8 ms·

I really hate articles like this. It's like they're only written for the shippers and their margin and no one else. The country as a whole suffered under those

I really hate articles like this. It's like they're only written for the shippers and their margin and no one else. The country as a whole suffered under those huge rates. Why is "falling" to normal prices a bad thing?

nl 4y ago
I don't think anyone (except maybe logistics companies) think this is a bad thing. For almost all other readers of the WSJ shipping costs are just seen as a tax that makes their products more expensive.
- manquer 4y ago
  Environmentalists or local manufacturers might also think dropping prices are bad ?. Local firms can compete better if cost of imports are higher . Similarly less goods will be imported if costs are high , therefore less emissions.
  - nl 4y ago
    Shipping is around 2.5% of global emissions, and notably the change in pricing didn't seem to substantially affect the volume[1] which is of course the thing that effects emissions. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/253987/international-seaborne-trade-carried-by-containers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/253987/international-sea...
    - manquer 4y ago
      Depends on the type of emissions. Shipping uses bunker oil one of the most unclean fuels out there . Few ports now are providing power supply so they don’t have to burn bunker oil while berthed and can also shutdown power systems to do maintenance, but connectors are not standard etc. IMO has reduced the % of sulfur allowed recently and so on . Still it is a problem. Sulfur content is especially high and is estimated to cause 150,000 deaths/year and, 13% of SOx emissions is attributed to shipping[1] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02774-9#ref-link-section-d1456e583 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02774-9#ref-link-...
      - b3orn 4y ago
        A lot of countries have laws about which types of fuel can be used within territorial waters, usually they restrict it to marine diesel, so nobody is burning bunker oil in port.
        heavenlyblue 4y ago
        Do ships have different fuel tanks to switch between just to enter territorial waters?
        pletnes 4y ago
        Some do, yes. Not sure how general this is. The price difference of the fuel is significant.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      2.5% would be far from insignificant. The European Commission Climate Action website put it closer to 2.9% and volumes are expected to increase by as much as 100% until 2050. The percentage is even more significant if you look at it from the point of view of relatively clean part of the world like the EU. Shipping is 4% of our emission. Something will definitely have to be done with shipping if countries want to hit their emission targets.
    - nosianu 4y ago
      > notably the change in pricing didn't seem to substantially affect the volume I don't think that means much. Changes would be long-term, there is a lot of inflexibility short-term, you can't just create new suppliers locally overnight. It also depends on expectations of where the price will go. If it is expected to be a local maximum and that prices will sink again then few will take the price as signal to move production locally.
    - eecc 4y ago
      That’s a false argument. There’s no activity that of itself produces 50% of humanity’s emissions. Every single one is “not worth reducing” because the bulk is always somewhere else. Nope. Every .1% reduction counts. That’s how we got here, ever so slightly increasing, and that’s how we must fix it.
      - stby 4y ago
        Could anyone who downvoted this explain their reasoning? Is this statement too radical, not radical enough, ...? I am genuinely curious.
      - 988747 4y ago
        There are activities that produce significantly more than 2.5% emissions, like burning coal for electricity and heating (which is something like 20-25%, I guess). Also, coal-fueled power plants have clear alternatives (nuclear, solar, etc). What is the alternative to transporting containers by ships?
        otikik 4y ago
        The alternative is building and sourcing things locally. This might not be feasible in the case of key primary materials (can’t build cars if there’s no steel) but a lot of manufacturing was moved overseas simply because salaries there were lower (which is changing) and the environmental laws were weaker (which is also changing). It’s not inconceivable any more that local is preferable to outsourced, and it might even be cheaper in some cases.
        988747 4y ago
        We already tried that strategy... in Middle Ages. World has moved on to globalized trade for a reason.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        this is a very silly comparison, why not compare to the vikings then, or cavemen, how did they get their iPhones?
    - easygenes 4y ago
      Shipping also uses RFO [1][2] (Residual Fuel Oil, often just referred to as bunker fuel). It is the absolute filthiest petrosludge that's essentially unfit for any other purpose, and the exhaust waste is dumped into the ocean directly. That 2.5% is likely a gross underestimate of the true impact [3][4]. The "scrubber" systems which are supposed to reduce the sulfur dumped into the air, just wind up dumping it into the sea [5]. 1: https://williamliggett.com/2018/05/28/bunker-fuel-sounds-bad-its-worse-than-it-sounds/ 2: https://wolfstreet.com/2018/06/03/bunker-the-fuel-for-the-giant-engines-in-large-cargo-ships/ 3: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/11399/2020/ 4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S026974912101280X 5: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00139/full
      - mistrial9 4y ago
        confirm basically zero pollution control on the open seas.
      - deelowe 4y ago
        RFO is being phased out due to regulations.
  - AzzieElbab 4y ago
    That sounds great but they don’t grow bananas in Canada, they also don’t make teslas or gpus here
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
graycat 4y ago
That's a good example of why I'm reluctant to read and rarely read such articles, the WSJ, or the MSM (mainstream media). Also a good example of why, for such a topic, I want to see well done graphs over time. And the graphs should be as good as needed for, say, lab reports in freshman college physics. And I want quality at least up to that of common high school standards for term papers, e.g., references to credible, hopefully primary, sources. As in a popular high school literature short story, I want to be able to "look it up". The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting. For the WSJ and MSM, for me, on paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. They want to grab me, by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, and as soon as I start reading their work I feel their fingers on me. I do care, a lot, about the economy and news about business, but this WSJ article is a good example of why, still, I won't read the WSJ.
- yaddaor 4y ago
  So where do you get that kind of analytical journalism then if not in MaiNsTReAm mEDiA?
  - graycat 4y ago
    For your > So where do you get that kind of analytical journalism then if not in MaiNsTReAm mEDiA? Part of my discussion was to explain that "that kind of analytical journalism" is not available in the MSM. Soooo, can't get such journalism from the MSM. So, get it elsewhere or don't get it at all. For a little more depth, the MSM has been in business for 100+ years, paper, radio, TV, and now the Internet. My view is that in this time they have found some techniques they believe in. In simple terms, they discovered long ago that they didn't know how to get many readers for "that kind of analytical journalism". And the MSM publishers are astoundingly similar in the "techniques" they use. Indeed, when one publisher gets a hot headline, many of the others will copy it, content, terminology, etc. In particular, for numerical data presented as I outlined, apparently the MSM hates that: (A) They concluded 100 years ago and have not changed their mind since that such numerical data presentations will cause the eyes of their audience to glaze over and the readers to move on. (B) As can suspect in the subject of this thread, presenting the data as I outlined, especially graphed over time, and as already observed in this thread, as is obvious, would make the alarmism of their story disappear. That is, one of the reasons for sloppy, incomplete reporting is that this is an easy way to get what we now call click bait. And one of the main reasons I want the "that kind of analytical journalism" is to reduce the amount of click bait. And, sure, there is the remark that, following what I am asking for, the MSM "would publish monthly" -- extra credit for knowing the source. That's not true, of course, since there is nearly no end of content to be reported, but, again, the MSM has treasured techniques, e.g., If it bleeds, it leads. I wrote: > The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting. I didn't say the sources exist yet! Such sources will appeal to fractions of the current MSM audience. Right: I am predicting that the audience will fracture into many small audiences. In a different sense from the MSM audience, this prediction of fracture is an assumption of my startup. But for your question of where to get "that kind of analytical journalism" one source is http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/ http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/ I suspect that there are more and as time goes on will be many more. Well, there are more: (1) YouTube is becoming a single source for essentially all video content. Some of the content is "analytical". There promises to be more content, i.e., there are YouTubers. (2) There are the math/science sites https://simonsfoundation.org/category/features/science-news/ https://simonsfoundation.org/category/features/science-news/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/ (3) For space, astronomy, and related physics, there is http://www.universetoday.com/ http://www.universetoday.com/ Uh, it is easy to notice reports of financial problems at CNN, WaPo, and the NYT. Since these are all ad supported, the problems are audience problems -- audience too small. Soooo, the MSM is changing, maybe just slowly going out of business. A lot of the content creators and publishers I've mentioned are essentially one person efforts. This means that, with the fraction I mentioned, the MSM is facing some severe pressure on cost of doing business.
notright1 4y ago
US consumers import 25% of all global trade, despite being 4% of world population But yes, when they have to pay a premium to win the auction, it's truly heartbreaking Somebody light a candle for the suffering american consumer
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  I'm confused. 75% of the suffering (large majority) is still happening outside the US...

nl 4y ago

I don't think anyone (except maybe logistics companies) think this is a bad thing. For almost all other readers of the WSJ shipping costs are just seen as a tax that makes their products more expensive.

manquer 4y ago
Environmentalists or local manufacturers might also think dropping prices are bad ?. Local firms can compete better if cost of imports are higher . Similarly less goods will be imported if costs are high , therefore less emissions.
- nl 4y ago
  Shipping is around 2.5% of global emissions, and notably the change in pricing didn't seem to substantially affect the volume[1] which is of course the thing that effects emissions. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/253987/international-seaborne-trade-carried-by-containers/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/253987/international-sea...
  - manquer 4y ago
    Depends on the type of emissions. Shipping uses bunker oil one of the most unclean fuels out there . Few ports now are providing power supply so they don’t have to burn bunker oil while berthed and can also shutdown power systems to do maintenance, but connectors are not standard etc. IMO has reduced the % of sulfur allowed recently and so on . Still it is a problem. Sulfur content is especially high and is estimated to cause 150,000 deaths/year and, 13% of SOx emissions is attributed to shipping[1] [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02774-9#ref-link-section-d1456e583 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02774-9#ref-link-...
    - b3orn 4y ago
      A lot of countries have laws about which types of fuel can be used within territorial waters, usually they restrict it to marine diesel, so nobody is burning bunker oil in port.
      - heavenlyblue 4y ago
        Do ships have different fuel tanks to switch between just to enter territorial waters?
        pletnes 4y ago
        Some do, yes. Not sure how general this is. The price difference of the fuel is significant.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    2.5% would be far from insignificant. The European Commission Climate Action website put it closer to 2.9% and volumes are expected to increase by as much as 100% until 2050. The percentage is even more significant if you look at it from the point of view of relatively clean part of the world like the EU. Shipping is 4% of our emission. Something will definitely have to be done with shipping if countries want to hit their emission targets.
  - nosianu 4y ago
    > notably the change in pricing didn't seem to substantially affect the volume I don't think that means much. Changes would be long-term, there is a lot of inflexibility short-term, you can't just create new suppliers locally overnight. It also depends on expectations of where the price will go. If it is expected to be a local maximum and that prices will sink again then few will take the price as signal to move production locally.
  - eecc 4y ago
    That’s a false argument. There’s no activity that of itself produces 50% of humanity’s emissions. Every single one is “not worth reducing” because the bulk is always somewhere else. Nope. Every .1% reduction counts. That’s how we got here, ever so slightly increasing, and that’s how we must fix it.
    - stby 4y ago
      Could anyone who downvoted this explain their reasoning? Is this statement too radical, not radical enough, ...? I am genuinely curious.
    - 988747 4y ago
      There are activities that produce significantly more than 2.5% emissions, like burning coal for electricity and heating (which is something like 20-25%, I guess). Also, coal-fueled power plants have clear alternatives (nuclear, solar, etc). What is the alternative to transporting containers by ships?
      - otikik 4y ago
        The alternative is building and sourcing things locally. This might not be feasible in the case of key primary materials (can’t build cars if there’s no steel) but a lot of manufacturing was moved overseas simply because salaries there were lower (which is changing) and the environmental laws were weaker (which is also changing). It’s not inconceivable any more that local is preferable to outsourced, and it might even be cheaper in some cases.
        988747 4y ago
        We already tried that strategy... in Middle Ages. World has moved on to globalized trade for a reason.
        ClumsyPilot 4y ago
        this is a very silly comparison, why not compare to the vikings then, or cavemen, how did they get their iPhones?
  - easygenes 4y ago
    Shipping also uses RFO [1][2] (Residual Fuel Oil, often just referred to as bunker fuel). It is the absolute filthiest petrosludge that's essentially unfit for any other purpose, and the exhaust waste is dumped into the ocean directly. That 2.5% is likely a gross underestimate of the true impact [3][4]. The "scrubber" systems which are supposed to reduce the sulfur dumped into the air, just wind up dumping it into the sea [5]. 1: https://williamliggett.com/2018/05/28/bunker-fuel-sounds-bad-its-worse-than-it-sounds/ 2: https://wolfstreet.com/2018/06/03/bunker-the-fuel-for-the-giant-engines-in-large-cargo-ships/ 3: https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/20/11399/2020/ 4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S026974912101280X 5: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2018.00139/full
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      confirm basically zero pollution control on the open seas.
    - deelowe 4y ago
      RFO is being phased out due to regulations.
- AzzieElbab 4y ago
  That sounds great but they don’t grow bananas in Canada, they also don’t make teslas or gpus here
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

graycat 4y ago

That's a good example of why I'm reluctant to read and rarely read such articles, the WSJ, or the MSM (mainstream media). Also a good example of why, for such a topic, I want to see well done graphs over time. And the graphs should be as good as needed for, say, lab reports in freshman college physics. And I want quality at least up to that of common high school standards for term papers, e.g., references to credible, hopefully primary, sources. As in a popular high school literature short story, I want to be able to "look it up". The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting. For the WSJ and MSM, for me, on paper they can't compete with Charmin and on the Internet are useless for wrapping dead fish heads. They want to grab me, by the heart, the gut, and below the belt, always below the shoulders, and as soon as I start reading their work I feel their fingers on me. I do care, a lot, about the economy and news about business, but this WSJ article is a good example of why, still, I won't read the WSJ.

yaddaor 4y ago
So where do you get that kind of analytical journalism then if not in MaiNsTReAm mEDiA?
- graycat 4y ago
  For your > So where do you get that kind of analytical journalism then if not in MaiNsTReAm mEDiA? Part of my discussion was to explain that "that kind of analytical journalism" is not available in the MSM. Soooo, can't get such journalism from the MSM. So, get it elsewhere or don't get it at all. For a little more depth, the MSM has been in business for 100+ years, paper, radio, TV, and now the Internet. My view is that in this time they have found some techniques they believe in. In simple terms, they discovered long ago that they didn't know how to get many readers for "that kind of analytical journalism". And the MSM publishers are astoundingly similar in the "techniques" they use. Indeed, when one publisher gets a hot headline, many of the others will copy it, content, terminology, etc. In particular, for numerical data presented as I outlined, apparently the MSM hates that: (A) They concluded 100 years ago and have not changed their mind since that such numerical data presentations will cause the eyes of their audience to glaze over and the readers to move on. (B) As can suspect in the subject of this thread, presenting the data as I outlined, especially graphed over time, and as already observed in this thread, as is obvious, would make the alarmism of their story disappear. That is, one of the reasons for sloppy, incomplete reporting is that this is an easy way to get what we now call click bait. And one of the main reasons I want the "that kind of analytical journalism" is to reduce the amount of click bait. And, sure, there is the remark that, following what I am asking for, the MSM "would publish monthly" -- extra credit for knowing the source. That's not true, of course, since there is nearly no end of content to be reported, but, again, the MSM has treasured techniques, e.g., If it bleeds, it leads. I wrote: > The Internet is permitting new sources including some with some good reporting. I didn't say the sources exist yet! Such sources will appeal to fractions of the current MSM audience. Right: I am predicting that the audience will fracture into many small audiences. In a different sense from the MSM audience, this prediction of fracture is an assumption of my startup. But for your question of where to get "that kind of analytical journalism" one source is http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/ http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/ I suspect that there are more and as time goes on will be many more. Well, there are more: (1) YouTube is becoming a single source for essentially all video content. Some of the content is "analytical". There promises to be more content, i.e., there are YouTubers. (2) There are the math/science sites https://simonsfoundation.org/category/features/science-news/ https://simonsfoundation.org/category/features/science-news/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/ (3) For space, astronomy, and related physics, there is http://www.universetoday.com/ http://www.universetoday.com/ Uh, it is easy to notice reports of financial problems at CNN, WaPo, and the NYT. Since these are all ad supported, the problems are audience problems -- audience too small. Soooo, the MSM is changing, maybe just slowly going out of business. A lot of the content creators and publishers I've mentioned are essentially one person efforts. This means that, with the fraction I mentioned, the MSM is facing some severe pressure on cost of doing business.

notright1 4y ago

US consumers import 25% of all global trade, despite being 4% of world population But yes, when they have to pay a premium to win the auction, it's truly heartbreaking Somebody light a candle for the suffering american consumer

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
I'm confused. 75% of the suffering (large majority) is still happening outside the US...