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Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping
- anovikov 5y agoIt is astounding to see that shipping is now about 1/3 the price of air freight! Which means, because air freight charges have doubled, it is almost as much as air freight was in 2019! Truly unbelievable.
- duemti 5y agoNothing about energy crisis. Summary: Ocean shipping reached bottleneck.
- dghughes 5y agoIn northern Canada pretty much everything needs to be flown in. Prices are very high. The highest cost are for the heaviest items which is anything liquid they will cost more than dry items.
- darkerside 5y agoCan we add a "more" into the title? As is, it's easily read incorrectly.
- HenryKissinger 5y agoCars are also apprecating in value. What other economic oddities are happening at the moment?
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago> Cars are also apprecating in value. Depends on who's inflation estimates you're using.
- mym1990 5y agoI'm pretty sure you don't need to look at inflation estimates to see that car prices are actually pretty bonkers right now. But here is a graph for the sake of it: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SETA02
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoYeah prices are crazy right now but my point is everyone seems to ignore inflation when looking at car values over time.
- mym1990 5y agoYeah I mean car depreciation is usually so much that the standard 1-2% inflation that we are used to doesn’t seem to be that much. It’s similar to getting a 3% raise until you realize that it’s really only 1%(with 2% inflation).
- jjk166 5y agoI was in a car accident a few weeks ago, my car was totaled. Between the insurance payout being super high and low financing rate, I was able to get a new (to me) car that has traditionally been worth twice as much as my old one while keeping my autopayments at the same rate and with the same amount of debt. I could have bought a car that was the same model year as my old one but with about half as many miles and still made about $3000 in profit. Maybe without inflation the number's smaller, but it's still way higher than zero.
- Arrath 5y agoGood old anecdata: I've now had three friends sell cars less than two years old for more than they paid for them. Indeed whether they turned a profit when considering inflation is up in the air but pure $-wise they did make money.
- gitfan86 5y agoEmployers are dropping quality standards for employees so fast that entire businesses have to shut down, because their employees leave and no one will work at a wage that makes the business profitable
- londons_explore 5y agoI much prefer this way if saying it to "we can't find any staff", which so many businesses are saying. No... You can't find any staff willing to do this work for the pay you're offering. Offer more pay and you won't have an issue.
- kiklion 5y agoThis is kind of ignoring that we don’t have high unemployment and our labor participation rate is nearly recovered as well. So anyone who wants a job, basically has one. A company raising wages isn’t going to create new labor by hiring an unemployed person, they are going to move labor by hiring one of their competitors employees. This doesn’t reduce the markets labor shortage.
- aksss 5y agoUnemployment is about where it was in 2017, which continued to drop all the way until 2020. So not as low as it was pre-pandemic, but objectively quite low, yes. Doesn't take away from your point. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
- s1artibartfast 5y agoU-3 unemployment is a garbage metric for most applications because it ignores anyone who has given up or underemployed. U-6 is a much better metric that doesn't sweep these factors under the rug.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago>our labor participation rate is nearly recovered as well. I don't think this is true. Labor participation dropped a couple percent, made up about half the loss, then has been about the same since June 2020 Jan 2020 83% June 2020 81.5% OCT 2021 81.7% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
- rossdavidh 5y agoAll of them. My wife had a problem getting studded leather belts for her goth/punk clothing store. T-shirts for old cult horror films are in short supply because the blank shirts aren't available as easily. Packages that do show up at the store are rain-soaked or dumped outside for anyone to find because the FedEx/DHL/etc delivery guy is overworked. You name it, if it involves the economy, it's weird now.
- freeflight 5y agoA lot of that, and over here in Germany there's even a weird bag shortage. Super markets running out of plastic and paper bags, in some places even McDonalds has started to use unbranded white paper bags. Same supermarkets are now also mentioning "inflation" as part of their weekly discount brochures, which is not something I think I've ever seen them do before.
- VortexDream 5y agoOh. I noticed that none of the supermarkets around me have had any bags for weeks. I somehow didn't connect the dots that there was a bag shortage. Odd. Why would there be a bag shortage?
- freeflight 5y ago> Odd. Why would there be a bag shortage? Apparently a combination of phasing out plastic bags while there's a pandemic related supply shortage of paper. At least that's what German news are saying, no more details as I can't find anything without a paywall.
- perl4ever 5y agoRight around the start of the epidemic, my state (US, not California) banned plastic bags. In the early part of it, the ban was relaxed, probably because it was felt that plastic bags might be more sanitary. But then they disappeared again. So I've gotten used to reusing the paper bags, which now cost a few cents. It's funny that you're still using plastic bags.
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- tehjoker 5y agoNet win or loss on carbon emissions? Planes are awful fuel-wise but ships use bunker fuel...
- thatfrenchguy 5y agoNo matter how you look at it and what you compare it against, flying is always going to emit more carbon because... flying is hard compared to moving on the ground.
- version_five 5y agoMy guess is that bunker fuel is (way) worse for other pollutants - sulphur compounds etc, but overall much higher efficiency when used to drive a giant container ship, so much lower CO2 per unit of freight overall.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoI'm not sure bunker fuel is worse for other pollutants. There's going to be much more jet fuel. If jet fuel emits 1% as much sulphur but there's 100x as much burned, then it's a wash.
- missedthecue 5y agoBunker fuel is relatively low in terms of CO2 emissions, requires far less energy and emissions to refine, and its use is disallowed anywhere near land. Given this, aside from pollution being something we don't like to do in general, there's no particular reason why bunker fuel is worse than something else. Emitting NOx thousands of kilometers from people, plants, or animals isn't really harmful.
- mym1990 5y agoWhat about the ocean?
- missedthecue 5y agoWhat about it? Since the major sink of methane in the atmosphere is by reaction with OH radicals, the NOx emissions from ship travel leads to a net global cooling, according to Wikipedia. The main threat of NOx is to the respiratory tract of mammals, very few of whom find themselves in the middle of Pacific.
- noduerme 5y agoI ordered an M1 Max the day after it was announced. It's supposed to arrive today. The route it took to get to Portland, Oregon, was Shanghai to Zhenzhou (where it spent a week), on to South Korea, then Anchorage, then a weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. How this makes any sense in terms of efficiency is totally beyond me. As a side note, I'm mildly paranoid about new Apple devices spending a week held up in Chinese customs. Is the CCP throttling exports, or installing backdoors?
- paxys 5y agoIf the CCP wanted to install backdoors they would do it at the factory rather than at customs. Also Apple's logistics game has always had these weird efficiencies. I remember ordering an iPod like 15 years ago, and I got a FedEx tracking number where I could see its progress flying overnight out of China. It was pretty wild at the time.
- sneak 5y agoI think if the CCP wanted to install backdoors, they would simply ask Apple to do it, as they did for iCloud. Apple would, of course, comply, as they did for iCloud. In the default configuration of a mac, Apple retains full remote code execution ability on the machine.
- onethought 5y agoThey didn’t install a back door for CCP. Edit: Back door exists for all gov, in that keys to encryption are stored in country. So back door always existed. But apparently that’s only bad when China have access to it. I guess because of the US long record of cyber trustworthiness.
- kalleboo 5y agoApples compliance in China applies to Chinese customers only. They would most likely be less willing to comply if it meant compromising foreign customers. As lucrative as the Chinese market is, losing the US market would be sudden death for Apple.
- mercy_dude 5y agoWould airline stocks be finally profitable? Asking as a bag holder.
- londons_explore 5y agoAirlines are making a lot of money in freight right now, yes.
- compress_stock 5y agoyour best hope is that this story picks up steam and a bunch of unsophisticated investors think it’s a hidden nugget of gains, and then you have to avoid falling for the hype yourself. sell the moment you’re in profit.
- elefanten 5y agoThe story of 2021, brought to you by Gamestop
- scoopertrooper 5y agoOh, we're going to squeeze those short sellers so hard. I don't care if they've already closed out all their positions, at this point it's the principle of the thing. Next stop omega squeeze!
- hanniabu 5y agoAh yes, the greater fool
- geoduck14 5y ago>your best hope is that this story picks up steam and a bunch of unsophisticated investors think it’s a hidden nugget of gains, and then you have to avoid falling for the hype yourself. sell the moment you’re in profit. So... Definitely yes?
- mastax 5y ago> The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down. — Warren Buffett, in the 2007 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter (Though this is relevant more to a value investor than to a speculator)
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- analog31 5y agoA friend of mine who flies big jets to Asia told me that the past year has been his busiest ever.
- fnord77 5y agoIt's not affordable if you take into account hidden costs of greenhouse gases on the planet.
- epolanski 5y agoI wonder how many people care. How many wind farms we need to offset this environmental disaster? Lately I’ve reduced my meat consumption and many other things to be more eco friendly but this kind of news makes me think this is all for nothing.
- kgin 5y agoIndividual changes at the scale of this problem aren’t literally nothing, but they’re pretty close to nothing.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoA big changes a sum of little change. You can't travel anywhere if you aren't willing to move an inch.
- baud147258 5y agoit's not nothing, it also makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside (and allow to look down on others, less ecological-conscious, people). But even if it's nearly nothing, it's a step in the right direction and it's better done than not.
- anyfoo 5y ago> it also makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside (and allow to look down on others, less ecological-conscious, people) What cause are you trying to advance with this rhetoric? I could not care less about feeling superior to others in this matter, and it's certainly not enough to make me feel "warm and fuzzy". I literally just don't want the world to spin out of control. I know acting a bit more conscious as an individual is next to nothing, but maybe doing so anyway and mentioning it in a non-condescending way helps a little bit to foster a culture where people are more conscious of environmental effects. Rhetoric like the above seems to aim a bit at the opposite.
- sushsjsuauahab 5y agoSpent $300 to fly a rug from Shanghai to Seattle, by way of HK and Japan. The bottleneck is, and will always be, large organizations have communication breakdowns.
- rossdavidh 5y ago[insert joke about flying carpet here]
- sushsjsuauahab 5y agoHah, if only! Though its quite large, like 7ft by 9ft. It would have to have extra magic than normal.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago>Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping I would say ocean shipping is now as exorbitant as air cargo, or more so.
- oliwarner 5y agoThat's exactly the case, and a much better summary. The relative prices have little bearing in the affordability as relatively few things have enough margin left in them to spend more on their shipping.
- nstart 5y agoDid anyone else read this article and feel like it is a lot of words to say very little? I feel like the core of the article can be summarized into this: Air transport is still more expensive than shipping. But the magnitude is less than it used to be. This is because shipping is seeing bottlenecks and surcharges to handle the bottlenecks. Therefore it makes the more expensive air transport ok to use especially with time sensitive holiday purchases coming up. If that sounds right, almost all that comes from the last few sentences in the article.
- LudwigNagasena 5y agoI wish there was a news site that didn’t pretend that most news need more than a single paragraph.
- lmilcin 5y agoI wonder if this means there is a niche for no-nonsense, no-bullshit news outlet.
- pokot0 5y agoYes. Thanks for the summary. Also the title pretty much says it all already if you are up to date with the supply chain crises. :)
- chrisseaton 5y agoJournalists are paid by the word. Imagine if programmers were paid like that!
- toss1 5y agoHa! Yet 'Lines Of Code' are still mentioned as a metric...
- scoopertrooper 5y agoI assume air cargo may also be cheaper at the moment given the human transportation business likely hasn't fully recovered.
- RNCTX 5y agoAlready seeing it this month. I order my dog's meds offshore, plain post mail from Australia flew by DHL and got here (Texas) in under a week.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoGod, I was hoping this was going to be an article about zeppelins