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Comment by SixSigma | Hacker News Reader

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SixSigma·

4% of all shipping containers are inspected by customs at The Port Of Rotterdam.

1% contain things that shouldn't be there (that's all they would say when telling us).

The port I was at (there are 25 I think) unload 14 million containers per year.

Those are pretty good odds for smugglers.

EDIT: they said random inspection but they would, wouldn't they

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Depends how the shipping containers they inspect are selected. It could be that they are targeted inspections.

Yea, they pick the 4% most likely to contain smuggled goods. 25% of them do. That does not mean 25% of all containers contain smuggled goods.

Even if those 4% were mostly targeted searches, a lot of smuggling happens 'via' another country, to avoid containers (from, say, Colombia) from being targeted as suspect based on where they're from (or not directly). But yeah, good odds - 100% checks are impractical and even those will sometimes fail to find anything. The only real effect successfully finding smuggled wares has is that the wares will become more expensive, which will only make the suppliers want to smuggle more.

Port of Rotterdam doesn't randomly check containers. They have pretty good systems to determine if something strange is going on. You cannot just extrapolate the 4% if the distribution wasn't random.

1% of the 4% (so 0.04% of the total) or 1% of the total, meaning 1 in every 4 inspections finds something?

1% of the 4%. But without targetting that's still 1% of all containers.

You're assuming that the 4% where chosen completely at random.

1% of the 4% or of the 100%?

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