[HN Gopher] An unexpected victory: container stacking at the por...
___________________________________________________________________
An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los
Angeles
Author : catbird
Score : 378 points
Date : 2021-10-28 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thezvi.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thezvi.wordpress.com)
| aninteger wrote:
| 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.
| datameta wrote:
| 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| of being superceded by those less experienced.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.
| walkerbrown wrote:
| > There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could
| only stack shipping containers two containers high.
|
| 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.
| scythe wrote:
| >how about we create a new port?
|
| There _are_ other ports. They 're not economically viable. See
| e.g. my old comment about the history of Prince Rupert, BC:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871284
| Alex3917 wrote:
| 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.
| seymore_12 wrote:
| Article is wrong. The rule for max 2 container height stacking
| was for areas *outside" of the port/terminal, i.e various
| container yards hinterland.
| BitLit wrote:
| 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.
| mig39 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| cwp wrote:
| 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.
| vanattab wrote:
| Maybe SF and LA are there because the area is a good port?
| Cities have been built near navigatable waterways since
| time immoral.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The daily and seasonal temperate variations are quite low.
| Seems like that would be good for smooth operations year
| around.
|
| https://weatherspark.com/y/298/Average-Weather-in-Prince-
| Rup...
| mig39 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| jetbooster wrote:
| > Just rainy season, and less rainy season :-)
|
| Calling it British Columbia certainly tracks then!
| vlovich123 wrote:
| 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.
| BitLit wrote:
| 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.
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| To be fair, many big money consultants are very clear about
| this.
|
| Often times the goal is to simply provide information to
| senior management that middle management isn't giving them.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| See this recent article on the thermocline of truth:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056
| TedShiller wrote:
| This is not a victory. In the area where I live containers
| constantly fall into the ocean because shipping companies stack
| them too high.
|
| The only thing this achieves is even more garbage in the ocean.
| zelienople wrote:
| 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!
| C19is20 wrote:
| Buyers remorse?
| fabianfabian wrote:
| Hey take a look around in your room and find out where half of
| the things are made, and then reflect on who these consumers
| are you are talking about.
| SSLy wrote:
| Most of items in my room are clothes, made in EU (at least
| that's what the labels say).
| eli_gottlieb wrote:
| Yes, I actually prefer consumer capitalism over a deliberate
| eugenic extermination of "consoomers".
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what
| this site is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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.
| SilasX wrote:
| >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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| LeanderK wrote:
| wow, i was a bit confused after reading the article but
| your buffer analogy immediately made sense!
| btown wrote:
| By this analogy, the politician _literally_ "downloaded
| more RAM!"
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| 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...
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| Two points:
|
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If you're suggesting the NYTimes acts differently than other
| newspapers of record (i.e. decent sources of news) I would be
| interested in more details.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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.
| ksdale wrote:
| What new timebombs do you think he has installed, for example?
| ncmncm wrote:
| Did you read the tweets? He implies that it is a given that
| negative feedback is a problem, not a solution to problems.
| ksdale wrote:
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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.
| contingencies wrote:
| 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.
| inetknght wrote:
| > * 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.
|
| This is a widespread problem in my eyes.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| There was an article about this phenomenon recently--the author
| called it the "thermocline of truth".
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There was an article about this phenomenon recently--the
| author called it the "thermocline of truth".
|
| The author was using terminology introduced quite a while ago
| by Bruce F. Webster:
| https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-
| the-...
| bluGill wrote:
| 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"...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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.
| gouggoug wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to
| be honest.
|
| Also, how high of a stack of containers do you feel safe
| working around in the next major SoCal earthquake?
| YokoZar wrote:
| Chesterton's fence is satisfied here: it asks us to know why a
| rule was put into place so that we know we aren't missing
| something when we change it.
|
| In this case we do know the reason why: aesthetics. The side
| effects are just greater now, so out the rule goes.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| What is the evidence that the reason is aesthetics? Other
| posters have claimed that it is a fire department ordinance.
| tuatoru wrote:
| What would the consequences of an earthquake be?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| yeah, stacking boxes X levels high is not some deep thing
| that requires philosophers to gather 'round and debate
| Chesterton's fence for _too long_.
| esturk wrote:
| Hyperbole aside, you can only stack as high as your crane can
| lift it which is also finite.
| Nelkins wrote:
| But did it actually help? It's not clear to me that suspending
| the rule had the intended effect.
| lftl wrote:
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| It (helped) to solve one of the problems. Others remain, but
| it's a good first step.
| OldHand2018 wrote:
| 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.
| jeromegv wrote:
| 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.
| mrandish wrote:
| 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.
| revel wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| 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.
| p1mrx wrote:
| If the limit had always been 6 instead of 2, wouldn't we have
| (1) smaller truck yards, and (2) the same problem with no
| easy solution?
| revel wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Do you think the current mayor had anything to do with
| enacting the regulation to limit the stacking height?
| ramblenode wrote:
| > 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...
|
| That's kind of the heart of the perennial frustration with
| bureaucracy: it's nobody's fault, so nothing gets done.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Has a causal relationship between the Flexport analysis and
| Garcia's order been established?
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| 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....
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| The timeline seems so short, it makes me suspect. I would
| hope that the Mayors office would do some form of diligence
| before making the order.
|
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| 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.
| CalChris wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1453753924960219145
| ncmncm wrote:
| At least, they will have a lot of yards with empty
| containers stacked five high, when LB doesn't want that.
|
| 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.
| revel wrote:
| I would love to hear why you think this won't help
| CalChris wrote:
| Because that two high rule doesn't apply to the port. Take
| a look at this photo.
|
| https://polb.com/
|
| 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.
| defen wrote:
| > 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.
| revel wrote:
| 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!
| defen wrote:
| > 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"?
| whateveracct wrote:
| > 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.
| IncRnd wrote:
| You should look up the word bureaucrat. It was used correctly
| in the article.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| A mayor isn't a bureaucrat by most definitions.
|
| 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
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bureaucracy
| IncRnd wrote:
| 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
| ksdale wrote:
| 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).
| adolph wrote:
| > 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.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Never said that - I'm mostly commenting on how glib the
| commentary is. Not saying there isn't room for improvement
| or optimism.
| saas_sam wrote:
| 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.
| erlapso wrote:
| 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
| CalChris wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1453753924960219145
| kaesar14 wrote:
| 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?
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| Why didn't private industry work to solve the problem
| that they created?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.)
| gota wrote:
| 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.
|
| Experts are what you want them to be
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Huh? Calling up your local shipping exec for a meeting is
| most definitely not forming "expert panels"
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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. "
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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).
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| 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.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > 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.
|
| --------
|
| 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?
| ccn0p wrote:
| 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.
| amznthrwaway wrote:
| You're at (or very near) a million a year at the Director
| level in FAANG.
|
| My lowest paid manager makes $250k.
| clairity wrote:
| $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.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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".
| mzs wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the CEO knew beforehand and crafted a
| narrative.
| SilasX wrote:
| 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).
|
| See my other comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29032229
| beerandt wrote:
| I'm with you. He impressed me until the list.
|
| 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.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Better than being in a position to solve it and doing
| nothing..
| indymike wrote:
| > ... looked at what was happening + talked to some people.
| He did the thing everyone assumes public officials do, but
| who clearly are not doing.
|
| 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.
| dcow wrote:
| 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".
| IncRnd wrote:
| 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."
| ncmncm wrote:
| And, what do you imagine are the odds that the person charged
| with enforcing the rule also made the rule?
| IncRnd wrote:
| That's not germane.
| ksdale wrote:
| *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.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Just because they changed behavior doesn't mean it will work.
| dustintrex wrote:
| 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.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| 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.
|
| Also I think the deadline is gonna be Christmas .
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| Incidentally, there was another post on HN earlier written by a
| truck driver and he believes it's more complicated.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124
| CalChris wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/los-an...
|
| Containers are stacked five high.
| bhy wrote:
| 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.
| slobiwan wrote:
| 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.
| datameta wrote:
| 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.
| oasisbob wrote:
| The price of high quality paint, insulation, structural
| reinforcements, and exterior drainage sounds expensive.
|
| 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.
| datameta wrote:
| 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.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| 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).
| darkarmani wrote:
| 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.
|
| (i like this dream, but it just isn't practical)
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Make a rule that a ship is not allowed to leave with fewer
| containers than it drops. Containers may be full or empty,
| their choice.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| 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?
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| No wonder companies that aim to optimize/disrupt shipping
| are hiring so many ML engineers!
|
| Maybe if the containers themselves were autonomous and
| mobile, and could optimize their own value... there's a
| Black Mirror episode somewhere in that.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| The limit of 2 was for off-port sites, within cities
| themselves. The article is wrong on that point.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| 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.
| zz865 wrote:
| 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.
| Factorium wrote:
| Its currently taking too long to load those containers back.
| Its cheaper to just dock, unload, sail off.
|
| Short-term optimisation.
| zz865 wrote:
| 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.
| justinator wrote:
| 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.
|
| That's _also bad_.
| dqpb wrote:
| What do you mean by self-written?
| justinator wrote:
| 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.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Don't worry you have joined the group. It is a right of passage
| on social networking and news sites. The next step is using
| what you have learned .
| otterley wrote:
| If the solution proves effective, will you change your mind, or
| will you simply remain forever outraged that you didn't like
| how the story was told?
| justinator wrote:
| Well, we can talk about dropping atomic bombs on Japan during
| WWII if you want. The discussion isn't going to be a very
| simple one.
| Strom wrote:
| Referencing the atomic bomb in this context is also
| manipulation. You're trying to evoke emotion, as opposed to
| arguing your point with boring facts.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| The Japanese were ready to surrender weeks before the bombs
| were dropped. So it wasn't such a hard discussion really..
| bluGill wrote:
| 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).
| otterley wrote:
| 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?
| justinator wrote:
| 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?
| otterley wrote:
| 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.
| justinator wrote:
| > 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?
| pessimizer wrote:
| If the solution proves ineffective, will you ever read about
| that fact anywhere?
| yunohn wrote:
| 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.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The fact that a story is written in a way that is easy for
| humans to understand and share is not "manipulative", it's just
| good communication.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| codazoda wrote:
| 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?
| johnklos wrote:
| Simple fix: stand containers on their ends. You'd fit a heck of a
| lot more even if you don't stack two high.
| skybrian wrote:
| What sort of equipment do you suppose is needed to do that?
| bluGill wrote:
| Containers are not made to be stacked on end like that and
| won't always support their own weight if stacked on end.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| silexia wrote:
| 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.
| sleibrock wrote:
| 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.
| notwedtm wrote:
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| The increased wait time also degrades capacity permanently.
| There was an essay by a truck driver posted here
| yesterday[1].
|
| 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.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| 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.
| aeternum wrote:
| 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.
| jkelleyrtp wrote:
| The increased buffer size gives more time to solve the rate
| issue before a catastrophic meltdown with inflationary
| pricing, civil unrest, etc.
| servercobra wrote:
| 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.
| smileysteve wrote:
| 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
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| groby_b wrote:
| 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.
| anonAndOn wrote:
| From the tweets, "containers are not fungible".
|
| 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.
| aeternum wrote:
| It's like we forgot the most fundamental goal of
| containers: to be fungible.. containers?
| smileysteve wrote:
| 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
| someguydave wrote:
| or melting every container that arrives at LA
| xyzzyz wrote:
| No way making a new container is cheaper than shipping
| back the old one.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Cheaper for who? If the state is subsidizing steel, it
| can absolutely be cheaper for the buyer.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Look at this graph of freight prices:
| https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-
| aem/global/...
|
| 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)
| xyzzyz wrote:
| 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.
| diordiderot wrote:
| Why?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| 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.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| darkerside wrote:
| 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.
| politician wrote:
| 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.
| cure wrote:
| > It might be fun to release a Port of Los Angeles savegame
| that challenges folks to unhork the port.
|
| That would be awesome!
| chadwittman wrote:
| Love that game idea
| MauranKilom wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's time to load. An empty ship may be halfway back to
| China to get a new (overpriced) load before a similar ship
| is loaded with empties.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume a port would be designed to have a buffer of
| empties (or filled containers) ready to load.
| jaycroft wrote:
| 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.
| foolinaround wrote:
| you can find containers for $400 online, maybe even free,
| if you have a truck to pick up..
| corpdronejuly wrote:
| I've been tempted to pay someone to pour a concrete pad
| and buy a few to try and build a cabin on. With prices
| that low it's worth looking at.
| bluGill wrote:
| Do careful research. Many have done that, but the
| negatives of containers for that purpose are rarely
| stated.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| daveevad wrote:
| > the cost of manufacturing a new container is (or should
| be) less than the cost of putting it on an empty boat.
|
| If you can prove that considering all externalities you
| would win a Nobel prize in Economic Sciences.
| briffle wrote:
| Considering the price and availability of steel, i'm kind of
| suprised nobody is trying to scrap and recycle them.
| someguydave wrote:
| Probably china uses low quality steel to make those
| containers. But you could melt containers and they would
| take up less space to ship back to China
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| more_corn wrote:
| 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.
| ncmncm wrote:
| This seems to be why he suggests a place other than the port
| to dump empties.
|
| It would be better to require that the ships carry away as
| many empties as fit aboard.
| phire wrote:
| 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.
| nostrademons wrote:
| 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.
| kqr wrote:
| 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.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Just run over all empty containers holding F
| [deleted]
| unreal37 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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)
| thrower123 wrote:
| 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| WJW wrote:
| 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.
| _jal wrote:
| If you can develop the political will to treat the citizens
| of LA like we did the Iraqis in the second Gulf adventure,
| sure.
|
| Just suspend the rule of law and send in Bechtel behind a
| bunch of guns.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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.
| abduhl wrote:
| We didn't do it when it was just a union why should we do
| it for the citizens of LA?
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/how-
| onl...
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| LA county already has the two largest ports in the USA:
| Long Beach and LA. Maybe some other region can pick up
| the slack.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I agree, if/when we build a new port it shouldn't be in
| LA County or probably California at all.
| xxpor wrote:
| The feds wouldn't have to follow CEQA if they didn't want
| to. The whole supremacy clause and all that.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Port of Oakland says hi.
|
| Is there a reason it does not get the traffic of L.A.? Or is a
| 3rd large port needed?
| otterley wrote:
| 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.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| LA is a much much larger manufacturing hub than the Bay. Land
| is also much cheaper. Also I think the train situation is
| better in LA.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| darkarmani wrote:
| I think talking about the price of a new port, reveals how
| important it is to use the existing ones efficiently.
| miniatureape wrote:
| 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?
| ISL wrote:
| Government can move extremely quickly when there is universal
| agreement. For precisely that reason, periods of universal
| agreement rarely last long.
| beastman82 wrote:
| This is one of the most incredible victories I've ever seen.
| Congratulations!
| ReptileMan wrote:
| I still prefer Austerlitz and Cannae ...
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| xxpor wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| 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)
| ciphol wrote:
| 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?
| conductr wrote:
| 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
| ciphol wrote:
| 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.
| conductr wrote:
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| 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.)
| tuatoru wrote:
| There is also fire and earthquake risk.
| jcims wrote:
| 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.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| 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.
| phicoh wrote:
| Based on container port statistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/List_of_busiest_container_port...) LA and Long Beach are not
| very big compared to Rotterdam and Antwerp. And Hamburg is
| roughly in the middle between LA and Long Beach in size.
|
| LA and Long Beach don't seem big enough to cause a global
| problem.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| You're suggesting the east coast ports for stuff shipped from
| China?
| dang wrote:
| Ongoing related thread:
|
| _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)
| krisoft wrote:
| > 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.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Yea, that stood out to me too the stacking limit was not at the
| port..
| elzbardico wrote:
| 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.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| 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.
| daveslash wrote:
| I agree with everything you said.
|
| 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....
| jlkuester7 wrote:
| > _is the only one worth going into_
|
| 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.
| mcguire wrote:
| Assuming no other conditions change, how long will it take
| them to use up the extra storage space?
| gkop wrote:
| 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.
| hbosch wrote:
| Correct! If we simply let the person die of cancer, we can
| properly investigate the tumor when they are dead.
| gkop wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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".
| labster wrote:
| Let the global supply chain burn? By Jove, let's have a
| great depression!
| gkop wrote:
| 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".
| bregma wrote:
| Why not? It worked last time.
| SkeuomorphicBee wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| Lol!
|
| 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?
| morelisp wrote:
| 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.
| neltnerb wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| 1cvmask wrote:
| 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.
| mbauman wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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?
| mcguire wrote:
| The problem isn't _fixed._ If the actual problem isn 't fixed
| soon, the extra capacity will be used in some finite and
| probably short time.
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