Human Interest

I always enjoyed TED videos. What really struck me was the opening sentence of the video, "everything is everywhere these days." This is so true in so many ways. The video uses different examples that you can find in different stores from places all over the world. How many things can you could in your bedroom that says "Made in China" or some other place other than the US? This is very common as we all know. Products and goods come from all over the world and even over seas. This is a process that we call globalization. However, the video introduces a process called containerization. This process saves an ample amount of time for the workers. The process was a success. "shrinking the world and enlarging human choice."

Globalization has connected the world in such a way that we hadn't thought possible. This idea has created rising economies all over the world and has made transport of goods and services move faster and continues to increase this rate with advances in technology. Containerization is a staple of globalization and without it, none of these products would be able to get from country to country. In essence it has developed the world of import and exports. To add to this success, globalization has also created jobs and communities which revolve heavily around the transport of goods. It saves time by using massive containers to move goods and it creates opportunities in places where it had not been possible before. 

The economies of scale that globalization depends on, relies on logistics and transportation networks that can handle this high-volume.  In a word, the container, as mundane as it may seem, facilitated the era within which we live today.  This is a very useful video.  

These vessels are specifically made to increase more profit and is a symbol of economic power for trades between Europe and Asia. They aim to increase containment of cargo so it is more efficient and time consuming of going back to fourth. However, they forced ports to become bigger to compete and keep up with these new inventions. These ships are getting too big and are only able to transit through the Suez canal and cannot go through the Panama. This lead to the Chinese expanding their reach to Nicaragua and building a larger canal to be able to pass through Central America.

These containers are symbols of global commerce that enable economies of scale to be profitable and the outsourcing of so many manufacturing jobs to developing countries.  The invention of these containers have changed the geography of global shipping and the vast majority of the world's largest ports are now in East Asia.  Today though, the biggest container ships are too big to go through the Panama Canal, encouraging China to build a larger canal through Nicaragua.      

Tags: transportation, globalization, diffusion, industry, economic.