[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Great only if your goal was to make things on one side of the planet, and ship it all to the other side of the planet. If that's your goal, then the invention of containers makes that so much easier. Should we have this goal? Is international shipping (at the scale we engage in it) a good thing? If it were (just for the sake of the argument) a bad thing, then containers would in fact be a horrible invention that enables a very bad thing to happen even more than it could otherwise.

[SllX]

Yes, domestic and international trade is a worthy human endeavor. Shipping containers are awesome.

Shipping containers are also multimodal and are loaded up on trucks and rail cars at ports to be hauled away.

[EasyMark]

Trade between countries is actually a good thing and has prevented many wars for resources that lie mostly in other countries. I guess for global warming though it’s an L

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Trade is war, the United States has been under siege for decades, and the walls slowly crumble. Why shoot at soldiers when you can just make the enemies' jobs all disappear, make their country unable to manufacture steel, and deprive them of key technologies? You'll trounce them and they'll thank you for it and ask for more.

It's a loss all around, just about every way you can imagine it. The people who are complaining on r/antiwork about their Starbucks job can't pay their $3000/month rent... they work that job because all the real jobs left for Asia back in the late 1980s. Was the international trade good for them?

[shiroiushi]

>they work that job because all the real jobs left for Asia back in the late 1980s.

They did? If you mean STEM jobs, the Starbucks workers were never going to get those jobs in the first place. Anyone capable of doing those jobs got a college degree in STEM and got a job in that field in the US; there's plenty of STEM jobs available, and in fact a shortage of workers in many fields. The only jobs these Starbucks workers could have done was factory work, and that isn't going to pay for $3k/month apartments either. Even here, there's lots of hands-on manual labor work in the US, but it's not in nice cities with $3k apartments, but rather in generally crappy places to live (and a lot of the work is probably outdoors too, in frequently terrible weather conditions). I'm guessing most of these /r/antiwork people just don't want to move there.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> They did? If you mean STEM jobs,

No.

> there's plenty of STEM jobs available,

This sort of statement is always sort of bizarre. Did you mean there are "many"? Many and plenty aren't synonyms. But even if you meant "many", given the scale of the US population, the working-age portion of it, and so forth, the numbers that are often cited aren't many at all. And that's when the economy is doing great. We've been talking about layoffs here on HN for over a year at this point, it seems like one after the other, so we're not really in that cycle either. There aren't "plenty of jobs". No sane, honest person should be describing jobs as "plentiful".

> The only jobs these Starbucks workers could have done was factory work, and that isn't going to pay for $3k/month apartments either.

That's an interesting theory. I suppose if you figure the factory work is only going to pay McDonald's wages (seeing alot of $14/hour around where I am)...

> Even here, there's lots of hands-on manual labor work in the US

Where, roughly? And what's "lots" mean to you?

[inglor_cz]

China aside, the poorer countries where US manufacturing moved into hardly see the US as an enemy, and the dependence goes both ways. A US trade embargo against a smaller country that rebuilt its economy to supply US customers would be nearly as destructive as a war.

[mistrial9]

agree - an example is container shipping into "food miles/km", as in South America fish and avacado shipped to the USA for a small change in price to the consumer.. Food miles is widely seen as out of control and makes no sense from fairly simple systems analysis