If true, it's extremely depressing that it required a viral post on social media.
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.
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.
Not drawing a direct causality link, more of a butterfly effect type.
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'.
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.
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....
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.