
The secret world of cargo ships - danso
http://theweek.com/article/index/252438/the-secret-world-of-cargo-ships
======
rurounijones
> "Before containers, transport costs ate up to 25 percent of the value of
> whatever was being shipped."

And lost you a portion of the cargo if you were shipping something the
dockyard workers had a fancy for (Barrels of whiskey "accidentally broken"
during loading was a common one.)

There is a fantastic BBC documentary called "The Box that changed Britain"
which charts the rise of containerization and the massive affect it had on
maritime trade, the ports and workers.

~~~
eru
There are also two good books I know of about the topic of containers: "The
Box" and "Ninety Percent of Everything".

~~~
derekp7
This article is an excerpt of "Ninety Percent of Everything".

------
danso
There's a great book about the shipping container:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container-
Smaller/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Box-Shipping-Container-
Smaller/dp/0691136408)

It is hard to imagine a company like Amazon being successful without the
humble shipping container...before its time, a ship could spend as much time
loading and unloading as it would to cross the entire Atlantic.

I also think the value of the shipping container is a great analogy for any
kind of logistics...such as he importance of structured data when building any
kind of web app...non devs have. A hard time grasping how something as simple
as a spreadsheet is so vital to collecting and organizing info for an
interactive app.

~~~
nkurz
It's only mentioned at the end, but this article is an excerpt from a book as
well: [http://www.amazon.com/Ninety-Percent-Everything-Shipping-
Inv...](http://www.amazon.com/Ninety-Percent-Everything-Shipping-
Invisible/dp/0805092633)

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
Great book, too - I've almost finished it. (It's titled "Deep Sea and Foreign
Going" here in the UK.)

------
Zigurd
Sorry about the lengthy quote, but this is an incredible collection of non-
sequitors and random free-association alarmism:

 _IN 2004, Al QAIDA reportedly recruited a maritime expert. U.S. security
sources revealed in 2010 that the organization had been working out how best
to blow up oil tankers. Though why bother with intercontinental missiles or
explosives, the urban planning academic Stephen Cohen writes, when you can
just ship everything you need in parts and assemble it at the required
destination? "Containers...are the poor man's missiles: you no longer have to
be a big powerful government to create catastrophe." In 2003, ABC News shipped
depleted uranium from Jakarta to Los Angeles in an attempt to expose the
weaknesses in port barriers. The stunt didn't go down well at the Department
of Homeland Security, whose declared mission is to "stop dangerous things and
dangerous people from entering the country," even if those dangerous things
are sent by people from a national news channel. In fact, shipping uranium is
legal, as long as you declare it. ABC didn't, and no one checked._

 _Connecting the sea to terrorism has become popular in security studies. Al
Qaida certainly understands ships: not only because it rammed the USS Cole
with a boat, but because it is thought to own or charter a small fleet. North
Korea has its own flag, a fleet of 242 vessels, and the ability to make
maritime mischief. Lloyd 's List reported in 2012 that 120 vessels had
reported GPS malfunctions in seas near North Korea, in an article that
suspected the work of a North Korean signals jammer._

 _A senior government official was asked in 2002 about the threat of maritime
terrorism. "This industry is a shadowy underworld," he said. "After 9/11 we
suddenly realized how little we understood about commercial shipping." In
2010, Nigerian security forces discovered 240 tons of rockets, mortar shells,
and small arms ammunition in 13 containers that had been shipped on the
German-owned, French-operated, Marshall Islands–flagged Everest from Bandar
Abbas in Iran, despite U.N. sanctions that prohibit Iran from selling arms.
The contraband was hidden behind marble slabs and fiberglass. The manifest
showed that the recipient was "to order." In short, according to a report,
"the ship's owners, operators, and officers had no knowledge or reason for
suspicion regarding the container."_

So... the potential for using containerized freight for terrorism is... what?

~~~
dsl
Remember before 9/11 when airport security was sane? The biggest thing they
kept drilling in was "don't leave your bags unattended," followed by "don't
carry items for persons unknown to you."

Abstraction from consequences allowed for a large number of things to make it
aboard planes. With minimal risk of getting caught, you could try once a week
to put a bomb on a plane until you managed to succeed.

Shipping containers are effectively the same threat. Due to the globalization
and efficiency of trade, I can ship a box full of anything I want anywhere in
the world, and the only way anyone will know the contents is if I declare it.

Container cargo is how a ton of bad stuff gets into the country. Not just
terrorist stuff, but drugs (and we aren't talking mexican skunk weed here),
military grade arms, sex slaves, counterfeit nikes, etc. It is pretty much the
wild west.

Something should be done to verify and inspect cargo. A container full of 20
Filipino girls bound for massage parlors should be found and stopped. There is
no realistic way of catching more than 1% of illicit shipments without serious
investment or impacting the volume of trade that can take place. The best
efforts than can be made, unfortunately, are by swinging the terrorism hammer
to get dollars.

~~~
snitko
How about you make things that are illegal - legal. Then you don't need to
inspect anything. And for those things that are truly horrible - like sex
slavery - stop fighting the symptom. Shipping companies are not the root cause
of sex slavery. There is a demand for such things. Eliminate the demand and
there will be no sex slaves.

~~~
DanBC
This is gently baffling. Very few people leave their home country with the
intent of becoming a sex slave. They pay some money to leave their country and
enter another. When they arrive they're told they still owe $X, and need to
pay it off. One way to pay is to become a sex worker. Their legal documents
are taken from them. They are told that the police will lock them in prison or
deport them if they try to get help.

Domestic sex workers rarely turn to sex work out of free choice. They've made
bad decisions, and now they're addicted to drugs, or in deep debt, and sex
work is the only way they can get money.

The few people who enjoy sex work are not enough to satiate demand for sex
workers, especially if it's legal.

It's nice to think that a bit of sex work is one way that people could chose
to put themselves through college and then move on to much better work, but
unfortunately that's nothing like the truth of sex work.

~~~
xixi77
_Their legal documents are taken from them. They are told that the police will
lock them in prison or deport them if they try to get help._

You are down to the very root of the problem here; the logical thing to do
would be to make sure these threats are not credible, but it seems you are
advocating exactly the opposite.

 _Domestic sex workers rarely turn to sex work out of free choice. They 've
made bad decisions, and now they're addicted to drugs, or in deep debt, and
sex work is the only way they can get money._

There are many (most?) professions that people choose primarily because that
is the best way for them to make money. Why take exception with sex work?

 _The few people who enjoy sex work are not enough to satiate demand for sex
workers, especially if it 's legal._

What does this even mean? Normally, demand and supply are made equal through
price, and this is exactly how it happens in sex work, just as in any other.

 _It 's nice to think that a bit of sex work is one way that people could
chose to put themselves through college and then move on to much better work,
but unfortunately that's nothing like the truth of sex work._

s/sex work/any other manual job/, and your statement would still stand true,
except it often provides a much higher hourly rate for the worker, compared to
most alternatives.

Fundamentally, this is nothing but covert moralizing, implicitly arguing that
if other people make choices that you personally consider repugnant, they are
somehow objectively wrong and need to be re-educated to see the error of their
ways.

~~~
DanBC
> the logical thing to do would be to make sure these threats are not
> credible, but it seems you are advocating exactly the opposite.

The threats are already not credible. A trafficked sex worker going to police
is not going to be arrested; the person controlling a trafficked sex worker is
in far more legal trouble.

> Why take exception with sex work?

Because it's not a free choice. An addict cannot freely chose sex work.

> Fundamentally, this is nothing but covert moralizing, implicitly arguing
> that if other people make choices that you personally consider repugnant,
> they are somehow objectively wrong and need to be re-educated to see the
> error of their ways.

You need to speak to sex workers and ex-sex workers and hear the very strong
trauma they experience. I've said (although not in this thread) that I have no
problem with people selling or buying sex. Someone paying for sex, and someone
providing that service is in theory a normal transaction. In practice, very
few people want to be paid to provide sex services, and the number of people
forced to work in the sex trade is worrying.

Perhaps I've been a bit confusing with terminology. By sex work I tend to mean
prostitution, rather than camming etc. (Although the lighter end has some
distressing problems too.) And I'm in the UK, where it's legal to pay for sex
and to receive money for sex, but we have lots of trafficked people working in
the industry.

------
kayoone
Another little known fact:

Cargo ships also burn a lot of very nasty bunker fuel. The ships going through
the panama canal have carbon emissions per year that rival those of all
motored vehicles in the US combined (800 metric tons vs 1100 metric tons).
Each ship burns 200 to 400 tonnes of fuel per day (worth $40K-$80K)

~~~
dsl
"Bunker" isn't a type of fuel, thats just what it is called when store aboard
a ship (the "bunker" is where coal used to be stored). Large ships burn about
a dozen different types of fuel oils.

Cargo ships are also the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods.
Better than trucks, trains, and planes.

~~~
_mulder_
>Cargo ships are also the most carbon efficient means of transporting goods.

Only due to their scale, there seem to be very little 'carbon reducing'
technologies employed in the shipping trade.

I don't know why some sort of modern Sail power hasn't been looked at. If
you're sailing with the wind why would you not save "$40 - $80k" a day?

Of wind turbines for that matter, as far as I know, most ships still derive
electricity from diesel generators. Why not wind or solar?

~~~
aunty_helen
Ship engines produce a lot of power. Around 75MW.

The size of the sails / solar / wind turbine to replace this would be...? You
get the idea.

As for carbon reduction, the engines already run at ~50% efficiency so there
is little waste. The amount of carbon produced is the reality of pushing such
a huge weight through the water.

~~~
_mulder_
Not sure why I was down-voted on this.

I should have made it clearer in my post but I wasn't suggesting replacing
diesel engines with Sail power, just augmenting it in the same manner as the
SkySails (see response from jk4930 and markdown).

I also don't see why covering the deck in solar panels, or installing some
form of wind turbine, wouldn't go some way to reducing the demand from diesel
power generators.

~~~
wmoser
There are a lot of people looking at fuel efficiency as well as carbon/sox/nox
emmissions. For the companies running ships, the more efficient the plant is,
the more money they save on fuel. About ten years ago we did a rough back of
the envelope calculation in one of my engineering classes when I asked a
similar question. The extra weight of the solar panels would negate any small
benefit they would provide plus the cost of maintaining extra equipment. A lot
modern ships run a shaft generator which uses the power from the shaft turning
the propellor to turn an alternator to make electricity. When the ship slows
down at the end of the trip, they go back to running smaller 'port'
generators.

------
bbatchelder
I worked for a start-up for quite a while working on this problem. We had a
system for CTPAT enrollment of a supply chain, but that proved to go nowhere
pretty quickly.

We ended up being part of the Advance Trade Data Initiative (ATDI) where we
received a feed of data corresponding to Bills of Lading, Advance Shipment
Notices, Stow Plans, Container Updates, etc. We were able to take that feed of
data and marry it to other open source intelligence (watch lists for crew,
commodities used to cover contraband, historical location data for vessels,
historical data on containers, etc) and a rules engine.

The result was a risk score for each shipment, and an aggregate score for each
conveyance.

Customs officials then used this data to target their scanning/inspection,
instead of trying to do 100% of all cargo.

Not only can this approach be used for security concerns, but also for
combating smuggling of legal items by importers trying to circumvent tariffs
and taxes.

Hey, here is a screenshot from their website:
[http://www.greenlinesystems.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/m...](http://www.greenlinesystems.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/maritime_example.png)

Here is a marketing blurb on the product:
[http://www.greenlinesystems.com/cargo-risk-
targeting/](http://www.greenlinesystems.com/cargo-risk-targeting/)

------
newsmaster
Might be a good idea to stop doing things which cause people to send you
bombs.

~~~
bane
Doing what violent people want you to do so they stop hurting you is usually
not the optimal solution.

~~~
lostlogin
Where do drones fit into this theory? Using the crudest possible measure -
deaths - it's hard not to see the US as the "violent people" you describe. It
has become a cycle, how do you suggest breaking it?

~~~
twoodfin
So is your assumption that drone strikes are deliberately targeting the
innocent as a way to inspire terror? If not, isn't it obvious what the
difference is?

~~~
msandford
Do you honestly expect anyone under the age of 25 to understand the
geopolitics of having their family, friends, etc being killed and to realize
that they were actually "bad" people and that the "proper" reaction is to
simply accept the "punishment" of a drone strike?

------
thret
[http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/](http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/)

Related article previously submitted on HN, about what happens when one of
these containers has radioactive cargo.

------
caycep
Does this remind anyone of the Guild navigator ships in Dune?

------
the_watcher
The section on arms shipments to Nigeria reminded me strongly of the film
"Lord of War," where Nic Cage's character notes that his favorite cover for
his arms is the combination of tropical heat and old potatoes.

------
JetSpiegel
If the Internet should be neutral, why should this peer-to-peer container-
switched network be different?

~~~
freehunter
Well for one, you can't really email someone a nuclear bomb or chemical
weapon. The most you could do over the Internet is detonate an already-
existing bomb (either a real bomb or blow something up Stuxnet-style).

~~~
Zigurd
Containerized freight has never been used in an act of terrorism. For that to
be a concern, it would first have to be plausible for terrorists to get a
nuclear bomb and have the capability to set it off. Then, using a shipping
container would have to come to the top of the list of how to deliver it.
Neither is now plausible.

