> There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high.
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.
It sounded like the capacity to physically move things around is being blocked because trucks are being used for storage.
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.
For us software developers, it seems like the shipping industry has the container equivalent of a memory leak (a "container leak" if you will). Then the stacking rule change is the equivalent of simply adding more memory to the system, it doesn't fix the problem, but it buys you some more time of normal system operation before the next out-of-memory crash. Hopefully they use this time they bought to work on an actual solution to the original leak.
If you want to phrase it in programming terms, there's a pretty obvious comparison to semaphores and deadlocks. We've deadlocked. As a workaround we've increased a bunch of our semaphore limits. But we also had those limits for a reason (various balances of safety, efficiency, and available amount of other ancillary resources). Maybe now we'll run out of some other resource, or hit contention somewhere else - we don't really know, the system is big and hasn't been operated in this state before. And on top of that, we didn't solve the fundamental deadlock - if the underlying conditions persist, there's hard limits to how often we can do this before we deadlock permanently.
No, it isn't a leak as the containers are empty but not garbage. It is very common to allocate extra memory that isn't used - in garbage collected languages you often need to fight the garbage collector for maximum performance in specific ways - which means you will have empty objects just waiting to be filled. You will get around to them eventually, but for now they are just taking up memory. If you allocate more of these objects than you have physical ram you will start swapping - but there is no leak, you will eventually either use them, or destroy them.
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?
Counterpoint, sometimes it's better to let the system burn, or else the root cause will never be addressed. Treating the symptoms can take the pressure off solving the root cause.
I should have given more context. In cases where incentives are deeply, structurally misaligned, and it will take heroic effort and significant luck to yield an order of magnitude improvement over the status quo, we should consider "letting it burn" as an option, and recognize the total cost of treating the symptoms. The global logistics quagmire may be a candidate for nuclear-ish options. Agree with you on the cancer patient scenario.
Let the containers on the streets piss people off to build pressure to align incentives, rather than prolonging the problem with a temporary stacking improvement. This is just a tool in our toolbox that we should not ignore, I'm not saying it's the right tool. But there is a cost of papering over the root cause, that's not free.
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".
But the temporary rule change is a quality of life improvement. Less trucks idling on the streets, less ships idling offshore means better air quality. Less ships anchored means less chance of another oil pipeline spill. More cargo hauled means more prosperity. A few months of eyesore are an acceptable cost.
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.
The problem is that often the consequences of letting it burn are most felt by innocent bystanders, rather than the people who are meant to be "taught a lesson".
Indeed. Given the "balance" of trade, surely most of the empty containers need to go back on a ship so China can fill them up again? The problem is not the size of the buffer but the fact that we aren't emptying the buffer.
Ok, a fair point. But in the end is the same thing: stupid public worker bureaucrats exerting their petty, ignorant power like the Gods they think they are.
Unrelated to the trailer issue, but everyday we should thank our lucky stars that there's no such thing as "stupid private sector bureaucrats exerting their petty, ignorant power like the Gods they think they are."
<I>PGE is considered directly responsible for >$40B in fire damage in California.</I>
<p>That (officially sanctioned) conclusion was in complete disregard of the state and federal gov’t contribution. But I would agree with you that it’s an example of similar phenomena. Probably not for the same reasons.
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.
Regulatory capture blurs the line between government and industry. There’s no fantasy about it. The power is suborned, not eliminated. However I was pointing out the phenomenon as a precursor to enabling petty corporate bureaucracy empowered with government authority.
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.
You certainly have made some good arguments against regulation, suggesting a near certainty of regulatory capture screwing up whatever good intentions the original premise of regulation promised.
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”…
We went decades without PGE systems routinely causing fires. Conditions now are somewhat different, but not that different. The important difference is PGE's maintenance policies. They abandoned that responsibility in order to deliver a dividend. They were ordered to resume, but there is a huge backlog of work.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the 'stacking rule' meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their property were "storing" empties on trailer chassis that carry one container.
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.
You're correct. The article was imprecise with its terminology.
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.
>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.
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.
Granted, Twitter virality definitely has a certain TED-ness about it: boil everything down to a simple model system, that makes everyone listening feel smart, and end on an optimistic note, without mentioning any intractable nuances.
From Ryan Peterson's description, it was more that there was no space left to unload full containers from ships or empties from trucks to then pick up a full one from the ship. In essence container grid lock.
Yep. Both the rx and tx buffers were full and the port was dropping packets. (There were both container ships waiting to offload and trucks waiting to offload full and empty containers, respectively.) Now that buffer size has been increased, there is more bandwidth to available to actually move containers. Since the spike is temporary, the problem has gone away. If we were permanently faced with more containers then, yes, we'd need another port.
Was this just caused by just a spike in demand? It seems to me the pretty would only full up with empties if there is some kind of imbalance between shipping and receiving, right?
As Ryan pointed out in his Twitter thread the bottleneck "should" be the cranes.
While it's a long-running gag, I would like to remind everyone that swapping to zram is a thing on Linux (I don't know whether there's an equivalent on Darwin, and I think NT ships it by default), and the tech goes all the way back to RAM Doubler for MacOS (or at least, that's the earliest implementation that I know about). So for quite a long time you kind of have been able to do exactly that...
I suppose it's not fair, but I was disappointed after reading the title, hoping that the article would be an assessment on whether changing the container stacking rule has made a difference yet. There seems to be a fair amount of skepticism that the stacking rule was having a large negative impact, so I was excited to see an assessment of how/if it's made any difference.
Did it help? That's the question. We should have enough data to get preliminary results.
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.
There are many problems. Many. So it’s unlikely one fix is going to solve a lot and make a huge dent. But those problems need to be fixed one after each other as they compound on each other.
> * 14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.*
> 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.
While you are not wrong, it isn't 100% true either. The problem has long been recognized in various forms and solutions have been developed. I did a factory tour a few years back for a local major manufacture (I work for them but I won't say who...), and there were signs all over "stop the line: you have the power!" to remind workers when they see something wrong they have the power to stop everything until it is fixed. It doesn't happen often, but more than once a worker has seen a part that looked "off" stopped the line and had a full investigation done. Sometimes it was determined things were okay, but other times the wrong alloy was used if the part had gone to a customer it would have been an early failure.
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"...
Apropos the importance of building new container shipping ports in places that don’t have land scarcity, traffic, and well organized NIMBYs? Let me introduce you to the port of Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia.
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.
Prince Rupert is also physically closer to Asia (saves 2-3 days of sailing time), and has very little other sea traffic. The rail line is also expanding, and has very little non-port traffic.
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.
Yes! On one hand, very little snow (and if there is snow, it melts soon enough). On the other hand, no real summer, either. Just rainy season, and less rainy season :-)
To me, you're raising the question of: why are ports in locations like Long Beach and LA (and SF/Oakland)? They seem like terrible locations for ports. There's a lot of coastline on the western US. Why pick places where land is astronomically expensive, and transportation options aren't great?
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.
Well, to be fair, San Francisco Bay is one of the best natural harbors on the West Coast, and very close to some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. It's a great place for a port, or it was until the NIMBYs showed up. I don't know LA, but I bet it's similar.
LA was never a good natural harbor - in fact I think it was pretty terrible. But they had a lot of cattle hides to export, so ships came, which built up the city, so more ships came, and on and on and on until it was worth building the port facilities:
> 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.
I wonder if the containers per berth number goes down as the number of berths increases in one port because other bottlenecks appear. I suspect adding more ports is actually a way to maintain efficiency here, but there's probably logistical challenges with that (skilled workforce, supply chain support, road network & other infrastructure to handle the volume, etc). There's probably also far more cost to adding a port than adding a berth.
Indeed. And Prince Rupert is probably an outlier since it has almost everything going for it in terms of ship-to-shore efficiency. With a population is ~12k, road traffic rounds to zero. This also shows that a large population isn’t required for a large port.
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.
> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously.
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.
I think the broader (meta-?)point of Chesterton's fence is that our beliefs about the reason for the fence can still be wrong because we lost the tacit knowledge that produced and kept the fence there.
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.
> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore
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.
I’ve seen this kind of thing happen at companies. There is a serious problem that all the lower level people know about, but nobody says anything to the higher ups because nobody wants to be seen as a troublemaker and potentially lose their job. Everyone assumes that eventually it will become so bad that the higher ups will notice. That rarely happens in my experience. Instead things become bad and the solution is layoffs, reorgs, etc. In the midst of the chaos we can often make the change that precipitated the whole crisis without anyone becoming wiser. Rinse and repeat.
This is where big money consultants make their money. They come in and tell everyone what they already knew in a way that lets everyone pretend is was magically discovered.
This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!"
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.
Flexport's technology had nothing to do with this, though. The CEO literally took a boat ride around the bay and looked at what was happening + talked to some people. He did the thing everyone assumes public officials do, but who clearly are not doing.
But the CEO has a different level of understanding of logistics compared to the major. They may be looking at the same port, but they see different things. The CEO saw bottlenecks like Neo sees the Matrix
Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?
> Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?
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. But it's not like politicians aren't intelligent and ambitious, so many of them look to earn money in other ways, ie the stock market, which gets dangerously close to conflicts of interest because they are, by design, there to regulate industry.
$180K puts you well within the top 20% in income. pay is not the problem. in fact, trying to solve politician quality by increasing pay would likely worsen the problem by misaligning incentives even more. also the assumption that the best and the brightest are managers at tech companies is amusingly naive.
But how much opportunity do they have for graft and corruption? Most of such money does not actually go through the mayor's bank account; instead, it is directed to people who then provide favors, e.g. employing his associates. Informal exchange of favors is the lifeblood of politicians.
You don't seem to be getting what motivates people to go into politics. They are not looking for ways to avoid involvement in corruption. The opportunity to be involved in the favors economy is most of the job's appeal. Paying them more would just cost more.
Because in this case the "solution" doesn't solve the rest of the problem: that their aren't enough truckers or locomotives to haul the cargo inward to their domestic destinations due to the unprecedented demand for shipped goods, which is why containers were piling up in the port in the first place.
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).
> Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started?
(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.)
Because incompetence is everywhere. I think most people assume that high level positions are filled by people who know what they’re doing, but my experience has shown that to be an incorrect assumption time and time again.
It's not a requirement that high level people know what they're doing: in fact, I'd go so far as to say that's impossible.
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.
What interaction does the mayor (or the administration) of a city normally have with the ports? I mean, beyond keeping an eye on the wear to road surfaces of port traffic.
In this case, its a city operated port, so its different than a private port or one operated by a special purpose public agency outside of city government (but operation is, under the City Charter, in the hands of a Harbor Commission, so its under a special body within city government, so the Mayor, Council, and City Manager—the last holding the executive role lots of people associate with the title “mayor” because Long Beach is Council-Manager model not Strong Mayor model—have less direct role than might at first be assumed from “city operated port”.)
This is inching close to the conclusion that mandatory expert panels are required for government to function.
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.
It might me. If they are just called at random things are fine. However if you do a little work you can figure out who will support whatever position you want.
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)
Yes, it is. And can also result in decisions that benefit your local shipping exec over any other considerations. Informality in cases like this is just another way to say "completely avoids oversight. "
Ryan Petersen is a smart guy with a good perspective but he started Flexport in 2013. He didn't go to Cal Maritime; he went to Berkeley. He doesn't have a deck license or even a CDL; he was a member of Cal Sailing.
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."
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.
Which is why he got the benefit of the doubt until he opened his mouth.
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.
Why is everyone "suspecting" this? The blog post starts by laying out that that was exactly what he did (knew beforehand and put it into a plausible but made-up narrative).
Even so, they should at least phrase it as "I agree with the author that..." rather than making it look like it's some brand new theory they're introducing to the discussion rather than the entire premise of the blog post.
The first section of the blog post goes to great lengths to say "oh this is actually something he figured out after extensive research, and he's making his advice seem more credible by framing it as 'aw shucks I just noticed this on a quick boat trip where I heard [what is actually his own understanding] from Legit Experts It's Okay To Trust' and thus reduce popular resistance to considering it".
*A local city mayor who also happens to have one of the busiest ports in the world in his city. The back up is literally in the global news. It doesn't seem unreasonable for him to, at the very least, ask someone on his staff to give him a gigantic list of problems at the port and spend quite a lot of time figuring out which problems he had the power to solve. He probably speaks at least monthly, if not weekly, with who knows how many people connected with the port.
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.
I don't know. If it's such a problem how can the mayor not be concerned, appraised, and trying to solve the problem? The article says "everyone knew this was happening and didn't do anything". So I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that people simply didn't know and thank god Flexport with it's vested interest in improving logistics took a look".
> Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair.
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.
I don't think this is unique to HNers talking about government, the reverse is also true, with many government officials assuming that most businesses are awash in cash that they can use to solve any problem (true of many businesses to be sure, but in the same way that government officials are scoring own goals, sometimes, not universally).
Your definition from websters is called "the essential meaning" and is literally not the dictionary definition. It is very similar to using definitions from what google returns at the top of a search page - kind of useful but not the same as the definition of the word.
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
It is quite reasonable to make fun of people who required a 2 container limit for aesthetic reasons which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain. It was also inarguably effective to publicly shame them into reversing their decision.
I may be going against the grain here, but making fun of people and/or publicly shaming them, while it may temporarily make you feel better, tends to be counterproductive in the end.
You can go to any port town in the US and you will see containers stacked up like tiny towns. The equipment to move the containers is usually the bottleneck not the yard space.
> which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain
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.
That is the definition of the word bureaucrat, which was absolutely used in a fair manner to describe the person who caused this issue.
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."
I mean sure without confirmation from Garcia there is no "proof" that the Flexport tweets influenced his decision. But it seems like a reasonable conclusion given that both the problem and Garcia's power to implement the fix existed together for a long time, but he only acted (8hrs) after the Flexport tweets when viral....
> This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem
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.
This kind of cross-cutting issue is very challenging for even the best run organizations to deal with. Local government is not equipped to randomly start calling in experts and directing large scale projects because we, collectively, have chosen not to fund and structure our government in a way that allows them to do so.
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!
> This kind of cross-cutting issue is very challenging for even the best run organizations to deal with
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"?
You appear to assume that the problem described is the problem faced. I bet we don't get a nice neat story about how changing stacking rules didn't actually solve the problem, and after a short time made it worse.
I completely agree. It is just too soon to tell. Moreover, this stacking rule won't change the port; it will change things in the City of Long Beach.
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."
That seems to also be a disguised pitch against the proposed unrealized gains tax. Whether that tax is good or bad or has fixable problems, I don't know, but there was some clear self-interest going on in that tweet thread.
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.
From what I heard, the real issue is the ships are not bringing these containers back, because: 1. there's not so much good for US to export (volume-wise); 2. shipping price is so high that to save time, ships do not wait to load empty containers.
As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.
That's the popular consensus here in LA, it's cheaper to discard the containers than to ship them back empty (and nobody at the receiving end wants enough of what we have to make it worth sending them back full). However I drive through the port area frequently and always see containers stacked well above the 2-high limit. I suppose that means they are not empty containers? There definitely has to be some alternate use for these empty containers. People have tried to build houses with them, but I think one issue preventing widescale implementation of that use is that quite a few of them were originally holding some kind of material that would be hostile to human inhabitants. And living in a metal box in the Southern California summer would not be feasible without expensive air conditioning retrofits.
We can get pretty far with passive solutions like internal and external insulation and painting the outside white. Burying them halfway into the ground would also give great benefits (albeit the trickier of the options)
Perhaps we can even cover the roof with sod where available. May only need a minimal power active A/C.
Structural reinforcement is unnecessary - they can be stacked half a dozen high safely. A bit of back of the envelope tells me the cost of paint to coat the exterior of a standard 2 story suburban house is about $1500, so I estimate painting a 40 foot container should be about $400 max. Insulation should be about $1K. I imagine for drainage a buried septic tank is the best solution here.
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.
It's gonna cost more than all of that to cut holes and install proper doors and windows. And after doing so now you're back to maybe needing structural reinforcement (those openings will require headers).
They don't have the strength to be buried. All of the strength is vertical in the corners for stacking. Once you cut into them for windows or more doors, you greatly reduce any strength. By the time you get done modifying it, it will cost more than traditional building materials.
Another unmentioned problem is that the plywood floors are saturated with carcinogenic insecticides- and not a small amount. Source: I sealed floors for a container reuse project.
I read recently that there’s such a great demand for containers in Asia right now that empty containers which used to be sent to our farms to fill with agricultural products to sell in Asia are instead being sent back empty. Maybe the consensus is outdated?
Agriculture has been aware of this for a while. It is more complex than that. Loaded containers need to consider balance of this ship, and grain is typically denser/heavier than what came over (most goods come over with a lot of air), so ships need to be carefully loaded, while only empty containers are easier to load because it is easier to balance the ship.
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.
I was also thinking about this after reading the original thread.
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.
All the dismissals here are fascinating to me — and sure seem to be exactly the overarching story of TFA. Yes, this certainly isn't the only problem here, but it's certainly the easiest to fix.
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.
We are so used to doom and negativity in the news that we discard any positive news outright... which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that everything is terrible all the time.
Declaring great success at the moment a course of action of decided on is going to be more productive for generalized cynicism than stories of bad things that have actually happened.
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 followed this and from my understanding the changes while enacted quickly are still only temporary (rollback in 120 days). If that's the case, I'd like "them" to think about how this situation could have been avoided all together. I can't help but thinking about how all the Asian markets were having similar log jams due to economies reopening and the Suez issue months ago. Surely it was known (or, could have been known) that that log jam was tsunami wave heading to LA?
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.
The problem is "them" in this case is the mayor of Long Beach. The people he worries about are the voters in Long Beach, who probably (given what we know about California...) complain very loudly about having to see container stacks. He has no incentive to care about things that the cities voters don't care about directly like... the global economy. I have to wonder if he got a very angry call from the White House telling him he'd better issue a suspension or he'd suddenly lose various federal funds.
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.
IDK if I'd blame one office or especially the one person currently sitting in that office. This is a (hopefully) extremely rare condition that wasn't seen coming. As we get back to business as usual, I think LB should keep it 2 high if that's what worked and what their residents want. But there needs to be a variable component, temporary permits are common and existing concept. I don't know anything about LB local govt but where I'm from the city council as a whole could vote this in. A state/federal level could force them to if that's what it takes. So I'd say "them" is >1.
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)
This was the first of five or six steps recommended by the Flexport CEO. I don't know if they would all 'work' in concert but clearly if the changes stop here the plan wasn't even followed to begin with.
What exactly is the problem with 8-9 high, or 20 high, or whatever the technical limit is? The land belongs to the port owners, why should anyone else be able to restrict how they stack containers?
1. LB residents don't want that, and limit of 2 has worked until now. Height restrictions are nearly universal in the US and this is not a California/Long Beach specific problem. Sure you can argue there the balance is too lopsided and limit of 2 is too restrictive for industry. I tend to believe a port town is an industrial town. If you live there, you should expect to see the industrial side. I grew up in Houston and would never live near the port/oil refinery areas because of that eyesore (completely subjective personal opinion). Unless maybe my profession was tied to it, at which point it probably doesn't bother me.
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
Again, why should one LB resident get to decide what another LB business does? Just because this sort of restriction is common doesn't mean it's right.
Ok but that that's a complete fork for the conversation. You're talking in terms of a philosophical land usage/property right debate; I see your point. I might not completely agree with it, but I see it. However, I'm not trying to have a philosophical debate. I'm talking about real terms of the world we live in today where it's highly unlikely anyone is going to be able to scrap all the existing rules, laws, norms, etc and come up with some new construct.
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 take it you would be fine with a hog feedlot moving in next to you?
(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.)
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.
OK so this is essentially a self-written news story that was manipulated to make it feel-good.
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.
While you could argue that Flexport did this for their own benefit, I think the outcome is still incredibly useful to the general public. Further, nobody is faking the quick turnaround in removing the rule - that actually happened.
Wait, what? You want to compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians during wartime to a story about temporarily allowing containers to be stacked a little higher?
It's a classic example of, "do the means justify the ends?" - that's what you were asking. It's a slippery slope from "make a cute story on changing container storage policy" to something more nefarious. So think: how many times have you've been manipulated like this? Are you OK with it? Where do you draw the line?
I think we all have much bigger problems to spend our time obsessing over.
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.
> I think we all have much bigger problems to spend our time obsessing over.
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?
Sure, and how many more weeks would they have remained ready to surrender, but never had done it? We don't know. We know they were beat in all but the surrender, but we also know countries through out history have fought on long after their loss was obvious. Japan has some "interesting" internal politics going on, even if they had formally surrendered it isn't clear if the military would stop fighting (Army and Navy needs to be considered separately).
They're breaking a story that didn't actually happen - the article itself says that the boatride isn't the reason for the policy change, it just sounds nice and marketable. They also admitted that they got influential people ready to retweet the story - also a marketing move.
From near the end:
"My going theory on why the news isn’t being shared is because it is being instinctively suppressed by the implicit forces that filter out such actions from the official narratives. The whole scenario might give people the idea that we could do things because they’re helpful. It gives status to someone for being helpful. It highlights our general failure to do helpful things, and plausibly blames all our supply chain (and also plausibly all our civilizational) problems on stupid pointless rules and a failure to do obviously correct things. That’s not a good look for power, and doesn’t help anyone’s narratives, so every step of the way such things get silenced."
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.
In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don't increase then it's not going to matter how large you make the buffer.
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.
I mean, I also play Factorio and came away from reading the article thinking that yeah, increasing the headroom in the chests (aka container stacks) from 2 slots to 6 slots would definitely introduce slack into the system. The short haul loop to a staging and integration area would also help because it allows you to re-sort the inputs to maximize pickup efficiency and is also something I've done in Factorio games.
It might be fun to release a Port of Los Angeles savegame that challenges folks to unhork the port.
what’s really awesome is how Google refuses to believe “unhork” could be a real word or even slang. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This truly is representative of the emergent horkage of bureaucratic oligarchy founded on algorithms. The supply chain crisis is merely representative of the same noumenon. HHOS.
On the flip side, hackspek is becoming obscure again. Which may be desirable to those who would be secret masters of hackerdom.
There were supposedly trucks that couldn’t be loaded because they had no place to get rid of the empty container they currently had. So truck loading rate was low, not because of the speed of the workers and cranes, but because of the availability of the trucks. So this is supposed to allow the truck loading rate to go up by making it easier for trucks to become available.
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.
Increasing a buffer size can also make it look like the problem is solved temporarily when you really have a rate issue. It seems that filled containers are coming in at a faster rate than empty containers are going out. We've increased the buffer for empty containers at the dock but did we address the outgoing rate problem?
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.
Your last point is being reported. It's cheaper for the Chinese to export containers (with subsidized steel) than it is for shipping them back, so they're just making new ones.
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.
The goods waiting in Shanghai are not in freshly minted containers. If they were, shipping from LA to Shanghai would be much more expensive than your graph suggests, because otherwise it would have been cheaper to ship one from LA than buy new one in Shanghai, and so people would do that instead of buying new containers.
The buffer would (maybe) not fill again, because the overflow containers were stored on chassis. The problem was that we needed buffer space and converted transport to buffer space - and then we didn't have enough transport, so we needed more buffer space. Cue ominous feedback loop music.
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.
On a long enough timeframe and nothing else changing, yes it would just fill up. Realistically, it gives them breathing room to get the rest of the rate up.
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.
I've read anecdotes that China is making new containers instead of accepting old containers. This could be because buffers aren't getting them back in time or because China needed a new market for steel
Containers have a lifespan, so China has always been making containers. When containers don't come back you can buy a new one. Shipping them back empty is a lot cheaper than buying a new one, but only if you can get them shipped back. The price to ship a container back empty is low enough that some ships decide it isn't worth it.
I'm not sure this is a "supposedly". There were tens of thousands of trucks that couldn't unload their empties because empties could only be stacked 2 high for aesthetic reasons. Longbeach has since amended that to 4 high doubling the capacity for empties, freeing up trucks to clear unloaded containers from the port. This may be enough to shift the bottleneck.
This is what I understood as well. However, I still don't understand how we got there in the first place. Last time I asked this I just got down voted.
FWIW I just looked at that previous comment of yours, and it's not obvious to me why it would get downvoted. You might want to chalk that one up to HN voting noise.
The trucks were acting as a buffer, if you believe the CEO of Flexport. So if you increase the buffer size, then the trucks can be trucks again and it's guaranteed to increase truck loadings per hour.
Truck-loadings-per-hour will increase, but that does not help shrink the buffer if every truck picking up a container also brings back an empty one.
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.
> 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.
Does the port charge container owners for storing empties? Ramp up the storage fee, and voila... empty containers go back on empty boats that would otherwise make the return trip with no load. Container owners will find that shipping them back with a reasonable premium to keep ships around long enough to pick up the empties eventually costs less than storing them at the port.
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.
Scrapping containers is a terrible idea. We need reuse those containers in 2 weeks. The supply chain is a loop. The pipeline is just stuffed up right now and we need to stash empties for a bit while we unload the ships that are backed up.
Or just make collapsible containers. Bolt the corners (where all the strength is) on right and then take them apart. Needs careful engineering work, but it seems like it should be possible to standardize then and then machines at either end can take them apart and stack into a standard container dimension.
If it's true that ships are refusing to load empties simply because it's more profitable to skip the loading times, then a requirement could actually fix things in the medium term.
You have idle trucks unable to increase the truck-loadings-per-hour because they can't complete a single job due to the lack of storage space for their empty containers.
Providing that storage space will allow the trucks to complete their circuit.
You could also look at it as putting down a storage chest so that you can run down a belt and pick up all the items that shouldn't be there, or sticking a chest next to your un-barreling factory while you work out how to get a return train back to the barreling factory, or putting down some fuel tanks to hold light/heavy oil while you research advanced oil processing (before the basic oil change).
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.
I'm skeptical that it will increase observability. Buffering tends to hide problems, not reveal them. We know what the bottleneck is (getting empty containers off a critical location, as far as I understand.) Adding more empty containers to this critical location will not increase our ability to solve the problem, it will put off the problem into the future while simultaneously making it worse.
Buffer size is critical in the case of things like the credit crunch that seized up the global economy back in 2008. Having room to maneuver makes it possible to address long term problems. Although it can also be thoughtlessly filled in service of short term needs with moves that don't actually provide a long term benefit.
Some talk about 'building a new port' as part of the solution. I'm thinking that's a decade project and $100B or some such? PoLA tried to expand for a decade and the impact statements got bogged down and nothing happened if I remember right (my sister-in-law was doing the math on the statements)
Yeah I'm not convinced as much by the new ports only being the solution. A big part of the reason that the SF Bay area and LA grew was because of the ports and the rail connections. Setting up a new port in, say, the area near Pismo Beach, might have slightly lower land costs, but it also has far lower value.
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.
some areas of coast line are naturally better for ports than others. You need the land to have deep water as close to the coast as you can. I don't know the geography of CA well enough to comment on Pismo Beach, but I wouldn't be surprised if it would be more expensive to open a port there than to buy land in LA.
I'd like to think that if we declared a state of emergency, suspended all regulations and deployed a couple battalions of Seabees we could still build a port in a matter of months, rather than years.
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.
Depends on what you consider a "port" to be. Sure, a shoddy good-enough-for-wartime place where ships can dock can be built in a few months. Building a decent container port with proper container cranes, train yards and the software to integrate it all in a couple of months? That capability has never existed.
The cement alone would take years to pour. The giant cranes have to have rail to unload onto, and it has to go somewhere. The computers to control it could take years to program. The harbor dredging and shore upgrades could take years. And its not all in parallel.
Maybe an off-shore port? With a floating causeway of rail? To do something quickly requires some out-of-the-box thinking.
I'm not saying we should do that, but it might be preferable to allowing the citizens of LA to hold the entire global economy hostage because they love their regulations.
The primary reason is that it doesn't have the capacity of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It has fewer cranes, less lot space, and importantly, less rail capacity serving it.
The Ports of LA and Long Beach (which are neighboring) are the largest cargo ports in the U.S. (#1 and #2, respectively) and collectively handle more than 30% of all cargo shipped to the U.S. Oakland is a dismal #10 on the list, and is 1/5th the size of the Port of Long Beach.
This seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Something is causing a surplus of empty containers, and allowing them to expand storage for them isn't going to change the underlying problem. So if the new rule to allow them 6-high is temporary, the owners will stack them 6-high and then run out of room again. But next time the (temporary) rule change will revert to 2-high and they'll all be in violation. If they get the proposed government land to "dump" them "temporarily" that will simply become a huge pile of empty containers.
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.
This. As the old saw says, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. I mean, it's not a bad thing they fixed the rule, but either way it's unlikely to cause or prevent the collapse of the US economy.
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.
I agree with you but not only the ports it’s going to be the last mile of the supply chain.
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.
The bureaucratic rule of only stacking containers of two in storage areas seem absurd when in the rest of the world there examples of them being stacked 9 or even 12 high. Weird government rules should have sunset clauses, at least for man-made emergencies.
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.
I think we can summarize that the solution is to remove things that prevent the free market from functioning properly. Here are some additional ideas:
-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.
Great post. I more or less assumed this is what had happened, but great to see it written up.
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.
It seems weird that there is no incentive to put empty containers on an empty boat to China, esp when there is a shortage of containers in China. Maybe the port should charge higher rent for storing empty containers? There is something missing in the story.
Its cheaper only because container storage isn't priced correctly. If the containers were charged at $HIGH_RENT/day storage fee the owners would pay someone to get rid of them.
This is a lesson on policy and rhetoric. As a programmer I always assumed people thought like me. But they don't. Studying policy mid-career is one of the most eye opening things I have done. Like it or not, if you want to advance policy you have to set up an organized plan that evokes some emotion. This is opposed to applying only logic which would motivate me if I were the audience. Apply to reason alone and you will lose.
> 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.
I don't have authoritative information about how other newspapers work. (By the evidence, most just transcribe press releases and wire stories.) But I read an account by a longtime NYT reporter describing how the NYT news office works.
It seems like maybe he confused positive and negative feedback? But if you think he's created a situation where positive feedback is going to cause massive problems down the line, I was interested in knowing specifically what you had in mind.
Yes, he is confused. He has created a situation where people he influences will have a negative attitude toward solutions described as introducing negative feedback.
Somebody who cannot understand what "negative feedback" means should not inspire confidence in his analysis of a mature queuing problem.
What will people be watching to see the effect? Is there any data published that would show an increase in freight behind moved because of this change?
This was a great story to read, especially after enduring over a year where so many small problems scaled into largely avoidable huge harms due to well-intentioned (but poorly thought through) rules being followed or created.
This is a regional problem. There are other ports in the US (East Coast, etc). I don’t see how it will be a global problem. Sure it will affect supply and demand significantly, but it’s not a global catastrophe.
I just finished listening to the freaknomics podcast about negativity in the media. Maybe this story didn't gain traction because it doesn't fit the "If it bleeds, it leads" model.
This article suggests that the twitter thread about the boat ride was just a story that could be told. If so, it's harmless, but I'm left wondering, is it true?
So in short, NIMBY zoning rules caused the port to suffocate on its own containers, even though it is merely a stone's throw from working oil pumps and LAX.
Wow. There's just no straight talk anymore... Why does everyone have to dance around the issue. Just say the facts and this article could have been quite a bit shorter.
Humans are not perfect, some of us get angry at the perception of being superceded by those less experienced. Some will dig in their heels and not fix the issue if it means admitting they were unable to see the problem and suggest a solution.
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.
Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil.
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!
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)