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Comment by graton | Hacker News Reader

Related: The mayor of Long Beach has increased the stacking limit.

https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...

It's weird to me that thousands of people work at the docks or with the trucks, and likely understand these problems quite well, but only after a silicon valley guy rented a boat to take a look and tweeted about it did it come to attention of the larger world.

Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?

It’s not clear to me whether the zoning regulation was changed in response to the Twitter thread.

Petersen is well thought of and his analysis and suggestions were copied by other industry types, for example Sal Mercogliano [1]. It also happened very soon after Petersen's suggestion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERqikbfoLnw

Happening so soon is actually a mark against it being related

Maybe not wanting to rock the boat, maybe just busy and not interested in waiting in line to speak to the manager.

Monopolies assume all forms.

My guess is they assume, mostly correctly, that their viewpoint will be ignored. Even if their boss takes them seriously, somewhere between them and whoever can make useful decisions will decide that some dock workers opinion can't be worth more than all the reports and data they themselves are working with... or something like that. So making a stink about it is a lot of effort and emotional labor for almost no upside and non-negligible chance of punishment. Why bother?

I don't think that the "low-level" workers' viewpoints are accidentally ignored, it's far more likely that the decision-makers at the top actively don't want change.

The upside? Minimal (for them personally.. huge for the country). The downside? Anything "bad" happens, they're fired or worse (e.g. a stack of containers collapses, killing someone). Very asymmetric returns.

On the other hand, Twitter publicity both forces them to do something (bad press if they don't), and also excuses them in case anything goes wrong ("well I thought it was a bad idea but they pressured me to do it"). CYA in action.

Because if enough people do it, that might make a difference.

I guess you've never been paid some low multiple of minimum wage.

You have no incentive to make anything efficient.

Longshoremen make a lot of money!

And bless them they deserve it.

Do they? Why? Do you have evidence?

Longshoreman make an average of $147,000/yr + benefits in the Bay Area.

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/dock-workers-u...

Didn't realize this. In a lot of other places the hourly figure is closer to $30-50 an hour.

There is a lot of inertia everywhere. "This is how we do it" is an attitude that is everywhere and you do something for 30 years then run the show, you keep doing it how you were trained to do it when you started. There are also things like company and regulatory standards of how to do things that aren't necessarily based on anything that regularly gets re-analyzed.

An outsider taking nothing as granted can often find big inefficiencies.

They are most likely all blind men feeling an elephant. They can all see some inefficiency but they don’t necessarily have a great view of what upstream problem is causing it or who to call to fix it.

I would imagine most companies don’t sufficiently reward low level employees pointing out and proactively fixing inefficiencies.

Dock Workers don't have the ability To change city regulations. For all we know, the organizations have been pushing for this change for decades.

As far as we know, the mayor only changed this policy because a tweet told readers to contact the mayor. A dock worker has the ability to tweet or contact a journalist.

I would argue that is our duty to our fellow humans in society to know about the issues and our proposed solutions.

But isn't this exactly what makes Silicon Valley so effective? A willingness to challenge the status quo and rapidly iterate.

Move fast and break things doesn't work so well with things like the supply chain. We don't have a good qa env.

> Move fast and break things doesn't work so well with things like the supply chain.

What about when it’s already almost completely broken and getting worse? That’s precisely when you need creative out of the container thinking.

When dealing with a system like the global supply chain, where the potential blast radius for issues is massive, it doesn’t matter how much incentive there is to fix the problem when the incentive to not make the problem worse by accident is so, so much bigger.

Breaking chains of stupid decisions is great.

But there is likely little or no understanding of what those decisions are or why they were made. Ask why the fence was put up before you start tearing it down. I agree the problem is huge, but the solution is unlikely to come from some outsider making a basic change. That change is likely to ripple into an even worse situation when we run it against the one testing environment we have.

Move slow an break things isn’t exactly working out so well is it?

I mean it was a government regulation, there isn't much they could do about it. I assume the 2 stack limit was due to safety reasons, like maybe they are more prone to collapsing like dominoes when stacked too high, and a good wind blows, I don't know. It makes me think of the egg crate challenge a little bit.

It's good that the mayor made a temporary adjustment and was allowed to save face. Hopefully it will make a difference.

Allegedly, the 2 stack limit was put in place for aesthetic reasons. On the ships they're stacked way taller than that!

Checks out, this is CA after all. NIMBYs are all about their sight lines. Couldn't possibly let a stack of containers diminish their view.

Not In My Expansive Front Yard View Of The Ocean Untouched By Globalization

NIMEFYVOTOUBG

No. It was entirely for esthetics.

I live near a port. Containers are regularly stacked five high.

It’s almost certainly because the tweet caused a bunch of people to call their elected representatives and exert political pressure. A couple dock workers aren’t going to be able to drum up that kind of publicity.

Ah Silicon Valley guys, saviours of the world.

Or they have asking for it for many years and it was ignored until the president put a spotlight on LB harbor and the mayor scrambled to look like he was doing something. Time may tell if it has any impact. At worst, the mayor end up being able to say they tried something. At best it helps resolve the problem, or the problem resolves itself over time and they can still claim a credit

You’re spot on. The fact that Mayor Garcia didn’t take any action on something he SHOULD intimately understand until a Silicon Valley outsider told him what to do is ridiculous.

Yeah, it is part of a familiar trope that a Silicon Valley outsider with sharp wits can discover one simple fix that hundreds of trained logistics/operation engineers missed.

Because that SV guy has a whole PR aparatus at his disposal aimed at creating public pressure for action. In our attention economy this gives you superpowers.

Every now and then someone given superpowers would be the ideal solution in an emergency rescue situation.

From what I've seen Petersen has taken a vast reserve of capitalist wealth and leveraged it by investing into his people to progress toward his objective of a more streamlined freight experience.

He seems to be participating seriously in a continuous improvement of his own expertise on this focused objective like no one else with those kind of resources at any recent time.

His proposed temporary container yards have got to be very urgent.

The inherent real estate problem has always loomed large. The "Just-In-Time" supply chain approach has factored out all but the minimal inventory buffers as it proliferated over the decades.

Now JIT can not be executed and there is little alternative remaining.

The storage & warehousing acreage & square footage were agressively downscaled over the long term and the increasing dependence on a fully enabled pipeline moving at maximum flow has been an ever-growing consequence.

Expediting cargo is a task that can not be fully accomplished within a single lifetime, so you really need to start early and never quit if you want to make worthwhile progress.

I think Petersen's gotten better every year and has unique abilities to offer in this crisis.

He would probably make a good supply chain tsar about now.

And he's making himself available, people should jump on it and give him a try.

Each day of delay is another day longer before a stagnant economy can begin to recover.

Coming from a marine cargo entrepreneur after 40 years of much-needed continuous improvement indeed.

Narratives about who is listened to

Theories about entrepreneurship for example are entirely based on the actions of financially successful entrepreneurs. There’s nothing to prove they are more rational or somehow superior…but that’s who gets to build the narrative.

I think there may be a slight causal disconnect between “guy tweets” and “stuff gets fixed.” I’d bet stuff got fixed after lots of stakeholders complained!

Almost all blue collar workers I know complain about how clueless their management is to operations on the ground. A complete "failure of common sense".

Bottom up communication isn't effectively or really in place because command comes from the top down. In many cases their boss and bosses boss never even worked a yard or understand the fundamental realities at the bottom.

It seems a lot more simple than that - Ryan is a "celebrity" and has a 66K twitter followers. His tweets generated a lot of exposure so the politicians are happy to use it. I'm sure there was some meeting between trucking companies and the mayor sometime with great recommendations form the truckers, but everybody just said "we'll check it" and didn't do a thing. Now with media and twitter exposure it's hard to avoid giving answers.

If Ryan's tweets had anything to do with this, my respect for him just went through the roof (and my disappointment with people actually tasked with figuring this out diminished proportionally).

Wait what? They are/were only stacking 2 containers high? When I google on how another big port is doing it, or example Rotterdam, I get a 5 year old video of 5 high stacks and a fully automated system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60Fz5gZRX9c.

What's going on in Long Beach?

The rich have disproportionate control of government?

As I understand it, the two-high rule never applied to the Port of Long Beach, it applied to various other intermediate container depots throughout the city. These are not owned by the Port, but by various trucking companies, and it is these trucking yards where containers are now allowed to be stacked higher.

This is important because the Port is not receiving empty containers, but trucking companies that have empties on truck chassis need somewhere to put that empty before they can get a new container. Allowing additional buffer for empty container storage may allow the current traffic jam to resolve itself.

What is the reason for limiting it to 2 when clearly it can be 4 or 5?

The area around the port of long beach is rather dense residential, so in order to preserve views the city limited the height of container stacks.

> "These provisions, which have been in effect for many years, were established to address the visual impact to surrounding areas of sites with excessive storage."

https://longbeach.gov/press-releases/city-of-long-beach-stat...

Makes sense thanks

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