overseas manufacturing in developing countries

grew up around ports and trawlers, not the worst place for bumming around as a 12 yr old

there's a really good BBC 4 doc about container ships, which might be, uh obtainable somehow, called "The Box That Changed Britain" ... talks a lot about the old culture of the docks and how that basically vanished overnight, how nobody besides port computers have any idea what's in any of the containers, how shipping costs have made it more cost-effective to farm, say, prawns in the UK, ship them to thailand for processing, then ship them back for sale to the UK public

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Comparison_knock_nevis_with_other_large_buildings.png

mother of god!

http://i.imgur.com/4IKPA.jpg

http://www.ships-info.info/design/knock_nevis_tug.jpg

That graphic is amaaazing

"an empire state building's worth of party poppers gets shipped from shanghai to LA every 2 weeks"

We will try to explain everything about Knock Nevis, or better known as Jahre Viking or Seawise Giant.

Knock Nevis is crazy - on its Wikipedia page it says that it was actually sunk by the Iraqi air force in the Straits of Hormuz, raised from the bottom and repaired, bish bosh!

And renamed Happy Giant after the repair! ;_;

Tugboat captains = balls of steel. Seriously.

must be so weird to spend 6 months at sea on one of these things. a ship the size of the empire state building, and you're part of its 20 man skeleton crew, just walking around between the containers at night, listening to the ocean.

lol

The shipyard exercised its right to sell the vessel and a deal was brokered with Hong Kong Orient Overseas Container Line founder C. Y. Tung to lengthen the ship by several metres and add 156,000 metric tons of cargo capacity through jumboisation. Two years later she was relaunched as Seawise Giant.

IT'S NOT BIG ENOUGH, GODDAMMIT

more cost-effective to farm, say, prawns in the UK, ship them to thailand for processing, then ship them back

Stuff like this is almost reassuring, like there's a lot of fat to be cut. I'll try to resist the temptation to be reassured.

Yeah I can't overstate how interesting it's going to be to see how these matrices revise themselves as fuel gets more and more costly.

Sales departments everywhere will be THRILLED because they won't have to figure 6 weeks' shipping lead times into their sales forecasts.

there also will be fewer sales

Pretty sure the natural relationship between those two phenomena won't even occur to them.

Anyone know how much it costs to truck an 18-wheeler's worth of goods from, say, Mississippi to NY today vs. 20 years ago?

In terms of rising fuel $

Yeah I can't overstate how interesting it's going to be to see how these matrices revise themselves as fuel gets more and more costly.

I wonder if anyone's done simulations, would be interesting to know the range of scenarios.

We started to see it earlier this year when container ships slowed down to their most fuel-efficient speeds, which are not their top speeds, and ocean transits started to take an extra week or so. But when the price of oil went back down, that seemed to go away.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5741896/Could-ship-be-a-scavengers-bonanza

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/devon/6287457.stm

lol @ getting a BMW bike from a broken up container washed up on the shore

i know, i was mad jealous

*shot of containers slowly bobbing in the frothy waves, a dim red sun rises in the distance as seagulls circle listlessly*

*cut to shot of kids in newsie caps gunning BMW motorbikes up and off dunes, doing flips*

iirc the cops blocked the beach off after a day or so cos people were travelling from all over the country to grab what they cd get

I wld like to make one trip on a container ship before peak oil makes it unreasonable. think of the photos

always wanted to be a sailor when i was a kid, dunno why i didn't follow that thru. wish i had.

'sailor' isn't really a job anymore tbh

i know :(

just a casual hitcher then, live on the containers, never touch land :D

full-time stowaway, an alright gig but the pay isn't all that

must be so weird to spend 6 months at sea on one of these things. a ship the size of the empire state building, and you're part of its 20 man skeleton crew, just walking around between the containers at night, listening to the ocean.

― dayo, Friday, 7 October 2011 17:44 (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is a real poetic post, transit logistics thread or no

a low, full and orange moon over the silent north sea with no land in sight is something to remember

tho tbf we were chucking dead mackerel over the side at the time iirc

I know someone whose dad was a merchant marine until retirement, and now her brother is one, too. Weird life imo.

Also you can get a passenger berth on a container ship, it's just kind of weird, I think, to be a passenger when everyone else is working. For days and days and days.

yeah i remember years ago there was some kind of website that helped you book passage on various merchant ships, iirc u cd pitch in with the work and get the ride even cheaper that way

it sounds like something out of graham greene really, hitching a ride on a working vessel

a man could get paid for an honest day's work

I have to confess that I find giant container ships filled with containers extremely beautiful

I think a lot of people do! you can post to my other thread

sublime machinery

esp maersk ships

http://vimeo.com/27982653

x-posted in steve jobs thread

2 days and nobody has called out the word "jumboisation" yet!

Great thread btw!

I did look twice at that word! Is it a word?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumboisation

Did they really need to coin a new word for this?

Yeah, embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word after all.

guess it would be remiss to not mention the serious flooding in thailand. I've heard that some of the companies are donating money to flood relief - hope that that extends to all the companies who own plants there