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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

#151

Post by CydeWeys »

datameta wrote: post #103
oasisbob wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of high quality paint, insulation, structural reinforcements, and exterior drainage sounds expensive. I've never messed with containers because digging yourself out of the thermal hole of starting with a metal box still doesn't sound worth it.

Structural reinforcement is unnecessary - they can be stacked half a dozen high safely. A bit of back of the envelope tells me the cost of paint to coat the exterior of a standard 2 story suburban house is about $1500, so I estimate painting a 40 foot container should be about $400 max. Insulation should be about $1K. I imagine for drainage a buried septic tank is the best solution here. I think the cost to retrofit…

It's gonna cost more than all of that to cut holes and install proper doors and windows. And after doing so now you're back to maybe needing structural reinforcement (those openings will require headers).

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

#152

Post by rsj_hn »

YokoZar wrote: post #150
gouggoug wrote: post #68

> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously. This is a little disingenuous. Fr…

Chesterton's fence is satisfied here: it asks us to know why a rule was put into place so that we know we aren't missing something when we change it. In this case we do know the reason why: aesthetics. The side effects are just greater now, so out the rule goes.

yeah, stacking boxes X levels high is not some deep thing that requires philosophers to gather 'round and debate Chesterton's fence for too long.

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

#153

Post by phkahler »

This seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Something is causing a surplus of empty containers, and allowing them to expand storage for them isn't going to change the underlying problem. So if the new rule to allow them 6-high is temporary, the owners will stack them 6-high and then run out of room again. But next time the (temporary) rule change will revert to 2-high and they'll all be in violation. If they get the proposed government land to "dump" them "temporarily" that will simply become a huge pile of empty containers.

It sounds like anyone with a fancy use for empty shipping containers can probably get them for "free" right now if you just show up with a truck to haul them away.

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

#154

Post by C19is20 »

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…

Buyers remorse?

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

#155

Post by whateveracct »

revel wrote: post #71

This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!" Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility! It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to hi…

> Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair.

HNers have pretty much no understanding or respect for what it means to realistically be in public service. They treat the realities as unfortunate errors ripe for optimization.

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

#156

Post by epistasis »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

Some talk about 'building a new port' as part of the solution. I'm thinking that's a decade project and $100B or some such? PoLA tried to expand for a decade and the impact statements got bogged down and nothing happened if I remember right (my sister-in-law was doing the math on the statements)

Yeah I'm not convinced as much by the new ports only being the solution. A big part of the reason that the SF Bay area and LA grew was because of the ports and the rail connections. Setting up a new port in, say, the area near Pismo Beach, might have slightly lower land costs, but it also has far lower value.

All those warehouses, importers, all the network of knowledge and people and demand for imports, all the stuff that's real but maybe difficult to see, that's the magic that really makes a port have high value.

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

#157

Post by IncRnd »

revel wrote: post #71

This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!" Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility! It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to hi…

That is the definition of the word bureaucrat, which was absolutely used in a fair manner to describe the person who caused this issue.

Reason 4 of the cause is what you should rail against: "This rule was created, and I am not making this up, because it was decided that higher stacks were not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing."

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

#158

Post by gamblor956 »

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?

Because in this case the "solution" doesn't solve the rest of the problem: that their aren't enough truckers or locomotives to haul the cargo inward to their domestic destinations due to the unprecedented demand for shipped goods, which is why containers were piling up in the port in the first place.

This just solves the problem of allowing slightly more ships to offload their cargo before they run out of space again. But as there are 100+ ships currently waiting to offload, this expanded "buffer" still isn't big enough.

EDIT: left out of the one-sided linked article: the city of Long Beach had been planning to waive the stacking requirements for a while prior to the Flexport CEO going on his rant due to pressure from the White House dating back to this summer. Container storage near (not in) the ports actually falls into 3 separate jurisdictions: the ports of LA and Long Beach, and the cities of Long Beach, LA, and Wilmington, and required coordination between all these agencies, coordination with the logistics companies operating at the ports, and coordination with the domestic shipping companies that would be moving containers out of the container storage areas (via truck or train).

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

#160

Post by darkarmani »

datameta wrote: post #50
slobiwan wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the popular consensus here in LA, it's cheaper to discard the containers than to ship them back empty (and nobody at the receiving end wants enough of what we have to make it worth sending them back full). However I drive through the port area frequently and always see containers stacked well above the 2-high limit. I suppose that means they are not empty containers? There definitely has to be some alternate u…

We can get pretty far with passive solutions like internal and external insulation and painting the outside white. Burying them halfway into the ground would also give great benefits (albeit the trickier of the options) Perhaps we can even cover the roof with sod where available. May only need a minimal power active A/C.

They don't have the strength to be buried. All of the strength is vertical in the corners for stacking. Once you cut into them for windows or more doors, you greatly reduce any strength. By the time you get done modifying it, it will cost more than traditional building materials.

(i like this dream, but it just isn't practical)

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