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Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

computerfriend 5y ago
Pointing out a problem, being ignored and then someone with some clout pointing it out resulting in the problem being fixed is sadly relatable. It's very depressing that these kinds of inefficiencies scale up to national supply chain levels.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Does this person actually know what the problem is? For example see https://news.yahoo.com/lazy-crane-operators-making-250-200100567.html https://news.yahoo.com/lazy-crane-operators-making-250-20010.... The symptom might be not enough space for containers, but the root cause could be something a few degrees removed, or a combination of things.
- bagels 5y ago
  I feel like it'd be pretty easy to pinpoint the problem with data. Historical rates of arriving containers to the port, leaving the port, time spent at the port, time spent in yards, number of drivers, number of trucks, etc. High level, throughput was lost somewhere, or there's more volume, or maybe both.
- thephyber 5y ago
  This person is the CEO of FlexPort, a startup that has been watching the efficiencies of the ports and the transport industry that interfaces with them slow to a crawl for months now. He has been tweeting out the size of the parking lot of ships outside of LA/LB port complex for months. I think he has a pretty good understanding of the issues at least one or two degrees removed, but I think he is also just trying to unblock the critical path (the large cranes at the ports). The other issues like “fully loaded cargo trains in North Dakota blocking the tracks because they can’t unload” need to be solved by others.
Ajay-p 5y ago
What about a temporary, emergency suspension of the Jones Act for select flagged vessels? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
- yuliyp 5y ago
  What would suspending the Jones Act do? The container ships are foreign ships already.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    The Jones Act prevents (or fines; I’m not clear) non-American made,owned,manned ships from going from US port to US port. Suspending the Jones Act would be relevant to foreign made,owned,manned ships except I’m not clear that there is need or desire for these cargo ships to go from clogged US port to clogged US port. The big profits are in racing back to China to get fully loaded.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > What about a temporary, emergency suspension of the Jones Act for select flagged vessels? The Jones Act applies to shipping between US ports, which isn’t the issue, and suspending the Jones Act would allow more ships on internal runs, but the problem is that we have too little port capacity for import runs, so it solves something that is, in a couple different dimensions, completely the wrong problem.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  The Jones act it's terrible and should always be repealed! But it's hard to see that it affects this problem much.
remarkEon 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions in this thread. >It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam This seems like definitely not the real bottleneck. You have to ask yourself, "why is there no space to put new containers" and the answer is (probably) "well we don't have enough trucks to move the ones we have off the docks". Why don't you have enough trucks? This is where the root cause for the bottleneck probably splits. I'm speculating here, but we either don't have enough physical trucks (I doubt this) or we don't have enough labor to load the containers on the trucks and actually drive them off the dock. Which is probably the most important question: why don't you have enough labor? I can venture a guess[1]. >Port truckers are typically independent contractors, without the benefits and protections of unionized transport sectors or even major companies with shipping divisions, like Amazon.com Inc. Their jobs require them to line up for hours to pick up cargo, and they’re paid only when they move it. [Emphasis mine] >“The port truck driver, for decades now, has basically been the slack adjuster in the whole system,” said Steve Viscelli, an economic sociologist with the University of Pennsylvania who studies labor markets and supply chains. The entire system, he said, is built around free labor from truck drivers as they wait for containers. Cut checks to these people, and get those containers off the docks. I feel like we're living through some Black Mirror version of The Wire Season 2. [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/biden-tackles-supply-chain-crisis-with-few-tools-clock-ticking?srnd=premium&sref=vuYGislZ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/biden-tac... Edit: added the larger context for the Bloomberg article quote
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  Doesn’t the thread say that there is nowhere to unload containers to, even if there was labor? That seems like what’s causing the truck shortage - it’s not a truck shortage, it’s an empty truck shortage.
  - remarkEon 5y ago
    I think that point in the thread was really about the lack of chassis on which to move the containers. That part I'm inclined to agree with to a certain extent, but then you're back to asking why there aren't enough chassis, and I'm back to asking why there are still full containers on the docks that can accept stacking empties higher than 2x.
mikewarot 5y ago
>Leadership is the missing ingredient at this point. Political will has evaporated in the age of polling driven decisions. The Donor class sees actual leadership as dangerous to them, they still remember the betrayal of FDR and guard against it. I suspect some huge profits are being made by some while the supply chain remains effectively strangled, so why would they want it fixed? Things have been going down hill since the Clintons and "triangulation" - their new Democratic strategy of engaging in strictly performative gestures for the working class, while courting the donors behind the scenes.
- missinfo 5y ago
  Even worse, they are increasingly deferring to Twitter.
  - more_corn 5y ago
    To be fair, some really good ideas came out of this particular Twitter thread.
    - missinfo 5y ago
      True, this is a good outlier example.
- thephyber 5y ago
  Leadership to fix this crisis doesn’t only have to come from the POTUS, but Biden has assigned a chief to deal with this as far back as July and that guy is already negotiating some of the solutions (extra shifts at the ports, UPS/FedEx, and large distribution centers like WalMart). Part of it is a lack of investment in the ports for decades. This isn’t donor class; it’s voters complaining about too much spending. Part of it is a lack of government will to impose any basic regulations on transport companies to be more efficient when their communication/planning for fear of being anti “free market”. There is no shortage of plebs screaming “SOCIALISM!!1!” at any suggestion for minimal regulation. The only “huge profits” I see here are international shipping companies who can’t legally be campaign donors in a US election. The reason I see why Biden or Newsom haven’t done something significant to fix goods transport is that half of the country is busy calling them tyrannical for masks and vaccines while claiming they shouldn’t be in office due to unverified claims of election tampering. It looks like we are one spark away from a civil war and appearing to nationalize shipping or trucking companies is a delicate proposition. I suspect both don’t yet see the supply chain issues as their top priority, but I’m increasingly thinking they should. I think it’s a significant contributor to inflation over the next few months.
coolso 5y ago
It feels like everyone is trying real hard to come up with solutions that just continue the status quo of having all of our goods produced in China. Just 20-25 years ago we were still making a lot of things in the US. But the American worker, and economy, was sold out to cheap, high-polluting, IP-stealing, yes-lets-ship-it-2000-miles-instead-of-making-it-in-the-US Chinese labor and manufacturing at the benefit of the CCP but everyone else’s expense. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This wasn’t even a direct supply chain disruption and it’s hitting us hard. Imagine if we ever had one, and there’s no evidence to suggest we won’t again. We’re dependent on… China of all places for everything? Why can’t we focus our brainstorming sessions on bringing manufacturing back to the USA? Why is this not a major talking point? Americans have been polled and across the aisle people prefer made in the USA. Let the CCP take care of its own people. It certainly thinks it’s system is the right way. It’s madness and it’s sad. Every corporation and politician that had a hand in this ought to be ashamed. Every media outlet that ignores it ought to be ashamed too.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  Agree. Almost all the discourse I see on this topic is really just a band-aid for what are actually much deeper and systemic problems with global supply chains that are just too damn optimized for JIT and cost-reduction. You can find lots of ink spilled over "MBAs" and "shareholder" or "managerial" capitalism, but functionally in order to fix this we actually have to reorder how industry is situated in the United States. If there ever was a direct supply chain disruption (intentional or not), the US would be in a much worse spot than we are right now. Everything from semiconductors to nuts and bolts would be a problem (some more than others). There isn't a single issue more important to national security right now.
- jdhn 5y ago
  >across the aisle people prefer made in the USA. They may say this, but when push comes to shove, people simply don't buy a lot of consumer goods that are made here.
  - coolso 5y ago
    That’s because right now, it’s significantly more expensive. But given more equal pricing, most people would of course buy USA-made goods. Right now the system is destroyed so of course made in the USA is going to be significantly more expensive until the system can be resurrected. But I assure you a supply chain disruption will be significantly more costly to society and not just financially.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
There's some good stuff in here, but also some bad ideas. The bad ones: - Bring the military and National Guard container chassis to relieve the ports. That works, unless there's a situation where the military or National Guard need them, in which case it could be catastrophic. - Force railroads to haul to this one particular new site. First, I kind of bristle at the word "force". That's not how it works in a free country. Second, there is no unused facility available that has the rail bandwidth to handle the traffic level that he's talking about. Third, the containers were intended to go to Dallas (the example he used), not to this new site 100 miles from LA. How and when do they get from there to Dallas?
- TheBill 5y ago
  Theres an AFB outside of LA with proper rail siding. He identified it & facilities in thread. Railroad are a regulated monopoly. DOT/FRA can mandate service & regulate rates (either for freight or using their track) to prevent one carrier from making movement impossible. If DOT/FRA do it right they'd economically incentivise the short haul.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > Theres an AFB outside of LA with proper rail siding. He identified it & facilities in thread. It exists. It has a rail siding. Can it handle the throughput that we're talking about? Air force bases have rail service, but they don't have the infrastructure for high-volume rail traffic. > Railroad are a regulated monopoly. Railroads are regulated, but are not a monopoly. (Though a railroad may have a monopoly on rail service to a particular customer, that's not the usual definition of a monopoly.) > DOT/FRA can mandate service & regulate rates (either for freight or using their track) to prevent one carrier from making movement impossible. If DOT/FRA do it right they'd economically incentivise the short haul. I believe that the STB is the one that regulates rates and service (and much less stringently than the old Interstate Commerce Commission did pre-Staggers Act deregulation). DOT is more about regulating safety. Anyway: Could it be done? Yes, maybe, to some degree. Could they move enough containers to unblock the ports in a finite amount of time? I'm much more skeptical. It's not a matter of the rates and regulation, either - it's a matter of building track and other infrastructure at the AFB.
GaryTang 5y ago
> He’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether. Anyone here surprised? The little things add up, multiply this code by the hundreds of others and you have a supply shortage.
- thephyber 5y ago
  It’s not a million little government regulations that is causing the majority of the supply chain kinks. China was the only country working full speed after the Wuhan lockdown for about a year. The entire world bought masses of PPG and ventilators in addition to our normal plastic consumerism widgets. China sent tons of full containers to the rest of the world but those containers haven’t returned to China. Everything else is a symptom of some local issue due to a region or industry being host to a disease outbreak or being host to a supply/demand mismatch with either containers or chassis. Even that distribution lot would not need containers stacked above 2 high if the distribution channels downstream of it were not similarly overloaded.
  - GaryTang 5y ago
    Mayor of Long Beach thinks otherwise.
    - thephyber 5y ago
      I’m happy that the Mayor of LB was responsive. To be objective, it cost him basically no political capital to agree to change the policy temporarily. It is the lowest of the low hanging fruit and perhaps the only easy step for that actor to take. I was careful to distinguish “the majority” in my assessment. I view the filled warehouses downstream of the ports and the occupied trailer chassis they are occupying as the majority of the problem. These warehouses cause back pressure to the ports. The only reason raising the LB container stack depth from 2 to 4 only matters because those lots are buffers between the ports and distributors/retailers, but those buffers are full. There are a handful of other problems, both downstream of distributors and upstream of the LA/LB ports which cause this change to be effectively a small lever.
digikata 5y ago
Why isn't the solution to put empty containers back on unloaded ships to be sent away? BTW for fun reading on operations logistics and identifying and attacking bottlenecks see "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_%28novel%29
- AngryData 5y ago
  Can cargo ships with empty containers actually sail back? In the past we shipped tons of alfalfa to China, partially because meat (and thus cow feed) is worth more in China, but I was under the impression that the main purpose was ballast for the ships because they can't sail without enough weight in them and alfalfa was the cheapest bulk weight they could source.
  - hammock 5y ago
    There is unlimited ballast all around a ship (water)
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      You can't just pump a bunch of salt water into the cargo hold of a container ship, I suspect.
      - Danieru 5y ago
        You can into the ballast tanks.
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        Sure, but the tanks will be sized on the assumption the ship will be under a normal load, not completely empty.
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      I'm no expert, but I believe many of these ships aren't designed to transport liquid cargo. In fact when their solid cargo starts to act too much like a liquid, things go south real fast: https://www.theshipyardblog.com/liquefaction-of-bulk-cargo-explained/ https://www.theshipyardblog.com/liquefaction-of-bulk-cargo-e...
arduinomancer 5y ago
I still don't understand the actual root cause after reading that thread. Is it too many full or empty containers? If full is the root cause a lack of truckers? If empty then why aren't boats picking up the empty containers when they leave?
- msandford 5y ago
  There are no empties in the ports because all the spots to put containers are filled with full ones. In order to get empties back into the ports and onto ships you need to do three things. 1. Get full containers out of ports to make room for empties 2. Bring empties back to port and queue them up 3. Unload a bunch of fulls and reload a bunch of empties onto every ship that comes into port Right now there's no room to store empties do they're being stored on trailers. Which means there are no trailers to unload full containers onto. So nothing is being unloaded. Deadlock.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    I’ve also heard that ships are rushing back to Asia to chase high profits after unloading at US ports before they allow empty containers on the ship. I think we have mismatched incentives that allow something like Tragedy of the Commons.
    - ta988 5y ago
      There are some systems that don't have a capacity for self-regulation, and this is not solved by believing really hard that if left alone they would. This will need intervention if we don't want to just burn money to let time solve it.
      - drak0n1c 5y ago
        Given that the described root cause is city port regulations and zoning ordinances, I don't see how such a deeply regulated and forcefully handicapped system is an argument against self-regulation. If anything, the opposite. Yes, the current mess of conflicting piecemeal regulations and dissonant incentives will need additional state intervention and reform to untangle ASAP - but that does not rule out the possibility of a future unencumbered self-regulated alternative potentially working better than the current route of incrementally adding context/dynamism-aware patches to the heavily and archaically regulated status quo.
huitzitziltzin 5y ago
Which of the two chief executives tagged in this Twitter thread is supposed to have the legal authority to unilaterally overrule Long Beach’s zoning ordinances? Surely it isn’t newsom, but I bet Biden has even less authority. This is not a judgment on the merit of the idea bc the zoning rule seems dumb but what’s the point of proposing a “solution” which it isn’t clear either man can actually implement?
- graton 5y ago
  Mayor of Long Beach just increased it. https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757688320?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...
- markdown 5y ago
  You're telling me the "most powerful man in the world" can't declare a state of emergency and temporarily suspend local government zoning laws? Hilarious if true.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Time to familiarize yourself with the Tenth Amendment.
    - thephyber 5y ago
      Constitutional Law typically involves weighing multiple competing rights/interests. The Interstate Commerce clause is relevant to US ports and under many circumstances overrides the 10A. Also, the state governor can easily override a local ordinance temporarily under a State of Emergency. And IMHO we are approaching that point.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  The state legislature can strip Long Beach of its status as a charter city, but I think it would take a much more serious crisis than this to cause that. After all, every city across the state has participated in causing a housing crisis through poor zoning and the legislature hasn't brandished its powers at all.
aptxkid 5y ago
It sounds more like deadlock than a positive feedback loop (also it’s weird that he calls it negative feedback loop).
- davidjfelix 5y ago
  I wouldn't say it's weird -- it seems like you understood what he was saying and he misspoke. Clearly he was trying to indicate that he believed that something negative was increasing. While I agree this isn't what a negative feedback loop is, I can see how saying this is a positive feedback loop of slowdowns (an undesirable negative effect) might feel like the wrong thing to say.
  - wenc 5y ago
    A positive feedback loop in this instance means more and more of something happening, and is being reinforced in every iteration. In control theory, the language of positive/negative in feedback loops usually means growth/diminution rather than good/bad. It’s seemingly counter to common intuition but as a former control theorist I immediately recognized this language in the context of feedback loops.
    - davidjfelix 5y ago
      I'm not arguing that what he said was correct nor saying that I don't know which is which. I think it's weird that we're nitpicking something that was pretty obviously miscommunicated rather than the content.
      - aptxkid 5y ago
        I agree that positive vs. negative is beside the point. But deadlock and positive feedback loop are different things though.
      - relaxing 5y ago
        An article posted to a computer site used a computer word, of course the nerds are going to argue about it.
sneak 5y ago
Once again zoning is the enemy of efficiency. Why did we ever agree to this?
- xxpor 5y ago
  Because "apartments bad" >With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities -- until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/#tab-opinion-1931541 https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/#tab-opi...
  - sneak 5y ago
    This is one of the most astoundingly antisocial things I have ever read.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - xxpor 5y ago
      And yet it's the law of the land!
new_realist 5y ago
The last year and a half of pandemic aid has been a large scale experiment in universal basic income. The results seem to be somewhat expected: a labor shortage and high inflation.
- AareyBaba 5y ago
  A UBI experiment with confounding variables: lockdown, schools closed, travel and tourism restricted, parts of the economy shutting down, job losses, women out of the workforce to take care of children, health care sector under stress, 734 thousand people dead etc. If you can correlate UBI with labor shortage and high inflation from that data - then perhaps you were predisposed to that conclusion.
  - new_realist 5y ago
    Lots of things have happened, but some are unrelated, and many have ceased. Extended unemployment benefits ceased last month. The expansion of the money supply remains. We’ll see if these problems resolve once the Fed tightens and asset prices crater (and replaced with a different set of problems, I imagine!).
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > A UBI experiment with confounding variables: lockdown, schools closed, travel and tourism restricted, parts of the economy shutting down, job losses, women out of the workforce to take care of children, health care sector under stress, 734 thousand people dead etc. Also, and more critical to its problems as a UBI experiment, without any UBI, just a bunch of conditional, mostly means-tested or not-working-tested, aid.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  Did you quit your job to get those very lucrative UBI payments? Me neither. Canada gave out a very "generous" $500 a week, which would not pay rent on anything outside of a 1B apartment in Toronto.
  - akvadrako 5y ago
graton 5y ago
Related: The mayor of Long Beach has increased the stacking limit. https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757688320?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...
- drcode 5y ago
  It's weird to me that thousands of people work at the docks or with the trucks, and likely understand these problems quite well, but only after a silicon valley guy rented a boat to take a look and tweeted about it did it come to attention of the larger world. Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?
  - School-Cotton 5y ago
    It’s not clear to me whether the zoning regulation was changed in response to the Twitter thread.
    - CalChris 5y ago
      Petersen is well thought of and his analysis and suggestions were copied by other industry types, for example Sal Mercogliano [1]. It also happened very soon after Petersen's suggestion. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERqikbfoLnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERqikbfoLnw
      - s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Happening so soon is actually a mark against it being related
  - adolph 5y ago
    Maybe not wanting to rock the boat, maybe just busy and not interested in waiting in line to speak to the manager.
  - recursive4 5y ago
aazaa 5y ago
> It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam. The author makes this claim without proof. The circumstances may be consistent with the explanation, but maybe others are as well. Also, the source of the claim is not clear. Did he glean all of this information from the boat captain, or someone else? The problem is that the claim is central to the entire thread and the proposed solution. If the root cause is wrong, then allowing containers to pile up in yards 6-deep could cause yet another bottleneck - a lack of containers to return back on ships, for example. This could happen, for example, if yard computer systems were never designed for this kind of use and records start going to paper. This article reports that the port has processed record numbers of ships: > In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. The Long Beach port will likely process more than 9m container units this year, exceeding last year’s record of 8.1m units, the most in the port’s 110-year history. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chain-crisis-california-ports-cargo-ships https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chai... Nowhere does the thread mention this record-high ship traffic.
- wbl 5y ago
  Rotterdam did 14.1 million.
sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
The real bottleneck is customs. The government works slow.
- bagels 5y ago
  Do you have any sources for the first claim?
  - sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
    One source for this claim is that the President has declared that operations at the port should become 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. If the original output was acceptable, he wouldn't have had to do that.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      That “source” does not support the claim that customs is the bottleneck, it supports the claim that port operations in their totality are the bottleneck.
      - sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
        While that is a fair criticism, I would like to ask you this: why are there so few ports in the USA? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_... The answer to this question is that merely possessing coastal land is not a sufficient enough condition to open a port-- rather various levels of government are involved in creating and regulating an official "port of entry" to the United States. Otherwise, you would have people bringing in nuclear bombs in the cover of darkness at a port that doesn't have government agents operating at it, no? If we had more ports, we would have less bottlenecks. But we can't have more ports, because of inefficient operations.
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        Big Sur and the Mendocino coastline make for poor port sites. Every major harbour site (and several minor ones) that can be utilised is: Seattle/Vancouver (Puget Sound), Portland (Columbia River), San Francisco, Los Angeles/Long Beach, and San Diego. Even the minor sites of Coos Bay (Oregon), Monterey, and Morro Bay have some cargo capacity (lumber at Coos, largely fishing out of Monterey and Morro). None of those are remotely near large population centres or other transportation infrastructure, and would make zarrow sense for a major port. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego are major destinations on their own, and are well-connected to major land-based transportation links (rail and highway).
m0zg 5y ago
Buttigieg should have been on that boat. But, as has become a custom lately, he's MIA, just like VP is MIA at the border. Not the worst outcome though - he could also be actively harmful like, say, Mayorkas.
- eightysixfour 5y ago
  People should be able to take family leave, it is the responsibility of the organization and his “manager” to make sure the job is getting done while they’re on leave.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Too bad the "manager" is a vegetable who doesn't know where he is half the time.
swiley 5y ago
Heh, California zoning manages to fuck up even more stuff. I wish we could just get rid of that state and figure out how to do without. We'd probably be better off.
kposehn 5y ago
(Cross posted this reply to the twitter thread) RE Railroads: This is much harder than it seems. Most of the railroads are also stuck with thousands of intermodal platforms that have loaded containers they can’t unload, or empty containers they can’t reposition. Trains are stacked up outside intermodal terminals. UP has miles of them outside chicago. There are no ways to get them off trains and it snarls the system even further. If we need to get containers off trains, we need to get to them and unload. The trip to Dallas isn’t the issue, instead we need to focus on shifting empty platforms to where they’re needed.
lostdog 5y ago
You could also set fees to fix the problem. Dropping off an [empty?] container at the port? Pay $1000. Loading an empty container onto your ship? Get a bonus of $900. Now you have a feedback loop that brings the empty containers back to where they are needed. It's sort of a recycling fee.
- thephyber 5y ago
  Worth considering how you change the incentives. What truck driver will show up at a US port now that you just made their delivery $1000 less profitable? I’ve heard one of the big asymmetries is how many full containers go Asia->US but how few containers (empty or full) are shipped US->Asia. Probably better to fine the ship company $9999 for each empty space they leave with below some median box capacity, then use those fines as bounty to return empty containers from inland US. The other problem is ownership of containers and chassis. I’m pretty sure there’s a complicated system of ownership and transfer, so it’s not like every container will carry an identical bounty price.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  Everybody involved is already being paid to get the containers to where they're supposed to go. Plus the specific incentives you suggest seem like they'd discourage any trucks from even coming to the port
bradgessler 5y ago
This has had me thinking all day about situations and industries where we all assume the “experts” have it “figured out”. I don’t think these people are stupid, there’s just this huge combination of junk that stacks up that nobody fully understands over time. It’s a lot like a really large, old codebases. Nobody dares to look under the covers and change anything out of fear of it breaking. What it takes is an outside who doesn’t know any better to start poking and prodding at it to see what it does. In this case Ryan effectively ran a profiler on the Long Beach port, a “decades old codebase”, and found a hotspot that was created by a deadlock between the local government and the yards. What other physical world situations can you think of what would benefit from an outside running a “profiler” against it?
libz5adfdaf 5y ago
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shusson 5y ago
Stupid question, why isn’t simple capitalism working on the port? This solution while admirable, reminds me of the USSR trying to set the price of bread.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Simple capitalism is what causes the problem. The capitalist looks at all the buffers and safeguards and regulation of a system and thinks that could all be thrown out for higher profits. That appears to work, until it stops working. It is the same reason Texas has cheap electricity until suddenly without warning they have no electricity. Planning and regulation and bureaucracy prevent these problems, at the cost of slightly higher prices due to the system not being really 'optimal' in the steady state.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    The explanation in the Twitter thread is the opposite: capitalism isn't working because of zoning regulations.
- CyanLite4 5y ago
  Capitalism is working, some companies are making more with the delays than without. Perverse incentives.
alex_young 5y ago
The basic problem is the increase in e-commerce. Since more goods are being shipped to people on a one off basis, there is more demand for all of the resources needed to do this, from boats, to containers, to warehouses. When you start to see slow-downs in international shipping, there become large incentives to do silly things, like stockpile supply in warehouses, so all of the warehouses fill up, and then all of the container yards fill up, and then all of the container ships have to wait, exacerbating the problem. On top of all of this, there is a huge shortage of truck drivers, because it sucks to drive a truck for a living. What can we do about all of this? Expand the number of containers we can store? Seems like an unlikely fix. If you have a clogged pipe, expanding the size of the funnel feeding it doesn't solve the problem. Why not put a price on the clog itself? If it cost an exponential rate to store containers full of stuff at ports I think the stockpiling would quickly subside, wouldn't it?
- rswail 5y ago
  Well fixing the "it sucks to drive a truck for a living" seems to be a potentially solvable problem, with better pay and conditions. The increase in e-commerce is correlated with COVID, but the supply chains have kept up for the most part. So there's not enough truck drivers? Pay them better and offer better driving conditions. Get more chassis made. I'm assuming this is a solvable industrial problem? Perhaps the use of the Defence Production Act might be called for. Call in National Guard vehicles to transport empty containers back to port to fill ships?
twright 5y ago
This was an odd read after this Ed Zitron piece[1] which included a tweet[2] mentioning how truckers aren’t paid when waiting in line to load up only when they are actually moving something are they paid. I’m going to hypothesize that there’s an enormous and possibly unfair labor requirement for moving these containers so the ships can be unloaded. As long as companies involved with these logistics are optimizing for profit bottleneck improvements won’t significantly change. [1] https://ez.substack.com/p/there-isnt-a-labor-shortage-theres https://ez.substack.com/p/there-isnt-a-labor-shortage-theres [2] https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1451163926780076032 https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1451163926780076032
dredmorbius 5y ago
About 7 years ago I wrote out a quick list of issues (or steps) in problem resolution. Ryan Peterson's Tweet thread here seems like a near-perfect fit for my formulation. Phrased positively,[1] the steps are: - Awareness. Registering that there is, in fact, a problem. "The first step is admitting you've got a problem". Here, "The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill." - Diagnosis. Recognizing a problem, and correctly identifing the type or symptoms. Failures often occur through superstition / mythology, poor understanding, or other modeling / framing errors, frequently of the "what you know that just ain't so" variety. Here, trucks that can't unload empties cannot load new, loaded containers for delivery. - Etiology. Correctly identify the root cause. Here: "If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container." - Objective. Determining a preferable (or attainable, or stable) resolved state. Here, "overwhelm the bottleneck and create yard space at the ports so we can operate". - Redress (or method). Having figured out where you are and where you want to be, how to get there. Here, "allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2". (Among other measures.) - Communication. Convincing others. Peterson's Twitter thread and CTA, of which the HN discussion is a part. - Execution. Having secured agreement and/or support, acting and executing effectively. The Getting Shit Done problem. Apparently in process, as the box-stack-height limit has been lifted: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757688320 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757... - Assessment. Did you actually solve / address the situation effectively? Learning from it and passing this on for future knowledge? Not so critical in terms of the present problem, but useful for future iterations. We're not there yet, but that's the final step in the loop. My earlier list (phrased as the negative of the above) here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarchy_of_failures_in_problem_resolution/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc... ________________________________ Notes: 1. I'd originally written the list as a "hierarchy of failure", itself a tool to properly identify stuck processes.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  This is highy logical and so very sensible. It would be intersting to see the converse in its failure version for comparison.
epa 5y ago
This is mostly being amplified by failed California regulation (CARB 20) which unfortunately was enforced starting 2020. The rule limited old trucks from being registered by the DMV to reduce emissions. CA policies now reveal themselves to be a hindrance to the nation, it used to be its own bubble.

Pointing out a problem, being ignored and then someone with some clout pointing it out resulting in the problem being fixed is sadly relatable. It's very depressing that these kinds of inefficiencies scale up to national supply chain levels.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Does this person actually know what the problem is? For example see https://news.yahoo.com/lazy-crane-operators-making-250-200100567.html https://news.yahoo.com/lazy-crane-operators-making-250-20010.... The symptom might be not enough space for containers, but the root cause could be something a few degrees removed, or a combination of things.

bagels 5y ago
I feel like it'd be pretty easy to pinpoint the problem with data. Historical rates of arriving containers to the port, leaving the port, time spent at the port, time spent in yards, number of drivers, number of trucks, etc. High level, throughput was lost somewhere, or there's more volume, or maybe both.
thephyber 5y ago
This person is the CEO of FlexPort, a startup that has been watching the efficiencies of the ports and the transport industry that interfaces with them slow to a crawl for months now. He has been tweeting out the size of the parking lot of ships outside of LA/LB port complex for months. I think he has a pretty good understanding of the issues at least one or two degrees removed, but I think he is also just trying to unblock the critical path (the large cranes at the ports). The other issues like “fully loaded cargo trains in North Dakota blocking the tracks because they can’t unload” need to be solved by others.

Ajay-p 5y ago

What about a temporary, emergency suspension of the Jones Act for select flagged vessels? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920

yuliyp 5y ago
What would suspending the Jones Act do? The container ships are foreign ships already.
- thephyber 5y ago
  The Jones Act prevents (or fines; I’m not clear) non-American made,owned,manned ships from going from US port to US port. Suspending the Jones Act would be relevant to foreign made,owned,manned ships except I’m not clear that there is need or desire for these cargo ships to go from clogged US port to clogged US port. The big profits are in racing back to China to get fully loaded.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> What about a temporary, emergency suspension of the Jones Act for select flagged vessels? The Jones Act applies to shipping between US ports, which isn’t the issue, and suspending the Jones Act would allow more ships on internal runs, but the problem is that we have too little port capacity for import runs, so it solves something that is, in a couple different dimensions, completely the wrong problem.
BurningFrog 5y ago
The Jones act it's terrible and should always be repealed! But it's hard to see that it affects this problem much.

remarkEon 5y ago

I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions in this thread. >It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam This seems like definitely not the real bottleneck. You have to ask yourself, "why is there no space to put new containers" and the answer is (probably) "well we don't have enough trucks to move the ones we have off the docks". Why don't you have enough trucks? This is where the root cause for the bottleneck probably splits. I'm speculating here, but we either don't have enough physical trucks (I doubt this) or we don't have enough labor to load the containers on the trucks and actually drive them off the dock. Which is probably the most important question: why don't you have enough labor? I can venture a guess[1]. >Port truckers are typically independent contractors, without the benefits and protections of unionized transport sectors or even major companies with shipping divisions, like Amazon.com Inc. Their jobs require them to line up for hours to pick up cargo, and they’re paid only when they move it. [Emphasis mine] >“The port truck driver, for decades now, has basically been the slack adjuster in the whole system,” said Steve Viscelli, an economic sociologist with the University of Pennsylvania who studies labor markets and supply chains. The entire system, he said, is built around free labor from truck drivers as they wait for containers. Cut checks to these people, and get those containers off the docks. I feel like we're living through some Black Mirror version of The Wire Season 2. [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/biden-tackles-supply-chain-crisis-with-few-tools-clock-ticking?srnd=premium&sref=vuYGislZ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-21/biden-tac... Edit: added the larger context for the Bloomberg article quote

edmundsauto 5y ago
Doesn’t the thread say that there is nowhere to unload containers to, even if there was labor? That seems like what’s causing the truck shortage - it’s not a truck shortage, it’s an empty truck shortage.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  I think that point in the thread was really about the lack of chassis on which to move the containers. That part I'm inclined to agree with to a certain extent, but then you're back to asking why there aren't enough chassis, and I'm back to asking why there are still full containers on the docks that can accept stacking empties higher than 2x.

mikewarot 5y ago

>Leadership is the missing ingredient at this point. Political will has evaporated in the age of polling driven decisions. The Donor class sees actual leadership as dangerous to them, they still remember the betrayal of FDR and guard against it. I suspect some huge profits are being made by some while the supply chain remains effectively strangled, so why would they want it fixed? Things have been going down hill since the Clintons and "triangulation" - their new Democratic strategy of engaging in strictly performative gestures for the working class, while courting the donors behind the scenes.

missinfo 5y ago
Even worse, they are increasingly deferring to Twitter.
- more_corn 5y ago
  To be fair, some really good ideas came out of this particular Twitter thread.
  - missinfo 5y ago
    True, this is a good outlier example.
thephyber 5y ago
Leadership to fix this crisis doesn’t only have to come from the POTUS, but Biden has assigned a chief to deal with this as far back as July and that guy is already negotiating some of the solutions (extra shifts at the ports, UPS/FedEx, and large distribution centers like WalMart). Part of it is a lack of investment in the ports for decades. This isn’t donor class; it’s voters complaining about too much spending. Part of it is a lack of government will to impose any basic regulations on transport companies to be more efficient when their communication/planning for fear of being anti “free market”. There is no shortage of plebs screaming “SOCIALISM!!1!” at any suggestion for minimal regulation. The only “huge profits” I see here are international shipping companies who can’t legally be campaign donors in a US election. The reason I see why Biden or Newsom haven’t done something significant to fix goods transport is that half of the country is busy calling them tyrannical for masks and vaccines while claiming they shouldn’t be in office due to unverified claims of election tampering. It looks like we are one spark away from a civil war and appearing to nationalize shipping or trucking companies is a delicate proposition. I suspect both don’t yet see the supply chain issues as their top priority, but I’m increasingly thinking they should. I think it’s a significant contributor to inflation over the next few months.

coolso 5y ago

It feels like everyone is trying real hard to come up with solutions that just continue the status quo of having all of our goods produced in China. Just 20-25 years ago we were still making a lot of things in the US. But the American worker, and economy, was sold out to cheap, high-polluting, IP-stealing, yes-lets-ship-it-2000-miles-instead-of-making-it-in-the-US Chinese labor and manufacturing at the benefit of the CCP but everyone else’s expense. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This wasn’t even a direct supply chain disruption and it’s hitting us hard. Imagine if we ever had one, and there’s no evidence to suggest we won’t again. We’re dependent on… China of all places for everything? Why can’t we focus our brainstorming sessions on bringing manufacturing back to the USA? Why is this not a major talking point? Americans have been polled and across the aisle people prefer made in the USA. Let the CCP take care of its own people. It certainly thinks it’s system is the right way. It’s madness and it’s sad. Every corporation and politician that had a hand in this ought to be ashamed. Every media outlet that ignores it ought to be ashamed too.

remarkEon 5y ago
Agree. Almost all the discourse I see on this topic is really just a band-aid for what are actually much deeper and systemic problems with global supply chains that are just too damn optimized for JIT and cost-reduction. You can find lots of ink spilled over "MBAs" and "shareholder" or "managerial" capitalism, but functionally in order to fix this we actually have to reorder how industry is situated in the United States. If there ever was a direct supply chain disruption (intentional or not), the US would be in a much worse spot than we are right now. Everything from semiconductors to nuts and bolts would be a problem (some more than others). There isn't a single issue more important to national security right now.
jdhn 5y ago
>across the aisle people prefer made in the USA. They may say this, but when push comes to shove, people simply don't buy a lot of consumer goods that are made here.
- coolso 5y ago
  That’s because right now, it’s significantly more expensive. But given more equal pricing, most people would of course buy USA-made goods. Right now the system is destroyed so of course made in the USA is going to be significantly more expensive until the system can be resurrected. But I assure you a supply chain disruption will be significantly more costly to society and not just financially.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

There's some good stuff in here, but also some bad ideas. The bad ones: - Bring the military and National Guard container chassis to relieve the ports. That works, unless there's a situation where the military or National Guard need them, in which case it could be catastrophic. - Force railroads to haul to this one particular new site. First, I kind of bristle at the word "force". That's not how it works in a free country. Second, there is no unused facility available that has the rail bandwidth to handle the traffic level that he's talking about. Third, the containers were intended to go to Dallas (the example he used), not to this new site 100 miles from LA. How and when do they get from there to Dallas?

TheBill 5y ago
Theres an AFB outside of LA with proper rail siding. He identified it & facilities in thread. Railroad are a regulated monopoly. DOT/FRA can mandate service & regulate rates (either for freight or using their track) to prevent one carrier from making movement impossible. If DOT/FRA do it right they'd economically incentivise the short haul.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > Theres an AFB outside of LA with proper rail siding. He identified it & facilities in thread. It exists. It has a rail siding. Can it handle the throughput that we're talking about? Air force bases have rail service, but they don't have the infrastructure for high-volume rail traffic. > Railroad are a regulated monopoly. Railroads are regulated, but are not a monopoly. (Though a railroad may have a monopoly on rail service to a particular customer, that's not the usual definition of a monopoly.) > DOT/FRA can mandate service & regulate rates (either for freight or using their track) to prevent one carrier from making movement impossible. If DOT/FRA do it right they'd economically incentivise the short haul. I believe that the STB is the one that regulates rates and service (and much less stringently than the old Interstate Commerce Commission did pre-Staggers Act deregulation). DOT is more about regulating safety. Anyway: Could it be done? Yes, maybe, to some degree. Could they move enough containers to unblock the ports in a finite amount of time? I'm much more skeptical. It's not a matter of the rates and regulation, either - it's a matter of building track and other infrastructure at the AFB.

GaryTang 5y ago

> He’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether. Anyone here surprised? The little things add up, multiply this code by the hundreds of others and you have a supply shortage.

thephyber 5y ago
It’s not a million little government regulations that is causing the majority of the supply chain kinks. China was the only country working full speed after the Wuhan lockdown for about a year. The entire world bought masses of PPG and ventilators in addition to our normal plastic consumerism widgets. China sent tons of full containers to the rest of the world but those containers haven’t returned to China. Everything else is a symptom of some local issue due to a region or industry being host to a disease outbreak or being host to a supply/demand mismatch with either containers or chassis. Even that distribution lot would not need containers stacked above 2 high if the distribution channels downstream of it were not similarly overloaded.
- GaryTang 5y ago
  Mayor of Long Beach thinks otherwise.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    I’m happy that the Mayor of LB was responsive. To be objective, it cost him basically no political capital to agree to change the policy temporarily. It is the lowest of the low hanging fruit and perhaps the only easy step for that actor to take. I was careful to distinguish “the majority” in my assessment. I view the filled warehouses downstream of the ports and the occupied trailer chassis they are occupying as the majority of the problem. These warehouses cause back pressure to the ports. The only reason raising the LB container stack depth from 2 to 4 only matters because those lots are buffers between the ports and distributors/retailers, but those buffers are full. There are a handful of other problems, both downstream of distributors and upstream of the LA/LB ports which cause this change to be effectively a small lever.

digikata 5y ago

Why isn't the solution to put empty containers back on unloaded ships to be sent away? BTW for fun reading on operations logistics and identifying and attacking bottlenecks see "The Goal" by Eli Goldratt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_%28novel%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_%28novel%29

AngryData 5y ago
Can cargo ships with empty containers actually sail back? In the past we shipped tons of alfalfa to China, partially because meat (and thus cow feed) is worth more in China, but I was under the impression that the main purpose was ballast for the ships because they can't sail without enough weight in them and alfalfa was the cheapest bulk weight they could source.
- hammock 5y ago
  There is unlimited ballast all around a ship (water)
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    You can't just pump a bunch of salt water into the cargo hold of a container ship, I suspect.
    - Danieru 5y ago
      You can into the ballast tanks.
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        Sure, but the tanks will be sized on the assumption the ship will be under a normal load, not completely empty.
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    I'm no expert, but I believe many of these ships aren't designed to transport liquid cargo. In fact when their solid cargo starts to act too much like a liquid, things go south real fast: https://www.theshipyardblog.com/liquefaction-of-bulk-cargo-explained/ https://www.theshipyardblog.com/liquefaction-of-bulk-cargo-e...

arduinomancer 5y ago

I still don't understand the actual root cause after reading that thread. Is it too many full or empty containers? If full is the root cause a lack of truckers? If empty then why aren't boats picking up the empty containers when they leave?

msandford 5y ago
There are no empties in the ports because all the spots to put containers are filled with full ones. In order to get empties back into the ports and onto ships you need to do three things. 1. Get full containers out of ports to make room for empties 2. Bring empties back to port and queue them up 3. Unload a bunch of fulls and reload a bunch of empties onto every ship that comes into port Right now there's no room to store empties do they're being stored on trailers. Which means there are no trailers to unload full containers onto. So nothing is being unloaded. Deadlock.
- thephyber 5y ago
  I’ve also heard that ships are rushing back to Asia to chase high profits after unloading at US ports before they allow empty containers on the ship. I think we have mismatched incentives that allow something like Tragedy of the Commons.
  - ta988 5y ago
    There are some systems that don't have a capacity for self-regulation, and this is not solved by believing really hard that if left alone they would. This will need intervention if we don't want to just burn money to let time solve it.
    - drak0n1c 5y ago
      Given that the described root cause is city port regulations and zoning ordinances, I don't see how such a deeply regulated and forcefully handicapped system is an argument against self-regulation. If anything, the opposite. Yes, the current mess of conflicting piecemeal regulations and dissonant incentives will need additional state intervention and reform to untangle ASAP - but that does not rule out the possibility of a future unencumbered self-regulated alternative potentially working better than the current route of incrementally adding context/dynamism-aware patches to the heavily and archaically regulated status quo.

huitzitziltzin 5y ago

Which of the two chief executives tagged in this Twitter thread is supposed to have the legal authority to unilaterally overrule Long Beach’s zoning ordinances? Surely it isn’t newsom, but I bet Biden has even less authority. This is not a judgment on the merit of the idea bc the zoning rule seems dumb but what’s the point of proposing a “solution” which it isn’t clear either man can actually implement?

graton 5y ago
Mayor of Long Beach just increased it. https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757688320?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...
markdown 5y ago
You're telling me the "most powerful man in the world" can't declare a state of emergency and temporarily suspend local government zoning laws? Hilarious if true.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Time to familiarize yourself with the Tenth Amendment.
  - thephyber 5y ago
    Constitutional Law typically involves weighing multiple competing rights/interests. The Interstate Commerce clause is relevant to US ports and under many circumstances overrides the 10A. Also, the state governor can easily override a local ordinance temporarily under a State of Emergency. And IMHO we are approaching that point.
jeffbee 5y ago
The state legislature can strip Long Beach of its status as a charter city, but I think it would take a much more serious crisis than this to cause that. After all, every city across the state has participated in causing a housing crisis through poor zoning and the legislature hasn't brandished its powers at all.

aptxkid 5y ago

It sounds more like deadlock than a positive feedback loop (also it’s weird that he calls it negative feedback loop).

davidjfelix 5y ago
I wouldn't say it's weird -- it seems like you understood what he was saying and he misspoke. Clearly he was trying to indicate that he believed that something negative was increasing. While I agree this isn't what a negative feedback loop is, I can see how saying this is a positive feedback loop of slowdowns (an undesirable negative effect) might feel like the wrong thing to say.
- wenc 5y ago
  A positive feedback loop in this instance means more and more of something happening, and is being reinforced in every iteration. In control theory, the language of positive/negative in feedback loops usually means growth/diminution rather than good/bad. It’s seemingly counter to common intuition but as a former control theorist I immediately recognized this language in the context of feedback loops.
  - davidjfelix 5y ago
    I'm not arguing that what he said was correct nor saying that I don't know which is which. I think it's weird that we're nitpicking something that was pretty obviously miscommunicated rather than the content.
    - aptxkid 5y ago
      I agree that positive vs. negative is beside the point. But deadlock and positive feedback loop are different things though.
    - relaxing 5y ago
      An article posted to a computer site used a computer word, of course the nerds are going to argue about it.

sneak 5y ago

Once again zoning is the enemy of efficiency. Why did we ever agree to this?

xxpor 5y ago
Because "apartments bad" >With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that, in such sections, very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities -- until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/#tab-opinion-1931541 https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/#tab-opi...
- sneak 5y ago
  This is one of the most astoundingly antisocial things I have ever read.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - xxpor 5y ago
    And yet it's the law of the land!

new_realist 5y ago

The last year and a half of pandemic aid has been a large scale experiment in universal basic income. The results seem to be somewhat expected: a labor shortage and high inflation.

AareyBaba 5y ago
A UBI experiment with confounding variables: lockdown, schools closed, travel and tourism restricted, parts of the economy shutting down, job losses, women out of the workforce to take care of children, health care sector under stress, 734 thousand people dead etc. If you can correlate UBI with labor shortage and high inflation from that data - then perhaps you were predisposed to that conclusion.
- new_realist 5y ago
  Lots of things have happened, but some are unrelated, and many have ceased. Extended unemployment benefits ceased last month. The expansion of the money supply remains. We’ll see if these problems resolve once the Fed tightens and asset prices crater (and replaced with a different set of problems, I imagine!).
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > A UBI experiment with confounding variables: lockdown, schools closed, travel and tourism restricted, parts of the economy shutting down, job losses, women out of the workforce to take care of children, health care sector under stress, 734 thousand people dead etc. Also, and more critical to its problems as a UBI experiment, without any UBI, just a bunch of conditional, mostly means-tested or not-working-tested, aid.
Ensorceled 5y ago
Did you quit your job to get those very lucrative UBI payments? Me neither. Canada gave out a very "generous" $500 a week, which would not pay rent on anything outside of a 1B apartment in Toronto.
- akvadrako 5y ago

graton 5y ago

Related: The mayor of Long Beach has increased the stacking limit. https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757688320?s=20 https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...

drcode 5y ago
It's weird to me that thousands of people work at the docks or with the trucks, and likely understand these problems quite well, but only after a silicon valley guy rented a boat to take a look and tweeted about it did it come to attention of the larger world. Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?
- School-Cotton 5y ago
  It’s not clear to me whether the zoning regulation was changed in response to the Twitter thread.
  - CalChris 5y ago
    Petersen is well thought of and his analysis and suggestions were copied by other industry types, for example Sal Mercogliano [1]. It also happened very soon after Petersen's suggestion. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERqikbfoLnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERqikbfoLnw
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      Happening so soon is actually a mark against it being related
- adolph 5y ago
  Maybe not wanting to rock the boat, maybe just busy and not interested in waiting in line to speak to the manager.
- recursive4 5y ago

aazaa 5y ago

> It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam. The author makes this claim without proof. The circumstances may be consistent with the explanation, but maybe others are as well. Also, the source of the claim is not clear. Did he glean all of this information from the boat captain, or someone else? The problem is that the claim is central to the entire thread and the proposed solution. If the root cause is wrong, then allowing containers to pile up in yards 6-deep could cause yet another bottleneck - a lack of containers to return back on ships, for example. This could happen, for example, if yard computer systems were never designed for this kind of use and records start going to paper. This article reports that the port has processed record numbers of ships: > In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. The Long Beach port will likely process more than 9m container units this year, exceeding last year’s record of 8.1m units, the most in the port’s 110-year history. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chain-crisis-california-ports-cargo-ships https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chai... Nowhere does the thread mention this record-high ship traffic.

wbl 5y ago
Rotterdam did 14.1 million.

sushsjsuauahab 5y ago

The real bottleneck is customs. The government works slow.

bagels 5y ago
Do you have any sources for the first claim?
- sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
  One source for this claim is that the President has declared that operations at the port should become 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. If the original output was acceptable, he wouldn't have had to do that.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    That “source” does not support the claim that customs is the bottleneck, it supports the claim that port operations in their totality are the bottleneck.
    - sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
      While that is a fair criticism, I would like to ask you this: why are there so few ports in the USA? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ports_in_the_United_... The answer to this question is that merely possessing coastal land is not a sufficient enough condition to open a port-- rather various levels of government are involved in creating and regulating an official "port of entry" to the United States. Otherwise, you would have people bringing in nuclear bombs in the cover of darkness at a port that doesn't have government agents operating at it, no? If we had more ports, we would have less bottlenecks. But we can't have more ports, because of inefficient operations.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Big Sur and the Mendocino coastline make for poor port sites. Every major harbour site (and several minor ones) that can be utilised is: Seattle/Vancouver (Puget Sound), Portland (Columbia River), San Francisco, Los Angeles/Long Beach, and San Diego. Even the minor sites of Coos Bay (Oregon), Monterey, and Morro Bay have some cargo capacity (lumber at Coos, largely fishing out of Monterey and Morro). None of those are remotely near large population centres or other transportation infrastructure, and would make zarrow sense for a major port. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego are major destinations on their own, and are well-connected to major land-based transportation links (rail and highway).

m0zg 5y ago

Buttigieg should have been on that boat. But, as has become a custom lately, he's MIA, just like VP is MIA at the border. Not the worst outcome though - he could also be actively harmful like, say, Mayorkas.

eightysixfour 5y ago
People should be able to take family leave, it is the responsibility of the organization and his “manager” to make sure the job is getting done while they’re on leave.
- m0zg 5y ago
  Too bad the "manager" is a vegetable who doesn't know where he is half the time.

swiley 5y ago

Heh, California zoning manages to fuck up even more stuff. I wish we could just get rid of that state and figure out how to do without. We'd probably be better off.

kposehn 5y ago

(Cross posted this reply to the twitter thread) RE Railroads: This is much harder than it seems. Most of the railroads are also stuck with thousands of intermodal platforms that have loaded containers they can’t unload, or empty containers they can’t reposition. Trains are stacked up outside intermodal terminals. UP has miles of them outside chicago. There are no ways to get them off trains and it snarls the system even further. If we need to get containers off trains, we need to get to them and unload. The trip to Dallas isn’t the issue, instead we need to focus on shifting empty platforms to where they’re needed.

lostdog 5y ago

You could also set fees to fix the problem. Dropping off an [empty?] container at the port? Pay $1000. Loading an empty container onto your ship? Get a bonus of $900. Now you have a feedback loop that brings the empty containers back to where they are needed. It's sort of a recycling fee.

thephyber 5y ago
Worth considering how you change the incentives. What truck driver will show up at a US port now that you just made their delivery $1000 less profitable? I’ve heard one of the big asymmetries is how many full containers go Asia->US but how few containers (empty or full) are shipped US->Asia. Probably better to fine the ship company $9999 for each empty space they leave with below some median box capacity, then use those fines as bounty to return empty containers from inland US. The other problem is ownership of containers and chassis. I’m pretty sure there’s a complicated system of ownership and transfer, so it’s not like every container will carry an identical bounty price.
seoaeu 5y ago
Everybody involved is already being paid to get the containers to where they're supposed to go. Plus the specific incentives you suggest seem like they'd discourage any trucks from even coming to the port

bradgessler 5y ago

This has had me thinking all day about situations and industries where we all assume the “experts” have it “figured out”. I don’t think these people are stupid, there’s just this huge combination of junk that stacks up that nobody fully understands over time. It’s a lot like a really large, old codebases. Nobody dares to look under the covers and change anything out of fear of it breaking. What it takes is an outside who doesn’t know any better to start poking and prodding at it to see what it does. In this case Ryan effectively ran a profiler on the Long Beach port, a “decades old codebase”, and found a hotspot that was created by a deadlock between the local government and the yards. What other physical world situations can you think of what would benefit from an outside running a “profiler” against it?

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shusson 5y ago

Stupid question, why isn’t simple capitalism working on the port? This solution while admirable, reminds me of the USSR trying to set the price of bread.

jeffbee 5y ago
Simple capitalism is what causes the problem. The capitalist looks at all the buffers and safeguards and regulation of a system and thinks that could all be thrown out for higher profits. That appears to work, until it stops working. It is the same reason Texas has cheap electricity until suddenly without warning they have no electricity. Planning and regulation and bureaucracy prevent these problems, at the cost of slightly higher prices due to the system not being really 'optimal' in the steady state.
- native_samples 5y ago
  The explanation in the Twitter thread is the opposite: capitalism isn't working because of zoning regulations.
CyanLite4 5y ago
Capitalism is working, some companies are making more with the delays than without. Perverse incentives.

alex_young 5y ago

The basic problem is the increase in e-commerce. Since more goods are being shipped to people on a one off basis, there is more demand for all of the resources needed to do this, from boats, to containers, to warehouses. When you start to see slow-downs in international shipping, there become large incentives to do silly things, like stockpile supply in warehouses, so all of the warehouses fill up, and then all of the container yards fill up, and then all of the container ships have to wait, exacerbating the problem. On top of all of this, there is a huge shortage of truck drivers, because it sucks to drive a truck for a living. What can we do about all of this? Expand the number of containers we can store? Seems like an unlikely fix. If you have a clogged pipe, expanding the size of the funnel feeding it doesn't solve the problem. Why not put a price on the clog itself? If it cost an exponential rate to store containers full of stuff at ports I think the stockpiling would quickly subside, wouldn't it?

rswail 5y ago
Well fixing the "it sucks to drive a truck for a living" seems to be a potentially solvable problem, with better pay and conditions. The increase in e-commerce is correlated with COVID, but the supply chains have kept up for the most part. So there's not enough truck drivers? Pay them better and offer better driving conditions. Get more chassis made. I'm assuming this is a solvable industrial problem? Perhaps the use of the Defence Production Act might be called for. Call in National Guard vehicles to transport empty containers back to port to fill ships?

twright 5y ago

This was an odd read after this Ed Zitron piece[1] which included a tweet[2] mentioning how truckers aren’t paid when waiting in line to load up only when they are actually moving something are they paid. I’m going to hypothesize that there’s an enormous and possibly unfair labor requirement for moving these containers so the ships can be unloaded. As long as companies involved with these logistics are optimizing for profit bottleneck improvements won’t significantly change. [1] https://ez.substack.com/p/there-isnt-a-labor-shortage-theres https://ez.substack.com/p/there-isnt-a-labor-shortage-theres [2] https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1451163926780076032 https://twitter.com/TheStalwart/status/1451163926780076032

dredmorbius 5y ago

About 7 years ago I wrote out a quick list of issues (or steps) in problem resolution. Ryan Peterson's Tweet thread here seems like a near-perfect fit for my formulation. Phrased positively,[1] the steps are: - Awareness. Registering that there is, in fact, a problem. "The first step is admitting you've got a problem". Here, "The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill." - Diagnosis. Recognizing a problem, and correctly identifing the type or symptoms. Failures often occur through superstition / mythology, poor understanding, or other modeling / framing errors, frequently of the "what you know that just ain't so" variety. Here, trucks that can't unload empties cannot load new, loaded containers for delivery. - Etiology. Correctly identify the root cause. Here: "If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container." - Objective. Determining a preferable (or attainable, or stable) resolved state. Here, "overwhelm the bottleneck and create yard space at the ports so we can operate". - Redress (or method). Having figured out where you are and where you want to be, how to get there. Here, "allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2". (Among other measures.) - Communication. Convincing others. Peterson's Twitter thread and CTA, of which the HN discussion is a part. - Execution. Having secured agreement and/or support, acting and executing effectively. The Getting Shit Done problem. Apparently in process, as the box-stack-height limit has been lifted: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757688320 https://nitter.kavin.rocks/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757... - Assessment. Did you actually solve / address the situation effectively? Learning from it and passing this on for future knowledge? Not so critical in terms of the present problem, but useful for future iterations. We're not there yet, but that's the final step in the loop. My earlier list (phrased as the negative of the above) here: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarchy_of_failures_in_problem_resolution/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc... ________________________________ Notes: 1. I'd originally written the list as a "hierarchy of failure", itself a tool to properly identify stuck processes.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
This is highy logical and so very sensible. It would be intersting to see the converse in its failure version for comparison.

epa 5y ago

This is mostly being amplified by failed California regulation (CARB 20) which unfortunately was enforced starting 2020. The rule limited old trucks from being registered by the DMV to reduce emissions. CA policies now reveal themselves to be a hindrance to the nation, it used to be its own bubble.