Cargo ships don't have to have a fleet of vehicles doing repairs and maintenance on tracks, nor do they cause other vehicle traffic to stop, idle for 10 minutes and then accelerate back up to speed when they roll by.
Pete C.
Actually, if the factory is near the dock and your house is near the dock then yes, that might very well be right.
To take an example, a typical 18 wheeler uses 100 or so horsepower to haul
40 tons of freight, while a Liberty ship (a small WWII-vintage cargo ship) uses 2500 horsepower to move 7,000 tons of freight.
well, unless you mine your own ore, use locally produced power to smelt it and manufacture with it, all at the same or better efficiencies as large scale industry does, the difference of pollution from shipping the finished goods disappears pretty fast.
Excuse me? "Columbian specifications"?
Not to mention that they make stuff cheaper and "better" by polluting. Some of these companies finish parts of the manufacturing process on the ships and dump the waste in the ocean on the way to the USA.. Our great grandchildren are going to pay the price for those cheap tools we are enjoying.
So do SUVs, doesn't stop all the yuppie idiots from buying them.
Well, "idiot" implies they're doing something irrational. They're not buying SUVs thinking they're getting great fuel economy; they're buying them as a status symbol.
Mike
The company, not the country :-).
Part of the WMH tool group (Jet, etc.)
Hadn't heard of that before; thanks for the clarification. That had me puzzled for a while...
>
Just retired after 30 years in the U.S. Navy with 18.5 of those years riding warships at sea and I've never seen a ship that performs manufacturing at sea, it is just too expensive to waste cargo space on people and shops. Everything is in conex boxes or bulk for liquid/gas. Manufacturers load into conex boxes at the plant and hundreds of boxes are loaded by crane onto the ship to minimize time alongside the pier. The shipper makes money in transit, not at pierside. I'd be interested in seeing anything that is actually processed at sea, besides seafood. Jack
You're not a sailor are you? Anyone who is has had the experience at least once in his life of standing with one leg on the dock and one on the boat and finding that his weight exerts enough force to move a hundred tons of boat far enough from the dock to drop him in the drink.
You don't move 100 tons of train with one person's muscle power.
Cargo ships don't "fight currents", they use them--ocean currents are well charted. As for "fighting cross winds" trains "fight" them too--has to be a Hell of a lot of wind before one does anything resembling "fighting" it though.
I would be _very_ surprised if unloading it on the west coast and loading it on the east coast was cheaper than just leaving it on the boat and running it through the Canal.
Life is full of little surprises.
I worked for Conrail as a Conductor for 11 years and saw an awful lot of such freight. Going straight across the US is cheaper than detouring a thousand miles south, waiting to use the canal, PAYING passage through the Panama Canal, passing through the canal and then recouping the lost thousand miles (all the while paying wages to the sailors and handling maintenance on a very big machine). I probably have the mileage wrong, but I think I've got a handle on the principle.
Then, too, there's the issue of getting a load to return home with.
Bill
From a certain perspective (mine, for instance) buying a SUV to flash as some sort of status symbol counts as irrational.
Bill
All you have to do is drive from Los Angeles to Needles across the California desert to truly appreciate how truly massive the unit trains are as they head across the country.
Maybe 200 railroad cars with four (4), 53 ft box trailers on each car would not be atypical.
Expect to see one of those trains at least every 4-6 hours.
Lots of retailers use those trains as their "warehouse", thus actual inventories are kept to a minimum.
Lew
Exactly. Buy expensive quality hand tools, and use them to make beautiful items, for a status symbol. If you need to show off put a Lie-Nielsen or Lee Valley plane on your dashboard while driving:-) Take it with you when you park, no sense tempting fate. Joe
That, and the fact that some of the newest ships can't fit through the canal at all. They're working up a project to widen the canal to accommodate the new ships.
Pete C.
Last I heard, Fedex Home only delivers Tuesday through Saturday. Why, I have no idea as folks aren't home that much more on Saturdays these days. If you have to get someone to sign, why bother going out the other four days?
Brian Elfert
Overall, they are still using a lot more fuel than buying something made in the USA.
Once the containers hit a US port, they still have to be moved to at least one warehouse and then perhaps to a distributor's warehouse. From there, it has to be shipped to you.
If an item is made in the USA, it may be shipped from the manufacturer directly, or shipped to a distributor and then to you.
The made in the USA item won't have all that fuel used by the container ship and getting the item to/from the container ship.
I don't strictly buy made in the USA items, but country of origin is certainly a factor. Many items are just not made in the USA anymore or are very hard to find.
Brian Elfert
This whole argument that shipping from Asia "wastes fuel" is Politically Correct buffoonery.
Factories don't make metal, they buy it from a mill and then cast, forge, and machine it into the finished product. Mills don't mine metal, they buy ore from a mine. So the ore gets shipped from the mine, and a fraction of the weight of the ore gets shipped from the mill as iron or steel and a fraction of the weight of that is shipped by the factory as finished tools. The US does not have all the raw materials to make modern tools--no matter where the tool is made there is significant shipping of some component of it from overseas, if not as a finished part then as ore or other raw materials. And it usually uses a lot more energy to ship that ore than it does to ship the tool.
If you want to buy American because you're loyal to your contry that's fine, but don't delude yourself that you are "saving energy".
"Politically Correct buffoonery", now that is an oxymoron.
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