Lunchtime Must-Read: Tim Worstall: Someone Needs To Tell Vox.com That Numbers Don’t Work Quite This Way

…the standard measure of these things, half the size of the container you see on an 18 wheeler trucking rig…. You can get 30 cubic metres of packing peanuts into one and not have to worry very much about the weight. But 30 cubic metres of gold or lead placed on the back of a truck will have the axles exploding into metal shards pretty much instantaneously…. Less than half the density of water and it’s volume that is important. More than that and it’s the weight…. The larger picture about shipping and containerisation [is that] it’s almost certainly true that this one technology is vying with the mobile phone as being the most important influence upon our lifestyles since WWII. Certainly vastly more important than anything that has come out of Congress or the House of Commons in that time. If you want to know quite how much difference then I recommend The Box (although I think he manages to underplay the economic impact)….And both the Vox and BBC pieces are interesting as well. Even if MSC Oscar cannot in fact carry 900 million cans of dog food.