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For those who didn't see the 5 points, I've copied them below from here https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834

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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.

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Funny how free-market, small-government, deregulation, rhetoric flies out of the window when own profit maximization short-terminism falls apart and everyone starts invoking centrally coordinated state intervention.

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…

I agree with you, but this isn't necessarily the best example. In this case, frankly part of this issue had to be resolved by relaxing strict zoning laws that weren't allowing space to be used in a way that the market demanded (offloading empty chassis). Such a measure falls under deregulation/free-market/small-government.

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.

Those 2-high zoning laws aren't new, are they?

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.

Presumably, the regulation had reasoning. Likely unsightfulness. But also likely danger.

Will the port's insurer cover damages when a 3 or 4 high stack falls?

Unsightliness maybe, but also California is no stranger to earthquakes. Stacking up to 6 high sounds like a deadly and expensive game of dominos.

They can be stacked higher on a container ship when full. And ships are subjected to what someone could think of as a "quake" - waves.

for sure, but the harmonic characteristics of sea waves are rather different.

But yeah, you do have a point.

Sure, although most of the measures proposed are about a massive mobilization subsidized by government.

One could also argue that it’s still a brittle, overly lean organization if a landscape regulation tipped it into service disruption.

It was the international demand imbalance that tipped it into service disruption; the landscape regulation just set the conditions for the existing bottleneck.

Indeed:

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?

But we don't live in a world of small governments and deregulated free markets. Without a regulation on stacking LA might not be at a point where any of those other measures are needed. A funny thing would be limiting yourself to approaches relevant in a system that doesn't exist.

Might, would… look, I don’t want to come up with a True Scotsman counter argument, but it does sound like one: blaming this mess on the single one restriction that seemed to exist.

Are we going to blame driving time restrictions next?

Next I'd blame environment regulations that banned older short-haul trucks from operating in the state, but that's besides that point. The point being: there is no contradiction between wanting smaller government and less regulations and wanting a mess caused by heavy handed regulations to be fixed by heavy handed mobilisation of resources.

Wasn't this mess made by the government's regulations in the first place?

Make it a port rule that container ships must be fully loaded with containers (full ones or empty ones) before leaving port, or they will be banned.

Make it fun as we’ve already got the military involved in step 2 - ships leaving without empties will be sunk.

I am no defender of government bureaucracy, but the fact we got the stacking rules changed in 48 hours is pretty crazy. I suspect more changes will come, but it may take some time. I'd let it play out over 1-2 weeks and re-evaluate.

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!

The pandemic has shown the bureaucracy can move quickly when they want to. Although I'd argue the politicians share some of the blame for slow legislation when they want to avoid something. It's not always the behind the scenes bureaucrats that are the bottle neck.

The reason why the focus was on the first one is because that was the easiest and fastest to do (You only need local officials to sign off on it because its a temporary order and its also the simplest). 2 and 3 need the federal government to organize it, which as a large organization takes some time. 4 and 5 requires figuring out contract terms (who's paying whom, etc). These are much more complex and therefore will take more time. Oh and the tweetstorm was done on a Friday on the West Coast, so it takes some time to get the attention of decision makers on the east coast.

Also, isn't someone from the government supposed to be in charge of this? Shouldn't they be out there finding out what's happening?

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.

I am sure you noticed that Ryan gently exposed those in charge of not doing enough by repeating the ship captain's comments that Ryan's team was the first to ask to get a tour of the port from the ocean side. Granted, perhaps those in charge have their own boats or are using helicopters, but the lack of action does make me wonder.

Ryan probably understands freight and logistics better than the government decision-makers. Regulatory bodies don’t often think in terms of changing the laws, and have narrower scopes. I bet the Long Beach zoning commission never even realized that they could be causing the backup, because the 2-high policy has worked fine for years.

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.

Funny enough this is supposed to be the good side for lobbying. Politicians need input from people on the ground in industry.

Let's not forget the media. Renting a boat and talking to people at the port to see what's going on should be right up an investigative journalist's alley. The Silicon Valley guy is doing the job of not just one power center, but two.

Perhaps the fourth estate needs the microphones currently stuck on a ship somewhere.

Temporary logistics czar. 1 year term, with the second half being transition to normal.

He's been on maternity leave.

Does he mean negative feedback loops or positive feedback loops? Getting worse every day sounds like positive feedback, whereas negative feedback would keep things steady.

He means a vicious cycle, which is technically a positive feedback loop: The worse things get, the more they get worse. Negative feedback means when the system is working properly, an unexpected perturbation will cause the system to correct itself automatically.

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?"

People without a controls background typically mean "positive feedback" at all times, regardless of what words they use.

In a steady system the output energy scales based on the input energy. When there is feedback, the output adds/subtracts to the input, making it difficult to control the output with your inputs. Positive feedback adds to the input, making the output increase even as you attempt to reduce the input energy. Negative feedback subtracts from the input and forces you to increase your input energy to prevent the output from diminishing.

Uncontrollable positive feedback explodes. Uncontrollable negative feedback freezes.

I’d recommend that he just say “feedback” and skip the adjective.

Doesn't matter, real feedback loops are complex. ;-)

> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work.

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.

You're missing an important point here - if US customers cannot get their Xmas gifts on time, they won't buy them (nobody is going to order Xmas gifts if they will likely only arrive in January of later). Facebook has about 5 million advertisers, and a material percentage of them relies on the Xmas season for their financials to work out on an annual basis. Millions of US business have deposited 7+ figures each in inventory deposits a few months ago, with the understanding that they will convert those deposits into profit by December at the latest. If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess? And how many people will lose their jobs with or without those loans? 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?

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 laugh at the idea that the US military might be engaged domestically in helping Amazon and Ebay drop-shippers get cheap chinese crap to 5 year olds who will play with it for maybe a week before it breaks or they lose interest.

This comment explains all I needed to know about why so few people in this country are taking this crisis seriously. The understanding is that this is the Amazon drop shippers who are whining, so why bother? There are countless counter arguments provided by other commenters, so I will just add this - the analogy with Lehman Brothers is a gift that keeps on giving; when they failed, there were also people saying "it's just the rich folks who will lose their money."

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.

On the military topic, why would the military do something humanitarian for citizens? It was pretty clear the industrial military complex was voted back in with Biden, and that's better for business than something altruistic.

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.

> The author of the above comment is obviously ignorant

> If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess?

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.

I don't disagree that the US made a huge mistake when it outsourced its production (for all the reasons you mentioned). But the solution is not to rip off the bandaid and view millions of businesses as collateral damage. You'll notice that the Chinese government is great at playing a long game, eg: Taiwan. We need to do the same.

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.

This isn't just Xmas gifts, it's servers, routers, hard drives, you name it, stuff that's vital for businesses. We have long delays for much of our IT infrastructure at my company due to this.

Well, bad for you to place trust in these people!

If you know there is a problem, why not fix it before the crash happens?

If the US fails really hard here, many innocent people will lose their jobs, homes and lives.