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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 o

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.
  - labster 5y ago
    Ryan probably understands freight and logistics better than the government decision-makers. Regulatory bodies don’t often think in terms of changing the laws, and have narrower scopes. I bet the Long Beach zoning commission never even realized that they could be causing the backup, because the 2-high policy has worked fine for years. In a democracy, we are the government. People who know how to fix problems need to engage with their representatives, not just hope they’ll figure out freight logistics problems because they have a law degree.
    - ajmurmann 5y ago
      Funny enough this is supposed to be the good side for lobbying. Politicians need input from people on the ground in industry.
- Camillo 5y ago
  Let's not forget the media. Renting a boat and talking to people at the port to see what's going on should be right up an investigative journalist's alley. The Silicon Valley guy is doing the job of not just one power center, but two.
  - Kye 5y ago
    Perhaps the fourth estate needs the microphones currently stuck on a ship somewhere.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    The MSM largely is a coverup for the Biden administration, so you're not going to see much in the way of investigative journalism until after the 2022 mid-terms. :) Proof of this is that Pelosi made a mistake recently and publicly asked the MSM "to sell the budget bills." Note that cnn.com is half-accurate since Sept. 1 because the Afghanistan debacle and plunging ratings jarred them into some factual reporting. In the meantime, you can watch Fox and Sky Australia, and NTD media (all on YT.)
twunde 5y ago
The reason why the focus was on the first one is because that was the easiest and fastest to do (You only need local officials to sign off on it because its a temporary order and its also the simplest). 2 and 3 need the federal government to organize it, which as a large organization takes some time. 4 and 5 requires figuring out contract terms (who's paying whom, etc). These are much more complex and therefore will take more time. Oh and the tweetstorm was done on a Friday on the West Coast, so it takes some time to get the attention of decision makers on the east coast.
jerry1979 5y ago
For those who didn't see the 5 points, I've copied them below from here https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 <snip> 1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days. This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers 2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days. 3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex. 4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port. 5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up. This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas. We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail. </snip>
- eecc 5y ago
  Funny how free-market, small-government, deregulation, rhetoric flies out of the window when own profit maximization short-terminism falls apart and everyone starts invoking centrally coordinated state intervention. I wonder if some governmental bureau tasked with coordinating this market hasn’t been shuttered in the last couple years to some lobbyist great success…
  - IkmoIkmo 5y ago
    I agree with you, but this isn't necessarily the best example. In this case, frankly part of this issue had to be resolved by relaxing strict zoning laws that weren't allowing space to be used in a way that the market demanded (offloading empty chassis). Such a measure falls under deregulation/free-market/small-government. The other measures proposed (forcing railroads, national guards etc) are of course of a different order, but it's not clear they'd be necessary if the build-up of empty chassis at the port (because offloading in the nearby area wasn't allowed) never materialised into a massive bottleneck, because zoning laws were deregulated.
baybal2 5y ago
> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Not for the world economy, but for Chinese economy, as it's what US companies make the most of their money. What the current crisis shows the most is that just how close the US economy coming to a sever crisis, from well.... just missing the shipment of holiday toys from China. If China can inadvertently move US markets through just messing up with shipping toys, imagine how bad a deliberate economic sabotage action would be.
- aerosmile 5y ago
  You're missing an important point here - if US customers cannot get their Xmas gifts on time, they won't buy them (nobody is going to order Xmas gifts if they will likely only arrive in January of later). Facebook has about 5 million advertisers, and a material percentage of them relies on the Xmas season for their financials to work out on an annual basis. Millions of US business have deposited 7+ figures each in inventory deposits a few months ago, with the understanding that they will convert those deposits into profit by December at the latest. If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess? And how many people will lose their jobs with or without those loans? We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale of a problem, and as Ryan pointed out, the only way to fix this is to unblock the ports. So if you're eventually going to have to do it, why not do it before millions of companies go out of business as opposed to only after that's happened? So this is not just a matter of Chinese factories not being able to sell their goods (in which case their government will take care of them as they have done in the past). This is about US e-commerce businesses who can only fall back on their banks (and which are far more unpredictable in their generosity). Ryan's idea to mobilize the military resources would have been a no-brainer and would have already happened in at least two countries I have lived in before. One final detail - this may seem like a recent issue, and most of us only heard about the problem sometime in early October. In reality, the industry press has been covering this since at least March [1], when the backlog of cargo ships at LAX started exceeding 20 (it's supposed to be well below that). Now it's at over 70. So it's been 7 months with practically no action until a week ago. I am a Democrat, but this is not going to bode well for Biden. [1] https://edisonreport.com/latest-update-on-the-global-shipping-situation-from-freight-forwarders/ https://edisonreport.com/latest-update-on-the-global-shippin...
icelancer 5y ago
I am no defender of government bureaucracy, but the fact we got the stacking rules changed in 48 hours is pretty crazy. I suspect more changes will come, but it may take some time. I'd let it play out over 1-2 weeks and re-evaluate. Can't believe I am giving government delays a pass here... but I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth when we get near-immediate action from people who aren't known for solving problems with any sort of urgency. EDIT: And I'm even a customer of Flexport!
- cube00 5y ago
  The pandemic has shown the bureaucracy can move quickly when they want to. Although I'd argue the politicians share some of the blame for slow legislation when they want to avoid something. It's not always the behind the scenes bureaucrats that are the bottle neck.
mkl 5y ago
Does he mean negative feedback loops or positive feedback loops? Getting worse every day sounds like positive feedback, whereas negative feedback would keep things steady.
- whoopdedo 5y ago
  In a steady system the output energy scales based on the input energy. When there is feedback, the output adds/subtracts to the input, making it difficult to control the output with your inputs. Positive feedback adds to the input, making the output increase even as you attempt to reduce the input energy. Negative feedback subtracts from the input and forces you to increase your input energy to prevent the output from diminishing. Uncontrollable positive feedback explodes. Uncontrollable negative feedback freezes.
- ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  People without a controls background typically mean "positive feedback" at all times, regardless of what words they use.
- analog31 5y ago
  Doesn't matter, real feedback loops are complex. ;-)
- wrycoder 5y ago
  I’d recommend that he just say “feedback” and skip the adjective.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  He means a vicious cycle, which is technically a positive feedback loop: The worse things get, the more they get worse. Negative feedback means when the system is working properly, an unexpected perturbation will cause the system to correct itself automatically. But since the general public thinks of positive as good and negative as bad, he's using the word "negative" to describe a bad situation. This kind of thing bugs me because I know control theory, but it's really in the same category as "Is Program X an X11 client or an X11 server?"

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.
- labster 5y ago
  Ryan probably understands freight and logistics better than the government decision-makers. Regulatory bodies don’t often think in terms of changing the laws, and have narrower scopes. I bet the Long Beach zoning commission never even realized that they could be causing the backup, because the 2-high policy has worked fine for years. In a democracy, we are the government. People who know how to fix problems need to engage with their representatives, not just hope they’ll figure out freight logistics problems because they have a law degree.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    Funny enough this is supposed to be the good side for lobbying. Politicians need input from people on the ground in industry.
Camillo 5y ago
Let's not forget the media. Renting a boat and talking to people at the port to see what's going on should be right up an investigative journalist's alley. The Silicon Valley guy is doing the job of not just one power center, but two.
- Kye 5y ago
  Perhaps the fourth estate needs the microphones currently stuck on a ship somewhere.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  The MSM largely is a coverup for the Biden administration, so you're not going to see much in the way of investigative journalism until after the 2022 mid-terms. :) Proof of this is that Pelosi made a mistake recently and publicly asked the MSM "to sell the budget bills." Note that cnn.com is half-accurate since Sept. 1 because the Afghanistan debacle and plunging ratings jarred them into some factual reporting. In the meantime, you can watch Fox and Sky Australia, and NTD media (all on YT.)

twunde 5y ago

The reason why the focus was on the first one is because that was the easiest and fastest to do (You only need local officials to sign off on it because its a temporary order and its also the simplest). 2 and 3 need the federal government to organize it, which as a large organization takes some time. 4 and 5 requires figuring out contract terms (who's paying whom, etc). These are much more complex and therefore will take more time. Oh and the tweetstorm was done on a Friday on the West Coast, so it takes some time to get the attention of decision makers on the east coast.

jerry1979 5y ago

For those who didn't see the 5 points, I've copied them below from here https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 <snip> 1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days. This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers 2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days. 3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex. 4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port. 5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up. This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas. We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail. </snip>

eecc 5y ago
Funny how free-market, small-government, deregulation, rhetoric flies out of the window when own profit maximization short-terminism falls apart and everyone starts invoking centrally coordinated state intervention. I wonder if some governmental bureau tasked with coordinating this market hasn’t been shuttered in the last couple years to some lobbyist great success…
- IkmoIkmo 5y ago
  I agree with you, but this isn't necessarily the best example. In this case, frankly part of this issue had to be resolved by relaxing strict zoning laws that weren't allowing space to be used in a way that the market demanded (offloading empty chassis). Such a measure falls under deregulation/free-market/small-government. The other measures proposed (forcing railroads, national guards etc) are of course of a different order, but it's not clear they'd be necessary if the build-up of empty chassis at the port (because offloading in the nearby area wasn't allowed) never materialised into a massive bottleneck, because zoning laws were deregulated.

baybal2 5y ago

> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Not for the world economy, but for Chinese economy, as it's what US companies make the most of their money. What the current crisis shows the most is that just how close the US economy coming to a sever crisis, from well.... just missing the shipment of holiday toys from China. If China can inadvertently move US markets through just messing up with shipping toys, imagine how bad a deliberate economic sabotage action would be.

aerosmile 5y ago
You're missing an important point here - if US customers cannot get their Xmas gifts on time, they won't buy them (nobody is going to order Xmas gifts if they will likely only arrive in January of later). Facebook has about 5 million advertisers, and a material percentage of them relies on the Xmas season for their financials to work out on an annual basis. Millions of US business have deposited 7+ figures each in inventory deposits a few months ago, with the understanding that they will convert those deposits into profit by December at the latest. If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess? And how many people will lose their jobs with or without those loans? We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale of a problem, and as Ryan pointed out, the only way to fix this is to unblock the ports. So if you're eventually going to have to do it, why not do it before millions of companies go out of business as opposed to only after that's happened? So this is not just a matter of Chinese factories not being able to sell their goods (in which case their government will take care of them as they have done in the past). This is about US e-commerce businesses who can only fall back on their banks (and which are far more unpredictable in their generosity). Ryan's idea to mobilize the military resources would have been a no-brainer and would have already happened in at least two countries I have lived in before. One final detail - this may seem like a recent issue, and most of us only heard about the problem sometime in early October. In reality, the industry press has been covering this since at least March [1], when the backlog of cargo ships at LAX started exceeding 20 (it's supposed to be well below that). Now it's at over 70. So it's been 7 months with practically no action until a week ago. I am a Democrat, but this is not going to bode well for Biden. [1] https://edisonreport.com/latest-update-on-the-global-shipping-situation-from-freight-forwarders/ https://edisonreport.com/latest-update-on-the-global-shippin...

icelancer 5y ago

I am no defender of government bureaucracy, but the fact we got the stacking rules changed in 48 hours is pretty crazy. I suspect more changes will come, but it may take some time. I'd let it play out over 1-2 weeks and re-evaluate. Can't believe I am giving government delays a pass here... but I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth when we get near-immediate action from people who aren't known for solving problems with any sort of urgency. EDIT: And I'm even a customer of Flexport!

cube00 5y ago
The pandemic has shown the bureaucracy can move quickly when they want to. Although I'd argue the politicians share some of the blame for slow legislation when they want to avoid something. It's not always the behind the scenes bureaucrats that are the bottle neck.

mkl 5y ago

Does he mean negative feedback loops or positive feedback loops? Getting worse every day sounds like positive feedback, whereas negative feedback would keep things steady.

whoopdedo 5y ago
In a steady system the output energy scales based on the input energy. When there is feedback, the output adds/subtracts to the input, making it difficult to control the output with your inputs. Positive feedback adds to the input, making the output increase even as you attempt to reduce the input energy. Negative feedback subtracts from the input and forces you to increase your input energy to prevent the output from diminishing. Uncontrollable positive feedback explodes. Uncontrollable negative feedback freezes.
ThrustVectoring 5y ago
People without a controls background typically mean "positive feedback" at all times, regardless of what words they use.
analog31 5y ago
Doesn't matter, real feedback loops are complex. ;-)
wrycoder 5y ago
I’d recommend that he just say “feedback” and skip the adjective.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
He means a vicious cycle, which is technically a positive feedback loop: The worse things get, the more they get worse. Negative feedback means when the system is working properly, an unexpected perturbation will cause the system to correct itself automatically. But since the general public thinks of positive as good and negative as bad, he's using the word "negative" to describe a bad situation. This kind of thing bugs me because I know control theory, but it's really in the same category as "Is Program X an X11 client or an X11 server?"