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Joined: Oct 2004
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The worlds largest Container ship is so big that it would require a Box-car train 44 miles long to carry the same load.
Its about to dock here full of Xmas goods

It also sports the worlds biggest Diesel engine.
And another 7 container ships are being built.

**I find the implications rather disturbing
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1934888,00.html

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"You will never find a real Human being - even in a mirror." .....Mike Kremer.

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"You will never find a real Human being - Even in a mirror." ....Mike Kremer.


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G'day Mike,

Why? Because those in Britain like to buy Christmas presents that are cheap? Perhaps because a lot of the stuff is useless?

Or because of the size of the ship and the enormous amounts of CO2 it would produce? Don't worry, the CO2 production of the coal power stations to make the gifts outweighs the ship production by such a huge factor that the ship wouldn't even count. And at least the ship is efficient. It would produce far less real pollutants, sulphates, carbon monoxide, soot, etc, than four or five smaller ships carrying the same load.

Why do the world's consumer goods come from China? I import remote control hobby products. Mostly planes and higher end cars. The quality from China is superb. The planes are generally built out of good quality balsa and other products, painted, solar filmed. Such things as fibreglass cowls fully painted, pilots remarkedly detailed etc are just part of the package. A plane made this way can cost me $40 US. The materials in UK or the US or Australia would cost a couple of hundred US dollars. The time to make a plane this good would take a hobbyist more than 60 hours. The plane is about a tenth of the price of the equivalent from Europe, locally or the US, and the quality is higher.


The Downside, imho


But all of this comes at a world price. The people may be getting more pay than they used to but the inefficiencies are breathtaking. I've visited factories and watched how this stuff is made. Anywhere else machines would do repetitive and work that is very slow. In China people are so cheap that no one cares that a process takes a worker several hours yet there is a machine that can do it in seconds and costs say $15,000. The $15,000 would be several years' wages for the worker it replaced. Not worth it.

The cities are badly polluted and I mean real pollution. The type that makes your eyes water and produces a nasty cough. The water is often toxic. I've even seen steam engines pulling trains! Now that is inefficient and highly polluting.

Because the labour is so incredibly cheap, the incentive for efficiencies is absent thus you end up with a terrible waste of resources. And by resources I mean the non renewable, dig out of the ground stuff such as oil or coal (although we still have several centuries of that left). But to someone used to efficient production, it really is strange to watch these superb models made so primitively and with so much waste in labour and in energy.

The other problem is that the products are so much cheaper they become throw away products. Ten years ago a decent drill cost several hundred dollars, a bench saw even more. I can buy both for less than $30 currently, retail in Australia. The planes I buy are so cheap that someone who was interested in the hobby may have bought one or two a year and now can and does buy 20 in the same period and doesn't even worry all that much if they are crashed. The very big drop in prices of these goods whether garden appliances, toasters, wheelchairs (actually that one maybe not), toys means that they are much less likely to be respected, repaired or kept for anywhere near as long as their predecessors. That encourages much higher consumption of the same products. I'm sure that eventually the Chinese, then the Vietnamese then the Indians and probably much sooner the East Europeans will get higher wages and this will start to peter out but in the meantime?


Regards


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
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I was happy to see your description of China's socio-economic situation. I can't write much these days until I get a new computer, but that is certainly the image that I have received of China over the past few years. I certainly was trying to imply all of that in my above post.* And regarding that statistic, I don't think it accounts for the pollution created by building their infrastructure (to support our consumerism) either.
~samwik

*re: my post from other thread: "Greenhouse gasses hit record high"
The article mentions China' growing contribution. Although I'vew been worrying about another contributer as large as the US, I hadn't realized that the US is fueling some of China's growth. While our contribution ~1/4 of world pollution has dropped several % (as other country's proportion rises), something like 12-15% of China's pollution is produced to make stuff for the US (Walmart).


Pyrolysis creates reduced carbon! ...Time for the next step in our evolutionary symbiosis with fire.
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If a ship is longer than the wave period of the sea during a storm its bow and stern may be in water and its midsection in air. That is the recipe for destroying a ship be it a German U-boat and a depth charge detonated underneath or the Edmund Fitzgerald. The keel snaps.

In the case of a Malacca-max container ship (~2010), that would lose about $1 billion in cargo if it all sank, or loose 18,000 lethal hazards to shipping if all the containers floated. The Emma Maersk is intermediate to the big ones with 11,000 containers nominal.

Either way, what does Great Britain do with the containers afterward? It has nothing to put in them except urban garbage and industrial waste. AH HA! What is the volume of the Mariana Trench?


Uncle Al
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http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz3.pdf
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Quote:
Originally posted by Uncle Al:
If a ship is longer than the wave period of the sea during a storm its bow and stern may be in water and its midsection in air. That is the recipe for destroying a ship be it a German U-boat and a depth charge detonated underneath or the Edmund Fitzgerald. The keel snaps.
actually, what happens is that if the ship is the same size as the wave, as in the case of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it would find that its stern would be at the crest of one wave, while its midship is at the bottom of the bottom, thus, the wave would crash over the bow before it could hope to rise. It was sunk as fast as the water could go get in. It would be like a sub submerging, save that it was not intended to do so.


the more man learns, the more he realises, he really does not know anything.
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G'day all,

Ships

Modern ships do sink, rarely. The last really big ship to sink had a problem with its forward hatches. They were secured with bolts that could not withstand 36 hours of hurricane conditions and 12 hatches blew because the ship had been inside a hurricane for five days. The hatches were actually quite small, only a couple of metres long. The ship sunk.

So you certainly do not need wave length conditions. Not being a marine architect or expert in just how these things are built, I'm pretty sure these very big ships have been built with wave lengths in mind. Actually even in the biggest seas, I've seen these ships just sitting in the water. They don't ride over the waves the way a smaller ship does. Really huge waves just pass down their sides like a model in a rippling pond. It really is strange to watch, especially if you are on a warship that is going through about 40 degree movement in three axis at the time.

I would suggest the risk is more likely that in a huge storm that containers could get swept overboard. Now this is something that happens all the time. I insure my cargo and it costs about 0.001% of the value of the cargo while on the sea, so the risks are pretty small. I was curious and asked what the biggest risk was, thinking theft in the ports. I was told being swept overboard was the largest risk by a very large factor but still a tiny risk per container (and I only import a few containers a year).

I know oil tankers that are really huge have a system where the ship actually is quite flexible. It is very disimilar to the ships in WWII extremely vulnerable to a shock wave at the keel. I'd think that they would sink if torpeodoed too but more because modern torpedoes work quite differently to the WWII ones. They actually don't even impact with the ship and a really big ship like this would be hit with a wide spread of topedoes set to go off almost simultaneously at various points.

Regards


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness
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G'day all,

China and Cheap Production

When it really comes down to it China just makes what is saleable. They make my high quality planes because there is a market for them. I found a company that made remote control ships for movies. The ships cost as little as a 100th of the cost of the studio type creation companies and are just amazing to look at. I have a 3.5 metre Titannic that has individual bolt marks as well as a timber deck where each scale strip of timber is hand laid. There isn't a great market for these things but much more than I expected. Boardrooms and the like rather like these huge, superbly detailed ships, even if I brought them in for RC fans and they actually come with motors, lead acid batteries, eight channel radio systems etc.

China has ended up producing all this stuff for only one reason, price. Already the super detailed WWII planes that have lower volume than other models I now buy from Vietnam because the Chinese cannot compete on price. When I started buying model planes the factory that I still do business with was paying its staff 400 yuan a month (about $50 US). A year later the wages went to 550 yuan and then 800 yuan and now the more skilled workers are commanding 1200 yuan.

At some point the increased wages are going to force the factories to actually start to think about wasted motion, and machines to replace labour and the prices of the goods will not necessarily rise much. In fact most of my goods have dropped in price every year as efficiencies have gradually been introduced because of rising wages. That really is ironic that higher wages has forced efficiencies that ends up making the goods cost less.

The whole system isn't going to last forever. Actually it isn't going to last all that long at all. I'd suggest perhaps 15 years for the really cheap labour to be transfered aroung Eastern Europe, Vietnam, India and China.

China has no ability currently to keep pace with its energy needs. This is going to have a big impact. It already has sent oil prices through the roof.

I have no idea what is going to happen in the long run but it seems to me that the cost of energy and the limits on just how much expansion one country can make to its energy system in a short time is going to change the equation far more than the wages of workers.


Regards


Richard


Sane=fits in. Unreasonable=world needs to fit to him. All Progress requires unreasonableness

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