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First of all, Europe only moves a few percent of its goods by rail and while north-central Europe has excensice navicable rivers and canals a lot of freight is moved by road. Second of all, water transport currently burns the lowest grade of toxic sludge left over from refining oil (well, the second lowers: the lowest goes to paving roads...) By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
And who's going to dismantle the things when they've outlived their design life? We can't, at present, get our merchant navies to decommission their ships in ways that don't cause toxic spills on the coast of random third-world countries. Wanna bet that they'll have a better track record with hulls that glow in the dark?
- Jake Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
relaunching the tall ships is not going to be an adequate solution as it would wreck havok on logistic chains to not have reliable schedules.
Not really. Most goods are not time-critical. It just requires larger inventories to smooth out the noise in the delivery cycle.
I am hearing that US banks are extending trade credit lines for just 24h which wreaks havoc with purchases and deliveries since your supplier needs to be ready to ship when you call them and tell them that now is the 24h window when you have the money. Paradoxically, this means JIT doesn't work. You're better off having some inventory so your trade credit is not time critical. By laying out pros and cons we risk inducing people to join the debate, and losing control of a process that only we fully understand. - Alan Greenspan
But in the real world, it makes your entire logistics operation that much more brittle - it only takes a much smaller upset for it to crash. And then everybody downstream from the problem is going to sit around and twiddle their thumbs for a while as the problem gets sorted out. Which is not cheap.
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