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Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

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Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that is. Because people love zoning! NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood. It's the main reason zoning exists! Particularly the wealthy people who h…

Why blame the rich people rather than the system that allows them to abuse it? Rich people will always exist. The solution is to make it so that abuse is not possible. One possibility: create a state system for zoning and override every local zoning system. Let local zoning boards decide how to zone but make zoning be based on a tiered zoning system. Namely every zoning is a superset of the previous zoning. So indust…

Rich people own and control the system.

Rich people have the power to change the system but they want to maintain the status quo because they are rich and powerful.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#82
post #2

If true, it's extremely depressing that it required a viral post on social media.

Or maybe it’s a success of social media? If we didn’t have social media cutting across the usual lines of communication, this problem may not have gotten fixed because no one had both the right information and the ability to act in it.

One could argue that if we didn't have social media there wouldn't have been a supply chain crisis.

Not drawing a direct causality link, more of a butterfly effect type.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#83
And in the middle of all that, Theory of Constraints in a tweet:

“When you're designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn't choose it, you aren't running an operation. It's running you.”

https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543795045183490?s=2...

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#84
A little off topic, but these ports don’t usually store so many empty crates, so why do we have them now? Are we not exporting at the same rate? Is that even what empty crates are used for? I’m assuming they aren’t sent back to (mostly?) China empty. I read something about the prices to ship out of the US being very high, but isn’t the price coming in also similarly proportionally high, yet we still have a backlog of ships waiting to unload.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#85
Truckers are leaving containers all over Los Angeles.[1]

Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2]

A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing trucks an easily accessible container to deliver, rather than a specific container that has to be retrieved. There's an app for that. This is being implemented by IMC, the largest marine drayage company in the US. They say they're already up to 8 high stacks in the LA area. The higher the stack, the longer the retrieval time.

"This keeps drivers moving and productive, even if they don’t know the exact load they’re getting or the delivery location." So it's really dumping the sorting problem on drivers. They have no idea where they're going next. There has to be some way to separate containers by approximate location to make this work, so a driver knows how far they're going to be asked to take the thing.

How well this all works depends on how well the software organizing the stacking works.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/the-streets-of-los-angeles-are-overflow...

[2] https://www.bison-jacks.com/why-bison/blog/how-to-lift-a-shi...

[3] https://www.peelpile.com/

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#86

Zoning laws prevent stacking containers more than 2 high. FFS. Zoning as practiced in the US may be the most pervasive, banal evil in the country. It kills our GDP[1], is a major driver of racial inequity[2], increases wealth inequality[3], and creates car-dependency which has horrible public health impacts[4]. Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that i…

> Yet somehow nearly no one in America is aware of this or concerned about it. I wish I understood why that is. Because people love zoning! NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood. It's the main reason zoning exists! Particularly the wealthy people who h…

> NIMBY is the rallying cry at zoning board hearings, where whiny people who only care about themselves make sure those Chinese people don't put their stinky laundromats near our nice rich white neighborhood.

Yes some of prefer zoning to "mixed" and "diverse" neighborhoods. What's wrong with me not willing to see a laundromat or an office building next to my house? Or what's wrong with me willing to live in quiet family-oriented neighborhood, where I can let children go outside alone since age of 6-7?

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the demand exists to build high rises then those people would already be pushed out at an ever faster rate. If you take a plot of land that previously had 4 units on it and turn it into a high rise with 100 units, then you can fit 96 higher income people onto that plot of land. In the scenario where you don't build that high rise, those 96 higher income people simply go into the existing housing stock and push tho…

I think you might be missing the point, which is that the entire scenario should not be happening. If people are getting priced out of their houses, or people are building high-rises that inconvenience people, that needs to be solved, not ignored "because GDP". Making people's lives worse or uprooting them in service of general economic gain isn't a good strategy. I mean, we certainly have used that rationale in the…

I think you are missing the point. When you say "priced out of their home" what you actually mean is that they have become so fabulously wealthy that they can no longer "afford" a 1% tax on that massive wealth. And even that is just a made up fabricated story, because nearly everywhere has abatement programs to delay taxes or decrease taxes for those who can't afford to pay their property taxes.

Further, they unjustly accumulated that wealth by keeping people out of an area that is in huge demand. They are hoarding a scarce resource, to the detriment of sooooo many people. They didn't create that land, and they didn't create that wealth, and they are standing in the way of many many many times more people's right to take part in society.

This sort of person you are idolizing is actually a greedy villian, working to make the world a worse place merely so they can avoid looking at apartments or meeting new people.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have bought a considerable amount of land next to your property too then. Just like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. I'm sure no one would complain about that since, you know, it'd be yours and not someone else's.

I'm not here to defend unnecessary zoning restrictions, but your argument here is that the right to not be affected by the externalities of someone else's decisions should be limited to the uber-wealthy?. It's completely reasonable to believe that a given person should be capable of quiet enjoyment of their property without having to purchase everything remotely close to it.

Why should somebody be allowed to keep others out of property that they are not paying for. I find your contention competent wrong on all counts.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I would be pretty angry if someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to my normal house, since I bought it on the impression I would not have that as a neighbor

If someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to your house it would mean that the demand for housing in your neighborhood was massive and restricted by zoning. Your land value would skyrocket by allowing apartment buildings and you could take a huge pay day and move somewhere farther out from the city. You shouldn't get to halt US GDP growth in its tracks because you want to dictate what your neighbors do with…

> If someone built a gigantic apartment complex next to your house it would mean that the demand for housing in your neighborhood was massive

or it could mean a developer was very stupid to overbuild somewhere, or more likely it's a shell building used as a money laundering scheme for organized crime (See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/trump-ocean-... for one such building built by Trump; such buildings are also often structurally unsafe such as the building in Florida that collapsed which was also started as a money laundering front). I'm not down with this "the free market will make sure everything is OK" idea.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#90
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just no. Zoning is extremely important. You should not be allowed to build a factory in the middle of a neighborhood next to a school. There are certainly bad zoning laws but to say they are all bad is just ignorant nonsense.

You don't need zoning laws for that. The UK doesn't have them, yet still has pretty stringent controls ("planning permission") on what you can build. Explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#United_Kingdom Each area - typically a district, which is a sub-unit of a county or city - has a "local plan" which is decided democratically by the local government. "The plan does not provide specific guidance on what…

“We don’t have speed limits, but instead a system where different classes of roads have a preset range of overall maximum velocity.”

Does a zoning law by any other name smell as sweet?

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