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The Box That Built the Modern World
HughPickens.com writes: Andrew Curry has an interesting article about how more than any other single innovation, the shipping container epitomizes the enormity, sophistication, and importance of our modern transportation system. It's invisible to most people, but fundamental to how practically everything in our consumer-driven lives works. "Think of the shipping container as the Internet of thing," says Curry. "Just as your email is disassembled into discrete bundles of data the minute you hit send, then re-assembled in your recipient's inbox later, the uniform, ubiquitous boxes are designed to be interchangeable, their contents irrelevant." Last year the world's container ports moved 560 million 20-foot containers. Even cars and trucks—known in the trade as "RoRo," or "roll-on, roll-off" cargo—are increasingly being loaded into containers rather than specialized ships. "Containers are just a lot easier," says James Rice. "A box is a box. All you need is a vessel, a berth, and a place to put the container on the ground.
Consider the economics of a T-shirt sewn at a factory near Beijing. The total time in transit for a typical box from a Chinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days. Cost per shirt? "Less than one U.S. cent," says Rainer Horn. "It doesn't matter anymore where you produce something now, because transport costs aren't important."
Consider the economics of a T-shirt sewn at a factory near Beijing. The total time in transit for a typical box from a Chinese factory to a customer in Europe might be as little as 35 days. Cost per shirt? "Less than one U.S. cent," says Rainer Horn. "It doesn't matter anymore where you produce something now, because transport costs aren't important."
If you buy local, you need less transport
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
by Marc Levinson
A really good read
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Its changing the world
It doesn't matter anymore where you produce something now, because transport costs aren't important.
The is utter bullshit. The cost of shipping is decidedly important if you're trying to move goods from China to the US, unless the goods have an enormous cost per unit volume. In the case of the t-shirts, the shipping was probably most of the 1 cent.
The next time we do a big import for our distribution business, we'll try telling the shippers that we don't need to pay them and we'll see how far that gets us.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The cost will be prohibitive. You make shirts in some southern China shithole where there are lots of unskilled workers and sweatshops.
It can also be used to transport people, often with fatal results. Or you can go eco and turn it into a modular pre-fab house.
"Think of the shipping container as the Internet of thing," says Curry. "Just as your email is disassembled into discrete bundles of data the minute you hit send, then re-assembled in your recipient's inbox later, the uniform, ubiquitous boxes are designed to be interchangeable, their contents irrelevant."
This analogy is poorly constructed. Analogies are needed when an abstract concept with no tangible component needs to be explained by substituting a tangible form in place of an abstract form. Packing shipping containers, even with disparate contents that are later 'broken down' to go to individual recipients, is a tangible concept that does not need to use an abstract concept like data into packets into frames into bits back into frames back into bits back into frames back into packets (etc) to explain.
It doesn't even need something abstract to explain how the form factors of shipping containers impact goods, as one can simply state that due to standardization in three or four common shipping container sizes dictates the size and packing of goods that get packed into such containers, which in-turn dictate the dimensions of pallets on which goods may be placed, the size of railcars on which containers may ride, and even the size of tunnels for rail cars and the shapes of loading docks at distribution facilities.
One can even talk about the downsides (like how the form factors were somewhat arbitrary and work equally well and poorly for both fractional and SI units) and how there's real concern for the wastes associated with moving the mass the mass of the container itself. Again, no analogy needed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I remember talking to an Aussie wine maker years ago.
He claimed that 90% of his shipping cost was paying a fork-lift driver to load the container.
As Californian fork-lift drivers were payed more than Australian ones,
he had a competitive advantage in East Coast markets vs. Californian producers.
Since then the "U-Haul trailer effect"* has distorted the picture somewhat.
* [You can measure the state of the TX vs. the CA economy by comparing the price of one way trailer rentals between CA & TX.
In effect, U-Haul could pay you to transport a trailer from TX to CA and still make a profit renting the trailer to an economic refugee fleeing from CA to TX.]
That's actually opposite of what it was just a couple of decades ago. It cost me 3-4x as much to move east to west (east coast to CA) as to move back to the east coast. People are still flocking to CA.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm old enough to remember when containerization was just beginning to ramp up. The stevedores (the guys who manually shifted the goods from ship to shore and vice versa) were really upset because it would reduce the number of jobs (their contracts typically let them set the number of men on each job. Nice deal, that) and make their pilfering from the cargo much tougher. Somebody estimated that 5% or so of consumer goods never made it to the destination. There were violent strikes and sabotage of the port facilities during that time. Goes to show that when you kick over somebody's rice bowl, no matter how much better you might be making things, you're going to get pushback. A lesson that still applies, these days for the Uber economy.
It's not the shipping container.
It's the REFRIGERATOR...by far the most disruptive modern technology. Not to say that the shipping container isn't very significant and postdates the fridge by many decades. How modern is MODERN?
The next logical step should make the outsourcer's blood run cold. That is, individuals gain access to the cheap container shipping.
What do they plan to do when a typical consumer figures out how to go direct and get a new wardrobe for $20? Right nbow, you can order from China but the shipping costs more than the goods you have shipped. That's the real reason U.S. corporations are going crazy over trademarks and clones. They know the day is coming when we can get the same thing they're selling for pennies on the dollar. Right now they're in an elaborate scheme that boils down to rent (in the economic sense, not leasing though they do that too).
Yup. Look at destination charges for vehicles. GMC $925-$1195 from USA to USA. BMW $995 from Germany to USA. Toyota $720-$835 from Japan. It is actually cheaper to ship it from overseas and then put it on a train and then on a truck than it is to just put it on a train and then on a truck.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
On big problem with Shipping Containers is their sometimes one-way nature. My father was in Marine Insurance, and his biggest last big problem was how to get, say 100,000 empty Containers from say, Abu Dhabi, back to all the Ports where they are needed. (That's ~$300,000,000 worth of Containers, every few months...)
Frankly, there's not much of interest in Abu Dhabi that's worth shipping out by Container.
Currently, at US West Coast Ports, between a quarter and a third of incoming full Containers leave Port empty. Just dead space; it's costing companies like Maersk a Billion a year moving boxes of air around.
Only two practical solutions had emerged- Collapsible Containers, where four Containers returned take the place of one, and Single-Use Containers, where they are broken up on the spot into scrap and shipped back to China to be recycled. (Other solutions, like turning them into Housing, are Silly. They still need to be shipped where needed, and making one livable costs ten times the Container value. There are usually cheaper local alternatives.)
This was a few years back; maybe better solutions have emerged since.
Assuming 7,000 miles from China to USA, and biking at 12 mph, would take about 583 hours, or 24 days. I'm not used to thinking that way, but that seems in line with ship transportation. I'm used to hearing it taking 6 months, or a year for those early European explorers. Heh heh heh, I can imagine Magellan and 200 people on a quest to circle the Earth. They get on bicycles, and just start peddling away. The Queen of Spain should be able to afford that.
I just have to laugh at the stupidity of the above claim. The ridiculous ignorance of slashdot commenters never fails to amaze me
No matter what kind of product to make - a T-Shirt, a book, or a vehicle, - raw materials must be sourced, and then preprocessed before any real assembly operation can commence
It is the sourcing and pre-processing of raw materials which often emit the most pollution, not when the final product is assembled
Seriously. We are currently in a state of half-a**ed implementation of containerization anyway. Checked bags must be "62 inch" bags (height, width, and depth adding to no more than 62") or they become "over-size" and subject to huge fees. According lots of people travel with bags that fit an almost standard set of dimensions: 27" x 21" x 14"; carry-ons are limited to being "45 inch bags" (22" x 14" x 9"). And unless you want all your belongings to be crushed beyond recognition it had better be a hard case, or have a rigid frame.
Going will full containerization of airline luggage, with standard bag units, properly spec'd and designed, all of them rigid sided, would permit highly automated baggage handling, efficient design and loading of baggage holds, and freedom from abusive baggage handlers.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Most recent write up I can find is from 8/14.
I suspect the ratio CA->TX/TX->CA has fallen somewhat with the decline in oil prices but most likely still > 1.
CA population is still growing, but mainly at the bottom (read "undocumented") end of the income spectrum.
Meanwhile, the middle+ income refugees continue to spread their toxic politics to CO, TX and any other state dumb enough not to follow Hungary's lead.
If I want to send a package overseas and I don't care if it takes 2-3 months to get there, I used to be able to save a ton of money by shipping it "sea mail."
Now my only options are air mail. Sure, it will get there in 2-3 weeks or less but I'll be out $20 for something the size and weight of a small paperback. Grrr....
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I was thinking I could maybe put together a frankenbox from other parts I had lying around, well I had a machine from 2006. But that had VGA and DVI outputs, my current monitor only has HDMI and DP.
DVI-D and HDMI are the same signals in a different connector. Monoprice has cheap DVI-D to HDMI cables to let you use the 2006 PC with the current monitor.
The bs article is tactic to push the ipv6 'internet of things'. We have been and are being sprayed with nano chip chemtrails. Idiots sucked down every 'tech', ignored every robbery and assault, fraud 'wars' fraud 'bailouts' mass immigration, 'welfare' scum parasites, bought every 'tech', now you have been made into a cell phone yourself, and worse.
On the post above, garbage chatter. So concerned about 'co2' while you let MILLIONS MORE IMMIGRANTS FLOOD IN.
The jew tribe and trolls bs double talk is a Fail.
Dupes don't realize the mass of shit they see on the web is by millions of jews trolls, and also computer generated fake posts.
The bs to keeping push scum 'global' bs, this after a hundred million jobs have been shipped overseas, as over 100 million immigrants have been brought in to crush nordic whites. The same time the tribe cabal yammers 'be green'. It is all bullshit from the tribe, in every direction. Propganda. Know who owns you. They are not just a religion, they are a Race.- thezog.info - see all pages at right, also top of main page 'required reading' page, bottom half of list copy articles from vnn. don't waste time at vnn, also run by them just see pages, copy for backup.
holo fraud - https://archive.org/details/TheLeuchterReport
http://jewishcrimenetworkdid911.blogspot.com -More faces, ee all pages at top -
http://web.archive.org/web/20100825152627/http://jewishfaces.com/banking.html
holodomorinfo.com - see pages don't waste time on videos, sites even 'jew truther' sites run by them so you sit 'reading' or 'follow' and don't do anything yourself to stop them. What else is in the chemtrails. Virus to kill by race. newworldwar.org/chemical.htm - ignore notes at bottom, skip rest of site.
They jabber and distract to dumb down the real and dire. The links show the situation. Copy this to re read, give links to others, put links on notes, hand out to everyone
Funny thing - Chinese Gooseberries are called "kiwifruit" and they are shipped in to Beijing from NZ for less than trucking them in from another part of china.
containers are so hyped, docker this, lxd that, stop it already!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I just saw a story on PBS that the port of jacksonville was trying to get tax dollars to pay to deepen the channel so bigger ships could come thru. They already are deepening the panama canal. This is all done with "free" money with respect to the shipper. If the shipping companies really want to have deeper channels, they should pay for them and increase the ship costs to the true unsubsidized cost. Imagine if I went to the government and asked for money to build a T-shirt factory. I'd get laughed at. But somehow the shipping companies have managed to convince us that we should collectively pay to export our jobs.
if you live near a port, even a small one, you see containers piling up (literally) in parking lots and empty property, because so many come in and so few leave. it's been suggested often that we use them for housing the homeless or whatever but the reply is always that they're unsuitable for various reasons
so, why not either enhance them, or have some standard procedure for enhancing them to make them usable for structures.
thinking outside the box: figure out a way to make a ship or raft or barge or something out of empty containers so we can ship them back cheaper than they can make them!
Ii assume these are made in China from Chinese steel?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
The reason no factories in the US is simple. CEOs want more money, so they outsource to slave labor then petition Congress to get rid if tarrifs. Like when Bush 'protected the American steel worker' by putting a tarrif on imported steel so America could compete. The CEOs of the steel industry's profit margin was protected, but the companies that consumed the steel, including a lot of telecomm, simply moved to another country. Jobs everywhere were lost in the ripple effect. Taxes/Tariffs on rare, dangerous, or polluting substances is fine, but tarrifs on all the JUNK coming in from China should be mandatory. Its not poorly engineered ... it lasts 1 day after warranty expires and that's it ... perfect for company profits. Why is it that a brand new product won't last 13 months, but the shit you bought 13 years ago still works fine?
But thanks to the new TPP, we'll never see tariffs on the crap made by slave labor and our middle class will disappear until we're all corporate slaves!
Government should subsidize when it is in the interest of its people. When these ports were first built, the US was a net exporter, so making shipping cheaper was a plus. Now we are a net importer, so we should no longer do this. Making foreign goods cheaper hurts domestic manufacturers. Sure goods may be cheaper, but if you have no one with a job to buy them, only the few benefit, with a long term detriment to your people.
Trucking and rail move both domestic and foreign goods, so less of an issue.
some docker joke to be made here somewhere...
Worked with a team at American President Lines back in the seventies that built the bar code tracking system for containers. Primitive tech, paper tape, punch cards and loads of green bar. Lots of trouble getting an optical scanner to interface with the 360/50 mainframe in the data center. But the biggest personal risk was to avoid letting the stevedores know what we were up to when visiting the wharves.
Which are what are loaded into those boxes, and are probably what designed their size in the first place?
Even when bar at top shows '0 hidden' there are still posts they're hiding. have click show all comments button - and also slide bar over at top to see all posts. have to do Both to see all posts. notice what they hide. do both, click show all and slide bar over. see 'bogus propaganda' post below