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Comment by fuzzfactor | Hacker News Reader

One thing abut cargo work is that it's always been at full scale since before anybody living was ever born.

Ships have always been as big as they can be, and fewer people handle more (retail value) quicker per person than during less-bulky links in the supply chain.

So fundamentally plenty of money is being made at the port, regardless of the state of automation, this boils down to the lowest priority until all the other elements leading up to the port are taken to a dramatically improved next level automation themselves.

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The cargo container was invented in 1956. The industry completely changed in just a few years. Look up the "docklands" area in the UK for example.

I'm reasonably certain people alive today were born before 1956.

Very few people alive before 1956 are working today.

Joe Biden is.

>Very few people alive before 1956 are working today.

I resemble that remark ;)

I am quite few people indeed.

Starting a new company soon anyway, and it's going to take a lot more effort than just working there.

Plus it does have something to do with automation and cargo subcontracting in my niche domain.

>The industry completely changed in just a few years

That does sound about right, IIRC it did only take from 1956 until about the mid-1980'a before containers were everywhere, a relatively few years when it comes to cargo operations.

You are generalizing too much. The article is specifically about the efficiency of US ports (compared to ports around the world).

The striking docker workers called a bit of attention to themselves this month ... and this article makes the interesting point that US dock workers are one of the least efficient in the world.

Huh? Ships have been continually getting larger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_container_ship...

Because the upper bound on how big they can be has been getting larger.

What OP is arguing is that each ship is built to the largest possible size at the time of its construction. There are plenty of external limitations at hand, e.g., the size of docking facilities, canal clearance, etc. that mean that a container ship can’t get larger than X.

Exactly. There's literally classes of ships that are something "max". e.g. Panamax. Panamax ships are literally built to the absolute limit of what will fit through the locks at the Panama Canal. And yes, sometimes the locks get bigger, and the ships follow.

For the original commenter to be wrong you'd have to argue that they've been underutilizing what's possible in the state of the art. Looking at the Wikipedia page, I don't get that impression. It sounds like giant engines and equipment on the terminal side are the main limitations, and I assume those capabilities have increased over time. Maybe the original commenter is wrong, although I highly doubt that cargo technology has been underutilized unless the cost of state of the art is/was truly so astronomical such that it genuinely doesn't make financial sense.

With crude oil tankers decades ago the indicators were the bigger the better financially, so that's what was done, and bigger ships were built and financial gains realized.

It was only proven how big was too big once a few ultra-large had been built, and the point of diminishing returns had been exceeded enough so accurate math could finally be accomplished.

Routine commercial operation has been scaled back decades ago to less than the max.

Less than the max that is physically possible, focused now more accurately on better returns.

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