111–120 of 180 posts
I know this is an unimportant thing, but why tf doesn’t kit kat just sell desirable flavors here themselves? What is the deal with the boner these companies have about withholding certain flavors in certain markets?
Japanese retail space (as in, the physical space available in the stores) favors small batches. US retail space favors economies of scale.
This reads like there is an opportunity for a YC company to create an authenticated freight dispatching service. Sort of "uber for freight" where you sign up owner/operators and connect them with freight loads that need to move from one place to another. If the company does the vetting and works with an insurance company to cover liabilities both ways (o/o is at fault, shipper is at fault) it seems they could capture…
> "uber for freight" A few years ago I needed an M1 machine to finalize arm64 support for the product I was working on. I asked our office manager if I could expense one, and the answer was "yes". So I went to the Apple store and ordered one with same-day delivery. It turns out that Apple's same day delivery provider is ... Uber Eats. After the order was picked up from Apple, you could see the Uber Eats tracking page…
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So your saying a container salvage company would be more profitable? :-)
There is probably a lot more money in that. The cargo will still be an insurance loss, but recovery of loads that can cause damage to marine environments are subject to mandatory reporting and fines. If you could build a device to detect the potential for conditions leading to parametric rolling and warn crews to make adjustments I would invest in that. https://www.marineinsight.com/marine-safety/what-is-parametr...
I was thinking more along the lines of a ship that was outfitted with a container retrieval bay sailing back and forth along the trade routes.
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According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m. By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.
> By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. Is that big number due to catastrophic failures of entire vessels sinking, or is it more like "whoopsy these goods fell off the truck *wink*" sorta fraud?
No, it's literally because containers fall off the ship and are lost at sea. Total losses of vessels are very rare.
Large container ships carry huge stacks of containers, sometimes as high as 8-10 containers above the deck. While the containers are locked together to keep them from moving, they can still fall off during storms.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/06/when-shipping-...
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Sounds like an interesting story! How big was a pallet? How does one come to know the specific truck driver?
This was back in 1997, so my memory is a little hazy, but I remember it being about 6ft x 6ft x 6ft. It was a bunch of cardboard shipping boxes with clear wrap around them. I think I was paying £10,000 per pallet. He told me he would just skip scanning a pallet at the docks as they were loaded into his trailer, and then his mate would meet him at a roadside services on the motorway with a van and they would somehow m…
So this guy whose job it is to hire truckers to move goods fell for the same scam twice in a row? Fool me once, etc, etc...
I mean, how is there no way to authenticate the truckers you charter on that platform, or when they arrive to pick up the load. Presumably the least they can do is identify the person.
Wait what was the scam how did it work? Was the plan to ransom the container to the owner?
Judging from the anger of the second driver, the scam is to steal the load and resell it on the black market; the driver must not have known what he was picking up? Or maybe they just take an up-front payment and disappear. Why Tristan bothered taking the loads to the storage facilities instead of just throwing them out the back is a mystery. Or why the storage facilities accepted them without some kind of payment.
The key to the whole scam is that the shipments are cross-continental and that there's no observability into where the shipment is during that time. The scammer immediately drops off the load at a storage facility, which begins to bill for storage time, several days later, when the load is supposed to arrive on the other side of the country, the owner comes looking for it and the storage facility presents the owner with an invoice for storage time that wasn't originally needed. The owner pays the storage facility, which sold storage space that would have gone unused, and the storage facility pays the driver a finder's fee kickback.
It's a variant on the squeegee window washers' scam. Pull up at the stoplight and the scammer starts washing your window, then demands payment for a service you didn't agree to. Victims pay because the amount of money is too small relative to the hassle of being held up, not because they (didn't) freely purchased a service that they got real value out of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to a study from CargoNet the total theft of cargo containers in 2022 was 1,778 units for a total of about $220m. By comparison about 10,000 cargo containers fall off of ships every year. The problem is well below the threshold where anyone would pay a dollar more per container to deal with it.
So your saying a container salvage company would be more profitable? :-)
I still don't know why they left another half but not took all kitkats and disappeared.
This was fascinating, but also terrible! I'm no expert, but this struck me as suspicious: In possibly the strangest twist on the KitKat trail, Bokksu announced in September that it had acquired Japan Crate. But NYTimes discovered that the acquisition had actually been completed back in June. So Bokksu, through a wholly owned subsidiary, had in effect overseen the loading of its own KitKats onto the original two fraud…