Pieces of roof falling on your head from a 5.9 Richter Scale earthquake is not "an emergency". It is actually a sign of White Privilege, since only White People are rich enough to have places with roofs.
More importantly, I am worried your comment has breached the Victorian Standards of Acceptable Speech (VSAS). "This is poor satire" - expressing your own opinions is strictly forbidden and is punishable by years in hard labour camps or by firing squad. Though this sounds extreme, it's really for the safety of the people, to protect them from dangerous thoughts. Please be careful about what things you share online.
I would have thought that you'd find my comment appropriate, given that Melbourne is now starting to display policies similar to those of China. This is not just empty rhetoric - they are instituting laws that you of all people should find worrisome. Wait... you didn't specify if you support the CCP or support an independent and free Hong Kong, so maybe the opposite is actually true.
There were some interesting profiles following the NotPetya attack on Maersk in 2017 where Maersk claimed to have 1,200 - 1,500 applications, 49,000 laptops, 6,200 servers.
Maersk are entering into block-chain "distributed ledger technology" with IBM and similar modern solutions. But one article put $300 of every $2,000 of shipping costs for administration and paperwork[0].
I think you're right, there is a massive advantage to be had, and companies are chasing that advantage. But from my (tangential logistics) background, even the biggest shipping companies have the usual range of legacy systems, heavy administration overhead, plenty of paperwork, excel-based-tools and huge integration headaches.
> 300 of every $2,000 of shipping costs for administration and paperwork
Damn that's a lot. I understand this is a capital intensive industry so I guess it's hard/impossible to get in now but it seems like if someone started a competitor from scratch and had great software as the foundation of their company, they'd make a killing
A good deal of it probably has to do with how crazy customs gets in every single port, and how to properly insure goods. (Lloyd’s of London got its start in marine insurance.)
If your paperwork is mostly driven by other actors tech probably won’t help all that much. Tech has not made significant inroads in disrupting American health insurance, for example.
Is there a reason these customs processes can't be simplified? Or is it due to some perverse capitalist reason, like TurboTax lobbying against simpler tax code?
- Every set of goods has its own regulations. Ships carry all sorts of goods.
- Every country has different customs regulations, so paperwork is not really that reusable across ports.
- Customs is a huge source of fraud. In poorly managed countries it is one of the prime vectors for bribery and corruption. So destination ports have to verify everything even if they do receive the paperwork, because there’s no trust.
Generally speaking if you want to cut customs red tape your options are some kind of free trade deal (which is not necessarily popular and never covers all types of goods), or banding together with a bunch of different countries to submit to one supranational entity like the EU. In fact we have a live example of how complicated customs arrangements can be; look at how trade from UK to EU has been disrupted by Brexit and the introduction of customs.
Here in Norway it's mostly been a lack of focus and money.
The government doesn't seem to consider the huge hidden cost to the businesses in the country this represents, and the businesses haven't been stellar at highlighting it, which I guess is because they mostly just push that cost onto the consumers.
One big factor is simply that a customs authority can dictate whatever process it wishes for ships who want to load/unload cargo there.
It's also not just customs, there are a ton of ancillary processes related to berthing - things like harbor fees, environmental documentation etc.
I know of at least one case where, as recently as ~2015, a shipping company had to keep around old machines with IE8 because that was the only way to interact with authorities at a given port.
Everyone has to do paperwork, but is that 'admin overhead' it an essential part of safety culture? I'm struggling to see where the overhead is that significant.
It is a lot more obvious in other fields -- medicine and highly regulated/litigious professions.
it does not compile, I guess it's just like those ERP Systems - you don't need shitton of domain knowledge, because you need fuckton of domain knowledge and during development you'll learn even more and have to refactor a lot of stuff frequently for edge cases.
This is obviously something that affects how competitive you can be. As an example, our software allowed a customer to go from 5-6 hours of work in their previous application, to less than 10 minutes in ours for a typical workload.
However, a big remaining issue is that there's a lot of local laws and procedures around which are not exposed in a computer-friendly way. If they are computerized they're often old systems with serious limitations.
For example, import declarations in Denmark is limited to only 99 goods items, so consolidation of goods items is almost required, especially in e-commerce settings, which again makes it more difficult if things are re-exported (customer didn't want that jacket say).
This can't be fixed on the commercial side, it requires work by the government agencies.
Trademark registrations are a formality in the US, but saves everyone a lot of time and money. In the US, it goes to whoever uses it first in commercial capacity. They will have to dispute it in court because they were using "Everyday Sling" in practice way before Amazon was.
The better argument for Amazon is that "Everyday Sling" is too generic of language similar to "Daypacks," and even Peak Design may have thought so because they did not bother to register it for years [0], [1].
> The better argument for Amazon is that "Everyday Sling" is too generic of language similar to "Daypacks,"
I don't really agree with that, because the "everyday sling" is not a sling, it's a container. It would appear to be a fanny pack supported by your shoulder instead of your waist.
A sling is a piece of cloth which supports something against gravity; the major applications are holding an injured arm and holding a baby. See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sling ; the ordinary sense is noun 2(a), and there is no sense that includes a container.
If you're looking a 20 x 20 x 20 meters of gold (i.e. 8000 cubic meters, not a 20m3 cube) then that's more like 154,000 metric tons.
Which Wolfram Alpha helpfully confirms is approximately equal to the mass of all gold ever mined. There is some contention about this value, the World Gold Council posit 197,576 metric tons (and up to 3000 additional tonnes per year) [1], USGS suggest a cube with 28 meter sides, or 244,000 metric tons [2].
400,000 kg probably comes from 20 cubic meters of gold (386,000 kg).
The stock Signal spiked after Elon Musk said to use signal, has nothing to do with the app. A different Zoom spiked at the beginning of COVID. A lemonade company in 2017 put blockchain in its name and watched the stock price soar. Hertz went way up after declaring bankruptcy. I’m willing to bet this is clueless speculators.
The "generally understood" purpose of prison is for:
retribution, incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation
The US skews a more towards the retributive (i.e. "just punishment") than other jurisdictions. For example, the federal sentencing guidelines explicitly prohibit reduced sentences in order to facilitate rehabilitation (except drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs).
It's easy enough to imagine a society where prison has a significantly less retribution focused, instead focusing on how a criminal can be rehabilitated (education opportunities, community corrections orders e.t.c). Popular example being some Nordic prisons.
"In an emergency" has always been allowed reason to leave home during the Victorian lockdowns.
1 - https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/how-we-live