> In fact, the Northwest Seaport Alliance … said it was so far seeing more vessels call into port in 2025 than in 2024, with three more calls in the first quarter of 2025 than during the same period in 2024.
> However, the ships calling into port were arriving with unpredictable volumes of cargo — sometimes 30% less than anticipated
And Snopes felt comfortable rating “mostly false” to the top level claim? I get that they’re trying to navigating treacherous waters, but “there’s still ships, they’re just 1/3 empty” is as much support for the top level claim as it is contradiction
Not the first time their headline has been at odds with their content. I've never really been a fan of this particular outlet, even in their early days I found their self-absorbed writing style insufferable. They strike me as pedantic rather than informative.
Most of what comprises a port is infrastructure for handling containers and bulk cargo. If cargo volumes are down, some fraction of that infrastructure is disused, or used below its capacity. That a ship was at berth is cold comfort to the longshoremen, truck drivers, etc. who expected to work that cargo, nevermind to the people that expected to, y’know, purchase and consume those goods.
Is 30% underutilized / partially disused tantamount to empty? Maybe not. But it’s in the ballpark in a way the snopes rating undersells.
And here's the port of Seattle: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=USSEA001 You'll note a distinct lack of yellow. If you zoom out a bit you can find some 'bulk carriers' but those aren't container ships.
So when the article quotes the Seattle port commissioner who says "we currently have no container ships at berth" that might be literally true right now at that specific port.
Other US ports seem to be doing better - Perhaps Seattle is badly located or expensive, and has taken a disproportionate fraction of the 30% drop in volumes? There are certainly larger ports on the same coast https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Top_container_ports_...
One sets off for a morning drive on Thanksgiving. Upon entering the freeway, they find the normally traffic-congested road smooth and free-flowing. The journey takes a little more than half the time it usually would. They exclaim "Wow, the roads are empty this morning!"
I'm playing a bit of devils advocate, but it's not inconsistent to observe a typically congested resource X operating at a fraction of its capacity, and note the observation with "wow, X is _empty_".
That's why it's just "mostly" false, but 'empty' is a word with a specific meaning, and claim here was that the port is literally empty of ships. (or, in the case of the Twitter message they show, that there's only one single ship in the harbor)
Snopes has been pwnd. It now adheres to the standard of literal truth with a political bias. So if someone posts “Bernie Sanders has 30,000 at a rally” (true) but the image is of a different (also true) rally but on a different date, then Snopes just says “it’s false”. Not “true, but the image is wrong”. Not informative, like “Bernie did have 30,000 people attend but this image is from XYZ”. Just says FALSE! Same here.
They've always seemed informative and do a good job of showing their sources. How big a deal is the single-word true/false judgement for an ambiguous claim if all the relevant details are summarized?
No, but if the claim is that the glass no longer has any boba it's irrelevant how much liquid you drink.
The specific claim was that the port no longer had any container ships on that specific day. And that claim was true.
Yes, there were other ships in the port. But that's irrelevant. A container ship is a specific kind of cargo ship used for international cargo shipments. In an article about international shipments, that distinctions matters.
Keep removing 1 cup of water and add 2/3 cups and eventually it goes to zero. For a port that very well may be sending people home early on an ‘empty’ port. Even if tomorrow brings in new ships for now it looks like a ghost town.
And then at one port on one day zero cargo ships showed up.
That is irrelevant. The question was weather or not the ports can be considered empty if some ships are up to 30% empty, which is not the case. Emptiness can be more encompassing than 0% (there is still some residual water in an “empty” glass of water), but it isn’t so expansive as to range from >0% to 70%.
You’re speaking about technicalities. There shouldn’t be any argument that our economy will continue to be fucked by tariffs and supply issues. 30 percent is massive.
It's not a technicality, it's literally what the claim was: "Seattle's marine cargo terminals were empty and international vessels had stopped calling into the port as of April 29, 2025, due to the U.S.'s newly imposed tariffs."
The fact that the terminals are not empty doesn't mean the economy isn't fucked, so there's no reason to argue about it either way.
We’re sitting here arguing about the obviously incorrect title and America is burning, so we are speaking about the wrong thing. It’s irrelevant whether it’s 70 or 0 percent, we’re still fucked. Discussing the issue of 70 vs 0 percent isn’t going to solve how fucked we are, so it’s a technicality.
Do you not see how „the port isn’t empty“ and „there will be a massive impact on the economy“ aren’t mutually exclusive? The argument isn’t that the tariffs are a good idea, it’s just about the snopes rating.
"Technicalities?" 70% does not round to 0%. That's not a "technicality," that is a blatant misrepresentation.
If a boy was watching the sheep, saw a wolf, and cried "Dragon! Dragon!" and then the king and his army came to fight the dragon, and when he was criticized for lying, he said, "You're talking in technicalities, there was indeed a wolf," that is what this feels like to me. But then if he refused to ever call the wolf a wolf, and this happened over and over again, and he always called it a dragon--well, a lot of people would just ignore him.
Like, why not just say "Yeah, it's not true. Not sure what this guy's agenda is, but easily-disproved exaggeration doesn't help make the case. There IS a problem though, and let's try to have that conversation while ignoring obvious alarmism." You would sound reasonable and mature, and possibly even convincing.
But also LA and Long Beach are effectively a single port, so per your enumeration … Seattle is the second biggest port on the west coast? Seems like that’d be one to look at when we’re talking about transpacific trade?
[0]: https://volumes.portoptimizer.com/ . NB The predictions for subsequent weeks are based on historical data AFAICT, and haven’t been accurate. The actual are good data though.
Again, LA/LB are basically the same port. One would also want to look at the next biggest geographically distinct port, which on the west coast is Seattle
Hi! I'm on the team behind Pyrefly. Thanks for taking a look and raising the need for poetry support. We added a GitHub issue to track that here: https://github.com/facebook/pyrefly/issues/166
At some life stages and situations, this makes total sense. I’d think those are predominantly when one is embarking on a new stage, and moving as a part of that. Graduations, retirement, marriage, divorce, … . But someone moving involuntarily (job change, new posting, …), perhaps with a partner, perhaps with children … it’s hard to begrudge that person bringing many of their things along to ease the transition.
It’s a fair fraction, on one hobby’s worth of stuff, nevermind the rest of the household (member’s!) items.
$14k just doesn’t cover replacing a household’s worth of stuff. If you still think it does, do a replacement value inventory of your place. And then update your insurance!
I’m sure they’re wonderful, and congratulations on the new acquisition! But you must know that’s a nonsensical statement. Above a certain level of sufficiency for purpose, it’s all a matter of taste. And like all matters of taste, the price can expand to absorb almost any budget
If you do furniture research seriously, you learn that the difference between Hancock and Moore or similar brands and like crate and barrel is enormous. Go search for Hancock and Moore furniture at your local estate sale and notice that no one will let it go for less than like 50% of its original cost even despite significant usage. This is because those in the know realize that it’s the top quality product.
It’s like boots - whites boots or Thurgood are objectively superior to almost everything else in terms of price to performance ratio. Most don’t buy them because they buy into Nikes bullshit propaganda. Product differentiation based on quality is the single most important aspect of price - even if companies do everything they can to obscure quality discovery.
When you care about the following (google these, they are the marks of quality in the furniture world), paying a pretty penny is worth it.
Kiln-Dried Hardwood, Corner-Blocked, Double-Doweled Joinery, Eight-Way Hand-Tied Sinuous Springs, real full-grain leather (Aniline or Semi-aniline Dyed)
And priorities. I spent a lot on a dining room table but recently decided I'd buy an all-wood with more assembly replacement bed rather a really expensive hand-crafted platform. Can probably just have my contractors assemble and I'll still come out way ahead.
Respectfully, consider that other people are actual people, and their lives are meaningfully distinct from yours. To wit, “climbing equipment” encompasses everything from the backpack of gym-climbing gear you describe to a half-ton of tents, rope, crashpads, anchors, packs, portaledges, outerwear, camp gear, etc.
That's ... that's the communication network they're avoiding? Because the problem is not _which_ app, it's that it's _an_ app, on standard hardware, on the public internet?
For people _alleged_ to be among the worst elements of society. If they're that bad, try them, get your slam-dunk conviction, and jail them here.
Deportation does not annihilate a person, or shift them to another astral plane, it moves them a few dozen or hundred or thousand miles away. The counterfactual for 'if so-and-so was deported' is unknowable. They might have just walked back in the following week.
> However, the ships calling into port were arriving with unpredictable volumes of cargo — sometimes 30% less than anticipated
And Snopes felt comfortable rating “mostly false” to the top level claim? I get that they’re trying to navigating treacherous waters, but “there’s still ships, they’re just 1/3 empty” is as much support for the top level claim as it is contradiction
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