#Logistics

[skycowboys]

Hey everyone!

I've had more people lately ask about what Sky Cowboys is and how they can interact with the IP as a whole, so I'm creating a Community page over on the Sky Cowboys website to explain what a Sandbox Community is.

And on that page I'm featuring OCs, so if you have an OC you'd like to add to the gallery, toss me a DM :)

~ Larn

[discopaws]

Letters to mail? Our Bunnies won't fail!

[probablyasocialecologist]

The supply chain capitalism of AI. This image partially captures the supply chain of AI as a global and complex phenomenon. Natural resources, components and materials to build AI infrastructure are extracted, shipped, manufactured and produced across the globe. For instance, NVIDIA obtains tungsten from Brazil; gold from Colombia and tantalum from Kazakhstan. Minerals are assembled to manufacture GPUs by TSMC. NVIDIA sells GPUs across data centres in the world. Given the refresh rates of these materials, data centres sent their components to recycle plants or dumps. The human labour wrapped-up in this chain includes, data labellers, logistics drivers, data scientists, miners, data centre operators and electronic waste dismantlers, who are also scattered across different geographies. Source: NVIDIA (2022) and fieldwork.

The supply chain capitalism of AI: a call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens

[supplyside]

Japanese port operations

[janeuary-month]

Hi everyone! Janeuary 2025 is over, but it was a great success! Below, you'll find more information about the 2025 event:

End-of-event round-up post

Prompts

Rules

FAQs

Posting instructions

Save the date for Janeuary 2026 throughout the entire month of January next year! 2026 prompts will be shared in September.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

This event is organized by @firawren

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

How do you think the Yeerks kept their Hork-Bajir fed between the invasion of their homeworld and the Earth invasion? The one world we're sure that they invaded was the Taxxon homeworld, which was supposed to be mostly desert, likely with minimal trees and tree bark. If the Yeerks really would end up destroying the natural beauty of planets that they conquered like Ax says in Book 4, I can't imagine feeding all the Hork-Bajir would be easy. Unlike Taxxons, who eat anything.

All right, so. You can get up to 12 square yards of mulch from Home Depot for $560 in today's dollars, which is $285 in 1997 dollars. We don't know exactly how many hork-bajir-controllers are left after Alloran's ethnic cleansing, but from Visser I'm guessing it's a few hundred to a couple thousand. Of those, not every one is posted on Earth, so I'm willing to bet there are only ~1000 hork-bajir on Earth.

How much does a hork-bajir eat? Well, an Earth animal that's about 7' long and herbivorous — I'm going with okapi — eats about 35lbs of plant matter a day. A cubic yard of mulch weighs about 600lbs, according to Home Depot. So 1 cubic yard of mulch is about 17 days' food for one hork-bajir, or 1 day's food for 17. Which means you could get 204 days' food (12*17) out of $285 in 1997.

If there are 1000 hork-bajir, then you'll need 5 of those 12-yd shipments a day, which comes out to $1425 in then-dollars, $2802 in now-dollars. UNESCO says that cheap bulk meals for humans can be calculated at $3 a meal or $9 a day with U.S. ingredients, meaning it'd cost a nonprofit ~$9000 a day to feed 1000 humans. So if feeding a human costs about $9 a day and feeding a hork-bajir costs about $2.75 a day in today's money, then I'd say they're probably feeding the hork-bajir just fine. I'd even venture that they're spending more on the "grilled chicken, roast potatoes, steamed broccoli" (Visser) the humans get than on their hork-bajir.

[pratchettquotes]

"He's started catching fish," said the Senior Wrangler. "That means he'll come over all smug and start asking what plans we've got for making a boat at any minute, you know what he's like."

The Dean looked at some sketches he'd made on a rock.

"How hard can it be to build a boat?" he said. "People with bones in their noses build boats. And we are the end product of thousands of years of enlightenment. Building a boat is not beyond men like us, Senior Wrangler."

"Quite, Dean."

"All we have to do is search this island until we find a book with a title like Practical Boat-Building for Beginners."

"Exactly. It'll be plain sailing after that, Dean. Ahaha."

Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Iveco Stralis 570XP 4×2 Abarth Emotional Truck, 2017. A truck that celebrated Iveco becoming supplier of heavy-duty logistics vehicles for the Abarth racing division

[vintagegermany]

Hamburg, Germany 1890s

[titleknown]

Thinking about it, I wonder how much the reason it seems like people're willing to accept unethical production for the sake of low prices is because we don't really know what goes into the price of things.

Because like... did you know that Games Workshop does all its factory production in the UK instead of offshoring it to the Global South like other companies might? And that's good, a rare GW dub!

But also, we have no idea whether that's responsible for their bloated prices compared to other companies, as opposed to shareholders and executives wanting more cocaine money.

And that's the problem.

Like, to add, I bitch about Transformers Deluxes costing 25$ now, but that would be perfectly fine if it were what was necessary for the folks on the design teams and in the factories to make a living wage!

But again, I have no idea whether it's that, or because Hasbro execs want to buy a third Golden Sex Yacht (The Yacht You Can Have Sex With) (C) (TM).

IDK where I'm going with this, it's just depressingly interesting wrt the issues of imperialist exploitation and the global supply chain...

[greatwyrmgold]

Dungeon Logistics

Between the currently-airing Dungeon Meshi anime and my recent binge of the manga (I finally got past the 40% mark), I've been thinking about the logistics of long-term dungeoneering.

The Problem

Military theorists and historians have some rules of thumb about what soldiers can be expected to do and need. [citation] For instance, they usually need around three pounds of food per day and can carry around 90-120 pounds of stuff. (The total varies less by strength and more by how much of that strength you can convince soldiers to use carrying stuff the general cares about.)

Theoretically, this means soldiers can carry a month or two of food; however, hardtack makes a pretty terrible weapon. Most of their carrying capacity is taken up by inedible (and also important) gear; the standard rule of thumb seems to be that soldiers can carry about ten days' worth of food.

The same is presumably more or less true for dungeoneers. A wizard's robe, staff, and spellbook probably weigh less than a sword and a suit of armor, but that space is going to get taken up by the miscellaneous tools you need to survive in a dungeon that aren't necessary for armies walking through inhabited lands.

In short, in the absence of Senshi, dungeoneers can only spend about a week and a half in the dungeon. Obviously, you need to set aside time to return to the surface, so you can't go deeper than five days. Well, you can—starvation doesn't kill you instantly—but you really shouldn't.

Extra Cargo

What if we added some people who only carried food? That would help some. Including two porters per three dungeoneers would roughly double the group's operational endurance, from ten days to twenty.

But the number of porters grows rapidly as the desired trip into the dungeon grows longer; operational endurance to 30 days requires four porters per dungeoneer. Even if the dungeon is spacious for a party of dozens to be possible, having that party be 80% or more noncombatants is a recipe for disaster.

What about pack animals? Mules require about five times as much food as humans (assuming they can't graze in the dungeon), but they can carry close to 300 pounds of supplies. One mule per three dungeoneers extends operational endurance from 10 to 15 days, a second to 17.

That's not bad, but pack animals work better when they can graze. If the dungeon has grass or equivalent foliage, one mule per three dungeoneers increases operational endurance to about 26 days, a second to 35, and one mule per dungeoneer increases it to 39. But most dungeons don't have much to graze on.

For the spendthrift dungeoneer, pack animals have one advantage over porters: You can eat them.

Butchery

I can't find any actual data about how much meat you get from butchering a mule, but combining other data lets me estimate 300 pounds (with large error bars).

So you could theoretically buy a (relatively) cheap mule at the surface, bring it with you through the dungeon, butcher it when you'd eaten through the supplies on its back, and live off its meat for a while. In this case, you probably don't even need to feed it on the way down! I have been informed that you do, in fact, need to feed it.

Five dungeoneers could live off the supplies carried by an increasingly malnourished mule for about 19 9.5 days. The mule would probably lose weight during that time, but the butcher could probably get at least a hundred pounds of decent meat off the poor critter. That would give them at least a week of extra rations, plus whatever they carried on their own backs, for a total operational endurance of at least five three and a half weeks.

This strategy probably works best if the adventurers are planning to go establish a camp after a few days and linger there for a few weeks. That would let them slaughter the mule as soon as they reach their base camp and free them from somehow carrying a whole mule carcass worth of food around afterwards.

This kind of strategy could enable supply depots relatively close to the surface. If we increase the party from five dungeoneers and a mule to five merchants and twenty mules, they could supply adventurers going a bit deeper. They'd need to charge a pretty hefty surcharge—at the very least, they'd need to cover the cost of killing so many mules!

It's also possible to create supply depots without slaughtering pack animals, but they would need to be smaller, closer to the surface, or both.

It would, strictly speaking, be possible to make a deeper supply depot, supplied by a larger depot. It would probably be impractical, though.

Conclusion

Dungeoneers weighed down by their own equipment can only spend brief periods of time exploring a dungeon. If they include some porters or pack animals in the party, they can increase that to maybe a month (two weeks down, two weeks up).

A sufficiently profitable dungeon economy might enable a set of outposts where adventurers can rest and resupply between treks deeper into the dungeon. If enough pack animals were slaughtered, they might be able to bring supplies a week or two deeper than the surface market.

In the right circumstances, dungeoneers might be able to delve a full month below the sunlit world without eating anything except wheat bread and mule meat. But this requires a small army of merchants and herdsmen and porters and butchers and so on, feeding not just the dungeoneers themselves but all the people supporting them, and all the people supporting those people, reaching through countless miles of cavern and across acres of farmland.

And of course, all of that assumes that no step in this process gets disrupted by the dangers of a dungeon; no wargs killing your mule, no warg packs overrunning the outpost, no getting lost in the twisty little maze of passages all alike. The higher you build that house of cards, the farther you'll far if it fails.

Senshi had the right idea.

[silly-lazytown-polls]

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Sargon developed this new form of governance by conquering all the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia, creating what most historians call the first empire in the world.” He added that, until these latest excavations, information on that empire was limited to fragmentary and bombastic royal inscriptions or much later copies of Akkadian inscriptions “which are not completely reliable”. Of the new discovery, he said: “It is extremely important because, for the first time, we have concrete evidence – with artefacts in situ.” He has been astonished by the detail in those records: “They note absolutely everything down. If a sheep dies at the very edge of the empire, it will be noted. They are obsessed with bureaucracy.” The tablets, containing cuneiform symbols, an early writing system, record affairs of state, deliveries and expenditures, on everything from fish to domesticated animals, flour to barley, textiles to precious stones. Dana Goodburn-Brown, a British-American conservator, is cleaning the tablets so that they can be transcribed. The work is both painstaking and exciting, she said: “People just think things come out of the ground and look like you see them in the museum, but they don’t.” One tablet lists different commodities: “250 grams of gold / 500 grams of silver/ … fattened cows… / 30 litres of beer.” Even the names and professions of the citizens are recorded, Rey said: “Women, men, children – we have names for everyone. “Women held important offices within the state. So we have high priestesses, for example, although it was a society very much led by men. But the role of the woman was at least higher than many other societies, and it’s undeniable based on the evidence that we have.” The jobs listed range from stone-cutters to the sweeper of the temple floor. Rey said: “Being able to sweep the floor where the gods and the high priest were located was very important. The cities of ancient Mesopotamia in theory all belonged to the gods. The society worked for the temple state.” The tablets were found at the site of a large state archive building, made of mud-brick walls and divided into rooms or offices. Some of the tablets contain architectural plans of buildings, field plans and maps of canals.

15 March 2025

[supplyside]

LNG tanker at the breaker yard