XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.sf.science
From: jclarkeusenet@cox.net
In article ,
droleary@8usenet2013.subsume.com says...
>
> In article ,
> Chrysi Cat wrote:
>
> > Unless I _really_ miss Bernard's meaning here
>
> You do. Don't let the limited thinking of people like J. Clarke have an
> influence on you. It's best just to drop them into your killfile.
Yeah, God forbid that anybody expect you to defend your idea.
> > Everything is in its little pod.
>
> No, a "pod" is just a way to push the concept of containerization
> further out in the supply chain. Right now, it pretty much stops at
> retail locations. At that point, everything is unboxed and shelved,
> thereby requiring manual effort to pull things from the shelf
> "container" to put them in our cart container and move them to the
> checkout so they can go into a bag container to be placed into a car
> container to move them to our home container for placement on our own
> shelf containers. The more steps in there that you can remove/automate,
> the cheaper and easier the whole process becomes.
It still gets unboxed, it just gets put into pods instead of carts. Or
does it come from the manufacturer in individual pods? If so you are
adding shipping weight and volume.
> > Your 'home' itself may be a pod.
>
> It may be. Mobile homes are pods. Modular homes start as pods. We
> live in a world when it is usually easier to leave our homes than take
> them with us, but that doesn't mean things couldn't be different.
The Monsanto House of the Future. Which went over like a lead balloon.
> > Everything is somehow point-to-poing despite the fact that he's
> > now turned every transportation event, whether living or inanimate, into
> > cargo shipping and as FedEx can attest, that's best done via
> > hub-and-spoke, which his system doesn't seem to be.
>
> Any fractal configuration will scale, and many solutions are better than
> simple hub/spoke when you have to deal with existing infrastructure
> issues (e.g., street grids and left turn delays).
So show us a sample routing for a typical community.
> > If you order a
> > single unit of milk, it gets packed at the farm, never sees a warehouse,
> > and is delivered to your door--apparently with nothing else in the
> > shipment.
>
> Depends on how the supply chain works out. It may very well *be* the
> case that you want to order direct from the farm for whatever reason
> (ultimate freshness, or maybe one specific cow they have has been
> genetically modified to produce a medicine you need in its milk). But
> the odds are pretty good that the logistics of processing orders will
> still leave room for a few middle men to add some value. Stores will
> still be more popular than factory outlets, for variety/alternatives if
> nothing else.
So does this milk get homogenized and pasteurized and sampled and
inspected all in its little one-quart pod? How does the cost of doing
those processes individually for millions of pods compare do doing them
in bulk?
> > Yeah, he'd _need_ all retail and commercial buildings gone in order to
> > make room for all the extra roadspace/railspace all the
> > crawlers-including-what-we-now-call-train-flatcars would need.
>
> That makes no sense. Stores *now* overstock trying to anticipate
> demand. Roads *now* are overcrowded by inefficient travel. It should
> be obvious that a world with a better supply chain needs fewer
> resources, not more.
But you are going to add vast quantities of pod-carriers to the traffic
and have not demonstrated that you will take away anything.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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