151–160 of 514 posts
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…
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.
Why not? It sounds like you think this is obvious, but it isn’t to me. I live in an area with occasional grandfathered-in exceptions to zoning rules. There’s a cafe run out of a house, and a butcher shop run on a residential street corner between houses. And its absolutely lovely! I would have no problem with people making things (“a factory”) next to a school.
They also need heavy transport, which wears out road infrastructure much more quickly than light vehicles. Keeping residential streets largely clear of heavy traffic means you can focus repairs and replacements of road surfaces in the industrial areas.
Zoning isnt the only way to solve these problems, but it's a good one
Why wasn't the federal government doing this? How hard would it have been for the new "shipping czar" to have gone down there and seen what at least one simple issue was and get it fixed?
People are waking up and realizing that government is pretty useless for specific action. Our representatives would rather pontificate about vague niceties.
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…
My understanding is that the us doesn't send all that much back to china, and that it was a problem for a while but wasn't the bottleneck until recently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The guy in charge took a paternity leave for 2 months and no one in the media even noticed.
>The guy in charge took a paternity leave for 2 months and no one in the media even noticed. Don't worry, once people did notice, it did take long before they started ridiculing him for spending time with his family.
Had me up to this point. Let's not do ALL the ideas, let's have someone with authority and decision making skills make a judgment call with the best information available at the time. I assume he really means "all the best ideas", but it's worth saying that we shouldn't panic and just do anything someone yells loudly.
I thought that Flexport CEO's tweet stream was really great - had a ton of insightful, first hand information and made the problem very clear. Especially import was the feedback loops showing how the system was essentially deadlocked, in the classical sense of the term.
To give you a taste, this is him 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjUs7o-TnjY. I remember watching that video the first time and being particularly struck by his insight on how entrepreneurial sales is different from regular sales [1], which I have been able to apply since then on a regular basis.
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 truc…
What I would like to know is how it ever got to this breaking point? Is there no planning for such cases or continuous optimization? Or were plans presented to the government which just sat on it until it was too late?
My mental model is that regulations are decided on through a political process, and then no one looks at them until it becomes a political issue again.
Japan managed to arrest housing prices by moving zoning definition to national rather than local level, where local busybodies do not have the critical mass needed to do regulatory capture. Local areas can still decide what zoning to put where, but it's not nearly as ridiculously specific as American zoning can be. (e.g. you can sell lemonade out of your driveway, but not craft beer; or you can't run a hair salon, but you can run a daycare from your house, but only if you watch a maximum of five kids. etc.) California is now trying a similar tack by loosening zoning regulations at the state level.
If true, it's extremely depressing that it required a viral post on social media.
How is crisis management supposed to go? What would have been a preferable source of this change?
Somebody in the mayor's office should have been getting in contact with people at the major shipping companies, asking for suggestions like this, rather than waiting until a twitter thread got viral enough to embarass them into taking action.