Iran-US tanker attacks escalate while US and South Korea discuss shipbuilding cooperation and Hawaii ships calves through Canada due to the Jones Act.
how this picture was made
Painted by @cf/leonardo/lucid-origin on workers-ai.cloudflare.com, 2026-09-16 00:36Z. Scene directed by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast.
The scene the art director wrote
A cargo ship sails through choppy waters near a rocky coastline as a cattle transport vessel passes in the distance, with a subtle hint of a Hawaiian landscape on the horizon, under a cloudy grey sky with warm light peeking through the gaps.
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 cargo ship sails through choppy waters near a rocky coastline as a cattle transport vessel passes in the distance, with a subtle hint of a Hawaiian landscape on the horizon, under a cloudy grey sky with warm light peeking through the gaps. 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)
3b1d237ba4d2b8e29f4f915ab337142c25d7e6d73f776785a8cc74c669da6f83
The Jones Act is a 64.6% tariff on American ports. Repeal it.
A 1920 law that acts as a 64.6% tariff on domestic seaborne trade raises costs for Puerto Rico, Alaska, and every American port, and should be repealed.
By Marin Whitlock · 3wThe Jones Act is a 64.6% tariff on domestic seaborne trade. That is not a metaphor. It is the measured effect of a law that blocks foreign-built, foreign-crewed ships from carrying goods between U.S. ports.
Shipping a container from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico costs nearly $3,000. The same container to the Dominican Republic costs half that. The difference is the Jones Act. The law raises gasoline prices by up to 15 cents per gallon. It raises the price of liquefied natural gas for Puerto Rico by up to 30%. A 1988 GAO study found extra shipping costs of $163 million per year for goods between Alaska and the mainland.
The law is designed to restrict supply so American shippers can charge higher prices. It created a government-ordered cartel that led to criminal price-fixing convictions among Jones Act carriers between 2011 and 2012. Even the Defense Department prefers foreign transport ships because they cost less.
This column has argued before that the Jones Act taxes every port. The numbers keep proving it. A 64.6% tariff on American trade is not a shipping policy. It is a tax on every family that buys fuel, food, or anything that moves by water. Repeal it.
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