I SAW an article about using shipping containers as houses — not a new idea but novel to the extent that they might be considered in Ireland.

There are some obvious issues with them such as that they are too small under the building standards.

3 Cargo ships are bigger polluters than all the world's cars

What is less thought about are the containers themselves.

Shipping containers created a uniformity that has gone hand in hand with globalisation, they tend to come in a 20ft or 40ft length with a width of 8ft and a height of 8.5ft.

If anybody wanted to end globalisation all they’d have to do is get rid of all the shipping containers, thankfully an impossible feat.

Like many great ideas, they came from the business world.

American trucker Malcolm McLean came up with the idea and converted some ships so they could carry containers.

In 1956, most cargo was loaded and unloaded by hand by stevedores.

Hand-loading a ship cost $5.86 a ton at that time. Using containers, it cost only 16 cents a ton to load a ship, a 36-fold saving. Not only that, the amount that a dock worker could load was also increased 30-fold.

The unions hated the idea as it posed a threat to their monopoly on controlling a port’s ability to load and unload ships, thereby their ‘toll road’ between land and vessel was largely removed.

3 A shipping container used for student accommodation

That said, logistics was on its way toward a revolutionary change which is still shaping the world around us in amazing ways.

Nowadays about 90 per cent of all cargo in the world goes by ship, something we don’t always appreciate.

The cargo capacity of a container ship is measured in ‘TEUs’ or ‘twenty foot equivalent units’.

The six largest in the world are all owned by the Orient Overseas Container Line, the two largest each have capacity for more than 21,000 TEUs.

It’s mind boggling to see such massive works of engineering, I recall seeing a super-tanker in South America and being almost unable to accept that it was real because it was just so massive.

To give you an idea of their scale, here’s a statistic I still marvel at: Just one mega-container ship gives off as many emissions as 50,000,000 cars. That’s right, one ship equals 50 million cars.

The world’s 15 largest ships put out more pollutants (nitrogen and sulphur oxide) than ALL of the world’s cars added up.

So when you are getting an NCT and you see your car tested for minute amounts of pollutant remember that super-ships use a heavy, dirty fuel and are virtually unregulated for pollution.

Something that makes me laugh is how our government wants electric cars (which still pollute because their batteries are filthy to dispose of, use rare earth metals and still need energy generated somewhere to charge them) but is totally silent on the environmental impact of shipping.

I’m all for affordable consumer goods and I like the fact that this country has ports where these things are brought in, but why do we have such double standards?

This is yet another example of where we are all wide-eyed conscientious environmentalists on one hand and simultaneously ignorant Neanderthals on the other.

It’s hard to come down on only one side of this.

Every person who tells me how ‘green’ they are still likes to take foreign holidays, they still buy goods carried on heavily-polluting container ships and buy fruit that has to be flown here.

The reason so many arguments are never black and white is because of this type of interlinking of cause and effect.

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Why do we care about the output of cars when there is worse at sea than on our roads?

I wrote before about the silly way we tax cars.

Don’t even get me started on the taxation of ships which are all registered in places where it’s designed to avoid taxation, while at the same time being the most polluting vehicles in the world.

Hillary's lost without trace HILLARY Clinton is my number one idol when it comes to being the world’s sorest loser.



Two years on, she still can’t accept that she lost out to Donald Trump whose every gaffe makes it burn all the more.



Last week she was in Mumbai and said that she won in places that were moving forward and Trump in places that were moving backwards, she also mentioned that his supporters were poorer.



What a condescending, pontificating dumbass, it’s like the gods of irony possessed her and made her utter something destined for Donald.



She calls Trump a racist while being a classist, I can’t see how one is any better than the other.



If Trump lost and went to India blaming minorities and women for electing Hillary, the media would go into meltdown, but when the shoe’s on the other foot we don’t even hear about it. Perhaps that’s a sign Hillary is simply no longer significant?

Walk's a fit tip for the record

LAST week I broke a record of mine I have been working on for quite a while.

I did two dips with 50kg attached to me.

3 Walking is really effective for losing weight

That’s over half my body weight so it was a big day for me.

What wasn’t so great was the lack of progress being made on the scales.

I haven’t been sticking to the diet as rigidly as I should and this is a problem that always starts to kick in about two months into a diet (for me).

Sliding discipline means slower results, or worse yet, none at all, so I’m going to have to make up some lost ground.

To do this I’ll be whipping out my secret weapon — walking.

It’s really effective, doesn’t give you a wild appetite and it works.

In fact, the entire health and weight loss industry would lose billions if everybody woke up to the benefits of walking in the morning.

I’ll do a step by step of how to do it soon.

Flying high I FLEW a drone recently for the first time and I think I felt the way older generations did the first time they saw television or went on the internet, it really blew me away.



The view from up high is amazing.

It also taught me that the world looks really different from up there — the way that roads go, and where things are located is different than the way you picture them while moving around on the ground.



The idea that drones may one day be delivering things to us became suddenly more realistic. My grandfather was an aviator and I still have pictures he took out of planes in the 1920s and ’30s.



Here in the year 2018 and from the safety of ground level you can record movies in high definition clarity.



You just have to love science and engineering!

Learning on the job

WE had another intern in my company recently and by the end of a few weeks, they had a job in the financial services industry, having only ever worked in retail prior to that.

Academics blow a gasket when I say most of the things worth knowing are known and learned in businesses.

That isn’t to say that education isn’t vital.

You have to go in with a certain level of knowledge and ability to understand abstract ideas, but what we miss out on so often in Ireland is the practical knowledge.

My own view is that it should be mandatory to have work placements with every degree.

We host Germans who are educated under this system and they fit into the workplace so much more quickly and smoothly than our own graduates.

Q&A IF YOU buy a commercial vehicle do you still have to get an NCT? YOU don’t get an actual ‘NCT’ but you do get a roughly equivalent ‘CVRT’ which stands for ‘commercial vehicle roadworthiness test’ and like an NCT you have to have it.

Q&A IF a person puts up a planning notice and you want to object what do you do? THERE are two stages, the first is for ‘observations’ which is where you list concerns with the project. If they get planning you can then object via An Bord Pleanala.