Comment by Macha
4 days ago
Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in the Ukraine war, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
4 days ago
Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in the Ukraine war, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
Centralised and long-distance commerce (and passenger travel) are all but wholly predicated on minuscule risks.
I draw parallels between the development of whales and large-scale shipping:
- Both are comparatively recent developments. Giant whales are less than 5 million years old, large cargo ships (tankers, dry bulk, containers) at what are now considered ordinary scales are less than three decades old. (See: <https://logisticselearning.com/largest-container-ships/> especially graphic here: <https://logisticselearning.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/im...>.)
- Both require highly-efficient propulsion: mammalian metabolism, petroleum-fueled diesel engines, respectively.
- Both require widely-separated resource opportunities. For whales, seasonally-abundant food such as krill or fish; for cargo, large-scale production and consumption of goods separated by water.
- Both require comparative safety from predators. Large adult whales have virtually no natural predators (orcas being a notable exception), until human whaling grew in scale largely since the 1500s and accelerating greatly through the 19th and 20th centuries, during which whole populations where annihilated. Maritime shipping depends on a lack of piracy or hostile naval warfare, with tremendous losses to traffic being seen during the 1st and 2nd World Wars in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
(There's a similar pattern with air travel, in which flights virtually instantly divert far from active combat zones. The list of airliner shoot-down incidents is surprisingly large: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inc...>.)
Highly-centralised or choreographed logistics chains are also fragile and subject to disruption. During WWII, the Soviet Union was initially inclined to One Big Dump supply depots, possibly a hallmark of centralised planning. These proved attractive targets and quite harmful to ongoing operations, and over the course of the war much more decentralised patterns emerged, or so I dimly recall from long-ago reading. Decentralised operations are integral to much guerilla / asymmetric warfare by the inferior party.
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The Gulf States aren't at war with Iran.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who naively thought he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
They aren't neutral either. They're hosting military bases and miilitary assets that are being used to attack them. They are allowing their airspace to be used. Same with their waters and ports.
Which is to say that all the military assets in Gulf countries, including this Amazon DC, are valid military targets.
The Gulf States are in fact military rivals and cold adversaries of Iran; Iran vs. the Gulf States is a more salient geopolitical conflict than Iran vs. Israel. Iran has, through the IRGC, been in hot wars with the Gulf States in the last 10 years.
Officially, neither is the US, since Trump doesn't have that power.
If you take that approach, Ukraine is still a special operation.
4 replies →
Struck Wildberries depots are in Russia, not Ukraine.
They hit one in Crimea yesterday.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/ukraine-hits-russias-larg...
At least some of them, it depends on who you ask (Simferopol). But I had been using Ukraine as a shorthand for the conflict, so editing it to be clearer
St. Petersburg is certainly in Russia. Thanks for clarifying.
Which reminds me: a friend made a wild mulberry pie yesterday with some dried mulberries shipped in from Chernobyl a year ago. He set it to cool overnight but when he checked in early morning and cut a slice, he found some of the berries glowed in the dark.
His quandary: should he eat it anyway? Seems like the radiation should be minimal, after all. Or maybe wait until this next Wednesday when he has a stomach x-ray and eat a small slice just beforehand to confound his primary care physician (they are both great practical jokers!)?
I didn't know they had significant fruit production in Russia and Ukraine. What sort of berries do they produce?
"Wildberries" is a Russian online retailer, comparable to Amazon.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildberries>