1. Do you have any idea what is the latency for a such operation? This is real world, not computers. Imagine AWS engineers going on strike to give you an idea of how hard would it be to build a competitor from scratch. IRL clients will try to migrate to big existing players like FedEx, but you can’t build warehouses and a truck/railroad fleet overnight. This is a new “let them eat cake”. Why don’t peasants just make a startup that will make more food? Right? 2. “This is not real capitalism” — this is the convergence I did not expect to happen.

> In a REAL capitalistic economy, a small shipping provider would have raised the capital immediately to capitalize on the strikes, advertised their services to UPSs customers and eaten the company away.

In a REAL capitalistic economy, a large shipping provider would intimidate their own employees by means of having their own army.

And it would all work out, because the army would actually be composed of the striking workers, hired on short-contracts to intimidate themselves, and any strike-breakers would also be striking workers hired at greater pay; where else are you going to find people with exactly the right knowledge and experience, AND available suddenly? :)

Wasn't there a part of Catch 22, where the entrepreneur character outsourced the German bombing of some US air base to that very same US air base's bombers?

Sounds about like that. In non-fiction there are just more steps in between to hide it.

Not really. The army is the part of the workforce they actually take good care of. It might be contracted from a PMC, or even the state because under REAL capitalism the state exists to keep the capital happy.

>In a REAL capitalistic economy, a small shipping provider would have raised the capital immediately to capitalize on the strikes, advertised their services to UPSs customers and eaten the company away.

In the real world it takes weeks if not months to purchase a delivery vehicle. There are no delivery van lots that you go to in order to browse a wide variety of Morgan Olson and Utilimaster vans and then plop down a million dollars for 20 of them, not that 20 of them would allow you to run a parcel shipping service. You need thousands. Which means a production run at a manufacturer who is already booked through next year.

Hell, it would take weeks just to figure out WHERE to advertise much less actually inking deals, unless you like throwing money away.

It doesn't matter if you apparate a trillion dollars, time is immovable. It took a decade of conceptualizing and two years of actualizing to start FedEx.

If a rationally-acting rational actor rationalizes ten quadrillion dollars of gold into his pocket, it doesn't matter one fucking bit.

They can't buy the facilities, systems, equipment, and experience needed to do shit. They can't use their iron capitalist will to pour concrete faster.

This is one, of many, fundamental blind spot concerning reality that capitalists or pseudo-capitalists used to working in the fake online venture capitalist world have.

> In the real world it takes weeks if not months to purchase a delivery vehicle.

But you are looking at it from the perspective of someone sitting behind a keyboard, starting from scratch.

In the real world with thriving economies, there will be smaller, underdog players already operating. Maybe they are regional, or maybe they have a slower/smaller fleet.

Whatever the reason, these smaller players rise up to eat the big one because they already have something to leverage. Facilities, workers etc. They just need to raise capital to expand rapidly.

The steps in the parent post are not meant for someone starting from scratch.

There are regional parcel carriers. Two of the largest just merged (OnTrac and LaserShip).

Neither of them, nor the combined, has the assets (physical vehicles/aircraft, drivers, pilots, package handlers, terminals/hubs) to take over a substantial fraction of UPS volume on a few days’ notice. And they won’t scale up ahead of obvious opportunity because if UPS settles, they’ve got a ton of previous capital stranded and employees to fire with no associated business to pay for them.

The original post bemoaned the fact that the economy has become too concentrated to a handful of companies and is too protective of large corporations.

I took this to mean that capitalism would better work as intended if UPS was not allowed to grow to be as big as they are. They would then be a regional player themselves, one of many, and it would be easier for one or more other similarly sized companies to take over their business if they drop the ball. There would be a real competitive market.

The scenario you mentioned is the current state of affairs, where such a large company cannot be replaced, and can hold the economy hostage.

>In the real world with thriving economies, there will be smaller, underdog players already operating. Maybe they are regional, or maybe they have a slower/smaller fleet.

Yes. I use them every day. I send million of dollars of aerospace equipment to and fro every year using 3PL, none of which are UPS or FedEx or the USPS.

There are thousands of 3PL firms, each competing with each other.

If you search "full truck" and/or "intermodal" and "logistics" I guarangoddamntee there are a dozen within 50 miles of your zip code.

> They just need to raise capital to expand rapidly.

LOL

If my preferred smaller logistics firm (Polaris) was given eleventy-billion hexaseptillion dollars it would take two years at a minimum just to lease the aircraft, airport slots, and facilities needed to compete with a single-digit percentage of UPS's network.

Again, the fact that people think that smaller underdog competitors to UPS don't exist is a glaring, supermassive-black-hole-sized blind spot that pseudo-capitalists have.