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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Erm, then pay some truckers to haul empty containers to some space in the middle of Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Idaho, Iowa, etc.?

If the problem is empties clogging things up, move the empties. America isn't exactly short of empty space without zoning restrictions. In a week, the yards will be empty.

This seems like a problem that money can solve. The fact that money isn't solving it is extremely suspicious.

Either it means that we don't have enough truckers because they're treated and paid like shit or it means that somebody is making money on things being clogged.

Why are the capitalists all running to the government to break regulations instead of throwing money around? Things that make you go "Hmmmmm."

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> Erm, then pay some truckers to haul empty containers to some space in the middle of Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Idaho, Iowa, etc.?

The empty containers don't need to be trucked to Arizona, they need to be shipped back to China so that they can be filled with more goods and shipped back to LA. There are fewer goods flowing from the US to China though, so they are piling up in LA. Either the price of shipping from US to China has to fall so much that it becomes profitable to ship all these containers back completely empty, or the government has to subsidize the shipping cost - but then which government should even be responsible for paying for this?

Too bad they didn’t switch to collapsible containers: https://www.shiplilly.com/blog/collapsible-shipping-containe...

That would handle the trade imbalance by allowing more empties to fit on the way back.

Or the USA could actually make something worth shipping. But that’s probably a lot harder than replacing a worldwide fleet of existing non-collapsible containers.

Boeing aircaft and college educations, which are probably the two largest US exports to China, don't fit in shipping containers.

The US exports a lot of agricultural commodities to China. Those used to all be shipped in bulkers but now some are loaded into containers.

https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peo...

> The top export categories (2-digit HS) in 2019 were: electrical machinery ($14 billion); machinery ($13 billion); aircraft ($10 billion); optical and medical instruments ($9.7 billion); and vehicles ($9.1 billion).

Love the ingenuity, but isn’t needing to develop new technologies to overcome a severe trade imbalance just ignoring the larger problem of why there is such lopsided trade? It can’t be healthy or long-term sustainable for the US to basically stop manufacturing, can it?

> Either the price of shipping from US to China has to fall so much that it becomes profitable to ship all these containers back completely empty, or the government has to subsidize the shipping cost

What's happening is that everybody is playing chicken waiting for somebody else to blink and foot the bill for the fact that everything is out of whack. Why should the government break this logjam instead of the companies that sucked up all the profits over decades from this arrangement?

Since nobody is going to risk spending money, breaking the logjam, and then having their competitor who isn't spending the money benefit, they would rather all hit the wall simultaneously. Fine. But don't come whining to the electorate and elected representatives to fix problems that corporations, themselves created when it bites them in the shorts.

Spend some of those record profits, assholes, and the problems will get fixed.

Socialism for the rich; capitalism for the poor. Same old, same old.

Did you not read the entire thread above your post?

The issue seems to be a combination of factors exacerbated by the state of california.

Existing regs restricting storage space. Existing regs restricting available trucking stuck holding containers Existing regs disincentivizing labor or new owner operators.

All this is compounded it seems, by existing contracts limiting pay wait time.

So when wait time increases, due to 1)no space, (2)no trucks, and (3) no labor... mostly due to circumstances directly attributable to the state then nothing moves.

Where are the corporations making money off this ? Can you name them?

The legal environment is not new to the companies operating in it. Nothing in that environment prevented them from preparing properly, yet they didn't.

Example for why your argument doesn't hold water: one of the issues mentioned in the thread is that trucking companies can only stack containers two high in their yards. Well, what do you think would have happened if that regulation had been changed to six high (one of the suggestions) 20 years ago? Trucking companies would now own or lease smaller yards!

GP is absolutely right that the capitalists need to foot the bill of clearing this mess.

It does seem to me that government should step in to resolve the Gordic knot of coordination problems discussed elsewhere in the thread, but the companies who screwed it up in the first place need to be stuck with the bill. That's part of the deal of capitalism: you get the chance of profits, but also the risk of losses.

>Erm, then pay some truckers to haul empty containers to some space in the middle of Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Idaho, Iowa, etc.?

Would that just cause a container shortage at the other end of the supply chain?

There needs to be more buffer real estate for containers. One of the thread creator’s reccs was to do this using cargo trains.

But you are right as well. We need to send more containers back to East Asian ports where they are most commonly filled. The problem is that ship owners make more profit by sending back container ships immediately without waiting for them to be restocked with empty containers.

There needs to be a legal or contractual requirement for shippers to lose some economic opportunity cost to help rebalance the supply and demand of containers.

This was already one Rx from the Twitter thread.

Also not all “capitalists” have aligned incentives. Everybody wants shipping to be efficient except those who profit from this inefficiency.

Specifically ship companies are making huge profits by racing to the big East Asian ports right now. So much profit that they don’t want their ships to wait in US ports for empty containers to reload. This asymmetry makes it even more profitable to rush back to those East Asian ports. Snowball of profits for them at the expense of everyone else.

This is a Tragedy of the Commons situation. It is a great purpose for government intervention.

Not at all Tragedy of the Commons.

In 40 days (one round trip from US to China), the system clogs and the boats can't go running off because they can't unload at all (happening now). At this point the system stabilizes. Sure, it's not a stable point that the shipping companies want, but it is stable.

Capitalism has a way to deal with this. It's called "rising prices". However, business managers have gotten far too used to never suffering any consequences for their decisions. The moment actual responsibility comes down the pipe they all start whining and running home to Daddy (the government) for help.

Let the ships sit. When the shipping companies lose more money with a sitting ship that can't be unloaded than they gained racing back without empty containers, it will correct.

That’s idealistic.

Do you think people will just tolerate hyperinflation that would cause and sit quietly in line while waiting for overpriced food staples? Riots. Public disorder. Maybe even rebellion against the government.

Governments get involved because the individuals in that government fear what happens when we reach the tipping point where basic society breaks down.

I think we forget that 95% of all goods (or their inputs) are shipped and over 20% of GDP directly relies on shipping. That’s a massive gamble that the same people involved in the supply chain that is suffering from massive entropy can magically reduce that entropy after it snowballs.

I’m not sure if waging a siege on ourselves is a free market solution here.

Won't there be an equilibrium at some point? Empty ships rush back to Asia but can't load in Asia because all the containers are back in the US. Hence they will sit idle in Asia not earning any money and ships that do carry empty containers back will be rewarded because someone will pay to ensure trade is not blocked in Asia

in a closed system, at some point the containers stuck in the US would become valuable enough in china that the ships would prioritize shipping them back, yes. but it's not a closed system, the chinese are building new shipping containers as fast as they can, and every new container they build lessens the demand for those containers stuck in the US.

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