4 ms·

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the 'stacking rule' meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their prop

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the 'stacking rule' meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their property were "storing" empties on trailer chassis that carry one container. As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When that happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on. So the "win" here was that more trailers would be available to take full containers from ships and that would move things along.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ajmurmann 5y ago
From Ryan Peterson's description, it was more that there was no space left to unload full containers from ships or empties from trucks to then pick up a full one from the ship. In essence container grid lock.
- dcow 5y ago
  Yep. Both the rx and tx buffers were full and the port was dropping packets. (There were both container ships waiting to offload and trucks waiting to offload full and empty containers, respectively.) Now that buffer size has been increased, there is more bandwidth to available to actually move containers. Since the spike is temporary, the problem has gone away. If we were permanently faced with more containers then, yes, we'd need another port.
  - LeanderK 5y ago
    wow, i was a bit confused after reading the article but your buffer analogy immediately made sense!
  - btown 5y ago
    By this analogy, the politician literally "downloaded more RAM!"
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      While it's a long-running gag, I would like to remind everyone that swapping to zram is a thing on Linux (I don't know whether there's an equivalent on Darwin, and I think NT ships it by default), and the tech goes all the way back to RAM Doubler for MacOS (or at least, that's the earliest implementation that I know about). So for quite a long time you kind of have been able to do exactly that...
      - valleyer 5y ago
        Yep -- Darwin has had an implementation of memory compression since OS X Mavericks. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    Was this just caused by just a spike in demand? It seems to me the pretty would only full up with empties if there is some kind of imbalance between shipping and receiving, right? As Ryan pointed out in his Twitter thread the bottleneck "should" be the cranes.
ethbr0 5y ago
You're correct. The article was imprecise with its terminology. Most people who aren't familiar with trucking understand a tractor-trailer as a single vehicle, because that's what they usually see on the road. When in reality it's exactly what the phrase describes: a tractor (or cab, or engine and steering and driver) + a trailer (or chassis + whatever it's hauling). The entire idea of modern over-the-road trucking is built on the concept that one cab can pick up and haul any standard chassis (leaving aside hazmat and other complexities). This is what allows for optimized freight movement, as you can limit the amount of time cabs are moving around without hauling anything, in addition to decoupling the load/unloading of a trailer (time consuming) from the driver turning around (want to minimize). I.e. driver arrives at warehouse with container A on chassis B, parks it in a loading dock, and immediately hooks up to container T, already waiting on chassis U, and heads back out. The bottleneck in this case was: (1) nowhere to legally put empty containers, causing (2) empty containers to stay on chassis, leading to (3) no available empty chassis to unload port cargo onto (containers must be loaded onto some sort of chassis to be removed from a port), leading to (4) a backup and full port yard, leading to (5) ports refusing to accept empties, to conserve their limited yard space, leading to GOTO 1.
- SilasX 5y ago
  >Most people who aren't familiar with trucking understand a tractor-trailer as a single vehicle, because that's what they usually see on the road. Heh, I was noticing myself that it was kind of hard to follow because the domain ontology (what entities exist and how they relate) wasn't make explicit (like I just did with the previous parenthetical). Would have helped to know that a chassis and container-free trailer are the same thing. And so I kind of balked when the author said the Flexport CEO: >>Describes a clear physical problem that everyone can understand, in simple terms that everyone can understand but that don’t talk down to anyone.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Granted, Twitter virality definitely has a certain TED-ness about it: boil everything down to a simple model system, that makes everyone listening feel smart, and end on an optimistic note, without mentioning any intractable nuances.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ajmurmann 5y ago

From Ryan Peterson's description, it was more that there was no space left to unload full containers from ships or empties from trucks to then pick up a full one from the ship. In essence container grid lock.

dcow 5y ago
Yep. Both the rx and tx buffers were full and the port was dropping packets. (There were both container ships waiting to offload and trucks waiting to offload full and empty containers, respectively.) Now that buffer size has been increased, there is more bandwidth to available to actually move containers. Since the spike is temporary, the problem has gone away. If we were permanently faced with more containers then, yes, we'd need another port.
- LeanderK 5y ago
  wow, i was a bit confused after reading the article but your buffer analogy immediately made sense!
- btown 5y ago
  By this analogy, the politician literally "downloaded more RAM!"
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    While it's a long-running gag, I would like to remind everyone that swapping to zram is a thing on Linux (I don't know whether there's an equivalent on Darwin, and I think NT ships it by default), and the tech goes all the way back to RAM Doubler for MacOS (or at least, that's the earliest implementation that I know about). So for quite a long time you kind of have been able to do exactly that...
    - valleyer 5y ago
      Yep -- Darwin has had an implementation of memory compression since OS X Mavericks. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  Was this just caused by just a spike in demand? It seems to me the pretty would only full up with empties if there is some kind of imbalance between shipping and receiving, right? As Ryan pointed out in his Twitter thread the bottleneck "should" be the cranes.

ethbr0 5y ago

You're correct. The article was imprecise with its terminology. Most people who aren't familiar with trucking understand a tractor-trailer as a single vehicle, because that's what they usually see on the road. When in reality it's exactly what the phrase describes: a tractor (or cab, or engine and steering and driver) + a trailer (or chassis + whatever it's hauling). The entire idea of modern over-the-road trucking is built on the concept that one cab can pick up and haul any standard chassis (leaving aside hazmat and other complexities). This is what allows for optimized freight movement, as you can limit the amount of time cabs are moving around without hauling anything, in addition to decoupling the load/unloading of a trailer (time consuming) from the driver turning around (want to minimize). I.e. driver arrives at warehouse with container A on chassis B, parks it in a loading dock, and immediately hooks up to container T, already waiting on chassis U, and heads back out. The bottleneck in this case was: (1) nowhere to legally put empty containers, causing (2) empty containers to stay on chassis, leading to (3) no available empty chassis to unload port cargo onto (containers must be loaded onto some sort of chassis to be removed from a port), leading to (4) a backup and full port yard, leading to (5) ports refusing to accept empties, to conserve their limited yard space, leading to GOTO 1.

SilasX 5y ago
>Most people who aren't familiar with trucking understand a tractor-trailer as a single vehicle, because that's what they usually see on the road. Heh, I was noticing myself that it was kind of hard to follow because the domain ontology (what entities exist and how they relate) wasn't make explicit (like I just did with the previous parenthetical). Would have helped to know that a chassis and container-free trailer are the same thing. And so I kind of balked when the author said the Flexport CEO: >>Describes a clear physical problem that everyone can understand, in simple terms that everyone can understand but that don’t talk down to anyone.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Granted, Twitter virality definitely has a certain TED-ness about it: boil everything down to a simple model system, that makes everyone listening feel smart, and end on an optimistic note, without mentioning any intractable nuances.