[shoo]

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).

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...

[pchristensen]

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.

[ineedasername]

Yes, absolutely. It absolutely hammered home for me the extreme value potential of even (seemingly) small logistical changes.

It reminds me of a quote about warfare: "Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics"

[contingencies]

Logistics entrepreneur here. I'm keeping that quote! Apparently Robert Hilliard Barrow (1922-2008), USMC four-star general. Added to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

[philwelch]

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.

[ineedasername]

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.

[philwelch]

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.

[javajosh]

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.

[contingencies]

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.

[ineedasername]

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.

[spockz]

Isn’t there a quote along similar lines, “battles are won by soldiers, wars are won by food/supply”?

[ineedasername]

Also: "An army marches on it's stomach".

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.

[drummojg]

One of the oldest is "Armies march on their stomachs."

[javajosh]

Robot armies march on their data.

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!

[johnchristopher]

I also read on a blog about minimalism and long distance walking: *amateurs talk hardware, professionals talk software ".

[spacemanmatt]

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.

[ashtonkem]

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.

[sangnoir]

Wasn't it actually Roman carriage wheel spacing that determined rail gauges (and the rest)?

[kasey_junk]

It’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last 10 years. The discussion about the traffic to the Manhattan docks by itself was wild.

[goodpoint]

> To anchor discussion

cough

[nradov]

The Scottish distillers should just ship whisky in tankers a few million gallons at a time. Much more cost effective.

[55555]

They should just build pipelines.

[euroderf]

FWIW there have been vodka pipelines across the Russia-Estonia border at Narva, and from Belarus to Poland.

[MereInterest]

It has happened before for beer, though I haven't heard of it for whiskey.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/08/bruges-pipe-dr...

[donw]

I've taken an interest in learning more about both the history of logistics, as well as modern practices.

Any more links (books or otherwise) you could share?

[lifeisstillgood]

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.

[Stratoscope]

I see a book by Bill Bryson called At Home: A Short History of Private Life:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B003F3FJGY/

Is that the one you're talking about? Thanks!

[ink_13]

That's the one.

IIRC Frederick Tudor is only one chapter. The rest of the book is also excellent.

[dharmab]

99pi's podcast episode on "Reefers" (refrigerated containers)

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/reefer-madness/

[ineedasername]

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.

[jcims]

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.

[Scoundreller]

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.

[dzhiurgis]

IMO Amazon makes money by selling counterfeits.

[ineedasername]

That's a bit of a separate issue from their massively efficient logistics network.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

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.

[smabie]

You think Amazon would not be profitable if there were no counterfeits?

[throwaway_kufu]

Isn’t true they never turned a profit until AWS?

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.

[dharmab]

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_.

[ericbarrett]

Amazon's retail business (amazon.com) isn't even the majority of its revenue anymore.

[ketzo]

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.

[1] page 19 of https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2021/q1/...

[kqr]

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.)

[ericbarrett]

Ah, my mistake. Thanks for the correction.

[rurounijones]

"The box that changed Britain" is a good BBC documentary on the subject as well if you can find it online.

[samstave]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIEH0Db0XVc

[chha]

Thanks for suggesting the book, added it to my list of things to read!