An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles(thezvi.wordpress.com) |
An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles(thezvi.wordpress.com) |
> Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.
First, negative feedback is good. The problem here was a case of positive feedback, which are always bad. This Ryan person might be helping in the one crisis, but he has just installed a thousand new timebombs.
Second, the reason NYT has nothing about this is that NYT editors tell its reporters to find stories that seem to illustrate what the editors want said. NYT is not really interested in what is actually happening; NYT has always been that way.
There are other ports. They're not economically viable. See e.g. my old comment about the history of Prince Rupert, BC:
LA and Long Beach don't seem big enough to cause a global problem.
The only thing this achieves is even more garbage in the ocean.
So that's the beauty of how it was communicated. No blame was placed on anyone, plausible deniability was given out to everyone, and he pre-empted being derided as a layman who doesn't know shit by pretending to accidentally discover the issue. In one fell swoop so many egos were placated and a plan was laid out on top of all that. No back and forth, just all boxes checked and all given license to proceed forward with enthusiasm and intent.
This is not correct.
Next though, CA DOT should do a one time waiver and extension of the 90-day BIT inspections on trailer chassis.
Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old.
Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways.
But no, let's keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!
Somebody who cannot understand what "negative feedback" means should not inspire confidence in his analysis of a mature queuing problem.
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029825
The previous stack:
Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28971226 - Oct 2021 (483 comments)
Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (265 comments)
This is incorrect. There was a zoning rule which affected truck yards in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Truck yards. Not the port itself.
As stated in the linked tweets actually.
But if you don't believe that you can just google an image of the Port of Los Angeles from let's say 2019 and count how high the container piles go. Here is a randomly selected image from 2019 where 5 high piles can be clearly counted: https://www.joc.com/sites/default/files/field_feature_image/...
Accuracy is important. I'm not an expert on logistics, or zoning laws. But how could I trust the article's author when they clearly unable to parse their own sources?
> Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages.
It's nice that the article is not going into that. Instead it hammers on that politicians regulate where and how many containers can you plop down. That is not the real issue.
If you are moving containers into an area, and you are not moving an equal amount out then you are going to run out of space to store the containers. It is that simple. You can tweak rules to make a bit more space, for example by stacking them higher in the truck yards. But the real question is: why are the people who own these containers incentivised to move them back to where they want them to be filled? If you solve that the problem solves itself. If you can't solve that piles of containers will fill up what little more space you won by tweaking. So the very point the article decides to "not go into" is the only one worth going into.
Anecdote: I was driving into San Pedro in 2019, and I didn't have a smart phone at the time (so no map/gps). I took the wrong exit off of the 710 and ended up on Terminal Island. That was the most visually overwhelming place I have ever been... the scale of the ships, the height of the stacked containers (more than 2), the abundance of trains... the cranes... visually, overwhelming. And then there was all the road work, construction, detours, one-ways down wrong-way streets.... I was a hell of a morning as I tried to get to my presentation....
Sure, when your critical system goes down an RCA is hugely important and ultimately you have to apply a fix that addresses the core issue to avoid it happening again in the future.
But, at the time that the system is actually down it seems like the most important first step (once you understand the problem) is to get the system running again ASAP. This can give you the runway to fix the actual problem.
In that particular situation a temporary buffer that allows the flow to become unblocked is necessary.
The computer won't operate if you are unable to move data off the internal registers because there's nowhere to go. Including operations to delete the data in long term storage that is preventing the internal registers from being cleared.
As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When that happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on.
So the "win" here was that more trailers would be available to take full containers from ships and that would move things along.
I search Google news just about every day and all I can find is people patting themselves on the back for getting the rule changed, but nothing about whether the rule change has made a difference.
> 15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away.
It's been my experience that nearly all of the times it's the low-, and maybe mid-, -level workers who see problems. And it's usually the upper end of the business or bureaucracy who end up ignoring the problem.
And then it's also been my experience that after the problem gets ignored for a while, the people who see the problem also don't report later problems because they know it won't be fixed and they're not empowered to fix it themselves.
This is a widespread problem in my eyes.
Of course the above is only able to fix local issues. It doesn't really leave any way for someone to say "we will have a bottleneck here if something else goes wrong"...
The author was using terminology introduced quite a while ago by Bruce F. Webster: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...
The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year.
The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year.
Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.
This is a little disingenuous. From what I understand, this was a rule put in place a long time ago, in a different context. The ramifications of such rule under unprecedented stress weren't understood or foreseen. Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to be honest.
Great they removed the rule, but don't forget about Chesterton's fence.
In this case we do know the reason why: aesthetics. The side effects are just greater now, so out the rule goes.
So even if the rule shows up in some "city aesthetic code" where they wrote down "yep more than two is ugly", it may very well be satisfying some other desideratum that no one wrote down.
That's not to say this rule really does have other reasons, but you can't stop at "yup that's what our records show". And indeed, some of them mentioned possible safety issues that arise with greater depths.
Also, how high of a stack of containers do you feel safe working around in the next major SoCal earthquake?
No, that wasn't the case. It was a Fire Department ordinance for the city and not the port. It didn't apply to the Port of Long Beach itself. This is a photo from October 19th, before the emergency order on October 22.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/los-an...
Containers are stacked five high.
Often times the goal is to simply provide information to senior management that middle management isn't giving them.
Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility!
It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.
As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.
And yes, the narrative of the story is definitely important, because it avoided all the rabble you see here that was getting in the way of a simple first step.
Pretend this were reported as "Long Beach allows containers to be stacked higher in order to deal with a glut of empty containers" rather than Randian Superhero Casually Solves Port Problem, and Miraculously the Parasitic Bureaucrats Are Forced to Listen to Him by the People of Twitter, and By the Way, Why Can't We Demolish Neighborhoods and Replace Them With SROs?
Wouldn't more cynicism be engendered by the second story than the first if the change turns out to be ineffective or even destructive?
I'm not sure if stacking 5-6 high is a long term solution. It works now, because it's only at 2 high and the buffer is available. But if they were at 5-6 high under normal circumstances when this tsunami wave hit we'd be talking about letting them go 8-9 high? Maybe limit them to 2 high but allow them to file a temporary permit to go to X high with justification... something along those lines, so it is a rather accessible flex up and down and it doesn't require extreme levels of non-local politics to accomplish.
That's bad.
Also, now that I know I'm manipulated, I'm skeptical that the changes will have the outcome that they want. It could but it's not good that you've told me you've manipulated me.
That's also bad.
No, I think the news isn't being shared because it doesn't stoke fear, greed, or anger. The economics of the news causes people in those industries to (consciously or subconsciously) prioritize headlines which stoke fear, greed, or anger. "We solved a problem" doesn't stoke any of that.
Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are now going to have to go to a completely different site altogether, and who knows how many IO issues the new site will also bring in.
Now's the chance for logistics companies to start hiring OpenTTD players.
It sounds like anyone with a fancy use for empty shipping containers can probably get them for "free" right now if you just show up with a truck to haul them away.
My money is on the ports themselves being the problem. Having people waiting around for hours if not days is incredibly inefficient, and the Rotterdams, Singapores and Shenzhens of the world do not have this issue.
Let’s assume they unload every ship in a week or two all of those trucks have to push the stuff to the right place. Maybe some of them had to layoff and or furlough truckers. Those truckers then get better jobs . So you still fail.
Also I think the deadline is gonna be Christmas .
Maybe they should travel and see how ports are managed in the rest of the world.
This workflow rule that clogged the port seems to be the perfect platform for a former McKinsey consultant like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to shine. Yet that thunder is stolen by the WSJ coverage and Flexport CEO tweetstorm.
-Unions are good for representing workers in negotiations with private companies. Taxpayers do not have anyone to represent them in negotiations with public unions. Disallow unions in government jobs. Government already has enough corruption and inefficiency.
-Dismantle the patent system. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
-Abolish the limited liability company. We saw in the mortgage crisis that allowing private companies to profit by putting risk on the public shoulders leads to disaster.
-Publish all tax records and make a constitutional amendment that all prices paid must be public. The free market makes the basic assumption that all prices paid and offered are public information.
On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of song and dance to get anything done is probably yet another good indicator that America is deep into an irreversible decline. One the other hand, it's great to see this kind of well-document contemporaneous analysis of what good change making actually entails right now, something that's not only interesting and useful currently, and will surely be of interest to folks long into the future.
Like maybe being right was never enough to get things done at any point in history, but the amount of hoops you currently need to jump through in addition to being right seems deeply pathological.
Short-term optimisation.
Most people who aren't familiar with trucking understand a tractor-trailer as a single vehicle, because that's what they usually see on the road.
When in reality it's exactly what the phrase describes: a tractor (or cab, or engine and steering and driver) + a trailer (or chassis + whatever it's hauling).
The entire idea of modern over-the-road trucking is built on the concept that one cab can pick up and haul any standard chassis (leaving aside hazmat and other complexities).
This is what allows for optimized freight movement, as you can limit the amount of time cabs are moving around without hauling anything, in addition to decoupling the load/unloading of a trailer (time consuming) from the driver turning around (want to minimize).
I.e. driver arrives at warehouse with container A on chassis B, parks it in a loading dock, and immediately hooks up to container T, already waiting on chassis U, and heads back out.
The bottleneck in this case was: (1) nowhere to legally put empty containers, causing (2) empty containers to stay on chassis, leading to (3) no available empty chassis to unload port cargo onto (containers must be loaded onto some sort of chassis to be removed from a port), leading to (4) a backup and full port yard, leading to (5) ports refusing to accept empties, to conserve their limited yard space, leading to GOTO 1.
Heh, I was noticing myself that it was kind of hard to follow because the domain ontology (what entities exist and how they relate) wasn't make explicit (like I just did with the previous parenthetical). Would have helped to know that a chassis and container-free trailer are the same thing.
And so I kind of balked when the author said the Flexport CEO:
>>Describes a clear physical problem that everyone can understand, in simple terms that everyone can understand but that don’t talk down to anyone.
The port itself is protected by geography, and is one of the deepest natural harbours in the world.
It's a neat place!
Well, except for being one of the rainiest cities in Canada.
Edit: If you're interested in this kind of thing, here's a drone video I shot last year, of Prince Rupert's container port: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DyG9wOWi0c
https://weatherspark.com/y/298/Average-Weather-in-Prince-Rup...
One reason I can think of is availability of labor, but how many people does it take to run a good-sized port? Not saying we build a new port out in the middle of nowhere, but a location where there is already a small- to mid-sized town nearby might be suitable. And also consider that the existing port locations have housing costs that are probably too high for many/most port workers anyway.
It seems like we need more ports in the US in places similar to Prince Rupert.
But, more importantly Prince Rupert is well connected to the CN rail network. A rail connection is key for efficient intermodal shipping. And there aren’t many deep water harbours on the west coast with railways. Building rail or road connections to new ports wouldn’t be trivial.
I've lost count of the number of times that I've been able to solve what was thought to be impossible by just talking to people.
I agree that the fact it was changed so quickly should be celebrated, but it also gives me pause to think about just how many things could instantly be improved if the people with the power sat up and paid attention.
HNers have pretty much no understanding or respect for what it means to realistically be in public service. They treat the realities as unfortunate errors ripe for optimization.
Yes, it is a deeply optimistic and progressive worldview. It's a real shame people don't respect the unimprovable world as it really is.
Nope - you don’t get to blame a new problem on a 20+ yr old regulation. Changing this will likely help in the short term, but it’s not the cause of the problem.
Reason 4 of the cause is what you should rail against: "This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing."
Isn't that alone an indictment of him or his organization (which, by extension, is an indictment of him)? Why did no one on his team tell him about the container backlog? If they did, why did they not suggest that he allow containers to be stacked higher? This isn't a new problem, it's been going on since at least March if not earlier.
Also consider for a minute how blindingly obvious it is, in retrospect, to know that containers can -- and should -- be stacked 3+ high vs. how hard it is to walk into a field of 2-stacks and know that they're being stacked inefficiently. Part of the challenge is informational: those that see the problem see it so obviously that they assume that there's a reason why the problem can't be fixed. Those that can't see the problem don't even realize there is a problem!
That's kind of the heart of the perennial frustration with bureaucracy: it's nobody's fault, so nothing gets done.
I don't think it will make matters worse but I won't be surprised if it doesn't actually solve the problem. It just seems like a cheap+fast attempt at a solution which is good.
There's a lot of narrative that's going into this discussion, an heroic visionary CEO, a bumbling politician. In fact, the mayor made the change as soon as it was brought up.
But I really like Petersen's thread:
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? Modern finance with its obsession with "Return on Equity."
If the port is full and the trucks are full, clearly we have more overall containers than before. Where did they come from? And is the place they come from now short on containers?
Those are of course separate problems. If we are accumulating empty containers, you could just dump them somewhere for the time being. Yes, the trucks would have to drive somewhere else than the port to dump them, but that's clearly better than economic standstill. And if it turns out that China is short on empty containers, then we might need to work on the incentives for ships to bring back the empties.
But unless this whole clogging was caused by a very temporary spike in container throughput, increasing buffer capacity will only alleviate the problem for so long.
The hyperlocalization of things like this in the US are the source of a lot of our problems IMO. We get stuck in local maxima that actually add up to terrible inefficiencies on the whole.
Something similar in concept, when evacuating a hurricane inbound lanes can be turned into outbound lanes and double the buffer. Of course the citizens of coastal cities don't want outbound lanes only at all times. This is for extreme situations (skimming but I think this is valid ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraflow_lane_reversal)
2. What if it was stacked up to LIMIT and a wave of containers come again? The point is to reserve a buffer. I'm rather agnostic on the numbers use variables if you like; Normal limit X, buffer size Y, X+Y is what you can get a temporary permit for, Z is technical limit and this math is a test X+Y <= Z
A) the article is wrong, the limit was at truck yards, not the port B) Zoning is a thing, and as long as it is, residents (read voters) will want it used to keep their homes pretty and valuable whenever possible.
It might be fun to release a Port of Los Angeles savegame that challenges folks to unhork the port.
That would be awesome!
I don’t know if that will happen, but this is an increased buffer size that is directly addressing a limiting factor. It might help.
Why wouldn't the buffer just fill again? I wonder if we've reached a point where manufacturing a new container is more economical than hauling an empty back across the ocean especially if you include opportunity cost to ship actual goods.
Increasing the buffer size is a temporary relief, but clearly the underlying problem is an ever-increasing number of containers (empty or full), or we wouldn't have gotten into this situation.
If we could dispose of the empty containers somewhere then this bottleneck would cease to exist - trucks could just haul away containers at max throughput. I gather that it's become harder to ship back empty containers though, and presumably just scrapping them is not a sound solution in the long run either.
This is not obvious to me. The same ships are going back to fetch more goods, so why would they want to go empty?
Surely the cost of manufacturing a new container is (or should be) less than the cost of putting it on an empty boat.
It would be better to require that the ships carry away as many empties as fit aboard.
Providing that storage space will allow the trucks to complete their circuit.
MMy understanding: many truck drivers are owner-operators, operating on extremely slim margins at the best of times (say 5 pickups per day).
With long waits and maybe one or two pickups per day, they go out of business.
I'm skeptical that this will fix the problem by itself, but it buys time to observe the system in action and adjust capacity on other bottlenecks to bring it back into balance.
All those warehouses, importers, all the network of knowledge and people and demand for imports, all the stuff that's real but maybe difficult to see, that's the magic that really makes a port have high value.
I'd like to think we still have those kinds of capabilities if they were needed, but I'm increasingly not sure that we actually do.
Maybe an off-shore port? With a floating causeway of rail? To do something quickly requires some out-of-the-box thinking.
Just suspend the rule of law and send in Bechtel behind a bunch of guns.
Is there a reason it does not get the traffic of L.A.? Or is a 3rd large port needed?
If you don't worth in latency senstive applications you might not have encountered a situation where you need to apply the above tricks.
Continuing this analogy, what has happened is that the swap space for containers has filled, and it now has a form of compression applied to it, so that five containers can now be stored in the space where two could be beforehand.
(Edit: let's hope the swap space doesn't become encrypted.)
I wonder when the out-of-memory-killer process will start up? What would it look like--just not shipping anything to the US for a few months?
8 hours just seems really fast for Tweet> Mayor notices > Expert review > Draft proposal > Order signed.
It seems at least as likely to me that the timing is a coincidence or ,more cynically, Flexport knew the stacking was under review.
The port is already stacking five high. The two high rule is for outlying yards. Basically, it will help if it helps. We just don't know yet, but it seems like a really good+cheap idea.
Then, once the yards are stacked high, if the inflow and outflow rate still do not match, the problem will remain, just with a lot of higher stacks.
Do you specifically mean local governments here when you say organizations? If he were the CEO of Long Beach, Inc, and you were a shareholder, would you consider any of this to be reasonable?
> Also consider for a minute how blindingly obvious it is, in retrospect, to know that containers can -- and should -- be stacked 3+ high
I don't believe that the mayor of Long Beach has never seen a fully-loaded container ship. A good first question might be "Why can we stack them 9-high on a ship that traverses the Pacific ocean but only 2-high on land"?
On the flip side, hackspek is becoming obscure again. Which may be desirable to those who would be secret masters of hackerdom.
I am unaware of any place where neighboring property owners are not considered when contemplating what a property owner is allowed to do. You're saying the property owner shouldn't be regulated at all, which is fine except you're not the decision maker and other people will disagree with you. The net effect is what we have now. It's not perfect, some people will always disagree but the idea is it works for most people most of the time.
(I grew up in the vicinity of cattle feedlots---they're nasty. Industrial chicken coops are worse. But hogs are a whole different order of magnitude of stank.)
Making the above worse, even though containers are worth more in Asia, and containers of grain are worth a lot: to ship owners they get paid more for the Asia to US trip than the return trip, a ship that leaves the US unloaded (taking on ballast while unloading) and rushes back to Asia makes more money at the end of the year than a ship that waits around in LA to be reloaded with containers.
Maybe if the containers themselves were autonomous and mobile, and could optimize their own value… there’s a Black Mirror episode somewhere in that.
Besides, slippery-slope arguments are weak because predictions based on precipitating events rarely pan out to see our worst fears realized. As an extreme example, one could get wrapped around the axle fearing that a child squashing an ant in the garden could end up being the next Hitler.
Aside, I'd love to have an empty container on my parcel out in the desert, if there's such a huge glut of empties, why does one in any condition cost $10k, without delivery? If anyone has a source for empty containers for sale at reasonable prices, I'd love to have their contact info.
If you can prove that considering all externalities you would win a Nobel prize in Economic Sciences.
Calling it British Columbia certainly tracks then!
Webster:
Bureaucrat: A member of a bureaucracy
Bureaucracy: a large group of people who are involved in running a government but who are not elected
Look below that in the next section. There you will find the definition of bureaucracy. That section is called "Full Definition of bureaucracy"
1a: a body of nonelected government officials
b: an administrative policy-making group
2: government characterized by specialization of functions,
adherence to fixed rules, and a hierarchy of authority
3: a system of administration marked by officialism, red
tape, and proliferation> The fourteenth of August (in the year 1834) was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim, on her voyage from Boston, round Cape Horn, to the Western coast of North America.
> What brought us into such a place, we could not conceive. No sooner had we come to anchor, than the slip-rope, and the other preparations for southeasters, were got ready; and there was reason enough for it, for we lay exposed to every wind that could blow, except the northerly winds, and they came over a flat country with a rake of more than a league of water.
> I also learned, to my surprise, that the desolate-looking place we were in furnished more hides than any port on the coast. It was the only port for a distance of eighty miles, and about thirty miles in the interior was a fine plane country, filled with herds of cattle, in the centre of which was the Pueblo de los Angeles,– the largest town in California,– and several of the wealthiest missions; to all of which San Pedro was the seaport.
You can hold more than one thought at a time.
Media manipulation is a thing, and here's an example of it - they must have thought it's not a big deal, since they're so callous of showing the man behind the curtain. If you don't find it a problem, speak for yourself. There's many, many stories of how Facebook manipulated during the US election cycle. Also not worth thinking about?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/how-onl...
I've never messed with containers because digging yourself out of the thermal hole of starting with a metal box still doesn't sound worth it.
I think the cost to retrofit an otherwise sound but unwanted container is less than the cost to purchase a used one. That is orders of magnitude lower than the cost to erect "standard" solutions to the housing problem.
(i like this dream, but it just isn't practical)
BTW I don't live in LA/Long Beach. I recognize that LA doesn't deserve the quality of life degradation, that's an externality. We have tools to resolve externalities. I could imagine living in an affected neighborhood in LA and being super grateful for the container stacking "quick fix".
The thing is, there is no fix to the root cause. You can either have cheaper products with just-in-time supply chains, or you can pay more for storage. The trade-off will always be efficiency or redundancy, and most industries have already chosen the level of risk they can accept. Real world systems have tipping points and bottlenecks, and it’s okay to use government to push them back into steady state.
PGE is considered directly responsible for >$40B in fire damage in California.
IMHO regulation, the phenomena of regulatory capture, and the implementation of regulatory compliance bureaucracy within PG&E resulted in private sector bureaucrats drunk on power imposing government-supported misfeasance with unintended consequence...With a organization like PG&E it’s difficult to discern the boundary between the state and the corporation. Modern government enthusiasts dream of ways to impose more perfect order using the power of government, not realizing the emergent imperfection is a consequence of such aggrandizement.
Pretending otherwise is libertarian fantasy absolutely opposite to the objective facts.
Fires need three things: fuel, oxygen, heat, and two are effected by humans.
Heat: PGE, Lightning, Vehicle fires etc. all statistically provide opportunities for heat.
Fuel: There is an order of magnitude more fuel than a century ago.
As Ryan pointed out in his Twitter thread the bottleneck "should" be the cranes.
Stacking containers and finding more storage space is smart, but I think he also went pretty far outside his knowledge domain when he started talking about messing with train logistics and mobilizing the military (other than maybe using federal land/ depots for storage).
I don't know his background, but I do know trains are all about throughput, which isn't significantly improved by reducing the distance empties get hauled temporarily.
You can recruit all the traction you can find, but those tracks have a fixed limit on outbound capacity.
If anything, making a line a temporary one-way long-haul line would improve the throughput by getting rid of trains waiting on sidages to take turns going different directions. Or if dual track, run running both tracks east for some blocked amount of time.
Pull in new engines from other lines/directions, as needed.
But the bigger point is the guy appears (to me) to be talking out of his ass on at least half of his recommendations, no matter what his title and experience.
He’s the CEO of Flexport - if he’s not one of the foremost experts on logistics in the country, it’s only because they all work for him.
Being a CEO doesn't necessarily mean fully understanding the technical aspects of your companies work, and it certainly doesn't mean understanding technical aspects of adjacent industries, like railroads, or understanding military logistics or operations.
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29032229
Conjecture, but policy wise, this could relate to steel tariffs, decrease Chinese steel imports to the US and finding the container market to allow you to keep pumping money into the industry
It's not that it's cheaper to make new containers. It's that the opportunity cost of waiting for the ship to be loaded with empty containers is more expensive than immediately heading back to Shanghai with an empty ship so that you can make another very lucrative journey to LA.
That's my limited understanding of the situation. I could be wrong.
Source: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional... (which was posted here a few weeks ago)
This should free up transportation space, so we can unload more ships, so we can load containers on them and ship them back. Is it the only problem in the supply chain? Probably not. Will it make things better? Definitely in the short term, and probably in the long term.
At the very least it buys a respite to think about further fixes.
I am curious what the costs of making a new container and recycling the old instead of shipping them back is. Trade isn't symmetrical. I assume shipping them back is cheap because otherwise the ships are going back nearly empty, so it's almost free to ship them back.
Cosco containers need to be returned to X, Maersk containers go back to Y, etc.
If you can't sort and aggregate your empties efficiently, you further slow down the rate of return.
Because we pay our politicians terribly low compared to other leadership positions.
Our best leaders have gone to Facebook / Google to make better ads. It makes no sense for a 18-year-old going into college to study political theory and become a mayor by 30 or so.
Our political system is broken because there's no incentives to get good leaders into our political system. There's far more leadership positions available in private industry, and they all pay maybe 500% higher.
Remember: Senators are only paid like $180,000/year. Most other positions are paid much much less. In contrast, you can easily get $250k+/year as a VP for... well... pretty much anyone else. (Exxon, Facebook, Microsoft). Reach "3-letter" positions (CEO, CFO, CIO) at FANNGs and you're upwards of $1MM/year.
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Bonus points: a typical VP at Microsoft probably doesn't have to worry about legitimate death threats / assassination attempts like our politicians do. Its a quieter, safer, easier life. You put your family through hell, the media hound you and try to dig up dirt on you constantly. Etc. etc.
Does anyone here actually want to be a politician? Or would you rather continue your path in Engineering / programming / whatever you're doing right now? I'm not necessarily saying Hacker News is the "best and brightest", but... a lot of us are at least _trying_ to be the best-and-brightest in our selective fields. How many of us actually think about going into politics?
This just solves the problem of allowing slightly more ships to offload their cargo before they run out of space again. But as there are 100+ ships currently waiting to offload, this expanded "buffer" still isn't big enough.
EDIT: left out of the one-sided linked article: the city of Long Beach had been planning to waive the stacking requirements for a while prior to the Flexport CEO going on his rant due to pressure from the White House dating back to this summer. Container storage near (not in) the ports actually falls into 3 separate jurisdictions: the ports of LA and Long Beach, and the cities of Long Beach, LA, and Wilmington, and required coordination between all these agencies, coordination with the logistics companies operating at the ports, and coordination with the domestic shipping companies that would be moving containers out of the container storage areas (via truck or train).
(1) Because the Mayor of Long Beach is a primus inter pares legislator; as is the common for cities in California, Long Beach is a Council-Manager system, the chief executive is the appointed City Manager.
(2) But, anyhow, under the City Charter (basically, its Constitution) the harbor is actually governee by the Harbor Commission, anyway, which (like the city itself) also has appointed chief executive (the Executive Director),
So, the question should probably be “Why didn't the Executive Director of the Harbor Commission call in a experts like this..." (or, why aren’t the members and Executive Director of the Harbor Commission experts like this in the first place.)
What is a requirement (when you're a high level person) is ensuring people under you know what they're doing.
It feels like we have far too little of that in our culture.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do enough research to understand if the person who's advising you on rocket science knows what they're about. It takes a good reading list, some time, and effort.
And yet far too many manager+ just... don't.
Which allows frauds to persist on teams, and ultimately breaks things when they're asked to advise or implement things they're unqualified to do.
Every good company I've worked at expected its managers and advisors to get up to speed ASAP on (insert new thing they're working on). Every bad company had a culture that that wasn't a manager or advisor's job, and it was sufficient to repackage the words of direct reports.
But then you go back to the problem of "who determines who are the experts". Point in case, the anti-vaccine politicians dredge up the 1 out of a 1000 doctors that spouts whatever fits their narrative. Lots o people die gasping for air unnecessarily as a result...
And we have no idea how to begin to solve that problem while keeping a functional democracy, it seems
Sorry to bring in vaccines into the topic - it's just the clear parallel between these situations that I wanted to draw on.
Experts are what you want them to be
Notionally, one would think that's what the existing Harbor Commission is.
He is however smart and smart is good. Time will tell whether his suggestion was a major factor or just a good idea.
I like his Twitter thread:
What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? Modern finance with its obsession with "Return on Equity."
With respect to your comment, are we supposing regulatory capture is never a responsible corporate behavior? I’m not sure how we must conclude that responsible corporate behavior necessarily follows from and is solely dependent upon the exercise of regulatory power.
It is clearly possible, in principle, for a corporation to behave responsibly if its officers really want to and its board permits it. A corporation whose management wants it to do something responsible doesn't need a regulator to tell it that must. They can just do it.
What else, then, would lead it to choose to capture a regulator? To force its competitors to behave responsibly too? To force its future self to behave responsibly? Can you identify any single instance of either ever occurring?
Whatever may be possible, what we have seen over and over again is, instead, corporations capturing regulators and then hamstringing every effort to enforce any sort of responsible behavior.
Automobile manufacturers fought tooth and nail against requirements that they provide seatbelts, and then airbags, and then pollution controls, and then crash safety. Tobacco companies fought tooth and nail against labeling requirements, and restrictions on sales and advertising to children. Boeing management lately had the FAA approve their deathtrap 737-Max, at ultimately ruinous expense to their own stockholders and to airlines suckered into buying them.
The least harmful examples I know of have been to raise barriers to entry for their industry by imposing expenses that they, but not new entrants or smaller competitors, could afford, in the form of requirements on reporting, or fabrication materials, or quality standards, or occasionally even restrictions on effluents.
We see in many states a Dairy Council that has got itself delegated authority to assess their own taxes, spent then on billboards promoting dairy products, or buying up and destroying "excess" production, invariably favoring the biggest dairies and making smaller ones less competitive. Medical, dental, legal, hairdressing, and other "associations" are allowed to maintain licensing regimes to limit competition that, sometimes, act to establish a minimum required level of competency or education, but more reliably guarantee captive income for schools and exam boards.
Was that your intention? I can’t dismiss your arguments out of hand as purely fantastic.
OnTheOtherHand, viewing all regulation and regulatory process as necessarily corrupt from birth doesn’t prevent some good coming of some regulation. I don’t think you’ll find corporations participating for the sake of highlighting their own immoral or irresponsible practices targeted by said regulation…maybe something along the lines of “thank god we helped develop this regulation that will allow us to stop doing these negative things forced on us by evil competitors/fraudulent bad actors/whatever scapegoat”. In spin world, everyone’s heroic in deed and motive…
Given your arguments, you might support this thesis: the more regulation and regulatory proceedings, the more likely some corruption may be concealed within it.
Thus a corporation seeking limits to regulation is acting responsibly to limit potential corruption, regardless of motive. It also follows that anyone seeking expansion of regulation is inviting corruption, regardless of motive (aka “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”, HaHaOnlySerious).
Obviously overtly corrupt and succinct regulatory proceedings are outside the scope of this thesis. Not that I’m aware of any succinct regulatory proceedings, heheh.
InMyHumbleOpinion the libertarian perspective would view using the power of government with good intentions as fraught with unintended negative consequences. Therefore we should use a minimum of government power exercised with maximal certainty of appropriateness. If we are not unanimously and honestly certain then government should refrain from the exercise of power.
I feel I might have left out something about how being cynical about regulation doesn’t make one an irresponsible actor but then this isn’t a retelling of “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, “The Wealth of Nations”, “Atlas Shrugged”, or maybe “The Mystery of Capital”…
A few months ago I listened to one "expert panel" called before congress about high speed trail. Most of the people didn't have any useful expertise on the subject. There was the union rep who considered anything good so long as it makes jobs - if they could dig and refill the same hole all day that would be good). There was the you are not listening to NIMBYs enough - without any acknowledgement on how much NIMBYs had been listened to. There were several people who define HSR so slow that Amtrak meets it.
I believe the above is typical of congressional hearings, though I don't have 4 hours to sit through them on a regular basis. (I had a lot of long compiling tasks to do that day)
Those numbers are nutty, I know 22yos that make more than that.