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An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

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Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#131

Post by tomc1985 »

gota wrote: post #126
kaesar14 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?

This is inching close to the conclusion that mandatory expert panels are required for government to function. But then you go back to the problem of "who determines who are the experts". Point in case, the anti-vaccine politicians dredge up the 1 out of a 1000 doctors that spouts whatever fits their narrative. Lots o people die gasping for air unnecessarily as a result... And we have no idea how to begin to solve tha…

Huh? Calling up your local shipping exec for a meeting is most definitely not forming "expert panels"

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#132

Post by eli_gottlieb »

zelienople wrote: post #64

Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil. Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old. Or, even more radical, we could stop…

Yes, I actually prefer consumer capitalism over a deliberate eugenic extermination of "consoomers".

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#133

Post by dragontamer »

kaesar14 wrote: post #116
erlapso wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the CEO has a different level of understanding of logistics compared to the major. They may be looking at the same port, but they see different things. The CEO saw bottlenecks like Neo sees the Matrix

Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?

> Why doesn't the mayor of a city with one of America's most important ports call in experts like this the second trouble started? It was this easy and he never bothered to ask the experts?

Because we pay our politicians terribly low compared to other leadership positions.

Our best leaders have gone to Facebook / Google to make better ads. It makes no sense for a 18-year-old going into college to study political theory and become a mayor by 30 or so.

Our political system is broken because there's no incentives to get good leaders into our political system. There's far more leadership positions available in private industry, and they all pay maybe 500% higher.

Remember: Senators are only paid like $180,000/year. Most other positions are paid much much less. In contrast, you can easily get $250k+/year as a VP for... well... pretty much anyone else. (Exxon, Facebook, Microsoft). Reach "3-letter" positions (CEO, CFO, CIO) at FANNGs and you're upwards of $1MM/year.

--------

Bonus points: a typical VP at Microsoft probably doesn't have to worry about legitimate death threats / assassination attempts like our politicians do. Its a quieter, safer, easier life. You put your family through hell, the media hound you and try to dig up dirt on you constantly. Etc. etc.

Does anyone here actually want to be a politician? Or would you rather continue your path in Engineering / programming / whatever you're doing right now? I'm not necessarily saying Hacker News is the "best and brightest", but... a lot of us are at least _trying_ to be the best-and-brightest in our selective fields. How many of us actually think about going into politics?

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#134

Post by jlkuester7 »

krisoft wrote: post #93

> There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high. This is incorrect. There was a zoning rule which affected truck yards in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Truck yards. Not the port itself. As stated in the linked tweets actually. But if you don't believe that you can just google an image of the Port of Los Angeles from let's say 2019 and count how high the…

> is the only one worth going into

Sure, when your critical system goes down an RCA is hugely important and ultimately you have to apply a fix that addresses the core issue to avoid it happening again in the future.

But, at the time that the system is actually down it seems like the most important first step (once you understand the problem) is to get the system running again ASAP. This can give you the runway to fix the actual problem.

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#135

Post by 1cvmask »

The bureaucratic rule of only stacking containers of two in storage areas seem absurd when in the rest of the world there examples of them being stacked 9 or even 12 high. Weird government rules should have sunset clauses, at least for man-made emergencies.

Maybe they should travel and see how ports are managed in the rest of the world.

This workflow rule that clogged the port seems to be the perfect platform for a former McKinsey consultant like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to shine. Yet that thunder is stolen by the WSJ coverage and Flexport CEO tweetstorm.

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#136

Post by anonuser123456 »

xyzzyz wrote: post #96
smileysteve wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last point is being reported. It's cheaper for the Chinese to export containers (with subsidized steel) than it is for shipping them back, so they're just making new ones. Conjecture, but policy wise, this could relate to steel tariffs, decrease Chinese steel imports to the US and finding the container market to allow you to keep pumping money into the industry

No way making a new container is cheaper than shipping back the old one.

Cheaper for who? If the state is subsidizing steel, it can absolutely be cheaper for the buyer.

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#137

Post by shepherdjerred »

xyzzyz wrote: post #96
smileysteve wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last point is being reported. It's cheaper for the Chinese to export containers (with subsidized steel) than it is for shipping them back, so they're just making new ones. Conjecture, but policy wise, this could relate to steel tariffs, decrease Chinese steel imports to the US and finding the container market to allow you to keep pumping money into the industry

No way making a new container is cheaper than shipping back the old one.

Look at this graph of freight prices: https://cdn.jpmorganfunds.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/...

It's not that it's cheaper to make new containers. It's that the opportunity cost of waiting for the ship to be loaded with empty containers is more expensive than immediately heading back to Shanghai with an empty ship so that you can make another very lucrative journey to LA.

That's my limited understanding of the situation. I could be wrong.

Source: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional... (which was posted here a few weeks ago)

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#138

Post by someguydave »

briffle wrote: post #78
MauranKilom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truck-loadings-per-hour will increase, but that does not help shrink the buffer if every truck picking up a container also brings back an empty one. Increasing the buffer size is a temporary relief, but clearly the underlying problem is an ever-increasing number of containers (empty or full), or we wouldn't have gotten into this situation. If we could dispose of the empty containers somewhere then this bottleneck wou…

Considering the price and availability of steel, i'm kind of suprised nobody is trying to scrap and recycle them.

Probably china uses low quality steel to make those containers. But you could melt containers and they would take up less space to ship back to China

Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

#139

Post by ciphol »

conductr wrote: post #22

I followed this and from my understanding the changes while enacted quickly are still only temporary (rollback in 120 days). If that's the case, I'd like "them" to think about how this situation could have been avoided all together. I can't help but thinking about how all the Asian markets were having similar log jams due to economies reopening and the Suez issue months ago. Surely it was known (or, could have been k…

What exactly is the problem with 8-9 high, or 20 high, or whatever the technical limit is? The land belongs to the port owners, why should anyone else be able to restrict how they stack containers?
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