standardized shipping container

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pages: 247 words: 71,698

Avogadro Corp by William Hertling

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, invisible hand, messenger bag, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, off-the-grid, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, standardized shipping container, tech worker, technological singularity, Turing test, web application, WikiLeaks

Avogadro worked to refine the design, with plans to use the offshore data centers existing for their own operations, and lease cloud computing capacity to commercial customers. Directly in front of Bill, the primary floating barge held what appear to be sixteen standard shipping containers. They had in fact originated as standard shipping containers, but Bill’s team had added a thick layer of weather proofing to protect the sensitive electronics contained within. Of course, these floating data centers had a few problems that got Bill up in the middle of the night. Resiliency to storms was one big issue.

Gene’s printed records showed that Gary’s department purchased tremendous quantities of servers, had servers reallocated from other projects, paid for a variety of subcontractors to do programming work, and finally transferred substantial funds to both the ELOPe project and the Offshore Data Center department. “Offshore Data Center department? What do they do?” asked Christine. “They took the data center in a box concept, which is a standard shipping container filled with racks of computers, and put it on a seaworthy barge,” David answered. “Then they connect the data-center-boxes to wave-action electrical generators. The whole thing is connected back to the data grid with fiber optic cables. Avogadro calls them ODCs for short.” “Well, anyone care to guess the third department with the same unusual pattern of purchases?”


pages: 757 words: 193,541

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2 by Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan

active measures, Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, continuous integration, correlation coefficient, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, delayed gratification, DevOps, domain-specific language, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, finite state, Firefox, functional programming, Google Glasses, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intermodal, Internet of things, job automation, job satisfaction, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, level 1 cache, load shedding, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine readable, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, place-making, platform as a service, premature optimization, recommendation engine, revision control, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, software as a service, sorting algorithm, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The future is already here, Toyota Production System, vertical integration, web application, Yogi Berra

Since many containers can coexist on the same machine, the resulting machine works much like a large hotel that is able to provide for many customers, treating them all the same way, even though they are all unique. * * * Standardized Shipping Containers A common way for industries to dramatically improve processes is to standardize their delivery mechanism. The introduction of standardized shipping containers revolutionized the freight industry. Previously individual items were loaded and unloaded from ships, usually by hand. Each item was a different size and shape, so each had to be handled differently. Standardized shipping containers resulted in an entirely different way to ship products. Because each shipping container was the same shape and size, loading and unloading could be done much faster.

A single container might hold many individual items, but since they were transported as a group, transferring the items between modes of transport was quick work. Customs could approve all the items in a particular container and seal it, eliminating the need for customs checks at remaining hops on the container’s journey as long as the seal remained unbroken. As other modes of transportation adopted the standard shipping container, the concept of intermodal shipping was born. A container would be loaded at a factory and remain as a unit whether it was on a truck, train, or ship. All of this started in April 1956, when Malcom McLean’s company SeaLand organized the first shipment using standardized containers from New Jersey (where Tom lives) to Texas.

., 121 Sprints, 189 SQS (Simple Queue Service), 86 SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), 147–148 DevOps, 181 overview, 151–152 vs. traditional enterprise IT, 148–149 SSDs (solid-state drives) failures, 132 speed, 26 Stability vs. change, 149–151 Stack Exchange, 167 Stack ranking, 360 Stakeholders, 148 Standard capacity planning, 366–368 Standardized shipping containers, 62 Startup in design for operations, 34–35 States, distributed, 17–20 Static content on web servers, 70 Status of design documents, 277, 282 Steal time, 59 Stickiness in load balancing, 75 Storage systems, monitoring, 345, 362 Stranded capacity, 57 Stranded resources in containers, 61 Style guides automation, 266–267, 270 code review systems, 269 Sub-linear scaling, 477 Subscribers in message bus architectures, 86 Subsystems, linking tickets to, 263–264 Suggested resolution in alert messages, 355 Summarization, monitoring, 339 Super-linear scaling, 477 Survivable systems, 120 SWEs (software engineers), 199 Synthesized measurements, 347–348 System administration, automating, 248–249, 253 System logs, 340 System testing in build phase, 203 vs. canarying, 228–229 overview, 215 T-bird database system, 103 Tags in repositories, 208 Taking down services for upgrading, 225–226 Targeting in system integration, 250 Tasks assessments, 423–425 automating, 153–155 TCO (total cost of ownership), 172 TDD (test-driven development), 267–268 Team managers in operational rotation, 162 TeamCity tool, 205 Teams, 160–162 automating processes, 155 fix-it days, 166 focus, 165–166 in Incident Command System, 326 oncall days, 163–164 organizing strategies, 160–166 project-focused days, 162–163 ticket duty days, 164–165 toil reduction, 166 virtual offices, 166–167 Technical debt, 166 Technical practices in DevOps, 184–185 Technology cloud computing era, 472 dot-bomb era, 460–461 first web era, 455–456 pre-web era, 453–454 second web era, 465–466 Telles, Marcel, 401 Templates design documents, 279, 282, 481–484 postmortem, 484–485 Terminology for Incident Command System, 324 Test-driven development (TDD), 267–268 Tests vs. canarying, 228–229 continuous deployment, 237 deployment phase, 215–216 DevOps, 186 disaster preparedness.


pages: 265 words: 60,880

The Docker Book by James Turnbull

Airbnb, continuous integration, Debian, DevOps, domain-specific language, false flag, fault tolerance, job automation, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, microservices, MVC pattern, platform as a service, pull request, Ruby on Rails, software as a service, standardized shipping container, web application

As we've just learned, containers are launched from images and can contain one or more running processes. You can think about images as the building or packing aspect of Docker and the containers as the running or execution aspect of Docker. A Docker container is: An image format. A set of standard operations. An execution environment. Docker borrows the concept of the standard shipping container, used to transport goods globally, as a model for its containers. But instead of shipping goods, Docker containers ship software. Each container contains a software image -- its 'cargo' -- and, like its physical counterpart, allows a set of operations to be performed. For example, it can be created, started, stopped, restarted, and destroyed.


pages: 271 words: 79,367

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All by Chris Goodall

3D printing, additive manufacturing, carbon tax, clean tech, decarbonisation, demand response, Easter island, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, gigafactory, Haber-Bosch Process, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Ken Thompson, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Negawatt, off grid, Peter Thiel, rewilding, Russell Ohl, smart meter, standardized shipping container, Tim Cook: Apple, wikimedia commons

In countries such as Kenya that will get most of their power from PV, biomass can be a perfect complement to the daily variability of solar electricity. Dry biomass: Entrade In June 2015 I went up to Cheshire, in the north of England, to see one of the world’s first commercial small scale biomass gasifiers. Sitting inside a standard shipping container, the Entrade E3 plant from Germany takes in small pellets of woody biomass and heats them in the absence of air to several hundred degrees. At the right temperature, these pellets turn into hydrogen and carbon monoxide (‘syngas’) and this combination can be burnt in a gas turbine to generate electricity.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

It was called “featherbedding” and forced companies to keep paying workers whose jobs had been rendered obsolete by automation. This seems destined to be copied in future shelterism. Containerized shipping was a boon to trade and manufacturing from the 1960s. Shipping costs were slashed by the switch to standardized shipping containers that could be loaded and unloaded directly from trains or trucks with massive cranes. The labour-and time-saving technology, however, scuppered the fortunes of highly paid dock workers known as longshoremen, who loaded and unloaded ships using traditional methods. Ultimately, it was a question of who would bear the economic and social costs of technological change: the workers or the companies.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Fablabs and TechShops: DIY micro-factories that make anything Conceived and launched by Neil Gershenfeld, a professor at MIT, a Fablab is a digital fabrication workshop, fully equipped with CNC machines, laser cutters and 3D printers, which is free and open to the public to tinker and make “almost anything”. A Fablab has been described as a “factory in a box”. Indeed, Fablabs’ contents fit into a standard shipping container, allowing them to be easily transported and installed in any city around the world. There are currently more than 125 Fablabs in 34 countries. TechShops are an advanced version of Fablabs where, for a $175 monthly fee, users get access to heavy-duty equipment for making industrial-calibre products.


pages: 534 words: 15,752

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

Unlike previous passenger planes, the 747 was also designed with freight in mind. What some describe as a roomier interior—the familiar two-aisle arrangement, and its attendant five-seat middle block, home to the most undesirable middle seat possible— was really the consequence of building a hold wide enough for two standard shipping containers to sit side by side. The struggle to build the 747 nearly bankrupted not only Boeing (“within a gnat’s whisker,” its president said) but the company town in which it was based, so much so that Seattle’s Japanese sister city Kobe sent relief supplies of food and money in 1968. A year earlier, JAL had been one of the first airlines to place an order for three 747s, and three years later introduced them on Pacific routes.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

Just as the industrial revolution can be traced to James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, which drove innovations and changes across the economic landscape, much of the current technological revolution can be traced back to the semiconductor and the computer, a history that Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee recount in The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.14 There are multiple examples, but I will focus on technological advances in four areas that have been important to developing countries: transportation, agriculture, information, and health. MOVING GOODS, MOVING PEOPLE The most important development in integrating global trade during the last century was not the World Trade Organization (WTO) or global trade agreements or lower tariffs. The most important development was a box: a standardized shipping container. Up until the 1950s, goods were loaded and unloaded onto ships in individual boxes, barrels, sacks, and wooden crates, a process that was slow, cumbersome, and expensive, and resulted in a high rate of damaged goods and very inefficient use of space. An entrepreneur named Malcolm McLean developed an idea of how it could be done better.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

“Just as you can download apps on your smartphone according to your changing needs,” said Koen in his interview with the blog Inhabitat, “you can adjust functionality in a slum by adding functions with city apps. These are floating developments based on standard sea-freight containers, and because of their flexibility and small size, they are suitable for installing and upgrading sanitation, housing, and communication.” Koen has already transformed a standard shipping container into a sleek school classroom fitted with twenty computer screens and two large TV screens featuring a teacher. Painted on the side of the floating school is “City App,” the first demonstration of what Koen hopes will be a humanitarian delivery system. As we write, Dutch children enjoy it where it sits next to Koen’s office, which means it will probably pass muster among curious slum children.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

As Marc Levinson recounts in The Box, his obsessively detailed history of the shipping container, “It took a major war, the United States’ painful campaign in Vietnam, to prove the merit of this revolutionary approach to moving freight.” Until that war, containerized shipping as we know it today, with all its interdependencies of ships, cranes, docks, trucks, railroad cars, and countless other bits of equipment, all built to accommodate standardized shipping containers, was proving nearly impossible to jump-start. Everything was a chicken-and-egg problem—huge investments in onshore cranes couldn’t be justified without equally enormous investments in the proper ships. And it was compounded by a collective-action problem—the commercial interests of a variety of companies all wanting their size and type of shipping container to become the standard.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

Merchant capitalism flourished, fueled by furs, timber, gold, spices, and coal imported from overseas. Guided by multinational banks, by the 1870s goods and capital were flowing across national borders as freely as they do today. Steamships, the telegraph, and railroads were opening up the world just as standardized shipping containers, jet aircraft, and the Internet would do again a century later. Many countries decided to peg their paper currencies to a gold standard, creating fluid international currency markets and huge flows of cross-border capital. The British pound became the dominant circulating world currency much as the U.S. dollar is now.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Moving Value: Daily, the financial system moves money around the world, making sure that no dollar is spent twice: from the ninety-nine-cent purchase of a song on iTunes to the transfer of billions of dollars to settle an intracompany fund transfer, purchase an asset, or acquire a company. Blockchain can become the common standard for the movement of anything of value—currencies, stocks, bonds, and titles—in batches big and small, to distances near and far, and to counterparties known and unknown. Thus, blockchain can do for the movement of value what the standard shipping container did for the movement of goods: dramatically lower cost, improve speed, reduce friction, and boost economic growth and prosperity. 3. Storing Value: Financial institutions are the repositories of value for people, institutions, and governments. For the average Joe, a bank stores value in a safety deposit box, a savings account, or a checking account.


pages: 473 words: 154,182

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hindcast, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Isaac Newton, means of production, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, post-Panamax, profit motive, Skype, standardized shipping container, statistical model, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman

The China was a C-11-class post-Panamax ship, meaning that—at 906 feet long and 131 feet wide—it was too big for the locks of the Panama Canal. Standing on a dock beside it, you would have felt as though you were standing at the foot of an unnaturally smooth cliff, a palisade of steel. The carrying capacity of a container ship is measured in TEUs, or twenty-foot-equivalent units, because a standard shipping container is twenty feet long. One twenty-footer equals one TEU, a forty-footer, two. The China had a carrying capacity of 4,832 TEUs. (That of the Evergreen Ever Laurel, by contrast, was a mere 1,180 TEUs.) Imagine a train pulling 4,832 boxcars: it would stretch for nineteen miles, from the southern tip of Manhattan up into Westchester.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

He regularly sat down with chiefs and deputy chiefs of the CIA’s technical branches, representing Dell in meetings with Jeanne Tisinger, the CIA’s chief information officer, and Ira “Gus” Hunt, the agency’s chief technology officer. Hunt liked to brainstorm, and Snowden told me he pitched one blue sky proposal after another. How about a self-contained, globally deployable data center, sized to fit a standard shipping container? How about a network switch with built-in “separation kernels,” or secure hardware enclaves, to guard the digital boundaries between differently classified data flows? Snowden’s career seemed to be thriving, but he was already looking for a change. Interesting problems, the kind that combined technical and operational challenges, attracted him more than access to the executive suites at Dell and its client agencies.


pages: 719 words: 209,224

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

Declassified in part to author Sept. 22, 2006, under FOIA. 9 Burns, interview, Aug. 12, 2004. 10 "Delegation on Nuclear Safety, Security and Dismantlement (SSD): Summary Report of Technical Exchanges in Albuquerque, April 28--May 1, 1992," State Department cable. 11 Note made by a participant who asked to remain anonymous, undated. 12 Keith Almquist, communications with author, Dec. 14, 2008, and Jan. 24, 2009. Later, Sandia procured materials for another ninety-nine upgrades and sent these in standard shipping containers to a Russian rail car factory in Tver, Russia, and then contracted with the factory to do the conversions. The upgrades involved changing the insulation and locking down the movable platform. Sandi also provided alarm-monitoring equipment. Some older Russian rail cars were made of wood.


The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier by Ian Urbina

9 dash line, Airbnb, British Empire, clean water, Costa Concordia, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, forensic accounting, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global value chain, Global Witness, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, Jones Act, Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Maui Hawaii, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, standardized shipping container, statistical arbitrage, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

This military presence allowed for more efficient deployments of sniper teams, coordination of ransom payoffs, and safe evacuations during hostage situations. Complicating matters further, the shipping industry reacted in its own way, and the economics of that response was at times perverse. For example, freight companies and their insurers began imposing piracy fees—upwards of $23 per standard shipping container—to cover additional security costs, which on bigger ships could mean a quarter of a million dollars per trip. Even factoring in the cost of private guards and the occasional multimillion-dollar ransom payouts exacted by pirates, shipping companies and crews were sometimes profiting from the threat of Somali piracy.