Leaky Ships: Ocean Carriers and the Age of Profitless Shipping | Hacker News Reader

Leaky Ships: Ocean Carriers and the Age of Profitless Shipping

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48 pointsthedogeye34 comments

The pollution shipping causes is really not taken seriously enough. Much of overseas production of cheap products is possible because of cheap shipping, but the environmental impact of this is going to cost us dearly.

One report say 16 of the biggest container ships produce as much pollution as all the cars in the world: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...

While I agree that it's horrible (but also presumably comparatively easy to fix), I think they only measure pollution by certain pollutants, not total pollution.

I'm not so sure about that. Assuming that the pollution due to shipping is mostly by burning fuels, "low cost of shipping" actually puts an upper bound on the amount of pollution, because shipping companies can burn only so much fuel while staying profitable.

Once there was a popular meme saying shipping CFLs from China generates more pollution than the amount reduced by changing incandescent bulbs to CFLs. Of course, when you consider how much coal you can burn for the shipping cost, the argument falls down quickly.

"Let’s say that you want to travel for a year; it’s cheaper to put your personal belongings in a shipping container as it sails around the world than to keep it at a local mini-storage facility."

Yow.

My collegue repatriated back to the US earlier this year from Europe, and I'll be following shortly. I was stunned at how cheap it was (relatively speaking) to ship our things back.

The moving company brings a 40ft container to your house, and starts packing it up. Then it's right off to the port. It amazes me, perhaps more so than it should, that moving an entire household full of items across the ocean is so economical.

If it wouldn't be that economical then the whole 'made in China' phenomenon would not exist.

The biggest problem I had in moving back from Canada to NL was to pick up the container in Rotterdam harbor and to have it delivered at our house. The rest of the 6500 km journey was trivial.

Expect the prices to spike horribly in a few years, it sounds like a classic oligopoly in the making.

Small & mid-sized carriers are being killed off, and the big carriers are forming consortiums.

Once that consolidation is complete, it'll be a closed field with massive barriers to entry: the immense amounts of capital necessary to build those huge ships, plus the need to secure the necessary docking slots.

This has been taking place since the beginning of containerization and it has resulted in ever lower prices per container.

Yes, it's a classic pattern. Companies get bigger and more efficient, driving down prices until there's only 2 or 3 left and they can start enjoying their oligopoly.

Rates are very low, but the example given of Rotterdam to Shanghai is a bit misleading. There is much less demand in that direction than the other way, but the ships still need to get to Shanghai to pick up all those toys for the children of Europe. I'd expect the price the other direction to be more than double that.

A friend of mine, back when I was in logistics, actually managed to get PAID $200 per container to move 1000 containers worth of stuff from the US to China. Quoting a cheap rate from the "west" to the "east" is totally bogus. That's not the real price.

Exactly. The carriers are happy to get any money at all on the Europe to Asia route, because most of their containers are moving back to Shanghai empty.

One common cargo from Europe to China is waste cardboard. Think how cheap shipping would have to be for that to be worth shipping. Many of these will be the boxes from goods shipped to Europe from China, and will be recycled into more boxes for more goods to send back to Europe. It's like the circle of life, but with cardboard.

Scape metal has also become common to ship to China to be smelted back down shipped back to the U.S.

Chinese Customs has started banning a lot of these commodities because of the pollution that recycling them creates. Used tires for example. But apparently it is still somehow profitable to ship them to Vietnam and smuggle them across the border into China for recycling.

Yes, and ocean carriers' managerial accounting systems may actually assign credit to shipments that help reposition containers from surplus ports to shortage ports. So the actual cost of moving a container from Rotterdam to Shanghai might be $1,000 and the customer is only paying $500 but the office that sold the business can at least "break even" because they may also get a $500 credit for getting an empty box back to Shanghai where there's always a shortage, because of the opportunity cost of not having equipment available for the customer shipping from Shanghai to Rotterdam who will pay $3,000.

I smell a credit bubble that has put too many ships on the market.

See also this Article about an advertising bubble where there is "There's more money being made from advertising than consumers are putting in." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10572863

Crazy idea: what if cargo ships towed behind them a "cruise barge" - basically a section of cruise ship that people can rent cabins on to go from point A to point B -- its basically like a cruise ship - but its only on the barge behind the cargo ship - maybe not as luxurious as a cruise ship - but might be another way to charge given that no matter what the cargo ships will always be traversing these routes on the seas.

You can buy passage on freighters as it is. Writers, for example, use the isolation to keep them from distractions.

Alex Haley, for example. http://www.alex-haley.com/alex_haley_speaks_out_for_freighte...

True. Unfortunately, in 2015, it has become bloody expensive.

Why? A demand spike?

I have the impression it is being positioned as a unique and alternative travel experience. Most freighter can only take a max. of 10-12 people.

Travel in a container.

Bad idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_%28season_2%29

I think part of the point of this plotline was to display how common/routine it is as a method of travel. They focus the whole season on the one instance it went poorly-- There are multiple scenes that make it clear they were bringing girls in by this method before the incident, and that they continue to do it once the investigation concludes.

There is a reason for having a maximum of twelve passengers:

http://www.stunningyachts.com/articles/reference/faq.php#12

I read something about it being a function of how much longer you are aboard a freighter vs. a cruise. If you are at sea 3X as long, it costs 3X to feed you, etc.

Because there's a natural lower bound to how long you can stay --- freighters take time to get anywhere. Per-day, it's not too pricy, but you have to book weeks at a go.

I guess if a cruise ship is a package holiday what you're describing is a self catering cruise ship?

What if an operator sourced high-speed internet for a trip and rented a good few months of container space to programmers who want a working holiday ha.

Or rent out kitted out livable containers to go on ships with an occupant for x time of the trip.

This are some pretty terrible pictures, but they show you how densely packed the containers are:

http://www.travelwithachallenge.com/Images/Travel_Article_Li... http://www.travelwithachallenge.com/Images/Travel_Article_Li...

That's 14 layers of containers, eight below deck and six above. Some contains will need power hookups because they're refridgerated, so it's feasible that those are accessible, but most won't be.

Plus, containers do get lost overboard occasionally. Cabins would be rather safer...

Internet is only possible by satellite on the oceans. Meaning its very expensive and not really high-speed. Better to rent that 5-star suite in a big city ;-)

Prison would be safer and more fun.

There are kind of two halves to that idea - towing a barge rather than having a single big ship, and using some space for cruise passengers rather than cargo.

For the first half, it sounds like a clever way of getting around the Panama Canal lock size limits, so I can only assume there are good reasons not to - maybe towing a barge across the ocean is too dangerous given the kind of storms you get there?

For the second thing there's plenty of competition from large purpose-built cruise ships (e.g. Oasis of the Seas is bigger-than-panamax). So I doubt space on a cargo ship would be competitive with space on a dedicated cruise ship. Fundamentally the cruise industry is subject to the same issues of overbuilding and consolidation.

Towing a separate hull is going to incur a severe drag penalty compared to carrying the same weight onboard, and it's not going to be pulled along for free. It will reduce the ship's speed and increase fuel consumption. There will be a direct tradeoff between weight carried in the form of the barge and weight the ship could carry internally for the same performance penalty.

Plus the barge will be traveling according to the cargo ship's itinerary, not it's captain or passenger's preference, and at cargo ship speeds which are considerably slower than cruise ships. The slower speed means increased crew, food, drink servicing and entertainment costs compared to alternatives.

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