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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

> 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.

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.

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!

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.

> The author of the above comment is obviously ignorant

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.

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