As a side note, I'm mildly paranoid about new Apple devices spending a week held up in Chinese customs. Is the CCP throttling exports, or installing backdoors?
Good article here: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor...
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=y3qfeoqErtY&t=5m50s
Anchorage is also not all that far off the Great Circle route anyway.
I recently discovered Nullschool's new (or updated) NO2 channel. This is even more effective than the SO2 channel for identifying global shipping routes. See for example (time-stamped for earlier today):
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2021/11/15/2100Z/chem/surface/...
Note that trans-pacific routes from both Seattle/Vancouver and Los Angeles/San Diego meet near Kodiak Island along the Aleutians.
I'm fairly confident those represent sea traffic rather than air, given similar traces through the Indian Ocean / Red Sea. I'm presuming relatively little air traffic traverses Suez. Similarly Panama, and traffic from Europe to South Africa.
Anchorage is located slightly north of that trace and has its own NO2 track.
The intermediary stop in Anchorage, as opposed to flying from Shanghai to Oakland, CA, actually increases total flight distance by around 144 miles but allows the aircraft to carry an additional 45,000kg of cargo (instead of extra fuel) increasing revenue for the trip by around $90,000.
Why would traveling an extra 144 miles allow the aircraft to carry 45,000kg of cargo instead of fuel? I feel like I'm misreading it.
There's probably a little bit of effect like the rocket equation going on - the further you are going, the more fuel you need to get there, and the more fuel you need to carry the additional fuel. Stated a different way, fuel requirements vs distance is worse than linear, since fuel itself has weight.
For it to make economic sense it just needs to exceed the extra cost of time spent at the intermediate port. And even that can offset by adding cargo for that intermediate destination to replace the weight savings of not carrying that “last mile” jet fuel.
The orbit around the Earth is the closest and travel there is the cheapest, but manufacturing fuel out of nothing (vacuum) is pretty much impossible. Technically, what you have on lower Earth orbits isn't vacuum, but a very, very thin gas. It is still probably too thin to be used as a source of stuff for industrial processes.
The closest solid body we have as of now is the Moon. A nice source of minerals, where fuel will be almost certainly produced in situ in the future, but then you still need to fly from Earth to Moon orbit and get the produced fuel to the Moon orbit to tank the ship. (Possibly using a space elevator.) Still quite a lot of delta v.
The best solution could be to intercept a comet full of volatile materials and drag it somehow to the Earth orbit, say, 1000 km above the planet. Of course, if you mess up and hit the Earth instead, you will cause a nice extinction event down there...
You mean a space elevator from the Moon (since on Earth it seems to be infeasible)? It's probably doable but I suspect that an electromagnetic accelerator would be far more affordable and technologically less demanding.
You need approximately 60 seconds of 3G acceleration to reach orbit around the Moon. That would mean some 54 km of an accelerator. That is more feasible than I instinctively expected. The main question is how much metal would be needed for 1 m of such accelerator track.
As for the track, I suspect it might be (order-of-magnitude-wise) similar to existing maglevs on Earth. On one hand, you need to reach higher velocities, higher precisions, etc. On the other hand, any supporting structure can be substantially more lightweight (much smaller gravity, no corrosion resistance required, etc.).
>Of course, if you mess up and hit the Earth instead, you will cause a nice extinction event down there...
Why does it need to be in Earth's orbit. If we have the ability to capture a comet and place it in a more friendly orbit, we'd surely have the ability to park it in the moon's orbit negating a SimCity-esque ELE.
Electric aircraft you are always "flying with a full load of fuel" which means every joule of energy is "the most expensive energy" as someone here put it, analogous to the last mile of range for a liquid-fueled aircraft. You never have that ability to "take off with a half tank" and trade fuel for extra payload, or operate more efficiently by tailoring fuel to actual needed range, or benefit from higher efficiency at the tail end of a long flight.
Unless electric power becomes significantly more energy-dense, it's always going to be a problem that dogs electric-powered aircraft. And it's hard to see that happening since it's very much the opposite - liquid fuel is significantly more energy-dense than batteries anyway, plus the implications of the rocket equation.
To beat (or at least, not completely be ruined by) the rocket equation what you need is droppable battery packs - completely use them up in sequence, then drop them in midair as you fly to lighten the load. (Well, you need much higher energy density than batteries can currently deliver, too, but let's just talk rocket equation.)
Using "droppable" packs also has the implication that each individual pack (or at least a "core" pack) has to be able to support enough current for at least cruising power (and you probably do not want to design an aircraft with the known implication that full takeoff power will be unavailable after a certain duration of the mission - or that taking off with a "partial fuel load" means you do not have full takeoff power available - the FAA is not going to look kindly on either of those approaches, because if you miss a landing, going around is now very difficult, and that is one of the most likely places for crashes to happen already).
As far as pluggable battery packs - major airports already are critically short on available landing/takeoff slots. Airlines bid fiercely to get them already, and would love to add more slots for real aircraft and not gimmick 200-mile-range electric aircraft. And a large aircraft needs a large runway, so you can't just trivially "add more airports", nor do you want too many planes interacting in the same vicinity - two or maybe three active runways is about the practical limit. So that's not a very good idea at all, there's already a critical resource constraint that building an aircraft around high-takeoff-landing-cycle flight models would make much worse. The "meta" of airport landing slot economics already runs heavily to running bigger aircraft so you can fit more fares/cargo per landing slot - the A380 and 787 and other super-jumbo aircraft are basically designed for this situation where you simply cannot land any more aircraft so you have to land bigger ones.
Leaving aside runway slots, takeoffs and landings are also the most dangerous part of flight, more flight cycles means much more danger for the aircraft and its surroundings (and passenger airports tend to be near people, although perhaps this is not a constraint for cargo airports as much). It's also the hardest on the airplane - pressurization/depressurization cycles and wing loadings are what busts up an aircraft to a much greater extent than mere flight hours, there are only so many cycles you can make an aircraft take regardless of flight hours. So if you land and take off a lot more, you have to spend the energy (and financial) cost of aircraft manufacture much more frequently, which likely neutralizes a lot of the environmental benefits. It's also the most energy intensive phase of flight - if you are taking off 5x as much to make the same trip, are you even more efficient within a single flight, let alone when we amortize that the airplane (and it's "build-time emissions") now lasts 1/5th as long due to increased flight cycles?
It's a bad idea for a lot of reasons. Just make more railways, and high-speed railways, we'd benefit hugely from moving as much traffic as possible (obviously not overseas!) to trains and (for cargo) ships. Significantly more environmentally friendly than air travel will ever be.
It's fun from a tech development perspective though. Obviously pushing tech at the edge of capabilities benefits everything - motor technology, manufacturing, battery technology. And those do go into some useful things.
Adding a stop in Anchorage adds about 200 km: https://www.greatcirclemap.com/?routes=PVG-ANC-OAK
The plane is probably limited by takeoff weight: body plus fuel plus cargo. By adding a stop in the middle, the plane can take off with less fuel from Shanghai. Since it has 45000 kg less fuel, it can instead carry 45000 kg more cargo. Total fuel consumption for the trip ends up slightly higher, but fuel per kg of useful cargo is much less.
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.2044509,-174.2639372,10.04z
[edit]: The town of Atka apparently has a population of 53, spread over 32 households. There's an airport, but some expansion would probably be needed to handle Shanghai<->Oakland shipping traffic...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atka,_Alaska
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atka,_Alaska#/media/File:Atka....
I wonder why it has not been done? Maybe because of this -
"In 1996, the U.S. Department of Transportation exempted Alaska's Anchorage International Airport and Fairbanks International Airport from the Jones Act, which prohibits foreign airlines from transporting cargo between U.S. cities. Now, foreign carriers are allowed to refuel their planes in Alaska before continuing on to an American airport or returning home. Because of this, Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport now handles approximately 80% of all air cargo traffic between Asia and North America."
Maybe you need to find a non American location. A floating refuel location?
It'd be interesting to run the numbers.
It is.
A direct great circle route still goes over the Aleutians, it seems.
P.S. BOOOOOO on UPS, who just claimed they tried and failed to deliver it while I was standing on my porch with the Ring camera on. So much for spending the night migrating. Hello, Monday night happy hour.
Oh man, I'd be on fire right now. Drinking is probably the best alternative.
It was delivered to a pickup point around 6pm thou so I was still able to get it that day at least.
1. Hub and Spoke. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoke%E2%80%93hub_distribution...)
2. Optimized traveling salesman looks very suboptimal locally.
----
For more details: try playing OpenTTD with cargodist (OpenTTD 1.4.0 and above, roughly June 2013 or later). This is where mail / passengers / cargo will automatically route themselves and plan where to go rather than the default pathing algorithm.
You'll find that the most efficient route is to fill up your trains such that they're full. __Not__ necessarily for individual packages to take the shortest path. In fact, many routes are locally suboptimal (ie: moving away from the destination) so that you can reach a hub.
Sending a train with 100% of cargo down your rail-lines is far more efficient than sending two trains with 50% cargo. Similar issues happen to airplanes, busses, trains, and ships in real life.
Your post convinced me to try playing with cargodist.
Business finds a way.
Also Apple's logistics game has always had these weird efficiencies. I remember ordering an iPod like 15 years ago, and I got a FedEx tracking number where I could see its progress flying overnight out of China. It was pretty wild at the time.
Apple would, of course, comply, as they did for iCloud.
In the default configuration of a mac, Apple retains full remote code execution ability on the machine.
Edit:
Back door exists for all gov, in that keys to encryption are stored in country.
So back door always existed. But apparently that’s only bad when China have access to it.
I guess because of the US long record of cyber trustworthiness.
Effectively everything Apple sells is made in China. Apple is nothing without China. They are, unfortunately, required to do literally anything the CCP demands of them, push comes to shove, to continue existing as we know them.
Losing the Chinese market would be sudden-er death for Apple. China is Apple's largest market, and will be the vast majority of their revenue growth for the next 15-30 quarters.
More importantly, losing the Chinese market means losing ~100% of all of their manufacturing. (Anyone know how many iPhones are being made in India these days?)
Kentucky is the UPS International Air Hub, nearly all UPS cargo flights go there. FedEx is Memphis, both because they are well positioned relative to the densest parts of the US population with the earliest delivery requirements.
[1] https://www.adn.com/business-economy/2019/12/06/ups-plans-ma...
[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/news/2019/08/15/fedex-ne...
First we flew to Seattle, and then after a layover, flew directly over Anchorage to Beijing via the great circle route. About 10 hrs and maybe 3800 miles into the journey, I was looking down at my home town.
Also, how hard can it be to bribe a delivery in US guy working for minimum wage?
What is your threat model? Do you have reason to suspect for package interdiction ?
Lots of jewelry places use USPS to ship gems.
If your parcel is in a box of other parcels with other destinations, it makes sense to send the whole lot to one place to split it up and reorg packages, even if the end result is more airmiles, because there are fewer unpack-sort-pack events.
A package from abroad often changes hands through various regional carriers, and is sometimes bumped or combined or divided by many criteria depending on where it is and what it is. I found this out by ordering electronics that also had single items that required special shipping that arrived far far later (the trigger for me, is batteries, which always take more time)
That explains the last two steps.
For the rest of them, no idea; but I can speculate: it looks like zhenzhou is a major shipping hub and occasionally there are long delays: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/stuck-in-zhenzhou-for-5... (note that sometimes my packages say they are in china but are actually landed in the US already).
South Korea and Anchorage: maybe it's cheaper to take more short-hop flights? Haha, I had to look it up (TLDR: yes) Well: https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-your-ipad-comes-via-anchor... (note in that case it went to memphis before the final US destination, memphis is the Fedex hub).
Some things look inefficient from a distance, especially if you look at just a few random samples, but then turn out to be efficient when you compute overall measures like "package throughput divided by shipping costs". Never underestimate both the efficiency and ineffiency of modern transport systems.
The 2nd half seems absurd on too many levels, conspiracy level thinking.
Changing software? Super easy to detect. Changing hardware? insanely expensive to do it en masse, esp outside of the factory.
There's no target, but mass surveillance? This checks so few logic boxes.
1. CCP needs to hack shipping label system to track a specific person (DHL/CCP shipper/Fedex) which method? We need to interject against them all.
2. CCP was waiting for this person to buy a Macbook Pro?!
3. CCP was lucky enough that the exact model was back ordered via China shipping routes. We were lucky because normally they could just walk into any Apple Store and buy it and walk out. No ability to target a specific person.
4. What if the target "returns the laptop?!" Our years of hacking setup didn't work.
There are insane amounts of difficulty for this target vector which make it effectively impossible to go after a specific person via supply chain, specific order.
So we're back at mass surveillance. That doesn't work because given enough people, someone pen/security check the laptops coming out. Apple will recall.
The way you do this, is you have ‘partnerships’ with the major shippers where they match against known person of interest on your list. When someone has an interesting shipment to one of your targets, it gets flagged and set aside in a known location.
Since all new style equipment needs a basic plan to add targeted hardware/firmware attacks anyway, since if you need the capability to compromise any given target at will (which they do) you need the capability to compromise pretty much all common equipment readily available, at a minimum. All available equipment being a realistic requirement too.
Some bored tech will then take the already developed playbook for that specific piece of equipment, write the firmware or glue on the specific special chip to the board, pack it up, and hand it back to the shipper.
A physical version of room 641a [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A] essentially.
The Snowden leaks showed it happened regularly, what, a decade ago?
If you think China doesn’t have something like that too, I have a bridge to sell you.
So then the question is - are you interesting enough to make the list? That I don’t know.
But, again, I'll "buy that bridge" when it comes to an Apple product-supply-chain being hacked by a state actor to target an individual.
CCP can't bank on a specific Apple product being purchased by a specific person routed through their side/controlled supply chain.
As before, most apple products are not routed directly from China to a consumer. This is a pretty rare circumstance given the supply chain bottlenecks.
I agree both sides have the ability to "hold product" in the shipping lane to do all sorts of nefarious things, but that only works if you can predict that movement (i.e. destination being on "your side" of control). The specific circumstances matter here and they don't make it an attack vector against a specific person.
Definitely not the case for everyone, especially an enterprise, but I bought it via the apple store app and the tracking showed it from China -> Chinese Customs -> To me, and through fedex.
So they had all the information they would need in one place to do what I am describing in at least this scenario.
Someone somewhere puts the persons name and address into a To address for a shipping company. If the origination is in China and it's sold direct, that final address and name will be on that label, and in the tracking database.
It doesn't have to be perfect to catch a decent number of targets. If even 25% of the purchased products get intercepted this way for a target it will likely be effective.
With that destination, I'm assuming UPS delivery. I spent 24 hours at the sort facility there shooting a documentary about the delivery service. There's a reason UPS picked Louisville and FedEx picked Memphis. Knowing that reason it does make sense.
Fun fact, Lousiville's airport is an international airport only because of UPS. No international passenger flights use that airport.
Shenzhen to Kentucky to west coast. No problem from my perspective.
For a premium product, I would expect them to be focussing on the "Designed by Americans in America" bit of the message rather than the "Made in China".
Also, on the back of my iPad Pro 12.9 2021 it says "Designed by Apple in California Manufactured in China". Apple doesn't hide this point at all.
The Mac Pro though is Manufactured in Texas domestically and outside of the US it is manufactured in China.
It does not anywhere say it is made in China. Yes Apple is hiding this.
are you ironically elevating Chinese rule of law over others while thinking its helping your American nationalist sentiment? wow, we have to go deeper
These days, I would expect most consumers to assume "tech is made in China/Taiwan/Korea/Japan" unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Chinese companies can make absolutely top quality stuff and my view on this has changed many years ago. I now own a Volvo built in Chengdou, China, and it's literally the most well build vehicle I ever owned, definitely better than any German car I've had(my previous Merc built in Germany creaked like a horse cart, this doesn't even make a peep from anywhere).
China are the boss of manufacturing these days.
Why? The reality is that Apple is reselling a Foxconn product made in Shenzhen.
Random. But curious to see if this will become more common (or remain relegated to specialized, small brands)
https://relwen.com/pages/hallmarks For reference.
The whole game is to play every country's people and their political instrument. From my perspective, it is easier the more nationalist they are, and both China and the US have very nationalist people. So stamp "made in china" on anything printed on paper, as required there, and stamp "designed in california" on things engraved in metal and then overcharge for it because Americans already suspect something domestic would be more expensive.
You are surprised they don't engage in (possibly fraudulent) deception of their customer? Should they?
They can order workers to do that in the factory. Apple won't be able to do anything about it apart from removing anything that shouldn't be there when it lands in the US. Chinese workers can't say no to CPC orders and Apple has to agree if they want to continue to exploit cheap workforce and lax environment regulations.
It's likely we both are not the main concerns of our respective surveillance apparatus :D
Which was strange. Usually all of my Apple kit goes through Alaska. Not this time.