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I have a lot of ex-military friends who go work for Amazon, and it's not hard to see why after reading this article. Moonshot ideas are exciting, but untangling the nationwide chokehold of shipping failures would be such a tangible, rewarding project to work on.
It's really hard to work with people who don't put effort into their work after being in the military around people who put so much effort into getting things right. I'm not saying time equal effort, either, I'm a clock watcher at work, but at least when I'm working I focus on the goal at hand and I actually try to think about the problems I'll face after I finish some task, so that I'll do it more robustly. The military doesn't have a monopoly on this, I've met several great people who have never served, and there are many ways in which the military sucks (don't get me started). However, it's pretty unrivaled when it comes to people who try hard and perfect their craft, imo.
You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth. From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad. You never hear the veterans talk about that - it's always about the success metrics that they define for themselves (eg: casualty ratio - "we lost only 2 lives on our end, and they lost XXXXX").
Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer, and contrast that to Google's net impact on our society. First of all, it's not a cost center but a massive revenue center, and it paid for endless road constructions and similar projects across California, New York, and all other states that Google operates in. And while we can argue about the political bias in their search results, I believe Google has made information more accessible, and that's fundamentally a good thing.
I imagine it has to do with how these two organizations approach their communities from the very beginning:
- Google: don't be evil
- Military: we have our own law where your jury can consist of as few as just 3 officers, and only 2 of them need to agree to send you to jail. Oh, and you don't get a lawyer until the investigation is finished, including your own deposition. So... still want to download all those incriminating documents and expose someone in the military?
Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules. So they are fundamentally not opposed to how the military works to begin with, and it's therefore not surprising that they are largely happy with their internal success metrics.
> Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer
The current set of Googlers that are complaining aren't the ones that built the company though. Google's success was built in the late 90's and early 2000s when they really revolutionized internet search and then email. I would argue that since 2010 they have lost this edge - even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches. Many of their interesting projects today are acquisitions.
I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years, and what future impact this may have - at least from the outside it seems like some of the brutal meritocracy attitude that made SV great has died off.
> I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years…
Money became more important. The amount of money to be made in the dot com boom attracted people for whom $ was the primary driver, and that changed the conversation. It changed the kinds of things that are worked on, and changed day to day life.
Pre dotcom Palo Alto wanted to help the homeless, promotes section 8 housing, SRO for the homeless, and accepts a sometimes weird culture. Had a lower medium income than some neighboring towns.
Today’s Palo Alto: “fuck off jack, I’ve got mine.”
There’s no way the next Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, or Grace Slick would emerge from today’s Silicon Valley.
Its probably just bias from only just hearing the success stories and because it was still pretty early in the time of computing, but reading about the stories/companies/projects/etc. from 70s/80s SV fills me with awe and regret that I came too late to be a part of it, whereas nowadays it’s just seems “meh”.
Also, Google is no longer "not evil".
You're conflating the military with their civilian leadership. Civilians decide what the military is going to do; the military gets the job done. If you have a problem with the direction and costs of the military, blame the civilians in charge.
See my related response to refurb's comment.
>Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth.
This sounds very biased. The VA is constantly complained about as is their benefits payments. The MRAs suck, they can’t speak about some secret stuff, none of this information is unusual or buried, it sounds like you have a very biased viewpoint, maybe from not getting to know any military.
>From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad.
Vietnam, the fuck up in Iraq, and suicides are well known to be bad to everyone including the military, the default response to anyone who served is “thank you for your service”. Many see it as a job. I know a very friendly female marine (they complained about her kindness and said it wasn’t militant -and reflected badly on their perceptions), she was well decorated, and complained about sexism even though she was a superior to these men. Get to know some military people, your biased opinion will change.
> Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth.
Are you talking about the US military and do you have some data on that? I see people with no experience of the military imagine a storybook entity (which is a very popular public concept these days), but the US military has significant retention problems, very high rates of suicide and sexual assault (signals of and, for the latter, a cause of a toxic environment), and a lot of morale, discipline, and corruption problems. As a couple of examples of the latter, around a year ago, the head of special operations said that it was their top priority. In ~ the last year, the Navy was having trouble filling higher ranks because so many officers had been kicked out due to corruption scandals (e.g., the 'Fat Leonard' scandal).
The glorification of the military might seem patriotic, but I think it's the opposite: It's a way of not seeing and addressing problems, which weakens defense and leaves the people serving to deal with the problems and suffer the consequences (including the environment, more and longer tours, and possibly their lives). It's like a case of extreme over-confidence in a CEO - a very dangerous flaw.
> Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer
People in the military don't gripe?
Yes, you can find some seriously messed up stuff in the military. I was looking at some criminal data and seeing a huge number of attempted murder charges related to one case I thought the data might have been in error. But no, throwing a live grenade into a tent is quite serious.
That said, it’s easy to underestimate just how large the US military is and how many people cycle in and out every year. Just unemployment benefits alone get quite expensive during any economic downturn. Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.
> Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.
While it's impossible to hire millions of excellent performers, I think that focuses too much on the people and not on the organization. The institutions themselves have real problems - like other large institutions, but these are problems the citizens are responsible for addressing.
>Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people.
I think that's an erroneous way to look at it.
The fundamental problem is that the military is, and has been, made up of volunteers for a long time.
It's not that with more people you get proportionally more bad apples, it's that when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's _way_ worse.
You get the people who are mentally ill _and_ not self-aware _and_ seeking something they can't find anywhere else signing up.
Consider Tim McVeigh, who was taught to kill in Iraq. Allegedly (may be controversial) "schizotypal". That basically means "has some weird ideas, might develop schizophrenia some day, but not actively psychotic". Plenty of people could be like him - _unstable_ in a lot of respects, but after talking to a recruiter go "nah, killing people on the other side of the world doesn't sound fun". So they don't enlist, and that shapes the military.
The only way to fix this is a return to the draft. Of course that's easier said than done. I know little about them, but people always mention Switzerland and Israel as having practically universal military service. So if it seems impossible, yet it must be possible somehow.
Forcing people to work, and only giving them a couple of years to learn the job and do it, has a poor track record. AFAIK, the US and other militaries believe the volunteer method is much more successful.
Imagine drafting in your profession. In many jobs, it takes months of training, then months for people to become truly productive - at the entry level. With the draft, you are mostly employing trainees and entry-level employees, all of them forced to be there.
> when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's way worse. / You get the people who are mentally ill and not self-aware and seeking something they can't find anywhere else signing up.
There is some risk of that, but it looks like you are suggesting that it's the predominant motive for volunteering. People do it for many reasons. Almost all jobs in the world are filled by volunteers.
Self selecting populations can be very different from the overall norms when your talking 0.001% of the population. However, when your talking 5+% of the population you can only stray so far from those norms.
Recruit say the smartest 5% of the population and their median IQ is ~130. The tallest 5% and sure you get everyone in the NBA, but also the more normal person at 6’ 1”. Considering in the real world you can’t select the most extreme in every category and the US military is more or less forced to be fairly average compared to the US population simply because they want multiple things. Select for decent health, decent intelligence, and decent physical capacity and you can only focus so much on mental health.
>However, when your talking 5+% of the population you can only stray so far from those norms
I would expect the top (or bottom) 5% of the population in any dimension to be far from the norm.
>Select for decent health, decent intelligence, and decent physical capacity and you can only focus so much on mental health
I think these are wishful thinking, not what is actually selected for. As long as there's no draft, _the military does not get to select people_. Someone takes the ASVAB, and decides against going further, there's nothing that can be done. People select themselves. The minimum standards weren't that high when I last talked to a recruiter and over the years I've read a lot of articles that suggest they've gotten lower.
The military, like a lot of difficult jobs (police officer, teacher, etc.) doesn't pay proportionally.
So recruits are selected for willingness to put up with that. From an abstract economic perspective, someone who accepts lower than market pay must receive some other form of non-monetary compensation that explains it. It would be nice to attribute it always and only to patriotism, but there are other possibilities, conscious or unconscious, just like a devotion to justice and protecting people is one particular reason for becoming a police officer.
In letting people select themselves for a difficult and low paid job, you will get people who are not near average because they highly value access to things that cannot be found anywhere else, for any amount of money.
>"Recruit millions over time and even if you reject the most obvious problem cases you will eventually get some seriously unstable people."
So you think they had specifically selected bunch of unstable to work in Abu Ghraib?
Those people were abusive, not unstable. It had been going on and would have continued. North Korea is stable. Dennis Rader was stable.
> People in the military don't gripe?
I had this platoon leader who was wondering about how much I used to gripe about _everything_ and I told him when joes _stop_ complaining is when you have to worry because they’re probably plotting your death or something.
> Not saying that we should operate like the military, but it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules.
I think there are probably a fair number of everyday people who enlist without thinking about such things as what they would do if they needed to expose a war crime to the media or how their due process protections would compare to civilian life.
Now, they would probably know and be okay with getting treated like dirt in boot camp, having restrictions about where to live, where they can go in their free time, etc. But probably not as much about the more philosophical institutional beliefs about authority, ethics, what to optimize for, etc.
> From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad.
For the most part, all of those issues fall squarely upon the leadership. Military personell have a duty to fufil lawful orders, and you can't simply resign and take a different job if given a lawful order you don't think is a good thing for all of those reasons.
In contrast, when working for an employer, you have at least some ability to refuse to do things you don't think are a good idea. Worst case, you're fired or resign and need to find other work. But you're very unlikely to be court martialed and imprisoned. Or even sued.
This is a bizarre take. The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does. And the militaries goals are well, war-focused?
It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.
> The military doesn’t decide where to invade, our government does.
I would agree with this statement when it comes to defensive campaigns. But in the case of offensive campaigns, the military very much gives the government an idea of what the plan looks like, including the budget, timeline, casualties, chances of success, etc. It's worth noting here that the military very much has a vested interest in saying yes to military action, because that's good for job security. But when it turns out that you cannot get in and out of a country in the forecasted amount of time, and when that country then goes back to its former political landscape despite all of our best efforts, that failure cannot land entirely at the government's feet.
> And the militaries goals are well, war-focused?
They are, apparently, in the US. I learned that when the CEO of Flexport suggested that we use the military to temporarily unblock the supply chain crisis by leveraging our military's logistics capabilities, which resulted in at least one person leaving a dismissive comment here on HN. I realize that this might have been an isolated view, but I doubt it. In other countries, it's very much expected that the military rolls up their sleeves whenever their capabilities can be generally beneficial to their communities, regardless if it's military-related or not. It's a resource we pay for, so why not share the excess capacity if it's not detrimental to our defensive readiness? I would argue that saving a few million jobs in the US is worth not being able to fulfill the two-war doctrine for a few months.
> It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.
This once again sounds like an internal KPI that the US military can without doubt be very proud of. An external observer may ask how much such an effort would cost, and how well we compare on a per soldier basis with someone like China or Russia. Who can do it for less money? Perhaps the US is still ahead, but I genuinely don't know. Does money matter when it comes to readiness? Well, when it comes to defense, probably not. But if we're talking about invading a foreign country, I think the economics very much start to be a part of the overall equation.
A good example to bring up here would be the cost of the F-35 program. Is it an impressive aircraft? You bet. Are the capabilities of that aircraft in line with its cost? My gut tells me no, and I think a lot of people would agree. Do I have any hope that this was an isolated instance, and that the next-gen aircraft program will be done more cost-efficiently? Not really.
For the record, I am not anti-military at all. I just want to point at behaviors that seem a bit out of touch, and which if rectified would position us to have all the military capabilities we need at the least necessary cost.
>_it's very much expected that the military rolls up their sleeves whenever their capabilities can be generally beneficial to their communities, regardless if it's military-related or not._
I’m not sure you’re aware of the full scope of what the U.S. military does. The Marines I know spent more time on humanitarian missions than combat ones. The Army Corps of Engineers regularly provides relief efforts during natural disasters, manages watersheds and dams, etc. It’s not too say there’s no truth to your claims but the US military is _huge_ and with any operation that large it’s easy to cherry pick examples to make cases for either side.
As long as their internal success metrics align with civilian interest, I am ok with that. But some can't integrate back especially when jobs require creativity, extensive domain knowledge and experience, and multi-tasking with multi-roles. It is that later that most veterans can't function well. In their previous life, things are predefined and roles are limited to just 1 or 2. Civilians have to juggle a lot and has no clear cut directions how things work out. Employers also won't tolerate your disabilities if that can be taken over by any other normal persons.
> But some can't integrate back ...
It's more than a few; it's a widespread problem. It's always a challenge for people from the military to not only adjust to civilian life, but to build up the networks of contacts, etc. that deliver us jobs and many other resources.
There are upsides and downsides to everything. I did say "don't get me started" on that topic, because while I have lots of good things to say about the personnel in the military, you'll note I didn't say anything about the military in general.
> costs of most of the military engagements
that's not on the personnel inside the military to decide what war to wage, but on the politicians and civilians.
The military is a tool - how well the tool works is a good metric to have. Whether the tool is used for good or evil, or whatever purpose the owner of the tool deems, is not on the tool itself to measure.
See my related response to refurb's comment.
> You have to give it to the military - they really succeed in indoctrinating their community in their success metrics. Everyone who leaves the military has a very high opinion of their peers' professionalism, dedication, and so forth.
Same in every bureaucracy.
People complaing about the military too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_assault_in_the_United...
Everyone who works anywhere is not "fundamentally opposed to how it works".
I served in the Israeli military, like every 18 year old male.
In ours, there are many places where people don't care.
A lot depends on the role one plays. some are very meaningful. In some you carry a direct and deep responsibility(for your team mates lives, for the people you protect). In some places, you'll get punished severely if you make a mistake, So you really try not to. So you try to do a good job.
In others ? Not so much. So you do the bare minimum and skate by. Many people are like that. It's a general "recommendation" for the new soldier.
Now compare that to civilian life - in most jobs you're just a cog, you get paid the minimum your employer can manage, and most of the benefit of doing a better job is making the boss richer. So why give a fuck ?
You are always a cog in the wheel, in a miltary the boss in addition making money can also kill you for a useless goal, the $2 trillion and thousands killed and injured over 20 years in afganistan is a recent example .
Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do not if its corrupt /inefficient /incompetent almost any large institutuion usually is
// Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do
Usually why people care about that is in-job competition and status hierarchies and ego.
But the role of those psychological/biological mechanisms(for ex. the serotonin system), in apes, for example, is to drive you to compete on mates and food. To get access to real, valuable resources.
Modern organizations are using those mechanisms to motivate you, without giving you any access to real resources. Another form of exploitation.
Some chose not to play that game.
I totally don’t see it this way — the machine that we’re all cogs in does in fact give you access to recourses. Being the best burger flipper gives you job security.
Today we have access to insane resources that our early humans couldn’t have even dreamt about, even for the relatively poor people today.
The machine provides a massive supply chain of a variety of food and medicine that was unheard of for ~all of human history. Flipping burgers for an hour makes you ~$10, with which you can buy food for two people for a whole day (or more). That’s less work for more reward than ever before in history.
So the reward system does work — you’re still competing, and the rewards are massive, relative to apes and early humans.
I don't care about the machine. It will work just the same without my participation(in most roles).
// Being the best burger flipper gives you job security.
Burger flippers earn close to the minimum wage. They always have decent job security, it's easy to find a similar job(not necessarily as a burger flipper).
"That’s less work for more reward than ever before in history"
This is absolutely, myopic, demonstrably wrong at so many levels, from the fact that minimum wage has been stagnant for decades to eising cost of living
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/24/this-char...
It seems to me that your comment is the myopic one. GP was talking about long time scales. The reason the industrial revolution was so amazing was the level of efficiency it brought with it. There is no arguing that we get more for less work than any time previous to that. Whether that's worth the cost of everyone being a cog in the industrial machine is however a valid question.
> useless goal
Is bringing peace, civil rights, and good governance to a corrupt, poor, and violent country useless? (Obviously, we ended up failing in large part.)
Well, considering America's recent military endeavors have done the opposite, you have to wonder how many times you can hear that until you conclude it was always a bald-faced lie to mask our economic interests.
Dropping bombs on a country rarely makes it less prone to conflict unless you intend to occupy it, it just gives more recruiting material to the "violent" radicals.
> to mask our economic interests
If "our" means the US and it's people as a collective, then it really seems clear that it wasn't in our collective economic interests either. If our means military contractors, then yes they made out very well.
It was in interests of the oil companies as well, and by extension the interests of the leaders of the country who are effectively on their payroll.
But yes, "our" in this case was perhaps a poor choice of words to refer to the interests of, for lack of a better term, the ruling class, whose interests do not align with the vast majority of the country.
Agree that "useless" was a bit harsh. Perhaps "unachievable"?
It's a bit like dieting. You take someone who has been chubby their entire life, put them through a bootcamp, and then look at their weight 5 years later. The stats are not looking good in those cases, and I think they largely reflect our efforts in up-leveling the political landscape in historically corrupt countries.
I am not saying that we shouldn't keep trying. But I think we should internalize that the chances of success are slim, and then make that a part of our upfront decisioning process on budget, casualties, political cost, etc.
the ghani administration was nothing more than an american imperialist puppet government, forcing american "ideals" (see: consumerism and globalism) on a people who want nothing to do with it.
“God has promised us victory, and Bush has promised us defeat. We’ll see which promise is more truthful,”
- Mullah Omar.
Mostly: the concept of a nation.
Afghanistan isn't a nation. And you can't externally force people to believe they're part of a nation.
Either they do, in which case they're willing to accept sacrifices for the greater good of their fellow citizens, or they aren't.
Yeah violating self-determination of a country without also permanently occupying it can be seen as useless.
Interesting. Based on your experience, would you say it's a consequence of filling the ranks with draftees?
Despite the rose-colored (gold-colored) glasses in some comments, I'm sure every military, and every other large organization, has the same things. We are dealing with millions of human beings. I've never worked with even 10 that were all so highly motivated.
> after being in the military around people who put so much effort into getting things right
I met some really bright, hard working people when I was in the military. But I met a huge number of slackers doing the absolute minimum required to skate by. I don't think the military has any particular monopoly on driven individuals.
I didn't serve myself but I ran a small consultancy for a few years and one of the primary predictive factors whether or not a new hire would do well was former military experience. I don't attribute it to core personality issues or intelligence or anything like that, I think it's just training and experience that was consistent with the expectations for the type of work we did (small infosec firm).
My experience in hiring ex enlisted folks is 100% great.
With officers…less than that. They are used to more infrastructure than a startup can or wants to provide.
I was an officer (personally, I think I was decent, but who knows), I can agree on that to a point: former enlisted folks who are technical experts are by far above most former officers, and I have to say one of the reasons I left was because the officer corp is basically rotten these days with the same crappy, entitled managers that you see in the civilian world. However, the good officers were and are a cut above the rest. The problem is adverse selection by the shitty officers who thrive in that crap environment and wouldn't last a week as a civilian manager because they have no carrot, just sticks.
Anyways, this is kind of off topic, so I'll take my leave.
I had a friend who was involved in the early US Air Force cyberwarfare stuff. He had a story of a (much more) senior officer visiting, seeing the people, who were also officers and had CS MSs and PhDs, doing their work, and throwing a fit. Air Force officers, you see, don't do work; they manage people who do work. Doing things was a job for the enlisted.
This is definitely the institutional culture within the US Army. Technical work is seen as being beneath an officer. I'm an officer in a specialized IT career field (BA and MS in CS, starting a PhD program next year) and we constantly struggle against this culture. The Army wants us to have graduate degrees in engineering or scientific disciplines so that we can almost exclusively fill management positions overseeing enlisted troops, warrant officers, contractors, and low-level federal civilians with high school diplomas doing the technical work.
Those of us who get hands-on to be in touch with reality, add value, and sharpen our skillset do so at risk to our careers. We are only rewarded for what we do as leaders, especially expanding our scope of responsibility (mission, people, budget, etc.).
When I was an officer in the aviation branch, it was the same problem. The rewards for briefing PowerPoint slides were greater than the rewards for competently flying helicopters.
> _The Army wants us to have graduate degrees in engineering or scientific disciplines so that we can almost exclusively fill management positions_
The former AF/SF CSO observed that the lack of technical expertise in commanding officers is a problem. [0]
> _Please stop putting a Major or Lt Col. (despite their devotion, exceptional attitude, and culture) in charge of ICAM, Zero Trust or Cloud for 1 to 4 million users when they have no previous experience in that field – we are setting up critical infrastructure to fail. [...] They do not know what to execute on or what to prioritize which leads to endless risk reduction efforts and diluted focus. IT is a highly skilled and trained job; Staff it as such._
But 100% agreed with you that top-loading degrees isn't a solution either.
It feels like the military's historical solution to a lot of problems (forced, regular duty station rotation, with assumed interchangeability based on rank) isn't suited to the types of technical project it's now being asked to execute quickly and successfully.
There's a _huge_ amount of good that comes from rotating people, but it feels like there's a new local optima that needs to be found.
A starter might be to make technical position rotations more pull / resume / experienced -based, and less solely on billet rank. I.e. Does a given position want _you_? Or who of a stack of applicants do they want _most_, for the job they're currently executing?
[0]
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-say-goodbye-nicolas-m-ch...
>>>It feels like the military's historical solution to a lot of problems (forced, regular duty station rotation, with assumed interchangeability based on rank) isn't suited to the types of technical project it's now being asked to execute quickly and successfully.
This is my experience as well. We have combat-arms guys who would probably be exceptional infantry regiment commanders or fighter squadron commanders, brought into a combined-arms, high-level headquarters where they are expected to weigh in on things like EM signature reduction, and issues with how IT infrastructure impacts their ability to execute Command & Control....and they don't even know what most of the relevant terminology means. By the time they learn enough via OJT they PCS to another duty station.
I'm so sick of field-grade officers saying "I dunno, I'm just a dumb grunt."
Then drop papers and resign your commission! Stop hiding behind your ignorance or faux-modesty. Educate yourself to confidently fight fifth-generation warfare, or go away.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but I will say that "I'm just a dumb grunt" is better than senior leaders who just spew buzzwords like "Big Data, AI, Cloud, 5G, Zero Trust, etc." as if they know what they are talking about, and convincing everyone above them that they are technical wizards.
Yeah, when I read a white paper for the next Combat Operations Center and saw they wanted to "run AI applications on a local server at the tactical edge" I knew the document wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. You can tell some O-6 or GS-15 who read a Popular Science article insisted on that being in there.
Then I ask people who the fuck is gonna tune the models when the "AI app" spits out garbage at a battalion CP? Are we gonna train Marines on linear algebra, tensors, and adversarial neural networks? Or even bother to run them through an AI code bootcamp? Are we gonna be shocked when our Lance Corporal AI technicians leave the Marine Corps to 10x their salaries in Silicon Valley?.... I get blank stares in return.
The Army has moved in the last three years to a market-based assignment system like you describe. It might be addressing some organizational problems, but not really this one.
I think the fundamental problem is that the Army doesn't value technical work enough to pay for senior people to fill technical positions. There is no technical career path for individual contributors. Officers (the only people paid something comparable to engineers in the civilian world) are in management positions from the very beginning of their career, so they get almost zero experience doing technical things as individual contributors. This leaves us with no senior leaders qualified to be in charge of technical things (like Mr. Chaillan said) nor any senior technical individual contributors to advise them and do the work.
That’s somewhat amusing coming from an Air Force officer, as all the pilots are officers.
Especially the Air Force should know better since the people doing the work for flying things are officers...
Flying is at pinnancle of jobs at an airforce. There are thousands of roles that is needed for a one plane to be ready to fly by a pilot.
Perhaps the more accurate statement officers do the what they see as cool jobs all boring ones are delegated.
Although the polar opposite can very often be true. The enlisted guy troubleshoots the obscure fault in the oxygen generator while his officer drafts messages detailing the problem, works to get parts ordered, and attends meetings about the whole fiasco.
Aren't the people doing the flying mostly low level officers such as lieutenants and maybe captains?
No, tactical flying is highly technical and requires years to master. Most lieutenants and junior captains (winged aviators, mind you) that check into a squadron are tactically useless for the first 12-18 months as we train them up and they aeronautically adapt. Your three-to-four year Captains will do most of the flying but even the CO generally flies 1-2 times a week (Marine aviation).
> Anyways, this is kind of off topic, so I'll take my leave.
Thanks for replying. I don’t think it’s off topic. Startups _should_ know that former enlisted personnel make great hires.
> They are used to more infrastructure than a startup can or wants to provide.
I've seen this with ex-Googlers on the software side, and ex-Apple folks from the hardware side who go independent tend to hit it too ("what do you mean our Chinese suppliers are refusing to retool their whole process for us?")
Does anyone have a neutral example? All the examples I have of military people who are in or adjacent to this part of Amazon have been disastrous. Full of themselves and not particularly high performance.
In my experience, ex military people are just like any other ex government office people. Mostly afraid to be known as having made mistakes, a bit too cocksure, and leaning on their “when I was at X”.
Maybe it’s different in different sub sections of the armed services. However, the local characteristics make sense considering the environment they were in (I only know two combat veterans). After all, similar mistakes lead to the Navy routinely bashing ships into each other.
I think it’s likely that the rubber meets the road very little in the US armed forces. Perhaps the people experienced in that have different characteristics.
The military might also be one of the only other places where you deal with the physical scale and speed of Walmart. They train to go set up a medium-sized city on 24hours notice. I can see why a logistics company like Amazon would see that as valuable!
Yep, and logistics may not be glamorous but it does have interesting problems to solve w/ a lot of real-world impact.
Better world-wide logistics doesn't just mean getting your latest shiny gadget on time either: it also means better and more robust response times in humanitarian disasters or other serious situations.
I argue logistics and ops are _more glamorous_ for the reasons you enumerate.
Logistics and operations is the kind of job where no one cares whether you exist when you’re doing well, but everyone’s beating down your door when something breaks.
It's worse. Everyone thinks your lazy when everything is running smoothly.
No. They don’t. Amazon Prime’s pioneering free two-day shipping was noticed. The same day shipping was noticed. I often hear about Amazon’s speed as a factor for why people use them. In fact, among my friends people remark that Amazon can often deliver to our homes faster than Best Buy can deliver to their stores for us to pick up.
It’s just that smoothly is table stakes. Amazon raised the bar so now you have to do it smoothly blazing fast.
> It’s just that smoothly is table stakes. Amazon raised the bar so now you have to do it smoothly blazing fast.
Amazon raised the bar. And then they completely failed to meet their own new higher bar.
Amazon will no longer _allow_ you to select the speed of your shipping. Amazon will offer you shipping at whatever speed they feel is appropriate, and if you want faster shipping than that, you can suck it. This is a huge downgrade from the system Prime started out with.
And when Amazon fails to meet the shipping deadline they quoted you, again, you can suck it. This is not infrequent. This despite the fact that the deadline is something _they_ made up.
Between this and Amazon's giving up on offering lower prices than other stores, I tend to prefer ordering from other stores.
Re:Prime-- Yes! I can understand if not everything can be practically or profitably delivered in two days, or next day. But I used to at least have the option to pay more and get it when I needed it.
What I think the parent meant is that oddly, if you mention to random folks at a bar or in line at the grocery store that you work in logistics they run _away_ instead of them and everyone else in earshot mobbing you for an autograph. As compared to being a rock star, movie producer/actor/actress, etc.
Amazon is executing on an insane level. It’s kind of mind blowing how big it’s getting.
I see a lot of pundits talking about other retailers catching up. And I know that’s true to a degree. But I think they’re only catching up in some areas. Meanwhile you have Amazon building out a whole delivery fleet for their next moat.
You see them building a delivery fleet as a moat: I see it as they've burned through literally every logistics broker in the US and now have no other choice. Their modus operandi to date was to put bids out to logistics brokers who would treat Amazon like any other customer and have some routes that were profitable, and some they'd lose money on in order to win the overall business. Amazon would then use that broker for nothing but the loss leader route and hammer it until the broker fired them as a customer. You can only do that to so many brokers before there is literally nobody left willing to do business with you.
Source: my buddy runs a broker business and will not do business with Amazon under any circumstances nor will any of his peers in this market.
This is pretty amazing (not for the brokers, I’m sure). Amazon just seems to be a hyper optimizing machine, logically stepping through all possible options to every decision.
It's possible because of their scale.
You could drive all over town buying groceries piecemeal at whatever store has the biggest loss leader deal on those particular items, but for a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk and a dozen eggs the savings will be offset by the expense of going to multiple stores. Yet if you are buying 10,000 gallons of milk and 10,000 loaves of bread, it becomes feasible.
Taking advantage of your friends doesn't make you a "hyper-optimising machine", it makes you an ass in the short term and a loner with no friends in the long term. Being a sociopath is not an innovation.
Companies are not people, and monopolies (and monopsonies) don’t need friends.
Why isn’t it an innovation? It’s a pretty brutalist view of how the world works, and is arguably optimizing for the short term over the long one. But it seems to work (and quite well at that).
I recently ordered from Walmart+ for the first time.
Order arrived direct from Amazon as a "gift".
My wife just had exactly the opposite experience. She ordered something from Amazon and it came in a Walmart box, directly from Walmart with no mention of the Amazon seller on the shipping label.
Against Amazon's rules, for sure.
Interestingly, the price was lower on Walmart.com but my wife had not checked first. But it was only $2.50 less. I have no idea how that worked out as profitable for the 'drop shipper' (in quotes because this kind of drop shipping is IMO not legitimate).
I knew a guy a few years ago who was dropshipping like this, making ~$4k/month as a side hustle. He had a couple employees in the Philippines handling the ordering. Basically using Amazon FBA to leverage Amazon's UI/UX to sell people stuff at Wal-Mart prices.
You got what you ordered at a price to liked. Someone got $2.50 for helping you. What's not legitimate?
You likely didn't order from the Walmart.com retailer. Instead, it was likely from a Pro seller or ordinary 3rd party seller. This is the largest source of confusion for shoppers on Amazon. So much so that Amazon now offers $1000 if a 3rd party harms an individual. [1]
I think the UI that combines the 3rd party sellers with the Walmart/Amazon corporation retailer, is deliberately made confusing. I believe over voice, like when using Alexa, it is even more unclear what vendor is being ordered from.
[1]
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-compensation-third-pa...
It is Non-Desktop Web Browser interfaces that are the problem.
Mobile Site, Mobile Apps, Alexa, etc make it very hard to see who the vendor it, I do not have this problem on the Traditional Full Size Browser Amazon.com site
Not surprising given the quote "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." by General Robert H. Barrow (then Commandant of the Marine Corps)
How _does_ one go about studying logistics?
Many universities (like MIT) have courses on Supply Chain Management, and logistics is a subset of that.
Or you can join the military, it looks like they might have some educational program.
And a lot of OJT.
Like everything else, university and / or professional training ajd experience. Amazon wad, hands down, the best Supppy Chain and logistics company I ever worked for.
Let’s not forget that in the 1940s, the allied supreme commander for Europe was…a logistics expert, Eisenhower.
Dan Carlin’s most recent podcast episodes have been on the WWII Pacific Theatre. He spends some time talking about how the unsexy thing like logistics and supply chains are essential to winning.
The attack on Pearl Harbor was precipitated by a supply chain issue: the US’s oil embargo on Japan. This is not to assign any blame to the US — Roosevelt did the right thing and, TBF, it did ultimately end with Japan out of China.
Check out
. We are working on such problems.
It would seem strange for ex-military folks to do this work and not feel as though they were simply helping China and a billionaire space cowboy at the expense of American sovereignty and oppression of all those under the Chinese thumb.
This is actually _part_ of the shipping failure. Does Amazon have different ports and different workers unloading things? Read the article and you will see the answer is no.
What Amazon has bought is priority within the massive shipping complex (with ships and port both controlled by the 3-4 cartels). There's nothing they've accomplished here except get an immunity to the problems that actually means the delays get shunted onto other organizations trying to get their stuff. Basically, the very largest monopolies are protecting each other and screwing the medium-sized and little guy operator.
Is Amazon using the Port of Oakland when LA is ultra-busy? No, Amazon stuff is going quick through LA and this automatically means other stuff is going slower.
Did you see the other parts in the article about building their own containers and delivering to ports in Houston and Washington state?
You really should have read the article, Joe.
Exactly. You don't need to be particularly inventive if you are sitting on a massive pile of money. Buy priority to stay in business? Sure. Lease a whole fleet of cargo planes? Put it on the tab.
Amazon is such a remarkable company. I may have underestimated their long-term prospects. I've been skeptical they would be able to maintain a monopoly for a few decades, but even without Jeff Bezos at the helm, they got enough foresight to continue to expand their operations nonstop.
Color me completely impressed.
> even without Jeff Bezos
It's honestly because of Jeff Bezos that Amazon can succeed without Jeff Bezos.
People honestly do not give Bezos enough credit, not just for what Amazon has achieved, but for what he has achieved within Amazon. Decades from now there will be case studies about the succession planning at Amazon versus other "major" companies of our time which oftentimes revolve around the ego and narcissism of a CEO with too much self-importance to foster any sort of succession within the organization.
Amazon's best years are quite likely still not behind us and will quite likely happen when Bezos is no longer around to see them.
This 2019 article [1] interestingly remarks that Amazon is one of the few companies that has been able to maintain efficiency with scale. Within the context of its foray into government contracting, perhaps the US government can learn a thing or two about cutting its obscene bureaucratic bloat?
As an aside, I would love to read a biography of Bezos the individual, not businessman. We all too often shrink the complex lives of humans into labels that fit 280 characters. Alas, that'll likely not happen anytime soon.
(You can listen to the article thanks to the YC-backed Audm. Great content, passable app)
[1] -
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/what-je...
Government will never be efficient because the players knows there are free money to grab and efficiency is not the goal of all the decision makers involve.
That assumes government wants less of itself...
True! There's a parallel here between government bloat and corporate bloat. In the case of corporations, failing to eliminate bloat reduces competitiveness leading to disruption. The corp may survive at least temporarily by bullying or buying disruptors, but its just delaying the inevitable.
>Amazon is such a remarkable company.
remarkable is such a strong word for a company that still doesnt pay taxes, violates unionization laws and forces workers to piss in plastic bottles while the CEO charters space flights.
Perhaps you should remove your political colored glasses and consider things objectively. A company can be both remarkable in its achievements and have committed labor abuses.
> doesn't pay taxes
Yes, that's what R&D investment is. They "make" billions but reinvest all of it into growth so they pay no tax. If you somehow split off AWS and taxed its profits separately Amazon would just increase its R&D spending on AWS and go back to paying $0 in tax.
This is a good policy, by the way. You want to encourage companies to make use of their money rather than returning it to shareholders. That creates more jobs and results in more technological and economic growth.
Let's not forget that they also use(d) actual tax avoidance schemes via Ireland, Luxembourg, etc. It's not just that they invested all their money back into their business.
> forces workers to piss in plastic bottles
I think a large portion of the American population would be surprised how often men piss in plastic bottles, and it just goes unmentioned.
Specifically delivery drivers.
It's easy to innovate and put in the hard work to do things efficiently when you have more money than God. Wealth begets wealth.
Governments have more money than god and are horrible at efficiency.
The money is diluted (excluding dictatorships), and the end goal to optimise for is more power, not more money.
amazon does have a lot of revenue, but it doesn't have the extreme margins that companies like google and facebook have. they can't just throw money at problems the same way. amazon has similar margins to walmart, and only just exceeded the latter's revenue in 2020. would anyone argue walmart is the more innovative company?
Did anyone else find this somewhat surprising:
"The seasonal workers are unloading and loading, picking and packing at more than 250 new facilities Amazon says it’s opened in the U.S. just in 2021..."
250 new warehouse facilities opened in the United States in 2021. Five new facilties per _state_? And, obviously, some states would only have gotten 1 or 2 (or maybe less) - so some states would have been getting 10-15....
That just seems like a suspiciously high number to me, I'm not sure if I buy it.
I can buy it because I don’t think we’ve yet gotten anywhere close to a full accounting of the second order effects of the collective reaction to Covid-19: not just in terms of negative health impacts of the shutdowns, but also the long-term economic devastation.
At the same time as many governors were effectively shutting down hordes of small businesses for daring to stay open even while Amazon and other big firms were doing record-setting business, scammers rushed to claim many of the government loans meant to keep actual businesses afloat. I think many real businesses got completely hosed.
Don’t expect to hear an inkling about this forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street from self-described progressives who are currently focusing on enriching Big Pharma. They might start to focus on the economy again when it’s entirely too late.
> this forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street
Another reason some people think the entire crisis was engineered, if not the virus itself, then it was certainly seized as an "opportunity"
I agree that the wealth transfer is awful, but your take is so wrong. Sanders was talking about it explicitly and continues to do so, and many progressives think the impact on small business during the pandemic is awful.
But you seem to think that vaccine advocacy is a bad faith attempt at giving pharma money rather than a good faith attempt at pu lic health and economic recovery. I think is a ridiculous opinion.
What I don't get is the government in Canada was fighting for everyone to have a right to a doctor assisted suicide, even based on mental state. And legalized euthanasia. But now did a complete 180 and now everyone must get medicated, even against their will under all kinds of threats. How do those two positions square?
Also imagine retarding your economy by a few years worth of progress, and everyones standard of living going down. How many future lives will that cost. All those inventions not being made, hospitals not being built, roads not being fixed, and so on.
And the possibility that the vaccine has long term effects is still not out of the question. Imagine if it raises the chance of lifetime cancer by 1%. Who will compensate all those people, pay for all that care, and so on. All that risk is shifted onto the public. While the vaccine manufacturers are absolved of all.
Pfizer wants to take 50 years, to release their own safety study to the public in full. For what possible good reason should it take that long. How is that possibly informed consent?
“Facilities” may be grander language than the reality. I know of one new facility near where I grew up which was a new mall that could never find tenants. It sat vacant for a decade. Amazon leased the whole thing and uses it as a warehouse. The parking lot is filled with their last-mile delivery vans.
A whole mall+parking lot is probably as grand if not grander than I was imagining an average facility to be.
Oh yeah… poor word choice on my part. I’d actually say it’s pretty damn creative given that this was unproductive space for 10 years and was well on its way to being a dead mall.
I guess I meant to say that “facilities” implies new construction in the reader’s mind, but in fact, they’re being more clever.
Did they build more loading docks? Most malls I've seen don't have a lot of big overhead door loading docks, which would be essential for a distribution center.
Yes, they’ve taken over vacant buildings in our area as well. Hard to complain about that but some folks still do.
Mourning the lost potential.
There is a grocery store near me that sat vacant for several years. Finally a storage company took it over. It's a good thing that something is there, just wish it was an actual grocery store.
My area in suburban Washington DC USA is filled with old grocery stores. Just within several miles of my home, one is now a trampoline park, one is an Amish market, and one is an LA Fitness.
My theory is that between huge warehouse stores, newer huge supermarkets, Dollar General, and Walmart (even non-supercenter ones) selling lots of food, and online shopping nibbling at the margins, marginal supermarkets are getting pushed out. There's another supermarket not far from my house that I doubt will make it.
I have no idea what it's like near you but where I am I don't think I'll be seeing any new supermarkets.
This is how it's been though. Before the supermarkets and malls there were just markets and corner grocery stores and Main Streets. But those mostly existed in walkable cities, and when they started being depopulated a generation ago the new suburban supermarkets and department stores and malls ate their lunch.
When the flow started going back into cities again during the '00s, a bunch of firms like Walmart and Target thought they would have a go at operating smaller "urban" stores but that seems to have had mixed results. Retail's a tough business.
My theory on how this works is as (nearly) everyone shopping on Amazon is logged in they know where you are probably going to ask to ship your order to. And so they show you search result tailored to what is in stock at your nearest Amazon warehouse. That way they don’t have to distribute the same stock to all warehouses.
Try searching Amazon in a privet window, you get very different result and prices (from different sellers) for the same products. I think that’s down to what’s regionally distributed near you.
You definitely get different shipping times for different products based on your location - so presumably they are cross referencing what is in your local distribution center to get you that shipping time.
Ahh, I'm wondering if they got it (uncredited) from this:
https://www.commercialsearch.com/news/amazon-to-open-more-th...
So - not just warehouses, but also delivery stations. I can buy that.
Looking around the surrounding Seattle area I see a ton of new warehousing going up. From SODO to Tacoma there are major projects. I'm not in that industry at all, just observational and noticing a lot of it is Amazon related. They've also been buying a lot of empty lots between Seattle and Kent for their delivery vehicle parking.
I want to say there's been a few articles that have discussed commercial property boom of new warehousing.
I checked wikipedia and they list 442 amazon facilities in the US currently and under construction, with 58 noted as opening in 2021. I can't speak to the accuracy of this, but those numbers seem more believable.
I think that's a believable number based on the info I've heard out of MN. evidently AMZN is crazy about their privacy and contracts so might be impossible for us to know unless we work directly.
The bigger more shocking number would be the huge % of commercial space bought up by PE and blackrock type etf money, & REITs. often paying shockingly high prices because they're bidding against each other & their investors keep pouring money in.
1. What possible reason could they have to lie about it?
2. It’s likely that this information could be confirmed in other publicly available information.
3. They were the beneficiaries of a gigantic positive shock to demand for their services in the last half of 2020 which continued through 2021 so the number seems very plausible to me.
I heard an anecdote 15 years ago that Walmart at the time opened 600 new stores a year. If that anecdote was true, this isn't that surprising to me with such a large shift we've experienced during the pandemic of increasing online purchases. It might be expanding too quickly, but it doesn't seem insane to me.
Is it so surprising in light of the absolute pummeling brick and mortar got during covid?
Great for Amazon, bad for everybody else. You think Amazon is going to share that cargo space with competitors? Absolutely not. While other retail stores run dry on stock because they're all competing over the same shipping lanes, Amazon will have plenty of supply with its own fleet of ships and planes. The world takeover of Big Tech just took another leap forward.
That is zero-sum thinking. It's my impression from the article that by building their own stuff they are adding to total capacity, at least to some extent.
For example, imagine how bad it would be if Amazon were competing for space with all the other container ships going to LA, instead of going to another port.
Or suppose they were competing for cargo containers instead of building their own?
There are probably still bottlenecks in different places, though.
Who's to say they don't turn around and sell the space and infrastructure as a service. Clearly there's a premium to be paid to get goods into the states by non-traditional means.
ASS - Amazon Shipping Services
Pilots who used to fly Amazon Prime branded planes were actually flying for large cargo outfits like Atlas Air.
But Amazon has now gotten into the airline business, with a purchase of 11 Boeing 767s.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-makes-its-first-aircr...
“Who else would think of putting something going into an obscure port in Washington, and then trucking it down to L.A.? Most people are thinking, well, just bring the ship into L.A. But then you’re experiencing those two-week and three-weeks delay. So Amazon’s really taken advantage of some of the niche strategies I believe that the market needs to employ,”
What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?
>They are doing over 10,000 containers per month of the small- and medium-sized Chinese exporters. Amazon’s volume as an ocean vendor — that’s right, you heard me correct, they’re considered an ocean vendor — would rank them in the top five transportation companies in the Trans Pacific,” Ferreira said.
This also doesn't add up. 10,000 containers is a single medium sized container ships.
Wow. I checked and its true. Largest capacity is around 24000 TEU (Twenty foot long containers, though 40 foot long ones are also used)
Its mind boggling how mich energy is spent in transporting stuff around the world. They produce 2.2% of green house gases (as on 2012), poised to grow from 50 to 250% till 2050. And this does not include further transport downstream to consumers.
Clearly concentrated manufacturing is environmentally disasterous. These are the kinds of challenges Silicon Valley ought to solve. Creating new technology to enable hyperlocal manufacturing.
_Its mind boggling how mich energy is spent in transporting stuff around the world._
What's truly mind boggling is just how _little_ energy is used to ship things around the world. Container ships are crazy efficient.
Container ships are crazy efficient in shipping dollars per kilogram not emissions. They use the worst most
Polluting fuel there is and because of their efficiency present a far more polluting option (ship across the world) as a logistic possibility to cut costs.
I think this is looking at the wrong number. The atmosphere "cares" about emissions in absolute terms, not in terms of who or what put them there per unit of utility gained by their presence.
The fuel used in these container ships is truly nasty stuff, with marine shipping being solely responsible for double-digit percentages of certain greenhouse gases.
[1]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_shipp...
Of which greenhouse gases?
I skimmed through the linked section and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_IMO_Strategy_on_the_re...
, without spotting a double-digit number that turned out to be a %-of-global-GHG-emissions.
Or are you referring to all-time emissions? That would seem more probable, given the long history of coal-fired ships.
It's been tried so many times esp when 3d printing got hot 8ish years ago.
Removing the shipping distance creates a host of other problems. Storing of raw materials, increased cost of non-shared tooling, local labor cost vs non-local just to name a few.
Storing of raw materials is not a huge problem, especially if they are distributed across the globe.
Also, manufacturing and distribution can happen at smaller geographical areas rather than country or continent wide areas. I think the overall impact of distributed manufacture and supply is lesser than concentrated systems.
Also, having a distributed system allows for greater innovation and investment into eco-friendly and sustainable processess. It is far easier to forget about the pollution happening halfway across the world, in a dictatorship that suppresses news than that happening in your backyard.
I'm not trying to argue against the eco-friendly nature and overall sustainability.
I used to live in Hong Kong from 2013-2015 and was directly connected to 2 startups that wanted to do this w/ 3d printing at the heart. One was a "container deployment" an ultra mini-manufacturing that fits inside a container that you would deploy in a specific city by "just hooking up power". Another was more a regional play, build a local factory via multi-container sets. Like how Starbucks deploys a store with X number of containers.
They did not work for the reasons stated above combined w/ 3d printing isn't that great. Except in high margin items, you'll never make up for the increased infrastructure cost. The local land and labor costs are non-trivial.
Cost is the ultimate driver and eco-friendly solutions invariably drive costs up because they lack economies of scale.
So while agree with your goal, it doesn't work in the real world.
> This season, a handful of other major retailers — Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, Ikea and Target — are also chartering their own vessels to bypass the busiest ports and get their goods unloaded sooner.
Then why is the title 'Amazon is'?. It seems that just mentioning Amazon brings more clicks, I guess.
I honestly probably would not have clicked if the retailer mentioned was Costco or Walmart. I assumed Amazon implemented some unique mind-blowing tech solution to the problem.
I had the opposite heuristic. If a headline has Amazon in it, then it is probably clickbait.
Yeah but it works (we're all "engaging" right now aren't we)
Submarine PR for Amazon.
This article sounds more like a PR piece for Amazon. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming weeks Amazon singlehandedly saves Christmas.
Singlehandedly? Of course not. But two years ago, they owned more than 50% of the holiday shopping [1]. It's fair to assume that the percentage has grown over time and especially this year given the supply chain issues that have affected their competitors more than Amazon.
[1]
https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-dominates-holiday-shopp...
In Australia right now I wouldn't trust AusPost to deliver a Christmas present as I'm struggling to find something for my son and my time is running out (#). They end up with massive pile ups of parcels in their distribution centers; it's all in shambles.
Amazon Prime? I'd feel very confident in their estimates. They are almost always bang on. They're doing an amazing job with their supply chain management.
This actively changes how I will do my shopping; either somewhere online for in-store physical pickup, or Amazon.
#) I've given him meaningful stuff throughout the year, and hate that I have to come up with something for this fixed date as is the tradition
There is a complex but ridiculously well-thought out pipeline for getting your order to your door, by the estimated delivery date.
If a few AusPost drivers call in sick, your package is one day late. If your Prime last-mine Flex driver doesn't show, the app texts other Flex workers with ever-escalating payments for the 'block' until someone accepts (as much as ~A$60-80/hour gross if it gets that high).
That would be a nice PR project! I think you are onto the right idea here. Let's seem what happens after the Christmas.
> What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?
Exactly my thought. Amazon hardly has a monopoly on good ideas. They may have a culture that rewards impulsive strategies, though.
> What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?
But are they doing this?
Coos Bay, Oregon (US west coast) is a deep water port with nothing really shipping in and out of it. It used to be busy when timber was being harvested madly and shipped out, but not anymore. The port is literally begging for shipping action.
The one negative? No major rail or road system in and out for delivery to the I-5 corridor.
Thinking maybe. Execution is hard, the extra truck overhead may make it a non-starter for many
Amazon's scale makes some things workable for them that would not work economically at smaller scales.
Not really, lots of companies are sharing space on charter vessels at the moment, and trunking networks are pretty well developed.
Lots of retailers are doing exactly what this article describes, it’s not just Amazon. In fact, I know a company that only ships c5 containers a day that is renting space on a charter vessel, so you don’t need Amazon-scale to do this.
They do also seem to be willing to or have a culture of taking bets like this that I suspect a lot of the other companies of their size don't - it sounds like they started working on this back in 2015, and I imagine it's been a pretty big investment so far. I'm not an Amazon fan, but not a lot of other companies out there seem to be willing to take bets like that.
First, this an article from CNBC, so I don't think the actual strategy is as simple as this (its coming from an external freight analyst).
Second, my understanding is that Amazon is essentially going to eat into its already thin profits to pull this off. So this is essentially a branding move - aka "we could deliver your christmas presents this year, trust us, others cant, why would you ever trust them?"
> What? Surely, everyone is thinking of this?
Amazon probably has enough trade to commission an entire ship unlike most companies who are using containers, and why they can divert to other ports which is whats being reported here. TLDR they have the size to be flexible in logistics.
Sometimes you need to get someone with enough general knowledge to act as a troubleshooter though, like this chap.
https://youtu.be/OBu5ewmEP2E?t=27
Stagnation occurs everywhere, people get comfortable which is why some on here big up those with Military experience because the military will get you out of your comfort zone.
Unions often but not always drive stagnation, rarely do they come up with innovation because some of the bigger unions work across a variety of different companies or organisations and just work on pay and conditions which is sometimes harmful to a business during its life.
Unions can have their place against bad bosses, but a union which could work well is one that is operating in just a business or organisation and isn't solely focussed on pay and conditions, they should drive innovation and efficiency or work with innovation & efficiency because there are times management and boards can stagnate and then businesses organisation can decline.
Covid has certainly exposed the lack of stock holding in the Just In Time (JIT) system of doing business.
Dell is another business to look at when he was starting up in the early years, he used his contracts to shift stock holding onto the suppliers to keep "inventory" at the right levels for accountancy purposes so suppliers had trucks loaded with goods waiting in goods in to unload. He also recycled returns which he got into court trouble with, ie flogging components from returns in new pc's.
Quite often you will find businesses bending rules somewhere though and it could be anywhere, contracts and accountancy practices can be common but not the only way to get the books looking good.
I agree, everyone was thinking this. Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, and other giganta-corps can afford to charter their own ships and such. Your local mom and pop are screwed. Also worth noting, there were reports of the backlog of the ships on the US West Coast was getting smaller. Those ships are now just stuck off the shore of Mexico, Japan, and Taiwan.
https://www-freightwaves-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.frei...
What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage. That's the sort of infra we need, it's frankly embarrassing that we're not looking at amazon as a country and thinking "why don't we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good".
P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.
It’s great wishful thinking but I really dont think our government can pull it off at this point. Maybe 30 years ago but not in today’s environment of everyone trying to screw the other side over at all costs.
Personally im happy we at least have one company who can get me stuff in a decent amount of time. But i gets it’s fun to throw out f the big company the government should do that. It’s not like it took thousands of well paid people years and years of work to develop that supply chain so im sure it’s as simple as “let the government do it”.
It’s the same in every Uber/Lyft comment thread. “It’s just a simple backend app why do they need so many people”. “I could do that in a year with a small team”. Yeah have fun dealing with every single state, city, country’s different regulations and requirements. “It’s JUST an app”.
I realize a lot of engineers have this problem. They oversimplify everything except the code they are working on and dismiss it as easy or unnecessary. I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.
_> fuck ton of money_
_> tried to solve this problem for everyone_
It doesn't sound like the GP was oversimplifying the problem, quite the opposite - wanting to spend a "fuck ton of money" to _try_ to solve something implies that it is a complex problem that may not be solved with a "fuck ton of money".
> I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.
Most of the people here have never run or attempted to create a business. That's true about the general population as well. As you hint at, it comes from lack of life experience at doing a thing.
You get a similar naivety from the average consumer that fantasizes about starting a restaurant because they have strong opinions about food; they've eaten at many restaurants, they've made food at home thousands of times, how hard could it be.
> I really dont think our government can pull it off at this point
That's not, to be clear, for reasons of technical capacity. The vaccine drive that started in ~February or so of this year was pretty good evidence that the government is still capable of doing big things.
Hardly any of the vaccine drive has been done by governments. Overwhelming majority of the people have been vaccinated in non-government facilities by doctors and nurses not employed by government. To be sure, a huge chunk of that was paid for by the government, but if the analogy here is to work, you would need to ask the government to pay Amazon a fuck ton of money to run the postal service.
The post office is unfortunately vulnerable to political pressure. Both from their unions, and from the federal government.
Imagine the nightmare of Pete Buttigieg sending down dictates to the post office as he tries to build political career. Look at what’s happening in CA right now: just park the ships far enough offshore that you can’t see them and then claim the problem is solved because there aren’t as many ships waiting, charge the people who are already losing money because they can’t get their containers out of the port fines, and punish them further, claiming this as a political win because it punishes the businesses.
Absolutely no thank you. This is an actual problem that needs real solutions, not politicians grubbing power.
This comment is pretty disingenuous. Your argument implies that ANY public service is not worth improving, because any government agency is vulnerable to political pressure.
If you think your elected leaders are not competent and professional, then fire them and elect leaders that will improve the government. If you want a better post office, we need to FIX the post office, not destroy it.
This sort of argument is the one that leads to hypocritically de-funding the post office by playing politics, then since it's too political pointing to it and saying "See? The government can't do anything right", then completely dismantling it.
Other countries manage to have public services that actually work. I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.
> _that ANY public service is not worth improving_
The argument is specific to logistics. Our government has a poor track record in that domain outside the military.
Instead of doubling down on a concentrated bet, increasing competition would seem to be the solution. For example, the federal government could grant porting rights on its property, thereby breaking the Ports of LA & Long Beach’s monopoly.
The post office has for decades been able to send mail across the country in a few days, anywhere, for less than a buck.
It can work and be efficient just fine if it weren't purposefully hamstrung by people trying to ruin it so it can be privatized.
> The argument is specific to logistics. Our government has a poor track record in that domain outside the military.
US public services have a long track record of being actively sabotaged by governments. See the US Post Office being undermined by Trump's appointment of DeJoy.
> _US public services have a long track record of being actively sabotaged by governments. See the US Post Office being undermined by Trump's appointment of DeJoy._
Why they have a poor track record is a separate discussion.
> Why they have a poor track record is a separate discussion.
The whole point is that if you're trying to dismiss an obvious option for it's track record, even though it is quite capable and able to do the legwork, then being aware of the root cause of that problem, and the fact that it's an artificial constraint with ideological roots, is very much central to the discussion.
The post office was a mess long before Trump.
> I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.
I sure do. Nothing is going to change until rejection of authority is no longer foundational to the culture. We literally convinced ourselves that dysfunction and gridlock are features of the system, not bugs.
That’s cultural, not genetic.
sure, that's more accurate. I kind of assumed that's what they meant. in any case changing either significantly is a long shot
> Other countries manage to have public services that actually work.
Which countries have something competing with Amazon?
> I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.
All governments are bad. The American people just happen to have alternatives that have revealed how bad some of the overlapping government orgs are so they make a lot of noise about how bad government departments are.
> If you think your elected leaders are not competent and professional, then fire them and elect leaders that will improve the government. If you want a better post office, we need to FIX the post office, not destroy it.
The whole thing is fucked from an incentives perspective. No government employee has motivation to try hard or innovate. There is no shared bonus structure to bring that on in any branch of the government.
When government is competing with an industry, it’s either going to need to run at a loss and live off of other tax revenue or it just won’t be competitive for whoever the customers are.
Look up Eni and Enrico Mattei:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Mattei
Mattei took over the relatively small national oil company in Italy, expanded it aggressively until it was able to compete with the Seven Sisters (Exxon, BP, etc, all not state owned). State owned companies can definitely compete.
Should I add that Mattei died under mysterious circumstances?
You should also add that said company enjoyed a government enforced monopoly on oil and gas extraction, which is basically a license to print money.
Italy barely has any oil and gas resources at a global level. His international deals are what grew Eni.
Any government employee care to weigh in on whether you’re motivated to try hard and innovate? I don’t think I’m being hopelessly optimistic, believing we’ve got a lot of good people in government service, doing their best.
I have a friend that likes the mission at the gov and likes the money at FAANG so he rotates between the two. 2 years at one, 2 years at the other and switch. He could make hundreds of thousands more just be sticking to FAANG.
I worked as a lifeguard many years ago, first for a private company and then for the local government. I tried hard at both jobs, but I was more motivated working for the gov and more importantly much better trained.
The private company worked to maximize revenue which meant minimize training costs, aka one training class every 3 years. In an emergency we would have been totally unprepared.
The local gov trained us every 2 weeks (2 hours on a Saturday) plus random spot testing (threw a dummy somewhere in the pool, you would have to notice it and respond as if it were an actual drowning person). We were extremely prepared.
I certainly have my gripes with the gov (dmv I am looking at you). But the idea that no profit motive equals no one tries hard is so annoying because of how simplistic is. And I constantly hear it from otherwise smart people.
> Which countries have something competing with Amazon?
Amazon have tried to enter the Swedish market and it has been a complete train wreck. The other businesses who were initially worried ended up just confused over how they could screw up as bad as they did.
Amazon has made a lot of mistakes in its history. They can keep trying at the Swedish market perpetually until they get it right.
> Which countries have something competing with Amazon?
All of them? Mail-order catalogs preceded the Internet, even! If you're referring to which other countries have let capitalism run amok to the same degrees - none, we're the only ones that stupid.
In the USA, the best and most competent and professional people have better options than elected office.
The post office does things that private carriers are unable to do: deliver a high volume of units to any valid address. FedEx pushes a fraction of the volume of USPS and is buckling under the strain of the current labor shortage[1]
[1]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-sho...
The Post Office doesn't actually deliver to every address. There are hundreds of rural areas where residents get a free PO Box in the nearest town, without the option of home delivery.
FedEx is so bad now that I avoid buying from sellers that use FedEx for shipping. The last few times I had a FedEx delivery, the delivery status went to pending twice, and the deliveries were a week late. Looking at the Google Maps reviews of the distribution centers where the packages sat, I consider myself lucky to have received the packages at all.
Amazon doesn’t really seem to have a long-term solution… they had to ease drug testing requirements at one point recently because their turnover is so high that they were running out of people.
Their last mile drivers are contracted companies that treat their employees so poorly that it’s somewhat typical for them to leave their keys in the van and quit on the spot.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/18/trump-a...
The US Post Office delivered the mail on time for generations until the prior administration got its hands on it.
Those people are in theory at least, elected by the American people. Meanwhile Amazon is beholden to whom, wealthy board members and stock holders? How is that better?
Look at reality. Do you want packages stuck at harbor?
My packages are stuck in a harbor regardless. Many major shippers, both public and private are having issues.
Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want. More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it. Circulating what the vast majority of people would consider as junk is the only thing really keeping the USPS in operation. Well that and they don't have to turn a profit and also have the protection of law to keep them going.
Alternative take: USPS is really quite a remarkable business and worth learning about as a case study - from their fleet, to eating 90s darling FedEx alive, to overcoming artificially created political pressures (eg PECA), to becoming Amazon's chief US delivery partner, and much more.
Was curious: "marketing" mail was 18% of USPS revenue[1] (2020) and dropping. Low share of total earnings compared to Meta, Google, and soon Amazon's ad revenue.
[1]
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-...
USPS would be, and historically has been, profitable if it weren't for the politicians actively trying to drag it down with arbitrary, arcane rules to protect their donors.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...
It is interesting, because shouldn't the expectation be that a pension be funded as the benefits accrue? That seems like the safe sustainable way to run things.
It absolutely should be. The question should not be why USPS was asked to fund accrued benefits properly. The question is why all the other city, county, state, and federal government accrued post employment benefits are not funded properly.
> if it weren't for the politicians actively trying to drag it down with arbitrary, arcane rules to protect their donors.
Is there a sector/program in the gov't where that isn't the case? Every entity that is created is just a new fiefdom to expand and lord over from the time it's created to infinity.
> arbitrary, arcane rules to protect their donors.
like what? The ones I heard of were prefunding the pension plans, but I’m not sure how that benefits any of “their donors”
> I’m not sure how that benefits any of “their donors”
You can't see how kneecapping the USPS might help FedEx, UPS, and Amazon?
The point of making the USPS pre-fund their pension obligations was to be able to turn around and say "look at the horrible state of their finances, government is clearly so inefficient, we should privatize it".
USPS was simply required to fund accrued post employment benefit obligations, something that all non governmental entities have to do.
The reason governments can offer ridiculous post employment benefit obligations, such as above average defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare, is that the laws governing funding for these benefits only applies to non governmental entities.
Not a surprise that politicians exempted governments from the same funding rules, opting instead to kick the can down onto future taxpayers and opt for offering voters lower taxes now. The real question is why only the USPS was asked to fund accrued benefits, and not every single other governmental entity in the US.
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/...
> Unlike any other public or private entity, under a 2006 law, the U.S. Postal Service must pre-fund retiree health benefits.
This claim by USPS seems false:
>Other federal agencies and most private sector companies use a “pay-as-you-go” system, by which the entity pays premiums as they are billed.
There are very strict rules about how non governmental employers have to calculate deferred compensation liabilities, and how much funding they have to have. The relevant laws are ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006. Once the deferred compensation is accrued, the employer must value the liabilities using certain yield curves for high grade corporate bonds and maintain certain funding levels. It is why private employers stopped offering pensions, it is exorbitantly expensive if you properly account for it, especially with increasing lifespans.
I do not know what USPS means when it says "pre-fund", but the text of the USPS funding law is here in section 802. To me, it indicates that money needs to be set aside for accrued benefits (from the wording "future payments required"). I also do not know if USPS is true in its claims that non government entities do not have to fund retiree healthcare benefits. I am pretty sure it would be covered by ERISA and PPA 2006, just like defined benefit pensions are, OR retiree healthcare benefits are not protected by law and if a company wants to stop paying them, they can.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407...
>`(d)(1) Not later than June 30, 2007, and by
June 30 of each succeeding year, the Office shall compute the net
present value of the future payments required under section
8906(g)(2)(A) and attributable to the service of Postal Service
employees during the most recently ended fiscal year.
Section section 8906(g)(2)(A) is:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/8906
>(A) The Government contributions authorized by this section for health benefits for an individual who first becomes an annuitant by reason of retirement from employment with the United States Postal Service on or after July 1, 1971, or for a survivor of such an individual or of an individual who died on or after July 1, 1971, while employed by the United States Postal Service, shall through September 30, 2016, be paid by the United States Postal Service, and thereafter shall be paid first from the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund up to the amount contained in the Fund, with any remaining amount paid by the United States Postal Service.
The GAO's report on the law (
https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
) has details.
> Rather, pursuant to OPM’s methodology, such
payments would be projected to fund the liability over a period in excess
of 50 years, from 2007 through 2056 and beyond (with rolling 15-year
amortization periods after 2041). However, the payments required by
PAEA were significantly “frontloaded,” with the fixed payment amounts in
the first 10 years exceeding what actuarially determined amounts would
have been using a 50-year amortization schedule.
> We also reviewed the prefunding requirements for other organizations
that offer retiree health benefits to their employees: private sector entities,
state and local governments, and other federal entities. Although other
federal, state and local, and private sector entities generally are not
required to prefund retiree health care benefits, a few do prefund at
limited percentages of their total liability.
> For example, Standard & Poor’s (S&P)
reported that 126 of the 296 companies in the S&P 500 that offered “other
post-employment benefits” (OPEB)64 prefunded some percentage of the
associated liabilities, while the USPS OIG has reported that 38 percent of
Fortune 1000 companies that offer retiree health care benefits prefund
them, at a median funding level of 37 percent.
USPS being weak (AFAIK primarily because of this law) benefits their competition, who are lobbying against "fixing" it.
If the USPS wasn’t a government agency, I would weld my mailbox shut and never look back.
USPS is profitable because we all accept the idea that companies are allowed to pay somebody to load _literal trash_ through a hole in the side of my house.
> More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it.
This can be fixed. In France for example, it’s illegal to put junk mail in a mailbox that has a “stop pub” (= no junk mail) sticker on it. I have one, and as a result <5% of my mail is junk mail.
Not in America. It’s not illegal and it seems you still get junk mail.
My brother in hated of USPS being an unnatural monopoly!
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GhettoComputers&next...
Its incredible how many people support this horrible service and think selling stamps makes it profitable.
> Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want.
Their equivalent are the ads you get on their home page or when you search for things.
I can ignore those digital ads and mostly do as the vast majority of the purchases are for things I know exactly what I want. In the case of physical mail I have to take periodic physical action to empty my mailbox (and physically recycle 95% of it, which I have to indirectly pay for) or they will quit delivering the mail and mark it as vacant. I don't think they are equivalent. I wonder how many waste disposal/recycling people this subsequently helps employ along the chain if you were to add up all of the tossed junk mail for a year. We're paying for all of that.
You can make a big dent in your junk mail by opting out at various direct marketing associations. It's a bit of a pain, and won't stop all of it, and you have to redo it periodically, but it does make a difference.
Now I just bin everything that's not first class, directly addressed to me by name before I even bring it into the house.
>Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want
Give it 10 years when Amazon is looking for new ways to increase profitability and shit's shipped to your door that you have to schedule a ship back or you'll end up being charged for it.
They already do it by hiding the "add to cart" button in favor of periodic shipments for certain consumables.
> Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want.
It did to me! I received about a dozen packages ordered from Russia/China and this stopped only after escalating with customer support to the point of cancelling my Amazon account.
> also have the protection of law to keep them going.
The law is actually what makes them weaker. Do some light research on why the USPS is not 'profitable'.
> More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it.
There is something you can do about it. See
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail
.
The USPS is a service, not a corporation, it shouldn't turn a profit. Does the army turn a profit? Or the navy? Why isn't anyone talking about the ATF 'losing' 1.2 billion a year while having overlapping responsibilities with countless other TLAs? How much money is our Coast Guard making us? Perhaps we should privatize the Coast Guard. Just saying..
As someone who didn't grow up in the US I never really understood the hate the USPS is getting. They've been systematically fucked by both sides of the political 'divide' and yet they still deliver my election ballot on time. They aren't even allowed (see both sides of the political divide) to set their own package prices, yet there is this continuous annoying stupid propaganda that they need to be profitable.
It's fine. in 20 years (if we survive as a country by then) when A-Z Epistle™ by Prime™ will be the only mail carrier for $9.99/month (or bundled with your Prime membership). They'll definitely find a constitutional loophole to make that happen.
Next time someone asks why the USPS isn't profitable, I'd gladly invite you to explain to me what is our ROI for the $83 billion spent sustaining the Afghan government.
Counterargument: as someone who doesn't live in the US, I personally benefit from the international logistics infrastructure built by private US companies fed mostly by demand from US private citizens. But I don't benefit at all from well-funded US public _domestic_ logistics services.
International logistics can't really be solved at the national level, because the _interests involved_ aren't national/unilateral — they're international/multilateral.
(You could maybe make an argument for treatied multilateral investment into public logistics infrastructure tied to said treaties, maybe led by the Universal Postal Union — something similar to the Paris Agreement, but with global-economic goals rather than global-ecological ones. But that's a very different thing from just saying that one country's citizens should demand their own government nationalize a particular service.)
US citizens don’t benefit from forced spam, or bad service from from USPS either. They could go paperless for most official documents but they need to give these spammers a reason to stay afloat: “official documents”.
Many parts of the US still do not have reliable internet or anything other than degraded phone lines that barely service 56k with cell service that gives 1 bar part of the time, which is a huge barrier to paperless service. Also they still need a way to send government documents, jury and court summons, ect. My own internet is wireless microwave transceiver which only works because I live on a hill, the people around me in the bowls and swamps barely have workable cell service even outside their house. And that is all on top of the fact that internet and devices to connect to the internet cost a significant amount of money to maintain, and paying private companies should not be a requirement to live your life on your own property.
The USPS doesn’t serve all households, you of all people should know that. Degraded phone lines can fax. They’re lucky they don’t get spammed.
Unless the Post office has some strong incentive to compete, such as a private company, there’s no reason to believe the Post office would be even half as effective as Amazon.
Amazons incentive, whether you agree with it or not, is to grow their company and show value to stakeholders. It’s quantitative numbers. They can certainly lie, but at the end of the day the market will punish them.
The USPS is driven by what incentives? Politics? Future pension obligations?
In reality, government ends up being a bloated mess, waste of tax payer dollar. Don’t believe me?
How many campaigns have we seen just in our own lifetimes of candidates promising “change”, “making America great”, fixing healthcare, infrastructure, reforming education. One of the two parties does win every election. Fundamentally, what has changed?
Regulating private companies might be the answer. But government has proven itself to NOT be the answer.
I agree. I'm kind've stumped by people's belief that you can just throw money at something and have it work. Doubly so for a government organization that's steeped in politics. Amazon is freaking lightening in a bottle. Last night, I was ordering Christmas presents at 12:30am, and they were at my door by 9:30am. That's completely _insane._
Government programs are frequently and mysteriously hamstrung by not having enough money as the sole explanatory variable for why they failed at X or why business Y performs more efficiently. It's never an organizational failure, the wrong people, the wrong incentives, just more money is all that's needed. If we'd properly funded the USPS 20 years ago, surely we'd all have same day shipping for pennies, right...? Money would've enabled that?
>there’s no reason to believe the Post office would be even half as effective as Amazon.//
I never understand this argument, take Amazon now. Pay everyone the same to do the same job, but don't pay dividends, reinvest profits (or pay them as if taxes). How does it suddenly become everyone is incompetent and can't do their job?
Why is it capitalists think people can only work if there's a rich person creaming off a profit?
Explain, please.
The problem is bureaucratic and union capture.
You would have very different results if you took the same people, removed performance bonuses, removed merit promotion, instituted seniority promotion and seniority pay scales.
You remove all incentive to take risks, perform, or innovate.
In such an environment, there is only downside to do anything more than the bare minimum. Because nobody is ever fired, the minimum is very low indeed
Because logistics is mind boggling difficult.
I would say the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks they could fund or create an org that can match Amazon’s.
_Pay everyone the same to do the same job…_
The federal pay ceiling in 2021 is $172,500 per year. That’s about what a SWE new grad at Amazon makes in their first year out of college.
Specifically, it's less (made 220, although did have what I think was a strong offer due to internship that went well)
> Pay everyone the same to do the same job
That’s the crux of the issue. Government employees across all branches are capped into pay scales that don’t compete with private. More importantly, that absolutely cannot get anything like profit sharing or stock grants so nobody is invested in the financial success of the operation.
> Why is it capitalists think people can only work if there's a rich person creaming off a profit?
Because in the real world, all of the employees are benefiting from the profit as well. Every company has bonuses/promotions for exceeding performance doing good for the company.
Why is it that socialists thing working for a company produces the same incentives as working for the government?
> but don't pay dividends, reinvest profits (or pay them as if taxes)
This is literally what Amazon is already doing, right? They don't pay dividends, and are just re-investing all the profits already, with no profits being skimmed off at all.
> What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage.
Amazon solved a problem and reaped a reward.
Your response to that is to take everyone’s money, and give it to someone else in the hopes that they can solve the problem. Sure, I suppose, no reason for it not to work.
On the other hand “why don’t we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good” is beyond simplistic and naive. Amazon is very good at what they do and what they do is not easy.
> P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.
They did that for a while. Wall Street ate the Post Office's pie, rather than the other way around. Which is why the US postal system's banking service shut down.
Which is not to say postal banking is a bad idea, but that perhaps we should be careful with our expectations.
Amazon uses USPS for small and rural cities. Only USPS delivers my Amazon packages at my business. Amazon vans delivers at my home. My business & my home is 20 miles apart.
Amazon uses USPS for large cities as well (where package theft is a very big issue) - most homes have a secondary lock with access to the foyer, and postal carriers have the key. This functions just like blocks of lockable mailboxes that are found in condo/apartment complexes, but for packages.
Needless to say, the overnight/next day delivery options that you'll see for suburban neighborhoods are nonexistent in many other places.
Post offices in Europe did banking for many years. Most of them have been broken up now though.
I think there should be an even more general effort made to remove the competitive advantage that comes from simply being big. Small enterprises suffer from the lack of economy of scale. As a private individual or sole trader it is more expensive for me to send a parcel than it is for a large company, this gives the incumbent an advantage.
> I think there should be an even more general effort made to remove the competitive advantage that comes from simply being big.
That’s ridiculous because you completely disincentivize automation and efficiency with those types of rules.
There is no reason to ensure that two guys spending 5 years to hand build one car need to be subsidized to continue that way.
The USPS is also an example of a postal system that formerly provided banking services.
I'd much rather we disincentivized intercontinental transport to incentivize domestic production and reduce carbon emissions due to transit. I don't necessarily mind that Amazon is successful so long as they aren't simply the best at deriving profits from Chinese slave labor, IP theft, and pollution. I don't think the solution is to make the Post Office better at those things.
> reduce carbon emissions due to transit.
Bulk and container ships are extremely efficient. Most of the carbon emissions are from the last few miles.
That's like saying that spaceships are extremely efficient, because "all they have to do is accelerate at the beginning and decelerate at the end." It's not the trip that gets you; it's the delta-V (or in this case, delta-p).
Also, cargo shipping voluntarily uses fuel ("bunker fuel" — the dregs of the petroleum distillation process) that's absolutely awful for the environment per watt generated compared to any other fuel (including any other petroleum distillate.) They do this because it's the cheapest [liquid] fuel to buy per watt generated, and because they "can" — cargo-ship engines are designed to deal with the low quality of bunker fuel, and ships at sea under most of the common charters [e.g. Bermuda] aren't subject to any ecological regulations restricting them from burning it.
Bunker fuel shouldn't be marketable for sale as a fuel at all. We (= OPEC, in this case) could still sell it to chemical companies, but the rest, we should just be sticking back in the ground. This would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by such an extent it's not even funny.
This would naturally make shipping more expensive, since their next-cheapest fuel would be slightly more expensive. (Probably not for long, though; some capital investment into ship engine design, using modern engine technologies like Cylinder Deactivation, could probably claw most of this cheapness back.)
Yes, bunker fuel is terrible. But this doesn't change the fact that most of the carbon emissions would still be there for domestic production, because ships are extraordinarily efficient per tonne-mile of goods hauled.
But _that_ doesn’t change the fact that no amount of efficiency can make domestic shipping + oceanic shipping cheaper than domestic shipping alone.
The carbon emissions would still be there, but they might not be nearly as toxic/hazardous. (See my reply to a sibling comment.)
On the other hand, they'd be happening over land, where people live; instead of over water, "merely" killing marine life, so that might be a wash in policy-makers' minds.
To be clear, though, I'm not arguing against using cargo ships for domestic logistic _as a concept_; just the current implementation. Cargo ships that _didn't use bunker fuel_ would be an _unalloyed_ ecological win compared to _both_ domestic ground logistics, and the current implementation of domestic marine logistics.
>Bunker fuel shouldn't be marketable for sale as a fuel at all. We (= OPEC, in this case) could still sell it to chemical companies, but the rest, we should just be sticking back in the ground. This would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by such an extent it's not even funny.
Bunker fuel is responsible for ~3% of CO2e emissions? OK it may have a greater impact on air quality, but in terms of carbon it is not exactly a stand-out item.
Carbon is a heuristic, not a target. The air isn't bad _because_ of carbon; carbon oxides are just the most common of the GHGs we put in the air.
Bunker fuel contains a lot more light-molecular-weight things that _aren't_ hydrocarbons (e.g. nitrogenous molecules), and so when they burn, you end up with _toxic_ GHGs being produced, rather than just _bad for climate change_ GHGs. (And, as you mention, the fact that we're burning it mostly at the beginning and end of the trip, means we're burning it _near ports_, and therefore making the air _at port cities_ — and nearby estuaries — toxic.)
But even then, the concern with bunker fuel in particular isn't really the GHGs (i.e. the low-molecular-weight products of combustion that stay airborne), but all the _high_-molecular-weight stuff that's mixed in there, that _doesn't_ stay airborne, but is temporarily put _into_ the air during combustion.
Bunker fuel is "dirty fuel", using a similar sense of "dirty" to a "dirty bomb" — not that it's radioactive, but that it "salts the earth" where it goes off. Except that a bunker-fuel "bomb" goes off over water, and all the resulting heavy-molecular-weight vapors that come off the combustion then fall into said water, contaminating the oceans+estuaries with these chemicals. Bunker fuel _salts the sea_.
As a single line item, that’s vast.
I'm sure they're "extremely efficient" compared to the last few miles, but those are still a whole lot of emissions that don't exist at all when production is domestic. That said, the more realistic possibility is that the threat of bringing production domestic will drive China (and the shipping industry, perhaps via nuclear marine propulsion) to make concessions.
Because the post office doesn’t care about doing it efficiently or with a profit.
Government employees don’t (and can’t legally) get bonuses for doing well or beating expectations.
The entire post office org gets no bonus (or punishment for that matter) by impacting the cost to revenue ratio.
Both of these are the reasons it never works to throw a pile of money at a government org and expect something sustainable monetarily _and_ good to come out of it.
The post office should be run efficiently. But I don’t require it to make a profit. It is a service, for our collective benefit. Just like the Army. I don’t expect the Army to make a profit.
These comments threads are fascinating for their display of confidently proclaimed ignorance.
Postal supervisors, including local supervisors at your local office can and do get performance bonuses.
Mailmen and clerks can not due to their union contracts.
Vertical integration is what makes the service that Amazon provides so good.
Splitting things into different siloed entities just leads to inefficiencies.
> What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage.
Why hasn't this happened already? What makes you think it would actually happen?
Takes political courage and public pressure. There is a little bit of that being exhibited by the current administration, but it's also pretty clear that another potential administration would have had a lot more potential to fix these problems.
What? The current admin spearheaded some 3-6T in spending bills presumably for “infrastructure”. It seems like all of the support is there.
The problem is that nobody gets political credit for improving existing systems. That money will instead be pissed away on other political gifts and novelties.
Thanks KittenInABox.
Politicians absolutely do get credit when they improve actual systems and improve people's lives. People like it, and will vote those politicians back into office. But it has to be actual, felt, day-by-day changes in their lives (such as fixed roads, the USPS offering free check cashing, or even a friggin relief check in the mail with the president's signature on it). The current infrastructure bill(s) promise that real support, but they didn't fund it enough imo and it's far from clear that they'll be able to use the money they did get to make meaningful changes in people's daily lives.
What do you mean "infrastructure" in quotes? The infrastructure bill is almost entirely infrastructure like roads, bridges, waterways, electricity, and broadband internet. (It's also only 1T. Not 3-6.)
To some extent it seems to have happened in China.
Why do you favor paying via taxes over paying via purchases for the same service?
Great write up on the USPS banking pilot:
https://prospect.org/economy/postal-banking-test-in-the-bron...
Not a fun outcome but the fight isn't over, yet.
The USPS is getting into banking:
https://www.govexec.com/management/2021/10/postal-service-la...
One of the few certainties in life, along with death and taxes, is that a Government body/or institution (any government) will be less efficient, the more money it has.
The replies to this that slag the post office would make more sense if Amazon didn't rely on the post office for last mile in so many places.
Because if there’s one thing that makes the government run well is more spending!
That is quite possibly true. The primary goal of government is not efficiency. We need to quit making that some kind of top priority. The first thing government should be is _effective_. This is fundamentally why mixing for-profit businesses into government functions always ends up a clusterfck.
> We need to quit making that some kind of top priority.
Then how do we pay for it? You’re either making the customers pay the true cost or you’re just stealing it from the entire tax base.
If you do the latter then it’s unfair to any business competing in the same category and they will all eventually go out of business because they have to be sustainable.
So we end up with less efficiency and absolutely no other options.
Spending more creates more bureaucracy and makes government _less effective_, which was the point of my sarcastic quip.
The government would find a way to fuck it up - most likely through forced diversity hiring. Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers - if you're not doing your job your fired - doing that in a gov ran business? good luck. everyone would claim wrongful termination so it becomes cheaper to keep the lower performers which leads to our current situation w/ the post office.
> Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers
So you're a fan of stack ranking, huh? I thought that was pretty widely discredited, and "truly innovative companies" know better by now.
Your 10% example was used by Jack Welsh GE and Enron right? Do you consider them innovative / forward looking?
So because Enron is bad, everything they did is bad? I’m not arguing in favor of firing the bottom 10% each year, but your logic here is ridiculous.
It is commonly speculated that the Darwinian "10% off the bottom" layoffs were one of the reasons why Enron had so many failings as a company (fear of getting laid off led to dishonest dealing and creative accounting) and that is supposedly one reason why it fell apart.
By arguing that effective, innovative companies get rid of dead weight, anyone making the argument needs to confront that there are obvious cases where this isn't true, and that it creates perverse incentives.
As for the topic in general, I'm of a mixed opinion about similar government services. The mail service in Canada is overpriced and feels poorly run (like most everything that is Federally run in Canada), but Japan Post was excellent the whole time I lived in Tokyo. Finding what works and reproducing them makes a lot of sense to me.
how does diversity hiring fuck up companies and government?
it shouldn't be consider a 'quota' to give equitable access and try to catch up the the actual balance of diversity in this country.
Tech I get is harder because of the century of lack of education and lower opportunities.
But you can't write off entire races as less performant.
Because it moves the hiring focus from skills and "meritocracy" to something that should be irrelevant: age, tattoos, hair color etc.
Skills give value to an organization making it more competitive and productive, your appearance does not. If you make decisions on who to hire based on the former you're basically saying "Guy X is better than guy Y but I'm gonna hire Y because some people are offended by the fact that we're not 50/50", which is obvious in every single part of life.
Also, I know a lot of friends that are saddened by their hiring process and they feel like they've been hired just because the HR had to and not because they were the top choices.
But yeah, this is controversial nowadays so I don't really try to put it out there at all and let it be.
You don’t think big companies have diversity quotas in 2021? Where have you been for a decade
Big companies can fire people if they are not doing their job, which obviously is not true of USPS.
> Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers
Name the truly innovative companies that have this as a policy right now.
These are really good ideas except ...
Republicans specifically _blocked_ the Post Office from doing these things with legislation.
Dude the post office would squander that money. I have no idea why people think these public entities can execute like Amazon does. Its the same with SpaceX and NASA, very clear at this point that NASA was a huge waste of money and completely incompetent.
Why doesn’t NASA get any credit for creating and funding the Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew programs?
SpaceX looks like a very savvy, competent investment made by NASA to me.
Because if a private company had worked on that same thing, the results would have been 10x.
Yeah, sure. Go look up what those programs involve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#2005%E2%80%932009:_Falc...
> The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under a program that evaluates new US launch vehicles suitable for use by DARPA. The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures. These failures almost ended the company as Musk had planned and financing to cover the costs of three launches; Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time as well; Musk was reportedly "waking from nightmares, screaming and in physical pain" because of the stress.
> However, things started to turn around when the first successful launch was achieved shortly after with the fourth attempt on 28 September 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded the first Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract to SpaceX in December, thus financially saving the company. Based on these factors and the further business operations they enabled, the Falcon 1 was soon after retired following its second successful, and fifth total, launch in July 2009; this allowed SpaceX to focus company resources on the development of a larger orbital rocket, the Falcon 9. Gwynne Shotwell was also promoted to company president at this time, for her role in successfully negotiating the CRS contract with NASA.
> can execute like Amazon does
We'd have to be willing to let the USPS operate at a significant loss for a decade, kinda like Amazon.
Or differently stated, reinvest all profits back into the business, report a loss. Amazon is brutal to its employees, a government run entity will never match the level of execution. Its really a fantasy to think otherwise, and has never been shown to be true
spacex stands on the shoulders of giants. don't forget that!
> instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office
Or the post office could find a sustainable and growth economic model . . . at which point it might be indistinguishable from Amazon/Walmart/Safeway/etc.
I completely disagree. Funding a government mandated monopoly is a _terrible_ idea.
I would vote so hard against Post Office handling banking. It is incalculable that this kind of stuff gets upvoted by the intellectual diaspora of HN.
I'm equally agog at your take, for whatever it's worth. The Post Office is wonderful, and it boils my blood to see legislation that aims to destroy it. I would _love_ to see the Post Office handle banking.
I'm also fascinated when can this sentiment expressed when there are so many posts along the lines of _{Apple,Amazon,Facebook} deleted my account with no warning or explanation_, and I can't help wondering if the folks saying _this is why you're an idiot if you don't run your own email server_ are the same as the ones saying you're an idiot if you _don't_ trust Amazon to be your sole postal provider.
Amazon isn’t a postal provider and they aren’t a monopoly. WTF are you talking about?
Funny enough almost every single person who has actually worked at the post office thinks postal banking is a ludicrous idea.
This is obviously not universally true. Do you really want to have privately owned roads? Privately owned courts?
Let's ban all bakeries, should bread be federalized?
No because then everyone would just…loaf.
Agreed. I thought that was meant as sarcasm at first, but apparently not. I'm shocked that is the top comment.
two words: visit Switzerland
Also, absolutely agree with anyone suggesting that we eliminate “bulk rate”—unsolicited mail should cost as much as first class—both to avoid real world spam, and to save trees.
I pay extra for my carrier to block spam calls—I world gladly pay the post office to do the same—like PaperKarma.com but last mile…
If you expect USPS to turn into Swiss-like government agency, sure. But it is not. And it can never be. The culture inside government agencies in USA is rotten.
We do, and have in the past gave a fuck ton of money to the Post office.
The idea that any government agency can solve this problem with the same amount of money defy's all documented history of all government programs
Some governments actually govern decently well, certainly way better than the US. I assume you haven't actually read much of said documented history.
I understand that you're intending to rebut the local claim that "giving money to government programs always ends poorly"; however, to the extent that your rebuttal is correct, it seems like a reason _not to give more money to the US government_?
Indeed it might! I personally hate paying a chunk of my annual income to the department of defense. But "the US govt" sure describes a large machine, and it's worth highlighting that some parts of that machine are better than others, and I believe that some of them are definitely fixable. We should fight for the good programs and try to kill that bad ones, imo.
But yeah, I mean on the whole, if I could abolish the US govt (not other govt's, just this one), I probably would. But that's not my call! So in the meantime I'm voting progressive and contributing to pressure to repair the good systems we have and make life more livable for the unlucky souls born poor in this country and on this planet.
Ah. I assume you can point out which of these "some governments" have logistics that rival Amazon via throwing a "fuckton of money" to their post offices?
"Well" is subjective, "well run" Governments by their nature have run programs to meet the needs of the "average" person which means there will be many people for which the programs simply do not work.
Poorly run government are corrupted so you end up with the programs working for a very small minority, but at best the government program will work for probally 51% of population.
Government programs can simply not offer the level of customization, flexibility, and variety that a private market can
Right, but I hope you also acknowledge that the US _does not_ have very many flexible, customizable offerings competing in healthy markets?
There is barely a US industry left that isn't completely captured by 2-5 corporations. We may have the illusion of markets and choice, but we don't. We have monopolies and oligopolies extracting monopoly rents because they buy, destroy, or merge with the competition.
>>Right, but I hope you also acknowledge that the US does not have very many flexible, customizable offerings competing in healthy markets?
The implication here is that the health market in the US is a free market?
I will agree with your statement,however it seems you are attempting to use to show how markets can fail, US Health is one of, if not the most encumbered market with regulations there is. To claim it is anything resembling a "Free market" is factually incorrect.
>There is barely a US industry left that isn't completely captured by 2-5 corporations.
I dont believe this to be the case, but even it was why do you believe that happened? I hope you do not believe or imply that it is result of market forces that cause this consolidation. You would be wrong if that is your belief. Consolidation and monopolization is a direct result of regulation not market forces
Corporations LOVE government regulations, they write most of them, as it prevents competition.
Private markets only cater to those who can afford to pay, which can be a _lot_ worse than only catering to the average.
Which is why public-private partnerships are a thing. This would end up essentially contracting one or more logistics companies to do the fulfillment for the public facing government service.
Yea I will pass on that as well, as an example I my City pays a private company to pick up trash, I have no recourse, I have to pay the city, the company has no obligiation to me at all, and there fore I get TERRIBLE trash service
When I lived out outside the city limits I had the choice of 5 different trash service vendors, all offering a different range of services at different monthly costs to suite my needs (and the needs of my neighbors) not only was the service CHEAPER, I got more for the money and if I needed something special or out of the ordinary I simply called up the company, asked for the additional service and maybe paid a little more... I have no such options with a city / government "public -private" partnership service
That is super rad, and markets can be so dope, and nothing beats good fair service like that, but doesn't it also seem kind of crazy inefficient to have 5 different company's trash trucks running around the city? Maybe I'm wrong, but in terms of overall ecosystem input/output, I would guess that 1 system consumes way fewer resources than the sum of 5. I guess if the prices correspond to resource-use, then maybe it is actually more efficient overall? Crazy.
> but doesn't it also seem kind of crazy inefficient to have 5 different company's trash trucks running around the city?
Why would you even think that? It’s going to be roughly the same number of employees, equipment, etc. The total amount of trash didn’t change.
The truck only has to drive down the street once, as opposed to 5 trucks driving down the same street?
In a perfect system, filled with perfect altruistic people, that always have perfect information, serving a community of people that all have the exact same needs then yes a monopoly would always be more efficient.
We do not live in such as world. First My trash needs are not the same as my neighbors trash needs so a single program does not work for all people. Some people have more trash, some people have more recycling, some people have large items all the time, others do not, etc etc etc. This is one of the reasons your city probably does have more than 5 companies already doing service in it, as most cities only provide residential trash services, not commercial, to businesses have to contract out their own trash removal because all of their removal needs are even more varied than residential and a government program would never work
Then there are other problems associated with monopolies that make them inefficient since they are divorced from the feedback loop of their customers. This is why there are very very few natural monopolies, because monopolies are inefficient even though on paper it seems like they would be the most efficient
It is like socialism in that way, good on paper bad in reality.
Monopolies are almost universally found due to some kind of government imposition, law or regulation that protects them.
I like the setup we have. The city regulates the trash company. So while they are private, they provide service according to what the city demands, and prices are regulated right along with it. I get _great_ trash service, even with only a single company serving the entire area. And the prices are completely acceptable.
Please read the history of post office budgets and spending.
They've actually done pretty well, given the amount of politics that gets played with their funding.
I don't know about you but from my personal experiences in dealing with the USPS, they're not exactly what I'd describe as the most efficient (or friendly for that matter) organization.
Compare that to same-day or next day delivery from Amazon, it's night and day.
I'd rather not dump more tax money into that mess.
EDIT: I find it interesting that 90% of the responding comments in this thread are seemingly against the parent comment's ideas yet all are being heavily downvoted now with practically no answers to justify the downvotes
> EDIT: I find it interesting that 90% of the responding comments in this thread are seemingly against the parent comment's ideas yet all are being heavily downvoted now with practically no answers to justify the downvotes
I think that's because many of the comments are posting regularly debunked misinformation.
Personally, I like the USPS more than Amazon. Because while Amazon frequently gives me great service, they can terminate that relationship at any time and then I'm completely stuck. Because the USPS is quasi-governmental, they can't just decide I'm no longer allowed to be a customer.
> I think that's because many of the comments are posting regularly debunked misinformation.
Such as?
Most of these faded out comments are talking about how the USPS is a government org so it has no incentives to efficiently fix things regardless of money. How do you debunk that? It’s true of the incentives of every government agency.
Why does the CEO of a private company have incentive to fix things? Presumably because they’ll be fired if they don’t. How is that any different for the head of a governmental organisation?
Stock compensation.
I mean sure, but do you really feel like that’s necessary for someone to be motivated to do a good job. IMO there’s plenty of incentive without that.
I have and claim zero expertise in this area but it seems that there is an emerging trend towards supply chain contraction with hard goods. Certainly the lesson of the last 24 months seems to be that lack of strategic risk management in the supply chain can cripple you when things go south. This was always obvious conceptually but the discipline seemed lacking.
Yet software and software-based services seem to be going the opposite direction. Certainly supply chain security issues are beginning to surface but I don't see anyone contracting the dependency graph with stacks on stacks of SaaS products.
NASA's email system is outsourced to Outlook.com. This is the first time I've ever seen anything potentially secured allowed out of internal networks.
The Azure, AWS, and and Google data centers are some of the most secure facilities on the planet, maybe even rivaling that of our nuclear missile silos. If us-east-1 got nuked or went offline [for months], we'd probably see an instant depression in the U.S. economy as so many parts of life break, so it's in the DoD's best interest to protect Virginia and North Carolina extremely well[0].
Azure even offers multiple levels of clouds that can house government secrets[1], although I couldn't find a way to tell whether an outlook hostname is part of a higher-security region or not.
0:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28825009
1:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-government-top-...
I did a bunch of security contract work for NASA and have worked in security capacities for other government and financial institutions. Honestly I think a lot of the migration to cloud providers is a form of mutiny against the ever increasing cost of running highly regulated workloads in your own data center. It’s nearly impossible to do anything in a reasonable amount of time when you’ve got layer upon layer of regulatory and internal audit oversight. It’s not just basic processes but governance around those processes and governance around the governance of those processes. It’s a nightmare.
I believe someone once characterized AWS success as stemming from hacking around procurement and IT policies in sclerotic organizations. One approval, one admin => all services.
Ford had a US$657 million IPO in 1956.
You can easily argue their hegemony lasted at least 60 years.
Amazon's public IPO was 1997. We are now ~20+ years in to their life as a public company.
How do you view Amazon if you believe they have another 40 years of unfettered leadership? How big does this company get? There are very few structural limits to their growth other than this logistics issue. (Ford was hardly unfettered, but as a public company performed much better, over a longer period of time, than the other auto makers).
I have what might be a really dumb question:
Can you helicopter airlift 40’ crates off a ship?
The most powerful lifting helicopters available can do up to 44,000 lbs, which is about the same as the maximum highway transport weight for 40' containers:
Source: 60 seconds on Google brings up:
https://www.ukpandi.com/news-and-resources/bulletins/2021/ov...
https://helicopterexpress.com/blog/how-much-weight-can-a-con...
.
Probably, with enough planning? The economics of it probably wouldn't make any sense though.
Yeah. But when ports are jammed I could see them doing ridiculous things to keep the spice flowing.
Lifting is probably just a single part of the whole process, in your scenario, helicopters will move the pill-up from ships to land
True. I was picturing it being a way to create another kind of port: helicopters to some parking lot or whatever.
Of course I likely deeply misunderstand the complexity and details.
If I understand correctly, it's not a lack of cranes to get containers off the ship but a lack of trailers to get the containers out of the port.
The mafia wouldn’t take that lightly.
Companies can move faster because they don’t spend public money so have fewer rules to follow.
If we let USPS function in the same way Amazon does (eg scrapping unprofitable activity) you’d see changes but USPS is providing a service for the public good.
Plus arguably politicians don’t benefit from creating an amazing USPS though who knows why.
That’s a good idea, we should stop publicly funding them and they’ll be able to possibly be good as amazon.
Sure, the but flipside is that you lose the public good. You no longer have a mandated universal service operation which means suddenly you can't send mail to rural locations. And not only can you not send mail to rural locations, all those rural locations can't access services that require mail, so suddenly you've got a problem where people won't be able to set up bank accounts. Now clearly, the mail isn't as important as it used to be, but let's not pretend- those in rural areas where universal service is the least profitable, are also those least likely to have access to the internet for e-mail etc.
You see this effect in the UK with Royal Mail, the Conservatives decided to float it on the stock exchange (astonishingly mispriced netting their donors a nice sum - it peaked up _58%_ on it's IPO price in 6 months). The Royal Mail was already profit making when it was floated. Since then did they get much more efficent? No. Did they start using those profits to lobby for removing the universal service obligation? Yes!
That sounds great actually, they deliver mostly spam and already don’t serve all rural areas. Most banks have paperless options as well. It isn’t efficient and there is no way to opt out of spam, the loss of the public harm and needlessly cutting down trees sounds great!
Eventually people will be paying yachtsmen to move totes.
I placed 4-5 orders from china/aliexpress in the last 1-1/2 month and if anything, shipments were delivered faster then usual...
supposedly them going to a 24/7 schedule has helped clear out a lot of the backed up stuff at ports.
Maybe we will see seaports as a service in a few years.
News to me. I bought a pair of headphones in early September and they still haven't shipped. Since then I've had chats with Amazon support thrice, and the first two times I was lied to with "it's just being packed for shipping now".
The third time I was given $20 in Amazon credit and told that a ticket had been lodged about my purchase. That was a week ago, and it still hasn't shipped.
I could easily have cancelled and bought another product, but I'm pissed off that they sold me a product they didn't have, and now I'm invested in seeing how this plays out.
Nice to have money
This will work well for some domestic transportation and land locked rural areas, but for everybody else... I don't think this will do anything. It just sounds like a massive expense.
I live right next to perhaps the largest inland port in the US and cargo here doesn't sit for very long because the only options are air, trucks, and trains and there is anywhere for excess cargo to sit. This is called the inter-modal system of logistics, the ability to rapidly move shipping contains between air and train via short truck routes or immediately onto trucks for long haul truck distribution. In this case the Amazon plan can skip sea ports and directly reach inland ports that don't have congestion. But, that will only work efficient for domestic transport.
The solution ignores the cause of the problem for sea ports, the point of congestion to which they are likely a massive contributor.
The problem for the congestion is that ports have run out of space, mostly from empty containers taking space needed by filled containers on ships. This problem is not a labor shortage, tracking inefficiency, or distribution failure.
This problem is intentional and created by the vendors most severely impacted from the result. Empty shipping containers take up space and have to be stored somewhere. If not at a port then at a vendor's warehouse clogging operations closer to the business. Parking contains costs money. Whether you are going to park them at a port or your own warehouse there is an expense to that lost space.
Parking at the port was, until about a month ago, tremendously cheaper. It takes fuel to drive that empty box around and it takes money to pay for a filled warehouse of your empty containers that is needed for actual operations. So just leave it at the port for a massive discount.
Parking at the ports worked well... until there was a massive pandemic and everybody starting shopping online, even from places like WalMart.
The Port of Los Angeles is solving this problem on their end with rate increases that increase per day (or week, I don't remember). I suspect their neighbor at the Port of Long Beach is following on that plan as well. Only time will tell if this actually solves the problem at those ports. Even the mere announcement of this price hike resulted in one vendor removing 5000 empty containers. That is a mind boggling amount of space, and from just one company.
Union labor at both LB and LA ports are f!@king America over. As much as I hate to say it, if American labor cannot become efficient at managing port traffic - - then let Chinese do it, and watch it get done proficiently.
Amazon is obviously behind the new Covid virus and the smash and grabs.
Gotta shop online.
Maybe they could get a fleet of ICBMs?