Amazon is bypassing supply chain chaos with chartered ships and long-haul planes

The notable exception here is, and that is a common theme, Amazon. Amazon realized how important ops and logistics and SCM are for their success. So they put them at their core (let's ignore AWS for now, I assume the AWS guys put ops at the center of stuff as well so). And it shows. Not everything was rosy at Amazon for sure, as relentless as Amazon is with operations it is with politics. And still, for an ops guy like myself it was the best place I ever worked at.

Anyways, this is kind of off topic, so I'll take my leave.

I've seen this with ex-Googlers on the software side, and ex-Apple folks from the hardware side who go independent tend to hit it too ("what do you mean our Chinese suppliers are refusing to retool their whole process for us?")

Being motivated about a job whether miltary /civilian should be about what you can do not if its corrupt /inefficient /incompetent almost any large institutuion usually is

Despite the rose-colored (gold-colored) glasses in some comments, I'm sure every military, and every other large organization, has the same things. We are dealing with millions of human beings. I've never worked with even 10 that were all so highly motivated.

For the most part, all of those issues fall squarely upon the leadership. Military personell have a duty to fufil lawful orders, and you can't simply resign and take a different job if given a lawful order you don't think is a good thing for all of those reasons.

In contrast, when working for an employer, you have at least some ability to refuse to do things you don't think are a good idea. Worst case, you're fired or resign and need to find other work. But you're very unlikely to be court martialed and imprisoned. Or even sued.

The current set of Googlers that are complaining aren't the ones that built the company though. Google's success was built in the late 90's and early 2000s when they really revolutionized internet search and then email. I would argue that since 2010 they have lost this edge - even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches. Many of their interesting projects today are acquisitions.

I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years, and what future impact this may have - at least from the outside it seems like some of the brutal meritocracy attitude that made SV great has died off.

Are you talking about the US military and do you have some data on that? I see people with no experience of the military imagine a storybook entity (which is a very popular public concept these days), but the US military has significant retention problems, very high rates of suicide and sexual assault (signals of and, for the latter, a cause of a toxic environment), and a lot of morale, discipline, and corruption problems. As a couple of examples of the latter, around a year ago, the head of special operations said that it was their top priority. In ~ the last year, the Navy was having trouble filling higher ranks because so many officers had been kicked out due to corruption scandals (e.g., the 'Fat Leonard' scandal).

The glorification of the military might seem patriotic, but I think it's the opposite: It's a way of not seeing and addressing problems, which weakens defense and leaves the people serving to deal with the problems and suffer the consequences (including the environment, more and longer tours, and possibly their lives). It's like a case of extreme over-confidence in a CEO - a very dangerous flaw.

> Compare that to the Googlers who constantly complain about their employer

People in the military don't gripe?

This sounds very biased. The VA is constantly complained about as is their benefits payments. The MRAs suck, they can’t speak about some secret stuff, none of this information is unusual or buried, it sounds like you have a very biased viewpoint, maybe from not getting to know any military.

>From an outside observer's perspective, the results are not as strong - the budgetary, humanitarian, environmental, collateral, and political costs of most of the military engagements of the past 50 years have been quite bad.

Vietnam, the fuck up in Iraq, and suicides are well known to be bad to everyone including the military, the default response to anyone who served is “thank you for your service”. Many see it as a job. I know a very friendly female marine (they complained about her kindness and said it wasn’t militant -and reflected badly on their perceptions), she was well decorated, and complained about sexism even though she was a superior to these men. Get to know some military people, your biased opinion will change.

Same in every bureaucracy.

It is impressive when a military can ship 100,000 soldiers and all the necessary equipment half way around the world in a month.

that's not on the personnel inside the military to decide what war to wage, but on the politicians and civilians.

The military is a tool - how well the tool works is a good metric to have. Whether the tool is used for good or evil, or whatever purpose the owner of the tool deems, is not on the tool itself to measure.

I think there are probably a fair number of everyday people who enlist without thinking about such things as what they would do if they needed to expose a war crime to the media or how their due process protections would compare to civilian life.

Now, they would probably know and be okay with getting treated like dirt in boot camp, having restrictions about where to live, where they can go in their free time, etc. But probably not as much about the more philosophical institutional beliefs about authority, ethics, what to optimize for, etc.

There's a pile and a half of people who only join the military for a much higher payout of benefits for essentially unskilled work, or only so the military will pay to educate them into skilled work certification, or only because they made some mistakes and it's that or a felony charge (typically with jail time), and they're all typically just hoping to fly under the radar of such things until they get out with what they want going in rather than genuinely approving of the military doing to them the sorts of things the military does.

Obviously not all, but many of these also come out with majorly reoriented priorities. We can pass value judgements on the goodness of the imposed priorities all we want, but they're pretty irrelevant to and just distract from the phenomenon itself: "Indoctrination" is absolutely the correct word to use, so much we need very little, if any, additional description. The US military, and pretty much every military under the sun, uses an intense bout of classical stress conditioning to induce the sort of immediate, unquestioning dedication you've needed for hundreds of years in an effective infantry formation to teach boot camp recruits how to be in the mindset of just efficiently and stoicly doing their job as the brass designed you, the very small cog in the very large machine of a superpower-scale techno-mechanized combined arms war machine, to do it. In software, experimentation is king everywhere with a healthy outlook, because wastes of time give just finite losses of money while breakout successes are comparatively infinite in money gains, so most risks are worth it until they're clearly working or not working. In the military, when the rubber hits the road, other people are depending on you to do your job just as everyone expects it to go so they can integrate you into their job, which includes shooting and getting shot at somewhere down the net. Flying by the seat of your pants in such an environment could possibly get your fellows killed when things don't pan out and you fail to deliver, so the simple stations the vast majority of military members fill just don't really tolerate independent thought without going up several ranks of approval. The type of risk just isn't seen as acceptable in that context regardless of why you're taking it, even if it's specifically for the military's long-term interest. The philosophy is that the juice is never worth the squeeze in combat, and since we're a combat force on the label we'll spread that philosophy of "just do what the man with the fancier patch says" to every desk worker and wrench turner as well as trigger puller. And we'll spread it through the most irresistible teaching method we're still allowed to.

Sorry for that ramble, but it's really important to not deemphasize the absolute psychological impact classical conditioning in such an overwhelming social context can have. There's a reason they march you for miles at first when they almost don't care how fat you get once you've got an actual job. There's a reason Marine boot camp intentionally prevents you from sleeping just about whenever possible the first few days you show up while knowing resistance to sleep is impossible to train. There's a reason hazing underperformers is just about as old as history itself. It's because you can make anyone do anything if you just beat them enough, if you just stress them more than they've experienced before. Stress basically compels obedience, and obedience is very habit forming. Is there some selection bias like you describe in play today? Absolutely, but I don't think anyone familiar enough with the psychological phenomenon I'm not doing a great job describing would think much would change if it wasn't around. We've all read about Stockholm/Lima syndrome after all, where people with neutral or reverse sympathies fall just as easily, and it's essentially the same phenomenon. Enough stress turns everyone, even independent thinking people or bullheaded rebellious people, into receptive sponges.

I think the UI that combines the 3rd party sellers with the Walmart/Amazon corporation retailer, is deliberately made confusing. I believe over voice, like when using Alexa, it is even more unclear what vendor is being ordered from.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-compensation-third-pa...

Against Amazon's rules, for sure.

Interestingly, the price was lower on Walmart.com but my wife had not checked first. But it was only $2.50 less. I have no idea how that worked out as profitable for the 'drop shipper' (in quotes because this kind of drop shipping is IMO not legitimate).

Or you can join the military, it looks like they might have some educational program.

There is clearly a spectrum here and blindly labelling all government as useless is wrong.

The Manhatten Project, the New Deal, and the Space Race were remarkably efficient and productive, back in the time that we believed that governments can and should do things, and politicians worked together in good faith.

Then corporate lobbyists bought our politicians and convinced us that governments are evil and inept, and that they shouldn't have to pay taxes because the government will just waste it. So we deregulated everything, and now billionares just waste their record profits on low orbit joyrides instead, while average Americans die preventable deaths because they can't afford healthcare (which the governments of every other developed nation manage to provide their citizens for free).

if I flip it to landscape, the layout looks right, but the button to reveal the search bar (the most important element on a retail homepage) doesn't work. I would be shocked to have that experience with Amazon in the middle of the holidays. it's just throwing away money.

There is a grocery store near me that sat vacant for several years. Finally a storage company took it over. It's a good thing that something is there, just wish it was an actual grocery store.

I guess I meant to say that “facilities” implies new construction in the reader’s mind, but in fact, they’re being more clever.

Lots of retailers are doing exactly what this article describes, it’s not just Amazon. In fact, I know a company that only ships c5 containers a day that is renting space on a charter vessel, so you don’t need Amazon-scale to do this.

If a few AusPost drivers call in sick, your package is one day late. If your Prime last-mine Flex driver doesn't show, the app texts other Flex workers with ever-escalating payments for the 'block' until someone accepts (as much as ~A$60-80/hour gross if it gets that high).

Removing the shipping distance creates a host of other problems. Storing of raw materials, increased cost of non-shared tooling, local labor cost vs non-local just to name a few.

What's truly mind boggling is just how little energy is used to ship things around the world. Container ships are crazy efficient.

Distributing the same level of manufacturing would probably be worse because of loss of efficiencies.

Which countries have something competing with Amazon?

> I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.

All governments are bad. The American people just happen to have alternatives that have revealed how bad some of the overlapping government orgs are so they make a lot of noise about how bad government departments are.

> If you think your elected leaders are not competent and professional, then fire them and elect leaders that will improve the government. If you want a better post office, we need to FIX the post office, not destroy it.

The whole thing is fucked from an incentives perspective. No government employee has motivation to try hard or innovate. There is no shared bonus structure to bring that on in any branch of the government.

When government is competing with an industry, it’s either going to need to run at a loss and live off of other tax revenue or it just won’t be competitive for whoever the customers are.

The argument is specific to logistics. Our government has a poor track record in that domain outside the military.

Instead of doubling down on a concentrated bet, increasing competition would seem to be the solution. For example, the federal government could grant porting rights on its property, thereby breaking the Ports of LA & Long Beach’s monopoly.

I sure do. Nothing is going to change until rejection of authority is no longer foundational to the culture. We literally convinced ourselves that dysfunction and gridlock are features of the system, not bugs.

Such as?

Most of these faded out comments are talking about how the USPS is a government org so it has no incentives to efficiently fix things regardless of money. How do you debunk that? It’s true of the incentives of every government agency.

The problem is that nobody gets political credit for improving existing systems. That money will instead be pissed away on other political gifts and novelties.

I would say the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks they could fund or create an org that can match Amazon’s.

The federal pay ceiling in 2021 is $172,500 per year. That’s about what a SWE new grad at Amazon makes in their first year out of college.

That’s the crux of the issue. Government employees across all branches are capped into pay scales that don’t compete with private. More importantly, that absolutely cannot get anything like profit sharing or stock grants so nobody is invested in the financial success of the operation.

> Why is it capitalists think people can only work if there's a rich person creaming off a profit?

Because in the real world, all of the employees are benefiting from the profit as well. Every company has bonuses/promotions for exceeding performance doing good for the company.

Why is it that socialists thing working for a company produces the same incentives as working for the government?

You would have very different results if you took the same people, removed performance bonuses, removed merit promotion, instituted seniority promotion and seniority pay scales.

You remove all incentive to take risks, perform, or innovate.

In such an environment, there is only downside to do anything more than the bare minimum. Because nobody is ever fired, the minimum is very low indeed

This is literally what Amazon is already doing, right? They don't pay dividends, and are just re-investing all the profits already, with no profits being skimmed off at all.

Amazon doesn’t pay dividends on their shares. They reinvest profits. Bezos was known for thinking about the long term, as opposed to politicians who think about the next 2-4 years, or whatever it is that will get them re elected. Did you not know that?

An Amazon SDE 1 earns over $165-170K fresh out of college. An SDE2 earns $200+. SDE 3 earns $300K. A regular software engineering manager earns $350k. The higher you earn, the more they (and other tech companies) pay on company shares. I’m not even talking about directors or VPs who make significantly more.

And Amazon has a reputation for being fast moving, with many people actually complaining that it’s too fast, that people burn out, etc.

That’s how Amazon operates. Whether you like their business model or not is besides the point. They enter new business verticals, move at a lightning fast pace, etc. and that’s how you order something and get it delivered within hours.

Please explain to us how Amazons equity compensation model will work under a system that isn’t capitalist and doesn’t pay these engineers equity. You want them to have a 9-5 work schedule, no on call, no extras - great.

And show me one example of a US government agency even a quarter efficient as Amazon. This isn’t a rhetorical question.

The government never really re orgs or changes it’s mission. It never evolves its practices. It never tries to compete. When the government doesn’t work or when tax payers wonder where’s their money going, the government just says, “we need to raise taxes! It’s not that we’re doing any wrong or have low performers. We just need more money!!”

Then how do we pay for it? You’re either making the customers pay the true cost or you’re just stealing it from the entire tax base.

If you do the latter then it’s unfair to any business competing in the same category and they will all eventually go out of business because they have to be sustainable.

So we end up with less efficiency and absolutely no other options.

like what? The ones I heard of were prefunding the pension plans, but I’m not sure how that benefits any of “their donors”

Is there a sector/program in the gov't where that isn't the case? Every entity that is created is just a new fiefdom to expand and lord over from the time it's created to infinity.

USPS is profitable because we all accept the idea that companies are allowed to pay somebody to load literal trash through a hole in the side of my house.

It is interesting, because shouldn't the expectation be that a pension be funded as the benefits accrue? That seems like the safe sustainable way to run things.

Also, cargo shipping voluntarily uses fuel ("bunker fuel" — the dregs of the petroleum distillation process) that's absolutely awful for the environment per watt generated compared to any other fuel (including any other petroleum distillate.) They do this because it's the cheapest [liquid] fuel to buy per watt generated, and because they "can" — cargo-ship engines are designed to deal with the low quality of bunker fuel, and ships at sea under most of the common charters [e.g. Bermuda] aren't subject to any ecological regulations restricting them from burning it.

Bunker fuel shouldn't be marketable for sale as a fuel at all. We (= OPEC, in this case) could still sell it to chemical companies, but the rest, we should just be sticking back in the ground. This would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by such an extent it's not even funny.

This would naturally make shipping more expensive, since their next-cheapest fuel would be slightly more expensive. (Probably not for long, though; some capital investment into ship engine design, using modern engine technologies like Cylinder Deactivation, could probably claw most of this cheapness back.)

Of course not. But it might be wise to subsidize them so that they can get started and disrupt the existing players that have become lazy and inefficient.

We don’t really care about businesses operating private militaries so the army isn’t a good comparison.

Skills give value to an organization making it more competitive and productive, your appearance does not. If you make decisions on who to hire based on the former you're basically saying "Guy X is better than guy Y but I'm gonna hire Y because some people are offended by the fact that we're not 50/50", which is obvious in every single part of life.

Also, I know a lot of friends that are saddened by their hiring process and they feel like they've been hired just because the HR had to and not because they were the top choices.

But yeah, this is controversial nowadays so I don't really try to put it out there at all and let it be.

Overall, I think we arguing about competition as a whole being good or bad. I worked at global logistics, and in my experience most of the players, both public and private, are unchangeable rent-seeking dinosaurs. I have 0 issues with amazon eating them up, and when amazon itself becomes an unchangeable rent-seeking dinosaur I hope something else will end it.