The part about Costco choosing to avoid the last mile shipping problem reminded me of a proverb, roughly translated as:

A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.

I think it holds a lot of truth in engineering.

Both spectrums are hard. Solving last mile is really really hard, but if you do that's a huge moat (aka Amazon). If you avoid last mile, you best deliver value in some other way, which Costco does by giving you more per dollar than anyone else.

It’s also amazing how bad delivery services are in general. The incentives for third party delivery services don’t align well with the other parties. A retailer is judged on the quality of delivery yet only amazon has seemed to realize this (queue incoming anecdotes about amazon screwing up delivery yet i’ve never had an issue getting a refund when it happens).

But they don't avoid solving it, they offer it by partnering with instacart.

Sounds Costco not paying for externalities.

They don’t avoid the problem. They avoid solving it and let it be your problem.

It seems costco can deliver HEAVY things that amazon can't (economically, afaict)

Incredible quote, thank you for posting it

I hear this, I have been in plenty of meetings where I propose a solution that eclipses most of the project requirements, often for a product person to turn around and say something like “yeah but I like working with X techhnology”, for example Tailwind.

Okay you like Tailwind because you seem to think “p-2” is better than specifying “padding: 2rem;” because when it comes time to tinker with things you don’t want to understand CSS, you want to play with Tailwind.

> A clever person solves a problem; a wise person avoids it.

Wow, what a great quote!I think that this combined with "there is no free lunch" explains a lot of thing (IMO)

(I like to write and once I write, I like to send it free on the internet in the spirit of how older internet must've originally intended but if you wish to read the TLDR it is: Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at!)

I think that this holds a lot within career-making as well, in terms of deciding what career that you want. For example, I think that sometimes I get hyper-focused on a topic and basically dig the weeds and every information about a particular topic. My recent obsession was with the dot com bubble and supply chains.

but at the same time I think that although its just good thinking about it and gives me more breath of knowledge which helps me form a more nuanced person, but that doesn't mean that for every interest that I have, I have to become the expert or a genuine professional career at it.

Some problems are worth the risk/tradeoff when thought from short term but they quickly become really painful over the long term whereas other problems are more fulfilling long term but really hurt short term and there is a balance within the middle which I have selected which is what's know as CS :-D

I am a somewhat frugal guy and my philosophy has always been of do it yourself but reading about supply chains makes me realize just how interconnected we are. A toilet making company in Japan is an irreplacable component within the AI industry (They make the ceramics sheets on which the wafers are built and they are the only company that have the genuine expertise, patent and skills for doing so and they aren't alone and there are many many companies within such thing)

and even a single aluminim screw-esque component could take like 4-5 turns from australia (mining) -> iceland (cheaper energy) -> China (making proper aluminum bars) -> Vietnam (cheaper labour than China so China itself is offshoring it) -> Back to China.

All while a software engineer from say India/America/Europe is making the website and handling the customer service and taking ad decisions/marketing while another MNC (Amazon) ships it to your doorsteps, a company can be formed anywhere nationwide, and the product could be gone to LATAM.

Basically, although I have gotten on a tangent, my main point is that not every problem has to be solved by you. the world has lots of money in every fields as its just soo interconnected and as such you should decide on the problems which are best worth your time, your expertise and your interests hopefully and tackling that problem and maybe even being clever at that! and being wise in avoiding many of other problems.

Be wise in selecting the problems to be clever at! but to be wise on selecting the problems you want to be clever at, you should be aware of other problems in the first place so its good to analyze more problems, though it could very well be a justification that I might provide myself when I am studying supply chains and the humble container, I also find it interesting how the concepts of containers become so intuitive once you know it in modern shipping and then we applied that same concept AGAIN in Docker/podman but before that time, we were none the "wiser" :-D