12 ms·
200-foot-long railway to nowhere is a brilliant shipping loophole
- cmdrriker 5y agoIgnoring the primary issue Uncle Sam has with this logistics solution, be reminded why laws and or regulations exist for things... there's always someone (right or wrong) that will circumvent the rules with shall we say... creative solutions.
- hangonhn 5y agoThis is where judges and spirit of the law come in. Laws hav always been imprecise and one remedy for that are judges and trials. I doubt what the company is doing will hold up in court if they want to argue that they satisfied the provision of the Jones Act.
- Okkef 5y agoMake stupid rules, get stupid compliance.
- bombcar 5y agoIt seems the truck gets off at the same point it got on, that may be a critical flaw in their trick as it can be argued the rail line didn't provide "part of the journey".
- gruez 5y agoSo all they need to do to make this legit is to build a dock on the other end?
- londons_explore 5y agoWhen sticking to the letter but not the spirit of the law, things like this matter...
- duck 5y agoIs there a video of them loading that truck onto the train? It seems like two ramps on both ends would make that easier and avoid what you pointed out.
- syspec 5y agoYeah i watched the video curious to see how the truck gets OFF the train, but it cut out. Does it really just backup? That seems much more treacherous, than having a ramp on the other side.
- nwsm 5y agoThe law just needs some graph theory
- jtbayly 5y agoThis is why programmers think they can treat the law like code. Because people often do and get away with it. Often they don’t get away with it, too. But still… programmers aren’t the only ones looking at the law this way apparently.
- geocrasher 5y ago"The Bureaucracy is expanding to support the needs of the expanding Bureaucracy." - Leonard Nimoy, Civ IV (Oh and originally some old guy. Edited for accuracy.)
- caymanjim 5y ago"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." - Oscar Wilde Credit where credit is due.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoIf, with the literate, I am / Impelled to try an epigram, / I never seek to take the credit; / We all assume that Oscar said it. -- Dorothy Parker
- geocrasher 5y agoTrue, but more fun to quote Spock ;-)
- ryandrake 5y agoLoopholes in the law are like security flaws in programs. Whenever the letter of the law (code) doesn't exactly match the intent, inevitably some attacker will find it and exploit it, especially if there is monetary incentive as is the case in business. This doesn't mean the law is wrong, just that the people who wrote it were careless and didn't think about all the edge cases. What most democratic governments lack is a way to do a quick security update to zero-day loopholes as they are found. These things shouldn't be fixed with years-long lawsuits arguing the intent of the law, they should be fixed with a patch to the actual wording of the law so the intent is more clear.
- Breza 5y agoThe Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts has made several high-profile rulings in line with this kind of thinking. They've punted a few cases on the grounds that it's the job of Congress to fix certain types of problems and Congress needs to get its act together.
- bombcar 5y agoIt's even more like that, because age old code (law) gets repurposed and reused and something nobody would even bother trying becomes practical. And in both cases the correct solution is fixing the law (code) but often that opens a whole new can of worms ...
- fuoqi 5y agoEven worse, the precedent-based legal system is quite crazy itself, especially to those who lives in the continental legal system. Instead of patching "code" (law) to new times and sometimes removing parts of it completely, the former uses age-old execution artifacts (court decisions) to determine future execution. Not only it bloats "code" with a truck load of pattern matching branches instead of using a lean algorithm, but it also makes it much harder to consciously evolve the system, which is especially important in the current times.
- visarga 5y ago
- krallja 5y agoThere was a video earlier this month on Half As Interesting about this railway: https://youtu.be/oP1Oq3JLNbc https://youtu.be/oP1Oq3JLNbc HAI makes interesting, short, sarcastic videos about obscure topics that HNers will probably enjoy.
- triyambakam 5y agoThe Jones Act has already made Hawaii's economy really difficult, but it might be about to get really worse. Hawaii gets a third or more crude oil from Russia, and with recent sanctions, it's unclear if that will continue. If it doesn't that means Hawaii will need to purchase much more expensive oil from the mainland. > It is much cheaper for Hawaii to buy oil from Russia than from the U.S., even though the per-barrel cost of oil from Russia is more expensive than from Texas. > Blame the Jones Act. The 1920 federal maritime law requires all goods shipped between American ports to be on vessels that are U.S. flagged, built and mostly owned and crewed by Americans. > The result of more than a century of protectionism has been that U.S. ships are more expensive to build and operate, with the additional costs inevitably passed on to consumers. In other words, the added cost of using American ships makes it more expensive for Hawaii to buy oil from Texas than from Russia. [1] [1] https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/2022/02/jones-act-threatens-hawaii-energy-security/ https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/2022/02/jones-act-threate...
- neon_electro 5y agoDo you think the increase in price means renewable energy can get a bigger foothold?
- triyambakam 5y agoGiven the history of how Hawaii policy gets shaped, probably not. But thinking optimistically, hopefully!
- letitbeirie 5y agoSolar is already so prevalent on Oahu that they have grid frequency excursions that would be unimaginable on the mainland. Once grid-scale energy storage gets cheaper Hawaii will have one of the cleanest energy grids on Earth. Until then they have to complement their solar production with peaker turbines that typically burn diesel.
- triceratops 5y agoWhy can't Hawaii use geothermal energy?
- beardog 5y agoReminds me of when Marvel argued in court that their mutant characters are non-human because human dolls were taxed differently https://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/marvel-comics-to-us-govt-mu.html https://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/marvel-comics-to-us-govt-m...
- smilespray 5y agoI'm going to steal that idea and give myself a few mutations to avoid income tax.
- ragazzina 5y agoThe same applies to Santa suits: should they be taxed as a dress or as a costume? https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/12/20/571645063/episode-670-the-santa-suit https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/12/20/571645063/epis...
- pmarreck 5y agoReminds me of when people routinely (and entirely legally) use tax loopholes to avoid paying tax. The problem is that no one even tries to pay a dime more taxes than is legally necessary. And yet those people are routinely attacked instead of the laws themselves, which to me seems completely absurd. A person should no sooner pay "the spirit of" the amount of tax they "should" owe, than the IRS would forgive a restaurant some tax during the pandemic since "the spirit of" tax wouldn't sink businesses temporarily set back by pandemics.
- arbitrary_name 5y agoExcept when those people fight against any proposed changes to the regulation, or actively influence the development of the legislation in the first place, at which point many people perceive them as using their resources to further entrench their privilege.
- ape4 5y agoObviously the law could be changed to specify a minimum distance traveled by rail.
- notpachet 5y agoTea must be served!
- mission_failed 5y agoBut then you might impact legit transport over short distances. And is it actual distance travelled, or as the crow flies?
- tinotopia 5y agoIt used to seem to me that there was a strong libertarian tendency among computer people, at least relative to the rest of society. I always attributed this to the fact that anyone who has ever tried to tell a computer what to do has a different kind of understanding of how hard it is to precisely define intentions, even when the compiler doesn't have a personal financial or other incentive to deliberately misconstrue your code so as to create a bug. It doesn't matter how beneficial is the intention of your law, it'll really only work if it's generally aligned with the local cultural values -- in which case people will Do What You Mean. Politicians either don't understand this, or pretend not to; you regularly see them passing laws to outlaw things that are already illegal.
- landemva 5y ago[flagged]
- erichocean 5y ago> [laws] only work if…generally aligned with the local cultural values The business in question is owned by a Norwegian. Perhaps American businesses should only be owned and operated by…Americans?
- seniorsassycat 5y agoFeels funny that the original 30 mile trip was above board. The new trip is clearly exploiting a loophole, but maybe both trips should be forbidden. Why is there an exemption for trips by rail?
- beeboop 5y agoFrom a link in the article: Objections were raised at the time about the potential disruption of pre-existing patterns of travel of both passengers and merchandise in part over Canadian rail lines. To address those objections, a proviso was added to the restated coastwise law – then the “first proviso” – which stated that the coastwise restriction did not apply to transportation “over through routes heretofore or hereafter recognized by the Interstate Commerce Commission for which routes rate tariffs have been or shall hereafter be filed with said commission when such routes are in part over Canadian rail lines . . .” – and “excluding Alaska.” In 1935 this proviso was interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court which wrote that “its evident purpose was to avoid disturbance of established routes, recognized by the Interstate Commerce Commission as in the public interest, between Northwestern and Eastern states through the lake ports.” End quote. The TLDR seems to be that forcing it for rail would have caused too many disturbances to how the rail was operating at the time.
- tastyfreeze 5y agoI really love creative workarounds for ridiculous rules. Like many of our laws the Jones Act is trying to force a desirable outcome because the existing laws forced people to adopt the undesirable outcome. In this case US laws make it too costly to operate a US flagged vessel. Instead of removing laws that were making it too costly we just added a new law to try to force operators to the desirable but costly path of being US flagged. If a law is preventing us from being globally competitive it is a bad law.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoI'm fine with global competition if it isn't arbitrage of environmental regulations. That used to be palatable to Americans when the polluting resulting from manufacturing their kewpie dolls in Walmart was a local concern of the third world factory. But global warming pollution isn't localized. Thus "being globally competitive" amounts to code words for bypassing environmental regulations and further dooming the entire human race. That is a big big big issue. So while this is amusing and farcical, loopholes are dangerous at industrial scale.
- shuntress 5y agoThere are some pretty obvious drawbacks to this that you seem to be deliberately ignoring. For example, in cases where this competitive advantage is gained through means that cause what a reasonable person would considered an excess of human suffering and the relevant US laws prevent the actions that gain that competitive advantage in exchange for human suffering, does it make sense to submit that this human suffering is just a fact of life or would it be better to attempt to eliminate that suffering?
- tastyfreeze 5y agoI had thought of those cases but didn't mention them as I feel most people would agree that those are "good" laws and accept the consequences. However, there are currently vastly more laws and regulations that do not fit in that category. There is a lot of space between sacrificing decency and removing law/regulation cruft to improve competitiveness.
- pmarreck 5y agoTell me what your incentives are, and I'll tell you how you'll behave
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vernie 5y agoWhen I see an example of tariff engineering I want whoever dreamed up the "cool hack" to be caned.
- exabrial 5y agoMake stupid laws, get stupid answers.
- TheMagicHorsey 5y agoJones Act is a bunch of bullshit. Its right up there with Sugar duties, Car dealership laws, Alcohol distributorship laws, and corn subsidies as bullshit insider manipulation of the market to line their own pockets.
- landemva 5y agoCrony fake-capitalism. Include the banksters and medical cartel in your list.
- worik 5y agoIn Aotearoa we no longer have a (local) coastal shipping industry. Look at a map. How did that happen? Slave labour imported by ruthless business operators on foreign flagged vessels. Now COVID has hit, we have very little coastal shipping of any sort. Put the Jones Act in that context
- crisdux 5y agoRepealing or reforming the Jones Act would really help river cities all along the mississippi river system. It would also reduce co2 and traffic congestion. It's amazing to me that no one will take a critical look at this outdated law. It's anti competitive and disproportionately affects interior states.
- tejtm 5y agoNew Brunswick Southern Railway ... sounds like something I should have heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brunswick_Southern_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Brunswick_Southern_Railway ahh... the Irvings, petrochemical and politics they showed up here on HN not that long ago (4 months) in conjunction with the mysterious chronic wasting disease in the same area https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28979532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28979532
- thewebcount 5y agoSo, am I understanding correctly that using US ships to go from, say, Alaska to Washington State and then on to wherever is necessary in the US is more expensive than hiring a foreign company to sail the cargo down to Panama, across the canal, back up to Canada, across 300 feet of railway, and then into the US? If so, I would not have guessed that were the case.