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That feeling is the same thing with railcar shortages. They are super easy to produce. But no one wants to be stuck with them if there is a glut, only a few man

That feeling is the same thing with railcar shortages. They are super easy to produce. But no one wants to be stuck with them if there is a glut, only a few manufacturers of railcars and they don't scale like servers. They make a normal amount of railcars, and when they need more they can make what 10-20% more? And then since they are "easy" to produce they still might take weeks to months to finish because of parts they rely on all being strained as well.

derefr 6y ago
> And then since they are "easy" to produce they still might take weeks to months to finish because of parts they rely on all being strained as well. I feel like a container factory would be a sensible thing to be vertically integrated: raw steel (or iron and carbon!) in; containers out; screws and bolts and any other needed stuff getting made during the process out of the same raw inputs. A lot like how IKEA's operation works (i.e. basically a vertically-integrated sawmill), but with metals. That approach doesn't vertically scale very well, but the techniques from it could be horizontally scaled pretty easily across a number of industries if well-known. This is what I was on about with the hemp sacks: every industry did used to make their own hemp sacks. It was easy, and the techniques and requirements were well-known, so every business that needed sacks just did what was necessary to make them, comparative advantage be damned. (Sort of like how every large factory today has its own machine shop, or how every modern building has its own internal water-treatment+recycling system.)
- rzzzt 6y ago
  What do they ship raw steel in?
  - derefr 6y ago
    Usually, refineries are located very close to mines, such that raw ore doesn't spend much time being shipped around — because most of it's going to be slag, anyway, and it's a waste of money to ship that. Often ore is delivered into a refinery "directly" on a minecart; or, if not, then on a railcar loaded from buffer hoppers at the mine; but either way using point-to-point rail service between the two sites (i.e. not part of the rail network.)

derefr 6y ago

> And then since they are "easy" to produce they still might take weeks to months to finish because of parts they rely on all being strained as well. I feel like a container factory would be a sensible thing to be vertically integrated: raw steel (or iron and carbon!) in; containers out; screws and bolts and any other needed stuff getting made during the process out of the same raw inputs. A lot like how IKEA's operation works (i.e. basically a vertically-integrated sawmill), but with metals. That approach doesn't vertically scale very well, but the techniques from it could be horizontally scaled pretty easily across a number of industries if well-known. This is what I was on about with the hemp sacks: every industry did used to make their own hemp sacks. It was easy, and the techniques and requirements were well-known, so every business that needed sacks just did what was necessary to make them, comparative advantage be damned. (Sort of like how every large factory today has its own machine shop, or how every modern building has its own internal water-treatment+recycling system.)

rzzzt 6y ago
What do they ship raw steel in?
- derefr 6y ago
  Usually, refineries are located very close to mines, such that raw ore doesn't spend much time being shipped around — because most of it's going to be slag, anyway, and it's a waste of money to ship that. Often ore is delivered into a refinery "directly" on a minecart; or, if not, then on a railcar loaded from buffer hoppers at the mine; but either way using point-to-point rail service between the two sites (i.e. not part of the rail network.)