Global shipping container shortage is now a container surplus
jalopnik.com
jalopnik.com
This reflects the US's lack of exports and China no longer wanting unsorted US recycling.
Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379
My article: http://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/flexport-ceo-wrong-bottlenec...
No discussion :( : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987281
Every 6 months or so I repost (on another site) bottle rocket under the ice:
https://i.imgur.com/IEW6QqB.gifv
Sometimes it's huge, somtimes it sinks. No pattern to it.
I wonder if there's anywhere in the contiguous U.S. where such fireworks are still legal. I hope so.
https://www.rd.com/article/states-where-fireworks-are-legal/
A lot of places(From the state level down to individual city level) use the annual Consumer Product Safety Commission report on Firework injuries to determine what needs to be banned for so called "public safety" reasons. Which is why you have places that have even banned Sparklers.
https://www.cpsc.gov/Research--Statistics/Fuel-Lighters-and-...
One source of "randomness" in user voting on time-sensitive sites (as opposed to e.g. a forum where you could log in once per day and read up on everything) is that the oline audience changes troughout the day as different timezones are at work / asleep / etc. This is both a regional change as well as an occupational/age change.
...well, is anyone today is wrong about their shipping container projections? :-)
It hit me that many rich countries get their so called "green-ness" by paying poorer, more corrupt countries, to offshore their environmental damage, while globally the impact is still the same, but as long as it's not in their back yard, it counts as being green.
As a guy living in Bucharest I can confirm that unfortunately that stuff is really happening.
It's kind of crazy when you think about it, i.e. the externality of regularly intoxicating about 2 million people with smoke that has the smell of some chemical trash so that some people further West can check the "we've done our part! we've recycled!" checkbox. All this while literally putting money in the Italian Mafia's pockets, as articles like this one [1] can attest to (in Romanian, but Google Translate can help).
[1] https://psnews.ro/groapa-de-gunoi-de-la-glina-de-la-afaceril...
However, here's a major issue I found in the link you shared (translated to English via DeepL):
"The landfill in Glina [Bucharest, Romania] is a health hazard for citizens and the European Commission recognized this a few years ago. According to the law, landfills must be at least 1000 meters away from people's homes, but the one in Glina is only 70 meters away. The National Environmental Guard has never thoroughly checked the entire area, and there is evidence that hazardous waste may also be hidden there. Underneath the mountains of rubbish that have risen up near Bucharest no one knows what is really hidden and how much damage is being done to the land in that area.
In 2017, environmentalists warned that there was even cyanide pollution at Glina that could reach Bucharest. Prosecutors also opened an investigation after it was discovered that a Romanian company was discharging cyanide waste at the Glina dump, but these cases never reached final decisions because the trials were far too long, bogged down in courtroom proceedings and the facts were time-barred."
The problems I see here are two fold:
One, the Romanian authorities can't be bothered to police what's happening meters away from the capital city, where all the government institutions and politicians are.
And two, it seems like whenever something foul gets uncovered, the Romanian justice system is so incompetent, that nothing happens in the end and the perpetrators get away scot free on technical failures of the system, which only serves to attract and encourage further criminal activity of this nature.
This is a systemic failure on the Romanian side of epic proportions and needs to be addressed ASAP.
Shit rolls downhill, don't forget that a lot of stuff imported in Romania is produced in China, partially because their environmental rules are even less strict than places like Romania.
In the last decades around here (the Netherlands) they have started burning more an more trash in an effort to stop using landfills, produce energy and to lower the amount of these corrupt streams going through poorer countries. I think some Nordic country even had to massively import garbage as they didn't produce enough.
Call me a conspiracy thinker, but I'm confident it was part of an international scam; companies in western European countries claim to recycle things, encourage consumers to separate their waste. They process it, bundle it up, and get a checkmark for having recycled it.
But then it gets exported and put in landfills or just burned. It would've been better for the environment (largely speaking) it was just landfilled or burned in the country of origin. I don't think garbage exports / imports should be a thing.
There is a bit of a pattern where society at large struggles to reason about waste (and end of life care, probably for similar reasons - triggers fear and disgust responses). Completely unavoidable part of sustaining a modern society. But it seems to be intolerable to handle in the harm-minimising way and essential to handle in the harm-most-difficult-to-see way.
It can be very frustrating. We'd be better off if people just took a deep breath and put their emotions to one side when we know that emotional reasoning leads to bad outcomes.
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/sweden-imports-trash-...
Australian landfill waste should go to the outback rather than rainforests, Chinese waste should go to their western deserts and tropical Africa should export waste to Saharan Africa to reduce the impact on wildlife.
More robust ecosystems reform readily, like hardwood and softwood secondary growth forests in the US, for example. They can quite happily grow back in a few decades on top of a clay capped landfill.
Or perhaps abandoned quarries or mines? Or already damaged sites.
On the other hand even giant landfills aren’t that big in the scheme of things. They’re pretty low on my list of environmental problems.
The myth was deliberately created by the plastic industry to shift blame from the plastic producers to the end consumers. Know who invented the recycling emblem?
Like is the idea that the recycling companies are getting so much for collection that they can afford to pay to ship the stuff to China and landfill it there?
A more generous reading would be that the industry is being incentivized to make their product easier to recycle by making them pay for the recycling, but it depends a bit on how cynical you are :).
The result though is that at least in my area the recycles pay so much for plastic waste that the municipality could lower the garbage disposal taxes as they were making money like with paper.
Recycling plastic was always a feel good political measure to let people continue consuming more and more with no guilt of harming the environment. The solution was always to reduce consumption, but that does not sell as well to voters.
But like they aren't paying people to come take the recycled plastic away, people pay them and someone comes and picks it up.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24685... (Compost as a carrier for microplastics and plastic-bound toxic metals into agroecosystems)
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aap8060 (Organic fertilizer as a vehicle for the entry of microplastic into the environment)
When I look at the contents of the organic waste bin of my apartment house people often put what they throw in there inside plastic bags, which is kind of understandable because just throwing it in there unprotected and open to the air will probably lead to a rot problem and some really bad smells right in front of the house. I don't think this is collected every day.
I read an article here in Germany years ago that this is a major problem and a leading cause of ever more plastic in agricultural soil.
and also https://www.newscientist.com/article/2345545-most-home-compo... (Most ‘home compostable’ plastic doesn’t break down in garden bins)
Two examples of large municipalities going this route:
* https://www.amsterdam.nl/afval-en-hergebruik/plastic-scheidi...
* https://www.almere.nl/wonen/afval/afval-scheiden/nascheiden
"...while I've seen gluts not followed by squeezes, I've never seen a squeeze not followed by a glut."
But that eats into profit margins today so it doesn't happen...
If the Chinese central planner Xi had decided against a zero-covid policy in China, this thing would have been far better.
China has about 1.4 billion people - and all-time 5.226 COVID deaths. The US has 331 million people - about a quarter of China - and an all-time of 1.1 million people, about 200x of China.
As much as it pains me to write this, but China did the morally better thing here and actually cared about the lives of its citizens.
Their leaders have never ever cared about the lives of individual citizens. Xu’s hero, Mao, boasted that he would sacrifice as many innocent lives as he saw fit to reach his goals. The 5,000 number is laughable and meant only to keep Xi from executing party members, which he would certainly do if they told him anything approximating fact.
Eventually you will learn that way more than 5,000 people, mostly senior citizens, died from starvation alone during the recent months-long lockdown in Shanghai.
But that's beside the point.
Had everyone followed the New Zealand model in the first year until vaccines were widespread and available, the virus would have gotten extinct just as Influenza Yamagata strain.
See Gosplan ([1]). They kind of tried. It will work better with an implementation that has more silicon than humans, but it will still be miserable on the edges.
I’ve seen a lot of Gosplan computer center. We were borrowing “untouched” versions of software for Soviet bloc-produced IBM-compatible mainframes there. At the exit there was a KGB post, they were checking for a permission for every single bit of paper that was being carried out. But we were not carrying paper, we were carrying magnetic tapes, and our contact at GVC (“the main computing center of”) Gosplan was too lazy to go get a permission for them. So I tucked a magnetic tape behind my belt and buttoned up my coat. Not a single time I was stopped. GVC Gosplan had a full detailed data on the Soviet economy and I could have potentially carried any secret data away.
But we were not carrying any secret data, we were carrying OS/360 21.8 and later on - VM/370 (do not remember the exact version for that, sorry).
So, while Gosplan was planning and financing the production and distribution of the “adapted for socialism” version of OS/360 (re)named ОС ЕС - their own computing center (and everyone else who could have got it) were using the original OS/360. I wonder if any mathematical model can handle such a situation properly.
But yes - the mathematical beauty of a planned economy model is often negated by sheer incompetence and corruption of the planner.
Also, to be cruel is not enough. You should have a political power to implement an effective solution. Political power is based on relationships. Suppose mathematics says: person A’s project should be reduced, person B’s project should be funded more. But: person A is your guy, and person B is of your rival’s camp. Will you follow the math? It’s probably a theorem: in a planned economy a recommendation that reduces the political power of a person that has the political power to implement it - will never be implemented…
https://www.google.com/search?q=red+plenty
It's a fictionalised history of some Soviet economics. There's a chapter on Kantorovich (cf the sibling comment). It goes reasonably deep (not mathematically deep) and provides a lot of context. Great book from a great author. Don't be put off by the "Soviet" part -- it's very entertaining.
"He is regarded as the founder of linear programming. He was the winner of the Stalin Prize in 1949 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1975."
In that respect, any book about linear programming is a good start. The problem with the approach used back in the time was a slow feedback loop (5-10 years) and inability to adjust to externalities, including technology changes. That should be possible to improve with our modern tech, but I am not aware of any good contemporary books about it - if someone knows one, I would appreciate a reference myself.
Edit: from the CIA file on Kantorovich ([2]):
"In addition to his mathematical research, Kantorovich has been directly involved in developing improved designs for high-speed digital computers, an activity apparently motivated by the Soviet Union's need for improved computers in solving large economic planning problems" "
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Kantorovich#/media/File...
One thing I noticed is that smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken to first reach the command threshold. This is interesting, if not quite surprising.
It's one of the fundamental techniques to get PIDs to work properly IRL. I can't find it right now, but I remember having a cheat sheet with a lot of tricks to make PIDs work properly. As a control engineer you learn a lot of fancy techniques, of which you usually only use a few, but practical PID control is sadly not taught in most courses because it's basically a collection of hacks.
If you know a little bit more about the system's behavior you can usually precalculate the optimal inputs and use the PID only for course correction, that often yields much better responses than what you can achieve with a controller alone.
If your system is nonlinear, it might be useful to use gain scheduling to adapt the PID parameters to the setpoint region you're operating in.
Switching behaviors in the system can also mess up your responses.
Sometimes your system has a vibrating frequency that can lead to resonance in your control. You may need to filter that, too, maybe even with a sliding frequency window. E.g. when controlling a gearbox attached to a motor, you don't want to actuate at the motor's vibrating frequency.
>smoothing functions that reduce overshooting the response also add some delay to the time taken
It's not so surprising if you think about what a low pass filter does. By filtering out the high frequencies the response becomes more sluggish, meaning that your input to the PID is already delayed. This means your PID reacts more slowly.
Aka good, fast, cheap.
The alternative is forcing some slack in the supply chain but that comes at a significant cost to consumers.
Not sure about you, but I’d rather pay less not more for things, even if it means a temporary price increase or even shortage.
I’m amused by this comment.
You think the squeeze and now the glut didn’t come at a significant cost to consumers and the economy as a whole?
It seems pretty clear after the massive failure at the start of the pandemic that just-in-time went too far and there is not enough slack in the supply chain at all level. Even from a purely systemic look, the wild oscillation we see right now should be proof enough that the system is significantly under-dampened.
Paying 10% more for a product in perpetuity costs a lot more than a 12 to 24 month period where prices double. And for non-essential goods, the option is for some customers to simple delay purchase.
And you’re forgetting it works in both directions. Consumers may see temporary high prices but they often see temporary low prices during supply chain recovery.
And again, how do you accurately predict the future? Demand can double pretty quickly. Having 10% slack (and the cost of it) would have dampened higher prices somewhat, but now you’re paying higher prices all the time and slightly less high prices when things go sideways. Doesn’t seem like a good deal at all.
I’d much prefer the free market approach where there are multiple actors each making different bets on future demand than some overarching rule about how future demand should be planned for (thats how we get famines).
The producers who bet on increased demand (or shrinking supply from competitors) get handsomely rewarded for the bet.
JIT manufacturing gains are far under 10%. It’s mostly advantageous from a capital flow point of view. At this point, considering the overall brittleness introduced, it’s not obvious to me there ever was gained at all if you consider both the up and the down.
It’s pretty obvious that at this point the purely free market approach is as successful for manufacturing as it was for banking. How can we even talk about free markets when the government just saves everyone each time a large crisis happens?
People had to pay more for cars? The cost of airline tickets went up? Lumbar prices went up?
I mean, don’t see many consequences for that brittleness. Inconvenience sure.
And I mean, if you think it’s the wrong move then there is an opportunity for you to get very rich - either start a company selling for higher prices to account for slack or heavily invest in ones that do.
Interestingly, food production is heavely planned through regulation, subsidies and incentives in most countries precisely because the free market cannot be trusted with such a sensitive matter. Famines cause riots and that's bad for buisness.
Ah, yes, this tired old "we should incur broad and hard to quantify bad things to avoid some small but easy to quantify bad thing" that is ever popular among people who should be smart enough to know better.
I agree that the system does seem somewhat under dampened but without a serious attempt at forecasting what the actual cost of damping it is I see no reason to change the status quo.
Most companies seem to not know that nuance.
Toyota's tier-two suppliers surely know it pretty well. Their suppliers a little less well. And so on, down through the supply chain.
It isn't the case that Toyota has some magical vision (though they are clear-thinkers). The key difference is that Toyota is at the end of the supply chain for all their suppliers.
Think of pulling an elastic tether on a solid object, which pulls an elastic tether on a solid object, which pulls an elastic tether on a solid object. Friction accumulates and it doesn't disperse evenly.
So the Toyota model is great iff you are Toyota or similar OEM. With diminishing returns as you progress further down the supply chain.
Now, do we have reasons to be believe that this oscillation between shortage and surplus will grow or diminish? Will the next half-cycle of the oscillation create negative qualitative effects, even if it is ultimately diminishing?
I'm not saying there are easy answers to those questions, but we're better off being able to ask them.
If you store the products in containers, it's easier to ship them when there's a squeeze, and you're also warehousing containers ;)
Of course, the more people who buy the glut and sell the squeeze, the less of a glut and a squeeze there is.
I can certainly see opportunity to profit through stock market inefficiencies. Eg transportation stocks that were overpriced on supply chain FUD
What does your construction industry do if not "construct" those things? Have they devolved to just being lego builders that glue together the work of others?
How many programmers do the low-level work on the "doors and windows" stuff? A tiny minority.
Uh, Lego comes literally from idea of using pre-made things to build a house. Lego was made from how construction industry worked.
Ever heard of BRICKS? Where you think Lego got the idea for it from ?
The house will suck and you'll never be able to fix anything, but I'm sure you can get it.
Just punch in your zip. I can get a 20 footer now for 2k.
For some reason, shipping containers are unlike every other market... sellers refuse to advertise their prices! Take a look on craigslist: nearly every ad either has a fake price ($1, $1000, $999,999) or else says "call for pricing". The only place I've seen with real prices is a printed-on-dead-trees farmer's newspaper.
That website is what is so hard to find: straightforward pricing updated regularly.
I need a shipping container at some point in the next year but I'm in no hurry. Now I can just check this site every week or so to get a feel for when prices have bottomed.
Anybody know why the container market has such weirdly opaque pricing? It's a nearly-ideal commodity...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullwhip_effect
It has seemed like a definite possibility for a long time with the covid demand... let alone with the Fed actively trying to crush consumers until they can't afford to consume to produce a second-order effect of forcing corporations to halt their price-increase-spiral. Of course you can never predict the exact moment the flip will happen (and it happens progressively across the economy of course), it's the old "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent in a short position", but, yeah, I've been saying this for like a year now and I'm nobody particularly special in that respect.
Hopefully we will see microcontrollers/power+display ICs, Raspberry Pis, and [housing] building materials come down soon. Those have remained stubbornly short despite the glut in consumer-facing electronic products and leading-edge ICs.
Fab space is going to be another interesting one too, everyone was super hot on building their own fabs for those embedded things, and while I think there's a strategic interest in that continuing, there is going to be some tough times ahead for the commercial operators - especially TSMC, they are the one company where the margins have undeniably and conspicuously soared over the past few years.
You've already seen pullback in planned increases to DRAM and actual cuts to flash production... and I doubt there's any particular product that is going to surge and take up that capacity right now either.
> After analyzing 2023 supply and demand in the memory market, due to a conservative demand outlook, DRAM and NAND Flash look to be greatly oversupplied in each quarter and inventory pressure will continue to accelerate in 1H23. In the DRAM sector, after Micron led the way to announce a DRAM production reduction plan that will fall far below historical levels of supply-side bit growth, the 2023 DRAM Sufficiency Ratio will contract from the 11.6% previously forecast by TrendForce to less than 10%, helping to alleviate rapidly deteriorating inventory pressure. However, more suppliers must be relied on to join in the actual reduction of DRAM production in the future in order to reverse the supply and demand imbalance next year.
https://www.techpowerup.com/299555/micron-and-kioxia-are-cut...
> Kioxia Corporation announced production adjustments at its Yokkaichi and Kitakami flash memory plants. The company will reduce its wafer start production volume by approximately 30 percent, starting from October this year. By adjusting production in line with current market conditions, Kioxia will better manage production and sales. The company will continue to review and adjust operations as needed.
https://www.kioxia.com/en-jp/about/news/2022/20220930-1.html
The container thing ( the right amount at the right place and right time ) is a symptom of the problem.
Note that right at the moment the cost to move a container across the ocean is almost exactly the same as the cost to buy the container (see the second graph at the same url), for several routes. So it's easy to mix them up.
Is it time to low ball the sellers I see on Craigslist for some extra storage?
https://www.gatewaycontainersales.com.au/shipping-container-...
Which is kinda cool.
I agree, they are a really poor choice for home construction though.
The buildings are, quite frankly, ugly. And that useless diagonal bit is really stupid. The tower for looking out over the beautiful country–side is a nice touch, but its square, blocky shape limits you to looking in four directions, making it quite inelegant. The nicest part of this project is probably the outdoor seating, and all you did there was plonk down a picnic table on some gravel. I’ve seen worse picnic tables though, so you get a few points there. I would have arranged for the courtyard to have an unobstructed view on one side, looking down the hill towards the orchard, but at least some of the tables have a view.
Seems like a lot of work to get it looking good and functional.