Sounds like the best time to start your container-house building company
Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
431–440 of 514 posts
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#432Everyone's focused on Ryan's comments about stacking, and the subsequent win there. Amazing job, Ryan, and thank you Robert Garcia for being a man to take one on the chin (for this solution not coming from your team) and for then doing the right thing. I am seriously impressed by not seeing any NIH (not invented here) behavior here. But why stop there? Ryan suggested 5 courses of actions, and made it clear that we ne…
Also, isn't someone from the government supposed to be in charge of this? Shouldn't they be out there finding out what's happening? It seems odd that no one has tried this, yet as someone who has worked in a factory, I can easily believe that the absentee managers have no idea what the hell actually goes on among the workers. You need to spend significant actual time, to the point of working actual shifts, to get a c…
He's been on maternity leave.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
All places I have done real estate development require permits for putting containers on your land, and it is not a quick process to get one. At the least, you usually have to justify why you need the container space and for how long. And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
As this is a short term problem and part of a national crisis ... just stack them up, and get them removed in the near future. Any place big enough to stack up enough containers to matter (stadium parking lot, dead airport, etc) isn't going to have neighbors that raise a huge stink immediately, and the wheels of zoning disputes take times. Heck, budget the possible fines into your business plan for holding the contai…
Exactly. Fix the problem, then ask for permission to do so afterwards.
If you can honestly say, "we fixed the problem and didn't hurt anything with our temporary fix" then the permission people who come along afterwards to fine you are going to have to think seriously about suspending the fine that your solution drew. Don't do anything criminal, but accrue a bit of civil liability: it will either be a cost of business, or will be forgiven.
As for contracts: If I am obligated to return the containers, but I dump them for a few weeks on a disused airstrip, I'm still going to, eventually, fulfill my contract, when the port allows me to.
No excuses. Fix problems, don't brainstorm reasons not to fix then.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
The guy is a bad ass. If he wanted to run for President, he would win. I am really not exaggerating - I had a chance to meet him a few years back, and at that time he was the most impressive person I had talked to in person for an extended amount of time (not based on credentials or achievement, but simply based on clarity of thought and new ways of thinking). I also know that PG rates him incredibly highly. To give…
Please no more CEOs running for president. The government is not a business.
Please no more lawyers running for president.
A CEO who built or run an actual value-adding business (e.g Flexport) probably has more integrity, intelligence and aptitude than the average lawyer-who-seeks-politics who very often turn out to be snakes.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's neat, but isn't this whole thing about stacking restrictions on empty containers? My understanding of what the Flexport CEO said in their twitter thread was that the best example of the problem is the haulage company that's keeping its driver count * 3 empty containers around on-chassis (which I think means on wheels), just sitting in their parking lot, because they have nowhere to put their empties, because t…
If they are getting paid per delivery, it seems they could find a quarry or an unused airstrip to dump empties on for a small price. When Tesla needs space urgently, they put up a tent. When the military needs to start a war they manage somehow to unload their tanks. Come on, USA, we still know how to do stuff...
From a quick Google map look, I'd ask the National Guard to take over runway 8R of LGB. That would still leave plenty of runways there, including 8L, usable under the same wind conditions.
There is also a huge amount of land at Palmdale airport, 1h30 north of Long Beach.
A glut of empty containers is a stupid problem, but the solution can be stupid easy, if we choose to make it so.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elsewhere someone mentioned it’s cheaper to build a new container in China than to ship and empty one over from the US. Even if you are already sending the boat. This sort of implies that it’s incredibly cheap to make the container, and/or it’s expensive to add that weight to the ship, and/or our ports are incredibly slow at loading empty containers onto ships.
Is it possible China is subsidizing creating the new containers exacerbating this problem?
Nope. China has the steel. China has cheaper labour. China has more efficient logistics systems to move container from place it's constructed to a port.
The answer to China being better at 99% of manufacturing isn't subsidies, it's efficiencies.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they are getting paid per delivery, it seems they could find a quarry or an unused airstrip to dump empties on for a small price. When Tesla needs space urgently, they put up a tent. When the military needs to start a war they manage somehow to unload their tanks. Come on, USA, we still know how to do stuff...
All places I have done real estate development require permits for putting containers on your land, and it is not a quick process to get one. At the least, you usually have to justify why you need the container space and for how long. And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
> And I cannot imagine a local zoning board wanting to go out on a limb to do something novel like approving containers just because a port is backed up.
I can, if they get paid for it. Rent should be reasonable for short-term storage and unreasonable for long-term.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. But let's also note that being CEO of a company in the industry doesn't automatically make you right, nor does it mean that when you speak to a reporter or send out a tweet thread like this you don't have some sort of agenda. There's almost always an agenda. Maybe that agenda is honest and in line with public interest, maybe it isn't. And twitter is less reliable than a news story, because usually reporters see…
> The core issue is not too many containers. It's not enough truckers picking up the new containers, This doesn't make sense to me unless the truckers are currently extremely busy. And if they are, why is there now a problem? Are there suddenly far fewer truckers?
Trucking is not an easy job. The working conditions are poor, you have to pay a fair amount of any benefits out of pocket, and like most "gig" economy stuff the logistics companies are driving a relentless rate towards the bottom.
According to the American Trucking Association, turnover rates for drivers have been at about 90% for a decade. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/05/25/999784202/is-t...
I would assume that the tight job market is making things worse.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're missing an important point here - if US customers cannot get their Xmas gifts on time, they won't buy them (nobody is going to order Xmas gifts if they will likely only arrive in January of later). Facebook has about 5 million advertisers, and a material percentage of them relies on the Xmas season for their financials to work out on an annual basis. Millions of US business have deposited 7+ figures each in in…
> If that doesn't happen, how many of them will get bank loans to get them out of this mess? I think you have just affirmed what I have said. USA is world's biggest, but an extremely fragile economy which is full of businesspeople too used to bailouts from a caring government. It's a bigger miracle it never seen major crisises from "encounter with reality" before. > We truly are talking about a Lehman Brothers scale…
If you know there is a problem, why not fix it before the crash happens?
If the US fails really hard here, many innocent people will lose their jobs, homes and lives.
Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
> G/O Media Inc. is an American media holding company that runs Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, The Root, The A.V. Club, The Takeout, The Onion, and The Inventory - Wikipedia
> G/O was formed in April 2019 when Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm, purchased the websites from Univision for $20.6 million. Is it just me or is that a shockingly low amount for those websites?
Online advertising nuked most media company revenues.