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Leaky Ships: Ocean Carriers and the Age of Profitless Shipping
- samstave 11y agoCrazy 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.
- DrScump 11y agoYou 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_freighter_travel.htm http://www.alex-haley.com/alex_haley_speaks_out_for_freighte...
- alltakendamned 11y agoTrue. Unfortunately, in 2015, it has become bloody expensive.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhy? A demand spike?
- alltakendamned 11y agoI 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.
- JulianMorrison 11y agoTravel in a container.
- spacehome 11y agoBad idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_%28season_2%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_%28season_2%29
- Phlarp 11y agoI 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.
- eCa 11y agoThere is a reason for having a maximum of twelve passengers: http://www.stunningyachts.com/articles/reference/faq.php#12 http://www.stunningyachts.com/articles/reference/faq.php#12
- DrScump 11y agoI 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.
- david-given 11y agoBecause 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.
- Already__Taken 11y agoI 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.
- david-given 11y agoThis are some pretty terrible pictures, but they show you how densely packed the containers are: http://www.travelwithachallenge.com/Images/Travel_Article_Library/Freighter-Travel/Container-Hold.jpg http://www.travelwithachallenge.com/Images/Travel_Article_Li... http://www.travelwithachallenge.com/Images/Travel_Article_Library/Freighter-Travel/Hanjin-Container-Ship-Seattle.jpg 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...
- Gys 11y agoInternet 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 ;-)
- kyllo 11y agoPrison would be safer and more fun.
- lmm 11y agoThere 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.
- simonh 11y agoTowing 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.
- DrScump 11y ago"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.
- ckozlowski 11y agoMy 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.
- jacquesm 11y agoIf 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.
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- ascorbic 11y agoRates 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.
- msandford 11y agoA 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.
- kyllo 11y agoExactly. 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.
- ascorbic 11y agoOne 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.
- burger_moon 11y agoScape metal has also become common to ship to China to be smelted back down shipped back to the U.S.
- kyllo 11y agoChinese 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.
- acd 11y agoI 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10572863
- bryanlarsen 11y agoExpect 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.
- cglace 11y agoThis has been taking place since the beginning of containerization and it has resulted in ever lower prices per container.
- bryanlarsen 11y agoYes, 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.
- lalalandland 11y agoThe 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-16-ships-create-pollution-cars-world.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...
- facepalm 11y agoWhile 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.
- yongjik 11y agoI'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.