Air cargo is suddenly affordable relative to ocean shipping
freightwaves.com
freightwaves.com
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.
Cargo ships and aircraft both require crew, so my above comment applies to that portion of the cost. (Mitigated by the fact that crew per tonne of cargo is typically much smaller on a cargo ship than an aircraft.) Crew also have to be paid.
For a given container, the number of times it can be reused per 10 year lifetime is proportional to the speed of the mode of transport. Airplanes are 20 times faster than cargo ships, so the container can be reused 20 times as many times in a given time period. That means it can be optimized to be lighter, etc. A similar argument applies to the rest of the vehicle. And airplane can make a lot more round trips in its lifetime than a cargo ship. (This is of course mitigated by the fact a ship is usually a LOT cheaper to build per unit dry mass.)
Air travel also can be much closer to destination than cargo ship can. This is mitigated by how efficient intermodal transport is, but some countries don’t even have international container ports and most states don’t. Every city has an airport and usually many of them. This makes it harder for local labor issues to cause massive logistical headaches.
It’s also not that uncommon to lose cargo containers overboard during actual transit in sea, which effectively never happens for air freight (as they use extremely safe airliners with cargo inside the contained fuselage).
Anyway, if we could somehow improve the efficiency of air travel by an order of magnitude and reduce the cost of airframe manufacture, it’s not unreasonable to imagine there may be a way for airfreight to become pretty competitive with sea freight even for cargo that isn’t particularly time sensitive.
But if authors would do that, people will spend far less time reading the articles and result in far less money for the news outlet.
I've started reading long articles on diagonal unless the article is very interesting or technical. I visually scan fast and try to extract the bits of information.
Maybe it would useful to submit articles to something like GPT-3 and get a meaningful summary in return.
That way, the editor can cut the length bottom-up to fit the article on the page.
The ads just work in a different way (and arguably interfere with the reading less.)
I would say ocean shipping is now as exorbitant as air cargo, or more so.
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?
Shenzhen to Kentucky to west coast. No problem from my perspective.
For a premium product, I would expect them to be focussing on the "Designed by Americans in America" bit of the message rather than the "Made in China".
Also, on the back of my iPad Pro 12.9 2021 it says "Designed by Apple in California Manufactured in China". Apple doesn't hide this point at all.
The Mac Pro though is Manufactured in Texas domestically and outside of the US it is manufactured in China.
It does not anywhere say it is made in China. Yes Apple is hiding this.
are you ironically elevating Chinese rule of law over others while thinking its helping your American nationalist sentiment? wow, we have to go deeper
These days, I would expect most consumers to assume "tech is made in China/Taiwan/Korea/Japan" unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Chinese companies can make absolutely top quality stuff and my view on this has changed many years ago. I now own a Volvo built in Chengdou, China, and it's literally the most well build vehicle I ever owned, definitely better than any German car I've had(my previous Merc built in Germany creaked like a horse cart, this doesn't even make a peep from anywhere).
China are the boss of manufacturing these days.
Why? The reality is that Apple is reselling a Foxconn product made in Shenzhen.
Random. But curious to see if this will become more common (or remain relegated to specialized, small brands)
https://relwen.com/pages/hallmarks For reference.
The whole game is to play every country's people and their political instrument. From my perspective, it is easier the more nationalist they are, and both China and the US have very nationalist people. So stamp "made in china" on anything printed on paper, as required there, and stamp "designed in california" on things engraved in metal and then overcharge for it because Americans already suspect something domestic would be more expensive.
You are surprised they don't engage in (possibly fraudulent) deception of their customer? Should they?
A package from abroad often changes hands through various regional carriers, and is sometimes bumped or combined or divided by many criteria depending on where it is and what it is. I found this out by ordering electronics that also had single items that required special shipping that arrived far far later (the trigger for me, is batteries, which always take more time)
If your parcel is in a box of other parcels with other destinations, it makes sense to send the whole lot to one place to split it up and reorg packages, even if the end result is more airmiles, because there are fewer unpack-sort-pack events.
Good article here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor...
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=y3qfeoqErtY&t=5m50s
Anchorage is also not all that far off the Great Circle route anyway.
I recently discovered Nullschool's new (or updated) NO2 channel. This is even more effective than the SO2 channel for identifying global shipping routes. See for example (time-stamped for earlier today):
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/11/15/2100Z/chem/surface/...
Note that trans-pacific routes from both Seattle/Vancouver and Los Angeles/San Diego meet near Kodiak Island along the Aleutians.
I'm fairly confident those represent sea traffic rather than air, given similar traces through the Indian Ocean / Red Sea. I'm presuming relatively little air traffic traverses Suez. Similarly Panama, and traffic from Europe to South Africa.
Anchorage is located slightly north of that trace and has its own NO2 track.
The intermediary stop in Anchorage, as opposed to flying from Shanghai to Oakland, CA, actually increases total flight distance by around 144 miles but allows the aircraft to carry an additional 45,000kg of cargo (instead of extra fuel) increasing revenue for the trip by around $90,000.
Why would traveling an extra 144 miles allow the aircraft to carry 45,000kg of cargo instead of fuel? I feel like I'm misreading it.
There's probably a little bit of effect like the rocket equation going on - the further you are going, the more fuel you need to get there, and the more fuel you need to carry the additional fuel. Stated a different way, fuel requirements vs distance is worse than linear, since fuel itself has weight.
For it to make economic sense it just needs to exceed the extra cost of time spent at the intermediate port. And even that can offset by adding cargo for that intermediate destination to replace the weight savings of not carrying that “last mile” jet fuel.
The orbit around the Earth is the closest and travel there is the cheapest, but manufacturing fuel out of nothing (vacuum) is pretty much impossible. Technically, what you have on lower Earth orbits isn't vacuum, but a very, very thin gas. It is still probably too thin to be used as a source of stuff for industrial processes.
The closest solid body we have as of now is the Moon. A nice source of minerals, where fuel will be almost certainly produced in situ in the future, but then you still need to fly from Earth to Moon orbit and get the produced fuel to the Moon orbit to tank the ship. (Possibly using a space elevator.) Still quite a lot of delta v.
The best solution could be to intercept a comet full of volatile materials and drag it somehow to the Earth orbit, say, 1000 km above the planet. Of course, if you mess up and hit the Earth instead, you will cause a nice extinction event down there...
You mean a space elevator from the Moon (since on Earth it seems to be infeasible)? It's probably doable but I suspect that an electromagnetic accelerator would be far more affordable and technologically less demanding.
You need approximately 60 seconds of 3G acceleration to reach orbit around the Moon. That would mean some 54 km of an accelerator. That is more feasible than I instinctively expected. The main question is how much metal would be needed for 1 m of such accelerator track.
As for the track, I suspect it might be (order-of-magnitude-wise) similar to existing maglevs on Earth. On one hand, you need to reach higher velocities, higher precisions, etc. On the other hand, any supporting structure can be substantially more lightweight (much smaller gravity, no corrosion resistance required, etc.).
>Of course, if you mess up and hit the Earth instead, you will cause a nice extinction event down there...
Why does it need to be in Earth's orbit. If we have the ability to capture a comet and place it in a more friendly orbit, we'd surely have the ability to park it in the moon's orbit negating a SimCity-esque ELE.
Electric aircraft you are always "flying with a full load of fuel" which means every joule of energy is "the most expensive energy" as someone here put it, analogous to the last mile of range for a liquid-fueled aircraft. You never have that ability to "take off with a half tank" and trade fuel for extra payload, or operate more efficiently by tailoring fuel to actual needed range, or benefit from higher efficiency at the tail end of a long flight.
Unless electric power becomes significantly more energy-dense, it's always going to be a problem that dogs electric-powered aircraft. And it's hard to see that happening since it's very much the opposite - liquid fuel is significantly more energy-dense than batteries anyway, plus the implications of the rocket equation.
To beat (or at least, not completely be ruined by) the rocket equation what you need is droppable battery packs - completely use them up in sequence, then drop them in midair as you fly to lighten the load. (Well, you need much higher energy density than batteries can currently deliver, too, but let's just talk rocket equation.)
Using "droppable" packs also has the implication that each individual pack (or at least a "core" pack) has to be able to support enough current for at least cruising power (and you probably do not want to design an aircraft with the known implication that full takeoff power will be unavailable after a certain duration of the mission - or that taking off with a "partial fuel load" means you do not have full takeoff power available - the FAA is not going to look kindly on either of those approaches, because if you miss a landing, going around is now very difficult, and that is one of the most likely places for crashes to happen already).
As far as pluggable battery packs - major airports already are critically short on available landing/takeoff slots. Airlines bid fiercely to get them already, and would love to add more slots for real aircraft and not gimmick 200-mile-range electric aircraft. And a large aircraft needs a large runway, so you can't just trivially "add more airports", nor do you want too many planes interacting in the same vicinity - two or maybe three active runways is about the practical limit. So that's not a very good idea at all, there's already a critical resource constraint that building an aircraft around high-takeoff-landing-cycle flight models would make much worse. The "meta" of airport landing slot economics already runs heavily to running bigger aircraft so you can fit more fares/cargo per landing slot - the A380 and 787 and other super-jumbo aircraft are basically designed for this situation where you simply cannot land any more aircraft so you have to land bigger ones.
Leaving aside runway slots, takeoffs and landings are also the most dangerous part of flight, more flight cycles means much more danger for the aircraft and its surroundings (and passenger airports tend to be near people, although perhaps this is not a constraint for cargo airports as much). It's also the hardest on the airplane - pressurization/depressurization cycles and wing loadings are what busts up an aircraft to a much greater extent than mere flight hours, there are only so many cycles you can make an aircraft take regardless of flight hours. So if you land and take off a lot more, you have to spend the energy (and financial) cost of aircraft manufacture much more frequently, which likely neutralizes a lot of the environmental benefits. It's also the most energy intensive phase of flight - if you are taking off 5x as much to make the same trip, are you even more efficient within a single flight, let alone when we amortize that the airplane (and it's "build-time emissions") now lasts 1/5th as long due to increased flight cycles?
It's a bad idea for a lot of reasons. Just make more railways, and high-speed railways, we'd benefit hugely from moving as much traffic as possible (obviously not overseas!) to trains and (for cargo) ships. Significantly more environmentally friendly than air travel will ever be.
It's fun from a tech development perspective though. Obviously pushing tech at the edge of capabilities benefits everything - motor technology, manufacturing, battery technology. And those do go into some useful things.
Adding a stop in Anchorage adds about 200 km: https://www.greatcirclemap.com/?routes=PVG-ANC-OAK
The plane is probably limited by takeoff weight: body plus fuel plus cargo. By adding a stop in the middle, the plane can take off with less fuel from Shanghai. Since it has 45000 kg less fuel, it can instead carry 45000 kg more cargo. Total fuel consumption for the trip ends up slightly higher, but fuel per kg of useful cargo is much less.
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2044509,-174.2639372,10.04z
[edit]: The town of Atka apparently has a population of 53, spread over 32 households. There's an airport, but some expansion would probably be needed to handle Shanghai<->Oakland shipping traffic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atka,_Alaska
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atka,_Alaska#/media/File:Atka....
I wonder why it has not been done? Maybe because of this -
"In 1996, the U.S. Department of Transportation exempted Alaska's Anchorage International Airport and Fairbanks International Airport from the Jones Act, which prohibits foreign airlines from transporting cargo between U.S. cities. Now, foreign carriers are allowed to refuel their planes in Alaska before continuing on to an American airport or returning home. Because of this, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport now handles approximately 80% of all air cargo traffic between Asia and North America."
Maybe you need to find a non American location. A floating refuel location?
It'd be interesting to run the numbers.
It is.
A direct great circle route still goes over the Aleutians, it seems.
P.S. BOOOOOO on UPS, who just claimed they tried and failed to deliver it while I was standing on my porch with the Ring camera on. So much for spending the night migrating. Hello, Monday night happy hour.
Oh man, I'd be on fire right now. Drinking is probably the best alternative.
It was delivered to a pickup point around 6pm thou so I was still able to get it that day at least.
That explains the last two steps.
For the rest of them, no idea; but I can speculate: it looks like zhenzhou is a major shipping hub and occasionally there are long delays: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/stuck-in-zhenzhou-for-5... (note that sometimes my packages say they are in china but are actually landed in the US already).
South Korea and Anchorage: maybe it's cheaper to take more short-hop flights? Haha, I had to look it up (TLDR: yes) Well: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor... (note in that case it went to memphis before the final US destination, memphis is the Fedex hub).
Some things look inefficient from a distance, especially if you look at just a few random samples, but then turn out to be efficient when you compute overall measures like "package throughput divided by shipping costs". Never underestimate both the efficiency and ineffiency of modern transport systems.
Kentucky is the UPS International Air Hub, nearly all UPS cargo flights go there. FedEx is Memphis, both because they are well positioned relative to the densest parts of the US population with the earliest delivery requirements.
[1] https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2019/12/06/ups-plans-ma...
[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/news/2019/08/15/fedex-ne...
First we flew to Seattle, and then after a layover, flew directly over Anchorage to Beijing via the great circle route. About 10 hrs and maybe 3800 miles into the journey, I was looking down at my home town.
Also, how hard can it be to bribe a delivery in US guy working for minimum wage?
What is your threat model? Do you have reason to suspect for package interdiction ?
Lots of jewelry places use USPS to ship gems.
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.
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.
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.
Effectively everything Apple sells is made in China. Apple is nothing without China. They are, unfortunately, required to do literally anything the CCP demands of them, push comes to shove, to continue existing as we know them.
Losing the Chinese market would be sudden-er death for Apple. China is Apple's largest market, and will be the vast majority of their revenue growth for the next 15-30 quarters.
More importantly, losing the Chinese market means losing ~100% of all of their manufacturing. (Anyone know how many iPhones are being made in India these days?)
Business finds a way.
1. Hub and Spoke. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoke%E2%80%93hub_distribution...)
2. Optimized traveling salesman looks very suboptimal locally.
----
For more details: try playing OpenTTD with cargodist (OpenTTD 1.4.0 and above, roughly June 2013 or later). This is where mail / passengers / cargo will automatically route themselves and plan where to go rather than the default pathing algorithm.
You'll find that the most efficient route is to fill up your trains such that they're full. __Not__ necessarily for individual packages to take the shortest path. In fact, many routes are locally suboptimal (ie: moving away from the destination) so that you can reach a hub.
Sending a train with 100% of cargo down your rail-lines is far more efficient than sending two trains with 50% cargo. Similar issues happen to airplanes, busses, trains, and ships in real life.
Your post convinced me to try playing with cargodist.
The 2nd half seems absurd on too many levels, conspiracy level thinking.
Changing software? Super easy to detect. Changing hardware? insanely expensive to do it en masse, esp outside of the factory.
There's no target, but mass surveillance? This checks so few logic boxes.
1. CCP needs to hack shipping label system to track a specific person (DHL/CCP shipper/Fedex) which method? We need to interject against them all.
2. CCP was waiting for this person to buy a Macbook Pro?!
3. CCP was lucky enough that the exact model was back ordered via China shipping routes. We were lucky because normally they could just walk into any Apple Store and buy it and walk out. No ability to target a specific person.
4. What if the target "returns the laptop?!" Our years of hacking setup didn't work.
There are insane amounts of difficulty for this target vector which make it effectively impossible to go after a specific person via supply chain, specific order.
So we're back at mass surveillance. That doesn't work because given enough people, someone pen/security check the laptops coming out. Apple will recall.
The way you do this, is you have ‘partnerships’ with the major shippers where they match against known person of interest on your list. When someone has an interesting shipment to one of your targets, it gets flagged and set aside in a known location.
Since all new style equipment needs a basic plan to add targeted hardware/firmware attacks anyway, since if you need the capability to compromise any given target at will (which they do) you need the capability to compromise pretty much all common equipment readily available, at a minimum. All available equipment being a realistic requirement too.
Some bored tech will then take the already developed playbook for that specific piece of equipment, write the firmware or glue on the specific special chip to the board, pack it up, and hand it back to the shipper.
A physical version of room 641a [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A] essentially.
The Snowden leaks showed it happened regularly, what, a decade ago?
If you think China doesn’t have something like that too, I have a bridge to sell you.
So then the question is - are you interesting enough to make the list? That I don’t know.
But, again, I'll "buy that bridge" when it comes to an Apple product-supply-chain being hacked by a state actor to target an individual.
CCP can't bank on a specific Apple product being purchased by a specific person routed through their side/controlled supply chain.
As before, most apple products are not routed directly from China to a consumer. This is a pretty rare circumstance given the supply chain bottlenecks.
I agree both sides have the ability to "hold product" in the shipping lane to do all sorts of nefarious things, but that only works if you can predict that movement (i.e. destination being on "your side" of control). The specific circumstances matter here and they don't make it an attack vector against a specific person.
Definitely not the case for everyone, especially an enterprise, but I bought it via the apple store app and the tracking showed it from China -> Chinese Customs -> To me, and through fedex.
So they had all the information they would need in one place to do what I am describing in at least this scenario.
Someone somewhere puts the persons name and address into a To address for a shipping company. If the origination is in China and it's sold direct, that final address and name will be on that label, and in the tracking database.
It doesn't have to be perfect to catch a decent number of targets. If even 25% of the purchased products get intercepted this way for a target it will likely be effective.
Which was strange. Usually all of my Apple kit goes through Alaska. Not this time.
It's likely we both are not the main concerns of our respective surveillance apparatus :D
They can order workers to do that in the factory. Apple won't be able to do anything about it apart from removing anything that shouldn't be there when it lands in the US. Chinese workers can't say no to CPC orders and Apple has to agree if they want to continue to exploit cheap workforce and lax environment regulations.
With that destination, I'm assuming UPS delivery. I spent 24 hours at the sort facility there shooting a documentary about the delivery service. There's a reason UPS picked Louisville and FedEx picked Memphis. Knowing that reason it does make sense.
Fun fact, Lousiville's airport is an international airport only because of UPS. No international passenger flights use that airport.
The bottleneck is, and will always be, large organizations have communication breakdowns.
So... Definitely yes?
— Warren Buffett, in the 2007 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter
(Though this is relevant more to a value investor than to a speculator)
currently airlines face cost pressure from fuel prices inflating and wages inflating - and covid is far from done, though hopefully we're in the second half now.
But even if it's nearly nothing, it's a step in the right direction and it's better done than not.
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.
I order my dog's meds offshore, plain post mail from Australia flew by DHL and got here (Texas) in under a week.
Summary: Ocean shipping reached bottleneck.
What other economic oddities are happening at the moment?
Depends on who's inflation estimates you're using.
Indeed whether they turned a profit when considering inflation is up in the air but pure $-wise they did make money.
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.
How so?
Yeah, there might be some jobs like carbon capturer where the market is not set up in a way for you to get payed for your service despite its vast value to society.
However in the case of flipping burgers, if people aren't willing to spend enough on a burger to pay the salary of a burger flipper, then clearly the job of burger flipping is not worth doing.
I'm not finding much by way of specific sectors affected, though healthcare, education, transportation, and hospitality (foodservice, lodgings) are often mentioned.
US Department of Labour has a breakdown by state, showing proportionately more quits in less-populated states:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jltst.nr0.htm
Other sector-based listings seem more classification artefacts than useful information, e.g., https://news.sky.com/story/labour-shortages-which-jobs-are-s...
(What we want isn't a list of openings per classification, but deviation from normal levels of openings, adjusted for total classification size. Stats are ... complicated.)
This listing looks somewhat more substantive, listing Agriculture, Education and Public Safety as leaders in openings: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2021/11/08/if-you-tho...
One job category that could desperately use greater competene is business and economy journalism. The number of useless articles rehashing opinion and generalities on this topic is too damn high!
> ...resulting in lost jobs as they shut down
Is a lost job lost if no one wanted it in the first place?
Sounds like one of those "if a tree falls in the forest" things.
Now they don't buy lunch or drive and fill up with gas.
Note that I do draw a distinction between activities which produce high positive externalities (and hence whose revenues strongly underrepresent net social gain), and those which produce high negative externalities, often contributing net harm.
The first type of enterprise should be supported (tax breaks, subsidies, wage credits). The latter should be penalised (inverse). The pragmatics of money, power, and influence frequently invert that relationship, a tendency noted as far back as Adam Smith and before.
That said, it's not clear to me what types of activity are having the greatest hiring challenges, though in some cases (e.g., healthcare), I'd class them among the former.
Because if USA doesn't start to get its exports up soon again after corona the entire economy will crash. And to do that USA needs to start to produce goods again at prices competitive with the rest of the world. And to do that businesses needs to produce those goods using workers at certain price points.
How was this priced-in or otherwise reflected in the earlier regime of valuation, management, or policy towards these firms? Does that downside risk represent an uncapitalised value of these ventures? Should that downside risk have been priced into goodwill, and hence, the access to financial or political capital of these businesses?
Because what you're stating, while having merits on the basis of rational argument and evidence, is not a business or market-based rationale. It has its foundations in some melange of national economic policy, security, and social obligation. Not economic bases.
(See also my other responses in this thread, particularly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249685)
Those businesses were working well enough in 2019 but were disproportionately affected by lock-downs that favored large retailers and chains. Amazon and WalMart had a great year but they don't treat their bottom tier workers any better than mom and pop stores do, in fact we subsidize Wal Mart's workers all the same. I'm tired of seeing small businesses blamed when they're the victims. Every time I have to wear a mask from the door of the restaurant to the table, or see an improvised "indoor-outdoor" shed structure built on the sidewalk I'm astounded at the sheer lunacy of it all. They've had to spend a much bigger chunk of their cash flow than some large corporation that can pick up the phone and get a few more billion in loans on a whim, and they have to compete for would-be workers getting "free" inflated money every week.
Another view is that sometimes the forces of destruction are overly effective, and that some degree of intervention might be required.
What's curious is that the nature of the firms impacted by rising labour costs hasn't been clearly defined, and certainly wasn't at the top of this thread. I've commented in another thread about looking for solid data on this, and have found little. (See this here, specifically the 3rd comment down by myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29235409) You're asserting that it's mom'n'pops rather than "large retailers and chains". I've seen a mix of reports suggesting both, though overall startlingly little clarity in news coverage.
I don't share your views on the apparent "lunacy" of masks at all.
To the extent that this may represent a new order and changing regime of public health and risk, an alternate narrative is that the previous structure had been built on a false presumption of risks and consequences, ignoring real ones, which, once those materialised, have changed the calculus and shown that what appeared to be a defensible, viable business and operational strategy was in fact not. It's not the world that's changed but our understanding of it. The risk was always present. It's just that now we're very much aware of it.
To the extent that this invalidates an ideologically-founded view of how "free markets" do or should operate and/or be regulated ... well, that's something which could also deserve more consideration.
Strange line of reasoning. Generally it is a good thing for businesses to exist because they create value: employment and wages, tax revenue, goods and services that wouldn't otherwise exist, and so on. Not sure why you would want to be antagonistic towards businesses "existing".
Is that in fact what you're saying?
(See also my other responses in this thread, particularly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29249685)
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.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
U-6 is a much better metric that doesn't sweep these factors under the rug.
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%
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.
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.
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.
Really not that out of the ordinary; Back then plenty of supermarkets still had "cardboard corners".
People who bought stuff in bulk could dispose of the boxes there, while people who forgot to bring a bag could take some boxes from the corner to carry their groceries.
They can still be found in discounters in the more lower income areas but have become noticeably rarer.
I think they're a scam. They cost orders of magnitude more than paper bags. There is hardly anything people like better than rationalizations for spending more rather than less to save the environment. Pull out the magic word "externalities", it can do anything!
Never thought I'd be supplying my mom with cat food, but here we are.
[0]: https://www.vet.cornell.edu/departments-centers-and-institut...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_windshield_pitting_epi...
Explain why the "coin shortage" seems situational and intermittent.
Nevertheless, it seems like I can't find mini pretzels, except for one brand I hate.
Thicker pretzels, yes. But not thin ones. And it seemed like they disappeared abruptly in the last few weeks.
I've checked enough stores to wonder if it's regional or national.
Not sure how you concluded that I think every reported instance is imaginary; that's definitely incompatible with my previous comment. The window pits weren't imaginary!
>A supply chain problem doesn't necessarily mean "totally unavailable everywhere".
I agree, but how do you tell the difference between something that happens all the time and nobody noticed a couple years ago outside of maybe a trade magazine about logistics, vs. something that is new and different?
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.
The main threat of NOx is to the respiratory tract of mammals, very few of whom find themselves in the middle of Pacific.
Their principle risk to humans is as lung irritants when concentrated in air near large populations. As is clear here, the concentrations even along shipping routes are far lower than in urban regions.
SO2 (fuel contaminant, notably in bunker fuel and coal): https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ove...
NO2 (a result of any combustion using atmospheric air which is 70% nitrogen, not merely a fuel contaminant): https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ove...
Sulfur dioxide in particular produces sulfuric acid. Small changes to pH and specific acid/base concentrations of seawater, even if limited to a narrow vertical column, could have large impacts. Say, non floating plankton, especially primary producers.
There's also the potential for positive "seeding" effects by introducing limiting nutrients to water, though my understanding is that iron and carbon are more likely to play these roles.
Jet fuel and marine bunker fuel both produce between 3.1 and 3.2 kg of CO2 per kg of fuel; jet fuel is slightly less dense at .74 kg/L vs .86 kg/L for marine bunker, but still planes are producing about 56 times as much CO2 per unit of cargo.
Marine bunker has way higher sulpher content, which is a whole other issue, but as of earlier this year not by as much. Until this year, sulphur for marine fuel was capped at 3.5% by weight, now it's down to 0.5%. Jet fuel, for comparison, is required to be under 0.3% by weight.
It should be noted though that planes release their emissions at higher altitudes, where both CO2 and sulphur do more damage, and ships can carry scrubbers to be cleaner (though many still don't) because they are not nearly as sensitive to weight as a plane. While in absolute terms there are larger sources of pollution, per unit of utility flying is one of the most polluting things humans do.
Stratospheric sulfur aerosols are largely considered one geoengineering solutions for global warming. How does this jive with your statement?
> From the planetary surface of the Earth, the average height of the troposphere is 18 km (11 mi; 59,000 ft) in the tropics; 17 km (11 mi; 56,000 ft) in the middle latitudes; and 6 km (3.7 mi; 20,000 ft) in the high latitudes of the polar regions in winter; thus the average height of the troposphere is 13 km (8.1 mi; 43,000 ft).
Airliners cruise around flight level 310-380 (31-38,000', about 5.9 to 7.2 miles).
SO2: https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ove...
NO2 (even clearer): https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/chem/surface/level/ove...
I wonder if it would be possible to save a great deal of fuel by going much slower.