How to Ship a Beluga Whale via UPS | Hacker News Reader

How to Ship a Beluga Whale via UPS

priceonomics.com

The infrastructure for moving big, heavy things is quite well developed. Most people never deal with it, but it's all in place. It only costs about $1100 to move a shipping container from Shentzen to Long Beach by ship. Heavy air transport is much more expensive, but quite available.

For moving really heavy things, check out Mammoet, the world leader in heavy transport. You call them when you need to move a zinc refinery to the Arctic.

People regularly import American trucks into Europe. It costs ~$2000 to ship an F150 from New York to Hamburg - more if you want it in a container. Apparently it's cheaper than buying them locally...

I've heard of people buying motorcycles breaking them down into separate pieces shipping them to their country. Once the arrive they reassemble them to avoid paying heavy import taxes.

"I just say yes, then figure it out later"

I like that.

Another way to read this is, "Never, ever have a free price point."

> When the Georgia Aquarium broke ground in 2005, UPS made a generous donation: at no cost, they offered their logistics and shipping services for whatever the facility needed.

Fair enough. I like it. So how did the aquarium reply:

>"we’d like to transport ... four whale sharks in Taipei and two beluga whales in Mexico to Atlanta".

There is no way UPS would have been shipping those whales at any reasonable (even discount) price point.

At least they got this article out of it!

A charitable donation is not a "free price point", and I doubt a company like UPS didn't anticipate the possibility that the open-ended donation might be somewhat expensive.

UPS knew what they were getting into. You don't pledge transportation services to the world's largest aquarium without expecting to ship some fish.

The publicity was probably worth the cost. If I had to ship a terracotta army, I'd much rather go with a company that is known to have successfully shipped a couple of sharks and whales.

The cost was probably tabulated and tax deductible. That helps.

I don't understand this mentality. Costs are always tax-deductible, it's not as if this is some added perk. Same with donations, "ooh, donations are tax-deductible!" Yeah, so is an advertising campaign, you're not doing me a favor here.

If you've already decided you're going to be charitable you can be much more generous because of the deduction.

With that said Georgia Aquarium keeps killing their beluga whales.

> If you've already decided you're going to be charitable you can be much more generous because of the deduction.

Can you explain that a bit? If I'm going to spend $1000 on ads, I can write them off as an expense, and save $X off taxes. If I decide to spend it on charity, will I save more than $X on taxes?

Charity gets you goodwill and free distribution of your message.

Advertising just annoys people -- to the extent that they will install software designed to block it.

Note that a) UPS didn't have to pay a additional dime for this article, or hundreds of others (google "UPS shipping beluga") and b) most of us are reading it voluntarily.

Which do you think is the better deal? Between this article and an intrusive popup ad jumping in your face, which do you think makes people think more positively toward UPS?

Without the deduction for charitable contributions, that wouldn't be an option.

This is irrelevant. I'm asking why "tax deductible" is touted as a benefit of charity, when costs are already tax deductible.

Without special legislation, charitable donations are not "costs", as they are not required for normal operation of a business.

I'm not sure why you have difficulty understanding this.

I'm not sure why you think "I have difficulty understanding" it when you're the first person saying it.

Give that it's clear to everyone else, it's obvious that you have difficulty understanding it. Or possibly you're just trolling.

In any case, it should be all sorted now, so we're done here.

Or maybe I'm just not from the US?

Where are you from that "charitable donation" and "cost" are synonymous?

Costs are subtracted from income to get net income, by contrast charitable deductions are subtracted directly from the tax owing.

Oh, really? Does that mean that, if you owe $1000 in tax, you can give it to a charity of your choice, rather than the government? That sounds like a pretty big advantage.

In canada, anyway, you have a limit as to how much you can donate and you receive tax credits in return. It's not 1:1 though, so it's not as if I can just donate my taxes to a charity rather than the government.

To my knowledge, this is not true in the US at least. Folks would just donate whatever they owe in taxes to their church or favorite charity if it directly reduced owed taxes.

If I donate $1k, it reduces my taxable income by $1k, saving me ~$300ish.

No, charitable donations are deductions, which mean they are deducted from income. What is deducted directly from tax liability is credits, but charitable donations don't give 1:1 credits.

More than the article--they have signs up in the aquarium talking about how UPS shipped the whales there.

I didn't know this, and wish I could delete or edit my comment. It's quite clear that this was done in exchange for publicity for UPS, which genuinely seems like a fair trade to me.

A 747 can carry up to 120,000 pounds of volume, so their weight wasn’t the issue; the issue, says Matthews, was where to put them, and how to distribute the weight.

The other very important point is to make sure that the load is securely in place, as something of that weight moving around inside the plane can have disasterous results:

http://avherald.com/h?article=46183bb4

For some reason this story reminded me of this guy who repos ships:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/14/max-hardberger-...

If you google his name you can find a few neat stories about him. He wrote a pretty entertaining book about his adventures too:

http://www.amazon.com/Freighter-Captain-Max-Hardberger/dp/09...

Love his "no violence" stance.

The cabin shown in the photo says it's a 747. It looks way too small to be a 747. Is it just me?

It's probably the upper deck, which is normally 6 seats across.

The caption now reads "767". Maybe it was a typo?

In pieces.

See also: one of several proposed methods of transmitting living organisms across extremely-long distances (namely, by disintegrating them, recording their atomic/molecular rearrangement, and rebuilding them at the destination).

(upvoted because is a logical answer to the question provided. The title don't say nothing about alive or not).

But I wonder why we want a marine animal to travel by air or in a closed container when you can easily provide it with a "migration experience" just putting a submerged cage in a jib and use water instead fuel to fully support their body weight.

Some problemas with this idea that I can see is how avoid the motorship noise (Helicopters and planes do a lot of noise also) and speed of the cruise vs speed of the animals. and the relationship between the cage and the ship

If we could solve those points the most human way to move a beluga should be by sea in a mix of a submerged sea cage next the prow (if wheater permits) and pool.

Yes, remember, we have huge ships with huge swimming pools!. People even could pay an extra price by a "extra-luxe-best-and-first-cruise-in-the-world-with-whale-shark-experience" (if you need to put the animal safely in a harbour or if a puntual danger appears you use the jib and put the whale or the shark in the pool).

You can put all fish and material that you want for the whale in the hold of the cruise (you could even save some costs of their feeding if you just fish for the whale in the meanwhile).

If properly done, this will be also a really great publicity for both the aquarium and the cruise company. No troubles with faeces, the best place to swim effortless, and the best water quality than a beluga can dream with. Put some fake whales in front of the cage and the beluga probably will try to follow them. Less stress, richer life and a healthy exercise for the whale. Both animals, whale and shark are designed to migrate huge distances and love it...

Yes, definitely we should explore the idea of creating mobile dolphinariums.

Could've been a nice article. But it said "fish" and "sharks" far too often and .. well. I doubt that this ever happened if you suck at the basics. Most offensive:

Matthews was only half-way done: he still had to transport the two beluga whales from Mexico City — a task that ended up being more logistically challenging than the first. Though he’d been warned by the aquarium that the whales were “distressed, and in subpar conditions,” he wasn’t prepared for what he found.

“The tank was literally in the center of a roller coaster, in the middle of an amusement park,” he says. “They were put in the tanks when they were 6 feet long, and at the time of transfer, they were 15 feet long. I thought, how the hell am I getting these sharks out of this park?"

>Could've been a nice article. But it said "fish" and "sharks" far too often

Why's that?

I don't want to sound like an ass, but you do realize that most people would describe a whale as a 'big fish', right? And that 'cetacean' is not in most people's vocabulary?

Author here. That quote should read "...how the hell am I getting these [whales] out of this park?" Thanks for catching that.

I went through and read the rest of the article to double check for other mix-ups, but this was the only one I found. Whale sharks are technically classified as "fish," hence my use of the word to refer to them throughout. Thanks for reading!

I just scanned the article, it seems correct now in its use of shark/fish/whale/etc designators.

It's a confusing situation with both belugas (who are whales, and therefore mammals, and not fish despite their appearance) and whale-sharks (who are sharks, and therefore fish, but not related to whales despite their name). Add to that things like fish-tanks and so on, and you got a lot of room for confusion, so it pays to double-check everything!

Apologies for a comment that shouldn't have made it past the compose-at-night filter.

That's a quote from the guy. He also transported two sharks foe the same job; he probably got mixed up.

Note that he hired a team of veterinarians. Seems like the logistics expert stuck to his area of expertise and was wise enough to let other experts handle their part.

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