Found in 3 comments on Hacker News
abtinf · 2018-08-31
· Original
thread
Some years ago I read The Box by Marc Levinson, a history of containerized shipping. Highly recommend it. If you live in SF and have wondered about the numerous barely used piers, this book explains their history as well - and why the major container terminal ended up in Oakland instead.
One of the painful early lessons for the industry was the discovery that minimizing operational costs (particularly fuel and maintenance) trumps every other value. A pioneering containerized shipping company went bankrupt pursuing a high-speed shipping strategy that cost marginally more than low-speed competition.
Edit: Oh, there is a second edition! Updated link.
Edit: replaced unhelpful snark.
hangonhn · 2017-08-24
· Original
thread
Hang on. The longshoreman part is a bit more complicated than that. Longshoreman was actually not a shit job. The workers had a great deal of flexibility and good pay for the hours worked. The labor unions protected them too. What caused that job to decline and disappear was the container box. The container box moved the packing and unpacking part from the source and destination instead of the ports. During the Vietnam war, the US military basically forced the ports to adopt container boxes. This dramatically increased the efficiency of shipping and eradicated longshoremen jobs. Nowadays though, the people operating the cranes loading and unloading the container boxes from/to container ships actually make 6 digit salaries.
The problem with shit jobs is that they tend to be "muscle" based jobs in unpleasant conditions, which makes them vulnerable to automation and mechanization.
(Source for all this is: The Box (https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...)
The Box ( https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom... ) has some interesting things to say about this.
In that book, the ordinary logistical setup is that ships tend to cover individual transit routes, which means that a delay affecting one ship doesn't spread through the system. Malcom McLean tries to set up a system of ships that always sail east instead, and it fails very badly, because delays on each individual leg of the (infinitely long!) route accumulate instead of happening and then fading away.