'We Currently Have No Container Ships,' Seattle Port Says | Hacker News Reader

'We Currently Have No Container Ships,' Seattle Port Says

newsweek.com

232 pointspseudolus156 comments

This article first published 2 days ago. Here's one from April 30: https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/rumors-claim-seattle-ports... April 29: https://www.king5.com/article/news/verify/what-we-can-verify... April 28: https://seemorerocks.substack.com/p/port-of-seattle-empty-ze... April 27: https://mishtalk.com/economics/shipping-collapse-port-worker... April 25: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/tariff-tit-for-tat-has...

Seattle/Tacoma Seaport schedule: https://www.nwseaportalliance.com/cargo-operations/vessel-sc...

This article from Dec, '24 says port volume is expected to be lower than pandemic levels until 2029. A lot of chatter around the issue centers on local politics and leaders: https://www.postalley.org/2024/12/26/seattles-port-faces-a-c...

A chunk of the Post Alley article is spent on the observation that a single stevedoring company controls operations at all terminals in Seattle, but not in Tacoma; yet they're both part of the same port alliance.

As is tradition, I'll plug the latest episode of What's Going On With Shipping:

https://youtu.be/QCyB-Ym0ryk?t=947

(the timestamp links to the "May 2025 Estimate" chapter)

Youtube just suggested that to me recently and it's quite an interesting channel with lots of charts and data if you're curious about this stuff.

Yeah, it is a far better source of information than literally anywhere else I have seen for getting commentary on the tariff's actual impact on trade.

A funny thing is the US could easily sanction any country in the 90s because it controlled so much manufacturing. Nowadays we can’t even sanction Houthis since they can get everything from China. Judging by the port situation, soon China can sanction us, easily.

The general idea is to restore that order, and decouple from China. The problem is such things will require serious leadership, not mafia style extortion.

There is no universe where any set of policies will restore manufacturing to the US that can compete with China

Not proven - america can engage in selected manufacturing esp if profit isn't the main tool of measurement.

Also keep in mind then ... China can't be cheap labor forever either ... either it will regress or we're all be buying from Africa which is the last place there's lower cost labor at scale.

In other words it's a double edge sword for China.

China can have cheap labor forever because they're an authoritarian government that runs "re-education camps" with enormous numbers of people in them.

Uh huh -- eventually even the Chinese won't put up with that in the long term. If however the Chinese gov run things like Russia or NK, for example, I'd reduce TTL by 50%. When fundamental problems persist overly long it goes from problem to distortion to corruption then purifies then explodes out when least expected. Here in the US we're going through a light case of that. Somehow the things Congress is supposed to handle has come out of the morass as President Trump.

Your faith that slavery and authoritarianism can be (and will be) overthrown by citizens is not based on reality.

For the vast majority of human history, most societies were slaveholding monarchies. There's very little incentive for Chinese people to organize when the slaves are "criminals" or Uyghur minorities.

Hey you wanna go there, go there. That's an assignation more severe than anything the west would or could or want to make. Nobody deserves that. N'uff said.

I think there is, but it would screw over large capital owners and would be practically impossible in the US political system. The policies I believe could too it are also too radical to realistically be implemented in Europe.

We know that massive investment in early education with tutoring etc. could easily give the average US child the equivalent of today's top 2% level academic performance. This would be expensive, but essentially unproblematic it will never happen. Similarly, university education could be made publicly funded, and also cheaper. Here in Sweden it's cheaper per head than highschool education.

We know that physician labour in the US cost more than it should due to a shortage due to too few residencies. It could be solved tomorrow, and all US medical system problems could be solved over 15-20 years.

You could ensure that there's investment capital and no inflation, sidestepping the simultaneous inflation and need for investment caused by supply shocks due to war and technology change, by making everybody save a certain inflation-dependent fraction of their income from wages.

When a company is doing weird legal stuff to prevent their competitor from opening a warehouse in a certain, crush them-- impose criminal penalties, throw the planners and everyone who knew about the idea in jail.

15 years of this and you'd be in another world, one in which China might not be such a competitor after all. The only reason you aren't moving towards this world is because 'you' in the sense of the donors and the political leadership don't want to do it. There's even people who don't want publicly funded school lunches. With this attitude one makes oneself irrelevant.

I have no idea what any of your comment has to do with manufacturing infrastructure

Manufacturing today is industrial automation, mechanical engineering, etc.

If you want to build it you need capital and a large mass of competent people. China has 4x your population, so if you are to do that match them in the number of people who can come up with a concept for a factory and implement it.

You have no chance without transforming your society. You can't match them and have all this inefficient industry with middle-men and insurance companies, local hospital monopolies, local food monopolies, etc. If you are to have any chance all of that has to go away. You can't have people doing things that don't matter, you have to educate everyone you have, from the earliest education to the later stages to get them to a much higher level of capability than they are at today. You can't waste people on being hungry or not having a tutor.

If you are wasting people on being hungry, not having a tutor, in inefficient middle-men industries, etc. the China will simply steamroll you by being as many as you and us Europeans together even after a population halving and by maintaining their current competence level.

Sure there is, it's just a real monkey's paw.

It would have to be deeply painful and it would take decades. Voters would never tolerate it.

But that's assuming there's even a theoretical way to do it, which there isn't. We just don't have the natural resources or the political structure.

The truth is there is no will to sanction them, same with Russia.

Threat with sanction anyone who do economic activities with houthis and actually do it later.

Sanctioning power comes from dollar primacy. When the whole world settles transactions in your currency then you have the power to switch off other countries foreign exchanges pretty easily.

The dollar has been in steady decline since the late 70's. As it's share of reserves drops, do goes the effectiveness of sanctions.

> Sanctioning power comes from dollar primacy

My worries is what sustains the dollar primacy. If the US can't make what's even essential for the nation, I'm curious how other nations will want our so-called services.

> My worries is what sustains the dollar primacy

Manufacturing was never part of the equation. It's somewhat ironically because of the trade deficit. Running a deficit blasts dollars out into the world. Countries put those dollars back in US banks and buy US treasuries as their reserves (hence the dollar as a reserve currency).

It's maybe the best economic deal any country has ever gotten, and the US is in the middle of blowing it all up.

Huge amount of discussion in this thread neglects the idea that a massive increase in tariffs will throttle trade shipments. Its the obvious expected effect.

That's obvious. I think the question is more one of how long will they be throttled for? Even if there was a domestic or foreign nontariffed supplier for 100% of the goods in question it would still take significant lead time for the new orders to be filled and even more for cases where capacity needs to be increased.

No one knows, it’s a game of chicken. Will the suppliers eat the tariff cost if they start losing market share? Will consumers just pay the extra cost if they really need the item?

If the latter happens, will a domestic company come in and undercut the international sellers?

If the suppliers decide that it's not worth the risk of letting the consumer to decide to pay the passed on tariff then there simply is no consumer choice.

There needs to exist a domestic supplier to be able to fill the gap. My guess is that for many products, there simply isn't one.

Yeah, standing up a new factory will take five years and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Larger businesses like Apple will cut deals. Smaller businesses will just fold.

The on-again-off-again of the tariffs throws another wrench in there. It would be a big gamble to start building a domestic factory right now because you don’t know if the tariffs are going to stick around long enough to make it worth it. Plus you still have the issue of tariffs on imported materials cutting away at any potential margin.

Again further stating the obvious here but this is the _desired_ effect. Not saying if that’s good one way or the other but it’s clear the goal is to reduce inbound volume from the world.

Maybe, but no trade means no new money from tariffs and the plan was to confuse the market get massive short term windfall while slowly onshoring those jobs replacing that income through corporate/income tax.

Now we have no trade and a drop in demand for US currency.

> Now we have no trade and a drop in demand for US currency.

Trade hasn't been this fair to the US since before WWII.

That's the period before the US dollar was the world's reserved currency. If things go back to that point it will mean the US couldn't afford to borrow at low rates anymore and would lower the ability to fund the military / society. Before the war the unemployment rate was 25% in the US.

i think that was their point, sarcastically

> it’s clear the goal is to reduce inbound volume from the world.

This is painting the bullseye around the arrow - while this was entirely predictable, when did anyone in the administration state that this[1] was the goal? This goal is obviously is contrary to another stated policy goal of lowering inflation.

1. Initially, the stated goal was to make trade imbalances "fair"

If you take "fair" to mean, less imbalanced, that would give three possible solutions: increase exports, decrease imports, or a bit of both. Tariffs only make goods produced within the tariffing country more competitive within that country. I.E. they don't make made in the US goods more competitive outside of the US. Add that to the other stated goal of producing more inside of the US and unless they are expecting a consumption boom to absorb imports and internal production a reduction in imports is a goal.

Also the fact sheet[0] uses a paper which found a reduction in trade with China as evidence for why they should do this which I think is evidence enough that they are hoping for at least a modest reduction in trade "A 2023 report by the U.S. International Trade Commission that analyzed the effects of Section 232 and 301 tariffs on more than $300 billion of U.S. imports found that the tariffs reduced imports from China and effectively stimulated more U.S. production of the tariffed goods, with very minor effects on prices."

[0]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

> Again further stating the obvious here but this is the _desired_ effect.

Hanlon's Razor suggests that your statement is incorrect.

Tariffs need consistency and stability to be effective rather than purely disruptive.

You can see this in how much more effective the countries applying tariffs against the US are handling things. Since they are applying tariffs and leaving them in place, the incentives are working properly, and they are disconnecting from the US businesses.

In the US, by contrast, businesses are either shutting down or holding their breath in the hopes that tariffs will pass.

I think the desire is a stupid one, not a malicious one. If you read through their documentation and their statements they seem to think this is a positive outcome and genuinely desire it.

yes. While the administration is full of wealthy people, the charity they need is all of us assuming they're not morons. Meanwhile, anyone who is not a moron and still feeling charitable is starting to question those assumptions.

By the time the effects get to me, I think it is irrelevant which one of these it is. Functionally stupidity is malice here.

Nobody ever thinks that they are evil. It's all for the greater good!

The point of Hanlon's Razor is that stupidity and malice are often indistinguishable and interchangeable.

It doesn't matter to someone getting the pointy end of the stick whether it happened out of malice or stupidity--the pointy end still hurts.

Looks like this needs updating now https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chinese-cargo-seattle-tari...

No, the original claim was "as of April 29, 2025", which was false and will always be false.

Perhaps they should make another page for the newest claims. But again, the situation is very different than this article's headline.

Seems like they are debunking that port is empty, while the article of this thread states that there are no container ships. Lots of cargo isn't moved by container ships.

> In fact, the Northwest Seaport Alliance … said it was so far seeing more vessels call into port in 2025 than in 2024, with three more calls in the first quarter of 2025 than during the same period in 2024.

> However, the ships calling into port were arriving with unpredictable volumes of cargo — sometimes 30% less than anticipated

And Snopes felt comfortable rating “mostly false” to the top level claim? I get that they’re trying to navigating treacherous waters, but “there’s still ships, they’re just 1/3 empty” is as much support for the top level claim as it is contradiction

Not really, the claim was „the port is empty“, not „the ships arriving are empty“. If there are still ships arriving, the claim is false.

Most of what comprises a port is infrastructure for handling containers and bulk cargo. If cargo volumes are down, some fraction of that infrastructure is disused, or used below its capacity. That a ship was at berth is cold comfort to the longshoremen, truck drivers, etc. who expected to work that cargo, nevermind to the people that expected to, y’know, purchase and consume those goods.

Is 30% underutilized / partially disused tantamount to empty? Maybe not. But it’s in the ballpark in a way the snopes rating undersells.

> But it’s in the ballpark

It is not remotely in the ballpark. The word “empty” is not understood to mean “70% full” anywhere in the English-speaking world.

There are websites that provide tracking for a lot of ships.

For comparison here's Tilbury, near London in the UK: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=GBTIL001 you'll note that big cargo vessels are shown in yellow.

And here's the port of Seattle: https://www.vesselfinder.com/?p=USSEA001 You'll note a distinct lack of yellow. If you zoom out a bit you can find some 'bulk carriers' but those aren't container ships.

So when the article quotes the Seattle port commissioner who says "we currently have no container ships at berth" that might be literally true right now at that specific port.

Other US ports seem to be doing better - Perhaps Seattle is badly located or expensive, and has taken a disproportionate fraction of the 30% drop in volumes? There are certainly larger ports on the same coast https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Top_container_ports_...

One sets off for a morning drive on Thanksgiving. Upon entering the freeway, they find the normally traffic-congested road smooth and free-flowing. The journey takes a little more than half the time it usually would. They exclaim "Wow, the roads are empty this morning!"

I'm playing a bit of devils advocate, but it's not inconsistent to observe a typically congested resource X operating at a fraction of its capacity, and note the observation with "wow, X is _empty_".

And if you’re snopes and the claim you’re checking is „the road is empty“, you would rate it as true?

That's why it's just "mostly" false, but 'empty' is a word with a specific meaning, and claim here was that the port is literally empty of ships. (or, in the case of the Twitter message they show, that there's only one single ship in the harbor)

The claim was "at this moment right now, the port is empty". The article then talks about 35% drop of "shipments" and "imports".

Snopes has been pwnd. It now adheres to the standard of literal truth with a political bias. So if someone posts “Bernie Sanders has 30,000 at a rally” (true) but the image is of a different (also true) rally but on a different date, then Snopes just says “it’s false”. Not “true, but the image is wrong”. Not informative, like “Bernie did have 30,000 people attend but this image is from XYZ”. Just says FALSE! Same here.

They've always seemed informative and do a good job of showing their sources. How big a deal is the single-word true/false judgement for an ambiguous claim if all the relevant details are summarized?

They weren’t.

Is this [0] the Snopes article you were talking about, on the Bernie Sander rally?

They rate it "mostly true" and in the summary mentioned the true attendance and the false photo, just like you said they should have.

I don't get what you are saying. They seem on the ball.

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/27000-people-came-to-a-ber...

Perfect use of treacherous waters. Kudos.

If I drink 30% of a glass of water, is the glass of water empty?

its closer to empty than before you drank

These aren’t static systems.

Keep removing 1 cup of water and add 2/3 cups and eventually it goes to zero. For a port that very well may be sending people home early on an ‘empty’ port. Even if tomorrow brings in new ships for now it looks like a ghost town.

And then at one port on one day zero cargo ships showed up.

> These aren’t static systems.

That is irrelevant.

No, but if the claim is that the glass no longer has any boba it's irrelevant how much liquid you drink.

The specific claim was that the port no longer had any container ships on that specific day. And that claim was true.

Yes, there were other ships in the port. But that's irrelevant. A container ship is a specific kind of cargo ship used for international cargo shipments. In an article about international shipments, that distinctions matters.

If I drink 30% less water overall, I’d be pretty unhealthy.

That is irrelevant. The question was weather or not the ports can be considered empty if some ships are up to 30% empty, which is not the case. Emptiness can be more encompassing than 0% (there is still some residual water in an “empty” glass of water), but it isn’t so expansive as to range from >0% to 70%.

You’re speaking about technicalities. There shouldn’t be any argument that our economy will continue to be fucked by tariffs and supply issues. 30 percent is massive.

"Technicalities?" 70% does not round to 0%. That's not a "technicality," that is a blatant misrepresentation.

If a boy was watching the sheep, saw a wolf, and cried "Dragon! Dragon!" and then the king and his army came to fight the dragon, and when he was criticized for lying, he said, "You're talking in technicalities, there was indeed a wolf," that is what this feels like to me. But then if he refused to ever call the wolf a wolf, and this happened over and over again, and he always called it a dragon--well, a lot of people would just ignore him.

Like, why not just say "Yeah, it's not true. Not sure what this guy's agenda is, but easily-disproved exaggeration doesn't help make the case. There IS a problem though, and let's try to have that conversation while ignoring obvious alarmism." You would sound reasonable and mature, and possibly even convincing.

Thr 35% was the port of LA not Seattle which was a single point in time report saying no container ships are in Seattle at the moment and usually are.

Do you not see how „the port isn’t empty“ and „there will be a massive impact on the economy“ aren’t mutually exclusive? The argument isn’t that the tariffs are a good idea, it’s just about the snopes rating.

It's not a technicality, it's literally what the claim was: "Seattle's marine cargo terminals were empty and international vessels had stopped calling into the port as of April 29, 2025, due to the U.S.'s newly imposed tariffs."

The fact that the terminals are not empty doesn't mean the economy isn't fucked, so there's no reason to argue about it either way.

We’re sitting here arguing about the obviously incorrect title and America is burning, so we are speaking about the wrong thing. It’s irrelevant whether it’s 70 or 0 percent, we’re still fucked. Discussing the issue of 70 vs 0 percent isn’t going to solve how fucked we are, so it’s a technicality.

> America is burning

Please take it back to Reddit.

That’s not a useful comment or even an argument against my statement, gfy

Not the first time their headline has been at odds with their content. I've never really been a fan of this particular outlet, even in their early days I found their self-absorbed writing style insufferable. They strike me as pedantic rather than informative.

The slopes article was about a claim in April.

This article was written in May, and directly quotes Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins.

Absolutely off-topic, but I started browsing Snopes’ tracking consent options and they use an insane amount of vendors. It took me longer to scroll through the list than reading the article itself.

I find it odd that recent articles are always about the Port of Seattle. From a quick Google search, it looks like the busiest US ports are Los Angeles, Long Beach, Port of New York, Port of Savannah, then Port of Seattle. As of 2018, the Port of Los Angeles alone was almost 3x busier than the Port of Seattle.

Not that it isn't worth noting, but I'm much more interested in overall volume across all of the nation's ports, and especially the West Coast ports.

I don't follow you. You can find numerous articles about cargo rates falling for those ports as well.

I don't follow you

What's not to follow? Numerous articles have been published with sensational headlines like "the Port of Seattle is empty". It's the smallest port on the West Coast.

As others have posted, LA is down 35%. That's useful information, not "this much smaller port is empty!"

I have been looking for an explanation to the US empty ports news. The best one I came with is that ships have been switching their destination ports to some that they could reach before the tariffs or some that have available tariff-free storage where the cargo can stay until Trump backpedals.

The total cargo volume seems to be falling only now, what still may be just noise.

Right, be interesting to see if the departure volume also dropped or how long it lags behind arrivals.

The simple explanation is that many (but not all) exporters simply stopped exporting things in April (as those shipments would have arrived in May, after the tariffs took effect). And many of the factories overseas have cut back on production, especially of low-value goods most affected by tariffs. Smaller ports like Seattle generally handle the overflow from the bigger ports, so they're the first to be affected by the reduction in cargo traffic.

Even if tariffs are reduced/eliminated, there will still be a lag of 3-6 weeks before destination-port cargo traffic picks up again, assuming that there is product overseas ready to be shipped.

My understanding is that ship tarrifs are calculated at the time of departure, not arrival. This supports the delayed volume reduction since we see the change 22 to 40 days delayed (Pacific transit time).

These in particular are calculated based on time of departure. I don’t believe that’s the common case though.

LA is down 32% YoY this week[0].

But also LA and Long Beach are effectively a single port, so per your enumeration … Seattle is the second biggest port on the west coast? Seems like that’d be one to look at when we’re talking about transpacific trade?

[0]: https://volumes.portoptimizer.com/ . NB The predictions for subsequent weeks are based on historical data AFAICT, and haven’t been accurate. The actual are good data though.

But also LA and Long Beach are effectively a single port, so per your enumeration … Seattle is the second biggest port on the west coast?

Long Beach has almost the traffic as Los Angeles, so by your logic Seattle is only 1/6 the volume.

Seems like that’d be one to look at when we’re talking about transpacific trade?

Which one? I would be looking at LA and LB.

I didn’t say it was a close second.

Again, LA/LB are basically the same port. One would also want to look at the next biggest geographically distinct port, which on the west coast is Seattle

Might be because more southern ports handle a wider variety of cargo origins (e.g., South America), whereas most cargo to Seattle is from China? Just speculation.

Savannah is one of the busiest container ports in the United States. China is the largest trading partner. Other countries are Vietnam, South Korea, India, Japan, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Italy, France, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Canada, Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand. Pretty much year to year, TEU has been steadily increasing not decreasing. March was up over the previous year despite tariff threats back then.

https://gaports.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Monthly-TEU-T...

Still don't have updated data for April and May published.

Data from before the tariffs went into effect would reflect an increase in imports due to companies trying to get things in before they take effect.

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/nx-s1-5389955/los-angeles-por...

LA Port is down 35 percent so far.

IIRC there was some speculation that a dip in container volumes would lead to less calls at smaller ports since there would be more room available at larger ports, and reducing port calls both reduces fees and travel times.

Not that it invalidates your point, but you're missing a lot of ports. Houston, South Louisiana, Mobile, Beaumont, etc. Seattle is actually 17th by foreign import tonnage.

This shows port traffic increasing by 56% when compared to the prior year for the time period of May 18-24 based on the number of scheduled vessels and twenty foot equivalent unit (TEU). What's really going on if tariffs were having a major detrimental impact?

The uptick can be explained by this story[0]. As trade talks begin, exporters want to be ready to begin shipping ASAP. It remains to be seen if this will volume will come through depending on the results of these trade talks and tariffs.

[0] https://gcaptain.com/as-trade-talks-begin-chinese-exporters-...

Friend of mine is in the commercial real estate business, leases lots of warehouses to big names. He says he's seeing a LOT of uptake on the east coast: Savannah, Jacksonville FL, Charleston.

A lot of companies are shifting to production in India, Pakistan, Vietnam, and it's easier to ship through Suez to the east coast from there.

I was thinking that too; I’m guessing the Seattle port was posted just because Seattle is a tech hub and people recognize the city.

I’m sure imports will be down though, as that’s the point of the tariffs

I've been watching What's Going on With Shipping (https://www.youtube.com/@wgowshipping). He's a professor and a former merchant mariner. More importantly, he's super sober about the facts of the situation and frankly has a better overall understanding of logistics than a random journalist. I'm tired of the sensationalism of every damn thing, and at least this guy's channel gives a more realistic perspective.

Highly recommend watching his stuff if "shipping" is your new sudden "expertise" because it's the hot new thing the media cycle wants you to focus on.

I've been watching that channel, too. Good stuff.

But calling this "a random journalist" when the article directly quotes Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins is minimizing the truth.

From the article:

"I can see it right over my shoulder here, I'm looking out at the Port of Seattle right now, and we currently have no container ships at berth," Seattle port commissioner Ryan Calkins told CNN on Wednesday.

"That happens every once in a while at normal times, but it's pretty rare," he added. "And so to see it tonight is I think a stark reminder that the impacts of the tariffs have real implications."

"That happens every once in a while..."

Are we looking at this moment as one of those times? It sounds like he is unsure if it is truly tariff impacts or not if he has seen it before.

Idk the whole discussion is hard for me to parse.

- Any one-off data point could be just random decrease or tariff impacts and we do not have a forward-looking time machine to accumulate more data

- It doesn't really shed any light at all if volumes are less or more: both outcomes can be spun as a success (if they're less, great, American Juche continues unimpeded, if they're more, great, then we just debate if the manufacturers ("China") are "paying for" the tariffs by decreasing list prices to the importer enough that the importer can maintain the same price for customers) ("China" cannot literally pay for the tariffs, they are paid for by the US company or individual accepting the shipment from the dock)

It's sort of like if it was February 2020, Wuhan was overrun and Italy was exploding, and people spent a lot of time in the nuances of if the US double digit case was up more this week than it was last week or two weeks ago

Spot on. Micro-analyzing week-to-week data in a system with lags, noise, and strategic behavior doesn’t help.

People crave conclusions with early, messy data.

There is also the other extreme of deliberately ignoring indicators that something is amiss.

Often people in pseudo-intellectual circles conflate aligning with that extreme with intelligence when it’s equally as foolish.

Yeah you're right, and ultimately it's important to discuss and bring up.

Just because I can invent a reason someone else can write it off...well, that doesn't shed any light either.

It's clear you can always find at least 15% of some group who will find a reason to write anything off.

(I'm basing that off of some stats I saw re: moon landing denial recently)

> Just because I can invent a reason someone else can write it off...well, that doesn't shed any light either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens's_razor

> Hitchens's razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states:

>> What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

> The razor is credited to author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, although its provenance can be traced to the Latin Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur ("What is asserted gratuitously is denied gratuitously"). It implies that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief.

I think it's pretty self-apparent? He's saying it occasionally happens but it's rare and the fact that it's happening now is a concerning data point.

It's like climate change: sure, historically you naturally get years with lots of hurricanes or really strong ones.

But if you get, on average, more and more hurricanes and the hurricanes themselves are stronger? That's a trend.

Related thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43844708 ("Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week (cnbc.com)" — 657 comments)

Can we talk about how many tiny/hidden x’s I had to find to read this article?!

Pixel Hunt https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PixelHunt

Think you want to look at Vancouver traffic as well. I believe some companies are shipping it there and waiting it out. This admin will fold faster than a cheap $2…

I wonder how long that can last. Quite a bit of Vancouver traffic diverts to Seattle and Tacoma to avoid capacity issues, and there's finite warehouse capacity to hold containers that haven't gone through customs.

Wouldn't such capacity be relatively easy to build quickly if needed. Paved lots with a cranes?

Take a look at where Vancouver's port facilities are. They're shoved up against steep mountains, a major city, and a major suburb. That makes it some of the most expensive land in the world. You'll also need to register that land with the government to operate as a bonded warehouse and invest at least a little in security to meet the requirements. For its part, the Canadian government isn't terribly incentivized to help you acquire that land so you can explicitly avoid paying any import duties.

The Netherlands fixed the lack of land for container and oil terminals by creating artificial land in the 1960s.

If you look on Google maps you can see that the "port of Rotterdam" is actually located off the coast. Singapore and other cities followed this example.

Vancouver is in a fjord. Building artificial land is expensive because the water is deep and the currents are strong. They're aware of how to do it, because Seattle's port is mostly built on top of one of the world's largest artificial islands (harbor island). The depth of the fjord is actually a strength to Vancouver, because it means they're not limited on ship draft. Seattle is.

Looking at Google satellite imagery, there's quite a bit of farmland and even a golf course in Vancouver. I'd guess challenges would be mostly cost of land and local zoning politics related,

Isn't Trump also placing extra charges on Chinese made ships docking at US ports? If they ship to Vancouver, and trains ship the shipping containers to the US, can you avoid this extra fee which is quite expensive at a $1M or so per Chinese made container ship?

Looks to me like a mighty crash is coming.

Haul in the sails.

So, the headline is direct quote from what port director says. He The article content talks about 35 percent drop.

People in this discussion here argue that article was written by bad lying journalist, because other sources say there is 35 percent drop in shipment and ports rarely have empty port.

Like, ok.

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:-121.6/cen...

why are we assuming this is just stupid trade policy? Why are we not understanding that this policy mirrors moves by historical leaders who used economic disruption and nationalism to justify consolidation of power? It follows a pattern: Create crisis > identify scapegoats > offer strongman solutions > dismantle democratic norms. Imposing drastic tariffs that severely harm the economy could create widespread instability (job losses, inflation, business closures.) He would then exploit this chaos to justify emergency powers or override normal constitutional constraints. Read your history.

That assumes a level of competence that Trump and his people do not possess. They're talking about some positive discussions and major trade resets with China already. None of that lends itself to setting up scapegoats. My prediction is they'll announce some great deal negotiated and a huge win for America which will in fact be double speak for just standing down the tariffs.

Also, if they really did want to find a scapegoat and introduce emergency powers, they'd be manufacturing some sort of illegal alien 9/11, rather than an obviously self inflicted recession

I truly hope you are correct. The recent drop seems to confirm Stupidity > Evil.

> "And that's hundreds of jobs right here in our region and across the country," he said, adding that his port had not witnessed such a significant downturn in activity since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

So much for "creating jobs for Americans", which is supposedly what this is all about. Shocking to me that some people actually believe Trump when he says that.

> "That happens every once in a while at normal times, but it's pretty rare,"

I really hope that capitalism works this time: we bring back our key manufacturing. One may argue that toys are not key manufacturing, but I think that argument misses the point. The point is, a truly industrialized country can produce anything en mass, if needed. Without light industry, we simply can't achieve that. Worse, we become the Soviet Union, letting heavy industry break the country's back. The recent India-Pkistan conflict is a good example.

During the India-Pakistan conflict on May 7, 2025, Pakistan claimed that it used a J-10C fighter jet to shoot down an Indian Rafale jet. The possible reasons below for the Rafale being shot down are quite a read. I listed some below. And I'm not sure how many people realized this: each J-10 sold for only 50M, while each Rafale sold for north of 200M. And when a dark factory in China churns out a thousand PL-15s a day like the US used to be able to do, how do we even fight that if there is indeed a war?

All the technologies list below used to be the envy of China, yet now China can make them. They may not as good as the western, but good enough with cheap enough will win, right?

What's even more sad is that we seemed content that we can export lots of agriculture products and raw materials to China. I thought that used to be what a colony did: Britains mandated that colonies couldn't produce advanced products and could only export raw materials. And our founding fathers fought a war so we didn't have to be a colonized country. Well, history is full of irony.

Now some technical stuff about J-10 vs Rafale:

Radar Performance Gap: The J-10C is equipped with the KLJ-7A active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar, which uses gallium nitride (GaN) technology and includes over 1,200 T/R modules. It can detect a 5 m² target at a range of up to 220 km. In contrast, the Rafale’s RBE2-AA radar uses only 836 gallium arsenide (GaAs) modules, with a detection range of about 150 km and weaker resistance to jamming. This allows the J-10C to lock onto the Rafale first, putting the Indian aircraft at a disadvantage.

Missile Range Advantage: The J-10C can carry the PL-15 ultra-long-range air-to-air missile, with a range exceeding 200 km, enabling it to engage targets from a distance. The Rafale is armed with MICA air-to-air missiles, which have a range of less than 100 km. Even when fitted with Meteor missiles, the range is only about 150 km, clearly inferior in comparison.

Electronic Warfare Capability Gap: The J-10C can carry advanced electronic warfare pods such as the RKL-700A, which can disrupt the Rafale's radar and communication systems. Moreover, the J-10C operates in coordination with the ZDK-03 early warning aircraft, which can penetrate cloud cover to locate targets and transmit encrypted coordinates to the J-10C via a jam-resistant data link, enabling a “silent kill.” On the other hand, the Indian Rafale, due to its diverse sourcing and poor data link compatibility, is at a disadvantage in electronic warfare.

The US is the world's second biggest manufacturing country, almost on par with China. We have lots of manufacturing -- we just rely on automation instead of people.

China has something like 20x the number of people working in manufacturing. They also have a deep local supply chain.

Putting those things together, they can efficiently handle smaller orders or bespoke things.

This whole situation is stupid.

It’s this simple: in the 1950s and 1960s you could graduate high school, get a job, and raise a family, often with home ownership as part of the equation. You also had more job security, at least for a while.

This past isn’t just glorified by MAGA. You also see it glorified by the Sanders/AOC wing of the Democrats at times.

Unfortunately neither side’s solutions will get us back there.

To get back there we’d have to attack the problem from two ends.

We would have to raise minimum wage, offer more assistance for health care or even full single payer, and to make the minimum wage increase work we probably would have to do a little of the tariffing and border enforcement MAGA likes… but not as much, and with better strategy.

But we would also have to implode the housing market. We’d have to MHCA (Make Housing Cheap Again). Real estate cost is one of the major reasons you can’t live like this anymore. Real estate cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment. We have opted in the past 50 years to protect the latter. We would have to switch and go for the former, which would destroy home equity.

It would cause problems. See, part of what we have done with housing is turn it into a stealth shadow second social security system for the middle class and the wealthy. Once you get on the housing treadmill your later life and retirement is subsidized by real estate appreciation. It’s a regressive tax, both economically and age wise as it’s essentially a tax on the young trying to get started.

But killing that system to make housing affordable would suddenly leave a ton of elderly people with no savings. The government would have to step in here too.

… which would mean both tax increases and spending cuts, and neither is popular.

Simply tariffing like mad and kicking out immigrant competition for labor won’t work because it won’t fix the cost disease.

Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s. 25% were unemployed in the early 30s.

If you wanted to go back you would have to kick women and minories out of the workforce so a man could earn double and have a percentage of young able bodied men killed or broken a generation before (through a war) before to get that demand where a highschool dropout who becomes a mailman can buy a house for a few thousand dollars.

Existing built home prices are going to go up in value if your society growing expanding. If you want declining home prices you need to reduce people/demand. The problem today is everyone wants to live in the biggest cities mostly because of jobs and everyone wants to setup a business because greater selection of employees. If the work from home movement succeeds this can break one of the pillars of why people need to be in big cities and cheaper houses can be built elsewhere.

> Those easy times of the 50s were created from the pains of the 30s and 40s.

Actually it was mostly created by the huge post-WW2 boom due to the fact that the US was quite literally the only country left standing, the only country not devastated by war, and the holder of much of the world's wealth in the form of gold reserves (collecting much of the gold that Europe had in store--you thought we did it for free?)

It's not clear how gold owned by the US's central bank (the Federal Reserve) translates into prosperity for the average US citizen.

Not these days, but back then it did because the US dollar was backed by gold, so more gold meant the Fed could increase the money supply without devaluing the currency (==inflation).

Existing built home prices will go up if construction doesn’t keep up with demand, which has been the case for some time. Why is housing exempt from normal supply and demand?

We do not have to ruin the world or kick women out of the work force. What we need is the same kind of price deflation that happened for appliances and manufactured goods to happen with housing. Of course the finite land supply probably makes price reductions that extreme unachievable but we could certainly make prices a lot more reasonable by density and taking the brakes off building.

It would also create a bunch of construction jobs.

> Why is housing exempt from normal supply and demand?

Most people feel the need to live in a house, so the demand is not going to diminish when the supply is low. Also, the land that housing requires is a fixed size resource, so is often seen as a good investment which means that over-supply of housing usually results in it being purchased by the wealthy and then used to generate rent income from the less wealthy.

> The US is the world's second biggest manufacturing country, almost on par with China. We have lots of manufacturing -- we just rely on automation instead of people.

On overall market cap, yes. What I'm not sure about are the numbers in key industries. For instance, we rely on China on key pharmaceutical ingredients. Heck, we were even in a crisis of shortage of salient solutions when there was a supply crunch from China. China manufactured more than 90% of the ships in the world. China manufactured many types of low-end chips we use in power supplies, in cars, and etc. The cost of our custom components on airplanes and battleships have been increasing through the roof because we simply can't rely on civil factories to make them cheaply. The list can go on.

It's fine if the US wanted to encourage onshoring of certain key industries for national security reasons.

You do that through strategic investment. Silicon Valley is where it is because of government investment here.

You don't do it through sudden high tariffs and angering our other allies. You don't need to be an economist to know it's a terrible idea.

You only need to know how tariffs work to understand it's an insanely stupid idea that'll crash our economy and put American businesses into bankruptcy.

Let’s assume all of this is done in good faith (which is debatable) and genuine love to bring manufacturing back to America. If you were in charge, how would you do it? What is the long term plan here? Even with massive capital, it is near impossible to set up factories and train workers overnight or even in a few months.

Are there any incentives to make household items here? How is it possible to compete in price with the Chinese factories? If the plan is to use 100% automation and robots, that defeats the purpose of creating jobs, right? I genuinely don’t understand this whole thing.

> If you were in charge, how would you do it

TBH I'm not sure. My charitable interpretation is that the US government said they would try but never did, or at least not successfully. At least Trump's government is willing to try in broad daylight, and Vance explicitly called out that it is a pipe dream that a nation could enjoying drawing boxes in air-conditioned offices and hope that we have technology superiority forever, as innovation only came from doing. So, I'm willing to give them benefit of doubt and wait for months if not years to see how things pan out.

> Are there any incentives to make household items here?

My naive view is price is the incentive. True capitalism means when price is too high to have space to arbitrage, the investment will pour in or the bootlegging will proper. I hope it's the former.

> If the plan is to use 100% automation and robots, that defeats the purpose of creating jobs, right?

My optimistic view is that we would create a lot more jobs in different categories if we can achieve certain level of automation.

P.S., super successful people like Balaji basically said that it's hopeless now. The western world can't bring manufacturing back because we don't have talent or know-how or great workforce any more. That saddens me greatly. China didn't have talent or know-how or great workforce 20 or 25 years ago. If we read the newspaper then, we would see everywhere that western talent and professionalism were the envy of the entire nation. Most people thought owning a car was a pipe dream, let alone making their own AEW or 5th-gen fighter jet. It was Japanese, Taiwanese, Americans, and Europeans who brought investment and know-how to China to boostrap the great nation. Yet now we throw the towel and thhink we can't rebuild out talent? Our fate is becoming a neo-colony?

If if we do increasing manufacturing, you can be sure it won't increase manufacturing _jobs_.

Meanwhile lots of jobs will be lost due to reduced trade (as per the article).

So even in the "best case scenario", this does not work out well for the average American.

> a dark factory in China

why is it a dark factory? power shortage?

more likely a reference to "lights-out" manufacturing where you have automated a factory to the extent you don't have to provide lighting or HVAC as there are no humans needed in the production area. The robots don't need to see.

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