Dach

There's this idea in computer science wherein the maximum theoretical speedup that can be acquired with an arbitrary number of processors is related to the percentage of the program which can be parallelized. If we have two segments of code that take the same amount of time to execute with one CPU core in which the first segment can't be parallelized at all and the second segment is perfectly parallelizable, we can only run the program twice as fast, no matter how many CPU cores we have. There's a similar idea in economics. It seems like the most powerful and civilizationally relevant feature controlling the medium to long term change in the price of goods is the extent to which the production of that good can be decoupled from the expenditure of man-hours. Some economic activity isn't "parallelizable" using current technology- we can't practically make that activity much faster without building powerful substitutes for humans, technology which is (for now) mostly out of our reach... For example, it turns out that moving stuff over land is not easy to decouple from human labor without self-driving cars. There are two methods of overland transportation worth noting here: Cars and Trains. Due to the nature of our road infrastructure, there's a pretty clear upper bound on how efficient car-based transportation of goods can get. There are legal limits on the allowed speed and size of vehicles, so without self-driving tech, we can't change how many man-hours need to be spent per cubic meter per kilometer. Train-based transportation has its own problems which limit its ability to dominate overland transportation. Namely, our train transportation network is incomplete in that goods must still be ferried to their final destination by cars, so overland transportation is only some % "parallelizable". Using this we can predict that overseas transportation would be really efficient compared to overland transportation. I suspect that Nautical miles per cargo container per h