I am a member of ILWU 13. A couple thoughts after reading the comments:
The zoning change is for TEU storage outside the port. The port itself was not subject to that rule.
The Port of Los Angeles is a landlord and is not directly involved in operations.
Private companies, such as APM, EverPort, and others, rent piers/berths and are responsible for the actual operations and logistics.
Some speculation: recently I’ve heard of some ships not even waiting to load empty TEU’s as they normally would and instead they are immediately leaving for China, literally empty. I suspect this behavior is what turned the congestion we had before into the quasi deadlock we have now.
Seems like more of a tragedy of the commons, with each ship (A) assuming it's fine to leave empty because some other ship (B) will grab the empty containers. That's all well and good until (A) comes back, and then it sits there waiting like everyone else.
Going back empty works once. Or more times if you're headed to a different market, I suppose.
I believe that's not the price for the physical box but rather "a container's worth of shipping". Empty containers are probably going up in price a lot now too - I don't really see why Ryan thinks there needs to be military intervention here. A shortage of empties in China and a surplus in the USA will get resolved real quick by people on the ground (=within the latencies afforded by the slow speed of ships themselves) as there's money to be made there.
This is the question that ties into mine — if the economic incentives have changed (i.e. there is no penalty for renters of containers to not get containers back to their primary shipper) then this is a perfectly reasonable response to the change from Covid to today — i.e. the new game is moving the ship as fast as possible with no downtime. If the demurrage is still incurred, then there’s some other alternatives that do not appear to be completely without nefarious intent.
If a single extra trip is lucrative enough and at current rates it’s 5-10 regular prices that would make sense to forgo loading in the us and just hurry home
It might be other forces driving their decision. Maybe the ships are booked and are already late to pickup next load with penalty clauses for delay, or the port has other costs that mean it wants to speed up getting the next ship unloaded.
> ... recently I’ve heard of some ships not even waiting to load empty TEU’s as they normally would and instead they are immediately leaving for China, literally empty.
If this is happening, what would be the consequences of allowing even more TEUs to be stored on the US side?
Shit is going to take longer and be more expensive to come from China because when there isn't a TEU available you have to wait for one to be fabbed and pay for it.
Everyone's focused on Ryan's comments about stacking, and the subsequent win there. Amazing job, Ryan, and thank you Robert Garcia for being a man to take one on the chin (for this solution not coming from your team) and for then doing the right thing. I am seriously impressed by not seeing any NIH (not invented here) behavior here.
But why stop there? Ryan suggested 5 courses of actions, and made it clear that we need to act on all of them at the same time. So far only the first of those 5 steps have been acted on. The rest of the steps are likely either bad or the people needed to act on them are doing that NIH bullshit (which I can understand to some extent given how much negativity is being directed at Robert Garcia). But negativity or not, if those are good suggestions, we need to act on them. Would love to hear any thoughts on how to mobilize support for quickly validating/invalidating those suggestions, and then acting accordingly.
If it's possible to cancel brands and individuals, it should be possible to do the same with politicians as well. I hope it doesn't turn out that we care more about certain individuals' views than the prevention of a nationwide and potentially even global crisis [1].
[1] From Ryan's tweet:
> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail. The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it's getting worse not better every day that goes by..
1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.
This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex.
4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port.
5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up.
This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.
We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.
Funny how free-market, small-government, deregulation, rhetoric flies out of the window when own profit maximization short-terminism falls apart and everyone starts invoking centrally coordinated state intervention.
I wonder if some governmental bureau tasked with coordinating this market hasn’t been shuttered in the last couple years to some lobbyist great success…
I agree with you, but this isn't necessarily the best example. In this case, frankly part of this issue had to be resolved by relaxing strict zoning laws that weren't allowing space to be used in a way that the market demanded (offloading empty chassis). Such a measure falls under deregulation/free-market/small-government.
The other measures proposed (forcing railroads, national guards etc) are of course of a different order, but it's not clear they'd be necessary if the build-up of empty chassis at the port (because offloading in the nearby area wasn't allowed) never materialised into a massive bottleneck, because zoning laws were deregulated.
Presumably the port would've architected its systems to work within all sorts of constraints, come they from physics, or business, or regulation. The fact that one of them can easily be relaxed is immaterial to their failure to account for it in the first place.
It was the international demand imbalance that tipped it into service disruption; the landscape regulation just set the conditions for the existing bottleneck.
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
Loan them sounds like they want them for free.
What's the plan for the military to move containers during the 180 days if all their kit is loaned out?
But we don't live in a world of small governments and deregulated free markets. Without a regulation on stacking LA might not be at a point where any of those other measures are needed. A funny thing would be limiting yourself to approaches relevant in a system that doesn't exist.
Might, would… look, I don’t want to come up with a True Scotsman counter argument, but it does sound like one: blaming this mess on the single one restriction that seemed to exist.
Are we going to blame driving time restrictions next?
Next I'd blame environment regulations that banned older short-haul trucks from operating in the state, but that's besides that point. The point being: there is no contradiction between wanting smaller government and less regulations and wanting a mess caused by heavy handed regulations to be fixed by heavy handed mobilisation of resources.
I am no defender of government bureaucracy, but the fact we got the stacking rules changed in 48 hours is pretty crazy. I suspect more changes will come, but it may take some time. I'd let it play out over 1-2 weeks and re-evaluate.
Can't believe I am giving government delays a pass here... but I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth when we get near-immediate action from people who aren't known for solving problems with any sort of urgency.
The pandemic has shown the bureaucracy can move quickly when they want to. Although I'd argue the politicians share some of the blame for slow legislation when they want to avoid something. It's not always the behind the scenes bureaucrats that are the bottle neck.
The reason why the focus was on the first one is because that was the easiest and fastest to do (You only need local officials to sign off on it because its a temporary order and its also the simplest). 2 and 3 need the federal government to organize it, which as a large organization takes some time. 4 and 5 requires figuring out contract terms (who's paying whom, etc). These are much more complex and therefore will take more time. Oh and the tweetstorm was done on a Friday on the West Coast, so it takes some time to get the attention of decision makers on the east coast.
Also, isn't someone from the government supposed to be in charge of this? Shouldn't they be out there finding out what's happening?
It seems odd that no one has tried this, yet as someone who has worked in a factory, I can easily believe that the absentee managers have no idea what the hell actually goes on among the workers.
You need to spend significant actual time, to the point of working actual shifts, to get a clear picture of things sometimes. People have weird and wrong notions of what efficiencies matter sometimes, for example. Shaving a second off an action repeated thousands of times daily matters, shaving a minute off of a rare task that's not even done every day matters far less in comparison.
I am sure you noticed that Ryan gently exposed those in charge of not doing enough by repeating the ship captain's comments that Ryan's team was the first to ask to get a tour of the port from the ocean side. Granted, perhaps those in charge have their own boats or are using helicopters, but the lack of action does make me wonder.
Ryan probably understands freight and logistics better than the government decision-makers. Regulatory bodies don’t often think in terms of changing the laws, and have narrower scopes. I bet the Long Beach zoning commission never even realized that they could be causing the backup, because the 2-high policy has worked fine for years.
In a democracy, we are the government. People who know how to fix problems need to engage with their representatives, not just hope they’ll figure out freight logistics problems because they have a law degree.
Let's not forget the media. Renting a boat and talking to people at the port to see what's going on should be right up an investigative journalist's alley. The Silicon Valley guy is doing the job of not just one power center, but two.
Does he mean negative feedback loops or positive feedback loops? Getting worse every day sounds like positive feedback, whereas negative feedback would keep things steady.
He means a vicious cycle, which is technically a positive feedback loop: The worse things get, the more they get worse. Negative feedback means when the system is working properly, an unexpected perturbation will cause the system to correct itself automatically.
But since the general public thinks of positive as good and negative as bad, he's using the word "negative" to describe a bad situation. This kind of thing bugs me because I know control theory, but it's really in the same category as "Is Program X an X11 client or an X11 server?"
In a steady system the output energy scales based on the input energy. When there is feedback, the output adds/subtracts to the input, making it difficult to control the output with your inputs. Positive feedback adds to the input, making the output increase even as you attempt to reduce the input energy. Negative feedback subtracts from the input and forces you to increase your input energy to prevent the output from diminishing.
> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work.
Not for the world economy, but for Chinese economy, as it's what US companies make the most of their money.
What the current crisis shows the most is that just how close the US economy coming to a sever crisis, from well.... just missing the shipment of holiday toys from China.
If China can inadvertently move US markets through just messing up with shipping toys, imagine how bad a deliberate economic sabotage action would be.
You're missing an important point here - if US customers cannot get their Xmas gifts on time, they won't buy them (nobody is going to order Xmas gifts if they will likely only arrive in January of later). Facebook has about 5 million advertisers, and a material percentage of them relies on the Xmas season for their financials to work out on an annual basis. Millions of US business have deposited 7+ figures each in inventory deposits a few months ago, with the understanding that they will convert those deposits into profit by December at the latest. If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess? And how many people will lose their jobs with or without those loans? We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale of a problem, and as Ryan pointed out, the only way to fix this is to unblock the ports. So if you're eventually going to have to do it, why not do it before millions of companies go out of business as opposed to only after that's happened?
So this is not just a matter of Chinese factories not being able to sell their goods (in which case their government will take care of them as they have done in the past). This is about US e-commerce businesses who can only fall back on their banks (and which are far more unpredictable in their generosity).
Ryan's idea to mobilize the military resources would have been a no-brainer and would have already happened in at least two countries I have lived in before.
One final detail - this may seem like a recent issue, and most of us only heard about the problem sometime in early October. In reality, the industry press has been covering this since at least March [1], when the backlog of cargo ships at LAX started exceeding 20 (it's supposed to be well below that). Now it's at over 70. So it's been 7 months with practically no action until a week ago. I am a Democrat, but this is not going to bode well for Biden.
I laugh at the idea that the US military might be engaged domestically in helping Amazon and Ebay drop-shippers get cheap chinese crap to 5 year olds who will play with it for maybe a week before it breaks or they lose interest.
This comment explains all I needed to know about why so few people in this country are taking this crisis seriously. The understanding is that this is the Amazon drop shippers who are whining, so why bother? There are countless counter arguments provided by other commenters, so I will just add this - the analogy with Lehman Brothers is a gift that keeps on giving; when they failed, there were also people saying "it's just the rich folks who will lose their money."
So the idea that this is all about the drop shippers is laughably wrong. But throwawayboise does bring up a point that's worth discussing - what kind of crises are "beneath" the role and purpose of the US military? Is their role just to blow shit up, or is there an economic and humanitarian angle there as well? For example, if an earthquake took out an entire metropolitan area, would it be beneath all those soldiers to dig for human remains, or would they leave that to whatever the more appropriate branch of public service that would be (even with the understanding that joining forces would save more lives)? I know that in the other two countries I've lived in this would be a silly question - of course the military would roll up their sleeves. In the US, I genuinely don't know. The author of the above comment is obviously ignorant when it comes to economic matters, but when it comes to military matters, I wouldn't be surprised if his tone resonated with many others.
FWIW, Ryan proves that not everyone in the US thinks like that, and certainly all the people from the international community I've met wouldn't agree with throwawayboise either.
On the military topic, why would the military do something humanitarian for citizens? It was pretty clear the industrial military complex was voted back in with Biden, and that's better for business than something altruistic.
Generals make a living from becoming lobbyists for the complex, and without a commander in chief keeping them in check, it's business as usual. And obviously they can walk over Biden all day to do this.
> If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess?
I think you have just affirmed what I have said.
USA is world's biggest, but an extremely fragile economy which is full of businesspeople too used to bailouts from a caring government. It's a bigger miracle it never seen major crisises from "encounter with reality" before.
> We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale of a problem, and as Ryan pointed out, the only way to fix this is to unblock the ports. So if you're eventually going to have to do it, why not do it before millions of companies go out of business as opposed to only after that's happened?
I think it's essential in a capitalist market economy to let the market forces to do their job, and for Lehmans to pop from time to time. USA faces such a big crisis during every new "Lehman Brothers moment" exactly because it never lets its Lehmans fail.
Now, imagine China will embargo USA next time... Trade with USA is just a few percent of China's GDP today.
I did intern in BestBuy 10 years ago, and I know what insane portion of profit comes from around Xmass. I honestly want the US to really fail here, and fail hard, and have a Lehman moment again. It's vitally important for the US to finally have such crisis to turn the ship around, pun intended.
Or the next time, spoiled US kids will find out that there are way worse things in life than missing their new iphone 15 for christmas.
I don't disagree that the US made a huge mistake when it outsourced its production (for all the reasons you mentioned). But the solution is not to rip off the bandaid and view millions of businesses as collateral damage. You'll notice that the Chinese government is great at playing a long game, eg: Taiwan. We need to do the same.
The only way we can get better at long games is to examine what's driving our current weakness in that area. My guess is that it has to do with the dynamics of presidential terms. To get re-elected, you have to achieve something big in the first four years, and anything big will piss off the other half of the country and will make you lose the congressional elections at the end of your second year. So the solution is to either do something big that buys you favors with both political parties (literally nothing comes to mind), or to get it done in the first two years. China, in comparison, has been plotting the takeover of Taiwan for decades, and is very strategically, step by step, moving in that direction. If this was the US, the only option would have been a quick invasion or a start-stop effort every 4-8 years.
This isn't just Xmas gifts, it's servers, routers, hard drives, you name it, stuff that's vital for businesses. We have long delays for much of our IT infrastructure at my company due to this.
Truckers are leaving containers all over Los Angeles.[1]
Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2]
A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing trucks an easily accessible container to deliver, rather than a specific container that has to be retrieved. There's an app for that. This is being implemented by IMC, the largest marine drayage company in the US. They say they're already up to 8 high stacks in the LA area. The higher the stack, the longer the retrieval time.
"This keeps drivers moving and productive, even if they don’t know the exact load they’re getting or the delivery location." So it's really dumping the sorting problem on drivers. They have no idea where they're going next. There has to be some way to separate containers by approximate location to make this work, so a driver knows how far they're going to be asked to take the thing.
How well this all works depends on how well the software organizing the stacking works.
> Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high.
These are empty containers that are getting unloaded and stacked in order to free up the truck and its chassis for another load. The equipment for doing that stacking/unstacking is called an Empty Container Stacker [1]. These are different from a Reach Stacker [2] which will have much less vertical reach and are also different from Container Cranes [3].
Plenty. That isn't actually the important question or rather important problem. The storage yards are currently stacked X x Y x 2 and now they need to be re-stacked into something like X x (Y / 2) x 4 to free up space for more empties but that re-stacking has to happen from the edges. That will take a little time.
How many cranes does the Port of Long Beach have?
The berths at the Port of Long Beach's Pier G International Transportation Service terminal are equipped with 17 gantry cranes. Of those cranes, six have outreach of 19 containers across, seven have outreach of 16 containers across, and four have outreach of 13 containers across.
That's neat, but isn't this whole thing about stacking restrictions on empty containers?
My understanding of what the Flexport CEO said in their twitter thread was that the best example of the problem is the haulage company that's keeping its driver count * 3 empty containers around on-chassis (which I think means on wheels), just sitting in their parking lot, because they have nowhere to put their empties, because they empty-storage is maxed out at the 2-height capacity. All/most of the haulage company's chassis are now tied up with empty containers, which prevents them from being able to go pick up filled containers to ship, which stops the full containers from getting picked, etc.
> That's neat, but isn't this whole thing about stacking restrictions on empty containers?
It's stacking restrictions for empty containers in lots that are not at the port, I believe.
> on-chassis (which I think means on wheels)
In container shipping, a chassis is basically a trailer that accepts a container and can be pulled by a semi-truck or one of the utility vehicles they've got at the port to move things around.
If a chassis comes back with an empty container on it, and the port isn't accepting empties, you've got to leave it somewhere before you can grab one of the many containers sitting at the dock that have goods waiting to be delivered. If the dock yard is full of containers, they can't unload the boats. If the can't unload the boats, they can't load outgoing cargo including outgoing empties.
Stacking empties higher, especially away from the dock may free up chassis that frees up dock space, etc, that gets things moving and then the empties can come back. But, that only works if the storage yards have the equipment to stack higher; which probably they don't all have. The thread mentions a limit on stacking empty containers, but the zoning limitation is for stacking any containers, it's just that outside of the yards at the port, you tend not to store full containers. Once you get those on a chassis, you want to get them delivered either to the final destination or a storage yard at another port or a train depot, etc. Empties are a bit different; you'd prefer to load filled containers most of the time, so it makes sense to stack some empties from time to time; also a trucking company may want to have some empties to take to an exporter, etc.
Honestly, I had thought that both chassis and empties were fungible, kind of like with rail wagons. You count what goes where and if things are uneven over time, make some transfers to bring it back, but otherwise no big deal. But the thread says otherwise.
For US railroads, railroad cars may seem to be fungible, but someone owns each one and there's a settlements system running behind the scenes. The Association of American Railroads, via their Railinc subsidiary, is behind that, and all railroads that interchange traffic are members. There are standard rates.
Apparently, it doesn't. I would have thought at least some shipping lines would have gotten together to allow for offsets and settlements and all that to ease logistics. Maybe the lines don't want to coordinate or enjoy the semi-lockin that returning a container to the line's yard means it's most convenient to pick up an outgoing container from that yard, or don't trust their inventory with each other.
All places I have done real estate development require permits for putting containers on your land, and it is not a quick process to get one. At the least, you usually have to justify why you need the container space and for how long.
And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
As this is a short term problem and part of a national crisis ... just stack them up, and get them removed in the near future. Any place big enough to stack up enough containers to matter (stadium parking lot, dead airport, etc) isn't going to have neighbors that raise a huge stink immediately, and the wheels of zoning disputes take times.
Heck, budget the possible fines into your business plan for holding the containers. Delivery firms already budget for tickets from parking illegally to make deliveries. This isn't so far removed from that.
Exactly. Fix the problem, then ask for permission to do so afterwards.
If you can honestly say, "we fixed the problem and didn't hurt anything with our temporary fix" then the permission people who come along afterwards to fine you are going to have to think seriously about suspending the fine that your solution drew. Don't do anything criminal, but accrue a bit of civil liability: it will either be a cost of business, or will be forgiven.
As for contracts: If I am obligated to return the containers, but I dump them for a few weeks on a disused airstrip, I'm still going to, eventually, fulfill my contract, when the port allows me to.
No excuses. Fix problems, don't brainstorm reasons not to fix then.
> And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
I can, if they get paid for it. Rent should be reasonable for short-term storage and unreasonable for long-term.
From a quick Google map look, I'd ask the National Guard to take over runway 8R of LGB. That would still leave plenty of runways there, including 8L, usable under the same wind conditions.
There is also a huge amount of land at Palmdale airport, 1h30 north of Long Beach.
A glut of empty containers is a stupid problem, but the solution can be stupid easy, if we choose to make it so.
Most of the stacks are already at 6 high https://www.tiktok.com/@stanimal18/video/7019310183545376006. The automated storage & retrieval system cannot go higher. Peel pile would be great if the empty containers did not have to be taken to Dallas. It is questionable if this is a government failure to zone empty buffer yards out in desert as there would be even less of an incentive to return the empty containers; changing the zoning at the secondary yards does not fix the underlying incentive issue and should only be put in place once the ratio of the rate at which new containers are being received to the rate at which containers are leaving begins to decline to accelerate the removal of the bottleneck. The storage fee needs to be raised to a point at which it is justifiable to move the empty containers out over processing fully loaded containers until the storage bottleneck is removed. Changing the zoning before figuring out the rate problem almost surely will just make the bottleneck worse. It would also be interesting to know if it would be feasible to make the containers able to be disassembled and multi-packed into an empty container.
Those 6 high stacks are the ones at the port. From the thread, there are plenty of smaller secondary lots outside the ports where empties are being stacked, because the ports won't accept them, and there's room. The zoning based stacking limit affects those secondary yards, but not the port yards. A real question is if the secondary yards have equipment to stack higher or if they can really only go two high, because they were limited by zoning anyway.
> It would also be interesting to know if it would be feasible to make the containers able to be disassembled and multi-packed into an empty container.
Not really; everything's welded together, and if you unweld and reweld, it's not going to be as strong. Plus that's a lot of labor. There are some collapsible containers, but those tend not to have sides or a top, which is not ideal for ocean shipping.
Each of the yards have unique constraints. Hopefully, the 2 to 4 increase is to be some sort of test such that the ability to stack 6/9 high is still within reason given it as the limit of the higher end stackers. Additionally, these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSn-dT4EMcM do not require welding to transform; are quoted with the same strength, a quarter of the original size, and 20% more expensive in early 2017.
Okay, but fancy collapsible containers does nothing to solve the problem with all the containers piling up right now. That's a longer term solution at best.
It's definitely a long term thing. Some guys from my university founded a company around foldable containers in 2008 (https://4foldcontainers.com/). It's still not common.
The way I read the linked article, the idea is to use peel piles for drayage only. That is, for goods that is due for shorter trips within the same urban area, not for long-haul freight. I think it seems like a part of the solution by virtue of having some potential for lowering drivers’ waiting time and maximizing the speed of emptying out a fully stacked terminal.
G/O media is particularly terrible with illustrations. They once had an article abut the ISS with a picture of Mir as an illustration.
I think they have a contract with a stock image provider, no photographer, and no one to seek out and license original pictures. Writer are probably asked to select an illustration in their stock image library.
I think it is a disgrace to journalism. The front picture is, with the title, the most important part of the article, do some effort FFS, or don't put a picture at all.
> G/O Media Inc. is an American media holding company that runs Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, The Root, The A.V. Club, The Takeout, The Onion, and The Inventory
It is -- the sites sold for $135m in 2016 (out of the gawker bankruptcy) to Univision. Gawker media group was famously operationally well run and threw off lots of cash.
After Great Hill bought them for $20m -- presumably with a ton of debt, or something -- they then put an idiot named Jim Spanfeller in charge. Jim managed to get the entire staff of deadspin -- also a profitable, well run site -- to quit en masse. Said staff later started Defector and are running it as a coop, basically. Defector has survived a full year running on subscription fees and largely without advertising (or maybe entirely without?).
Over the past decade advertisers shifted spending onto deep targeting (benefitting primarily FB and GOOG) and re-targeting (benefitting any rando site with lots of pageviews) away from interest-based publishers.
> Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.
This begs the question: If container storage were the only bottleneck, wouldn't operators merely lease space further afield? There's plenty of space in Corona, San Bernardino, and environs that wouldn't take more than a 30 minute commute each way.
I can't help but feel like there are other confounding factors at play.
Sidenote... I think this might be the first time I've personally heard "There's an app for that" to essentially indicate "this is a solved problem" - even if in this case it does kind of mean "software exists to solve this problem" in a literal sense.
We're only a decade or so out from when "there's an app for that" represented this cool new novel idea that you could install an app on your fancy new smartphone to do something useful.
Now it's trivial and commonplace but I could see this slogan sticking around in our vernacular outside of its original context kinda like the save icon. Neat.
I wrote "there's an app for that" because IMC does have an app for that.[1] Also a web site.[2] Drivers need to be able to talk to the container dispatching system.
That's a side issue, though. As the number of containers in temporary storage increases, system throughput drops. So, once you get into overload, you're stuck there until you somehow reduce traffic or get more capacity. That seems to be the current situation.
It's not just at the US end. Shipify reports about 200 ships stuck waiting to get into Chinese ports.[3] (That article has a good overview of the situation.) At the China end, there's an empty shipping container shortage.
Back in July, US farmers were also complaining about an empty shipping container shortage.[4] Ship lines wanted to load up and get out, because the China->US rate is currently much, much higher than the US->China rate. So loading up containers at the US end apparently cost time and profits. The way empties are handled is driven by a system of economic incentives to not hold onto empties, and apparently that's not working well enough to get containers back to someplace useful. Someone has to pay to ship the containers back.
It sounds like these are complementary solutions, no? Some yards have stacking equipment, some don't. It seems far more reasonable to let them become "sinks" for containers, which they'd gladly do and which would require nothing other than removing red tape, rather than requiring adoption of a more complex routing system.
Though efficient, this sounds incredibly stress-inducing for drivers, since it makes them even less able to plan ahead and know their future work schedule.
Couldn't large forklifts that have enough weight capacity to lift one full container and enough height capacity to lift an empty container on top of another simply pick up a stack of two containers from the bottom at the same time and put the two on top of a third, making a three-high stack?
The ends aren’t flat and the containers aren’t structurally designed for that. You’re putting twice the designed load for the bottom of the container on an end that wasn’t made to support that. I’d imagine it would do a fair amount of damage.
There are truck driver shortages too. It’s a crappy deal for a truck driver to take a load which they don’t know it’s risks/payout or how long of a drive they will be taking, what they’ll do at destination, or if they’ll have a return trip.
Odds are you could offer truckers a special premium flat rate to clear the blockage - but it wouldn’t be sustainable.
California emission standards also disallow a decent portion of truck fleets from operating in the state. Source is an extended family member who owns a small trucking company in Midwest.
The Twitter thread said that the crackdown on illegal immigrants hit the California trucking industry hard since so many companies were using undocumented drivers to cut down on their costs.
Ah well, I guess that’s a nice opportunity to quote and paraphrase the meme: if you can’t make a profit while paying a living wage, the problem is not with minimum wage but with your business model.
Arguably this is more true in shipping than other disciplines. There are great economies of scale in shipping, and drivers/operators will be required regardless of wage. importing goods from low-cost areas, transporting goods with underpaid workers, and selling them in minimum wage stores doesn't seem like a great business model.
Do shoes need to cost $20 or do the workers need to be paid $20/hr to afford $60 locally produced shoes?
This is literally the same argument for why Uber/Lyft/Doordash drivers need to know the details of a fare before accepting, but a couple of orders-of-magnitude higher.
my understanding is that not all containers pay the same (since they are different weights, have different destinations, etc.) and so this mostly screws over the driver who loses the ability to select the best offer.
Not only do containers not pay the same, but containers to the same location often don't pay the same. So many variables and often the driver is the one that ends up getting screwed in the process. I completely understand why so many simply refuse certain loads. And getting assigned a load you know nothing about before it's on your truck is a no go for most drivers.
I mean the rhetoric of free unregulated market is that the “homo economicus” would use total information and make fully conscious decisions.
Seems like some are withholding information to push other actors to make bad deals, externalize losses and generally speaking skirt from supply/demand dynamics.
No, it isn't. Most, or at least a very high percentage of independent truckers bid for cargo runs. Your cargo needs to get from point A to point B and weighs X amount and needs pickup and delivery at certain times. Truckers bid on the those routes and the the winning bidder gets the route.
If you don't want a delivery you don't bid on it or you set your bid high enough to make you want to take it. If no one bids on a delivery then the shipper raises the maximum they will pay and the process starts all over. Delivery location or pickup location a horrible place? Again, don't bid or bid high.
This is exactly the definition of a free market. Telling an independent that they must take the next load available without letting them decide if they even want it is not. That's being an employee. And shipping companies have spent years getting rid of their own fleets and drivers to push the cost to the individual drivers. And yes, there are a LOT of apps for this.
I thought that Flexport CEO's tweet stream was really great - had a ton of insightful, first hand information and made the problem very clear. Especially import was the feedback loops showing how the system was essentially deadlocked, in the classical sense of the term.
The guy is a bad ass. If he wanted to run for President, he would win. I am really not exaggerating - I had a chance to meet him a few years back, and at that time he was the most impressive person I had talked to in person for an extended amount of time (not based on credentials or achievement, but simply based on clarity of thought and new ways of thinking). I also know that PG rates him incredibly highly.
To give you a taste, this is him 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjUs7o-TnjY. I remember watching that video the first time and being particularly struck by his insight on how entrepreneurial sales is different from regular sales [1], which I have been able to apply since then on a regular basis.
>The guy is a bad ass. If he wanted to run for President, he would win.
It's interesting to note that we had a president like this, and that was Herbert Hoover. Hoover's claim to fame before being elected president was saving Belgium from starvation during WWI[1], the dude deeply understood logistics and had lots of connections so was able to negotiate with all the parties to get humanitarian relief and set up his own NGO. I picked this up from reading this biography of him.[2] Unfortunately he's become only associated with fumbling the Great Depression.
Jimmy Carter was the other engineer-president. His post-presidential career has burnished his image a bit but on the whole engineers who become president haven't been too popular.
I've been meaning to read that Hoover biography forever.
A very interesting guy, for sure. People respected his acumen, but no one seems to have liked the guy. Like a surprising number of presidents, he basically lucked into the job.
I thought the humorous podcast American Presidents: Totalus Rankium had an excellent two-parter on him:
That’s a legend that is in fact not true. He actually laid the ground for most of Roosevelt‘s „New Deal“ policies. These policies were likely ill-conceived and turned a bad recession into decade long depression.
A CEO who built or run an actual value-adding business (e.g Flexport) probably has more integrity, intelligence and aptitude than the average lawyer-who-seeks-politics who very often turn out to be snakes.
The government is not a business, but people can adapt, learn and re-purpose their skills. I think that the key, mistaken, assumption that you're making in your pushback is that general competence does not exist: people who are good at business are hyper-specialised for that environment and their skills will not carry over to governance. I think some people are really good at very general, cross-domain skills and should be put in positions to use their skills effectively.
Skills yes, but not their worldview. The fundamental duty of government to provide for its people compared to business' insatiable need for profit makes them incompatible.
There is no way for a food stamp program to generate a profit - that's entirely opposite from the point of it! Closer to home, you can tell when corners are getting cut for budget reasons that are penny-wise and pound foolish in a department at a businesses that treats departments that don't generate profit as a cost center, eg the IT department.
Businesses also have the luxury of firing poor workers. Government has no such luxury with their poor.
After four years of Trump, I know where you're coming from. But you're projecting the moral and ethical values of one person to millions of people.
Here's the thing - I've run startups that had a strong business, and those that haven't. While I would believe that my fundamental values never changed, I can tell you that I was far more tested in situations when we were running out of money than when we had 8 figures in our bank account. For example, how do you design a paid leave policy? With 8 figures in the bank, you really have to be a psychopath not to leaning on the generous side. But when you don't know if you can do the next payroll and the financial security of 100 people hinges on you hitting the next month's target... and then someone tells you about a family member who just passed away... Sometimes there are no good solutions, and you want to avoid getting yourself in those situations. So ironically, a hard-hitting CEO can sometimes lead to a better paid leave policy than a startup run by the most empathetic social worker in the world.
At my last employer, we lost a ton of engineering candidates to Flexport - it was frustrating because we'd try to articulate the scope of the opportunity, but some combination of what Flexport is doing and the recruiting process meant you guys would win every time.
He didn't really address why there are so many unclaimed empties though. That seems like the real issue. Stacking them higher might work temporarily, but isn't the real problem the empties themselves.
Perhaps no one wants to ship them back because it's not economical?
A little off topic, but these ports don’t usually store so many empty crates, so why do we have them now? Are we not exporting at the same rate? Is that even what empty crates are used for? I’m assuming they aren’t sent back to (mostly?) China empty. I read something about the prices to ship out of the US being very high, but isn’t the price coming in also similarly proportionally high, yet we still have a backlog of ships waiting to unload.
The demand became a lot more lopsided for several reasons:
* consumers were shifting spending from experiences that would've been COVID impacted (holiday travel, entertainment venues, restaurants) to online shopping
* industrial supply chains in Asia were the least impacted by COVID due to the relative lack of explosion in cases there compared to the rest of the world, so we are legitimately shipping more from there and exporting less
* a good chunk of the medical equipment that has been necessitated by COVID (e.g. masks) is made in Asia and that has made demand even more lopsided
* there was a ship backlog because COVID impacted how ships were getting unloaded, and at one point they weren't sending back ships with empty containers to reduce turnaround times, and now there are not enough containers in China and too many in the US.
Another poster said ships that would normally take empty containers back to China are now just unloading and leaving empty. If that's the case, it seems like it's trading short term gain for a longer term problem. Make them take the empties?
Nobody has to "make" anyone do anything in that situation. It's a classic supply/demand imbalance. Governments can't do anything here - even just getting them to pay attention to their own zoning rules required some random CEO in a boat talking to local workers then posting on Twitter. They aren't in a position to do anything better than the workers themselves can do.
Thanks a bunch, I think others have said it was the increased demand and I didn’t quite get it, or the scale of the lopsidedness it caused, until the way you described it!
Yes. To quote JP Morgan's recent article "Dude, where's my stuff?"[0]:
> The surge in US import demand has led to a sharp rise in eastbound freight rates (see charts for Shanghai->LA and Shanghai->Rotterdam). However, westbound freight rates have not risen nearly as much, leading to an odd and problematic phenomenon: incentives for container owners to move them back to China empty to accelerate receipt of eastbound freight rates, instead of waiting for containers to be refilled to earn westbound freight rates as well. This further exacerbates supply chain issues, since US goods (i.e., grains) that were supposed to depart US railcars and warehouses for export remain in place, occupying space that US imported goods were destined for.
That explains why we're sending them empty, but why are ports clogged with them? Shouldn't it be pretty straightforward to load them onto the next ship?
It is completely standard in the shipping industry to have lopsided routes, where one direction has 100% full containers, and the return direction a much lower percentage, like 50%. The shipping cost of different routes takes this into account.
And hence the extreme explosion in shipping prices, I assume. Anyone buying freight from China to LA now has to also pay for returning the empty. What I’ve been told is the price for shipping one container has increased 10-fold because of this.
What are the challenges in crossing the Pacific Ocean by boat? How much hardware would be involved with making individual containers seaworthy? Disposable cargo ships, anyone?
I looked into using them for construction as I am building a office / workshop, roughly the size of two 20ft shipping containers. As much as it may be glamourised on social media, it has a lot of limitations.
In my case it's actually cheaper and much more flexible to build it as you would a traditional building. I live 300 miles from the nearest port, so that doesn't help. I also looked into the container sized temporary buildings used on construction site, and they are made from scratch (not from old shipping containers).
I’ve seen businesses use them for stationary storage. I’ve assumed they use discarded containers that can no longer take the stress of freight.
But yeah in general you’re right.
> A little off topic, but these ports don’t usually store so many empty crates, so why do we have them now? Are we not exporting at the same rate? Is that even what empty crates are used for? I’m assuming they aren’t sent back to (mostly?) China empty.
My understanding is that the us doesn't send all that much back to china, and that it was a problem for a while but wasn't the bottleneck until recently.
I'm surprised it isn't worth it at some level to send a boat load (literally) of empty containers back? I know not every ship will just do the round trip China<->LA but presumably at least some number of them would.
The same podcast included a story about an entrepeneur _trying_ to ship empty containers but none of the shipping lines would eliminate the part of the lading contract that says they own the containers when you're done with it.
Anyways, right now the bottleneck isn't shipping containers in China, that was an early pandemic logistics story.
It is worth it in the grand scheme of things but there appears to be no mechanism to charge all the benefitting parties. There is cost shifting going on that’s creating bottlenecks
This is very bad for the rest of the world, and also for the US, since all the empty containers are stacking up there, then there aren't any empty containers available in China or anywhere else for exporters, so even getting your hands on an empty container can be very difficult or almost impossible, or they cost 2-3x more than usually.
Elsewhere someone mentioned it’s cheaper to build a new container in China than to ship and empty one over from the US. Even if you are already sending the boat.
This sort of implies that it’s incredibly cheap to make the container, and/or it’s expensive to add that weight to the ship, and/or our ports are incredibly slow at loading empty containers onto ships.
Right it seems like if a ship leaves empty you might as well flatten all the containers because they won’t go back anytime soon. The solution is to make the ship pay for all that as a precondition to leaving empty
Nope. China has the steel. China has cheaper labour. China has more efficient logistics systems to move container from place it's constructed to a port.
The answer to China being better at 99% of manufacturing isn't subsidies, it's efficiencies.
But this isn't manufacturing vs manufacturing. It's putting an empty container on a ship that is already going somewhere vs clawing tons of raw material out of the Earth, processing the raw material, manufacturing a container, transporting the container.
Sure but you asked if they are subsidizing them, the answer is no. Is it cheaper than waiting to load empty containers? It could be depending on the incentives, even if those short-term incentives are damaging to long term prospects you would be surprised how short-term most businesses think.
Biggest influencing factor I can think of right now is that many importers/exporters are willing to pay exorbitant fees to get product from China to the US. This is specifically acute in areas/industries that there are no other viable source, say for instance LiFePO4 batteries. These are absolutely key to a huge number of things happening in the world right now and are outside of a few very isolated plants (CATL has one in California) made entirely in China.
There are so many insane distortions happening because of supply crunch that subsidies and trade nonsense are actually starting to become irrelevant. (though I really do hope USA sorts their shit out, their China policy is fucking up the world for zero reason).
You've hinted at what I'm trying to understand. What incentives are actually in place that are impacting this behavior? My hypothesis was that the CCP decided it's going to flood the world market with containers by subsidizing them. Maybe that's not what is going on, fine. But what specifically is happening? It sounds like maybe you don't know either.
And in the middle of all that, Theory of Constraints in a tweet:
“When you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you.”
It's often said that ToC is a popularization of operations management knowledge that already existed at the time. Is there a better textbook that is more technical and not too dry?
Seems like all these tweets are about emptying ports so they - and the author’s startup - can go back to their business.
The rest of the systems’ profits and sustainability seem to be secondary.
Perhaps it might make sense to ponder if this super-lean truck-centric infrastructure wasn’t running too close to its breaking point?
Might be a good idea for big-gov to lend a hand but also impose some top-down decisions like: long term you will be rebasing your logistics onto a railroad based backbone.
There, and you’ve magically created a couple thousands well paying jobs in infrastructure build and maintenance…
Also call some operations researcher to copypaste a couple tiered caching algorithms onto this mess.
This. This right here is the voice of common sense.
With fossil fuel-supply contracting in the coming decades and over-spread cities' infrastructures being impossible to navigate without transportation, the US will have no choice but to turn to rail. It's just a matter of "when", not "if".
Isn't the problem with rail that it's nearly impossible to build new rail lines? Especially in a way that isn't destructive to the environment? I'm all for rail in general, but it feels like the same environmentalist push that wants to get away from trucks is also the force that's going to block putting fairly environmentally damaging train lines all over the American west.
Yeah, you won’t get animals randomly wandering on the tracks if you lay them over concrete bridge structures, costs a tad more also in terms of concrete production emissions but you can offset that by running the trains on renewables throughout their lifetime
Sure - there's answers to a lot of it, but you're still talking about having to acquire a ton of land that's likely in the middle of nowhere and putting in a big construction project. It's not too dissimilar to the sort of work that's required, and the risks associated with, adding new oil pipelines, and those have been a complete mess of corruption and environmental and land-rights protests.
Really? I don't think you'd have the same problems.
Sure, randomly contrarian NIMBYs will fight to their last breath over anything, but one thing is an overhead train track, another is an oil pipeline with all the environmental hazards of an oil spill.
Of course, corruption and garden variety incompetence are a variable, but all large projects are vulnerable to that.
Sure, but it's not just the construction. The concern is the long-term damage of moving freight over the line and the potential for accidents later, just like oil spills. There's plenty of hazardous freight that could be a problem in the case of a derailment, especially with over-head tracks where a derailment would be far more catastrophic.
It's also not just contrarian NIMBY folks - there's plenty of pushback on putting lines through places for well-supported reasons. Nowhere is "the middle of nowhere." Someone lives there, often people who have been displaced to there because of bad policy elsewhere.
Would be nice to see a follow-up of exactly what this fixed. He mentioned only 7 of 100 cranes were in operation, does that mean more cranes will soon be able to operate because they have room to put containers?
Well, assuming enough truck terminals have stacking equipment that can actually pile more than 2 high, it should free up some more wheels to start pulling full containers out of the port. But who knows? And it’s hardly going to solve this problem by itself.
As I understand the shipping fee from China to the US is very expensive right now, so ships don't want to wait for ports to load empty containers on. They turn around ASAP to catch another shipment from China, leaving all these empty containers at destination ports.
What I would like to know is how it ever got to this breaking point? Is there no planning for such cases or continuous optimization? Or were plans presented to the government which just sat on it until it was too late?
My mental model is that regulations are decided on through a political process, and then no one looks at them until it becomes a political issue again.
zoning is very easy for local busybodies to capture, since normal people don't have time to give a crap (work to do, errands to run, kids to take care of, etc.). and those busybodies with the most time (older, wealthier) want very restrictive zoning. (see also: HOA regulations). the particular issue here is defined by local zoning.
Japan managed to arrest housing prices by moving zoning definition to national rather than local level, where local busybodies do not have the critical mass needed to do regulatory capture. Local areas can still decide what zoning to put where, but it's not nearly as ridiculously specific as American zoning can be. (e.g. you can sell lemonade out of your driveway, but not craft beer; or you can't run a hair salon, but you can run a daycare from your house, but only if you watch a maximum of five kids. etc.) California is now trying a similar tack by loosening zoning regulations at the state level.
The height that containers can be stacked on sites in Long Beach outside of the Port of Long Beach are governed by the city's zoning regulations. Until today the limit was 2 containers, and all of the sites were occupied so there was literally no more capacity in the entire city to store empty containers.
Today the 2 container limit was temporarily suspended which essentially raises the limit to 6 containers - the max height at which most stackers operate. That's a 3x increase in empty container storage capacity which should give the system some wiggle room.
The renting a boat thing seems like a show. Hes got experts that should already know these things from other data sources. The boat thing is for simpletons in media to understand and spin
There are a lot of broken industries/companies in which "experts" don't know shit besides what they learned in school from people with no actual hands on experience. Talking to the people on the job can be very efficient, I've seen it many times; people on top can be so full of themselves that they don't even want to accept they can be wrong.
A collection of workers who know their shit will always be much more valuable than an expert looking at graphs from his office if you know how to interact with them
Since it's on Twitter it's obviously partly a PR move but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened
The boat tour seemed like much more than a PR show to me. There’s a lot of power in (a) seeing things in person to add context to the understanding you’ve built remotely, and (b) talking to people on the ground who are first-hand experts on what’s working and what’s not.
It is interesting to see this up close, from a human perspective. I was on a boat to Long Beach from Catalina last month, and the container ships are just everywhere. I counted 25 in view from the just right side of the boat. Very spooky.
Just as the network can only have a relatively small amount of traffic actually "in flight" but lots can be stuck in buffers - so likewise only a relatively modest amount of containers can be on ships in the ocean.
You need a buffer or every little inconsistency reverberates and it gets out of hand, but bufferbloat shows how too much buffering makes things worse not better. If your metrics say (and some trivial metrics do) that the huge buffer is better, your actual experience contradicts that as everything feels like you're wading through molasses.
I don't have any relevant expertise to judge what the right metrics are for international shipping, but it certainly raised my eyebrows that "Let's make the buffer bigger" is seen as automatically a good idea.
Of course, a network buffer is very different from a container port's stacks, maybe this genuinely is going to make a huge difference. I think more likely it turns out to make no real difference, but can be portrayed as a genius idea that just wasn't embraced wholeheartedly enough to be effective.
Mmmm. Doesn't necessarily hold as packets don't exist sans payload. You'd have to add an extra layer on top of the TCP logic to represent the logistical processes involved with moving packets to be filled with payload which are themselves not payload to places they are to be filled.
In a way, it sets off more token ring-ish bells for me for some reason.
“Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data. It is a huge drag on Internet performance created, ironically, by previous attempts to make it work better. The one-sentence summary is ‘Bloated buffers lead to network-crippling latency spikes.’”.
Increasing buffer sizes (increasing the number of containers stored) can have perverse effects that make the situation worse - although it is obviously unclear what the effects in this particular situation could be.
Hopefully the Flexport CEO has read the situation and consequences correctly and his suggestion helps, although chances are it won’t help much. Alternatively it could exacerbate the problem e.g. stacking more than two high could slow down retrieval enough that it ends up being net negative because truckers are deadlocked.
Destroying empty containers is one type of dropped packet. Destroying or discarding container contents (e.g. food gone off, end manufacturer gone out of business, parts sourced elsewhere) is another kind of dropped packet.
Quite a few comments here seem to imply this is some obvious silver bullet to fix the problem, when clearly the problem is far more complicated than that.
Hm, I think that analogy is too much of a stretch to yield interesting results, to be honest.
I suspect that global supply chain actors follow very different dynamics from naive TCP congestion control implementations (i.e. additive increase, multiplicative decrease), of which Bufferbloat is an emergent phenomenon.
Also, the solution to bufferbloat isn't making the buffers smaller again (there is no generic "correct" buffer size as that depends on the end-to-end RTT, but this can vary across flows at a given choke point). What works is to either make buffers or the endpoints' congestion control algorithms aware of the phenomenon.
The thing is, we're trying to solve a 90 day problem, where the packets have an 18 day round trip. And once an empty container is parked in a parking lot (without the trailer it's sitting on) you can just leave it there for years with close to zero consequences.
The downside at this point is that all the retail items for this holiday season won't be on shelves for christmas, so the damage done to brick and mortar sales industry has already been done
Related response by opendna “I checked into the claims in this port thread. While the facts are broadly correct, the policy response is not. I'm going point to some other possible choke-points, suggest solutions, and explain why some of the suggestions are counter-productive.”
> The most capital intensive process of your business should be the bottleneck.
Can you explain what this means? You find the bottleneck, then invest the most capital to improve it? Or whatever you're investing the most is the bottleneck? Or something else?
I'm not a business person, but I assume it means this:
Say you run a factory making widgets, and the process has several steps. One of the steps requires a very expensive machine. That step is the most capital intensive. You want that machine to always be running at its maximum throughput. You do not want it to be idle waiting for some other step, otherwise that big capital investment is being wasted. When the machine is at maximum throughput then it is also your bottleneck.
Hence, you want the bottleneck to be at the most capital intensive process in the business, to maximise the productivity of your capital.
@Animats said > A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2]
Some facts:
1) Container Height: 8'6". Add approx 4" for the lift slots on the bottom.
Logistics can be somewhat thought of as a flow problem.
If demand far exceeds supply, and both supply and demand stay constant, the backlog will continue to get worse in severity over time.
For the problem to get better, either demand has to decline, or supply has to increase. However, the ability to expand supply seems limited in the short term. E.g. how long does it take to improve port throughput, or build new container ships?
Translating to the real world, think every ship stuck at the port removes another ship/containers from being able to pick up new goods which creates a self reinforcing problem.
Or thought another way, if the port can only unload 10,000 containers a day, and 20,000 containers a day are showing up, the number of backlogged containers will increase linearly with time.
Just yesterday we hit a record number of ships backlogged at the CA port, so I suspect this is exactly the situation we're in.
The free market will eventually solve by either supply throughput breakthroughs, or prices continuing to rise until demand destruction kicks in.
I want to lay a few stats out here. Retail sales has been ~20% elevated from 2019 levels since the pandemic started, primarily due to government benefits/stimulus checks.
Enhanced UI has ended, but it seems consumers are relying on credit now to maintain the same level of spending. It's not clear how long this will last, but it could be months, judging by the consumer loan data here.
Note that many consumers paid off debts with the stimulus, is why this chart dips at the end. But we're quickly climbing back. Given lower interest rates, it's likely this can persist a few more months at current trend.
I suspect this will end organically whenever consumer credit is maxed out, and demand falls. But at the same time, wages are increasing fairly rapidly now... Is it possible higher wages can continue to support this new level of demand?
You can’t flat out say the rise in retail sales is due to stimulus. There are a lot of disruptions over the last year that have shifted spend from things like dining out and travel.
This shows the insane increase in personal income over the course of the pandemic.
Many made more money on enhanced UI benefits than in their line of work. This is a known fact.
People in this situation have more propensity to spend the marginal dollar than higher income earners. Spending as a percentage of income inversely trends with level of income.
It's true that some percentage of retail spending is spending shifted from other categories, but given personal income data, I doubt that's the primary cause.
Also keep in mind, there was mortgage forbearance, rent forgiveness, and student loan moratorium (which is still ongoing I believe).
Those factors don't show up in income, but will shift expenses from loan interest to goods most likely.
As you can see, services spending is equivalent to 2019 levels today, while goods spending is 20% higher.
Consider the level of fiscal stimulus, monetary stimulus through lower rates (cheaper credit), and expense reduction (moratoriums, forbearance).
The sheer magnitude of demand stimulation is frankly obvious, even without digging into the data. Of course, the data backs up this theory as well.
Saying it's "covid" isn't saying anything at all. You have to quantify what you're suggesting. What is the mechanism that can explain persistently higher goods spending? The data doesn't bear out substitution as the primary mechanism, either way.
Do you disagree that aggregate personal income was massively enhanced through stimulus spending? The facts show this.
You seem very intent on not considering that fact when it's the most obvious factor by a wide margin, with all of the data supporting it.
Are you aware of the size of federal deficit spending in 2020/2021? The level of monetary policy easing leading to more credit availability to consumers?
It's intellectually dishonest to attribute elevated retail sales solely, or even primarily to the substitution effect
Before the pandemic we talked about unfilled jobs looking for computer programmers and other higher paid positions. How many people moved from 'social' jobs to ones that required more skills but pay more?
You took that the wrong way. Software engineers moved up. I've gotten 2 promotions since the pandemic started. I'm talking about people shifting industries in to ones that have been short staffed, like programming, and leaving the crap jobs behind.
Stimulus is a small part. The 6 Trillion dollar deficit spending over the last two years increases disposable income whether it consists of checks being mailed out to households or Pfizer or Boeing. It ends up in people's pockets and is not matched by a corresponding increase in taxes.
There is a huge parking lot near the Queen Mary / Cruise Terminal in my recollection. Perhaps that could be appropriated for a time. It’s far easier to relocate cars/shuttle passengers than to move shipping containers a great distance.
I'm not sure on the USA but I know that to clear such a logjam will require a lot of workers who might be casual workers. What's the expected impact on these workers?
> Also containers are not fungible between carriers, so the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal. This is causing empty containers to pile up.
What does this mean? The individual containers are owned by carriers?
Could this be allieveted also by agreements between carriers (or a merger)?
Or is there some other reason containers are "sticky" to carriers?
I'm not an expert in this field but I know from experience that when converting buildings into logistics warehouses, the limiting variable most often is the carrying capacity of the floor.
I assume this is be the biggest risk factor that relates to lifting these limitations. The ground might not have the carrying capacity required for the loads that stacked containers can create.
Also, I'm sure nobody wants their view blocked by container stacks 5 high.
Generally speaking, it's not allowed. The supply chain has a very long tail and there are all kinds of steps and contracts that are based on the destination specified when goods are first loaded on a ship. Unloading at a completely different port far away would be a nightmare. As for why ships aren't utilizing other ports more, see [1].
If problem is too many empty containers. Wouldn't actually subsidising shipping them off make sense? That is make it worthwhile for ships to load them on.
Why has this obvious solution taken 3 months and a boat tour from a startup CEO to implement? Do not elect incompetent mouth breathers into local governments, folks. When such people run unopposed (or when all the alternatives suck about as hard) I write in Mickey Mouse. If this was a trend, Mickey would hold most of the elected offices in this country.
COVID mostly. Disruptions in supply and demand caused imbalances, and in places where there is not enough buffer space to handle the imbalances (like container storage in California) the buffers filled up and the whole thing stalled.
Just as a rule of thumb, a container is easily worth 10-20x what it costs to ship it from the US to China (under normal circumstances).
There's a reason they're reusable: these are quite sturdy boxes built out of high quality materials (steel frame, corrugated steel walls, thick hardwood floors), otherwise you couldn't stack them 10 high with 28 tons of goods in each of them.
No. Shipping container prices have risen threefold. The transshipment companies who have to deal with the containers piling up don't own the containers, and can't sell them to you.
They should switch to a model where the slot the empty container occupies is sold at auction.
I’d wager the difference between the current price of the slot and the value of the container is less than I’d be willing to pay for the container.
Alternatively, institute two simple rule: “No ship may leave the port with fewer containers than it entered with.” or even “no non-full ship may leave the port”.
If that leads to a shortage of movable empty containers (but the port is still full of immovable empty containers), add a second temporary rule: “any empty container stored at the port for more than N days may be ‘towed’ (by a cargo ship of the port’s choosing) to some other port.”
Containers increase the potential wind load on the ship, which needs to be balanced by additional weight. Ships do have ballast tanks, but you can't just load a ship up with empty containers and send it off. If you want a full load of containers, you need to put something in the containers.
Yes, and they do. But remember this is in the middle of Los Angeles where property is insanely expensive and ordinances limit how high you can stack your containers. So in order to make any kind of real dent you either need an astronomical capital outlay or you need to get a bunch of containers to emptier land outside the city (i.e. 40+ miles away), and you need to do it without violating customer contracts on where their stuff (goods or the containers themselves) is stored.
On the contrary, they are insanely expensive right now. Too many empty shipping containers in on particular area means too few everywhere else that wants them. Shipping containers prices have skyrocketed.
Nope. Unless you consider having to look at shipping containers to be a vital safety issue. From the City of Long Beach's announcement [1]:
> These provisions, which have been in effect for many years, were established to address the visual impact to surrounding areas of sites with excessive storage.
Zoning laws prevent stacking containers more than 2 high. FFS.
Zoning as practiced in the US may be the most pervasive, banal evil in the country. It kills our GDP[1], is a major driver of racial inequity[2], increases wealth inequality[3], and creates car-dependency which has horrible public health impacts[4].
Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that is.
But I’m not surprised to learn that LA area land use regulation is a major contributor to the dysfunction at the port.
> Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that is.
Because people love zoning! NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood. It's the main reason zoning exists! Particularly the wealthy people who have the influence to make it happen, but the casual racists of the past century, and middle class yuppies of the past half century, have plenty to answer for.
But it's also clear that bad zoning (like the 2-stack rule) is also an artifact of poor system maintenance. When you design a system, you may put in certain constraints for safety. Over time the system changes, but the entire design and its constraints are not re-evaluated for each change. So eventually you have constraints that are completely out of whack with the current state. Doesn't matter if it's zoning or a microservice architecture, you're going to end up with crappy legacy rules that only get re-evaluated when things break.
> NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood.
Yes some of prefer zoning to "mixed" and "diverse" neighborhoods. What's wrong with me not willing to see a laundromat or an office building next to my house? Or what's wrong with me willing to live in quiet family-oriented neighborhood, where I can let children go outside alone since age of 6-7?
What’s wrong is everything the top comment mentioned. Zoning in the US is an albatross on our GDP, increases wealth inequality and racial segregation, and is forcing the car-centric culture that we currently live in. In the broadest sense, it’s making it close to impossible to modernize our cities and will be a major factor in the US’s fall from being the biggest economy in the world.
If you’re okay with all of that as the price of you getting to live in an eternally quiet neighborhood (that your children will never have a similar opportunity to live in themselves due to zoning-driven real estate prices going far beyond what standard wages can afford), then sure. As long as you acknowledge what consequences your desires have on wider society, then you can say you think the price is worth it or that you don’t really care.
Excessive zoning makes everyone poorer and is implemented by a local political elite who have power because they can afford to spend the most time on politics.
Nothings wrong with that. Nothing is stopping you from buying up the land around you, or agreeing with you neighbors to make a HOA that has those characteristics.
The problem with zoning, is that it isn't voluntary.
It's certainly as voluntary as a HOA, which were originally called White Homeowners Associations.
Zoning is assigned by democratically elected administrations. HOAs are restrictive covenants that are required for the purchase of a house. Every single thing identified as NIMBYism could be enforced by covenants, and keeping blacks and Jews out was literally their original purpose.
Because the wording of such restrictions are often just window-dressing on the true motive, which is racial segregation.
The first zoning law in the country was in Los Angeles in 1908. Part of the law was crafted to force certain businesses to relocate retroactively. It was crafted specifically to target the Chinese businesses, which were the laundromats. White people just did not want to live alongside Chinese people.
Redlining was a further practice of both bankers and zoning having restrictions which were explicitly racially motivated. Levittown, the first planned community in the United States, was very explicitly "not mixed" - it had racial covenants that restricted blacks or jews from moving in. The intent was to sell more homes, as they presumed white people would not want to live in "mixed" areas with neighbors of an undesireable race. That practice continued throughout planned communities and zoning laws all over the country. Many of those racial covenants are still in place today.
As an aside: you can let your children go outside in most cities. The moral panic over children getting kidnapped or abused if they step foot outside the house has been overblown for decades, and at this point is just a bizarre psychological trope of America.
> What's wrong with me not willing
Misery loves company. City-dwellers have to deal with crime, dodging homeless excrement, noise, and general unpleasantness? So should you.
Why blame the rich people rather than the system that allows them to abuse it? Rich people will always exist. The solution is to make it so that abuse is not possible. One possibility: create a state system for zoning and override every local zoning system. Let local zoning boards decide how to zone but make zoning be based on a tiered zoning system. Namely every zoning is a superset of the previous zoning. So industrial areas also allow every other type of zoning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk
I don't know about your state, but in my state, rich people have influence at the state level too.
It doesn't seem axiomatic to me that rich people will always exist (I'm not sure I even agree that poor people will always exist, despite believing that the guy who most famously said it was divine), and one of the things I have learned from working in an industry with very rich people is that merely being rich is enough to let you influence the rules of the game. If someone was able to argue for tiered zoning, you can pay people to argue for un-tiered zoning. If there's a law preventing you from influencing local zoning, and you're rich, you can go change that law just as easily as it got created. If there's a law requiring certain representation on zoning boards, you can go lobby that representation. If there's a law moving zoning to an "apolitical" government agency, you can fund candidates willing to politicize it. And so forth.
Making people not have that level of influence/leverage in the first place, hard as it might be, seems like the only viable solution.
My post was actually about defining a system of zoning and forcing localities (if they want to allow zoning for industry at all) to also allow high rise housing and commercial in the same area as well. And anywhere that's zoned commercial also has to automatically allow residential. Localities can still choose how they zone, but the state sets the types of zoning possible.
Why not? It sounds like you think this is obvious, but it isn’t to me.
I live in an area with occasional grandfathered-in exceptions to zoning rules. There’s a cafe run out of a house, and a butcher shop run on a residential street corner between houses. And its absolutely lovely!
I would have no problem with people making things (“a factory”) next to a school.
This is a perfect reason why most zoning sucks - but not all zoning sucks. Current zoning prevents most neighborhoods from being walkable. You can't have cafes and grocery stores near most houses.
But replace cute cafe in your example with a landfill or a cement plant and see if it's still awesome.
I previously lived next to a cement plant, actually, in Brooklyn - the Ferrara Brothers one, now shut down. It was literally adjacent to my apartment, out the back window. And you know what? I didn’t mind one bit. I really loved that neighborhood.
You can have a little park between grocery stores and houses. I live in a neighborhood like this and have all necessary amenities in 5-10 minutes of walk.
> I would have no problem with people making things (“a factory”) next to a school.
yes you would, if it were a large plastics manufacturer bringing large amounts of truck traffic and noise pollution and spewing carcinogenic PCB compounds into local atmosphere.
Zoning is not the same as regulation. We shouldn’t be spewing carcinogenic PCBs anywhere.
Gigantic factories don’t want to be on small residential streets anyway because they cant fit the trucks in, so I think that argument cuts the other way - there are natural forces that deter that stuff.
Zoning exists as a common protection of property values. You may have no problem living next to a solid waste disposal site, but if they built one next to a home you owned for twenty years, you might come to appreciate zoning.
Make no mistake, the protection is more often than not for the local tax base. There more than enough examples of zoning changes approved because the change offers a multiple of new tax revenue.
I don’t see how I claimed that natural forces prevent all negative outcomes. Sorry, you don’t seem interested in understanding each others’ views here…
your view seemed to be pretty clearly, "commercial zoning is unnecessary for the problem of building factories next to schools", based on your phrase "Gigantic factories don’t want to be on small residential streets anyway because they cant fit the trucks in, so I think that argument cuts the other way - there are natural forces that deter that stuff. ", meaning, "natural forces" would "deter" "that stuff", in this case "that stuff" being building factories next to schools. Sorry to be pedantic but I'm not quite sure what it is I'm not understanding.
if you're saying, "I was just arguing that one exact example, i didnt say natural forces help for all kinds of other problems that commercial zoning is meant to help", well OK, so I think commercial zoning is necessary for even a less-than-gigantic, but nevertheless distruptive, noisy, and polluting manufacturing facilities being built inappropriately close to schools and residential areas which may nevertheless still be on roads that are fairly or fully accessible by truck traffic". After all the truck traffic could enter in the front of the building's property and the back and sides of the building's property abut said schools and homes in any case. just go look at any commercial property with a lot of trucking and movement going on, it doesn't take much imagination to see how such a thing can and quite often does abut residential areas in any case.
Thanks for explaining more fully, this is helpful.
Yeah, I was trying to say that factories specifically want good road access, so zones aren't necessary for that one exact example - your second paragraph. Sorry for being unclear with the phrase "that stuff," which seems to have sent us in the wrong direction.
You say they may be constructed in residential areas anyway - like, maybe the roads are good enough in a neighborhood. I agree with this, but then I'm not seeing what the problem with the factory is. If it's noisy, impose noise restrictions. If it's polluting, impose pollution restrictions. But I don't have any beef with people making stuff as a matter of course.
My position is mostly that zones are the wrong tool for the job. I wish we were more forgiving of mixed-use neighborhoods. If someone wants to run a 3D printing shop next door to a school, more power to 'em.
If you think your example was an exception, what was the use of it? It seemed like evidence to support the claim that there are "natural forces that deter that stuff."
how about a landfill. ever been to one? they smell quite awful. nothing illegal about them, and they would pretty much ruin a junior high school right next door.
And they're a horrible mistake of history that was a bad idea. The planet is a closed loop system with limited resources. Our use of those limited resources should be closed loop as well.
unfortunately there is no means for that to happen right away. but of course if there weren't any landfills, we would no longer need them to be mentioned in zoning regulations.
You should live next to a dog food factory or a bunch of chicken houses. Things don't have to be dangerous to create a situation that you don't want to be living next to.
The net result of relaxing zoning would be more residential housing built, not industrial. Industrial parks around the united states are sitting fallow while housing is being bid up to the moon. Demolishing houses to build a dog food factory would be very unprofitable since you would be replacing high value land use with low value land use. What you are saying is not a good argument for strict zoning, because your hypothetical scenario isn't realistic.
Zoning mistakes have also resulted in the death of vibrant neighborhoods. Having mixed residential and commercial zoning enables things like grocery, corner and hardware stores that make a good place to live even better.
Zoning shouldn't be able to limit how high containers are stacked. If the facility operates in a safe way consistent with OHSA laws, the municipality should come in with a half baked zoning law that prohibits an otherwise reasonable operation from working effectively.
In my travels I have found that many communities across the US seem to generally fear use of height. I've always found this odd compared to rest of the world. Maybe it's just because land is cheap, but it does tend to mean that zoning laws, which try to codify standard practice, do end up overreaching on this particular issue.
> I would have no problem with people making things (“a factory”) next to a school.
A factory isn't just "making things", though. There might be semi's coming and going making traffic more dangerous, there could be materials left out that are dangerous to kids if they wander through the wrong fence, maybe there'll be loud noises that are detrimental to kids' concentration during tests.
There's plenty of reasons industry is usually put outside of towns.
Industrial processes have a large surface area of different risks and hazards, and physical distance from where people live is a good way to mitigate all of them. Eg. Explosions, toxic chemical spills, electrical noise, air pollution etc.
They also need heavy transport, which wears out road infrastructure much more quickly than light vehicles. Keeping residential streets largely clear of heavy traffic means you can focus repairs and replacements of road surfaces in the industrial areas.
Zoning isnt the only way to solve these problems, but it's a good one
It seems like this would depend a lot on the industry, and on scale. If somebody is, I don't know, assembling board games, I think that sounds fine next to a school. If they're refining crude oil, well, that sounds more likely to have the problems you describe.
But "zoning" attempts to resolve those issues by carving territory up, not by requiring a particular physical distance. Zoning maps have boundaries which still have the problems you describe, right?
It seems a lot more reasonable to target the specific issues (noise, air pollution, etc - the stuff you descibed) rather than attack this via zones.
Of course, you said a similar thing too, so we probably 80% agree. But can you explain the remaining 20% - when is zoning ever a good way to solve these problems?
Further - is there a case to be made for zoning aside from moving really heavy industry away from really residential neighborhoods? My city has dozens of zones, carefully segregating walkable retail regions from single-family homes, which doesn't seem so defensible.
Zoning is a terrible terrible way to solve the heavy goods transport problem the states have. Fines proportional to vehicle wear would be a better way to do it, incentivizing use of industrial rail spurs. Switzerland is the place to look for inspiration on this.
That must be so, since you said it. Do you acknowledge, though, that many people would not like a factory next to their house? How about a foundry? How about an airport? And do you think that people's preferences ought to be taken into account by their local government? If so, there's no argument here, you just have your own opinion.
I am asking to be convinced ("why not?"). I'm not trying to convince you myself :)
There are alternative mechanisms for getting peoples' local preferences. City- or county-wide zoning maps rarely change, and - at least in Seattle - don't seem to respond to individual citizens desires or concerns in the way you imply. Are zones really the right tool for the job?
The massive administrative burden of making every piece of property a special case where everyone nearby has to be interviewed, then their interests quantified and compared and a final judgment made sounds like a lawyer's wet dream.
Instead, we have zoning, where we can say "build your factory here if you don't want to worry about residential complaints" or "build your house here if you don't want a noxious odor, noise, and constant semi traffic bothering you."
Well, you did say you wouldn't mind if there was a factory next to a school. My point is that most people probably wouldn't want that, because it would be dangerous at worst and disruptive at best, and it's generally considered the job of governments to prevent that kind of thing. Whether that happens in practice in specific locations is another issue completely, as is what individual citizens want to happen.
If you think that there are situations where preventing some kinds of things (say, a toxic landfill) from being constructed next to other kinds of things (say, a preschool) is desirable, and that there should be rules around that, and that most people want an elected government to make and enforce those rules, that ought to explain why the commenter you responded to said zoning is important. Even if you disagree with any of those clauses, I think you'd understand why they felt that way.
You don't need zoning laws for that. The UK doesn't have them, yet still has pretty stringent controls ("planning permission") on what you can build. Explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#United_Kingdom
Each area - typically a district, which is a sub-unit of a county or city - has a "local plan" which is decided democratically by the local government. "The plan does not provide specific guidance on what type of buildings will be allowed in a given location, rather it provides general principles for development and goals for the management of urban change."
All of this sits under a National Planning Policy Framework set by central Government.
Not quite. UK planning isn’t highly prescriptive, and made up extremely narrow and limited classes of building (like single unit family home).
Instead the plans set out browser goals, such as designating a area as being primarily residential with an objective of reducing traffic and increasing walking.
If you can submit a plan that show what you want to build fits with outline, you can probably get permission. That means it’s perfectly possible to build a shop, or an office, or restaurant in the middle of a residential area. All of those things would increase the walk ability of the area, and reduce the need for residents to own cars.
Equally just because a plan doesn’t indicate you can build a specific type of building, doesn’t mean you can’t get permission for. But you would have an uphill battle to convince planners that deviating from the local plan is necessary.
The result is that pretty much all of the UK has mixed use development. You find residential area right next to light industrial districts. You find shops and restaurants scattered through neighbourhoods, and find flat in the centre of commercial districts (just don’t complain about the noise).
The difference between zoning and planning is like the difference between a speed limit and the old "Reasonable and Prudent" law in Montana or the Richtgeschwindigkeit in Germany.
The UK’s planning system is very slow, unpredictable and inefficient. It also is not great at preventing suburban sprawl either. Probably Spain, the Netherlands or Japan would be more interesting to look at.
You don’t need zoning to stop that. You can regulate against nuisances directly - for example: no industrial noise levels within 2000’ of an existing neighborhood. You also don’t even _need_ to do that because it’s uneconomical: land in a neighborhood is worth too much per square foot to be used for industrial development.
Unless it's a black neighborhood, in which case it's cheap enough to bring in big polluters?
A default assumption that industrial processes are safe unless specifically regulated to say they're dangerous sounds like a shell game. The industry will chge between dangerous pollutants fast enough to be one step ahead of regulators, or pay regulators off to allow their pollutants.
It's right to assume all industrial work is dangerous
I think the bigger issue is that our culture sees housing as an investment vehicle rather than a commodity like food. You wouldn't stockpile a warehouse full of non perishables with the expectation that they will skyrocket in price. Likewise, nobody should buy multiple houses with the expectation that they will skyrocket in price.
Without this mindset, I doubt anyone would be so opposed to change zoning laws as cities grow/change
Some form of zoning must exist because you don't want people living next to an incinerator power plant for instance, but like any good thing, it can be taken to an extreme and micromanaged into evil.
Zoning means central planners literally draw a map saying what goes where, and generally make all kinds of aesthetic decisions to go along with it. There is a big gap between that level of micromanaging land use and regulating against nuisances.
No, since this alternative allows for an apartment building with a couple of shops on the ground floor (normal in most of the world), and any other reasonable mixed development.
No one is suggesting heavy industry should be allowed in a residential area.
If that power is local, NIMBY always wins. These decisions must be made at the state level. Cities are way too fractured into myriad municipalities competing for jobs and "quality" housing.
Why? If people choose to live next to the incinerator that's their choice. You can also have "industrial only" zones for stuff that's pollution emitting, but most things don't need that zoning. Example Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk
Well, I would be pretty angry if someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to my normal house, since I bought it on the impression I would not have that as a neighbor
If someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to your house it would mean that the demand for housing in your neighborhood was massive and restricted by zoning. Your land value would skyrocket by allowing apartment buildings and you could take a huge pay day and move somewhere farther out from the city. You shouldn't get to halt US GDP growth in its tracks because you want to dictate what your neighbors do with their property.
In practice, people are pushed out of their homes because they can't afford to live in the neighborhood full of high rise apartments anymore, and they then struggle to make a living (much less find another place to live). It's funny that the GDP itself is prized over the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of an economy with a high GDP.
If such people are homeowners (after all, it is homeowners who are the one complaining about this on zoning boards), they’ll become fantastically wealthy in such a scenario. They have nothing really to complain about except a wealth tax (of course, by limiting property tax increases, California’s prop 13 is like a wealth SUBSIDY).
That's unless the government uses eminent domain to give your home to a developer as "slum clearance"
Then, you're turned into a renter against your will, and also, everyone else needs to find new housing at the same time, so even before the new luxury units go up, the rent skyrockets.
Poor people with expensive homes can't defend their ownership. That takes paying expensive lawyers
More nominal wealth that reduces actual physical wealth (by slowing the improvement of land via adding denser housing) is not a good outcome. It’s just redistribution of wealth from newcomers or renters to existing homeowners.
If the demand exists to build high rises then those people would already be pushed out at an ever faster rate. If you take a plot of land that previously had 4 units on it and turn it into a high rise with 100 units, then you can fit 96 higher income people onto that plot of land. In the scenario where you don't build that high rise, those 96 higher income people simply go into the existing housing stock and push those people out anyway. You can think of a high rise as a sponge soaking up demand. In our hypothetical with the high rise, the existing neighborhood's housing stock is in less demand (and cheaper) because all the wealthier people moved into the high rise.
Why are the higher income people wanting to live in the worse accommodations in the high rise?
If they can push people out of houses regardless, theyre still going to go for the houses.
It'd be better to redirect demand elsewhere, so the wealthy people can build their own infrastructure and community rather than co-opting an existing one
Living in a newly built high rise in more attractive to some people than a decades old house that might not be in the best shape. You can't "redirect demand", that's just not how the world works. When a bunch of jobs are centered in a city, then people will move to that city to work. You need to have a solution that can accommodate the population growth. Just telling people to go away is xenophobic and denies the reality of the situation.
I think you might be missing the point, which is that the entire scenario should not be happening. If people are getting priced out of their houses, or people are building high-rises that inconvenience people, that needs to be solved, not ignored "because GDP". Making people's lives worse or uprooting them in service of general economic gain isn't a good strategy. I mean, we certainly have used that rationale in the past (genocide of the American Indian comes to mind) but it's probably not in the best interests of the nation.
High rises are built because people want to move to places with better opportunity. Should we simply not allow anyone to move to places with high opportunity? Are people who were born in rural areas or small towns not allowed to seek a better life in a big city because some people already live there? If you think people people should be allowed to move to places with better opportunity, then you need a solution on how to house a growing urban population, and that solution is building denser and taller high rises and housing of all types. You seem to view the people moving into the high rises as some sort of evil gentrifier trying to make other people lives hell, but they simple want to live in a more prosperous location. How is your argument any different than American anti-immigration people saying no one can immigrate to the US because "its full". Simply put, you need to build more housing in places where people want to live and unless you want endless urban sprawl of low density houses then you need to build high rises where demand supports it.
I'm not trying to argue in bad faith, but I genuinely don't see a solution where you allow people to move to areas of high opportunity without building more high rises (or just denser housing in general).
On the one hand, there's people with money who want to move to a new area. They have plenty of cash and resources, and they want to move primarily out of a lifestyle desire.
On the other hand, there's people without money who live in a neighborhood, who can no longer afford to live there. But they usually cannot simply "move somewhere else". Remember: they're poor (since they can't afford to even pay a property tax increase). They may not have good credit, not qualify for a loan, or even have any savings. They may already be stretched to the limit in terms of transportation to a job, or rely on their neighbors for child care. If they were a homeowner, it may have been the last vestige of generational wealth in their family, and they may simply have no money for rent or a new home. If they can rent, it'll certainly be much more than they were paying before, which may have just been their property tax. And if they are one of the millions of Americans whose parents brought them to this country in search of migrant work, they might not even have a birth certificate or social security number, or perhaps have difficulty speaking English.
For many disadvantaged Americans, being forced out of your home due to gentrification can leave you homeless, jobless, and broke, with no lifeline. No extended family to give you money or support, no savings to cushion rebooting your whole life. This has been a reality for decades, and I'm still surprised when people don't realize how much of a risk to human life there is here.
So.... if the question is "When will you let people build high rises and gentrify out poor people?", my answer would be: "When those same people who want to build high rises are forced to reconcile with the people whose lives they might destroy." If you want to gentrify a neighborhood, it should be a requirement that every single person who will be negatively affected by that move should be supported such that their lives won't end up in shambles just so a developer can get rich and some hipsters can have an expensive loft.
It's a choice between giving rich people a cozy pad, or letting poor people continue to have a livelihood and home. I just don't see that being much of a choice.
Building new housing isn't about "giving rich people a cozy pad" its about allowing millions of people from geographically disadvantaged areas live in high opportunity areas. I grew up in a small farm town 3 hours from the nearest city so I'm just supposed to live there the rest of my life? I'm not allowed to move to a city cause I got a good job offer? Sorry but your attempts to dehumanize new arrivals isn't going to convince many people, what about the millions of immigrants who come to this country, are they just banned from living in areas with jobs under your scenario because some people already live there? You're still not providing a solution to this problem, you've just ignored it.
You also must have completely ignored my comment from above, if you don't build new housing those existing people are just going to get kicked out at an even faster rate if you don't build new housing. New housing acts as a sponge to soak up demand. The entire reason housing is expensive is because we don't build enough housing units in places people want to live. Your solution to not build anymore only makes it worse. Their rents will go up at an even faster pace. If you made building fast, cheap and easy then housing units at all price points would sprout up. Do you think if you don't build a high rise then wealthier people just go away? No they just look at the existing housing stock and buy up and renovate whatever is there. Houston has one of the most deregulated housing markets in the country and for this reason the average home hasn't gone up in price despite a fast growing population. You have to build to keep up with demand.
Renters and owners are different, in a gentrification scenario owners get very wealthy. Tons of poor families who own in poorer neighborhoods just received a massive cash infusion when a developer bought their parcels. Gentrification is one of the largest transfers of wealth from rich to poor in history. Your hypothetical of someone selling their house for a huge premium and then having nowhere to go doesn't bear out in reality, they've just become rich from selling. There are millions of stories of poor families buying cheap property on the outskirts of town decades ago only for that land to worth a fortune now due to development potential.
Renters on the other hand suffer the most from lack of building, you say when they get kicked out they'll have to pay more in rent. That's because housing isn't being built fast enough so prices are skyrocketing. When you have increasing demand and fixed supply, prices go up. The only way to keep rents stable is too build as much as possible. As for neighborhoods, places change. You can't keep them stuck in time for ever. Families move, economies grow, people age and we need to have solutions that adapt, not ones that pretend no changes are happening and try to keep everything in place.
So in short you still haven't provided a solution to people wanting to live in areas with jobs. These aren't rich people with vacation condos, these are people who come from areas without good jobs and want to live in areas with jobs. Please give me a solution that accommodates them or you're just plugging your ears. Trying to deny reality isn't a solution and will only make things worse.
I think you are missing the point. When you say "priced out of their home" what you actually mean is that they have become so fabulously wealthy that they can no longer "afford" a 1% tax on that massive wealth. And even that is just a made up fabricated story, because nearly everywhere has abatement programs to delay taxes or decrease taxes for those who can't afford to pay their property taxes.
Further, they unjustly accumulated that wealth by keeping people out of an area that is in huge demand. They are hoarding a scarce resource, to the detriment of sooooo many people. They didn't create that land, and they didn't create that wealth, and they are standing in the way of many many many times more people's right to take part in society.
This sort of person you are idolizing is actually a greedy villian, working to make the world a worse place merely so they can avoid looking at apartments or meeting new people.
The land became valuable because they are there and have done a good job maintaining their community. It's collective action of the community that has made it a good place to be.
Maintaining the community is what ensures that value remains. The rea question is why all these other people aren't willing to go build a valuable community
I'm talking about poor people who can no longer afford to live in their home or apartment due to gentrification. I don't know who you're talking about.
>It's funny that the GDP itself is prized over the people who are supposed to be the beneficiaries of an economy with a high GDP.
The GDP isn't a magical number that rises by making people suffer. It rises because NIMBYs are unable to force others to struggle by keeping them out of their economically advantageous land.
I’m just asking about the mechanisms that force people out of their homes in US. Nothing more.
Here in the U.K. taxes etc don’t increase with property value, and eminent domain isn’t frequently used. So I lack the context to understand why increasing property values mean people are forced to leave, especially when I look around London and see thousands of people who bought their council homes 50 years ago, and are now living in properties that are worth many orders of magnitude more than what they bought them for. Notably, none of them have been forced out.
As for renters, well the mechanism is obvious, I don’t need someone to explain that to me.
Imagine 2 empty parcels of land in downtown Manhattan, one can have a giant skyscraper of any height built on it and the other has to be a single family home. The parcel of land with no restrictions is going to be worth exponentially more because you can built a massively profitable structure on it, the other one is so regulated that it isn't worth any where near as much. The more profit you could derive from a parcel of land the more its worth. Now I used an extreme example just to get my point across but the same principle holds on a small scale. If your house was rezoned for apartment buildings and the demand existed, someone would come in and buy it off your hands for a huge premium. Since in our hypothetical someone had just built an apartment building next to your house, the value of the land is already high, simply allow your parcel of land to allow more structures would cause it to rise in value.
On the infrastructure side, its a much better deal for you as well, the combined value of all the property taxes from the apartment buildings will be way more than if that lot had remained a house. Since the road, water, sewer and electric lines are already in place nothing new has to be built. You benefit from all those property taxes coming in from the apartment building while the liabilities to the government have barely increased. The local government can use this new surplus of taxes to build new amenities for you.
For traffic, sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere. Once you have enough people in a place you could open small shops so they can hang out around the building rather than drive everywhere.
Let's not imagine an unlikely scenario. None of this is likely true for US' cities.
> someone would come in and buy it off your hands for a huge premium.
This is still a far future.
> If your house was rezoned for apartment buildings and the demand existed
It's still better for you that only demand exists, but not supply.
To be honest, I doubt nimbyists are even interested to move. They just want their neighborhood to stay relatively the same (quiet, fewer people, safe, less crowded).
Either way we look at it, this kind of points are likely cons, not pros.
> sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere.
I laughed a little, assuming this is a US city.
Again, I don't own a house, so it's not that I agree or disagree with nimby. But I can understand why nimby hates new buildings next to their houses. It's just a lot more cons than pros.
I don't think one would be worth more than the other.
Extraordinarily wealthy people are going to be willing to pay a premium for a nice house in Manhattan, and extremely wealthy people are exponentially wealthier than moderately wealthy people, so you cant get that back in volume.
Yes it sucks for that guy, with one of best opening scenes of any cinema we cannot help feel bad for that guy. However economically it is bad for that city/country that he does not move.
We can of course choose to say we want quality of life over economic comforts modern economy offers, until our holiday shopping is stuck in the ports because of viewshed(!) regulations.
The cold truth is if only very rich do that it won't affect much, if however everyone also starts, the economy will suffer and eventually as a result of that quality of life will also drop, everything becomes expensive and industry/jobs go to places that don't restrict as much.
Look at Healthcare in U.S. for stark example, insurance(tied to employment!) or proper care is a luxury is out of reach of for many people, that on average citizens here actually may be getting poorer care than many other countries with poorer per capita GDP . The best in world research or care is possible in the U.S. what is the use if people cannot afford it ?
> If someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to your house it would mean that the demand for housing in your neighborhood was massive
or it could mean a developer was very stupid to overbuild somewhere, or more likely it's a shell building used as a money laundering scheme for organized crime (See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/trump-ocean-... for one such building built by Trump; such buildings are also often structurally unsafe such as the building in Florida that collapsed which was also started as a money laundering front). I'm not down with this "the free market will make sure everything is OK" idea.
If a developer is stupid to overbuild, then let them take that risk and that loss. We don't have to zone away risk. As for money laundering, you're using an example of one Trump Tower out of millions of apartments buildings to say it's "more likely" that every apartment building built is just used for money laundering. That's just silly.
As for structural safety, no one is arguing to reduce building codes or safety regulations so that's just a straw man argument. If an apartment building is built unsafe then the government should have done a better job inspecting and enforcing/expanding their regulations, it's not really an argument to not build.
That’s ridiculous. I can understand concerns about a dump yard or a concert venue or an industrial plant coming next to a residential suburban house but concerns about an apartment ? There will be legitimate concerns like increased traffic, increased enrollments in school district etc. which need to be solved but not stopping an apartment coming up altogether.
Also it’s unfair to ask the outside world around your house to be frozen in time because you bought a house at a period of time and setting which you liked.
Then you're stuck with an apartment complex you cant afford, and people who live there still have to drive 20min to get to amenities.
Source: I spent a hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon every day on the school bus, because development of apartments outpaced development of schools in my community.
Also, 20min to drive out to parks, because development of apartments outpaced development of parks and play fields and gyms.
Its just as unfair to force people to move because you don't like the way their community already is
You should have bought a considerable amount of land next to your property too then. Just like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. I'm sure no one would complain about that since, you know, it'd be yours and not someone else's.
I'm not here to defend unnecessary zoning restrictions, but your argument here is that the right to not be affected by the externalities of someone else's decisions should be limited to the uber-wealthy?.
It's completely reasonable to believe that a given person should be capable of quiet enjoyment of their property without having to purchase everything remotely close to it.
If you want to live in a very desirable area and you also want to have very few neighbors, you should have to pay for that luxury. Right now that luxury is effectively subsidized for a few people who are “grandfathered in”, thanks to the market distortion created by zoning.
If a lot of people want to be in an area, but you want an area with fewer people, why should your single vote override everybody else's desires? Simply move elsewhere, as nobody has the right to interfere with the free association of others.
If I'm making a software product in a specific product area, do I get to keep out other people from ever making that product?
If a ship sinks at sea, and there's a deserted island nearby, does the first passenger on the ship that arrives on the island get to claim it and prevent anybody else from stepping onto the island? Do all those other people on the ship get a vote on who can step onto the island even if they were not there first?
Does owning a piece of property give you the right to veto a particular person purchasing the neighboring property because you don't want then next door?
We as a society have set up a bunch of rules as for how much control people get when they "purchase" property. It's not a single thing, it's actually a bundle of rights, and we have chosen a particular bundle, and that bundle can be changed, and has changed, over time. Zoning is a century old invention.
The idea that a single land owner in an area can block the sale of land to others is considered ridiculous by most. But how much more ridiculous is it then saying that somebody else can't build apartments on their land, particularly in areas where lack of housing has caused massive homelessness and and skyrocketing of housing prices.
"Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that is."
I can't speak for everyone but in my case it is because I grew up in an impoverished community that had little to no zoning.
I experienced first-hand what the built environment is and the emergent behaviors of people are when there are no rules.
See, you live in a place that is nicely organized and, presumably, zoned and you think if we got rid of the zoning then everything would be just like it is now but with a few more housing units and maybe some delightful mixed light-commercial interspersed and wouldn't that be great!
In reality what you get is a welding shop next to your house. And llamas. And people disconnecting from city sewer because by god they're not paying for that when their home-built septic works just as well. And Grandma died and what do we do with her horse I know we'll keep it in the front yard.
If you had any exposure to anything other than nicely zoned locales you wouldn't romanticize the absence of rules.
It is embarrassing for the country that a CEO from a company had to discover and report this rather than someone from the govt doing their job. When I see people write "late stage capitalism", I actually wonder if we aren't in "late stage US govt". They had it too easy for too long and have forgotten how to do their jobs.
I love how these commenters think they know something about shipping that the CEO of Flexport doesn’t (I’m referring to the person you replied to, BTW).
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's a particularly low-quality, low-information sort of post, which reliably leads to worse subthreads, which is why we added that guideline.
p.s. Animats is a great HN commenter who knows a lot about a lot of stuff (not everything, of course). I don't know how much he knows about shipping but if you know more, a much better way to contribute to HN would be to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Supercilious putdowns of other commenters just degrade the community.
Most of them are usually the top comment on a thread like this, too, because there are a large number of people who consider them authoritative (or like what they say, or dogpile, or who knows). When it’s my industry being discussed here, I can usually predict who will be in the top spot (it’s only a few), and how wrong they’ll be. It’s a real problem but it’s also the immediate amnesia thing whoever-that-was talked about.
For the record that is one common prediction up there, in my experience, but I’m trying not to make it personal. There is very often a sense of reciting recent research into whatever the hot topic is, and little depth or mastery of any of those topics. But they score well, so here we are debating what is said instead of what is substantive.
> But they score well, so here we are debating what is said instead of what is substantive.
Blanket dismissals of everything any commenter mentions without providing any basis or reason or counterpoint besides empty appeals to authority is no way to conduct a discussion. In fact, doesn't your criticism also applies to you and your dismissal of everyone else's comments?
But taking your criticism at face value, the only way that the scenario you've depicted becomes possible is if those in the know do not step in to point out misconceptions and clear up doubts. Nevertheless, even so experience does not grant omniscience or infallibility, not to mention that the expert beginner problem is also a thing. In that case, an inability to refute points or offer counter-evidence, accompanied by this need to fallback to various types of appeals to authority and seniority, might actually indicate a discrepancy between actual and perceived competence and insightfulness.
The point is that if you happen to believe some posts are not right or fail to take into account critical aspects, why not call it out? I mea, you're already taking your time to write relatively lengthy posts complaining and vaguely casting doubts on how fellow posters are contributing. If you have the means and opportunity to right what you believe are wrong, why aren't you doing so and instead opt to waste your time posting messages that aren't constructive or contribute positively to a discussion?
True. But let's also note that being CEO of a company in the industry doesn't automatically make you right, nor does it mean that when you speak to a reporter or send out a tweet thread like this you don't have some sort of agenda. There's almost always an agenda. Maybe that agenda is honest and in line with public interest, maybe it isn't. And twitter is less reliable than a news story, because usually reporters seek more than one source and try to verify what they can, how they can. They're by no means perfect, but this dude can write whatever he wants.
I suspect that this measure just delays the inevitable. I'm also wondering why the limit of 2-high stacks exists (I'm guessing safety related in event of an earthquake?)
He has a lot of ideas in his other tweet thread, but I noticed that in his long list of ideas nowhere to be found was "offer better pay and working conditions for truckers."
The core issue is not too many containers. It's not enough truckers picking up the new containers, so there's no room for the old ones. And because the ships can't be unloaded, nobody can take the containers back to other ports.
It doesn't help that the full-in-union longshoremen (not the part-timer union guys) get way, way over $100k a year, some of them making $300k...and with zero requirements to meet any sort of metrics. They shouldn't be incentivized to where safety is compromised, but surely there is a balance. Right now they have zero incentive to do anything about the problem. The port sits doing nothing...and they sit too, getting paid.
> The core issue is not too many containers. It's not enough truckers picking up the new containers,
This doesn't make sense to me unless the truckers are currently extremely busy. And if they are, why is there now a problem? Are there suddenly far fewer truckers?
It's a knock-on effect from lockdowns. Governments got it in their heads that they could partition the economy into "essential" and "non-essential" and could make massive interventions without any side effects. So everyone has to work from home, not go to restaurants anymore, port rules are constantly changing in ways that screw over shipping firms, the economy tanks, everything including logistics is thrown into chaos. Meanwhile people who are ideologically blind to the costs of government intervention sit around and say "why now?! what's happened to cause this?", ignoring the ocean-sized elephant in the room.
Trucking is not an easy job. The working conditions are poor, you have to pay a fair amount of any benefits out of pocket, and like most "gig" economy stuff the logistics companies are driving a relentless rate towards the bottom.
The Flexport CEO may know more, but the Flexport CEO also has an agenda of being profitable for the Flexport CEO.
This may, or may not, align with being solutions and advice that benefits the public at large. In fact, it is becoming increasingly clear that things are currently "optimized" strongly enough that squeezing more profit out of the system generally corresponds to finding a sucker to take advantage of--normally the public at large.
Startups and their leaders have a "move fast and break things" attitude that is no big deal when imaginary things like software is involved that becomes a big deal when non-imaginary things like people become impacted.
Stacking 6-high triples storage space, sure. But it doesn't stop container ships from running back to Asia empty.
So, that storage space will fill up quickly, and we're back where we started only now we have dangerously stacked high center-of-mass (because empty) containers (this is an active seismic zone, you know) that nobody wants to pay to get rid of until somebody dies and their insurance rates shoot up enough to make it necessary to dump the containers.
At which point, the shipping companies will magically make the shipping containers go away--probably illegally to somewhere you don't want them to go to.
I mean, storage containers are made of structural steel. It's not like they're radioactive waste. They're valuable, and there's an active secondary market for used containers. There is absolutely no situation where empty containers would get dumped at sea or whatever.
If you want me to believe that "profit motive" is aligned with "public interest", why is everybody running to the regulators to clear this instead of spending money?
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that "profit motive" is aligned with "public interest" in the face of all the current evidence we have in other sectors that is quite to the contrary.
To start, it is not at all clear that super low cost, super low friction shipping from China is, in fact, in the general US public interest. But it is in the interest of WalMart. And it is in the interest of Amazon.
For example, from the standpoint of the public interest, consuming fewer Christmas goods (which are mostly disposable garbage and which is what the Asian shippers are all rushing to get transported) is probably preferable. A great deal of Asian garbage which is destined to be US garbage is currently clogging out the shipping of goods which have a steady demand and are far more necessary to the functioning of the economy.
You will note that "increased foreign shipping friction causing goods to be manufactured locally again" is not on the discussion table because it is not part of an agenda that people in the shipping industry wish to countenance.
I never suggested profit motive was good for public interest. Your argument in fact suggests that profit motive is never good for public interest without suggesting any good alternatives either. It’s easy to make an argument that everything should be produced locally… what happens when there are no trucks or truckers to ship it from one state to another ? Should each state be responsible to produce everything locally….should each county be then responsible to produce everything locally ….at what point does it stop ?
The point about “let’s just consume fewer goods” sounds pretty utopian to me. That’s not a plan it’s a hope and hope is not a plan.
When is the ceo of a company the real expert on anything? The ceo is the celebrity that makes the big decisions but rarely ever the actual ground level expert
Even if they were once the expert and know a lot about the area they just have too many other responsibilities to be the ground level expert and be ceo at the same time. A good ceo will delegate to folks that understand the details because details are the difference between success and failure.
What do you mean by "ground level expert"? In my experience the true expertise tends to hover a couple of levels above 'ground level' and get called in for the curly questions. The actual boots-on-the-ground-100%-of-the-time people are usually at a fairly basic level of competence (or rapidly get promoted) and do the simple 'grunt work'.
I occasionally run into the higher levels these days and let me tell you, most of them are whip smart.
This is the kind of dumbass comment I see on HN that makes me roll my eyes. You sound like you're 3 years into your tech career and you can't help but comment on everything as if you're an expert but in reality you show your ignorance.
Why wasn't the federal government doing this? How hard would it have been for the new "shipping czar" to have gone down there and seen what at least one simple issue was and get it fixed?
My comment seemed to be a little too subtle. Let me lay it out:
Our willingness to shame this guy (and other guys, by extension) for spending time with his family reflects our willingness to shame women for taking the same time off.
Our acceptance that he should put work over his family forces SOMEONE to put his family over THEIR work. In a male-female marriage (yes, I know he is gay), this means that men should work and women should stay at home. This attitude contributes to the gender pay divide and stereotypes that men shouldn't be great fathers.
It hurts our wives and our strength as husbands and fathers.
I didn't get appointed by the President to a Secretary position overseeing government resources.
I work at a tech company. I have responsibilities that I actually care about, and they are important to me and many others, so I could not possibly just disappear for 2 months. I can barely take a weekend off without feeling guilty.
It's not about why he wasn't there... it's that he wasn't there, for any reason. It shows that he doesn't care, and the people who picked him and allowed that to happen, also don't care.
Many people manage to spend time with their family and respond to work emergencies. They don't get paid as much or as much media attention, tho. So they don't really count.
Because US ports are run by private companies and not the federal government. The "Port of Long Beach" run by the local port authority is primarily a landlord. It's called capitalism.
I think the Port of Virginia is run by the State of Virginia and actually did pretty well. East Coast longshoreman unions are less insane than those on the West Coast.
People are waking up and realizing that government is pretty useless for specific action. Our representatives would rather pontificate about vague niceties.
I mean, you have to have law and order. That means laws. Someone has to be able to take specific action regarding those laws, and that means a government. We just have to expect competency and responsiveness from the government. There’s no alternative (get rid of the government and a power vacuum would develop and then be filled within seconds and you’d have a new “government” with a warlord or whatever).
This story actually had a good ending so far as the government actually responded about a day after the Flexport CEO’s Twitter thread. Sure, we wish the problem was solved earlier, but this is a good thing and should be celebrated!
>People are waking up and realizing that government is pretty useless for specific action.
Well, sure. The higher up you go, the less tactical (and more strategic) you become. You wouldn't want your CTO to launch code to production. You want her to make sure there is a plan to utilize CICD practices- that the ICs implement.
This comes in cycles, there are many famous ceos who made their name from rolling up their sleeves and working the lines.
If you have too many strategic thinkers you lose the ability to execute tactically, too many executors and you start building well optimized versions of the wrong thing.
I mean, good leaders actually DO dig into the tactical details if a massive bottleneck occurs. Because they’re often the only ones with the authority to solve it.
If we didn’t have social media cutting across the usual lines of communication, this problem may not have gotten fixed because no one had both the right information and the ability to act in it.
indeed. society often has trouble reaching for good.
that these democratic open communication means allowed sense to unjam & flow was awesome. an unstrucutred, unplanned, unpredicted ability to grasp at success.
reciprocally, i do want to acknowledge that access is still lolsided. if this was a random jie or nancy it would have taken pretty extreme circumstances to get their accurate & powerful suggestion raised & having an impact.
there's a lot of interesting examples in history of suggestion boxes for governance. this one isnt perfect but it still stands, to me, as an interesting positive example.
It is is depressing, that clear and obvious solutions were missing at economy-critical supply chain infra.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
But also it's 2021 where people are the most cynical we've ever been, it's almost like there's interest groups in the US that want a fanning of inflation or delayed recovery through shortages.
What's clear and obvious about temporarily suspending rules that were presumably in place for a reason? Seems more like a non-obvius value call was made.
I think 'we' (as in high-intelligence individual technical people) need to be more vocal on social media. Look at the effect that small vocal minorities have on politicians and the media...
The problem is that technical people are usually too busy working or raising a family to frequent those channels. Unemployed or childless activists however have plenty of time for their causes. The 'vocal minority'.
I can see why you might see it that way, but I'd very much prefer an outside perspective being able to bubble up and present a solution rather than ma alternatives. This is certainly better than the way governments in the US usually try to use consultants to find inefficiencies.
If it was a high leverage decision, you would have hoped one of the officials appointed to fix the situation would have already noticed and fixed it. So either they are completely incompetent or the decision didn't matter much.
> So either they are completely incompetent or the decision didn't matter much.
Or the field always wins. Every year a large team of highly paid professionals is responsible for selecting the best professional sports prospects to join their team. The team that goes first (almost) never gets the best player. Its not because they're incompetent. And its not because the decision doesn't matter- these are multi billion dollar organizations, and the decision is very much a high leverage one that will directly impact their fortunes.
Sometimes finding the best path is extremely difficult. Sometimes even when someone does see the best path, its still hard to recognize it as such. So I don't think its surprising at all for the best idea to come from outside a team devoted to solving a problem. Especially in today's age when more people than ever can propose solutions and more people than ever can see those proposals and bubble up the ones that sound good to them.
Ideally, yes. But that assumes people are looking into the right places at the right time, with the knowledge to understand what they are looking at. That’s a pretty tall order for any large system.
If the POTUS personally commits to resolving the issue, it is concerning that an outsider can literally sail through and identify a high leverage solution. Like what the hell is going on with our institutions. There might be an explanation but it looks really bad from the outside.
A large team under POTUS has been working on this for two weeks and the Flexport CEO can sail through and come up with this within 24 hours of doing that? That's embarrassing and concerning.
EDIT yes he's not an outsider to the industry, I mean he's an outsider to the group of officials who were tasked with solving this problem.
If you believe that A) you can't have literally everyone in the industry on POTUS's team and B) private industry often has some of the best expertise, I'm not sure I understand why you would be upset about this outcome.
He's upset that the government is (seemingly) incompetent. Defending their incompetence does not change the fact that they were incompetent as someone was so easily able to propose a solution while we have little reason to believe the government had a plan. It doesn't matter if that someone is the world's foremost expert (he's not, by the way) - what good is the government if they can't solve problems they're in charge of fixing?
I would be sympathetic to that if this fix was something highly complicated or requiring significant expertise to come up with. Then I could understand this oversight. And perhaps that's the case here, and it's just my ignorance speaking, but "relax stifling zoning restrictions to immediately double capacity" doesn't seem like it fits into that category of things.
Think of it like a designer giving you a design in 5 minutes. It wasn't the time it took to do the thing that was important, it was the thousands of hours of training that allowed the design to only take 5 minutes.
Ryan Peterson has been doing this for a long time at a high level, it's very hard to get someone like him into civil service.
No, he isn’t an expert, and people in logistics consider him an outsider who is a CEO of a startup that makes software that is helpful for a certain set of concerns within supply chain management. Making software for an industry does not make you a foremost expert.
> Making software for an industry does not make you a foremost expert.
I think it does, if your company is valued at 3.2 billion, does $830m in revenue, and has 10k+ customers (as of 2019) [1]. You probably know what you're doing at that point.
Buttigieg is broadly responsible for this sector on a national federal level.
My question is if anyone is specifically working to solve the current acute port clogging situation, ideally someone who has authority to implement solutions.
At the very simplest, the CEO of a large shipping company should have better contacts to suggest these things to than posting them to the world on twitter and hoping the tweet goes viral enough that somebody in charge notices.
Somebody in the mayor's office should have been getting in contact with people at the major shipping companies, asking for suggestions like this, rather than waiting until a twitter thread got viral enough to embarass them into taking action.
> This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.
Had me up to this point. Let's not do ALL the ideas, let's have someone with authority and decision making skills make a judgment call with the best information available at the time. I assume he really means "all the best ideas", but it's worth saying that we shouldn't panic and just do anything someone yells loudly.
Roads, bridges, are already overwhelmed with traffic, and we have 1/2 of congress preventing federal spending on infrastructure -- this will be the next bottleneck... I keep hearing about a 60,000 trucker shortage, but with us "long haul" trucker count @ around 1/2 a million, that will only add another 10% capacity... from what I've seen traveling the USA on interstates, 10% more trucks would be INSANE overload... these same highways are saturated and this doesn't even address the countless construction zones on all of them... there's a whole lot more "problems" than containers IMHO
Remember than the vast majority of the "infrastructure" bill is for "social infrastructure" and that the lesser amount of funding for the physical infrastructure is still subject to the contracting, procurement, environmental, safety, and other regulations at the federal, state, and local levels - all of which needs to be navigated before any actual work begins. By the time that is done, there won't be much left for materials and labor.
Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (225 comments)