[FredPret]

The humble pallet is the red blood cell of civilization.

There's a ton of really cool optimization ideas like this in Industrial Engineering - factory production schedule optimizations, path optimizations, lots of knapsack problems. What a treat that there are people willing to pay for this kind of work.

[bobim]

Nice analogy!

[a3n]

I agree, very nice.

I'm a truck driver. My analogy, zooming out a bit, is that the entire road system, at least the National Network, is a system of interconnecting and overlapping conveyor belts.

The trailers are trays on the belt.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Network

[FredPret]

Shipping containers are another genius-level invention - even better than wheels on luggage.

They used individual crates before!

[a3n]

Fun fact: inside many of the trailers you see, it's just manually loaded and stacked, and manually unloaded, individual boxes. No pallets.

Not most. But many.

Another fun fact: US/NATO logistics is pallet-based. Russian is largely not.

Unloading shells on a hot day in a "bucket brigade" must be fun.

[FredPret]

True - still a lot better than painstakingly offloading a ship's cargo onto trains and trucks and vice versa, one crate at a time. All of civilization runs a good deal faster and better because of shipping containers