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Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic o
by imgabe 6y ago
Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich.
My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are giant machines that go in warehouses and sort packages into, for example, different bays to go on to trucks to different places. It's like a little roller coaster for boxes. It was something that I had never even considered the existence of before I worked there. But someone has to make it.
- Swizec 6y agoYou know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined
- chii 6y ago> Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry there's 7 billion people on this planet, and most of them wear at least 1 pair of shoes (so 4 end bits), which means there's about 4x7,000,000,000 pieces of these things. I'm surprised it's only a 800,000,000/year industry! That means they are able to produce it so cheap (i.e., less than 2c per bit, which is an over-estimate)!
- aabhay 6y agoYeah, now multiply 28 billion by... three cents. Also, just because an industry brings in lots of revenue doesn’t make it a good industry. I’m sure there’s trillions of dollars exchanging hands in the plastic bag market, but I’m also sure that the margins are getting squeezed so tight that even a PhD in OR couldn’t find a percentage point to optimize. The margin per bag is essentially zero.
- chii 6y ago> The margin per bag is essentially zero. that's a good outcome imho (and it's not zero, it's just very low). But this means that the value of the bag and the cost of production is very, very close, meaning it's available to as many people as possible!
- gruez 6y agoYou assume that on average, each person buys 1 pair of laced shoes per year. How realistic is this? Maybe affluent consumers in developed countries can afford 1 pair of shoe per year, but I doubt it's affordable for consumers in developing countries (where most of the world's population are). Even in developed countries, how many of those shoes have laces? Many women's shoes don't have any laces, for instance.
- pkalinowski 6y agoYou know, it's called estimation. Maybe come up with better number?
- ianmcgowan 6y agoIf you had kids of the right age, into Phineas and Ferb, you'd know those little plastic bits are called aglets ;_)
- daseiner1 6y agoi’m really sorry to do this to you, but also, if you’re a recent grad of the right age ;)
- philiplu 6y agoThose are called aglets, and when I just now googled for “aglet manufacturers”, I got way more hits than I expected.
- anonytrary 6y agoWhen I have kids, I'm gonna play a game with them where we look at random stuff and try to make up how it got there, and then compare that to how it really got there. I bet if you did this consistently with kids during their formative years, it would be a great way to teach them about the world and the economy. My parents just had a huge book room with encyclopedias that I was expected to pick up and read.
- asadlionpk 6y agoThat actually sounds like a good idea. Favoriting this for later.
- MandieD 6y agoI’m expecting our first in a few months, so I’ll pass this great idea along to my husband, a mechanical engineer.
- lifeisstillgood 6y agoAll the best of luck with the birth, from all at HN. Remember to create them an account :-)
- loosetypes 6y agoHow would figure out how it really got there though? That you can, for the most part, peel back layers and trace steps back to an origin is one of my favorite things about code. But for a heterogeneous system of opaque supply chains in the physical world? For any given random stuff, I don’t know that I could make reliable progress in that endeavor.
- luckylion 6y ago> For any given random stuff, I don’t know that I could make reliable progress in that endeavor. I bet you'd get better at it after doing it for a while, and that in itself is a valuable skill.
- regularfry 6y ago
- shp0ngle 6y agoI like the TV Series “Rotten” on netflix... it basically shows every food, fruit, meat, vegetable, you name it, is actually heavily controlled by cartels and mafias. I had no idea there were mafia cartels that had wars about avocados.
- tjbiddle 6y agoHuh, hadn't considered this. But it absolutely makes sense. United Fruit Co. used to be larger than Google in today-dollars. "The Fish That Ate the Whale" by: Rich Cohen is a phenomenal read.
- icelancer 6y agoOh yeah, for sure. It's all just land, which is controlled by mafias or corporate-type entities. United Fruit being the major wakeup call for everyone who reads about that situation.
- selimthegrim 6y agoI assume you mean that town in Mexico? They had a quite a few articles in the US press about them.
- chris1993 6y agoAvocados were a big driver of crime in New Zealand pre-COVID. So high-value that orchards were being raided and stripped overnight. I can fully imagine violence around this.
- awongh 6y agoyes, and the global supply chain is a weird place. Because I also know that these industries seem to spring up overnight and disappear just as quick. From an american point of view it doesn't make sense for the amount of capital investment to happen so quickly, but that does seem to be true. Entire products with complex supply chains. Entire industries seem to be born and then completely die much much quicker than I thought possible. I would love to understand how all that works more deeply. Seems interesting.