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Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

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Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#71

Post by khuey »

koolba wrote: post #64
riskneutral wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Erm, then pay some truckers to haul empty containers to some space in the middle of Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Idaho, Iowa, etc.? The empty containers don't need to be trucked to Arizona, they need to be shipped back to China so that they can be filled with more goods and shipped back to LA. There are fewer goods flowing from the US to China though, so they are piling up in LA. Either the price of shipping from US to…

Too bad they didn’t switch to collapsible containers: https://www.shiplilly.com/blog/collapsible-shipping-containe... That would handle the trade imbalance by allowing more empties to fit on the way back. Or the USA could actually make something worth shipping. But that’s probably a lot harder than replacing a worldwide fleet of existing non-collapsible containers.

Boeing aircaft and college educations, which are probably the two largest US exports to China, don't fit in shipping containers.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#72

Post by new_realist »

AareyBaba wrote: post #59
new_realist wrote: post #58

The last year and a half of pandemic aid has been a large scale experiment in universal basic income. The results seem to be somewhat expected: a labor shortage and high inflation.

A UBI experiment with confounding variables: lockdown, schools closed, travel and tourism restricted, parts of the economy shutting down, job losses, women out of the workforce to take care of children, health care sector under stress, 734 thousand people dead etc. If you can correlate UBI with labor shortage and high inflation from that data - then perhaps you were predisposed to that conclusion.

Lots of things have happened, but some are unrelated, and many have ceased. Extended unemployment benefits ceased last month. The expansion of the money supply remains. We’ll see if these problems resolve once the Fed tightens and asset prices crater (and replaced with a different set of problems, I imagine!).

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#73

Post by s1artibartfast »

kmlx wrote: post #14
coolso wrote: post #4

It feels like everyone is trying real hard to come up with solutions that just continue the status quo of having all of our goods produced in China. Just 20-25 years ago we were still making a lot of things in the US. But the American worker, and economy, was sold out to cheap, high-polluting, IP-stealing, yes-lets-ship-it-2000-miles-instead-of-making-it-in-the-US Chinese labor and manufacturing at the benefit of the…

> Why is this not a major talking point? because we live in a globalised world. your phone would cost 10x what it costs now if you moved production to the US. that would mean lots of people without phones, so a much smaller economy. no one wants that. > Americans have been polled ah, polls :) > across the aisle people prefer made in the USA as a European, i have always associated American made with low quality, cheap…

I expect this is highly product and Industry specific. In healthcare, medical devices and drugs, the US, and Japan are the gold standard. Most companies won't even Source raw plastic materials or chemical precursors from China and India due to Quality Control issues.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#74

Post by aazaa »

> It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

The author makes this claim without proof. The circumstances may be consistent with the explanation, but maybe others are as well. Also, the source of the claim is not clear. Did he glean all of this information from the boat captain, or someone else?

The problem is that the claim is central to the entire thread and the proposed solution.

If the root cause is wrong, then allowing containers to pile up in yards 6-deep could cause yet another bottleneck - a lack of containers to return back on ships, for example. This could happen, for example, if yard computer systems were never designed for this kind of use and records start going to paper.

This article reports that the port has processed record numbers of ships:

> In June, the Los Angeles port became the first in the western hemisphere to process 10m container units in a 12‑month period. The Long Beach port will likely process more than 9m container units this year, exceeding last year’s record of 8.1m units, the most in the port’s 110-year history.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/20/supply-chai...

Nowhere does the thread mention this record-high ship traffic.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#75

Post by adolph »

drcode wrote: post #63
graton wrote: post #60

Related: The mayor of Long Beach has increased the stacking limit. https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...

It's weird to me that thousands of people work at the docks or with the trucks, and likely understand these problems quite well, but only after a silicon valley guy rented a boat to take a look and tweeted about it did it come to attention of the larger world. Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?

Maybe not wanting to rock the boat, maybe just busy and not interested in waiting in line to speak to the manager.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#76

Post by aerosmile »

graton wrote: post #60

Related: The mayor of Long Beach has increased the stacking limit. https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...

If Ryan's tweets had anything to do with this, my respect for him just went through the roof (and my disappointment with people actually tasked with figuring this out diminished proportionally).

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#77

Post by Ensorceled »

new_realist wrote: post #58

The last year and a half of pandemic aid has been a large scale experiment in universal basic income. The results seem to be somewhat expected: a labor shortage and high inflation.

Did you quit your job to get those very lucrative UBI payments?

Me neither.

Canada gave out a very "generous" $500 a week, which would not pay rent on anything outside of a 1B apartment in Toronto.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#79

Post by DaveExeter »

rsj_hn wrote: post #36
nradov wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still make things in the US. Manufacturing revenue has been consistently increasing. However manufacturing as a share of GDP has fallen as other sectors grew faster. And employment has fallen due to automation and process improvements. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...

You have to be really careful when citing numbers like these. A typical American "manufacturing" firm primarily does design and supply chain management, with the actual physical task of production and assembly outsourced. So if they can get the foreign production for $100 and they sell the product for $300, then their design and supply chain management is worth $200 and we say that the US has a strong manufacturing b…

>The moment the suppliers can set up their own shop or sell enough IP to local rivals, they will be able to sell the identical good for $150...

That's what I am looking forward to!

What is so special about manufacturing? What would be wrong with assembly-line workers going the way of farm workers?

14 million farm workers in 1910. 3 million today. Tragedy?

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Farm_Labor/fl_frmw...

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#80

Post by doodlebugging »

nradov wrote: post #29
spiffytech wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't you have enough trucks? This is addressed later in the thread. Normally, many trucks haul containers to their destination, unload the container, then return it empty to the port, pull it off the trailer, and haul away another loaded container. But the port is too full to accept empty containers, and zoning laws mean truck companies have already maxed out their own container holding areas. This leaves enor…

Would it make sense to clear the jam by scrapping some of empty containers for steel recycling?

Containers (8'x40' single-trip) were selling at auction over the last few years for $4000-5500. At auction in the last month I have seen the same item sell for $10000-14000.

Accepting scrap prices for a good container is a losing deal right now when the market obviously has room for them at a much higher price.

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