Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
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Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (225 comments)
The zoning change is for TEU storage outside the port. The port itself was not subject to that rule.
The Port of Los Angeles is a landlord and is not directly involved in operations.
Private companies, such as APM, EverPort, and others, rent piers/berths and are responsible for the actual operations and logistics.
Some speculation: recently I’ve heard of some ships not even waiting to load empty TEU’s as they normally would and instead they are immediately leaving for China, literally empty. I suspect this behavior is what turned the congestion we had before into the quasi deadlock we have now.
If this is happening, what would be the consequences of allowing even more TEUs to be stored on the US side?
Hopefully we’re doing better than that!
Going back empty works once. Or more times if you're headed to a different market, I suppose.
But why stop there? Ryan suggested 5 courses of actions, and made it clear that we need to act on all of them at the same time. So far only the first of those 5 steps have been acted on. The rest of the steps are likely either bad or the people needed to act on them are doing that NIH bullshit (which I can understand to some extent given how much negativity is being directed at Robert Garcia). But negativity or not, if those are good suggestions, we need to act on them. Would love to hear any thoughts on how to mobilize support for quickly validating/invalidating those suggestions, and then acting accordingly.
If it's possible to cancel brands and individuals, it should be possible to do the same with politicians as well. I hope it doesn't turn out that we care more about certain individuals' views than the prevention of a nationwide and potentially even global crisis [1].
[1] From Ryan's tweet:
> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail. The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it's getting worse not better every day that goes by..
It seems odd that no one has tried this, yet as someone who has worked in a factory, I can easily believe that the absentee managers have no idea what the hell actually goes on among the workers.
You need to spend significant actual time, to the point of working actual shifts, to get a clear picture of things sometimes. People have weird and wrong notions of what efficiencies matter sometimes, for example. Shaving a second off an action repeated thousands of times daily matters, shaving a minute off of a rare task that's not even done every day matters far less in comparison.
In a democracy, we are the government. People who know how to fix problems need to engage with their representatives, not just hope they’ll figure out freight logistics problems because they have a law degree.
<snip>
1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days.
This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now are just storing containers on wheels. Those chassis can immediately be taken to the ports to haul away the containers
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
3) Create a new temporary container yard at a large (need 500+ acres) piece of government land adjacent to an inland rail head within 100 miles of the port complex.
4) Force the railroads to haul all containers to this new site, turn around and come back. No more 1500 mile train journeys to Dallas. We're doing 100 mile shuttles, turning around and doing it again. Truckers will go to this site to get containers instead of the port.
5) Bring in barges and small container ships and start hauling containers out of long beach to other smaller ports that aren't backed up.
This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don't need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.
We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.
</snip>
I wonder if some governmental bureau tasked with coordinating this market hasn’t been shuttered in the last couple years to some lobbyist great success…
The other measures proposed (forcing railroads, national guards etc) are of course of a different order, but it's not clear they'd be necessary if the build-up of empty chassis at the port (because offloading in the nearby area wasn't allowed) never materialised into a massive bottleneck, because zoning laws were deregulated.
One could also argue that it’s still a brittle, overly lean organization if a landscape regulation tipped it into service disruption.
Presumably the port would've architected its systems to work within all sorts of constraints, come they from physics, or business, or regulation. The fact that one of them can easily be relaxed is immaterial to their failure to account for it in the first place.
Will the port's insurer cover damages when a 3 or 4 high stack falls?
But yeah, you do have a point.
Are we going to blame driving time restrictions next?
2) Bring every container chassis owned by the national guard and the military anywhere in the US to the ports and loan them to the terminals for 180 days.
Loan them sounds like they want them for free.
What's the plan for the military to move containers during the 180 days if all their kit is loaned out?
Not for the world economy, but for Chinese economy, as it's what US companies make the most of their money.
What the current crisis shows the most is that just how close the US economy coming to a sever crisis, from well.... just missing the shipment of holiday toys from China.
If China can inadvertently move US markets through just messing up with shipping toys, imagine how bad a deliberate economic sabotage action would be.
So this is not just a matter of Chinese factories not being able to sell their goods (in which case their government will take care of them as they have done in the past). This is about US e-commerce businesses who can only fall back on their banks (and which are far more unpredictable in their generosity).
Ryan's idea to mobilize the military resources would have been a no-brainer and would have already happened in at least two countries I have lived in before.
One final detail - this may seem like a recent issue, and most of us only heard about the problem sometime in early October. In reality, the industry press has been covering this since at least March [1], when the backlog of cargo ships at LAX started exceeding 20 (it's supposed to be well below that). Now it's at over 70. So it's been 7 months with practically no action until a week ago. I am a Democrat, but this is not going to bode well for Biden.
[1] https://edisonreport.com/latest-update-on-the-global-shippin...
I think you have just affirmed what I have said.
USA is world's biggest, but an extremely fragile economy which is full of businesspeople too used to bailouts from a caring government. It's a bigger miracle it never seen major crisises from "encounter with reality" before.
> We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale of a problem, and as Ryan pointed out, the only way to fix this is to unblock the ports. So if you're eventually going to have to do it, why not do it before millions of companies go out of business as opposed to only after that's happened?
I think it's essential in a capitalist market economy to let the market forces to do their job, and for Lehmans to pop from time to time. USA faces such a big crisis during every new "Lehman Brothers moment" exactly because it never lets its Lehmans fail.
Now, imagine China will embargo USA next time... Trade with USA is just a few percent of China's GDP today.
I did intern in BestBuy 10 years ago, and I know what insane portion of profit comes from around Xmass. I honestly want the US to really fail here, and fail hard, and have a Lehman moment again. It's vitally important for the US to finally have such crisis to turn the ship around, pun intended.
Or the next time, spoiled US kids will find out that there are way worse things in life than missing their new iphone 15 for christmas.
The only way we can get better at long games is to examine what's driving our current weakness in that area. My guess is that it has to do with the dynamics of presidential terms. To get re-elected, you have to achieve something big in the first four years, and anything big will piss off the other half of the country and will make you lose the congressional elections at the end of your second year. So the solution is to either do something big that buys you favors with both political parties (literally nothing comes to mind), or to get it done in the first two years. China, in comparison, has been plotting the takeover of Taiwan for decades, and is very strategically, step by step, moving in that direction. If this was the US, the only option would have been a quick invasion or a start-stop effort every 4-8 years.
If the US fails really hard here, many innocent people will lose their jobs, homes and lives.
So the idea that this is all about the drop shippers is laughably wrong. But throwawayboise does bring up a point that's worth discussing - what kind of crises are "beneath" the role and purpose of the US military? Is their role just to blow shit up, or is there an economic and humanitarian angle there as well? For example, if an earthquake took out an entire metropolitan area, would it be beneath all those soldiers to dig for human remains, or would they leave that to whatever the more appropriate branch of public service that would be (even with the understanding that joining forces would save more lives)? I know that in the other two countries I've lived in this would be a silly question - of course the military would roll up their sleeves. In the US, I genuinely don't know. The author of the above comment is obviously ignorant when it comes to economic matters, but when it comes to military matters, I wouldn't be surprised if his tone resonated with many others.
FWIW, Ryan proves that not everyone in the US thinks like that, and certainly all the people from the international community I've met wouldn't agree with throwawayboise either.
Generals make a living from becoming lobbyists for the complex, and without a commander in chief keeping them in check, it's business as usual. And obviously they can walk over Biden all day to do this.
Can't believe I am giving government delays a pass here... but I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth when we get near-immediate action from people who aren't known for solving problems with any sort of urgency.
EDIT: And I'm even a customer of Flexport!
Uncontrollable positive feedback explodes. Uncontrollable negative feedback freezes.
But since the general public thinks of positive as good and negative as bad, he's using the word "negative" to describe a bad situation. This kind of thing bugs me because I know control theory, but it's really in the same category as "Is Program X an X11 client or an X11 server?"
Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2]
A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing trucks an easily accessible container to deliver, rather than a specific container that has to be retrieved. There's an app for that. This is being implemented by IMC, the largest marine drayage company in the US. They say they're already up to 8 high stacks in the LA area. The higher the stack, the longer the retrieval time.
"This keeps drivers moving and productive, even if they don’t know the exact load they’re getting or the delivery location." So it's really dumping the sorting problem on drivers. They have no idea where they're going next. There has to be some way to separate containers by approximate location to make this work, so a driver knows how far they're going to be asked to take the thing.
How well this all works depends on how well the software organizing the stacking works.
[1] https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflow...
[2] https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shi...
My understanding of what the Flexport CEO said in their twitter thread was that the best example of the problem is the haulage company that's keeping its driver count * 3 empty containers around on-chassis (which I think means on wheels), just sitting in their parking lot, because they have nowhere to put their empties, because they empty-storage is maxed out at the 2-height capacity. All/most of the haulage company's chassis are now tied up with empty containers, which prevents them from being able to go pick up filled containers to ship, which stops the full containers from getting picked, etc.
When Tesla needs space urgently, they put up a tent. When the military needs to start a war they manage somehow to unload their tanks.
Come on, USA, we still know how to do stuff...
And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
Heck, budget the possible fines into your business plan for holding the containers. Delivery firms already budget for tickets from parking illegally to make deliveries. This isn't so far removed from that.
If you can honestly say, "we fixed the problem and didn't hurt anything with our temporary fix" then the permission people who come along afterwards to fine you are going to have to think seriously about suspending the fine that your solution drew. Don't do anything criminal, but accrue a bit of civil liability: it will either be a cost of business, or will be forgiven.
As for contracts: If I am obligated to return the containers, but I dump them for a few weeks on a disused airstrip, I'm still going to, eventually, fulfill my contract, when the port allows me to.
No excuses. Fix problems, don't brainstorm reasons not to fix then.
I can, if they get paid for it. Rent should be reasonable for short-term storage and unreasonable for long-term.
There is also a huge amount of land at Palmdale airport, 1h30 north of Long Beach.
A glut of empty containers is a stupid problem, but the solution can be stupid easy, if we choose to make it so.
It's stacking restrictions for empty containers in lots that are not at the port, I believe.
> on-chassis (which I think means on wheels)
In container shipping, a chassis is basically a trailer that accepts a container and can be pulled by a semi-truck or one of the utility vehicles they've got at the port to move things around.
If a chassis comes back with an empty container on it, and the port isn't accepting empties, you've got to leave it somewhere before you can grab one of the many containers sitting at the dock that have goods waiting to be delivered. If the dock yard is full of containers, they can't unload the boats. If the can't unload the boats, they can't load outgoing cargo including outgoing empties.
Stacking empties higher, especially away from the dock may free up chassis that frees up dock space, etc, that gets things moving and then the empties can come back. But, that only works if the storage yards have the equipment to stack higher; which probably they don't all have. The thread mentions a limit on stacking empty containers, but the zoning limitation is for stacking any containers, it's just that outside of the yards at the port, you tend not to store full containers. Once you get those on a chassis, you want to get them delivered either to the final destination or a storage yard at another port or a train depot, etc. Empties are a bit different; you'd prefer to load filled containers most of the time, so it makes sense to stack some empties from time to time; also a trucking company may want to have some empties to take to an exporter, etc.
Honestly, I had thought that both chassis and empties were fungible, kind of like with rail wagons. You count what goes where and if things are uneven over time, make some transfers to bring it back, but otherwise no big deal. But the thread says otherwise.
How does that work for containers?
Apparently, it doesn't. I would have thought at least some shipping lines would have gotten together to allow for offsets and settlements and all that to ease logistics. Maybe the lines don't want to coordinate or enjoy the semi-lockin that returning a container to the line's yard means it's most convenient to pick up an outgoing container from that yard, or don't trust their inventory with each other.
There are so many of them, that they couldn't find a picture of one of them to illustrate the article
I think they have a contract with a stock image provider, no photographer, and no one to seek out and license original pictures. Writer are probably asked to select an illustration in their stock image library.
I think it is a disgrace to journalism. The front picture is, with the title, the most important part of the article, do some effort FFS, or don't put a picture at all.
- Wikipedia
Is it just me or is that a shockingly low amount for those websites?
After Great Hill bought them for $20m -- presumably with a ton of debt, or something -- they then put an idiot named Jim Spanfeller in charge. Jim managed to get the entire staff of deadspin -- also a profitable, well run site -- to quit en masse. Said staff later started Defector and are running it as a coop, basically. Defector has survived a full year running on subscription fees and largely without advertising (or maybe entirely without?).
> It would also be interesting to know if it would be feasible to make the containers able to be disassembled and multi-packed into an empty container.
Not really; everything's welded together, and if you unweld and reweld, it's not going to be as strong. Plus that's a lot of labor. There are some collapsible containers, but those tend not to have sides or a top, which is not ideal for ocean shipping.
This is such an obvious thing. Do they really have people so incompetent they didn't think of that? Wow
I mean the rhetoric of free unregulated market is that the “homo economicus” would use total information and make fully conscious decisions.
Seems like some are withholding information to push other actors to make bad deals, externalize losses and generally speaking skirt from supply/demand dynamics.
If you don't want a delivery you don't bid on it or you set your bid high enough to make you want to take it. If no one bids on a delivery then the shipper raises the maximum they will pay and the process starts all over. Delivery location or pickup location a horrible place? Again, don't bid or bid high.
This is exactly the definition of a free market. Telling an independent that they must take the next load available without letting them decide if they even want it is not. That's being an employee. And shipping companies have spent years getting rid of their own fleets and drivers to push the cost to the individual drivers. And yes, there are a LOT of apps for this.
Odds are you could offer truckers a special premium flat rate to clear the blockage - but it wouldn’t be sustainable.
Do shoes need to cost $20 or do the workers need to be paid $20/hr to afford $60 locally produced shoes?
This begs the question: If container storage were the only bottleneck, wouldn't operators merely lease space further afield? There's plenty of space in Corona, San Bernardino, and environs that wouldn't take more than a 30 minute commute each way.
I can't help but feel like there are other confounding factors at play.
These are empty containers that are getting unloaded and stacked in order to free up the truck and its chassis for another load. The equipment for doing that stacking/unstacking is called an Empty Container Stacker [1]. These are different from a Reach Stacker [2] which will have much less vertical reach and are also different from Container Cranes [3].
[1] https://www.goldbell.my/material-handling-equipment/port-han...
and does 7,500 container moves a day usually, but not in this environment, they are doing like 60% usual capacity.
https://www.presstelegram.com/2019/09/11/sale-of-long-beach-...
How many cranes does the Port of Long Beach have? The berths at the Port of Long Beach's Pier G International Transportation Service terminal are equipped with 17 gantry cranes. Of those cranes, six have outreach of 19 containers across, seven have outreach of 16 containers across, and four have outreach of 13 containers across.
That's a side issue, though. As the number of containers in temporary storage increases, system throughput drops. So, once you get into overload, you're stuck there until you somehow reduce traffic or get more capacity. That seems to be the current situation.
It's not just at the US end. Shipify reports about 200 ships stuck waiting to get into Chinese ports.[3] (That article has a good overview of the situation.) At the China end, there's an empty shipping container shortage.
Back in July, US farmers were also complaining about an empty shipping container shortage.[4] Ship lines wanted to load up and get out, because the China->US rate is currently much, much higher than the US->China rate. So loading up containers at the US end apparently cost time and profits. The way empties are handled is driven by a system of economic incentives to not hold onto empties, and apparently that's not working well enough to get containers back to someplace useful. Someone has to pay to ship the containers back.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/imcs-mydriver/id1299727364
[2] https://www.imcsmartstacks.com/
[3] https://www.shiplilly.com/blog/container-ships-now-piling-up...
[4] https://www.farmprogress.com/trade/shipping-container-shorta...
To give you a taste, this is him 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjUs7o-TnjY. I remember watching that video the first time and being particularly struck by his insight on how entrepreneurial sales is different from regular sales [1], which I have been able to apply since then on a regular basis.
Yes. It would be great to have non-ideological leadership focused on solving practical problems instead of waging culture war.
It's interesting to note that we had a president like this, and that was Herbert Hoover. Hoover's claim to fame before being elected president was saving Belgium from starvation during WWI[1], the dude deeply understood logistics and had lots of connections so was able to negotiate with all the parties to get humanitarian relief and set up his own NGO. I picked this up from reading this biography of him.[2] Unfortunately he's become only associated with fumbling the Great Depression.
[1] https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1989/spring/h... [2] https://smile.amazon.com/Hoover-Extraordinary-Life-Times/dp/...
I've been meaning to read that Hoover biography forever.
I thought the humorous podcast American Presidents: Totalus Rankium had an excellent two-parter on him:
Part 1: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-64j34-f045e3 Part 2: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-zsqhc-f1a4af
That’s a legend that is in fact not true. He actually laid the ground for most of Roosevelt‘s „New Deal“ policies. These policies were likely ill-conceived and turned a bad recession into decade long depression.
https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-herbert-hoover...
There is no way for a food stamp program to generate a profit - that's entirely opposite from the point of it! Closer to home, you can tell when corners are getting cut for budget reasons that are penny-wise and pound foolish in a department at a businesses that treats departments that don't generate profit as a cost center, eg the IT department.
Businesses also have the luxury of firing poor workers. Government has no such luxury with their poor.
A CEO who built or run an actual value-adding business (e.g Flexport) probably has more integrity, intelligence and aptitude than the average lawyer-who-seeks-politics who very often turn out to be snakes.
Here's the thing - I've run startups that had a strong business, and those that haven't. While I would believe that my fundamental values never changed, I can tell you that I was far more tested in situations when we were running out of money than when we had 8 figures in our bank account. For example, how do you design a paid leave policy? With 8 figures in the bank, you really have to be a psychopath not to leaning on the generous side. But when you don't know if you can do the next payroll and the financial security of 100 people hinges on you hitting the next month's target... and then someone tells you about a family member who just passed away... Sometimes there are no good solutions, and you want to avoid getting yourself in those situations. So ironically, a hard-hitting CEO can sometimes lead to a better paid leave policy than a startup run by the most empathetic social worker in the world.
Happy hunting!
This whole situation would make a great "systems design"-level tech interview question!
Perhaps no one wants to ship them back because it's not economical?
* consumers were shifting spending from experiences that would've been COVID impacted (holiday travel, entertainment venues, restaurants) to online shopping
* industrial supply chains in Asia were the least impacted by COVID due to the relative lack of explosion in cases there compared to the rest of the world, so we are legitimately shipping more from there and exporting less
* a good chunk of the medical equipment that has been necessitated by COVID (e.g. masks) is made in Asia and that has made demand even more lopsided
* there was a ship backlog because COVID impacted how ships were getting unloaded, and at one point they weren't sending back ships with empty containers to reduce turnaround times, and now there are not enough containers in China and too many in the US.
Wendover Productions video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1JlYZQG3lI
My understanding is that the us doesn't send all that much back to china, and that it was a problem for a while but wasn't the bottleneck until recently.
Anyways, right now the bottleneck isn't shipping containers in China, that was an early pandemic logistics story.
Sounds absurd, but that's how it is.
In my case it's actually cheaper and much more flexible to build it as you would a traditional building. I live 300 miles from the nearest port, so that doesn't help. I also looked into the container sized temporary buildings used on construction site, and they are made from scratch (not from old shipping containers).
Yes. To quote JP Morgan's recent article "Dude, where's my stuff?"[0]:
> The surge in US import demand has led to a sharp rise in eastbound freight rates (see charts for Shanghai->LA and Shanghai->Rotterdam). However, westbound freight rates have not risen nearly as much, leading to an odd and problematic phenomenon: incentives for container owners to move them back to China empty to accelerate receipt of eastbound freight rates, instead of waiting for containers to be refilled to earn westbound freight rates as well. This further exacerbates supply chain issues, since US goods (i.e., grains) that were supposed to depart US railcars and warehouses for export remain in place, occupying space that US imported goods were destined for.
[0] https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional...
This sort of implies that it’s incredibly cheap to make the container, and/or it’s expensive to add that weight to the ship, and/or our ports are incredibly slow at loading empty containers onto ships.
Edit: e.g. chop them, pack the result into containers, and ship it to Asia to use as raw materials for new containers.
The answer to China being better at 99% of manufacturing isn't subsidies, it's efficiencies.
There are so many insane distortions happening because of supply crunch that subsidies and trade nonsense are actually starting to become irrelevant. (though I really do hope USA sorts their shit out, their China policy is fucking up the world for zero reason).
“When you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you.”
https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543795045183490?s=2...
The rest of the systems’ profits and sustainability seem to be secondary.
Perhaps it might make sense to ponder if this super-lean truck-centric infrastructure wasn’t running too close to its breaking point?
Might be a good idea for big-gov to lend a hand but also impose some top-down decisions like: long term you will be rebasing your logistics onto a railroad based backbone.
There, and you’ve magically created a couple thousands well paying jobs in infrastructure build and maintenance…
Also call some operations researcher to copypaste a couple tiered caching algorithms onto this mess.
Sure, randomly contrarian NIMBYs will fight to their last breath over anything, but one thing is an overhead train track, another is an oil pipeline with all the environmental hazards of an oil spill.
Of course, corruption and garden variety incompetence are a variable, but all large projects are vulnerable to that.
It's also not just contrarian NIMBY folks - there's plenty of pushback on putting lines through places for well-supported reasons. Nowhere is "the middle of nowhere." Someone lives there, often people who have been displaced to there because of bad policy elsewhere.
IIRC shipping recycled material was super cheap. So many empty containers. Might as well fill them with something.
Why aren't empty containers shipped back to China? Boat has to go back anyway, right?
Did the empty containers pile up because no one was willing to pay to ship them back?
Japan managed to arrest housing prices by moving zoning definition to national rather than local level, where local busybodies do not have the critical mass needed to do regulatory capture. Local areas can still decide what zoning to put where, but it's not nearly as ridiculously specific as American zoning can be. (e.g. you can sell lemonade out of your driveway, but not craft beer; or you can't run a hair salon, but you can run a daycare from your house, but only if you watch a maximum of five kids. etc.) California is now trying a similar tack by loosening zoning regulations at the state level.
Today the 2 container limit was temporarily suspended which essentially raises the limit to 6 containers - the max height at which most stackers operate. That's a 3x increase in empty container storage capacity which should give the system some wiggle room.
Tweet thread @ https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834
Or threadreader
A collection of workers who know their shit will always be much more valuable than an expert looking at graphs from his office if you know how to interact with them
Since it's on Twitter it's obviously partly a PR move but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened
> This is a negative feedback loop that is rapidly cycling out of control that if it continues unabated will destroy the global economy.
No, the global economy won't be destroyed because of backed up cargo ships in LA/Long Beach. Don't be ridiculous Ryan.
“Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data. It is a huge drag on Internet performance created, ironically, by previous attempts to make it work better. The one-sentence summary is ‘Bloated buffers lead to network-crippling latency spikes.’”.
Increasing buffer sizes (increasing the number of containers stored) can have perverse effects that make the situation worse - although it is obviously unclear what the effects in this particular situation could be.
Hopefully the Flexport CEO has read the situation and consequences correctly and his suggestion helps, although chances are it won’t help much. Alternatively it could exacerbate the problem e.g. stacking more than two high could slow down retrieval enough that it ends up being net negative because truckers are deadlocked.
Destroying empty containers is one type of dropped packet. Destroying or discarding container contents (e.g. food gone off, end manufacturer gone out of business, parts sourced elsewhere) is another kind of dropped packet.
Quite a few comments here seem to imply this is some obvious silver bullet to fix the problem, when clearly the problem is far more complicated than that.
I suspect that global supply chain actors follow very different dynamics from naive TCP congestion control implementations (i.e. additive increase, multiplicative decrease), of which Bufferbloat is an emergent phenomenon.
Also, the solution to bufferbloat isn't making the buffers smaller again (there is no generic "correct" buffer size as that depends on the end-to-end RTT, but this can vary across flows at a given choke point). What works is to either make buffers or the endpoints' congestion control algorithms aware of the phenomenon.
The downside at this point is that all the retail items for this holiday season won't be on shelves for christmas, so the damage done to brick and mortar sales industry has already been done
Just as the network can only have a relatively small amount of traffic actually "in flight" but lots can be stuck in buffers - so likewise only a relatively modest amount of containers can be on ships in the ocean.
You need a buffer or every little inconsistency reverberates and it gets out of hand, but bufferbloat shows how too much buffering makes things worse not better. If your metrics say (and some trivial metrics do) that the huge buffer is better, your actual experience contradicts that as everything feels like you're wading through molasses.
I don't have any relevant expertise to judge what the right metrics are for international shipping, but it certainly raised my eyebrows that "Let's make the buffer bigger" is seen as automatically a good idea.
Of course, a network buffer is very different from a container port's stacks, maybe this genuinely is going to make a huge difference. I think more likely it turns out to make no real difference, but can be portrayed as a genius idea that just wasn't embraced wholeheartedly enough to be effective.
In a way, it sets off more token ring-ish bells for me for some reason.
* The most capital intensive process of your business should be the bottleneck.
* When you find a bottleneck not of your making, overwhelm it.
Can you explain what this means? You find the bottleneck, then invest the most capital to improve it? Or whatever you're investing the most is the bottleneck? Or something else?
Say you run a factory making widgets, and the process has several steps. One of the steps requires a very expensive machine. That step is the most capital intensive. You want that machine to always be running at its maximum throughput. You do not want it to be idle waiting for some other step, otherwise that big capital investment is being wasted. When the machine is at maximum throughput then it is also your bottleneck.
Hence, you want the bottleneck to be at the most capital intensive process in the business, to maximise the productivity of your capital.
Some facts:
1) Container Height: 8'6". Add approx 4" for the lift slots on the bottom.
2) Forklift with 22' lift available from Sunbelt = 3 Container Height / 50% increase in yard capacity https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment/detail/1044/0550320...
3) Common "construction" type forklift with 39' lift from United Rentals = 4 Container Height / 100% increase in yard capacity. https://www.unitedrentals.com/marketplace/equipment/forklift...
And United has forklifts with even higher reach available.
Logistics can be somewhat thought of as a flow problem.
If demand far exceeds supply, and both supply and demand stay constant, the backlog will continue to get worse in severity over time.
For the problem to get better, either demand has to decline, or supply has to increase. However, the ability to expand supply seems limited in the short term. E.g. how long does it take to improve port throughput, or build new container ships?
Translating to the real world, think every ship stuck at the port removes another ship/containers from being able to pick up new goods which creates a self reinforcing problem.
Or thought another way, if the port can only unload 10,000 containers a day, and 20,000 containers a day are showing up, the number of backlogged containers will increase linearly with time.
Just yesterday we hit a record number of ships backlogged at the CA port, so I suspect this is exactly the situation we're in.
The free market will eventually solve by either supply throughput breakthroughs, or prices continuing to rise until demand destruction kicks in.
I want to lay a few stats out here. Retail sales has been ~20% elevated from 2019 levels since the pandemic started, primarily due to government benefits/stimulus checks.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS
Some is due to spending habits changing, but that's likely a smaller portion.
Check real personal income over the course of the pandemic.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI
Enhanced UI has ended, but it seems consumers are relying on credit now to maintain the same level of spending. It's not clear how long this will last, but it could be months, judging by the consumer loan data here.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CONSUMER
Note that many consumers paid off debts with the stimulus, is why this chart dips at the end. But we're quickly climbing back. Given lower interest rates, it's likely this can persist a few more months at current trend.
I suspect this will end organically whenever consumer credit is maxed out, and demand falls. But at the same time, wages are increasing fairly rapidly now... Is it possible higher wages can continue to support this new level of demand?
Probably in part, but not entirely.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI
This shows the insane increase in personal income over the course of the pandemic.
Many made more money on enhanced UI benefits than in their line of work. This is a known fact.
People in this situation have more propensity to spend the marginal dollar than higher income earners. Spending as a percentage of income inversely trends with level of income.
It's true that some percentage of retail spending is spending shifted from other categories, but given personal income data, I doubt that's the primary cause.
Also keep in mind, there was mortgage forbearance, rent forgiveness, and student loan moratorium (which is still ongoing I believe).
Those factors don't show up in income, but will shift expenses from loan interest to goods most likely.
Everyone's been stuck at home and purchasing consumer items that would usually be bought in bulk and supplied by employers, restaurants, etc.
Claiming it's government spending as the cause and not covid as the cause seems silly
Shifts in spending from services to goods can only alter consumption patterns so much.
Here is the Fed data on services spending: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCESV
As you can see, services spending is equivalent to 2019 levels today, while goods spending is 20% higher.
Consider the level of fiscal stimulus, monetary stimulus through lower rates (cheaper credit), and expense reduction (moratoriums, forbearance).
The sheer magnitude of demand stimulation is frankly obvious, even without digging into the data. Of course, the data backs up this theory as well.
Saying it's "covid" isn't saying anything at all. You have to quantify what you're suggesting. What is the mechanism that can explain persistently higher goods spending? The data doesn't bear out substitution as the primary mechanism, either way.
You seem very intent on not considering that fact when it's the most obvious factor by a wide margin, with all of the data supporting it.
Are you aware of the size of federal deficit spending in 2020/2021? The level of monetary policy easing leading to more credit availability to consumers?
It's intellectually dishonest to attribute elevated retail sales solely, or even primarily to the substitution effect
So you could say that it’s the deficit (e.g. the big tax cut from 4 years ago) that precipitated to this.
My point is that “stimulus equals problems at the ports” is likely an overly simplistic answer.
Before the pandemic we talked about unfilled jobs looking for computer programmers and other higher paid positions. How many people moved from 'social' jobs to ones that required more skills but pay more?
That is not how I remember the world in 2019.
https://datalab.usaspending.gov/americas-finance-guide/defic...
What does this mean? The individual containers are owned by carriers?
Could this be allieveted also by agreements between carriers (or a merger)?
Or is there some other reason containers are "sticky" to carriers?
I assume this is be the biggest risk factor that relates to lifting these limitations. The ground might not have the carrying capacity required for the loads that stacked containers can create.
Also, I'm sure nobody wants their view blocked by container stacks 5 high.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-container-ships-cant-sail-a...
PS: I am not based in the US
I’d wager the difference between the current price of the slot and the value of the container is less than I’d be willing to pay for the container.
Alternatively, institute two simple rule: “No ship may leave the port with fewer containers than it entered with.” or even “no non-full ship may leave the port”.
If that leads to a shortage of movable empty containers (but the port is still full of immovable empty containers), add a second temporary rule: “any empty container stored at the port for more than N days may be ‘towed’ (by a cargo ship of the port’s choosing) to some other port.”
There's a reason they're reusable: these are quite sturdy boxes built out of high quality materials (steel frame, corrugated steel walls, thick hardwood floors), otherwise you couldn't stack them 10 high with 28 tons of goods in each of them.
> 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.
[1] https://longbeach.gov/press-releases/city-of-long-beach-stat...
Zoning as practiced in the US may be the most pervasive, banal evil in the country. It kills our GDP[1], is a major driver of racial inequity[2], increases wealth inequality[3], and creates car-dependency which has horrible public health impacts[4].
Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that is.
But I’m not surprised to learn that LA area land use regulation is a major contributor to the dysfunction at the port.
1. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
2. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/18/the-local-case...
If that power is local, NIMBY always wins. These decisions must be made at the state level. Cities are way too fractured into myriad municipalities competing for jobs and "quality" housing.
I'd assume state power is with the same rich folks, so it's still NIMBY, but the state can force it on poor locals. Woooo
So basically zoning but pretending it's not called zoning.
No one is suggesting heavy industry should be allowed in a residential area.
It's completely reasonable to believe that a given person should be capable of quiet enjoyment of their property without having to purchase everything remotely close to it.
Really?
If a ship sinks at sea, and there's a deserted island nearby, does the first passenger on the ship that arrives on the island get to claim it and prevent anybody else from stepping onto the island? Do all those other people on the ship get a vote on who can step onto the island even if they were not there first?
Does owning a piece of property give you the right to veto a particular person purchasing the neighboring property because you don't want then next door?
We as a society have set up a bunch of rules as for how much control people get when they "purchase" property. It's not a single thing, it's actually a bundle of rights, and we have chosen a particular bundle, and that bundle can be changed, and has changed, over time. Zoning is a century old invention.
The idea that a single land owner in an area can block the sale of land to others is considered ridiculous by most. But how much more ridiculous is it then saying that somebody else can't build apartments on their land, particularly in areas where lack of housing has caused massive homelessness and and skyrocketing of housing prices.
Your suggestion is much worse. It'd require millions of dollars.
Doing this might also get yelled at by another activist group for buying up all the lands in the city.
A better alternative: we could just join city council and vote to reject any new building.
Not that I agree or disagree with NIMBY, it's just that your suggestion is much worse than the alternative for NIMBY-ists.
That is too far away. That may or may not happen
In the short term, the supply just increases significantly. Probably also the traffic and other infrastructure use.
Not that I disagree or agree with nimby. Just pointing it out because you only point out one side.
On the infrastructure side, its a much better deal for you as well, the combined value of all the property taxes from the apartment buildings will be way more than if that lot had remained a house. Since the road, water, sewer and electric lines are already in place nothing new has to be built. You benefit from all those property taxes coming in from the apartment building while the liabilities to the government have barely increased. The local government can use this new surplus of taxes to build new amenities for you.
For traffic, sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere. Once you have enough people in a place you could open small shops so they can hang out around the building rather than drive everywhere.
We can of course choose to say we want quality of life over economic comforts modern economy offers, until our holiday shopping is stuck in the ports because of viewshed(!) regulations.
The cold truth is if only very rich do that it won't affect much, if however everyone also starts, the economy will suffer and eventually as a result of that quality of life will also drop, everything becomes expensive and industry/jobs go to places that don't restrict as much.
Look at Healthcare in U.S. for stark example, insurance(tied to employment!) or proper care is a luxury is out of reach of for many people, that on average citizens here actually may be getting poorer care than many other countries with poorer per capita GDP . The best in world research or care is possible in the U.S. what is the use if people cannot afford it ?
> someone would come in and buy it off your hands for a huge premium.
This is still a far future.
> If your house was rezoned for apartment buildings and the demand existed
It's still better for you that only demand exists, but not supply.
To be honest, I doubt nimbyists are even interested to move. They just want their neighborhood to stay relatively the same (quiet, fewer people, safe, less crowded).
Either way we look at it, this kind of points are likely cons, not pros.
> sure but that's why you want to build more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and public transit so people don't have to drive everywhere.
I laughed a little, assuming this is a US city.
Again, I don't own a house, so it's not that I agree or disagree with nimby. But I can understand why nimby hates new buildings next to their houses. It's just a lot more cons than pros.
Extraordinarily wealthy people are going to be willing to pay a premium for a nice house in Manhattan, and extremely wealthy people are exponentially wealthier than moderately wealthy people, so you cant get that back in volume.
I'm not trying to argue in bad faith, but I genuinely don't see a solution where you allow people to move to areas of high opportunity without building more high rises (or just denser housing in general).
On the other hand, there's people without money who live in a neighborhood, who can no longer afford to live there. But they usually cannot simply "move somewhere else". Remember: they're poor (since they can't afford to even pay a property tax increase). They may not have good credit, not qualify for a loan, or even have any savings. They may already be stretched to the limit in terms of transportation to a job, or rely on their neighbors for child care. If they were a homeowner, it may have been the last vestige of generational wealth in their family, and they may simply have no money for rent or a new home. If they can rent, it'll certainly be much more than they were paying before, which may have just been their property tax. And if they are one of the millions of Americans whose parents brought them to this country in search of migrant work, they might not even have a birth certificate or social security number, or perhaps have difficulty speaking English.
For many disadvantaged Americans, being forced out of your home due to gentrification can leave you homeless, jobless, and broke, with no lifeline. No extended family to give you money or support, no savings to cushion rebooting your whole life. This has been a reality for decades, and I'm still surprised when people don't realize how much of a risk to human life there is here.
So.... if the question is "When will you let people build high rises and gentrify out poor people?", my answer would be: "When those same people who want to build high rises are forced to reconcile with the people whose lives they might destroy." If you want to gentrify a neighborhood, it should be a requirement that every single person who will be negatively affected by that move should be supported such that their lives won't end up in shambles just so a developer can get rich and some hipsters can have an expensive loft.
It's a choice between giving rich people a cozy pad, or letting poor people continue to have a livelihood and home. I just don't see that being much of a choice.
You also must have completely ignored my comment from above, if you don't build new housing those existing people are just going to get kicked out at an even faster rate if you don't build new housing. New housing acts as a sponge to soak up demand. The entire reason housing is expensive is because we don't build enough housing units in places people want to live. Your solution to not build anymore only makes it worse. Their rents will go up at an even faster pace. If you made building fast, cheap and easy then housing units at all price points would sprout up. Do you think if you don't build a high rise then wealthier people just go away? No they just look at the existing housing stock and buy up and renovate whatever is there. Houston has one of the most deregulated housing markets in the country and for this reason the average home hasn't gone up in price despite a fast growing population. You have to build to keep up with demand.
Renters and owners are different, in a gentrification scenario owners get very wealthy. Tons of poor families who own in poorer neighborhoods just received a massive cash infusion when a developer bought their parcels. Gentrification is one of the largest transfers of wealth from rich to poor in history. Your hypothetical of someone selling their house for a huge premium and then having nowhere to go doesn't bear out in reality, they've just become rich from selling. There are millions of stories of poor families buying cheap property on the outskirts of town decades ago only for that land to worth a fortune now due to development potential.
Renters on the other hand suffer the most from lack of building, you say when they get kicked out they'll have to pay more in rent. That's because housing isn't being built fast enough so prices are skyrocketing. When you have increasing demand and fixed supply, prices go up. The only way to keep rents stable is too build as much as possible. As for neighborhoods, places change. You can't keep them stuck in time for ever. Families move, economies grow, people age and we need to have solutions that adapt, not ones that pretend no changes are happening and try to keep everything in place.
So in short you still haven't provided a solution to people wanting to live in areas with jobs. These aren't rich people with vacation condos, these are people who come from areas without good jobs and want to live in areas with jobs. Please give me a solution that accommodates them or you're just plugging your ears. Trying to deny reality isn't a solution and will only make things worse.
Further, they unjustly accumulated that wealth by keeping people out of an area that is in huge demand. They are hoarding a scarce resource, to the detriment of sooooo many people. They didn't create that land, and they didn't create that wealth, and they are standing in the way of many many many times more people's right to take part in society.
This sort of person you are idolizing is actually a greedy villian, working to make the world a worse place merely so they can avoid looking at apartments or meeting new people.
The land became valuable because they are there and have done a good job maintaining their community. It's collective action of the community that has made it a good place to be.
Maintaining the community is what ensures that value remains. The rea question is why all these other people aren't willing to go build a valuable community
If they can push people out of houses regardless, theyre still going to go for the houses.
It'd be better to redirect demand elsewhere, so the wealthy people can build their own infrastructure and community rather than co-opting an existing one
Then, you're turned into a renter against your will, and also, everyone else needs to find new housing at the same time, so even before the new luxury units go up, the rent skyrockets.
Poor people with expensive homes can't defend their ownership. That takes paying expensive lawyers
If they leave immediately, rather than struggling to pay their massively increased property taxes, then mortgaging their house to keep up...
> by limiting property tax increases, California’s prop 13 is like a wealth SUBSIDY
...which apparently is a good outcome?
The GDP isn't a magical number that rises by making people suffer. It rises because NIMBYs are unable to force others to struggle by keeping them out of their economically advantageous land.
Similar land is all over the place
Eminent domain is another.
Why not worry about renters though? Are they not people?
Here in the U.K. taxes etc don’t increase with property value, and eminent domain isn’t frequently used. So I lack the context to understand why increasing property values mean people are forced to leave, especially when I look around London and see thousands of people who bought their council homes 50 years ago, and are now living in properties that are worth many orders of magnitude more than what they bought them for. Notably, none of them have been forced out.
As for renters, well the mechanism is obvious, I don’t need someone to explain that to me.
or it could mean a developer was very stupid to overbuild somewhere, or more likely it's a shell building used as a money laundering scheme for organized crime (See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/trump-ocean-... for one such building built by Trump; such buildings are also often structurally unsafe such as the building in Florida that collapsed which was also started as a money laundering front). I'm not down with this "the free market will make sure everything is OK" idea.
As for structural safety, no one is arguing to reduce building codes or safety regulations so that's just a straw man argument. If an apartment building is built unsafe then the government should have done a better job inspecting and enforcing/expanding their regulations, it's not really an argument to not build.
Also it’s unfair to ask the outside world around your house to be frozen in time because you bought a house at a period of time and setting which you liked.
Then you're stuck with an apartment complex you cant afford, and people who live there still have to drive 20min to get to amenities.
Source: I spent a hour in the morning, and an hour in the afternoon every day on the school bus, because development of apartments outpaced development of schools in my community.
Also, 20min to drive out to parks, because development of apartments outpaced development of parks and play fields and gyms.
Its just as unfair to force people to move because you don't like the way their community already is
Buy the land around you.
No need to restrict what others can do on their land or you on yours
Because people love zoning! NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood. It's the main reason zoning exists! Particularly the wealthy people who have the influence to make it happen, but the casual racists of the past century, and middle class yuppies of the past half century, have plenty to answer for.
But it's also clear that bad zoning (like the 2-stack rule) is also an artifact of poor system maintenance. When you design a system, you may put in certain constraints for safety. Over time the system changes, but the entire design and its constraints are not re-evaluated for each change. So eventually you have constraints that are completely out of whack with the current state. Doesn't matter if it's zoning or a microservice architecture, you're going to end up with crappy legacy rules that only get re-evaluated when things break.
State govts have to appeal to a much wider demographic.
Delegation of power to local authority is a central concept of American democracy. Do not throw that baby out with the zoning bathwater.
Rich people have the power to change the system but they want to maintain the status quo because they are rich and powerful.
It doesn't seem axiomatic to me that rich people will always exist (I'm not sure I even agree that poor people will always exist, despite believing that the guy who most famously said it was divine), and one of the things I have learned from working in an industry with very rich people is that merely being rich is enough to let you influence the rules of the game. If someone was able to argue for tiered zoning, you can pay people to argue for un-tiered zoning. If there's a law preventing you from influencing local zoning, and you're rich, you can go change that law just as easily as it got created. If there's a law requiring certain representation on zoning boards, you can go lobby that representation. If there's a law moving zoning to an "apolitical" government agency, you can fund candidates willing to politicize it. And so forth.
Making people not have that level of influence/leverage in the first place, hard as it might be, seems like the only viable solution.
Yes some of prefer zoning to "mixed" and "diverse" neighborhoods. What's wrong with me not willing to see a laundromat or an office building next to my house? Or what's wrong with me willing to live in quiet family-oriented neighborhood, where I can let children go outside alone since age of 6-7?
The problem with zoning, is that it isn't voluntary.
Zoning is assigned by democratically elected administrations. HOAs are restrictive covenants that are required for the purchase of a house. Every single thing identified as NIMBYism could be enforced by covenants, and keeping blacks and Jews out was literally their original purpose.
The first zoning law in the country was in Los Angeles in 1908. Part of the law was crafted to force certain businesses to relocate retroactively. It was crafted specifically to target the Chinese businesses, which were the laundromats. White people just did not want to live alongside Chinese people.
Redlining was a further practice of both bankers and zoning having restrictions which were explicitly racially motivated. Levittown, the first planned community in the United States, was very explicitly "not mixed" - it had racial covenants that restricted blacks or jews from moving in. The intent was to sell more homes, as they presumed white people would not want to live in "mixed" areas with neighbors of an undesireable race. That practice continued throughout planned communities and zoning laws all over the country. Many of those racial covenants are still in place today.
As an aside: you can let your children go outside in most cities. The moral panic over children getting kidnapped or abused if they step foot outside the house has been overblown for decades, and at this point is just a bizarre psychological trope of America.
If you’re okay with all of that as the price of you getting to live in an eternally quiet neighborhood (that your children will never have a similar opportunity to live in themselves due to zoning-driven real estate prices going far beyond what standard wages can afford), then sure. As long as you acknowledge what consequences your desires have on wider society, then you can say you think the price is worth it or that you don’t really care.
Zoning is extremely important. You should not be allowed to build a factory in the middle of a neighborhood next to a school.
There are certainly bad zoning laws but to say they are all bad is just ignorant nonsense.
I live in an area with occasional grandfathered-in exceptions to zoning rules. There’s a cafe run out of a house, and a butcher shop run on a residential street corner between houses. And its absolutely lovely!
I would have no problem with people making things (“a factory”) next to a school.
But replace cute cafe in your example with a landfill or a cement plant and see if it's still awesome.
This is why some zoning is good.
A factory isn't just "making things", though. There might be semi's coming and going making traffic more dangerous, there could be materials left out that are dangerous to kids if they wander through the wrong fence, maybe there'll be loud noises that are detrimental to kids' concentration during tests.
There's plenty of reasons industry is usually put outside of towns.
yes you would, if it were a large plastics manufacturer bringing large amounts of truck traffic and noise pollution and spewing carcinogenic PCB compounds into local atmosphere.
Zoning shouldn't be able to limit how high containers are stacked. If the facility operates in a safe way consistent with OHSA laws, the municipality should come in with a half baked zoning law that prohibits an otherwise reasonable operation from working effectively.
In my travels I have found that many communities across the US seem to generally fear use of height. I've always found this odd compared to rest of the world. Maybe it's just because land is cheap, but it does tend to mean that zoning laws, which try to codify standard practice, do end up overreaching on this particular issue.
Gigantic factories don’t want to be on small residential streets anyway because they cant fit the trucks in, so I think that argument cuts the other way - there are natural forces that deter that stuff.
if you're saying, "I was just arguing that one exact example, i didnt say natural forces help for all kinds of other problems that commercial zoning is meant to help", well OK, so I think commercial zoning is necessary for even a less-than-gigantic, but nevertheless distruptive, noisy, and polluting manufacturing facilities being built inappropriately close to schools and residential areas which may nevertheless still be on roads that are fairly or fully accessible by truck traffic". After all the truck traffic could enter in the front of the building's property and the back and sides of the building's property abut said schools and homes in any case. just go look at any commercial property with a lot of trucking and movement going on, it doesn't take much imagination to see how such a thing can and quite often does abut residential areas in any case.
Yeah, I was trying to say that factories specifically want good road access, so zones aren't necessary for that one exact example - your second paragraph. Sorry for being unclear with the phrase "that stuff," which seems to have sent us in the wrong direction.
You say they may be constructed in residential areas anyway - like, maybe the roads are good enough in a neighborhood. I agree with this, but then I'm not seeing what the problem with the factory is. If it's noisy, impose noise restrictions. If it's polluting, impose pollution restrictions. But I don't have any beef with people making stuff as a matter of course.
My position is mostly that zones are the wrong tool for the job. I wish we were more forgiving of mixed-use neighborhoods. If someone wants to run a 3D printing shop next door to a school, more power to 'em.
Make no mistake, the protection is more often than not for the local tax base. There more than enough examples of zoning changes approved because the change offers a multiple of new tax revenue.
of course we don't want anything carcinogenic or that dangerous anywhere where people live.
that doesn't invalidate GP's main point that schools need safe and calm environments.
There are alternative mechanisms for getting peoples' local preferences. City- or county-wide zoning maps rarely change, and - at least in Seattle - don't seem to respond to individual citizens desires or concerns in the way you imply. Are zones really the right tool for the job?
If you think that there are situations where preventing some kinds of things (say, a toxic landfill) from being constructed next to other kinds of things (say, a preschool) is desirable, and that there should be rules around that, and that most people want an elected government to make and enforce those rules, that ought to explain why the commenter you responded to said zoning is important. Even if you disagree with any of those clauses, I think you'd understand why they felt that way.
Instead, we have zoning, where we can say "build your factory here if you don't want to worry about residential complaints" or "build your house here if you don't want a noxious odor, noise, and constant semi traffic bothering you."
They also need heavy transport, which wears out road infrastructure much more quickly than light vehicles. Keeping residential streets largely clear of heavy traffic means you can focus repairs and replacements of road surfaces in the industrial areas.
Zoning isnt the only way to solve these problems, but it's a good one
But "zoning" attempts to resolve those issues by carving territory up, not by requiring a particular physical distance. Zoning maps have boundaries which still have the problems you describe, right?
It seems a lot more reasonable to target the specific issues (noise, air pollution, etc - the stuff you descibed) rather than attack this via zones.
Of course, you said a similar thing too, so we probably 80% agree. But can you explain the remaining 20% - when is zoning ever a good way to solve these problems?
Further - is there a case to be made for zoning aside from moving really heavy industry away from really residential neighborhoods? My city has dozens of zones, carefully segregating walkable retail regions from single-family homes, which doesn't seem so defensible.
Each area - typically a district, which is a sub-unit of a county or city - has a "local plan" which is decided democratically by the local government. "The plan does not provide specific guidance on what type of buildings will be allowed in a given location, rather it provides general principles for development and goals for the management of urban change."
All of this sits under a National Planning Policy Framework set by central Government.
Does a zoning law by any other name smell as sweet?
Instead the plans set out browser goals, such as designating a area as being primarily residential with an objective of reducing traffic and increasing walking.
If you can submit a plan that show what you want to build fits with outline, you can probably get permission. That means it’s perfectly possible to build a shop, or an office, or restaurant in the middle of a residential area. All of those things would increase the walk ability of the area, and reduce the need for residents to own cars.
Equally just because a plan doesn’t indicate you can build a specific type of building, doesn’t mean you can’t get permission for. But you would have an uphill battle to convince planners that deviating from the local plan is necessary.
The result is that pretty much all of the UK has mixed use development. You find residential area right next to light industrial districts. You find shops and restaurants scattered through neighbourhoods, and find flat in the centre of commercial districts (just don’t complain about the noise).
A default assumption that industrial processes are safe unless specifically regulated to say they're dangerous sounds like a shell game. The industry will chge between dangerous pollutants fast enough to be one step ahead of regulators, or pay regulators off to allow their pollutants.
It's right to assume all industrial work is dangerous
their smokestack blew over last year, and now i get headaches all the time since they haven't bothered to rebuild it.
even in san francisco, purported leftie paradise - there really isn't anything i can do about it.
assume that _every_ shop is cutting corners
Without this mindset, I doubt anyone would be so opposed to change zoning laws as cities grow/change
There is another root cause at work here. Temporarily suspending the zoning is just one of many short-term treatments to resolve a backlog.
I can't speak for everyone but in my case it is because I grew up in an impoverished community that had little to no zoning.
I experienced first-hand what the built environment is and the emergent behaviors of people are when there are no rules.
See, you live in a place that is nicely organized and, presumably, zoned and you think if we got rid of the zoning then everything would be just like it is now but with a few more housing units and maybe some delightful mixed light-commercial interspersed and wouldn't that be great!
In reality what you get is a welding shop next to your house. And llamas. And people disconnecting from city sewer because by god they're not paying for that when their home-built septic works just as well. And Grandma died and what do we do with her horse I know we'll keep it in the front yard.
If you had any exposure to anything other than nicely zoned locales you wouldn't romanticize the absence of rules.
For the record that is one common prediction up there, in my experience, but I’m trying not to make it personal. There is very often a sense of reciting recent research into whatever the hot topic is, and little depth or mastery of any of those topics. But they score well, so here we are debating what is said instead of what is substantive.
That gave me a chuckle.
Blanket dismissals of everything any commenter mentions without providing any basis or reason or counterpoint besides empty appeals to authority is no way to conduct a discussion. In fact, doesn't your criticism also applies to you and your dismissal of everyone else's comments?
But taking your criticism at face value, the only way that the scenario you've depicted becomes possible is if those in the know do not step in to point out misconceptions and clear up doubts. Nevertheless, even so experience does not grant omniscience or infallibility, not to mention that the expert beginner problem is also a thing. In that case, an inability to refute points or offer counter-evidence, accompanied by this need to fallback to various types of appeals to authority and seniority, might actually indicate a discrepancy between actual and perceived competence and insightfulness.
The point is that if you happen to believe some posts are not right or fail to take into account critical aspects, why not call it out? I mea, you're already taking your time to write relatively lengthy posts complaining and vaguely casting doubts on how fellow posters are contributing. If you have the means and opportunity to right what you believe are wrong, why aren't you doing so and instead opt to waste your time posting messages that aren't constructive or contribute positively to a discussion?
This may, or may not, align with being solutions and advice that benefits the public at large. In fact, it is becoming increasingly clear that things are currently "optimized" strongly enough that squeezing more profit out of the system generally corresponds to finding a sucker to take advantage of--normally the public at large.
Startups and their leaders have a "move fast and break things" attitude that is no big deal when imaginary things like software is involved that becomes a big deal when non-imaginary things like people become impacted.
Stacking 6-high triples storage space, sure. But it doesn't stop container ships from running back to Asia empty.
So, that storage space will fill up quickly, and we're back where we started only now we have dangerously stacked high center-of-mass (because empty) containers (this is an active seismic zone, you know) that nobody wants to pay to get rid of until somebody dies and their insurance rates shoot up enough to make it necessary to dump the containers.
At which point, the shipping companies will magically make the shipping containers go away--probably illegally to somewhere you don't want them to go to.
These are all for profit companies. It’s a bit utopian to suggest anything else would be better without providing any specific alternatives.
It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that "profit motive" is aligned with "public interest" in the face of all the current evidence we have in other sectors that is quite to the contrary.
To start, it is not at all clear that super low cost, super low friction shipping from China is, in fact, in the general US public interest. But it is in the interest of WalMart. And it is in the interest of Amazon.
For example, from the standpoint of the public interest, consuming fewer Christmas goods (which are mostly disposable garbage and which is what the Asian shippers are all rushing to get transported) is probably preferable. A great deal of Asian garbage which is destined to be US garbage is currently clogging out the shipping of goods which have a steady demand and are far more necessary to the functioning of the economy.
You will note that "increased foreign shipping friction causing goods to be manufactured locally again" is not on the discussion table because it is not part of an agenda that people in the shipping industry wish to countenance.
I occasionally run into the higher levels these days and let me tell you, most of them are whip smart.
I suspect that this measure just delays the inevitable. I'm also wondering why the limit of 2-high stacks exists (I'm guessing safety related in event of an earthquake?)
He has a lot of ideas in his other tweet thread, but I noticed that in his long list of ideas nowhere to be found was "offer better pay and working conditions for truckers."
The core issue is not too many containers. It's not enough truckers picking up the new containers, so there's no room for the old ones. And because the ships can't be unloaded, nobody can take the containers back to other ports.
It doesn't help that the full-in-union longshoremen (not the part-timer union guys) get way, way over $100k a year, some of them making $300k...and with zero requirements to meet any sort of metrics. They shouldn't be incentivized to where safety is compromised, but surely there is a balance. Right now they have zero incentive to do anything about the problem. The port sits doing nothing...and they sit too, getting paid.
This doesn't make sense to me unless the truckers are currently extremely busy. And if they are, why is there now a problem? Are there suddenly far fewer truckers?
According to the American Trucking Association, turnover rates for drivers have been at about 90% for a decade. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/05/25/999784202/is-t...
I would assume that the tight job market is making things worse.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28972094.)
p.s. Animats is a great HN commenter who knows a lot about a lot of stuff (not everything, of course). I don't know how much he knows about shipping but if you know more, a much better way to contribute to HN would be to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Supercilious putdowns of other commenters just degrade the community.
Well, sure. The higher up you go, the less tactical (and more strategic) you become. You wouldn't want your CTO to launch code to production. You want her to make sure there is a plan to utilize CICD practices- that the ICs implement.
If you have too many strategic thinkers you lose the ability to execute tactically, too many executors and you start building well optimized versions of the wrong thing.
This story actually had a good ending so far as the government actually responded about a day after the Flexport CEO’s Twitter thread. Sure, we wish the problem was solved earlier, but this is a good thing and should be celebrated!
Don't worry, once people did notice, it did take long before they started ridiculing him for spending time with his family.
I work at a tech company. I have responsibilities that I actually care about, and they are important to me and many others, so I could not possibly just disappear for 2 months. I can barely take a weekend off without feeling guilty.
It's not about why he wasn't there... it's that he wasn't there, for any reason. It shows that he doesn't care, and the people who picked him and allowed that to happen, also don't care.
Our willingness to shame this guy (and other guys, by extension) for spending time with his family reflects our willingness to shame women for taking the same time off.
Our acceptance that he should put work over his family forces SOMEONE to put his family over THEIR work. In a male-female marriage (yes, I know he is gay), this means that men should work and women should stay at home. This attitude contributes to the gender pay divide and stereotypes that men shouldn't be great fathers.
It hurts our wives and our strength as husbands and fathers.
EDIT yes he's not an outsider to the industry, I mean he's an outsider to the group of officials who were tasked with solving this problem.
Ryan Peterson has been doing this for a long time at a high level, it's very hard to get someone like him into civil service.
I think it does, if your company is valued at 3.2 billion, does $830m in revenue, and has 10k+ customers (as of 2019) [1]. You probably know what you're doing at that point.
[1] https://getlatka.com/companies/flexport#:~:text=Flexport%20h....
Or the field always wins. Every year a large team of highly paid professionals is responsible for selecting the best professional sports prospects to join their team. The team that goes first (almost) never gets the best player. Its not because they're incompetent. And its not because the decision doesn't matter- these are multi billion dollar organizations, and the decision is very much a high leverage one that will directly impact their fortunes.
Sometimes finding the best path is extremely difficult. Sometimes even when someone does see the best path, its still hard to recognize it as such. So I don't think its surprising at all for the best idea to come from outside a team devoted to solving a problem. Especially in today's age when more people than ever can propose solutions and more people than ever can see those proposals and bubble up the ones that sound good to them.
Genuine question: Are there actual officials appointed to fix the situation? If so, who are they?
My question is if anyone is specifically working to solve the current acute port clogging situation, ideally someone who has authority to implement solutions.
Somebody in the mayor's office should have been getting in contact with people at the major shipping companies, asking for suggestions like this, rather than waiting until a twitter thread got viral enough to embarass them into taking action.
If we didn’t have social media cutting across the usual lines of communication, this problem may not have gotten fixed because no one had both the right information and the ability to act in it.
Not drawing a direct causality link, more of a butterfly effect type.
that these democratic open communication means allowed sense to unjam & flow was awesome. an unstrucutred, unplanned, unpredicted ability to grasp at success.
reciprocally, i do want to acknowledge that access is still lolsided. if this was a random jie or nancy it would have taken pretty extreme circumstances to get their accurate & powerful suggestion raised & having an impact.
there's a lot of interesting examples in history of suggestion boxes for governance. this one isnt perfect but it still stands, to me, as an interesting positive example.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
But also it's 2021 where people are the most cynical we've ever been, it's almost like there's interest groups in the US that want a fanning of inflation or delayed recovery through shortages.
It could be both e.g. foreign actor using administration's stupidity to probe country's weak points. It seems like the US is probed from all angles.
The problem is that technical people are usually too busy working or raising a family to frequent those channels. Unemployed or childless activists however have plenty of time for their causes. The 'vocal minority'.
Had me up to this point. Let's not do ALL the ideas, let's have someone with authority and decision making skills make a judgment call with the best information available at the time. I assume he really means "all the best ideas", but it's worth saying that we shouldn't panic and just do anything someone yells loudly.
The best part is every container impounded in the US is a drain on destinations that aren’t in the US like Europe.
How petty can US citizens be?