John Robb of Global Guerrillas touches my heart

Part of my daily required reading is the magnificently creative and throughful 4th Generation Warfare (4GW) blog, Global Guerrillas.

In a strange departure (unless you’ve been reading the GG blog for a long time), John Robb just posted on how the sea freight shipping system was revolutionized with a new platform (and describes the term, excellently).

Part of the post’s appeal is that it makes me think about The Wire, and I really do miss that show. Even though Brother Mouzone was a cartoon character, Simon Templeton never was expanded beyond a character outline and seemed mostly to be a collection of stereotypes, and that the second ‘working class white crime’ season most relevant to JR’s post was the weakest season…

The REAL reason why the post could be interesting to many people is that it shows how such a simple conceptual change (standardization of container dimensions, and their ability to be moved from land to sea transport and vice versa without modification) could lead to such a modern revolution.  There are so many gross inefficiencies in the world that just need a bit of logical and surprisingly low-tech thinking to correct.  Of course, implementation requires some heft, however all that is really required is for an organization or person with ‘heft’ to ask any old idiot how things could be improved, and revolutions like that of the containerized shipping industry can be had.

Sad that I get all excited about a short blog posting about shipping containers. But John Robb deserves all the shout-outs he can get.

… and the cow goes moo