Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 514 posts

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#441

Post by IkmoIkmo »

eecc wrote: post #423
jerry1979 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who didn't see the 5 points, I've copied them below from here https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 1) Executive order effective immediately over riding the zoning rules in Long Beach and Los Angeles to allow truck yards to store empty containers up to six high instead of the current limit of 2. Make it temporary for ~120 days. This will free up tens of thousands of chassis that right now…

Funny how free-market, small-government, deregulation, rhetoric flies out of the window when own profit maximization short-terminism falls apart and everyone starts invoking centrally coordinated state intervention. I wonder if some governmental bureau tasked with coordinating this market hasn’t been shuttered in the last couple years to some lobbyist great success…

I agree with you, but this isn't necessarily the best example. In this case, frankly part of this issue had to be resolved by relaxing strict zoning laws that weren't allowing space to be used in a way that the market demanded (offloading empty chassis). Such a measure falls under deregulation/free-market/small-government.

The other measures proposed (forcing railroads, national guards etc) are of course of a different order, but it's not clear they'd be necessary if the build-up of empty chassis at the port (because offloading in the nearby area wasn't allowed) never materialised into a massive bottleneck, because zoning laws were deregulated.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#442

Post by lm28469 »

rdtwo wrote: post #364
IronWolve wrote: post #267

The ceo of flexport rented a boat and toured the area and reported on issues people saw and reported to him. Very informative. Tweet thread @ https://twitter.com/typesfast/status/1451543776992845834 Or threadreader https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1451543776992845834.html

The renting a boat thing seems like a show. Hes got experts that should already know these things from other data sources. The boat thing is for simpletons in media to understand and spin

There are a lot of broken industries/companies in which "experts" don't know shit besides what they learned in school from people with no actual hands on experience. Talking to the people on the job can be very efficient, I've seen it many times; people on top can be so full of themselves that they don't even want to accept they can be wrong.

A collection of workers who know their shit will always be much more valuable than an expert looking at graphs from his office if you know how to interact with them

Since it's on Twitter it's obviously partly a PR move but I wouldn't be surprised if it actually happened

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#443

Post by marderfarker2 »

bsder wrote: post #376
weyland108 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ The Flexport CEO may know more, but the Flexport CEO also has an agenda of being profitable for the Flexport CEO” These are all for profit companies. It’s a bit utopian to suggest anything else would be better without providing any specific alternatives.

If you want me to believe that "profit motive" is aligned with "public interest", why is everybody running to the regulators to clear this instead of spending money? It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that "profit motive" is aligned with "public interest" in the face of all the current evidence we have in other sectors that is quite to the contrary. To start, it is not at all clear that super low cost, super low fric…

Ironically the US the largest exporter of unrecyclable garbage to Asia.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#444

Post by native_samples »

singularity2001 wrote: post #429
rossjudson wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like more of a tragedy of the commons, with each ship (A) assuming it's fine to leave empty because some other ship (B) will grab the empty containers. That's all well and good until (A) comes back, and then it sits there waiting like everyone else. Going back empty works once . Or more times if you're headed to a different market, I suppose.

I thought the price for containers had more than quadrupled. How can leaving them behind be economic?

I believe that's not the price for the physical box but rather "a container's worth of shipping". Empty containers are probably going up in price a lot now too - I don't really see why Ryan thinks there needs to be military intervention here. A shortage of empties in China and a surplus in the USA will get resolved real quick by people on the ground (=within the latencies afforded by the slow speed of ships themselves) as there's money to be made there.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#445

Post by native_samples »

phkahler wrote: post #302
bobthepanda wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand became a lot more lopsided for several reasons: * consumers were shifting spending from experiences that would've been COVID impacted (holiday travel, entertainment venues, restaurants) to online shopping * industrial supply chains in Asia were the least impacted by COVID due to the relative lack of explosion in cases there compared to the rest of the world, so we are legitimately shipping more from there…

Another poster said ships that would normally take empty containers back to China are now just unloading and leaving empty. If that's the case, it seems like it's trading short term gain for a longer term problem. Make them take the empties?

Nobody has to "make" anyone do anything in that situation. It's a classic supply/demand imbalance. Governments can't do anything here - even just getting them to pay attention to their own zoning rules required some random CEO in a boat talking to local workers then posting on Twitter. They aren't in a position to do anything better than the workers themselves can do.

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#446

Post by native_samples »

IanCal wrote: post #426
KennyBlanken wrote: post #415

Earlier 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?

It's a knock-on effect from lockdowns. Governments got it in their heads that they could partition the economy into "essential" and "non-essential" and could make massive interventions without any side effects. So everyone has to work from home, not go to restaurants anymore, port rules are constantly changing in ways that screw over shipping firms, the economy tanks, everything including logistics is thrown into chaos. Meanwhile people who are ideologically blind to the costs of government intervention sit around and say "why now?! what's happened to cause this?", ignoring the ocean-sized elephant in the room.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/cave-man-capitalism

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#447

Post by baq »

babypuncher wrote: post #327
aerosmile wrote: post #157

Earlier 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.

who would you rather have? a politician...?

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#448

Post by hansel_der »

bombcar wrote: post #402
rdtwo wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a single extra trip is lucrative enough and at current rates it’s 5-10 regular prices that would make sense to forgo loading in the us and just hurry home

For awhile that’s beneficial to the shipper until all containers are empty in LA and none exist in China to fill.

pretty sure chinese companies will be happy to produce new containers for a small fee

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#449

Post by tomjen3 »

rdtwo wrote: post #351
IAmGraydon wrote: post #260

I love how these commenters think they know something about shipping that the CEO of Flexport doesn’t (I’m referring to the person you replied to, BTW).

When is the ceo of a company the real expert on anything? The ceo is the celebrity that makes the big decisions but rarely ever the actual ground level expert

That is the case with companies not started by the CEO. Flexport is a startup (YC, I think).

Re: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations

#450

Post by nuerow »

hbworn77 wrote: post #276
IAmGraydon wrote: post #260

I love how these commenters think they know something about shipping that the CEO of Flexport doesn’t (I’m referring to the person you replied to, BTW).

Most of them are usually the top comment on a thread like this, too, because there are a large number of people who consider them authoritative (or like what they say, or dogpile, or who knows). When it’s my industry being discussed here, I can usually predict who will be in the top spot (it’s only a few), and how wrong they’ll be. It’s a real problem but it’s also the immediate amnesia thing whoever-that-was talked…

> But they score well, so here we are debating what is said instead of what is substantive.

Blanket dismissals of everything any commenter mentions without providing any basis or reason or counterpoint besides empty appeals to authority is no way to conduct a discussion. In fact, doesn't your criticism also applies to you and your dismissal of everyone else's comments?

But taking your criticism at face value, the only way that the scenario you've depicted becomes possible is if those in the know do not step in to point out misconceptions and clear up doubts. Nevertheless, even so experience does not grant omniscience or infallibility, not to mention that the expert beginner problem is also a thing. In that case, an inability to refute points or offer counter-evidence, accompanied by this need to fallback to various types of appeals to authority and seniority, might actually indicate a discrepancy between actual and perceived competence and insightfulness.

The point is that if you happen to believe some posts are not right or fail to take into account critical aspects, why not call it out? I mea, you're already taking your time to write relatively lengthy posts complaining and vaguely casting doubts on how fellow posters are contributing. If you have the means and opportunity to right what you believe are wrong, why aren't you doing so and instead opt to waste your time posting messages that aren't constructive or contribute positively to a discussion?

Post reply on HN