From the same folks who had the piece on the airline industry I posted back in January comes another illuminating piece about the container ships that dominate shipping via the oceans these days.
One notion I found especially interesting was the one that posited that “perfect” systems –by which I read systems that are optimized as perfectly as factors allow– can be more susceptible to issues than imperfect –or non-optimized systems. That’s not necessarily an argument for imperfect systems, though with the delays faced by ocean shipping, this may be a case where the system needs some variability, potentially in terms of redundancy.