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”.
I suspect a lot of it would be the success of garage-based inventors, and the pure-R&D divisions in larger corporations (Xerox-PARC, HP Labs, etc.)
The former is likely harder to achieve now, much like how games development is now an affair involving large teams whereas games developed in the 1980s may have been single-person affairs. The act of making a computer and all related silicon is a much more complex affair, the last CPU design you could probably feasibly keep in your head may be the MC68000 .
The latter too is now still a thing, but much less open, and either rent-seeking through patent, or pure profit with lower tolerance for wild ideas (less risk tolerated for an obvious cost-centre).
Not the parent, but my thought is, and their comment seems to suggest, that the sheer density of exciting, new, and groundbreaking CS work is an absolutely energizing thing to read about.
Having been there across the transition I'd say the culture changed enormously.
In particular I watched as a lot of the people I respected the most and identified as having made Google great, drifted away and left the firm. Most obviously all 3 leader/CEOs left. The complaining really started to ramp up after that. Larry/Sergey had ways to put those people back in their place in ways that weren't particularly aggressive but worked well (e.g. just mocking them at TGIF when a stupid question was asked). Culture needs to be renewed and cultivated. What remains now seems like a sort of hollowed out version of the culture that continues along its prior path through inertia, whilst slowly rotting away.
> even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches
You've just made me realise how rarely I find myself needing to add a !g to my searches on DDG these days. That used to be a multiple times a day thing. I can't remember the last time I did it.
> 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
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.
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.
Both Switzerland and Israel have very high levels of belief in the purpose behind their country's military engagement. In Israel because (whatever you think about the causes or history of the wider conflict) most people feel, generally correctly, that the military is critically necessary to protect them from terrorism and other threats. In Switzerland because of the strong commitment to neutrality. The military is only designed to protect the country from external threats and the principle that it wouldn't get involved except in self defence is extremely important.
If the Swiss army was sent to distant countries to protect Swiss economic interest, to enforce a certain system of government, or even in 'self-defense' but against nebulous and theoretical threats, rather than the imminent risk of a direct attack, Swiss people would widely refuse to serve.
Similarly in America. If, for example, Canada carried out an aggressive land invasion of the United States, a very large number of people would be willing to serve, and accept a draft as well as poor conditions, low pay etc.
On the other hand, if there was a draft for young people to participate in controversial US overseas operations like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, there would be widespread resistance. Many people would evade the draft either illegally (going to prison, disappearing, moving abroad) or legally (using college exemptions, National Guard, bone spurs, etc). Some people in the military would refuse to follow orders, pursue criminal or radical political activity (more than they already do), sabotage or go AWOL.
This was attempted with the Vietnam war. It wasn't stopped despite its success. It was stopped because it didn't work and threatened to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces.
I'm not sure whether you are disagreeing with anything I wrote.
>It wasn't stopped despite its success. It was stopped because it didn't work and threatened to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces.
Whether something "works" depends on what you define its purpose to be.
Saying the draft "didn't work" is exactly where I think we went wrong.
"Threatening to destroy the entire fabric of US military forces" (or of society in general) constitutes "working" if it prevents the continuation of that sort of war and in the long run, preserves a country that is as we would like it to be.
It was also done in WWII and WWI, at much greater scale and to great success, as well as the Gulf War and many smaller conflicts. The UK did it for a long time before the US.
You are welcome to your beliefs about international involvement, but often people see it otherwise.
It doesn't matter what my beliefs are. If a significant minority of people who are going to be drafted believe that the war is unjust or unnecessary or that they should not be the ones to fight it, the effects which I described will happen. It is clear that for the engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan this was the case.
There was no draft for the Gulf War. The United States entered WW2 after an unprovoked act of aggression against US territory.
I'm not sure which 'smaller conflicts' you are referring to because conscription has only been used in the Korean war, the American Civil War and the American Revolutionary War, other than the 3 already mentioned.
You are technically correct about WW1. The situation has changed in the more than 100 years since that conflict.
>The United States entered WW2 after an unprovoked act of aggression against US territory
I think this common statement may be a bit misleading whether or not strictly accurate.
From what I've read, the Flying Tigers were authorized by Roosevelt, and the only reason they failed to engage in combat with Japan until after Pearl Harbor was because of unforeseen delays.
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. And they will be concentrated together, changing the character of an organization.
Modern Western culture holds individual freedom, social mobility, and self-direction in such esteem I think we may have a blind spot with regard to how random selection and assignment of people to jobs can sometimes produce better results.
With perfect filtering, they can be two standard deviations from the norm which is quite noticeable, but that’s not what’s going on.
The military rejects ~23% of applicants due to educational issues. One of the results of this is members of the military are above the average intelligence in the US. But they also reject people with excessive criminal history, significant physical disability, or even extreme weight. Though it’s a sliding scale based on rates of recruitment.
This is putting a civilian-centric filter on the problem. Many, many people chose the military for reasons other than pay. If it were strictly for pay, almost nobody would choose the “harder” military occupations like Marines, or Army infantry, or Navy SEALs etc. Yet those often get more applicants than they have slots.
As for your statistical claim, we’re not really wired to think well about stats so we get erroneous intuitions. To be in the 95th percentile, you’re away from the norm but not as much as you may think, which is the GP’s point. A quick Google search shows 95th percentile for height is 6’2”…it’s tall but not so tall as to actually catch my attention. 95th percentile in IQ is 125, in pay is $248k, in male weight is 246 lbs. Non-normative, sure, but none so far away as to leave someone awestruck
>Many, many people chose the military for reasons other than pay.
Slow down, that's exactly what I said.
I work for (a) government, and of course I didn't choose to because it paid more than anything else. And I didn't decide not to join the Navy because it paid too little.
I’m having a hard time following your point. Are you claiming those who go into the military are disproportionately doing so for negative incentives? If so, do you apply the same logic to your coworkers in government?
I'm saying that people who accept less pay do it because they consider other factors that compensate. Those factors could be anything, and are subjective in the sense they vary for individuals. It's very common to suggest that public servants are motivated by something other than to selflessly serve the public. For example, gold plated health insurance.
What I'm claiming as a general principle is that some people have a huge advantage in opportunity cost for a certain job, and organizations can be seriously affected by concentrating those people together. And we see this all over the place.
Consider the Abu Ghraib scandal. It's not that joining the military entails that sort of thing, or that it's rightly part of the job, but if someone has an affinity for abusing prisoners, then most jobs do not offer the same opportunity. Theoretically, decent people who value doing good should be attracted to jobs that are important and underpaid, but in practice, bad people who value side benefits to an extreme degree may dominate the market of people who will take the job.
It's demonstrably difficult to build political opposition to such wars when most peoples' lives aren't on the line.
When a person has terminal cancer of some kinds, fentanyl and even morphine can't fully stop the pain. So there is a standard surgical procedure where they go in and cut a primary nerve.
That is in effect what was done in eliminating the draft. It did away with the feedback loop, not the problem.
>it's that when you accept volunteers, you get people self-selecting and that's way worse.
I’m not sure this is true. There’s a reason commanders generally oppose the draft; they know volunteers tend to be better service members than draftees. Imagine if your civilian job was full of people who were conscripted rather than chose that field (even if they chose it for the wrong reasons). I can imagine the amount of disciplinary problems would rise dramatically. I don’t know the statistics, but draft-era service members seemed to have serious problems from drug abuse to fratricide too.
>Imagine if your civilian job was full of people who were conscripted rather than chose that field
Well, consider juries. While they don't end up being completely random, still, there seems to be a recognition that nobody or no organization should be unilaterally trying to select the best. Or taking volunteers.
I think most people agree that juries are very important.
>draft-era service members seemed to have serious problems from drug abuse to fratricide too
Yes, I just think the problems should have been attributed to the war being fought and not the fact of the draft. Maybe the corruption of the draft; I'm not old enough to have a sense of what it was like during Vietnam, but obviously it's a cliche how people were able to avoid it.
Which reminds me of juries again - it used to be, in my state, there were tons of exemptions for jury duty, and that really biased the pool. There were reforms to eliminate most of the exemptions.
I don’t know that juries are a paragon of a great system. The joke is juries select for those who are too dumb to get out of jury duty. (Yes, I know many people do so out of civic duty, but that’s to the same point of military service)
I think you underestimate the effect of a draft on unit morale. Units can become more undisciplined because commanders have limited recourse for transgressions and people dont want to be there in the first place. Imagine if you and your coworkers were uprooted to perform some difficult, manual, potentially life threatening task. Not by choice, but by conscription; what do you think organizational morale (and productivity) would be like? I’d much rather be with people who chose that path.
>I just think the problems should have been attributed to the war being fought and not the fact of the draft.
And yet you recognize the premium Western cultures put on personal agency. The irony of your above statement is that in a “popular and just” war (if such a thing exists), there’s no need for a draft because ranks will be filled with volunteers. If you’re old enough, you probably remember the long lines at recruiting centers on Sept. 12, 2001.
>there’s no need for a draft because ranks will be filled with volunteers
This reflects the fact that the US military has learned how to carry on a substantial conflict without large numbers of casualties.
That sounds like a great achievement. But I think it's the problem.
There shouldn't be wars that can be run by a relatively small number of volunteers. That is the problem.
WWII and the US Civil War had drafts.
I wish I could find some cartoons that I remember from fairly soon after 9/11, about the dread people had that we were headed straight to hell in the military response.
I remember them as profoundly different from what you might see today with a left-wing slant, exactly because of the general sense of unity and nonpartisan feeling. Foreseeing the obvious subsequent events meant being against seemingly everyone and not just the red or blue tribe.
My recollection (of what I read more recently) is that only one congressperson voted against war in Iraq.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
The US military is pretty much a transit agency. Beholden to external forces and external corruption. Having to spend skilled labor making plans that everyone knows will never see the light of day, simply because these were asked for by someone who holds the power to ask for them. Having to abide by laws and policy that any expert in the field would agree don't make any sense.
So, basically, you are painting the US military as the hapless victim of incompetent and unskilled external forces, bearing absolutely no responsibility for any of it’s failures.
That seems like blind and dichotomic wishful thinking.
The problem is more one of impersonal, emergent, bureaucratic forces. Any particular officer, defense contractor, politician, pentagon analysist, etc ... might want to change how the system as a whole runs. But they are other groups (who might even agree with the overall goal) that will oppose any particular change that impacts their own political/bureaucratic/social power or influence. The result is an institutional inertia where only changes that fit into certain well-tread paths can succeed. Solving this collective-action problem is one of the major challenges of our era in many different verticals.
This relates to one of Hemingway's famous lines, "Gradually, then suddenly." When this a mismatch between the collective desires of a large group and their current circumstance, when suddenly there is some sort meaningful change (a disaster, a drastic court-case, assignation, etc ...) all of sudden rapid change can ensue.
I'd be really interested to know what could change the US Military-Industrial Complex. Our history of political changes and wars of the past hundred years seems to have been fluctuation on a common trajectory. It seems like we need something drastic, but the consequences of whatever is more drastic, seem large enough that they could be far worse than the current status quo. But there has to be something, I'm not trying to fatalistic here.
Yes, because when you read about the great failures of the U.S. military for the last 100 years, it usually boils down to political reasons rather than a failure of military planning. For example, the U.S. military understood vietnam and afganistan to be unwinnable years before politicians were willing to admit as much in front of the American public. The stunts in central america were all dictated by politicians for political reasons as well, mostly in effort to protect American corporate interests who had their assets seized by communist governments.
> 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
You're correct that the military comes up with the plans. In some scenarios they may come up with multiple plans. There may also be other parts of the government, such as the state department, coming up with alternative plans. Choosing which plan to go with and what budget to give it is the responsibility of civilian leadership.
> 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.
Whose job security is it good for? The private who just joined isn't involved in these conversations. The people who are in these conversation are well established and in the later parts of their careers so they don't need to worry so much about 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.
Why not? What happened to "the buck stops here"?
> 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
Sounds like the sort of things people in relevant committees in congress would probably ask questions about. If they don't like the answers they could probably even make some headway in getting that changed.
> 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.
These kind of purchases are very political. How spread out is the manufacturing for this jet? How many different congressional districts in the US have at least one part being made there? Here are a couple articles about the government buying military equipment the military doesn't need or want [0][1].
> 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.
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.
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.
As a practical matter, what I've seen in SV companies, is that there are networks from folks that new each other in the service. Once one gets a role in a company, many other skilled veterans are sure to follow. The same thing happens to group from other prior companies that get hired in a waves, often following a particular senior leader brought in for a new initiative, or a new startup. I guess this doesn't scale to veterans as a whole, but it does show how even a little support can go a long way.
This applies to many excluded groups. People hire from networks; if you don't make any effort, your network will be the status quo, which last from generation to generation. With a little effort, you can expand your network to excluded groups. From even a purely self-interested perspective, access to more talent and a more diverse set of ideas and experiences is never a bad thing, and being exluded means there is more undiscovered talent.
One simple method is to tell the recruiter that you want at least N serious candidates from excluded groups for each job. This causes the recruiter to also expand their network.
Most military people I've met were from all over the political spectrum. A lot of people I knew just joined to get free tuition in college. They don't have fun when they have to do their regular drill and work is generally stressful and not exciting. They have drug test timing down to a science. That's the sort of environment that apparently breeds real camaraderie, at least.
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.
The current Googlers complain when the morning shake is not warm enough to their liking. Not to mention too many Googlers (and other tech companies employees, esp in the US) forget that they are getting paid to build products and no one cares about their political ideology.
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.
> 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.
The only construction project Google ever did in my city was use ancient (loud as hell) equipment to rip these big grooves down mile after mile of perfectly good neighborhood streets in all of our poor communities to cheaply install their “fiber internet” experiment that they abandoned 1 year later. And our streets are still covered with the rubber crap they filled the grooves with. More of it comes up every time it rains. It gets all over our pets and everything. I hate Google so much.
Surely, someone did at some point do some work on the roads in your neighborhood outside of the example you're bringing up? Well, that's taxpayer money, and Google is a big taxpayer.
If you were going to complain about wasteful spending and failing projects in the DoD, I would respect your reasoning more. Instead, when it got to "humanitarian this, environmental that" you turned into Charlie Brown's teacher.
I don't know why anything "humanitarian" should be taken with a grain of salt. You surely are not going to argue that something like the Syrian humanitarian crisis is comparable with a cartoon character?
On the environmental side, I am not surprised to see people raising eyebrows, because the US military's impact there is vastly underreported. A lot of effort went into exempting the US military from the Kyoto Protocol - and that's for a good reason, since the US military alone emits more CO2 than many industrialized nations. So if you don't believe in global warming, there's nothing I can do to reason with you. But if you do, you might realize that the environmental impact alone might be more damaging than some of the other items I mentioned.
Think of it this way - if the US military cleaned up its act, we could remove the emission control devices from all US cars and still come out on top.
>it's important to realize that anyone who joins the military is ok with this set of rules.
There's a pile and a half of people who only join the military for a much higher payout of benefits for essentially unskilled work, or only so the military will pay to educate them into skilled work certification, or only because they made some mistakes and it's that or a felony charge (typically with jail time), and they're all typically just hoping to fly under the radar of such things until they get out with what they want going in rather than genuinely approving of the military doing to them the sorts of things the military does.
Obviously not all, but many of these also come out with majorly reoriented priorities. We can pass value judgements on the goodness of the imposed priorities all we want, but they're pretty irrelevant to and just distract from the phenomenon itself: "Indoctrination" is absolutely the correct word to use, so much we need very little, if any, additional description. The US military, and pretty much every military under the sun, uses an intense bout of classical stress conditioning to induce the sort of immediate, unquestioning dedication you've needed for hundreds of years in an effective infantry formation to teach boot camp recruits how to be in the mindset of just efficiently and stoicly doing their job as the brass designed you, the very small cog in the very large machine of a superpower-scale techno-mechanized combined arms war machine, to do it. In software, experimentation is king everywhere with a healthy outlook, because wastes of time give just finite losses of money while breakout successes are comparatively infinite in money gains, so most risks are worth it until they're clearly working or not working. In the military, when the rubber hits the road, other people are depending on you to do your job just as everyone expects it to go so they can integrate you into their job, which includes shooting and getting shot at somewhere down the net. Flying by the seat of your pants in such an environment could possibly get your fellows killed when things don't pan out and you fail to deliver, so the simple stations the vast majority of military members fill just don't really tolerate independent thought without going up several ranks of approval. The type of risk just isn't seen as acceptable in that context regardless of why you're taking it, even if it's specifically for the military's long-term interest. The philosophy is that the juice is never worth the squeeze in combat, and since we're a combat force on the label we'll spread that philosophy of "just do what the man with the fancier patch says" to every desk worker and wrench turner as well as trigger puller. And we'll spread it through the most irresistible teaching method we're still allowed to.
Sorry for that ramble, but it's really important to not deemphasize the absolute psychological impact classical conditioning in such an overwhelming social context can have. There's a reason they march you for miles at first when they almost don't care how fat you get once you've got an actual job. There's a reason Marine boot camp intentionally prevents you from sleeping just about whenever possible the first few days you show up while knowing resistance to sleep is impossible to train. There's a reason hazing underperformers is just about as old as history itself. It's because you can make anyone do anything if you just beat them enough, if you just stress them more than they've experienced before. Stress basically compels obedience, and obedience is very habit forming. Is there some selection bias like you describe in play today? Absolutely, but I don't think anyone familiar enough with the psychological phenomenon I'm not doing a great job describing would think much would change if it wasn't around. We've all read about Stockholm/Lima syndrome after all, where people with neutral or reverse sympathies fall just as easily, and it's essentially the same phenomenon. Enough stress turns everyone, even independent thinking people or bullheaded rebellious people, into receptive sponges.
> 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.
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.
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.
Being the best burger flipper gives you zero job security because your boss will believe they can’t afford you if you suddenly realize how much you are worth. They may preemptively let you go, if they’re a good boss that wants to see you grow.
There’s no such thing as job security without a form of a contract.
Also, you should look up the minimum wage in the 60’s and 70’s and adjust it for inflation. They were getting paid $40USD+ per hour in today’s dollars. So, no $10 is not a lot.
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
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.
It is just as true in the military as well, most well defined organizations are pyramid in their hierarchy, career growth almost by definition is going to stagnate higher you go up the ladder and depend on factors that may or may not be in your control.
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.
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.
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,”
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.
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).
I remember the sales director at a company I worked for telling me he liked to hire ex-military people because they were compliant. If he told them to cold call 100 people then they would do exactly that.
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?
>>>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.
It's stuff like this that tempts me to send up a trial balloon when landing in management at new companies.
Find someone at the bottom of the totem pole, ask them to include a bullshit, non-sensical, or actually harmful slide in a presentation as a favor to you, then see how far it percolates back up before someone challenges it.
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.
> 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.
I don't know if the Army uses them for IT functions, but isn't that the exact issue with technical fields more broadly for which Warrant Officers exist?
Warrant officers in technical fields are able to remain more technically focused, but they are largely pushed into management too. At CW3 the Army says that they are field-grade officers who are basically interchangeable with an O-4.
The other issue is that many warrant officers still just have a high school diploma, or a check-the-block degree from an online diploma mill. They have deep institutional knowledge and vocational experience, but they aren't going to do technical innovation. This isn't like hiring a senior researcher or engineer.
On the Army enlisted side, what does an E7-9 typically do if in an IT/technical role?
On the officer side, great observation. And pretty much mirrors the private industry: companies without individual contributor career paths are struggling to retain experienced technical talent and deliver complex projects.
At E-7, E-8, E-9 there is no technical role. They will still have a career field like IT, maintenance, artillery, etc. and work in those types of units, but they will do purely HR/administrative functions.
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.
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).
The only employer I had in my life, among quite a few, where leadership had that devotion t the operational aspects of their jobs was Amazon. I like to work with those people. I guess that culture is what gives Amazon its continuous edge over the competition.
I agree. Developing my own technical proficiency and teaching the next generations has been the only thing keeping me going in an organization otherwise wrought with inefficiency and stupidity. In my experience aviation is fairly unique in this aspect (in the context of the military writ large).
> 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.
Its incredibly painful to read Americans perspective about work. I'm sorry if that comes across as rude, but this is incredible:
> I'm a clock watcher at work, ...
As is your right! As you should! What you're really saying is: I do value my lifetime. I do value the time with my partner, kids, friends. I do value my hobbies and spare time. I appreciate that I exist not just to serve some corporate (or government) goal.
What a sad world to be so brainwashed by american corporate culture that you call this 'clock watching'. Sorry I really don't want to come across as rude or insulting as the term is ladden, but there's no other way to express this.
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!
I read a lot of history books during the lockdowns, and it really illuminated for me how much of war boils down to logistics. You can’t expect to win battles without good logistics, but even if you do, your victories wont mean anything without good logistics. For instance Hannibal had basically defeated the Roman Republic at Cannae, but then spent the next 14 years meandering around Italy failing to reinforce or adequately resupply his army. Eventually leading to unconditional Carthaginian defeat. Much of the reason that neither the Ottomans or the Persians managed to properly defeat the other in their many wars came down to the difficult terrain that separates them cutting any advancing army off from proper reinforcements.
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.
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.
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.
Not in real life. Usually, in most orgs, career oriented people in ops pick the sexy, easy to sell aspects. At best, they delegate the non-sexy basics to capable people. Usually those aspects are just ignored so, because someone will sort this easy stuff out.
The notable exception here is, and that is a common theme, Amazon. Amazon realized how important ops and logistics and SCM are for their success. So they put them at their core (let's ignore AWS for now, I assume the AWS guys put ops at the center of stuff as well so). And it shows. Not everything was rosy at Amazon for sure, as relentless as Amazon is with operations it is with politics. And still, for an ops guy like myself it was the best place I ever worked at.
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.
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.
It's cultural and it started way before they reached any scale. Bezos famously refused to buy desks and used recycled doors because it was cheaper. This isn't specific to Amazon, pretty much any business involved in distribution will work on ultra thin margins. If they don't penny pinch then they don't survive.
Incidentally this is most of what makes these places so miserable for their employees. They will think about their employees the same way they might consider an order for a million rolls of toilet paper.
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.
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'm not sure why you feel the need to go to absurd examples to just prove a point. Whatever floats your boat, but this has ceased to be a useful conversation so I'm going to step out of it.
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.
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
It was ordered directly from the Walmart website and arrived in an Amazon package with zero mention of the Walmart "seller". The Amazon product was listed by an actual brand.
IMO it was a clear case of someone doing arbitrage across ecom platforms. As a first time Walmart+ customer it certainly tarnishes my desire to ever order from there again.
It most definitely is arbitrage. The Walmart website supports a marketplace. So ordering from the website doesn't mean much these days unless you specifically look for the caption "Sold by Walmart.com"
Otherwise, like I have realized, you might as well just buy from eBay.
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.
I recently ordered directly from a company's website (it was listed on the product's packaging, so I'm fairly confident it wasn't a third party seller), as it was a little cheaper than ordering from Amazon. It still ended up being delivered directly from Amazon.
Not surprising given the quote "Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." by General Robert H. Barrow (then Commandant of the Marine Corps)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bezos made a better web interface for a Walmart level selection of goods and now Walmart is caught up and it's all the same. Shopping at Amazon is ethically the same as shopping at Walmart (not good IMO).
how is Walmart "caught up"? this is what their homepage looks like today on my pixel 4a: https://ibb.co/Y3Zh7k2
if I flip it to landscape, the layout looks right, but the button to reveal the search bar (the most important element on a retail homepage) doesn't work. I would be shocked to have that experience with Amazon in the middle of the holidays. it's just throwing away money.
>how is Walmart "caught up"? this is what their homepage looks like today on my pixel 4a: https://ibb.co/Y3Zh7k2
They're caught up exactly because your biggest problem is that the site layout shit the bed. Your complaint wasn't that their business model and logistical infrastructure doesn't let you order stuff to your home on par with amazon.
it might seem like a minor issue. if I really wanted to shop with Walmart I could try a different browser, try their app, or switch to my PC. but people don't do that when they just want to buy something. approximately no one cares about giving second chances to a megacorp.
when you have strong competition, it's not enough to mostly get things right at a high level. the little things matter just as much for earning trust. Amazon gets this. Walmart, apparently, does not. they're a solid second choice if something is sold out elsewhere, I'll give them that.
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)
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.
I don't know. In the UK I can submit my taxes online, the whole thing is straightforward even including dividends and capital gains tax. It spits out the calculations for you and avoids needing an accountant. You could do it all manually but why would you when it is so efficient.
There is clearly a spectrum here and blindly labelling all government as useless is wrong.
The parent commenter didn't refer to efficiency of tax collection.
They refer to the fact that taxes is the pot the government will draw money from whenever any of their enterprises becomes unprofitable. If the pot is too small to fund all the projects they can simply grow out by taxing the populace more.
When an unprofitable business in the private sector runs out of investor money it sells all its assets and eventually collapses.
>The parent commenter didn't refer to efficiency of tax collection.
Tax collection is part of government and in this case is an useful counterexample to the endless "all government is bad" messages we regularly hear on HN.
>When an unprofitable business in the private sector runs out of investor money it sells all its assets and eventually collapses.
Yes, and unpopular governments get voted out (assuming they are democratic).
It is easy to believe that “all government is bad” when the only government you’ve interacted with is the US government. Thanks for highlighting a counter example.
Eh, most companies in the world aren't as efficient as Amazon. I know it's fashionable to complain about big government, but I think everyone can learn from Amazon. The idea that it's only the government that is inefficient is such a strange thing to me
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.
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.
Every large American company and every American business owner is involved in minimizing their tax burden. Why is it “wrong” when Amazon or any other large company does it?
I took every write off I could last year to minimize my tax burden. Am I also a bad person?
I can actually respect Amazon. They reinvest a huge chunk of the change into new business verticals and create new jobs.
Let’s say Amazon paid another $N billion in taxes. Where would the money go? To Washington politicians who’ve been promising change and reform in education, infrastructure, healthcare - at least my entire existence on this planet of not longer. Why should we give them money? Who holds them accountable, and regardless of your politics, how well has that worked out? Americas politicians optimize for their reelection. None of them, not the career officials or the one or two term presidents, regardless of political party, have done much to optimize for the marathon.
Bezos was apparently going to go bankrupt and Amazons model just wasn’t sustainable - according to the same media that cheerleads the two political parties. Yet, here we are, and the failed politicians and divisive media has no ideas other than blaming successful companies.
You could take every penny of Amazon and Apples total market cap and hand it to Washington and state governments. You believe anything will change and will stop overspending every year and adding to the national debt? Who will politicians blame then? Tesla? Ha!
You seem to be questioning taxes/government in general, I'm not gonna comment on that.
Sure, individuals and companies can use the rules of the system to minimize the tax they're paying. Everyone does that. But companies like Amazon also have a responsibility to the country they operate in and in my opinion should pay taxes there. Just because some financial wizard figured out that that there is such a thing as a double dutch sandwich or what it's called doesn't mean everyone has to eat it.
If you're going to make an argument for why we should tax companies like Amazon more, you need to also make an argument for why that money wouldn't otherwise be better used by Amazon compared to the government.
In my opinion anything larger than a medium sized city (think one of the many cities in SoCal) is basically guaranteed to use its funds poorly.
And Amazon most likely shared a postal address in Amsterdam with Mercedes, Siemens or BMW. Or at least the street. That shit is common practice. DO I like it? No. Does this make Amazon any less impressive? No.
> Amazon most likely shared a postal address in Amsterdam with Mercedes, Siemens or BMW. Or at least the street
You are talking out of your ass and revealing your xenophobia. The Dutch Sandwich tax dodge works mostly for firms who can pretend that Caribbean post box firm own their "intellectual property" (i.e. tech and pharma firms) and who can then pretend that their actual operating entities are loss making. And no, the German car and industrial companies don't do that.
The efficiency of a government is determined by those who direct it, it's not inherent to the structure.
The Manhatten Project, the New Deal, and the Space Race were remarkably efficient and productive, back in the time that we believed that governments can and should do things, and politicians worked together in good faith.
Then corporate lobbyists bought our politicians and convinced us that governments are evil and inept, and that they shouldn't have to pay taxes because the government will just waste it. So we deregulated everything, and now billionares just waste their record profits on low orbit joyrides instead, while average Americans die preventable deaths because they can't afford healthcare (which the governments of every other developed nation manage to provide their citizens for free).
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?
"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.
> 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.
Progressives, including progressive Democrats in Congress, were arguing from day one for a much larger massive transfer from the rich to everyone else to compensate for expected costs of the pandemic including anticipated control measures.
I think you are confusing the neoliberal centrist Democrats who aligned against that with the Republicans that with “progressives.” All while ignoring the actual progressives, who have been talking about this since before it happened, and continue to talk about it, and also Pharma profiteering, contrary to your description; e.g., https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1467622911989145618?t=...
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.
Yep. All the people refusing the vaccine due to misinformation are not rich wallstreet folks, it’s the less educated of our society. Those are the people suffering and losing their family members because Covid is devastating their community.
As a self-described progressive, I mostly agree. I'm skeptical that any administration is equipped to handle widespread profiteering. It's beyond even regulatory capture. The megacorps just ignore the rules which bind everyone else. Then treat any fines and such as the cost of doing business.
On my todo list is reading about how the robber barrons were eventually, albeit partially, reigned in.
“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.
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.
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 local grocer was bought out by a competitor 2 miles away. They figured that most of the customers would shop at the 2 mile away store instead of the 2.7 mile away supermarket. They closed the store and maintained the lease. They were willing to sublease to anyone as long as they weren't a grocery store. With the lack of an anchoring grocery store, the small stores around it died.
I don't think I'll visit a large supermarket again more than a handful times in my lifetime. I get my groceries delivered from a company without retail outlets. It seems likely big supermarkets are doomed.
The company I use (Ocado) have started licensing their tech worldwide, and includes mostly robotic warehouses.
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.
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.
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.
> “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,”
>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.
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.
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.
Per the linked Guardian article from 2009, shipping is responsible for 18-30% of all the world's nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution and 9% of the global sulphur oxide (SOx) pollution.
Yeah, technically those are indirectly greenhouse gases, but just to note, the article linked points out that "Maritime transport accounts for 3.5% to 4%".
It's double-digit percentages of some pollutants that are very bad for human health, but relatively minor in terms of climate change.
EDIT: I take it back. NOx is significant. SOx not so much.
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.
The pollution of the last mile of trucking an item to the store and the consumer driving to said store are an order of magnitude more than the entire journey across the Pacific on the boat
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.
One thought experiment is setup manufacturing in East coast & West coast. If one coast decreases in demand, what happens? Likely have excess supply, which then requires storage or shipping it to the other coast.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
Because it keeps being hobbled, on purpose In my industry we rely on mail. A few years ago it got bad around this time, but we'd still get mail. Now we go months without getting important documents in the mail. It gets worse every year. Look who's managing the current postmaster general and how political the appointment is. But somehow in these conversations people forget about these specific issues that bring things down, and feel instead it's just some impossible herculean task that has become entire impossible. Many of the common issues people complain about, are on purpose
> 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.
That's not at all the case in my state. The state and county operated facilities were huge, and moved a significant number of people through the vaccination process extremely efficiently.
For testing, I've been to many facilities. The county run facilities have been efficient and organized, whereas the private ones were not set up as efficiently to get tests issued and results returned.
That said, my primary care office is now set up to return results quickly, so private seems to be catching up.
They use existing infrastructure. We don't have government hospitals and doctors in every city, it's easier to reimburse doctors and clinics to give out vaccines. We have a post office system hundreds of years old, which has worked fine for 95+% of that time. The idea that we need to rely on Amazon to send all postal mail, which they aren't actually capable of doing, is so strange to me
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.
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 is increasingly losing business to low cost shippers and high margin business to same-day delivery tech startups. Not only that, their trucks are older than some drivers and the contract to replace them was filled with government pork.
You're never going to get innovation from people who are just trying to work a job for a wage and pension. That's why Amazon is disrupting everyone with their logistics network.
> 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.
> 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
It's proximate, not central, to the question of whether centralising logistics will improve outcomes.
The central question is whether the USPS, as a centralized, federally-controlled logistics network, works better than its privately-owned, de-centralised freight counterparts. It doesn't. That it's being sabotaged is good to be aware of. But it's not super relevant to the core question, and frankly, an argument against centralization since it suggests moving from a domain where they're being neglected by one set of parties to one where it's being sabotaged by another.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
Of course. With the extreme level of incompetence they have shown so far I do wonder if people in other markets have very low standards. Of course you can provide a crappy service if there are few competitors.
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.
You either hear from outliers then or there is systematic oppression of this innovation in you claim to hear of. If the government was filled with innovative smart people we would see innovative results.
> 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.
> 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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
>`(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.
>(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.
> 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.
Seems I was wrong about funding for retiree healthcare benefits. But I wonder if there is no funding rules for it because they are not a legally protected benefit like DB pensions.
I would agree that politicians did try to handicap USPS probably to benefit UPS/FedEx. I would also say every entity, government or non government, should be required to fund future promises today, otherwise it should be listed as debt on the balance sheet.
Deferred compensation is used too easily to shift costs from today into the future and keep those costs off the books, either by not accounting for them at all or undervaluing them.
> 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.
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.
I mean I also get important mail in there, as so I expect most people. Same way Google delivers multiple times more trash to my Gmail account but I don't say I need to stop using email
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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'd send that by another carrier if there was no USPS. Everyone along the way profits from those adverts even if you don't-- that's why they pay valuable money to do to
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.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
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?
> 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?
Amazon doesn’t pay dividends on their shares. They reinvest profits. Bezos was known for thinking about the long term, as opposed to politicians who think about the next 2-4 years, or whatever it is that will get them re elected. Did you not know that?
An Amazon SDE 1 earns over $165-170K fresh out of college. An SDE2 earns $200+. SDE 3 earns $300K. A regular software engineering manager earns $350k. The higher you earn, the more they (and other tech companies) pay on company shares. I’m not even talking about directors or VPs who make significantly more.
And Amazon has a reputation for being fast moving, with many people actually complaining that it’s too fast, that people burn out, etc.
That’s how Amazon operates. Whether you like their business model or not is besides the point. They enter new business verticals, move at a lightning fast pace, etc. and that’s how you order something and get it delivered within hours.
Please explain to us how Amazons equity compensation model will work under a system that isn’t capitalist and doesn’t pay these engineers equity. You want them to have a 9-5 work schedule, no on call, no extras - great.
And show me one example of a US government agency even a quarter efficient as Amazon. This isn’t a rhetorical question.
The government never really re orgs or changes it’s mission. It never evolves its practices. It never tries to compete. When the government doesn’t work or when tax payers wonder where’s their money going, the government just says, “we need to raise taxes! It’s not that we’re doing any wrong or have low performers. We just need more money!!”
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Of course not. But it might be wise to subsidize them so that they can get started and disrupt the existing players that have become lazy and inefficient.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As long as it’s not operating at a loss or using taxpayer money, then that’s fine. Otherwise it’s using taxpayer money to destroy competing businesses.
We don’t really care about businesses operating private militaries so the army isn’t a good comparison.
Getting performance bonuses while not having the ability to change anything is the same thing. If you can’t see why tying the incentives to the ability to affect outcomes is important, I don’t know what to tell you.
Yeah basically by the union and dysfunction at higher levels like sorting plants.
If supervisors could hire and fire mail carriers for performance and pay them market rate wages then the service would be drastically different.
How it is now supervisors have very little control over local branches. They can not control who to hire, in my district interviews for hourly workers were not even a thing, they can not control what to pay staff or what staffing level they need. They can not control the volume of mail they receive. While FedEx or UPS can refuse work if they lack capacity USPS has to accept the over flow.
Almost all new hire mailmen are hired "part time" with no set schedule for a low nationally uniform annual wage. The entry level wage for a mailman is the same in both small towns and big cities.
The union contract sets a certain percentage quota for "part time" workforce so under-staffing is the norm.
The senior mailman gets a solid middle class wage, while the entry level barely makes enough to live on in some cases or in others gets absurd mandatory overtime.
Thanks. That is all unfortunate. I really hope the USPS can get an administrator with enough political clout to let employees at all levels make good changes.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> Great for Amazon, bad for everybody else. You think Amazon is going to share that cargo space with competitors? Absolutely not.
Well, think about it. This is almost like how AWS started. Build infrastructure that can support yourself, then productize it, and sell it. Private ports, private airstrips, private boats, private planes… a container is a container!
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.
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.
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.
It was ultimately Bezos' API mandate that made this (and the cloud as we know it) happen:
> 1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
>...
>5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
us-east-1 is made up from several availability zones, it is extremely unlikely to go offline for months. If a catastrophe of a scale to do that happened, some datacenters being offline wouldn't be the headline news.
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.
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:
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.
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!
The internet also delivers mostly spam, and is still a public good.
The USPS needs reform, sure. But a public postal service which will deliver mail to everywhere, even at a loss, is fundamental to civilized society. Prior to the internet, this public good was more obvious. It's still needed.
Amazon delivers efficiently to 95% of addresses, so long as there's a profit to be had, and this is good for buyers. The USPS delivers to 100%, regardless of profit, and this is good for citizens and businesses - bills, legal documents, ballots and governments' communications are receivable at nearly every address in every state, thanks to the USPS. That's a tremendous public good.
If there were possible to talk about the American postal service non-ideologically, it would be a cinch to regulate away most junk mail, I imagine. Political oversight has in recent decades demanded the USPS be profitable, which misses its point.
> The USPS delivers to 100%, regardless of profit.
False. Did you see the part I said it already don’t serve all areas?
> The internet also delivers mostly spam, and is still a public good.
Compared to what and by what metric? You can’t opt out of physical spam, would you call it a public good (what does that mean?) if you couldn’t stop spam?
> If there were possible to talk about the American postal service non-ideologically, it would be a cinch to regulate away most junk mail, I imagine.
So you’re advocating for privatizing them?
> Political oversight has in recent decades demanded the USPS be profitable, which misses its point.
What is the point? It’s been talked about as a terrible monopoly for decades. It wasn’t profitable before they asked it to stop squandering money.
“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,” Ferreira said.
Well that's exactly the thinking that created FedEx (and which "right thinking" people, like the founder's professor, "knew" would obviously never work. Until it did.
If you remember the job is about results rather than simply repeating existing rituals and habits, this kind of solution becomes obvious. Most people can't be bothered to live beyond rituals and habits.
Alternate reading, Amazon is worsening the supply chain chaos by buying up transport.
I guess it depends on whether you are waiting for a finished article that is already produced and sold from Amazon, or your waiting for a supplier (of a supplier, of a supplier...) to deliver some intermediate part to the factory that makes what you want or something that isn't sold on Amazon.
What makes the problem tricky is the interconnectedness, so I feel any "solution" that comes from one source is likely just adding to the problem, like "solving" a bus getting stuck in traffic by taking the car instead. The collective solution is more people on the bus, and the individual solution makes the wider problem worse.
“ Alternate reading, Amazon is worsening the supply chain chaos by buying up transport” any evidence behind your theory? Like assuming Amazon wasn’t doing this, would things get better? Assume your bus is stuck because the driver is an idiot. Would putting more ppl on the bus solve the problem?
So, after actually reading the article, it's not clear what Amazon are actually doing in this area, the article seems a bit stretched, linking the vague idea that Amazon is investing heavily in supply logistics to the recent pandemic related supply chain issues.
My point was a more general one, that this claim of someone 'beating' or 'bypassing' a problem can, in many common cases, actually just be foisting the problem onto others and/or their future self. Beating a vaccine shortage by buying up stocks of the vaccine is a solution from one angle, but a problem from another.
And it's become fairly mainstream thought that traffic jams are emergent properties of traffic rather than individual problems (e.g. the viral video of the cars going in a circle and causing jams that pass backwards like a wave via mismatched breaking/acceleration). The tone of recent coverage of the supply chain stuff on HN from people with some inside knolwedge reminds me more of traffic engineering, than a stupid bus driver causing trouble.
Actually dedicated bus lines is what works in preventing buses getting stuck in traffic. Not surprisingly, even that does not seem to make buses more popular.
Overall, I think we arguing about competition as a whole being good or bad. I worked at global logistics, and in my experience most of the players, both public and private, are unchangeable rent-seeking dinosaurs. I have 0 issues with amazon eating them up, and when amazon itself becomes an unchangeable rent-seeking dinosaur I hope something else will end it.
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).
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.
To say that they don't think small is a massive oversimplification. They are on a scale that affords them the luxury of thinking big without being overly exposed.
They can quite literally burn through several epochs at a loss while the competition would go bankrupt.
