alt Hacker NewsI liked reading "The Box" about the transition to container shipping.
It was interesting to see this totally-unrelated-to-our-times process from the outside.
From our place in time, container shipping is obvious.
At the time, to people who wanted to ship something, it was ridiculously hard and expensive and risky.
If you were shipping something from cleveland to paris, you might just give up.
Say you were shipping alcohol - only part might arrive, the rest would disappear.
The shipping industry had all KINDS of forces at work to keep the status quo. trucking companies, trains, shipping companies, freight forwarders, longshoremen, stevedores, unions, people with older non-container boats, etc.
and they didn't want standards.
Replies
In all fairness, this is exactly why insurance was invented: unreliable shipping. You just took out a policy, and the shipment didn’t make it you took the payout.
It creates a system that diminishes risk, but simultaneously diminishes incentives for improvement.
They seem to have made their peace with standards, but now a lot of them don’t want robots. “Automation hurts families” is a common slogan.
https://youtu.be/hr-isyMV1y8?si=grnJqn8AOEuIwkRw