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Jacob Hodes writes in Cabinet Magazine that there are approximately two billion wooden shipping pallets in the holds of tractor-trailers in the United States transporting Honey Nut Cheerios and oysters and penicillin and just about any other product you can think of. According to Hodes the magic of pallets is the magic of abstraction. "Take any object you like, pile it onto a pallet, and it becomes, simply, a “unit load”—standardized, cubical, and ideally suited to being scooped up by the tines of a forklift. This allows your Cheerios and your oysters to be whisked through the supply chain with great efficiency; the gains are so impressive, in fact, that many experts consider the pallet to be the most important materials-handling innovation of the twentieth century." Although the technology was in place by the mid-1920s, pallets didn’t see widespread adoption until World War II, when the challenge of keeping eight million G.I.s supplied—“the most enormous single task of distribution ever accomplished anywhere,” according to one historian—gave new urgency to the science of materials handling. "The pallet really made it possible for us to fight a war on two fronts the way that we did." It would have been impossible to supply military forces in both the European and Pacific theaters if logistics operations had been limited to manual labor and hand-loading cargo.
To get a sense of the productivity gains that were achieved, consider the time it took to unload a boxcar before the advent of pallets. “According to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours.” Pallets, of course, are merely one cog in the global machine for moving things and while shipping containers have had their due, the humble pallet is arguably "the single most important object in the global economy."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday December 22 2014, @10:58PM
Who would you prefer to work for, the poor? Oh, you'd probably rather work for The State. Skip off to Cuba or Venezuela and enjoy living in third world conditions then. Never going to happen here in the US.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:13AM
With a worker-owned co-op, you're your own boss.
Cooperatives rock [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [commondreams.org]
Mondragon (since 1956) [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [wikipedia.org]
Seize the day [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [libcom.org]
...but, with the schools^W authoritarian, Capitalism-oriented indoctrination centers not teaching that, few Working Class people think of that as an option.
Workers and their children should be angry about that.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:56AM
Wait, they should be angry that someone didn't do their thinking for them? Dude, you sure about that?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:45AM
No, they should be angry about NOT being taught to think for themselves in school, and NOT being presented with the options to consider. The problem is that their thinking HAS been done for them, but it isn't in their best interest.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Tuesday December 23 2014, @03:30AM
> Who would you prefer to work for, the poor?
Me not want work nobody. Me jus want free stuffs. Why U so mean no gimme free stuffs?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 23 2014, @10:40PM
I would prefer that when automation makes workers less needed, that prices go down as wages stay the same, or prices stay the same as wages go up, but not prices and wages both going down as jobs disappear.
Based on your other posts that I have seem, you seem like a intelligent, but extremely cynical and either heartless or naive person. The fact is, there are many poor, stupid, unlucky, or otherwise miserable people who are worse off than you (or me), that may or may not "deserve" to be in their position, but I would like to think that as a society we try NOT to keep a large proportion of our population living miserable lives, yes?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 24 2014, @03:51PM
Surprisingly, I have no problem with that attitude. I only have a problem with taking money from people at gunpoint to do so. If you think that's hyperbole, try not paying your taxes and see if men with guns don't show up.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.