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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!”
"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.
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.
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 funny, because I think you overlook the odd commonalities between the old-fashioned stevedore model and the Uber model.
Both of them are based on an idea that having a steady job with consistent employees is unnecessary. It's obviously cheaper to hire people on demand.
The traditional model for stevedores were guys who'd show up at the docks every morning and just HOPE they might get enough work that day to get paid and go home and feed their families. That just depended on whether the shipping schedules and amount of goods happened to be enough to support them.
The life of a lot of these guys was terrible -- they worked hard, when they could, but they had no job security at all... since they had no "job," per se. If they had an unlucky accident and hurt their backs or whatever, they could be out on the street begging.
Then, at some point, through strikes workers' rights movements, the stevedores finally achieved REAL jobs.
Ironically, the "Uber economy" you favor is heading toward putting its "contract workers" (people who struggle to cobble together enough part-time work to live) back in the same place that the stevedores were before unions... standing on the docks, hoping that enough ships come in today to feed the family.
(P.S. I'm not arguing in favor of corrupt unions, nor am I celebrating destructive stevedore protests. But I think we need to realize why those stevedores were so upset to lose their jobs... those were hard-won concessions that they fought to get out of an "Uber economy" model, because it made their lives miserable.)