31 ms·

Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

678 points by yblu 5y ago

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
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.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  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 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. [1] https://youtu.be/hjUs7o-TnjY?t=2499 https://youtu.be/hjUs7o-TnjY?t=2499
  - quotemstr 5y ago
    > If he wanted to run for President, he would win Yes. It would be great to have non-ideological leadership focused on solving practical problems instead of waging culture war.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      Please expand on what you mean by "culture war"
      - Cipater 5y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war
        JaimeThompson 5y ago
        As of late their has been a bit of a disturbing trend to ignore everything before the past 5 to 10 years, that is why I ask such questions.
    - coolso 5y ago
      > waging There's nothing wrong with pushing back, though.
  - joecool1029 5y ago
    >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. [1] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1989/spring/hoover-belgium.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1989/spring/h... [2] https://smile.amazon.com/Hoover-Extraordinary-Life-Times/dp/0307597962 https://smile.amazon.com/Hoover-Extraordinary-Life-Times/dp/...
    - jrumbut 5y ago
      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.
    - acjohnson55 5y ago
      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: Part 1: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-64j34-f045e3 https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-64j34-f045e3 Part 2: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-zsqhc-f1a4af https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-zsqhc-f1a4af
    - viburnum 5y ago
      Hoover didn’t just fumble it, he was absolutely committed to passivity. If only he had shown the same determination that he had for postwar relief.
      - G3rn0ti 5y ago
        > Hoover … committed to passivity 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. https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-herbert-hoover-new-deal https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-herbert-hoover... https://mises.org/library/great-depression https://mises.org/library/great-depression
  - babypuncher 5y ago
    Please no more CEOs running for president. The government is not a business.
    - The_Amp_Walrus 5y ago
      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.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        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.
    - csee 5y ago
      Please no more lawyers running for president. 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.
    - baq 5y ago
      who would you rather have? a politician...?
    - aerosmile 5y ago
      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.
  - jeffypoo 5y ago
    I was an early customer of Flexport and got to talk to him on a number of occasions. I felt the same way about him. Total beast.
- pchristensen 5y ago
  I work at Flexport, Ryan is the real deal.
  - presidentender 5y ago
    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.
    - pchristensen 5y ago
      I wouldn’t want to compete with Flexport on “scope of opportunity”. It’s like AWS 10 years ago. Happy hunting!
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > Especially import was the feedback loops showing how the system was essentially deadlocked, in the classical sense of the term. This whole situation would make a great "systems design"-level tech interview question!
- aeternum 5y ago
  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?
destitude 5y ago
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?
- Jolter 5y ago
  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.
jgalt212 5y ago
When a YC company's valuation is under assault, people will mountains, er containers.
csee 5y ago
If true, it's extremely depressing that it required a viral post on social media.
- TameAntelope 5y ago
  How is crisis management supposed to go? What would have been a preferable source of this change?
  - csee 5y ago
    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.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      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.
      - csee 5y ago
        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.
        TameAntelope 5y ago
        Do you know who Ryan Peterson is? He's not an "outsider", he is the CEO of a digital supply chain company. He's a "foremost expert", to be sure.
        5y ago
burlesona 5y ago
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. 1. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 2. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/18/the-local-case-for-reparations https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/18/the-local-case... 3. https://www.cato.org/blog/housing-wealth-inequality https://www.cato.org/blog/housing-wealth-inequality 4. https://vtpi.org/autodep.pdf https://vtpi.org/autodep.pdf
- ch4s3 5y ago
  Arcane zoning rules are absolutely strangling society.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  This is not a zoning problem, because the zoning laws have been in place for decades, while the port worked fine. There is another root cause at work here. Temporarily suspending the zoning is just one of many short-term treatments to resolve a backlog.
- Asooka 5y ago
  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.
  - burlesona 5y ago
    That’s not really true. It’s perfectly possible to directly regulate, prohibit and/or tax nuisances and externalities directly without zoning.
_3u10 5y ago
Wrong move. The container problem is way more of an effective tariff on China than anything else we could think of. The best part is every container impounded in the US is a drain on destinations that aren’t in the US like Europe.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  Well now you can stack even more containers in Long Beach. Just sitting there. Doing nothing.
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Literally wrecking the entirety of global supply lines in order to "spite" "Chyna" How petty can US citizens be?
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  I guess this means you can’t export either.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    Nah, there’s plenty of containers for that. If they want a container they’ll have to buy something.
micro_cam 5y ago
Does this mean it is a cheap time to buy empty shipping containers?
- mastax 5y ago
  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.
  - foota 5y ago
    Could someone feasibly charge for storage of them offsite?
    - mdorazio 5y ago
      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.
      - foota 5y ago
        So like... is it just really hard for an outsider to come in and arrange contracts to do this right now?
  - hedora 5y ago
    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.”
adam_arthur 5y ago
Something to recognize. 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. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS Some is due to spending habits changing, but that's likely a smaller portion. Check real personal income over the course of the pandemic. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI 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. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CONSUMER https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CONSUMER 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? Probably in part, but not entirely.
- ec109685 5y ago
  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.
destitude 5y ago
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?
- ckall101 5y ago
  The government prioritizes family over work (and the economy). I believe the transport secretary is "chest feeding": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/pete-buttigieg-paternity-leave-response https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/pete-b...
- coredog64 5y ago
  One would think that a former McKinsey consultant would understand constraint theory.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - whymauri 5y ago
    Who does this refer to?
    - Upgrayyed_U 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg
- richwater 5y ago
  People are waking up and realizing that government is pretty useless for specific action. Our representatives would rather pontificate about vague niceties.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >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.
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (225 comments)
krisoft 5y ago
Cool. Now we have more space to store the empty containers temporaly. Is this going to solve the problem or only save us a few days?
- kevingadd 5y ago
  It doesn't fix anything, but it creates buffer space that can potentially be used to fix things that otherwise can't be fixed
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    Your comment seems to imply that you know what the underlying cause is that lead to this pile up in the first place. What is it?
  - robocat 5y ago
    Real-time 3D bufferbloat visualisation! https://netduma.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-bufferbloat/ https://netduma.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-bufferbloat/ uses traffic as the metaphor, but future articles will use shipping containers.
    - lxgr 5y ago
      How is bufferbloat related to the situation at hand?
      - robocat 5y ago
        The metaphor is that a container is data. “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.
dboreham 5y ago
"Do not stack more than N high"
aerosmile 5y ago
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..
- Natsu 5y ago
  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.
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    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.
asplake 5y ago
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.” https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543795045183490?s=21 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543795045183490?s=2...
- orangesite 5y ago
  Eli would have loved that thread…
  - jes 5y ago
    Eli was a great man and mentor. I miss him almost every day.
- Kinrany 5y ago
  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?
  - chowndown 5y ago
    I studied industrial engineering and don't recall "ToC" being covered outside of The Goal
codezero 5y ago
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.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  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. Wendover Productions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI
  - codezero 5y ago
    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!
  - phkahler 5y ago
    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?
    - 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
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. [1] https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflowing-with-cargo-t-1847917927 https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflow... [2] https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shipping-container/ https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shi... [3] https://www.peelpile.com/ https://www.peelpile.com/
- jasonhansel 5y ago
  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.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  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?
  - JohnHaugeland 5y ago
    the top one will fall off in the process, and most of the forklifts aren't meant for that angle of leverage
itsthecourier 5y ago
oh god thank you
sschueller 5y ago
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?
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  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.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    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.
    - tjr225 5y ago
      What does any of this have to do with zoning?
      - derekdahmer 5y ago
        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.
ConcernedCoder 5y ago
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
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Kye 5y ago
I hope those limitations didn't serve a vital safety purpose.
- jonas21 5y ago
  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. [1] https://longbeach.gov/press-releases/city-of-long-beach-statement-on-temporarily-allowing-additional-container-stacking/ https://longbeach.gov/press-releases/city-of-long-beach-stat...
orangepurple 5y ago
Why are these blocked ships not diverting to other US ports? We have plenty!
- mdorazio 5y ago
  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]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-container-ships-cant-sail-around-the-california-ports-bottleneck-11632216603 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-container-ships-cant-sail-a...
karaterobot 5y ago
> 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.
- Jolter 5y ago
  “Don’t just do something! Stand there!”
willmadden 5y ago
It seems like the Flexport CEO made this happen. Good on him. What an idiotic, self-inflicted wound. Regulation needs to crawl out of the stone ages.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
reilly3000 5y ago
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.
throwaway9870 5y ago
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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mkl95 5y ago
Why is it temporary? What are the negative effects of suspending the limitations?
- pasiaj 5y ago
  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.
- lostapathy 5y ago
  Wind, earthquakes, or accidents knocking the stacks over is a concern, I don't know how real it is though.
IAmGraydon 5y ago
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).
- bb88 5y ago
  The best HN commenters seem to speak only when it concerns their expertise, or do so after fully understanding the issues at play.
  - deadmutex 5y ago
    Unfortunately, many comments are not from "best HN commenters", so signal/noise ratio perhaps lower than expected.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  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
  - ameister14 5y ago
    A lot of the time when they found the company I find the CEO knows a lot about it
    - rdtwo 5y ago
      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.
  - taneq 5y ago
    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.
IronWolve 5y ago
The ceo of flexport rented a boat and toured the area and reported on issues people saw and reported to him. Very informative. Tweet thread @ https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 Or threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451543776992845834.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451543776992845834.html
- rdtwo 5y ago
  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
  - burnished 5y ago
    Taking time to stop and look at a problem is for simpletons? I don't think thats right.
  - divbzero 5y ago
    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.
  - raegis 5y ago
    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.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    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
honksillet 5y ago
Build stuff here! I can’t imagine how much fossil fuel is being wasted in this process.
ilwu_member 5y ago
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.
- rossjudson 5y ago
  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.
  - singularity2001 5y ago
    I thought the price for containers had more than quadrupled. How can leaving them behind be economic?
    - native_samples 5y ago
      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.
- aazaa 5y ago
  > ... 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?
m0zg 5y ago
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.
hk1337 5y ago
Since this is HackerNews, I thought Long Beach was a new up and coming Docker alternative.
unethical_ban 5y ago
* Own the bottleneck of your business. * The most capital intensive process of your business should be the bottleneck. * When you find a bottleneck not of your making, overwhelm it.
- yblu 5y ago
  > 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?
  - azornathogron 5y ago
    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.
rcpt 5y ago
surprised that the local busybodies responsible for the height limit haven't shown up and decried the new stacks as "luxury containers"
Ekaros 5y ago
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.
vallard 5y ago
Is this how Ready Player One started?
synaesthesisx 5y ago
They should’ve used Kubernetes
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
specialist 5y ago
Is this related somehow to China refusing to take USA's recycling material? IIRC shipping recycled material was super cheap. So many empty containers. Might as well fill them with something. Why aren't empty containers shipped back to China? Boat has to go back anyway, right? Did the empty containers pile up because no one was willing to pay to ship them back?
- xuki 5y ago
  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.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Yep but every time you do that you basically permanently leave extra containers state side. Might as well flatten them because they will never go back
rajacombinator 5y ago
No real cost, no real pain, for those making decisions - no proper decisions. No surprise.
thoughty 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what started this supply chain and container issue? PS: I am not based in the US
- jandrese 5y ago
  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.
SimonVeith2021 5y ago
Good Night https://neo.bet/de/Sportwetten?affiliateId=friends5-7412910#account/Registration https://neo.bet/de/Sportwetten?affiliateId=friends5-7412910#...
peter_retief 5y ago
Wow this could be really serious, who could have predicted the world economy could crash on too many containers brought on by an epidemic.
marsven_422 5y ago
Why is there a none saftey related stacking limit at all?
eecc 5y ago
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.
- antoinebalaine 5y ago
  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".
  - noirbot 5y ago
    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.
    - eecc 5y ago
      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
      - noirbot 5y ago
aakkaarr 5y ago
Sounds like the best time to start your container-house building company
jussy 5y ago
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?
e12e 5y ago
> 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?
CodeWriter23 5y ago
@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. 2) Forklift with 22' lift available from Sunbelt = 3 Container Height / 50% increase in yard capacity https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1044/0550320 https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1044/0550320... 3) Common "construction" type forklift with 39' lift from United Rentals = 4 Container Height / 100% increase in yard capacity. https://www.unitedrentals.com/marketplace/equipment/forklift https://www.unitedrentals.com/marketplace/equipment/forklift... And United has forklifts with even higher reach available.
- stevemadere 5y ago
  If you order one now, the factory in china will ship it to you as soon as they can get it through the port in Long Beach.
- Ichthypresbyter 5y ago
  Those don't look like they can lift a shipping container.
  - CodeWriter23 5y ago
    We lift empty containers with smaller forklifts at my place of employment. The target for this problem space is stacking empty not full containers.
robocat 5y ago
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.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452064336726290434.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452064336726290434.html
pontifier 5y ago
So... I'm in Arkansas near a river shipping port. Is there any way for me to take advantage of this situation and acquire a bunch of empty containers?

678 points by yblu 5y ago

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.

aerosmile 5y ago
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 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. [1] https://youtu.be/hjUs7o-TnjY?t=2499 https://youtu.be/hjUs7o-TnjY?t=2499
- quotemstr 5y ago
  > If he wanted to run for President, he would win Yes. It would be great to have non-ideological leadership focused on solving practical problems instead of waging culture war.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    Please expand on what you mean by "culture war"
    - Cipater 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war
      - JaimeThompson 5y ago
        As of late their has been a bit of a disturbing trend to ignore everything before the past 5 to 10 years, that is why I ask such questions.
  - coolso 5y ago
    > waging There's nothing wrong with pushing back, though.
- joecool1029 5y ago
  >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. [1] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1989/spring/hoover-belgium.html https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1989/spring/h... [2] https://smile.amazon.com/Hoover-Extraordinary-Life-Times/dp/0307597962 https://smile.amazon.com/Hoover-Extraordinary-Life-Times/dp/...
  - jrumbut 5y ago
    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.
  - acjohnson55 5y ago
    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: Part 1: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-64j34-f045e3 https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-64j34-f045e3 Part 2: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-zsqhc-f1a4af https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-zsqhc-f1a4af
  - viburnum 5y ago
    Hoover didn’t just fumble it, he was absolutely committed to passivity. If only he had shown the same determination that he had for postwar relief.
    - G3rn0ti 5y ago
      > Hoover … committed to passivity 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. https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-herbert-hoover-new-deal https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-herbert-hoover... https://mises.org/library/great-depression https://mises.org/library/great-depression
- babypuncher 5y ago
  Please no more CEOs running for president. The government is not a business.
  - The_Amp_Walrus 5y ago
    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.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      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.
  - csee 5y ago
    Please no more lawyers running for president. 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.
  - baq 5y ago
    who would you rather have? a politician...?
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    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.
- jeffypoo 5y ago
  I was an early customer of Flexport and got to talk to him on a number of occasions. I felt the same way about him. Total beast.
pchristensen 5y ago
I work at Flexport, Ryan is the real deal.
- presidentender 5y ago
  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.
  - pchristensen 5y ago
    I wouldn’t want to compete with Flexport on “scope of opportunity”. It’s like AWS 10 years ago. Happy hunting!
quotemstr 5y ago
> Especially import was the feedback loops showing how the system was essentially deadlocked, in the classical sense of the term. This whole situation would make a great "systems design"-level tech interview question!
aeternum 5y ago
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?

destitude 5y ago

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?

Jolter 5y ago
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.

jgalt212 5y ago

When a YC company's valuation is under assault, people will mountains, er containers.

csee 5y ago

If true, it's extremely depressing that it required a viral post on social media.

TameAntelope 5y ago
How is crisis management supposed to go? What would have been a preferable source of this change?
- csee 5y ago
  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.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    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.
    - csee 5y ago
      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.
      - TameAntelope 5y ago
        Do you know who Ryan Peterson is? He's not an "outsider", he is the CEO of a digital supply chain company. He's a "foremost expert", to be sure.
        5y ago

burlesona 5y ago

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. 1. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388 2. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/18/the-local-case-for-reparations https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/18/the-local-case... 3. https://www.cato.org/blog/housing-wealth-inequality https://www.cato.org/blog/housing-wealth-inequality 4. https://vtpi.org/autodep.pdf https://vtpi.org/autodep.pdf

ch4s3 5y ago
Arcane zoning rules are absolutely strangling society.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
snowwrestler 5y ago
This is not a zoning problem, because the zoning laws have been in place for decades, while the port worked fine. There is another root cause at work here. Temporarily suspending the zoning is just one of many short-term treatments to resolve a backlog.
Asooka 5y ago
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.
- burlesona 5y ago
  That’s not really true. It’s perfectly possible to directly regulate, prohibit and/or tax nuisances and externalities directly without zoning.

_3u10 5y ago

Wrong move. The container problem is way more of an effective tariff on China than anything else we could think of. The best part is every container impounded in the US is a drain on destinations that aren’t in the US like Europe.

cinntaile 5y ago
Well now you can stack even more containers in Long Beach. Just sitting there. Doing nothing.
CyanBird 5y ago
Literally wrecking the entirety of global supply lines in order to "spite" "Chyna" How petty can US citizens be?
quickthrower2 5y ago
I guess this means you can’t export either.
- _3u10 5y ago
  Nah, there’s plenty of containers for that. If they want a container they’ll have to buy something.

micro_cam 5y ago

Does this mean it is a cheap time to buy empty shipping containers?

mastax 5y ago
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.
- foota 5y ago
  Could someone feasibly charge for storage of them offsite?
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    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.
    - foota 5y ago
      So like... is it just really hard for an outsider to come in and arrange contracts to do this right now?
- hedora 5y ago
  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.”

adam_arthur 5y ago

Something to recognize. 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. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS Some is due to spending habits changing, but that's likely a smaller portion. Check real personal income over the course of the pandemic. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI 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. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CONSUMER https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CONSUMER 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? Probably in part, but not entirely.

ec109685 5y ago
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.

destitude 5y ago

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?

ckall101 5y ago
The government prioritizes family over work (and the economy). I believe the transport secretary is "chest feeding": https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/pete-buttigieg-paternity-leave-response https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/23/pete-b...
coredog64 5y ago
One would think that a former McKinsey consultant would understand constraint theory.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- whymauri 5y ago
  Who does this refer to?
  - Upgrayyed_U 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg
richwater 5y ago
People are waking up and realizing that government is pretty useless for specific action. Our representatives would rather pontificate about vague niceties.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >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.

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (225 comments)

krisoft 5y ago

Cool. Now we have more space to store the empty containers temporaly. Is this going to solve the problem or only save us a few days?

kevingadd 5y ago
It doesn't fix anything, but it creates buffer space that can potentially be used to fix things that otherwise can't be fixed
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  Your comment seems to imply that you know what the underlying cause is that lead to this pile up in the first place. What is it?
- robocat 5y ago
  Real-time 3D bufferbloat visualisation! https://netduma.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-bufferbloat/ https://netduma.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-bufferbloat/ uses traffic as the metaphor, but future articles will use shipping containers.
  - lxgr 5y ago
    How is bufferbloat related to the situation at hand?
    - robocat 5y ago
      The metaphor is that a container is data. “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.

dboreham 5y ago

"Do not stack more than N high"

aerosmile 5y ago

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..

Natsu 5y ago
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.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  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.

asplake 5y ago

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.” https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543795045183490?s=21 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543795045183490?s=2...

orangesite 5y ago
Eli would have loved that thread…
- jes 5y ago
  Eli was a great man and mentor. I miss him almost every day.
Kinrany 5y ago
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?
- chowndown 5y ago
  I studied industrial engineering and don't recall "ToC" being covered outside of The Goal

codezero 5y ago

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.

bobthepanda 5y ago
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. Wendover Productions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI
- codezero 5y ago
  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!
- phkahler 5y ago
  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?
  - 5y ago

Animats 5y ago

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. [1] https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflowing-with-cargo-t-1847917927 https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflow... [2] https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shipping-container/ https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shi... [3] https://www.peelpile.com/ https://www.peelpile.com/

jasonhansel 5y ago
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.
LeifCarrotson 5y ago
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?
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  the top one will fall off in the process, and most of the forklifts aren't meant for that angle of leverage

itsthecourier 5y ago

oh god thank you

sschueller 5y ago

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?

BurningFrog 5y ago
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.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  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.
  - tjr225 5y ago
    What does any of this have to do with zoning?
    - derekdahmer 5y ago
      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.

ConcernedCoder 5y ago

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

jimmygrapes 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Kye 5y ago

I hope those limitations didn't serve a vital safety purpose.

jonas21 5y ago
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. [1] https://longbeach.gov/press-releases/city-of-long-beach-statement-on-temporarily-allowing-additional-container-stacking/ https://longbeach.gov/press-releases/city-of-long-beach-stat...

orangepurple 5y ago

Why are these blocked ships not diverting to other US ports? We have plenty!

mdorazio 5y ago
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]. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-container-ships-cant-sail-around-the-california-ports-bottleneck-11632216603 https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-container-ships-cant-sail-a...

karaterobot 5y ago

> 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.

Jolter 5y ago
“Don’t just do something! Stand there!”

willmadden 5y ago

It seems like the Flexport CEO made this happen. Good on him. What an idiotic, self-inflicted wound. Regulation needs to crawl out of the stone ages.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

reilly3000 5y ago

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.

throwaway9870 5y ago

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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mkl95 5y ago

Why is it temporary? What are the negative effects of suspending the limitations?

pasiaj 5y ago
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.
lostapathy 5y ago
Wind, earthquakes, or accidents knocking the stacks over is a concern, I don't know how real it is though.

IAmGraydon 5y ago

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).

bb88 5y ago
The best HN commenters seem to speak only when it concerns their expertise, or do so after fully understanding the issues at play.
- deadmutex 5y ago
  Unfortunately, many comments are not from "best HN commenters", so signal/noise ratio perhaps lower than expected.
rdtwo 5y ago
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
- ameister14 5y ago
  A lot of the time when they found the company I find the CEO knows a lot about it
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    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.
- taneq 5y ago
  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.

IronWolve 5y ago

The ceo of flexport rented a boat and toured the area and reported on issues people saw and reported to him. Very informative. Tweet thread @ https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 Or threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451543776992845834.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451543776992845834.html

rdtwo 5y ago
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
- burnished 5y ago
  Taking time to stop and look at a problem is for simpletons? I don't think thats right.
- divbzero 5y ago
  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.
- raegis 5y ago
  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.
- lm28469 5y ago
  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

honksillet 5y ago

Build stuff here! I can’t imagine how much fossil fuel is being wasted in this process.

ilwu_member 5y ago

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.

rossjudson 5y ago
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.
- singularity2001 5y ago
  I thought the price for containers had more than quadrupled. How can leaving them behind be economic?
  - native_samples 5y ago
    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.
aazaa 5y ago
> ... 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?

m0zg 5y ago

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.

hk1337 5y ago

Since this is HackerNews, I thought Long Beach was a new up and coming Docker alternative.

unethical_ban 5y ago

* Own the bottleneck of your business. * The most capital intensive process of your business should be the bottleneck. * When you find a bottleneck not of your making, overwhelm it.

yblu 5y ago
> 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?
- azornathogron 5y ago
  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.

rcpt 5y ago

surprised that the local busybodies responsible for the height limit haven't shown up and decried the new stacks as "luxury containers"

Ekaros 5y ago

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.

vallard 5y ago

Is this how Ready Player One started?

synaesthesisx 5y ago

They should’ve used Kubernetes

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

specialist 5y ago

Is this related somehow to China refusing to take USA's recycling material? IIRC shipping recycled material was super cheap. So many empty containers. Might as well fill them with something. Why aren't empty containers shipped back to China? Boat has to go back anyway, right? Did the empty containers pile up because no one was willing to pay to ship them back?

xuki 5y ago
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.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Yep but every time you do that you basically permanently leave extra containers state side. Might as well flatten them because they will never go back

rajacombinator 5y ago

No real cost, no real pain, for those making decisions - no proper decisions. No surprise.

thoughty 5y ago

Out of curiosity, what started this supply chain and container issue? PS: I am not based in the US

jandrese 5y ago
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.

SimonVeith2021 5y ago

Good Night https://neo.bet/de/Sportwetten?affiliateId=friends5-7412910#account/Registration https://neo.bet/de/Sportwetten?affiliateId=friends5-7412910#...

peter_retief 5y ago

Wow this could be really serious, who could have predicted the world economy could crash on too many containers brought on by an epidemic.

marsven_422 5y ago

Why is there a none saftey related stacking limit at all?

eecc 5y ago

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.

antoinebalaine 5y ago
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".
- noirbot 5y ago
  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.
  - eecc 5y ago
    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
    - noirbot 5y ago

aakkaarr 5y ago

Sounds like the best time to start your container-house building company

jussy 5y ago

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?

e12e 5y ago

> 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?

CodeWriter23 5y ago

@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. 2) Forklift with 22' lift available from Sunbelt = 3 Container Height / 50% increase in yard capacity https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1044/0550320 https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1044/0550320... 3) Common "construction" type forklift with 39' lift from United Rentals = 4 Container Height / 100% increase in yard capacity. https://www.unitedrentals.com/marketplace/equipment/forklift https://www.unitedrentals.com/marketplace/equipment/forklift... And United has forklifts with even higher reach available.

stevemadere 5y ago
If you order one now, the factory in china will ship it to you as soon as they can get it through the port in Long Beach.
Ichthypresbyter 5y ago
Those don't look like they can lift a shipping container.
- CodeWriter23 5y ago
  We lift empty containers with smaller forklifts at my place of employment. The target for this problem space is stacking empty not full containers.

robocat 5y ago

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.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452064336726290434.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1452064336726290434.html

pontifier 5y ago

So... I'm in Arkansas near a river shipping port. Is there any way for me to take advantage of this situation and acquire a bunch of empty containers?