3 ms·

Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.

by mooreds 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
metalman 5mo ago
and therefor you will not be surprised to find out that there has been a very recent dramatic decline in the asking price for empty containers in areas that are primarily devoted to imports, as the empty can is not worth the cost to ship it back.
- throwaway85825 5mo ago
  In this case it's because of the time it takes to load the empties because its more profitable to use the time sailing. Some ports have rules now forcing them to take back empties so the yards don't fill up.
  - metalman 5mo ago
    which then leads to negative values for the cans, and makes it profitable for some trucking outfits to run "tiltload" container trucks, that can autonomously off load an empty can ,somewhere convienient or other wierdness where filling a can with an otherwise unprofitable comodity ,like hay, then drives a whole industry driven by water cost and the return value of cans, or scrap metal, and who knows what else, "half cut" cars, etc.
    - namibj 5mo ago
      Dropping containers at the consumer end isn't that bad, at least when they're empty they're not that hard to move back on a truck and there are plenty of uses above scrap value for a container in seaworthy condition. It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete. For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
      - Animats 5mo ago
        > It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed. There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them. Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers. But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it. The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.
        Animats 5mo ago
        Another common solution is to have the driver park and leave the container and chassis. Long-haul driver and tractor leave. Local movement is done with a "terminal tractor" or "yard goat", a mini tractor built for short trips. Those have a tight turning radius, good visibility, and low speed.[1] Like most buffering systems, it adds latency and consumes buffer space, while allowing more backlog. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_b2Rqe4Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_b2Rqe4Ug
  - Animats 5mo ago
    Yes. The Port of Los Angeles had a huge problem with empties when Hanjin went bankrupt. Everybody thought the South Korean government would bail out Hanjin, one of the largest shipping lines. There was no bailout. Port of LA finally shipped most of the empties to Fontana, CA, an inland city which exists mostly to move freight around. Three freeways, two rail lines, Amazon and WalMart plants, and an auto mall that's all truck dealers. If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area. Probably much less in quantity.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  We should standardize some "dual-container" format that can be formed out of disassembled containers.
marcosdumay 5mo ago
Complex systems are dominated by feedback curves, but people insist on analyzing them by the forward transmission curves. The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.
- jrave 5mo ago
  i think this is a fascinating comment that highlights how tactical successes may turn to dust in the medium and long term - and also how the intention behind an action may often not be relevant to practical effects at all, since transitive consequences override the primary outcome (if it was even well calculated in the first place). since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation
bix6 5mo ago
Externalities always felt glossed over in economics. So yes this business will ruin the river for everyone but please direct your attention to this chart and look at all that producer surplus!
- Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
  At a certain point, businesses and the world in general focus way too much on the directly measurable rather than the accountance of the immeasurable (downstream effects) Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages. As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river. But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.) I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
- dfc 5mo ago
  One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-problem.pdf https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...
  - cperciva 5mo ago
    They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place. If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.
strueman 5mo ago
[flagged]
tracerbulletx 5mo ago
I mean a move that will get you checkmated in one is bad, but there are a lot less of those than there are moves that will get you checkmated in 4 that are just as bad of an outcome for you.
alexey-salmin 5mo ago
[flagged]
state_less 5mo ago
I think you're over analyzing to some degree. The distribution and median outcome (1st through N order) was always negative for the course of action this administration has taken. The proponents try to sell people on the notion that this could all turn out great, which is way out on one end of the tail (e.g let's say 1% chance for sake of argument) for this action, and here we sit right around a median realized outcome for this kind of an intervention. I'd bundle all the N order effects up, then look how an aerial bombardment operation affects the liklihood of outcomes like the straight of hormuz being closed and/or controlled by iran, or iran surrendering the nuclear material and raising the white flag, etc... You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.
- munk-a 5mo ago
  It appears that right now the administration is fighting desperately to achieve an international state like the one had under the prior nuclear deal with Iran... the one Trump tore up because it had Obama's name on it. It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.
- bawolff 5mo ago
  Doing this analysis kind of requires knowing the probability of various events occuring. If we knew that, then world politics would be very different. Like its easy to say in retrospect something is obvious, but it rarely is at the outset.
dmurray 5mo ago
I was going to reply to this post with "surely shipping prices going up is a first order effect", but it's wrong. The real first order effect is the thousands of Iranian civilians (and fine, the hundreds of Iranian servicemen and the tens of American killers and their allies) whose families won't see them again.
23hartr 5mo ago
Since the U.S. knew that Iran was 100% going to close Hormuz since Jimmy Carter, who also refrained from taking Kharg island precisely for that reason, the second order effects appear to be desired. Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.
- drnick1 5mo ago
  The U.S. should form a coalition with the neighboring countries and "finish the job" once and for all. Negotiations with Iran will always amount to kicking the can down the road.
  - kergonath 5mo ago
    The US are incapable of finishing the job. That's what they tried to do in Iraq and look how it turned out. Iran is much more organised, has a competent secret police, is huge and better armed than Iraq was. It's physically impossible to carpet bomb the country like Israel is trying to do to Lebanon, so whatever you do you can be sure that there will be plenty of armed partisans. If the central power disintegrates, there will be a mess of Kurdish forces, the remains of governmental armies, and you can expect other interesting groups to show up along the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the US were lead by competent people with a decent strategy it would be worse than a long shot. And they are not. They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly. That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.
    - drnick1 5mo ago
      Destroying what remains of their missiles and drones and forcibly reopening the straits is absolutely possible. Estimates vary, but so far about 50% of their offensive capabilities seem to have been destroyed. Continue combat operations and destroy the rest. Escort ships trapped in the Gulf out. Maintain the blockade on Iranian ports to apply maximum economic pressure on the theocracy. I don't care about the internal politics of Iran. If the country descends into chaos or civil war, so be it. Hopefully, this may result in a collapse of the so called Islamic Republic. It is for the Iranians to decide what government they want, so long as it does not interfere with global and in particular U.S. interests.
basisword 5mo ago
The rest of the world suffering the stupidity of average the American voter.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
viccis 5mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect They absolutely are
lazystar 5mo ago
same here. gas is $6 in seattle; every business uses gas, explains the extreme cost of living. i'm going broke working for AWS.
- walrus01 5mo ago
  I'm also seeing a vast array of smug comments from Seattle and Portland area personal electric car owners who don't realize that $7/gallon diesel affects Everything they purchase. My message to the smug EV owners is: Go hang out by the loading docks for your local grocery store for a full business day and tell me how many all-electric semi tractor/trailer trucks you see delivering product.
- pibaker 5mo ago
  > i'm going broke working for AWS. I don't want to pretend gas isn't getting expensive but let's be real, Amazon pays almost 200k for entry level positions in Seattle. If you earn that much and still feel you are going broke, then you are not short on money. You are short on common sense spending and budgeting skills. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-engineer/locations/greater-seattle-area https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
  - lazystar 5mo ago
    been here 6 years, making less than that first top left number, 190k. idk what to do about it. every manager just gets a cheshire cat grin whenever i complain about it. i know i should boomerang but ugh.
    - jghn 5mo ago
      TC? Or base pay?
      - lazystar 5mo ago
        tc less than 190k. in this year's salary meeting thing in april, i asked my manager if they were trying to get rid of me lol.
jmyeet 5mo ago
The hallmark of anti-intellectualism is to insist something is far simpler than they've been told, dismantle it and then find out why it was the way it was. If you're an engineer, you've experienced something similar. You come across some code and scratch your head thinking "why did they do it like this?", spend half a day getting rid of it and then find out why it was the way it was. There are people who understand all these complex systems. We just insist on silencing them, even firing them and then listening to the dumbest people on the planet. You see this in startups too, even very large ones. I've now spent years watching people in crypto discover why exactly the financial system works like it does while spewing banalities about "disruption". Sometimes new thinking can be good but more often than not it's somewhere between ignorance and a scam, particularly when so much money is involved. Another classic example: orbital data centers. It doesn't have to be that way. The Chinese Communist Party is, despite the name, technocratic [1]. Xi Jinping's undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering. [1]: https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-in-china/ https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-i...
cyanydeez 5mo ago
ok, but is electing trump a 1st order or 4th order effect
e40 5mo ago
Unintended consequences are indeed a bitch.
ambientenv 5mo ago
Nate Hagens [1] often talks about a wider-boundary view and nth-order effects. I find it both informative and enlightening as well as thought-provoking. [1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/141-wide-boundary-news-5-8-26 https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/141-...

Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.

by mooreds 5mo ago

Man, the older I get, the more I think that second and third and fourth order effects are way more important than first order effects.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

metalman 5mo ago

and therefor you will not be surprised to find out that there has been a very recent dramatic decline in the asking price for empty containers in areas that are primarily devoted to imports, as the empty can is not worth the cost to ship it back.

throwaway85825 5mo ago
In this case it's because of the time it takes to load the empties because its more profitable to use the time sailing. Some ports have rules now forcing them to take back empties so the yards don't fill up.
- metalman 5mo ago
  which then leads to negative values for the cans, and makes it profitable for some trucking outfits to run "tiltload" container trucks, that can autonomously off load an empty can ,somewhere convienient or other wierdness where filling a can with an otherwise unprofitable comodity ,like hay, then drives a whole industry driven by water cost and the return value of cans, or scrap metal, and who knows what else, "half cut" cars, etc.
  - namibj 5mo ago
    Dropping containers at the consumer end isn't that bad, at least when they're empty they're not that hard to move back on a truck and there are plenty of uses above scrap value for a container in seaworthy condition. It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete. For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
    - Animats 5mo ago
      > It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed. There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them. Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers. But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it. The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.
      - Animats 5mo ago
        Another common solution is to have the driver park and leave the container and chassis. Long-haul driver and tractor leave. Local movement is done with a "terminal tractor" or "yard goat", a mini tractor built for short trips. Those have a tight turning radius, good visibility, and low speed.[1] Like most buffering systems, it adds latency and consumes buffer space, while allowing more backlog. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_b2Rqe4Ug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_b2Rqe4Ug
- Animats 5mo ago
  Yes. The Port of Los Angeles had a huge problem with empties when Hanjin went bankrupt. Everybody thought the South Korean government would bail out Hanjin, one of the largest shipping lines. There was no bailout. Port of LA finally shipped most of the empties to Fontana, CA, an inland city which exists mostly to move freight around. Three freeways, two rail lines, Amazon and WalMart plants, and an auto mall that's all truck dealers. If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area. Probably much less in quantity.
marcosdumay 5mo ago
We should standardize some "dual-container" format that can be formed out of disassembled containers.

marcosdumay 5mo ago

Complex systems are dominated by feedback curves, but people insist on analyzing them by the forward transmission curves. The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.

jrave 5mo ago
i think this is a fascinating comment that highlights how tactical successes may turn to dust in the medium and long term - and also how the intention behind an action may often not be relevant to practical effects at all, since transitive consequences override the primary outcome (if it was even well calculated in the first place). since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation

bix6 5mo ago

Externalities always felt glossed over in economics. So yes this business will ruin the river for everyone but please direct your attention to this chart and look at all that producer surplus!

Imustaskforhelp 5mo ago
At a certain point, businesses and the world in general focus way too much on the directly measurable rather than the accountance of the immeasurable (downstream effects) Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages. As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river. But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.) I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
dfc 5mo ago
One of my favorite readings from undergrad and grad school was "The Problem of Social Costs" by R. Coase. I'm sorry you think externalities are glossed over by economics, but Im excited to tell you that this is certainly not the case. Coase won the Nobel Prize in economics in large part for his work on externalities. They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. It's definitely worth a read of you wish economics paid more attention to externalities: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-problem.pdf https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...
- cperciva 5mo ago
  They don't hand out Nobel prizes for glossed over topics. Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place. If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.

strueman 5mo ago

[flagged]

tracerbulletx 5mo ago

I mean a move that will get you checkmated in one is bad, but there are a lot less of those than there are moves that will get you checkmated in 4 that are just as bad of an outcome for you.

alexey-salmin 5mo ago

[flagged]

state_less 5mo ago

I think you're over analyzing to some degree. The distribution and median outcome (1st through N order) was always negative for the course of action this administration has taken. The proponents try to sell people on the notion that this could all turn out great, which is way out on one end of the tail (e.g let's say 1% chance for sake of argument) for this action, and here we sit right around a median realized outcome for this kind of an intervention. I'd bundle all the N order effects up, then look how an aerial bombardment operation affects the liklihood of outcomes like the straight of hormuz being closed and/or controlled by iran, or iran surrendering the nuclear material and raising the white flag, etc... You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.

munk-a 5mo ago
It appears that right now the administration is fighting desperately to achieve an international state like the one had under the prior nuclear deal with Iran... the one Trump tore up because it had Obama's name on it. It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.
bawolff 5mo ago
Doing this analysis kind of requires knowing the probability of various events occuring. If we knew that, then world politics would be very different. Like its easy to say in retrospect something is obvious, but it rarely is at the outset.

dmurray 5mo ago

I was going to reply to this post with "surely shipping prices going up is a first order effect", but it's wrong. The real first order effect is the thousands of Iranian civilians (and fine, the hundreds of Iranian servicemen and the tens of American killers and their allies) whose families won't see them again.

23hartr 5mo ago

Since the U.S. knew that Iran was 100% going to close Hormuz since Jimmy Carter, who also refrained from taking Kharg island precisely for that reason, the second order effects appear to be desired. Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.

drnick1 5mo ago
The U.S. should form a coalition with the neighboring countries and "finish the job" once and for all. Negotiations with Iran will always amount to kicking the can down the road.
- kergonath 5mo ago
  The US are incapable of finishing the job. That's what they tried to do in Iraq and look how it turned out. Iran is much more organised, has a competent secret police, is huge and better armed than Iraq was. It's physically impossible to carpet bomb the country like Israel is trying to do to Lebanon, so whatever you do you can be sure that there will be plenty of armed partisans. If the central power disintegrates, there will be a mess of Kurdish forces, the remains of governmental armies, and you can expect other interesting groups to show up along the borders with Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the US were lead by competent people with a decent strategy it would be worse than a long shot. And they are not. They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly. That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.
  - drnick1 5mo ago
    Destroying what remains of their missiles and drones and forcibly reopening the straits is absolutely possible. Estimates vary, but so far about 50% of their offensive capabilities seem to have been destroyed. Continue combat operations and destroy the rest. Escort ships trapped in the Gulf out. Maintain the blockade on Iranian ports to apply maximum economic pressure on the theocracy. I don't care about the internal politics of Iran. If the country descends into chaos or civil war, so be it. Hopefully, this may result in a collapse of the so called Islamic Republic. It is for the Iranians to decide what government they want, so long as it does not interfere with global and in particular U.S. interests.

basisword 5mo ago

The rest of the world suffering the stupidity of average the American voter.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

viccis 5mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect They absolutely are

lazystar 5mo ago

same here. gas is $6 in seattle; every business uses gas, explains the extreme cost of living. i'm going broke working for AWS.

walrus01 5mo ago
I'm also seeing a vast array of smug comments from Seattle and Portland area personal electric car owners who don't realize that $7/gallon diesel affects Everything they purchase. My message to the smug EV owners is: Go hang out by the loading docks for your local grocery store for a full business day and tell me how many all-electric semi tractor/trailer trucks you see delivering product.
pibaker 5mo ago
> i'm going broke working for AWS. I don't want to pretend gas isn't getting expensive but let's be real, Amazon pays almost 200k for entry level positions in Seattle. If you earn that much and still feel you are going broke, then you are not short on money. You are short on common sense spending and budgeting skills. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-engineer/locations/greater-seattle-area https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
- lazystar 5mo ago
  been here 6 years, making less than that first top left number, 190k. idk what to do about it. every manager just gets a cheshire cat grin whenever i complain about it. i know i should boomerang but ugh.
  - jghn 5mo ago
    TC? Or base pay?
    - lazystar 5mo ago
      tc less than 190k. in this year's salary meeting thing in april, i asked my manager if they were trying to get rid of me lol.

jmyeet 5mo ago

The hallmark of anti-intellectualism is to insist something is far simpler than they've been told, dismantle it and then find out why it was the way it was. If you're an engineer, you've experienced something similar. You come across some code and scratch your head thinking "why did they do it like this?", spend half a day getting rid of it and then find out why it was the way it was. There are people who understand all these complex systems. We just insist on silencing them, even firing them and then listening to the dumbest people on the planet. You see this in startups too, even very large ones. I've now spent years watching people in crypto discover why exactly the financial system works like it does while spewing banalities about "disruption". Sometimes new thinking can be good but more often than not it's somewhere between ignorance and a scam, particularly when so much money is involved. Another classic example: orbital data centers. It doesn't have to be that way. The Chinese Communist Party is, despite the name, technocratic [1]. Xi Jinping's undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering. [1]: https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-in-china/ https://issues.org/perspective-the-benefits-of-technocracy-i...

cyanydeez 5mo ago

ok, but is electing trump a 1st order or 4th order effect

e40 5mo ago

Unintended consequences are indeed a bitch.

ambientenv 5mo ago

Nate Hagens [1] often talks about a wider-boundary view and nth-order effects. I find it both informative and enlightening as well as thought-provoking. [1] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/141-wide-boundary-news-5-8-26 https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/141-...