To anchor discussion, prior to the rise of intermodal shipping containers in the '60s & '70s, cargo was shipped as breakbulk cargo. Losses from theft and damage were considerably reduced by switching from breakbulk cargo to shipping containers. Not the same as losing stuff over the side, but still a regular and somewhat predictable expense.
One anecdote I remember from Levinson's book is about a scottish whisky distiller exporting to the US being very excited about being able to ship whisky in a giant stainless steel vessel inside a container instead of shipping individual bottles inside wooden crates (imagine the theft during loading/unloading...).
That said, shipping containers were not adopted because they reduced theft and damage (consequently the cost of insuring cargo), they were adopted because they offered much lower costs to shippers (after enough investment in ships and ports and cranes and trucks and changes to transport regulation to provide the infrastructure to move containers around efficiently without double-handling them or unloading and repacking them for technical/labour/regulatory reasons).
The Box is way more fascinating than it has any right to be. It touches on basically every aspect of post-1950 world economy, history, urban planning, social changes, migration, etc.
One interesting take I’ve read on that quote is that you need to consider the source. If you’re a general for a country that routinely deploys troops to the other side of the world, in the service that specializes in landing those troops on a hostile beach with no friendly infrastructure, in a milieu when it is no longer considered acceptable to supply your troops by allowing them to pillage the countryside, you are going to spend a lot more time worrying about logistics.
It's not just remote deployments where it matters.
There is no deployment scenario that is not heavily dependant on logistics. This is more true in protracted land deployments of troops across large distances, not less so. No matter the strategy, logistics must match it or success is significantly more difficult.
Take Napoleon w/ Russia, where Napoleon's ambition out ran his logistics. His strategy and tactics had yielded results until then, and despite a large effort to supply his troops, he was woefully under prepared and in the end it was his logistics that failed him: Russia's retreating scorched-earth strategy meant Russia was retreating into friendly territory with resupply, the French were extending into a no man's land. The Napoleonic forces originally outnumbered Russian forces about 2.5 to 1, but forced marches through barren terrain and cities left stripped of resources, ahead of their supply lines and the limited supply buffer they'd planned, resulted in failure. 200,000 troops, about 1/3 of his total, died from starvation or froze to death, far more than actually died in battle. Napoleon won
or fought the Russians to a standstill in pretty much all battles, yet lost the war for lack of supply and other planning for the rigors of campaigning in that area of the world.
A few thousand years of military history offer plenty of examples of what happens when a force fails to consolidate gains and outruns or otherwise has inadequate supply lines. This is has not changed from ancient times through to modern warfare.
Sure, but there are circumstances where logistics become more and more challenging, and I’d say Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was another clear case of such a circumstance. The more challenging the logistics are, the more you have to worry about them. American Marines need to worry about logistics a lot, and Napoleon probably should have worried about logistics more than he did in 1812. But, to pick an example off the top of my head, I don’t think the Finns needed to worry about logistics quite as much in 1940; logistics were the least of their challenges.
Bringing it back to software, I find it interesting that the word "deployment" is used in both contexts. And indeed, there is something to be said about the "logistics of data" - as in, how it flows through your system(s) to combine, in the end, into a rapid fire, accurate, useful, valuable response to specific request.
Notice how many posts it took us to get from shipping containers to relative ancient-modern military strategic considerations. I think we've all been playing too many strategy games.
Nah, I just study history. Many strategy games nearly completely ignore logistics-- certainly any semblance of realistic logistics. Though actually when I do play strategy games I avoid those more realistic simulations: I want to focus on strategy, not the fiddly logistical details that actually make it all possible. Sort of like choosing a higher level programming language where many fiddly details are handled behind the scenes and I rarely have to bother with them.
Or in the case of Napoleon in Russia when they ran out of supplies, it marches on the 200,000 dead corpses of starved and frozen to death soldiers, with some help from countless slaughtered horses killed for food; and boot leather boiled soft enough to chew.
That's what you get when your supply plan buffers 50 days for rapid assault & victory while the enemy retreats, retreats, retreats, scorched-earth all the way. Hell, the Russians torched the entire city of Moscow to deny it to the enemy so it couldn't be used as a stop over on the way to St. Petersburg.
That was pretty much the end of Napoleon's campaign in Russia, and the beginning of his downfall. You don't get 500,000 troops killed in a single campaign and come home to fanfare and accolades.
In fact his failures during that campaign foreshadowed his downfall with a (failed) military coup. This was actually slightly convenient for Napoleon, giving him a reason to get the heck out of Russia before the final end came: extremely fortunate since the very small remaining body of troops retreating back west were not especially happy with their failed commander.
The running, value-producing software that lives in the data-center requires many kinds of resources, like people do. Electricity is the air of the robot armies. The network is something like having legs and eyes. Data is food because it has to be gathered, stored, and moved to the right place at the right time, and it is certainly the hardest thing for a process to get!
On a related note, there is an episode of Connections that ties the width of the early railcar's wheelbase to pretty much all subsequent forms of transportation, ending with modern space exploration capability. Pretty awesome to observe the actual reach of decisions made long ago.
Semi related: “How big should a railroad track be?” Is actually an extremely complicated question that took a long time for us to figure out. It wasn’t unusual for different states to have different gauges, often requiring that passengers change trains at state lines.
Also, Russia to this day uses its own gauge, because they’re terrified of being invaded via rail from Europe.
Home by Bill Bryson - not the first thing you might think of but tells fascinating story of Frederick Tudor who spent a fortune in 1840s taking ice from Lake Wenham in New York State and persuading the world you could refrigerate food from America across the Atlantic.
With the completion of the Erie Canal, buffalo, cattle and wheat from the Great Plains could arrive in Chicago, be butchered, kept in giant ice warehouses then shipped in box cars and boats lined with ice across the lakes, down the canal, out NY harbour and across to a Europe that was experiencing a massive population growth (1848 revolutions).
This first wave of globalisation dropped food prices globally causing (by the 1870s) massive economic collapses and shifts away from failing farmlands. British landed gentry never recovered, and the links to WWI are clear.
The US civil war would have been very different without the Erie canal if the worlds food supply went south down the Missiippi to get out to the Atlantic
All because someone liked Christoph in Frozen and want to sell ice.
Bryson is a brilliant author and this one of his best.
There's been a fair bit written about how Walmart leveraged incredible logistics to achieve its retail dominance, not unlike Amazon doing the same in the online world. I've also come across interesting work on how Dell helped change consumer computing with Just in Time supply chains.
Anybody that worked at Walmart in the 80’s and 90’s saw unprecedented application of technology to retail operations. Even as a lowly stock boy i could see how the efficiencies and cost savings gave them a huge advantage over their competition.
Kinda makes you wonder if Dell (or Gateway?) could have become Amazon as they sold people stuff direct, possibly their first web browser, and never put two and two together about what else could be done with that beyond their next computer.
Probably, but could overlap if you believe that they got ahead by cutting corners; I imagine that their practice of commingling inventory nets them a nice improvement in efficiency while making the counterfeiting issue worse.
I wonder if the online marketplace by it self still doesn’t turn profit. Probably impossible to figure out with additions of services like Prime and Amazon Fresh.
For most of its history Amazon reinvested all of its excess revenue; the "Amazon wasn't profitable" soundbite is misleading. Amazon made money, and spent it on buying and building more Amazon instead of distributing dividends to shareholders. On paper that is "zero profit" _for shareholders_.
I looked this up just to make sure — it definitely, definitely is the majority of their revenue. Net sales on Amazon.com for Q1 2021 were $75 billion. AWS and “other” combined were $19 billion. [1]
As far as profit goes, you have a stronger argument — $6 billion vs. $4 billion for AWS alone. AWS has a 30% operating margin, jesus.
That kind of makes sense, though. The tail risk of something like AWS must to be significant in comparison, so a hefty margin to insure against that seems reasonable.
Sale and distribution of things is probably much milder in its variations, and the expenses seem like they'd be more strongly correlated with revenue.
(All of this is a speculative attempt at explaining the figures, not an authoritative source on strategy. Say I have a 70 % belief.)
Why would the tail risk of AWS be so high? Apart from the economic troubles of COVID which increased online buying, normal periodic economic downturn would be expected to hit all retail businesses fairly hard. Amazon's non retail unit AWS grew significantly throughout the 2008-2010 economic downturn.
I don't know. It feels like the demand from complex software systems would fluctuate more wildly than a relatively predictable human consumer base, but I could be way off the mark.
> More than 3,000 boxes dropped into the sea last year, and more than 1,000 have fallen overboard so far in 2021.
Umm... we have end of April (the article is dated April 29th) or 1/3rd of the year. The last time I checked a third of 3000 is around 1000.
Anyway, nowhere in the article I see any numbers to support that there is a "sudden rise in accidents". Even the graphs themselves seem to show entirely different picture -- that this might just be a fluke.
But the graph only shows YTD losses, right? If you make the 2021 graph 3 times larger to compensate for the roughly 1/3rd of the year we've seen so far[1], it looks like more than a fluke than just 2020 alone. Both 2020 and 2021 should have more cargo loss than any year since 2013.
Nor is there any reason to supposed that the increased accidents are pure flukes that can't possibly happen again this year. If there's increased _systemic_ risk due to risky sailing, bad cargo management, etc. it'd be understandable for more outliers to occur. I don't think we can handwave away that somehow we're done with major accidents for the year only a third of the way in.
>I don't think we can handwave away that somehow we're done with major accidents for the year only a third of the way in.
These kinds of events are rare, even if something is causing more systemic risk there's no way to predict how many more will happen this year. I'm not handwaving anything away, I'm saying projections aren't useful.
> Even the graphs themselves seem to show entirely different picture
The graph for 2020 is roughly double what you'd see in every year except 2013, and 2021 has already matched most other years.
I think they're trying to make too much of a trend out of years dominated by one major accident, but the data definitely shows two worse than usual years in a row.
Is there a list of what exactly was lost? Does anyone actively seek out and salvage this sunken treasure? I hate to think of another Garfield Phone thing in the future with something more dangerous.
In the 1990s, a ship from Hong Kong bound for Tacoma, Washington lost a shipping container that was filled with 30,000 yellow duckies.
Oceanographers were able to collaborate with beachcombers in the western US (and eventually as far away as the UK) to validate their models of how the currents would move the ducks.
This ship [0] went down offshore of Cornwall in 1641, with 60 men, 100,000 pounds of gold and 500,000 pieces-of-eight aboard. Cornwall is not known to be friendly to wrecks. And yet, nearly 400 years later, she's not been found. They say.
In the UK there is some dispute about 'finders keepers' in any case, there was a case last year where a couple of guys got jail time for stealing a hoard
... to captains not deviating from a storm to save on fuel and time as they face pressure from charterers ...
Rather than shifting this cost to the shippers, they are essentially shifting it to the insurers and then paying more in premiums as a result.
Slow Steaming is going to cause some of this because ships will be en route longer and therefore more at risk of weather delay. Maybe they should apply the principle of General Average and simply charge for weather delays, shift this cost to the shippers.
Intermodal shipping containers are arguable the most significant technology of the 20th century. They did more to improve worldwide standard of living, than any other advancement. Including medical.
A surprisingly huge leap forward for the world was air conditioning. Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, said it was essential for his country's development. Without AC a huge swath of the world would still be seen by the West as this uninhabitable, uncivilized jungle.
3000 containers/year is a pretty small drop in the ocean. Most dangerous chemicals that you don't want in the ocean are loaded in a way that they are surrounded by other containers, so they are less likely to fall off (and less likely to be shot by pirates and catch fire). It seems reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the sinking containers are filled with pretty harmless stuff
I saw somewhere that for loading the outer/upper containers are lighter ones, and generally consumer grade plastic crap (toys, shoes, etc). same video shows loads of this stuff arriving on the shores of Oregon, USA - just a little waterlogged.
My analysis of that analogy is that "ocean," being on both sides of the equation, simply cancels out, so basically it is saying that a 3000 shipping containers equals one drop. Which I'm not buying. :)
> The more countries trade with eachother, the less reason they have to fight wars with eachother.
WW1 pretty much proved that wrong.
Europe was trading a lot with each other. That didn't stop all the rivalries from starting up and causing the general "Great Game" feeling between powers.
For now, it seems like DEMOCRACY is the best thing to prevent wars. Democracies don't like fighting against other democracies: it seems like in most cases, convincing the other country through communication yields actual results.
I'm not sure if you are aware of the term "Great Game". But it refers to a particular philosophy which has been dead since the early 1900s.
The "Great Game" was a huge reason why WW1 broke out. Back then, social Darwinism was considered a good thing. To win a war and prove that you're superior was honorable. Imperialism was reaching its highest points.
Under the "Great Game" mindset: war between powers was good. War encourages innovation. War encourages progress. Its why World War 1 happened: so many political powers believed that humanity would be advanced by fighting.
If there is no longer any desire among the democracies of the world to war against rival nations, why have the leading democratic power and its allies been involved in constant covert and overt warfare for the better part of the last century?
Why are we talking about "winning" the next century if, as you allege, democracy has superseded geopolitical competition?
We may affect more opposition to war in the present day, and we may wage it more subtly, but by no means has it ceased
I don't think you understand the terms I'm using. Or the history behind these terms. It sounds like you have a bone to pick with somebody, and I'm not interested in being your punching bag.
Social Darwinism is a mostly dead philosophy. There are some radical subgroups who push social Darwinism today, but its well accepted to be a "dead" philosophy and a terrible one at that. Nonetheless, the awful philosophy of Social Darwinism (and "Great Game") was clearly evident throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s. So these philosophies have huge cultural significance to the time period being discussed.
My point, with regards to the original post, is that the "mercantilist peace theory" was overridden by 1900s "Great Game" and "Social Darwinism" philosophies. There were mercantilist peace theorists back then, but they were NOT the ones in power (and they were EXTREMELY wrong about the nature of trade and peace... as the 1910s came about and war broke out between trade partners).
> For now, it seems like DEMOCRACY is the best thing to prevent wars.
I'm not interested in throwing punches, however I don't think your claim is coherent
Twice now you respond with a loosely related objection about the definitions of terms used to describe 20th century philosophy and geopolitics
You claim a certain locus of power is best able to prevent war- I point out that this same power has been at war across the globe, in some form or another, for almost a century- is this not a contradiction you see fit to address?
2. We have a (seemingly) superior recipe for peace: the Democracy Peace Theory. I don't think its perfect, but its a superior theory to the Trade-Peace Theory.
If you disagree with #2, that's fine. It doesn't change the fact that its a well regarded theory of peace. Either way, it doesn't really change my #1 point about the Trade-Peace Theory seemingly being busted.
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The point is that democracies do not go to war WITH OTHER DEMOCRACIES. That's the democracy peace theory, and so far it has held true.
I don't dispute your point about the Trade-Peace theory, friend.
Respectfully, since you affirm your convictions re: #2, my goal here is to get you to think critically about why "democratic" nations do not go to war with one another, and whether it may be helpful to consider theories of war which do not so transparently "take a side" in present-day geopolitics, and which can account for decades of warfare waged by democracies
If a "recipe for peace" permits its favored system of governance to war with rival systems for political and economic dominance, perhaps it's not really a comprehensive theory of war and peace
My sister wrote & defended her PhD thesis disproving this intuitive but wrong connection. Plenty of states happily trade with their enemies during wars. So war does not necessarily stop trade. And thus trade is no prophylactic to war.
States are most likely to cut off trade during war in very long wars - which are no longer possible between nuclear powers.
The summary of her dissertation is really interesting, thanks for sharing! But I think OP's point was "countries who trade with each other are less likely to go to war", not "countries who trade with each other never go to war". And I think OP is right.
"So war does not necessarily stop trade. And thus trade is no prophylactic to war." Seatbelts do not stop people dying in car accidents. But seatbelts do reduce the chances of dying in a car accident. I know I'm being pedantic, but it doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. Even a prophylactic that works 1% of the time is better than nothing.
Yes, war doesn’t stop trading, but it makes it more expensive. My favourite example is the Kula ring that used 2 monetary instruments circling between islands in different directions as a proof that other islands are not in war with eachother:
Well, alternatively, the war was (in large part) triggered by Britain _restricting_ open trade via the stamp act / granting a monopoly on tea imports to a single company.
The stamp act was a tax, not a restriction, right? Britain was attempting to recoup losses from the French-Indian War if I'm not mistaken. And the colonists had no say in it and then realized that even after lobbying for years to remove it (hell, the U.S. sent Benjamin Franklin, the best statesman in history and even he couldn't get them to budge), that they would always be subservient to the Crown. The tea imports was just salt on the wound.
That trading partner wasn’t a democracy. King George has a pretty famous quote acknowledging that if George Washington actually gave up power (as the Presidency required) it would make him the greatest man in the World.
You don't have conflict with people you don't need anything from, usually. It might seem counterintuitive but there's weight to the idea that interdependence increases risk of conflict.
Agreed, physical conflict is basically just an extreme form of negotiation, and it will continue as long as it's potentially profitable to the aggressor. "The idea is to apply kinetic force to the other group until its behaviour changes as desired."
Forged certificates is indeed a problem in the latter countries, but whether Danish, Chinese, Indian or Filipino, they're all told by a computer where to put each container.
Some blame may lie with those who tell the computer how tall it should stack the containers, but another big problem in shipping is that stevedores in many ports simply can't be bothered to secure the cargo according to the instructions. Deck officers (even western ones) don't take the problem seriously, leave port in an unseaworthy state, and leave the able-bodied seamen with the dangerous task of re-lashing everything under way. That is if they can even reach the cargo, which is less likely on a container ship.
> Some blame may lie with those who tell the computer how tall it should stack the containers
Computers do NOT make the stowage layout. The stowage layout is the responsibility of stowage planners. The captain of the ship has final say. There are various computer programs that assist with the stowage layout. However, they are _not_ sufficient. If you'd take out the stowage planner the shipping company would have a lot of additional costs. These programs do help to check for loads of problems, plus the initial inefficient stowage plan.
How tall something is stacked is too simplistic. What matters is that it isn't stacked as a box. Further, certain twist locks cannot handle too much wind.
Source: used to sit next to a stowage planner, who'd be in the office around 1x/month. The planner mostly talked during these visits.
>Computers do NOT make the stowage layout. The stowage layout is the responsibility of stowage planners.
Yes, that's what I meant by "those who tell the computer..."
>how tall something is stacked is too simplistic.
And that's why I went on to expand on the dynamics of timetables, third party contractors and the correct execution of lashing instructions.
It's true that the captain has the final say, but realistically for large ships and the combinatorial explosion that comes with them the captain and his deck officers simply doesn't have time to check and correct the work of either the stowage planners or the stevedores. Even if they are all western Europeans and Americans with genuine documents.
At 200 million shipping container trips per year, whether losses are 1000, 4000 or 10,000 seems pretty insignificant. Even 200,000 would be around 1-in-1000 or a tenth of a percent chance of your laptop being lost overboard.
I would love for a shipment of dildos to be found, along with a shipment of books with at least one titled Teledildonics Programming in Python for the Professional Programmer, 3rd Edition: Updated with a new chapter on TCP/IP latency reduction.
I see it now, future oceanic archeologists uncover the container and publish an article about a long lost undersea civilization that used container as part of an religious site where they made offerings to their gods as part of a ritual. It will remain a mystery as to why the civilization left the site and disappeared but the team will be soliciting more funding to continue its research.
My container (used for land-based storage) has obviously seen travel, and has nothing beyond a couple corner air vents. None of the other containers I'm familiar without here (they're quite popular for storage) have anything of the sort. That valve is a nice idea, but doesn't really exist in most of the fleet of containers on the ocean.
They are, indeed, a hazard for other boats, though they generally won't "lurk below the surface." Either they're floating from buoyancy of what's in them, or they sink. The increasing water pressure as you descend makes "floating below the surface" a particularly unstable place.
Perhaps some new ones do, but generally most containers have nothing of the sort:
"Depending on whether they are full or empty, and on the nature of the cargo inside, containers may float at the surface for several days or weeks prior to sinking. Containers are not generally entirely watertight; while an empty container is likely to sink due to water ingress, a full container will likely float until air trapped in the cargo has escaped.’"
I wonder if someone can make a living recovering these containers and selling their contents on eBay (considering it seems everyone treats the fallen off container as litter..).
From the article, it seems that container losses don't generally happen one at a time, but rather you have some event where a ship loses hundreds at once. I guess if you're quick maybe you could get a ship in and scoop them up before they sink, but in order to save more than a few you'd need a big ship and most of the time you'd just be sitting around waiting for the next container loss event, and the ship would sit idle for months or years.
I'm assuming that if it sinks in deep water it's gone, but even there maybe there's an opportunity to salvage containers off the sea floor with the right equipment. Probably not worthwhile economically, but who knows?
Maybe the best case for this could be made for ships that normally at sea doing other things to be ready to divert from their ordinary tasks to collect containers if they don't have anything more pressing. (Coast Guard ships or Navy support vessels perhaps?)
His point is that container losses happen in bursts, so you'd spend a lot of time idle while waiting for a container loss. If you can't pick up enough of those containers, you'd be losing money to keep your ship ready-to-go.
I'd guess that the median economic value of the contents of some random container that's been saturated in sea water is probably pretty low. The container itself is worth a bit if it's still usable as a container, otherwise it's what it's worth as scrap metal.
I'm having trouble imagining many things that would still be valuable. Even things in sealed containers might be crushed by the water pressure. Other than gold bars, what would still be useful? Construction-grade lumber, maybe?
I could imagine this being a rich person's hobby. And maybe the basis of a Netflix series or something, like shows about the gold miners in Alaska.
Selling on eBay is theft. The contents if those containers belongs to someone. You can possibly make a living recovering the container for the owner, but if you don't agree to a price beforehand the lawyers will make a killing in court deciding what you should get.
North Korea and a few similar countries. Otherwise all countries recognised some form of law which is things lost at sea are still owned by the person/org that lost it.
Oh, interesting, I didn't have a sense of how widespread that was.
I remember this 300-year-old Spanish shipwreck that was dredged up by a private company. The Spanish government then sued and won. They had to give back ~500k coins. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44302476
I'm not sure how I feel about the outcome. In particular it seems odd that Spain could indefinitely claim ownership, even if they have no intention of recovering the wreck. That being said, I don't strictly believe "finders keepers" applies here either.
For interest, here are the UK Maritime Accident Investigation Branch reports into two incidents of loss of containers overboard in the Pacific from ships that happened to be UK-flagged at the time:
This has always worried me when I’ve moved across the ocean (three times). Books, photos, personal items heading over the side of a ship. I know the odds are low but it’s different from a container ipod identical, brand new Phones.
When you move overseas, wouldn't you take anything with sentimental value onboard with you as luggage? I can't imagine being too devastated to lose books or whatever other larger items people take when they relocate overseas (assuming that you would be compensated for the monetary value of lost items and be able to replace them). In my experience, most sentimental items are small enough to easily fit in a suitcase.
However, on second thought, I suppose some people would have more and larger sentimental items than I do, like large vases or antique pieces of furniture and so forth.
Is it possible to pay extra to have a very large flotation device attached to your shipping container? :P
I am wondering, why it's talking about the absolute number of 3000 containers, but not mentioning if or how the shipping logistics evolved in that time.
It could as well be, that shipping simply increased over years, could it not?
There are quite obviously consequences, but perhaps not for the people who are in a position to ensure the containers don't fall overboard? Somebody is certainly losing money here.
So insurance companies are losing money and raising premiums accordingly?
Perhaps nobody is losing enough money to really care about the problem. The graph in the linked article suggests that 11 out of the last 13 years, losses have amounted to around $80 million or less. A lot of money, but perhaps not a lot of money to the shipping industry and/or their insurers?
Considering there are individual ships that carry more than a billion dollars worth of cargo and way more containers in a single trip than are lost in total in a year, I think you are probably correct.
One anecdote I remember from Levinson's book is about a scottish whisky distiller exporting to the US being very excited about being able to ship whisky in a giant stainless steel vessel inside a container instead of shipping individual bottles inside wooden crates (imagine the theft during loading/unloading...).
That said, shipping containers were not adopted because they reduced theft and damage (consequently the cost of insuring cargo), they were adopted because they offered much lower costs to shippers (after enough investment in ships and ports and cranes and trucks and changes to transport regulation to provide the infrastructure to move containers around efficiently without double-handling them or unloading and repacking them for technical/labour/regulatory reasons).
Marc Levinson's book _The Box_ about the history of the shipping container is worth a read -- https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691170817/th...