A few years ago I needed an M1 machine to finalize arm64 support for the product I was working on. I asked our office manager if I could expense one, and the answer was "yes". So I went to the Apple store and ordered one with same-day delivery. It turns out that Apple's same day delivery provider is ... Uber Eats. After the order was picked up from Apple, you could see the Uber Eats tracking page. It was in transit for about 5 minutes, and then marked as "delivered", and the tracking page became unavailable for use. I emailed Apple and they gave me a refund, then I went to the store myself and acted as my own courier. That time I got a laptop.
What I'm saying is, "uber for X" is exactly what already exists. Someone picks up your stuff for a small fee, and if it's good, they just keep it for themselves and re-join the platform with a new name.
Incidentally, Apple no longer offers same-day delivery, at least to me.
The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.
If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that.
https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametr...
I was thinking more along the lines of a ship that was outfitted with a container retrieval bay sailing back and forth along the trade routes.
Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking, or is it more like "whoopsy these goods fell off the truck *wink*" sorta fraud?
No, it's literally because containers fall off the ship and are lost at sea. Total losses of vessels are very rare.
Large container ships carry huge stacks of containers, sometimes as high as 8-10 containers above the deck. While the containers are locked together to keep them from moving, they can still fall off during storms.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-...
Many lightweight items are more expensive to ship than the manufacture.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/17qp82w/cargo_ship_ap...
It’s not worth retrieving them from the sea, but anytime they get damaged on land the insurance company ends up owning the remains and auctions it off.
Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000.
Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly.
Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing?
Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.
Job boards are big business. They act like a 4th party logistics company, where they aggregate the available loads from multiple 3rd party logistics companies. But there’s plenty of these aggregation site that, as mentioned operate a lot more like Craigslist.
More sophisticated systems are like the stock market, automated systems booking loads within one second after becoming available.
I work as an SE at one the larger ones.