The Jones Act shrinks the US fleet and raises costs for families while China builds over 1,700 ships and the Korea-U.S. Shipbuilding Partnership Center launches.
how this picture was made
Painted by @cf/bytedance/stable-diffusion-xl-lightning on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-02 00:25Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A worn American shipyard at dusk with a nearly finished vessel, contrasts with a bustling Chinese shipyard in the background, under a warm orange sky with a few clouds, as workers in the American yard look on at the vibrant activity across the water.
Inside the house scaffold (the fixed style + safety clauses), the full prompt the painter received
Sprawling painted editorial illustration for a newspaper front page: A worn American shipyard at dusk with a nearly finished vessel, contrasts with a bustling Chinese shipyard in the background, under a warm orange sky with a few clouds, as workers in the American yard look on at the vibrant activity across the water. Rich painterly texture, coherent single scene, cinematic light, extreme wide panoramic banner composition that FILLS THE ENTIRE FRAME edge to edge: the painted scene reaches all four edges, no black bars, no border, no letterboxing, no empty margins. Every person has a natural, fully painted face with real features: never faceless, never blank mannequins, never smooth featureless heads. All people are fictional and resemble no real public figure. Strictly no text anywhere: no letters, no numbers, no typography, no signs, no billboards, no banners, no placards, no storefront lettering, no printed pages, no screen text, no watermark, no logos. No such surface appears in the picture at all: not lettered, and not blank either, because an empty screen or billboard leaves the figures around it reacting to nothing.
The picture's own pin (SHA-256 of the exact bytes served)
0b30ba66043a74cb473cd84c691c2b686b821c274824f70b40381a6fe85415e9
Puerto Rico House resolution asks Congress to exempt island from Jones Act
Representative José Varela introduced a concurrent resolution requesting that Puerto Rico be exempted from the Jones Act of 1920, citing higher crew costs and prior GAO studies.
By Nalani Reyes · 5wPuerto Rico Representative José Varela introduced a concurrent resolution in the Puerto Rico House of Representatives requesting that the U.S. Congress exempt the island from the cabotage restrictions imposed by the Jones Act of 1920.
The resolution cites prior studies by the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Puerto Rico's maritime commerce and the possible effects of changing the Jones Act, and notes that crew costs under cabotage provisions can be significantly higher than costs outside that legal regime. The resolution also asks that Puerto Rico be explicitly included in any recent or future congressional legislation that would relax or eliminate cabotage restrictions for non-contiguous U.S. territories, particularly those directed at Pacific territories.
Héctor Ferrer Santiago, the Popular Democratic Party spokesperson in the Puerto Rico House of Representatives, said the party delegation supports the resolution and argued that Puerto Rico cannot be left out of congressional discussions on cabotage, as similar economic isolation applies to the island. In written statements, Varela said Puerto Rico is not asking for privileged treatment but is asserting a demand for equal rights, stating that if Congress recognizes cabotage restrictions as a barrier to the economic development of U.S. Pacific territories, there is no reason for Puerto Rico to be treated differently. Varela said the resolution establishes a clear legislative request before the U.S. Congress and aims to avoid future cabotage initiatives leaving out Puerto Rico, stressing that the discussion is about the cost of merchandise and its impact on consumers, not partisan politics.
The Jones Act, Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, requires that all goods transported by water between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-built, U.S.-flagged, U.S.-owned, and U.S.-crewed ships. The act was reinstated after World War I and expanded cabotage restrictions; in 1940 Congress expanded it to cover towing vessels, and in 1988 said waterborne transport of valueless material like dredge spoil and municipal solid waste requires a Jones Act-qualified vessel.
Read with its sources →
