Shipping Containers: A One-way Story
If you wanted to charter one 40 foot container midweek to carry something from Shanghai to Los Angeles it would cost you $10,221 . That’s a 144% increase in a year.
But if you want to hire a 40 foot container to go back to Shanghai from Los Angeles it costs just $1,309. About the same percentage increase.
That tells you that there isn’t much demand to ship stuff from LA or other American and European cities back to China. It creates a shortage of containers where they are needed.
Drewry Supply Chain Advisors produces the stats. It’s hard to read, but here’s a link if you want to dip into more detail.
If the containers don’t get back to China or Vietnam the blockage at big North American and European ports is not going away anytime soon.
West Side Story flops; Spiderman soars.
The reason: both are on theatres and the only group flocking to the cinema are young males. They are not afraid of Covid and are not interested in the New York City version of Romeo and Juliette but do love the fantasy boom-bang of Spiderman: No Way Home.
West Side Story appeals to an older female audience and they are staying home and watching Netflix, Prime and Disney.
You couldn’t drag me to a theatre, but I would love to hear “Gee officer Krupke, we’e down on our knees, cause no one wants a fella with a social disease.” That’s from memory. Not even a free ticket would tempt me to watch Spiderman.
World Box office receipts of top 10 as of December 31, 2021
There are movies that are made and seen only in China. Hollywood still rules, for now.
1- Spiderman: No Way Home $1.161-billion
2- The Battle at Lake Chongjin 902.5-million ($889.4-million in China)
3- Hi Mom 822-million ($821-million in China)
4- No time to Die (James Bond) 774-million
5- The Fast Saga 726.2-million ($216.9-million in China)
6- Detective Chinatown 686.2-million (($685-million in China)
7- Venom: Let There Be Carnage 501-million
8- Godzilla vs Kong 467-million
9- Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings 432.2- million
10- Eternals 401.2-million
West Side Story World box office receipts: $36.6-million.
“West Side Story needs to generate at least $300-million globally to break even.” Variety.
Many readers are free subscribers. You can upgrade here.
Baby it’s Cold Outside
A midweek snapshot showed 14 of the 15 coldest places in the world were in Canada. It is the coldest weather in western Canada in eight years.
The only Russian coldspot is Jatutsk, also spelt Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia. It is home to the Mammoth Museum. That tells you a lot.
A chart showing who was in power for how long since 1970
Residential property up Commercial property down.
Not sure I agree with this, but the theory from Professor Scott Galloway of New York University is that people will work more from home since that’s what they have done so far. I think we are social beings and will want to see other people at work.
But he’s a smart guy and this is his chart of which companies he thinks will thrive and which will not.
CBC New Year’s broadcast
The CBC asked me to speak to several stations across the country about what war veterans were doing at New Year’s. It is similar to the Christmas broadcast but the Vancouver host went on much longer and there are several new stories, including the woman profiled in the first essay of the week.
Here is a link to the Vancouver interview by Sheryl Mackay
Essay of the Week (1)
A Woman of Bletchley Park
Margaret Cooper, was at a car showroom in Hamilton, Ontario, in the early 1950s when her husband Craig struck up a conversation with a young German immigrant. He said his father was a U-boat captain. Mrs. Cooper knew the name of the captain, the submarine he was on and where it had operated. She didn’t say a word, since she was still under the strictures of Britain’s Official Secrets Act.
Mrs. Cooper, who has died five years ago in Hamilton, Ontario at age 98, worked at Bletchley Park, helping decode messages sent to German submarines—U-boats.
“We knew everything about all the U-boats. We knew all their captains,” Mrs. Cooper told a Canadian newspaper several years ago
But for decades she kept her work secret.
“She never spoke about her work at Bletchley Park, even to my father, until the Official Secrets Act on that aspect of the war was lifted in the 1970s,” said her son, Ian Cooper. She then told her family about what went on and spoke on the record for the Memory Project, first-hand accounts of veterans.
“In August 1942, [Field Marshal Bernard] Montgomery’s forward forces had brought [Field Marshal Erwin] Rommel’s army to a halt. RAF bombers, British submarines, had sunk 47 supply ships totaling 169,000 tons. All except two had been a direct result of decrypts from BP [Bletchley Park],” recalled Mrs. Cooper. In October 1942, 44 percent of Axis shipping leaving Italy for Libya was sunk. By November the 4th, he [Rommel] reported ‘Africa Korps strength is down to 24 serviceable tanks. November the 10th, 11 tanks’. So that really brought to the end the war in North Africa.”
Margaret Douglas was born in Punta del Este, Uruguay in 1918. Her Canadian father, Jack Douglas, had moved to Argentina to buy and operate a cattle ranch. He was successful and had a beach house in the Uruguay across the Rio de la Plata from Buenos Aires. Margaret’s mother, Vera, was born in Argentina and was part of the large British colony there. At the time Argentina was so prosperous it was said to be the richest country in the world, and there were so many Anglo-Argentines that Buenos Aires had two English language newspapers, the Standard and the Herald, which still exists.
She led an idyllic life on the family ranch in the interior of Argentina. She and her brother, Sholto, were sent to school in Britain, but came back to live in Argentina. When the Second World War broke out Margaret and Sholto soon boarded a ship for the treacherous crossing to Britain. German U-boats patrolled the Atlantic, as Margaret Douglas was soon to find out in detail.
When she arrived in England she joined the “Wrens” or WRNS, Women’s Royal Naval Service, and she was asked whether she wanted to be a cook or work in coding, which was encoding and deciphering military messages. Turned out it was much more than that.
“We were called to the Chief Officer’s office and she pointed to a letter which she said was from (British Prime Minister) Winston Churchill asking for some volunteers to go on to a job which was very, very, secret,” Mrs. Cooper recalled in The Memory Project, which recorded wartime experiences.
“She couldn’t tell us anything about it but it was very urgent. So sleep on it and let her know the next morning, so I think all but two of us, so that was eight of us, volunteered to do this job. The next day, we were duly put on a bus; we didn’t know where we were going and landed up in Bletchley [Park].”
“What we were going to do at that time was to work on a thing called a Bombe, which had nothing to do with being a `bomb’ as you would think of it. It was a machine which had been more or less invented by a man called Turing, Alan Turing [British computer scientist Alan Turing], which helped to find the setting for decoding encoded messages.”
The Enigma Machine was used by the Germans to send scrambled messages to armies in the field and ships and submarines at seas. The standard Enigma Machine had three rotors that allowed the coding system to be changed every day. The one used by the German navy was even more complex since it used four rotors.
Though Margaret Douglas was told at the start that the job offered no chance for promotion she was made an officer in the Wrens. Most of her time at Bletchley Park was spent in the `U-boat room. She dealt with all the messages regarding U-boats and passed them on to the Admiralty the headquarters of the Royal Navy is known.
“My mother told us they knew the names of U-boat captains and of the crew. When a message was sent that a U-boat crew member’s wife had given birth, they knew about it. That message was unusual and it made it easier to crack the code,” said her son Ian.
A month and half before the Allied invasion of Normandy Margaret Douglas was entrusted with a bigger job: helping track U-boat activity in the English Channel, the route of the invading force.
“I was sent down to Plymouth [on the coast] on the 26th of April 1944. Plymouth and Portsmouth were really the chief naval invasion ports of France [for the D-Day landings]. So absolutely everything was happening there. And I was to be, well, I was on the staff of the Chief of Staff, but I was liaison between Bletchley and Plymouth; should any U-boat messages relative to that area come up that I could deliver them to the appropriate person,” Mrs. Cooper told the Memory Project.
The Wrens at Bletchley Park were billeted at nearby Wobrun Abbey, which had been seconded from the Duke of Bedford during the war. One evening in 1942 the young WREN officer Margaret Douglas was standing on the platform at Bletchley Station during a blackout when an officer of the Royal Canadian Air Force started a conversation. His train to London arrived and they never exchanged names.
The RCAF officer made the hour long ride to London then continued to North Africa where he commanded a mobile radar group. He was so impressed by the woman on the platform that he wrote a letter addressed to “The blond Wren from Argentina on the platform at Bletchley Station”. It actually made its way to the local post office, since she never told him where she worked, and then to the Wren Margaret Douglas at Bletchley Park and a long distance correspondence sprung up.
Craig Cooper returned to England on leave and proposed to Margaret Douglas. They were married in March of 1945. He soon returned to Canada and Margaret Cooper followed on a troop ship filled with war brides.
She and her husband settled near Hamilton. Craig Cooper had been a Latin and Greek teacher before the war and he returned to that. The family bought a 65 acre farm in Carlisle, 15 kilometres north of Burlington. They raised cattle, kept horses and operated a cherry orchard, thus the name, Cherry Hill Farm.
Mrs. Cooper raised four children and lived on the farm until 2001. She drove a car until last year and was mentally astute. Her son said she followed the Brexit debate in Britain and didn’t like the result.
Margaret Elizabeth Cooper was born on January 25, 1918, in Punta del Este, Uruguay. She died on July 18, 2016, in Hamilton, Ontario. She is survived by her children, Elizabeth Salton, Ian Cooper, Jane Toews, and Peter Cooper, nine grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren.
Essay of the Week (2)
The following comes from interviews I have done with the people who run a private clinic in Toronto. I might write a book with them, or do some other work.
Slowing Aging
We know we can extend our lifespan. We've been doing it for eons.
When humans were hunter-gatherers, they were lucky to live past 20. At the end of the Middle Ages, aristocrats in Europe were lucky to make it to 54, according to an extensive study of birth records by scholars from Cambridge University,
Today, life expectancy in Canada is 82.05 years, for both women and men, around three years higher than the same projections for the United States. And if Canadians make it to the traditional retirement age of 65, they can expect to live another 20 years, according to Statistics Canada. There are 346,256 Canadians over the age of 90 and more than 12,000 over 100. You can count super-centenarians, those over 110, on one hand.
Perhaps more important than a long life is a long life with full mental and physical capacity.
"The purpose of what we do is to give you control of a life that is better longer," says Jean-Marc Mackenzie, co-founder of ReGen Scientific, a clinic in downtown Toronto that specializes in brain health and longevity. "Individualized health journeys guided by science-based innovations and integrated medicine give you control of a life that is better longer."
The clinic does extensive testing, from a brain scan and detailed blood work to DNA testing. That test works the way you see it done on television dramas: a technician takes a swab of the inside of your mouth, then the in-house laboratory checks for 90 gene variants.
"We call it made for living, and it is focused on what I call your factory settings," says Mr. Mackenzie, who has decades of experience managing an advanced private health clinic. "What we want to do is start looking and understanding the biomarkers of well-being and trying to maintain that longer into your life. Is your DNA ageing at a good rate? That's the future of medicine."
Your DNA can unlock a lot of information. It can tell you if you are sensitive to things such as dairy products, gluten or caffeine. Different diets work for people with different DNA.
One modern method of controlling ageing uses hyperbaric chambers, where a person breaths almost pure oxygen instead of the 21% in the air we breathe.
"For many years, our team has been engaged in hyperbaric research and therapy—treatments based on protocols of exposure to high-pressure oxygen at various concentrations inside a pressure chamber," says Professor Shai Efrati of Tel Aviv University. "Our achievements over the years included the improvement of brain functions damaged by age, stroke or brain injury."
That is from a clinical trial that treats ageing as a reversible condition.
"Anti-ageing is to stop your body from ageing quicker than it should be," says Jean-Marc Mackenzie. "That's where it's going: better identification not just of the disease or cancer that you have, to find it before you have bleeding and get an understanding that cancer is coming and have indicators of it before you have cancer, not just getting it earlier."
ReGen Scientific sees itself as part clinic, part lab and part research centre. There are advanced medical checkups that include brain scans and DNA testing, but the clinic aims to identify how people can live healthier longer. In plain English, living longer doesn't do you much good if you are physically or mentally incapacitated.
"We want to give people better futures," says Jean-Marc. "What if our preconceived notions of what our sunset years will look like are wrong?"
Remember, a hundred years ago, 55 was old. Now it's the peak of middle age. It seems pushing the limits of age is possible.