Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Well, at least they got their US Federal Motor Carrier broker registration and insurance:

    Date: 09/14/2016
    USDOT Number: 2926893 
    Legal Name: UBER FREIGHT LLC

They're not trying to pull their usual "we're a special snowflake beyond regulation" stunt.

Trucking is vulnerable to Uber. "More than 1 million smallish companies own 90 percent of all trucks, each owning about three trucks on average." That lets Uber be the master and the truckers the slaves, as with their taxi service.

Cargomatic claims 1,811,000 miles traveled. They launched in 2014, so that's under a million miles a year. That's nothing. The average delivery truck travels 12,000 miles a year, so, from their own numbers, Cargomatic represents about 80 trucks, total. They may be run over by Uber.

The biggest freight broker is C.H. Robinson Worldwide, net revenue about $2.2bn. They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into because the players there are not small.

Freight brokerage is so fragmented that Uber could roll up the industry.

Amazon is also wading into this logistics space, so they will be head to head. https://logistics.amazon.com They have a lead; they're already into aviation: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/amazon...

It's going to be a spectacular, automated race to the bottom. The losers are going to be the 10 million professional drivers in the old trucking and taxi businesses.

>It's going to be a spectacular, automated race to the bottom.

Excellent! More efficient shipping benefits a lot of people. The problem isn't the increase in efficiency — are faster CPUs a race to the bottom because worse chip makers go out of business? — it's poor policy that fails to adequately compensate those who lose from this. We should focus on electing officials and supporting policy to turn these Kaldor-Hicks improvements into Pareto ones.

(I know you're not taking a stance against automation, I just think it's important to stress that the correct response is to make everyone better off by using some of the gains to compensate the losers)

Yea it's amazing people complaining about efficiency and an increase in prosperity. I understand people arguing for the redistribution of wealth but arguing against an increase in prosperity is ludicrous

While trying to validate your 12k number (its more likely 65k and thats not long-haul, http://www.afdc.energy.gov/data/10309) I found an interesting data sheet:

http://www.trucking.org/ata%20docs/what%20we%20do/image%20an...

I personally travel 20k miles a year, and that's just to and from work!

Thank you, that 12k number had me doing a double take. I drive more than that to/from work and around town for groceries and such. I have an old friend who runs a contracted local freight delivery service, he puts about 75k miles per year on his truck just delivering in the metro Atlanta area. His wheels are turning eight to ten hours per day, four or five days a week.

> They're not trying to pull their usual "we're a special snowflake beyond regulation" stunt.

Okay you need to understand that laws come with consequences. And if the consequences are not sufficient to deter an action, then the law does not exist.

Uber finds the consequences possible from state governments and smaller administrative authorities to be negligible. This is an accurate assessment generally due to predictable underfunded nature, deficits, lack of case law and lack of political will that these areas have.

The federal government is not any of that and has unlimited resources to ensure compliance. It also provides the benefit of supplanting state law, good across the entire republic and helps with reciprocal agreements in other republics. So there are both adequate consequences for noncompliance and adequate benefits for compliance.

State autonomy has been irrelevant since interstate commerce became the only form of commerce, and most of the time people are just playing along.

Big boat shipping is not going to go automated anytime soon. Boat staff are a relative rounding error in costs from my estimates. There are only 39k of those boats in the world, and they are not going to be electric any time soon unless there is a revolution in battery tech that makes it economical.

Port automation on the other hand, is an opportunity I'm guessing.

Probably 90% of port jobs are automated away compared to 50 years ago.

Containerization alone is probably responsible for half of that.

If you want a good read on containerization, I'd really recommend reading 'The Box', a history of shipping containers. For a topic that might sound bland, it's fascinating.

https://www.amazon.com/Box-Shipping-Container-Smaller-Econom...

Yes. For an extreme example, here's Rotterdam's container port. Zero people in the quay area.[1] This is sped up, but entirely real. Not only are the vehicles driverless, so are the cranes. A few people in a control tower oversee that operation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo

Amazing

The world's largest container ships run with a crew of about seven people.

Do you have a source for that? I once asked a captain of a 14.000+ TEU vessel if they really only needed the minimum amount of crew. According to him theory and practice are vastly different. Meaning: a news article explaining that a vessel can be run with X amount of people doesn't mean there are only X amount of people on board.

Secondly, there's all kinds of regulations. A container vessel is operated 24/7. If 7 is the amount of people working on it at a time, in practice the crew will be twice that.

In any case, your response lacks a lot. The person you replied to talked about big boat shipping and how it is not going to be automated any time soon. You only account for the crew on a vessel. There's the customers (loads of which still like to send a fax), lots of outdated governments, outdated vendors, other companies, etc.

That's true that newer ships have more automation so crew size reduced dramatically. For example there is no man in machine rooms any more in new ships.

Another thing, crew size would be 3x of needed crew for one shift because in ships there are three shifts, one shift lasts in 8 hours.

(Source: I am originally Naval Architect)

You're right, 'can be run' != 'is run'. According to Wikipedia, the Emma Maersk has a crew of 13:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_M%C3%A6rsk

Still not a lot of fat to cut for a ship with the capacity of a medium size port.

The captains I asked was a captain for one of Maersk E-class vessels. They don't use the minimal amount. Unfortunately it's been a few years since I asked and I don't remember much of the details, just that the stated minimal crew is not what's on a vessel.

If a ship has no people, it also needs no bridge, control room, bedrooms, kitchen etc. If it has none of that, it needs to water system, toilets, lighting, heating etc.

And with all that gone, you could fit a lot more cargo on the same size boat.

Can you express "a lot" as a percentage of existing capacity? Because it seems like, relative to the amount of cargo space these ships already have, that percentage would be pretty small.

By eyeballing an Emma Maersk diagram, I think you could get three more stacks of containers, for ~5% more capacity.

Related question: if they wanted 5% more capacity in the Emma Maersk, what kept them from just building it that way? Are the sizes of these ships a fuel and utilization efficiency optimization problem?

Rolls-Royce would disagree https://gcaptain.com/rolls-royce-launches-strategic-partners...

They could be electric by generating their own power, with a nuclear reactor for instance.

Most people would call those "nuclear". I'm sure you'd find some if you googled them.

Also, the ship's crew are doing most maintenance underway, which keeps the asset producing value. Pretty much the only maintenance done on cargo ships at a port is stuff that requires a drydock. It's actually cheaper overall to have the maintenance crew ride the ship around the world (and also do the small number of sailing tasks that would be expensive to automate) than it is to take the ship out of service at ports to, say, repaint everything, or change the engine oil.

I think "slaves" is not the best word to use here.

It's ok. It's just a word.

It's a fitting description, but since Uber workers are paid I suppose a better analogy would be "master/servant".

Not being able to quit as you were owned by your master made one a slave. Slaves were often paid to increase motivation.

I think that is the point that is trying to be made. If uber "captures" this industry they will become the "masters" it will be difficult to find work outside their network, giving you no choice but to stay.

Peasants?

Serfs is the most accurate

"Well, I do whatever he tells me to do."

"Where I come from, we call that slavery." - Wonder Woman.

The stunts are to get press headlines. Fortunately trucking and freight are a bit too boring for the ordinary consumer to relate to.

Their customers, corporations guarding themselves against risk want every checkbox checked and rechecked twice. That's why its no surprise they're not pulling off stunts here.

Too boring for the ordinary consumer, yes. Too boring for an investment banker weighing what price to purchase the stock at in an IPO, no.

Depending on how they do the accounting for this it could be huge gains to the top line, something much needed to validate a $60bn valuation in the public markets.

> They also organize ocean freight and air freight, which Uber isn't likely to get into…

…yet

1,000,000 / 1,200 = 833.3

1,000,000 / 12,000 = 83.3

Reply on news.ycombinator.com