Archive of posts with tag 'Logistics'

Norway's Stad Ship Tunnel →

October 17, 2022 • #

Norway is in the planning stages on a tunnel for ships to bypass having to sail around the Stad peninsula, an infamously dangerous spot with high winds, rough waters, and foul weather. It’s a 2km pathway under the base of the peninsula. Based on rough map calculation, it’ll save ferries and other ships over 30 miles of rough sailing into the open Atlantic.

When you look at the fjord-laden coastline of Norway — a thousand miles of sliced up mountains and deep chasms — it’s sort of surprising that this hasn’t been attempted before.

See on Google Earth

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Systems and Supply Chains

November 10, 2021 • #

You can’t touch current events online (at least in circles I follow) without running into 25 opinions on what’s causing our supply chain lock-ups.

Global supply chains are just about the most interesting examples of systems by the traditional systems thinking definition. They have stocks and flows, feedback loops, and nonlinear response dynamics, plus they’re highly visible, global, and impact each of us in very direct ways. Because everyone on earth is impacted directly by these problems, we’re hyper-aware of the issues, which drives the experts out of the woodwork to flex their Dunning-Kruger muscles.

My diagnosis in all the reading I’ve done is, generally, if you think there’s a single pinch point or monocausal explanation, you don’t understand how systems work.

That being said, I always love to hear what Venkatesh Rao has to say on complex systems like this. As much as we think of supply chains as an “old world” system of technologies, Rao points out that the analysis on the issue so far “seems to adopt the posture that we are talking about a crisis of mismanagement in a well-understood old technology rather than a crisis of understanding in a poorly understood young one.” Meaning, an enormous number of the contributing innovations to the modern supply chain are a decade or two old. Automation, algorithmic cargo sorting, the buy/sell economics of e-commerce, epic Panamax super containerships. All of the novel contributing innovations aren’t as well understood as we think they are, especially the impacts they have when they fail. It’s worth remembering that due to its sheer size and entangled complexity, a global shipping supply chain is a networked combination of entities designed individually, but interfacing with one another. No committee sat down and laid out the infrastructure, policy, transportation protocols, or decision making processes that would get silicon from a factory floor in Shenzhen to the chip in the car in your driveway. Rao reminds us to think of this network as an emergent one:

The thing is, a supply chain is mostly an emergent entity rather than a designed one, and its most salient features often have very little to do with its nominal function of getting stuff from Point A to Point B. That’s just the supply chain’s job, not what it is. What it is is a homeostatic equilibrium created by billions of sourcing decisions made over time, by millions of individuals at businesses around the world making buying and selling decisions over time.

When a complex system is breaking down, when there are stopped flows or undesirable negative feedback loops, we have to carefully pick apart the system’s interrelationships to find root causes. In an interesting could-only-happen-on-Twitter turn of events a couple of weeks ago, Flexport founder Ryan Petersen possibly single-handedly unplugged one of the many possible clogs in the system when he cataloged Long Beach Port issues in a thread, chasing down one example bottleneck in the local area’s container stacking limitations:

The gist was: there aren’t enough trucks to pick up and haul the unloaded containers, so they need to be put somewhere on-shore. The stockyards used for holding containers are subject to regulations where they can’t stack them more than 2 units high. Therefore, an ever-growing fleet of ships sit at anchor until the clog is removed. But even this simple political solution isn’t the only friction — what’s causing the lack of trucks and/or drivers? Why don’t we have fallback locations ships can be rerouted to? We have a complex and fragile system subject to too many failure points. Big monocausal opinions don’t paint a realistic picture, even if there’s truth in them. “It’s all the longshoremen unions!” or “it’s consumerism!” or “we should reshore all manufacturing from China!” are all claims with some possible merit to them. But responding to only one of those will do next to nothing. The system will evolve around changes you make.

Supply chains are emergent functions of millions of individual interactions between nodes on a network. Changing individual policies doesn’t cure all of the system’s ills, but neither does sitting around blaming one another with simplistic claims about who or what the problem is.

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Weekend Reading: DeFi Yields, Cloudflare's Internet, and Standards in Logistics

July 2, 2021 • #

📈 How Are DeFi Yields So High?

This is a great primer on yield farming in DeFi from Nat Eliason. Seeing the insane 1000% APYs on some DeFi products, you have to wonder if it’s a Ponzi scheme (hint: sometimes it probably is). But there are plenty of legitimate and relatively reliable projects growing right now that look fascinating for the movement.

☁️ Cloudflare’s Intelligent Design

Cloudflare has such an interesting approach to building the “pipes and wires” of the internet, a business most people wouldn’t think of as glamorous (even though it’s technically extremely complex). The only other companies out there building and shipping products as quickly are Stripe and Amazon, one that Byrne Hobart calls out the reference to:

Their “workers” product lets customers write code and then deploy it to the edge around the world; they can be location-agnostic, both in the technical sense that packets won’t take a needlessly roundabout path to users and in the legal sense that if they run something in a country that requires data to be stored locally, it will be stored locally. They originally built this as an internal tool for deploying their own code, then started letting customers use it. And then they turned that decision into an abstraction: “And so we implemented what we internally and somewhat cheekily called the Bezos Rule. And what the Bezos Rule is, is the exact same rule that Amazon put in place when they were developing AWS, which is, any API or any development tool that we build for ourselves and for our own team, we also are then going to make available to our customers.” Cloudflare built an uptime factory, then workers became an uptime factory factory, and with the Bezos rule they’ve codified the production of such things: an uptime factory factory factory. They are no doubt adding new layers of recursion even now.

🚢 Ever Given, Supply Chains, and the Physical World

A great overview of the state of logistics from Flexport founder Ryan Peterson.

With demand for goods rising around the world, our shipping infrastructure is hitting scaling limits and bottlenecks that will be hard problems in the coming years. Petersen considers inconsistent standards and fragmentation to be major challenges to surmount:

Our computers, laptops, tablets, phones, and more can all connect quickly to the information we seek thanks to standardization. And while today’s global trade network is kind of like an internet of physical goods, it’s missing a standard like HTTP. The same way data passes between devices via the internet, goods pass between ocean ports, airports, warehouses, and other entities to reach their final destination. Without a logistics standard to act as a request-response protocol, all the players — suppliers, drayage, ports, warehouses, buyers — have to stitch their networks together manually.

Information gets lost; layers of redundancy, designed as backups given low visibility, slow the exchange: connections end up being very brittle. Let’s say there’s a shipment scheduled to arrive in Long Beach on Tuesday. But which terminal exactly and what pier number? What time is pickup? How long before late charges are incurred? Finding these answers is labor-intensive and imprecise. Logistics managers end up consulting different sources on websites, via email, or in person.

The dirty secret of the industry is that no one really knows where their stuff is. But if global trade were like the network of information as it is on the internet, we could simply type or speak into a search bar to ask and answer these questions, precisely.

This is not about the desired features of such a system, but rather about the need for standardization, the need for a universal language for global trade. Once this exists, the physical world, like software, becomes searchable, programmable, accessible — connecting a patchwork of country-specific regulations and more.

Interface points between ships, terminals, carriers, and suppliers should follow standars, like APIs for the physical world. But standards are one of the hardest coordination problems to solve. The most powerful and versatile standards are adopted organically. How can you get thousands of freight forwarders speaking the same language?

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Second and Third-Order Effects

October 6, 2020 • #

From Mark Levinson’s The Box, on the shipping container and its impact on global trade:

The true importance of the revolution in freight transportation would be found not in its effect on ship lines and dockworkers, but later, as the impact of containerization resonated among the hundreds of thousands of factories and wholesalers and commodity traders and government agencies with goods to ship. For most shippers, except perhaps government agencies, the cost of transporting goods was decisive in determining what products they would make, where they would manufacture and sell them, and whether importing or exporting was worthwhile.

A lesson in second- and third-order effects of innovation. At the time when Malcom McLean’s first standardized containers were unloaded from cargo ships in the 1950s, it seemed like a minor incremental advance (if it was even appreciated that much). Putting cargo in a consistently-sized steel box was something anyone could’ve started doing decades earlier, but even simple innovations are sometimes non-obvious.

It’s an interesting lesson in cascading effects once an invention is embraced. Containers lowered costs for shippers, which lowered costs for manufacturers, which lowered purchase prices for customers (as well as increased supply volumes). When you sum all those changes that compound in combination, you unlock all sorts of formerly-impossible economic adaptations. Amazing what sorts of scale of change can be unlocked by something as simple as a metal box.

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Recent Links: Playing with Numbers, Logistics Networks, Vancouver Island

September 13, 2017 • #

🎓 Numbers at Play: Dynamic Toys Make the Invisible Visible

Great tools keep up with their users. They operate at the speed of thought, ever shrinking the feedback loop between conceiving of an idea and exploring its consequences.

Tools for thought must support communication not just from the expert to the novice: they should enhance conversation between collaborative peers. They should enact thought at the speed of speech. With tools this fluid, we can reinforce natural dialogue through novel representations without awkward pauses. We can support students in co-constructing meaning as they discuss and resolve their multiple interpretations.

Fascinating work by the Khan Academy research team. They’re exploring different types of tools for teaching using visible, tangible “toys” to visualize concepts like fractions, subtraction, and more with interactive models.

🚢 How Logistics Networks Respond to Natural Disasters

I just finished up reading The Box, a history of how container shipping came about and evolved the global economy. With the storms of the last few weeks, I always wonder what sorts of second- and third-order impacts there are around the world when supply chains are disrupted by natural events.

🇨🇦 The Wild West Coast of Vancouver Island

I enjoyed this piece in Cruising World about a family’s sailing trip down the west side of Vancouver Island. The wild, wooded, and rocky coast of British Columbia is amazing landscape. They took this trip with their daughters of 2 and 5. What an amazing experience for kids to see wild bears and the village outposts in those harbors.

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