago was playing at the Paramount
Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon,
we went into Russia,

and when we came out, the snow
was falling--the same snow
that fell in Moscow.

The sky had turned black velvet.
We'd been through the Revolution
and the frozen winters.

In the Chevy, we waited for the heater
to melt ice on the windshield,
clapping our hands to keep warm.

On the highway, these two things:
a song from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and that semi-truck careening by.

Now I travel through the dark without you
and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful
the way you were, no matter what.

Joyce Sutphen

New Readers this week include:-

Captain Sandra Leigh "Sam" Pirtle in Honolulu
Barbara Versfeltod lawyers Lowndes Jordan in Auckland Anna Zareba of lawyers HFW
Cheri Chestnut of lawyers GJTBS in New Orleans
Henk Akse

News of Readers

After spending almost all of the last 35 years in Bermuda, (re)insurance journalist Roger Crombie says he was expelled this week as the final chapter of a determined assault on freedom of speech by the Government of Dr. Ewart Brown. Crombie is keeping his e-mail address and will be carrying essentially the same workload from his new home in London. Dr. Brown was replaced as Bermuda Premier on October 28 by Paula Cox.

mailto:crombie@northrock.bm

Read more here:-

http://www.riskandinsurance.com/story.jsp?storyId=506265819

The Australian Marine Environment Protection Association has elected a new chairman, Captain Conrad Saldanaha, who is a marine manager with Origin Energy.

Captain Justin Lawes has joined international legal and claims consultants C Solutions in order to strengthen their investigative and technical abilities.

Insurance veterans Christina Lau and Carol Tan add to the team in the Asia Pacific region through a new C Solutions presence in Singapore.

http://www.csolutionslimited.com

Holger Stoelker has been appointed Managing Director for Taiwan by Gebrüder Weiss, the Austria-based logistics company.

FOB Update

The sign ups for FOB are approaching 1000, an encouraging start to our attempt to import the principles of on-line networking into the transport and maritime spheres where the take up of such things has to date been rather patchy. Although we imagined there would be a strong divide between generations, a visit to the People page shows that there are plenty of people joining who are not exactly members of the facebook generation

People joining FOB can access the Group Pages, which are not visible to unregistered browsers and the membership of the Group is visible to other members

There have been a few new Groups started this week, Project Cargo and Ship Sale and Purchase. Groups expand as people join and invite others to join

New people joining FOB include:

Tarja Wynn, marine survey work assigner at CS Solutions Jon Werner, maritime attorney in NY
Dan McDonald, marine surveyor in Toronto
Ted Crosby, marine surveyor and adjuster in Miami John Ironside, marine photographer in Ireland
Sue Stewart, marine insurance claims broker
Dean Allen, marine insurer in London
Bob Crighton, port authority man
Keith Duncan, classification society executive
Michael Bono, ship repo man

Registration is gratis for individuals. Businesses can take out a page for a small supporting contribution and we welcome firms prepared to sponsor Group pages or advertise with us.

FOB is a project designed to adapt the new ways of using the internet for the sorts of people who read Bow Wave.

You are welcome to join

http://www.fobnetworking.com

Note from the Editor

This edition is rather full of items relating to air cargo, the half cousin of all things maritime. The reason for this is simple, all the items in Bow Wave are the week's pick of either your editor's inbox (which overflows with contributions from Readers) or they are heard about in London. Any Readers who would like their good work to be read around the world (our zine appears in offices in over 120 countries) should not hesitate to send word in.

Enjoy!

2. Lloyd's List Opinion Piece

Your editor's most recent piece in Lloyd's List examines the economies the UK government is making in the maritime and international trade sectors:

Bonfire of the Quangos

The Coalition government in the UK is very largely about finding ways of economizing on public expenditure. It has been decades since this was a main animating spirit of a British government, but the state of the public debt in 2010 puts decision makers in difficult dilemmas. The maritime and international trade spheres are by no means immune from the cost controllers. For instance:

SITPRO

I was lately surprised to receive a "we’re closed" e-mail auto response from SITPRO a small British quango devoted to trade facilitation set up to deal with the challenges of through transport for traditional international trade processes. I occasionally attended SITPRO meetings. They were modest affairs, but the expertise on display on the fine print of international trade process was as good as it gets. I do not know anyone who had anything bad to say about SITPRO. I wonder whether SITPRO could be described in any way as a luxury or a waste of public money. At the end of August is was shut

Southampton Free Trade Zone

Go to the website of ABP and amongst the high quality offerings on view is a free trade zone in the port of Southampton. Someone has forgotten to tell the webmaster for the zone is no more from 17th September. All across Europe "free ports" are being consigned to the knackers as part of a review of customs arrangements. Freeports are usually established to attract valuable entrepot trade from outside businesses anxious to avoid being mired in local taxation. In my mind I associate them with go ahead port promotion and export mindedness.

Maritime Incident Report Group

Closer to home perhaps is the government's announcement that the future of the Maritime Incident Response Group (MIRG) is under review. The unit, set up in in 2006 to provide a co-ordinated national network of trained personnel to respond to fires, chemical releases and other accidents at sea costs £340,000 a year.

Emergency Towing Vessels (ETVs)

Perhaps the most eye catching economy proposed is for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency to cease funding four standby tugs on station in Falmouth, Dover, the Northern Isles and Western Isles from September 2011.The tugs--Anglian Prince, Anglian Princess, Anglian Sovereign and Anglian Monarch--are chartered by the MCGA for use in pollution control and towing vessels that are in difficulty.

The government is saying the salvage and clean-up of stricken vessels should be a commercial matter between a ship’s operator and the salvor and the insurers and their insurers. This may well be true--wait until the next time a Master under pressure from the bean counters back in head office dithers too long and spills his cargo on a sensitive shore.

ETVs were introduced after the Braer tanker casualty off the coast of Shetland in 1993. The Department of Transport estimates that scrapping ETVs will save £32.5million over the next four years.

So far as the four areas above are concerned, you could not say they are obviously surplus to requirements, or pork barrel politics, or sinecures for the political classes, or muddle headed wastes of public money. They have each seemed at the time of their creations a good idea, worth backing with a relatively small piece of public cash and a little legislation. But in the hunt for public economies, it seems a better idea to retire these ideas.

We must hope that the Coalition government can do better than this. The scale of economies being demanded in 2010 require major changes in the way the country and the society has lived for decades without asking whether the tradeoffs which have been produced have been worth the burden of expenditure and costs.

Three areas come to mind which have grown like topsy over the last 10 or 20 years, producing many new jobs in the public sector and a corresponding rise in the numbers of regulatory managers in the private sector. Those areas are: Industry Regulation, Health and Safety Regimes, Shipping and Transport Security Regimes.

Regulation of the financial industry has been a story of great underachievement in our times. The insurance industry weighed itself down with reams of compliance while the banks lost big time at the casino under the noses of thousands of officials charged with regulating the financial services industry. It might be argued that nearly all the regulatory work carried out in London during the last 10 years was in vain and should be reviewed with an eye on necessary economies.

Health and Safety Regimes in the UK have become something of a Frankenstein ‘monster, ushering in an era of risk aversion which shames a nation of risk takers and enshrines the log rollers and jobsworthians. The stifling effects of this trend occasionally surface in otiose regulations and mind-boggling stupidity. That a scaling back of unnecessary health and safety mindedness is desirable may be deduced from the narrative in a recent enquiry into the 7/7 bombings in London where firemen waited for a proper order (as per safety procedure) to descend to the scenes of carnage at Aldgate Tube Station while city workers died below

Finally, Michael O’Leary of Ryanair , the third biggest airline in Europe is on to something as he opines that modern air passengers will now have to deal with ‘ludicrous’ new security procedures after the Yemen mail bomb plot, making air travel more tedious and uncomfortable. O’Leary recently pointed out current aviation security manages to be both ineffective and excessive. The result of any terrorist incident in the world relating to transport is a further advance by‘securicrats’ to introduce more measures of mass inspection.

The rise and rise of industrial-commercial-governmental security regimes in our times is ripe for revisiting. Societies like the US and the UK should be getting out their cost-benefit spectacles and their respect for liberty and wondering how so much can be spent to so little effect, by politicians and electorates unable to understand the ordinary workings of risk and probabilities and the swings of public emotions prompted by the strategies of terrorism.

3. Air Cargo Security

Sane security Guru Bruce Schneider writes in the latest edition of his Crypto-Gram zine:-

The New York Times writes: "Despite the increased scrutiny of people and luggage on passenger planes since 9/11, there are far fewer safeguards for packages and bundles, particularly when loaded on cargo-only planes."

Well, of course. We've always known this. We've not worried about terrorism on cargo planes because it isn't very terrorizing. Packages aren't people. If a passenger plane blows up, it affects a couple of hundred people. If a cargo plane blows up, it just affects the crew.

Cargo that is loaded on to passenger planes should be subjected to the same level of security as passenger luggage. Cargo that is loaded onto cargo planes should be treated no differently from cargo loaded into ships, trains, trucks, and the trunks of cars.

Of course: now that the media is talking about cargo security, we have to "do something." (Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.) But if we're so scared that we have to devote resources to this kind of terrorist threat, we've well and truly lost.

Also note: the plot -- it's still unclear how serious it was -- wasn't uncovered by any security screening, but by intelligence gathering. The Washington Post writes: "Intelligence officials were onto the suspected plot for days, officials said. The packages in England and Dubai were discovered after Saudi Arabian intelligence picked up information related to Yemen and passed it on to the U.S., two officials said."

This is how you fight through terrorism: not by defending against specific threats, but through intelligence, investigation, and emergency response.

My essay on intelligence, investigation, and emergency response:

http://www.schneier.com/essay-292.html

4. More Entrepreneurs Needed for NYC

Courtesy of the Browser, we read this rather good review of how NYC has always been start-up city. Edward Glaeser writing in City Journal on 15NOV10 relates tales of historic New York entrepreneurship: Jeremiah Thompson, inventor of on-time freight shipping; Isaac Roosevelt, sugar refiner; A.E. Lefcourt, bootblack to property billionaire. The city's economy is 40 per cent dependent on the financial services. Glaeser opines that more entrepreneurs would be timely:-

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_urban-entrepreneurship.html

5. Skuld 1897 Launches

The following item appears in Grapevine, the newsletter of brokers RFIB:-

One of the worst kept secrets in the London market has been confirmed Skuld P&I club has now formally announced the formation of its Lloyd’s syndicate--numbered 1897, which is the year that the club was founded. The new syndicate will underwrite both marine and energy covers for physical loss or damage, including hull, loss of hire, war, cargo and offshore/energy related products.

Lloyd’s was very keen to keep the announcement under wraps until all the "t"s were crossed and all the "i"s dotted. But as foreshadowed in Grapevine 2010.6, London truly is an insurance market, with a strong rumour mill and it was difficult to the story quiet. Bernt Hellman, currently managing director of Skuld’s Aberdeen office will be the active underwriter for the new Lloyd’s syndicate. Michael Bennett, currently with Mitsui Sumitomo, will be in charge of the hull account and deputy active underwriter. The stamp capacity will be £60 million for 2011 and whilst Skuld has provided the majority of the capital, funds have also been provided by SCOR Underwriting Limited and Randall & Quilter Investment Holdings PLC.

90% of the planned income will come from business currently not in the Lloyd’s market and Skuld 1897 is undertaking series of presentations in 17 cities during November and December to inform its P&I members, who must be targets for the new venture.

RFIB understands that underwriting for risks incepting on 1st January 2011, will commence on 1st December 2010.

6. And Finally...

Michael Quinion, writing in the current edition of his excellent zine World Wide Words identifies a new term borrowed from the Chinese:-

CYBERSPEAK A curious English neologism, GELIVABLE, has been in the news this week. It originated in two Chinese characters which mean "giving power", which has become an Internet buzzword that means something cool, fantastic, awesome or exciting. It's written as "geili" in Pinyin, but to match the way it is said in Chinese it has been transcribed in English as "geli". Then it was turned into an adjective by adding the suffix "-able". It has also reached French, as "très guélile", so cool. Its opposite, "bugeili", for something dull or boring, actually came first, because it appeared earlier this year in an episode of a Chinese-dubbed Japanese comic manga.

http://www.worldwidewords.org

P.S.

God Bless Health Insurance

This fine joke comes courtesy of Randy Cassingham's JumboJoke.com:-

Two doctors and an HMO manager died and lined up at the pearly gates for admission to heaven. St. Peter asked them to identify themselves.

The first doctor stepped forward and said, "I was a pediatric spine surgeon and helped kids overcome their deformities."

St. Peter said, "You may enter."

The second doctor said, "I was a psychiatrist. I helped people rehabilitate themselves into functioning, happy people." St. Peter also invited him in.

The third applicant was trembling slightly, but stepped forward and said, "I was an Health Management Operation manager and I helped people get cost-effective health care."

St. Peter said, "You can come in too," and the HMO manager looked visibly relieved.

And as the HMO manager walked through the gate, St. Peter quietly added, "But you can only stay three days. After that you can go to hell."

BOW WAVE is published each week to over 15 500 Readers in the transport,insurance,shipping and finance industries. It is free to Readers but you can support it as a going concern by subscribing as a business member to:-

http://www.fobnetworking.com

Thanks for reading BOW WAVE