171–180 of 279 posts
You could also set fees to fix the problem. Dropping off an [empty?] container at the port? Pay $1000. Loading an empty container onto your ship? Get a bonus of $900. Now you have a feedback loop that brings the empty containers back to where they are needed. It's sort of a recycling fee.
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It's weird to me that thousands of people work at the docks or with the trucks, and likely understand these problems quite well, but only after a silicon valley guy rented a boat to take a look and tweeted about it did it come to attention of the larger world. Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?
But isn't this exactly what makes Silicon Valley so effective? A willingness to challenge the status quo and rapidly iterate.
Stupid question, why isn’t simple capitalism working on the port? This solution while admirable, reminds me of the USSR trying to set the price of bread.
Planning and regulation and bureaucracy prevent these problems, at the cost of slightly higher prices due to the system not being really 'optimal' in the steady state.
Related: The mayor of Long Beach has increased the stacking limit. https://mobile.twitter.com/RobertGarcia/status/1451679404757...
It's weird to me that thousands of people work at the docks or with the trucks, and likely understand these problems quite well, but only after a silicon valley guy rented a boat to take a look and tweeted about it did it come to attention of the larger world. Is it just that these other people don't want to "rock the boat" at their place of employment?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Empty containers are worth a lot in East Asia right now, just not in US ports or distributor points. It’s a misallocation, not a global oversupply problem
If they’re so valuable to people in East Asia right now, then people in East Asia have an incentive to take a more active role in getting them back. How much is a train ride up to the Port of Oakland? Less than $5k per rail car? Probably a lot less. So some enterprising person in Asia could organize that and get them on a ship heading back faster than their competitors, reducing their cost and gaining a competitive a…
Right now empty containers are 5x-10x their pre-COVID cost in Chinese ports. That’s how prices work in a market system. Perhaps there are non-market forces at work or perhaps the scale of the problem just requires more incentive before it becomes worth while to charter an expensive ship to bring containers back to China.
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There are no empties in the ports because all the spots to put containers are filled with full ones. In order to get empties back into the ports and onto ships you need to do three things. 1. Get full containers out of ports to make room for empties 2. Bring empties back to port and queue them up 3. Unload a bunch of fulls and reload a bunch of empties onto every ship that comes into port Right now there's no room to…
I’ve also heard that ships are rushing back to Asia to chase high profits after unloading at US ports before they allow empty containers on the ship. I think we have mismatched incentives that allow something like Tragedy of the Commons.
Which of the two chief executives tagged in this Twitter thread is supposed to have the legal authority to unilaterally overrule Long Beach’s zoning ordinances? Surely it isn’t newsom, but I bet Biden has even less authority. This is not a judgment on the merit of the idea bc the zoning rule seems dumb but what’s the point of proposing a “solution” which it isn’t clear either man can actually implement?
I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions in this thread. >It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam This seems like definitely not the real bottleneck. You have to ask yourself, "why is there no s…
They're paid by the load, so sitting idle is a non option.
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This was already one Rx from the Twitter thread. Also not all “capitalists” have aligned incentives. Everybody wants shipping to be efficient except those who profit from this inefficiency. Specifically ship companies are making huge profits by racing to the big East Asian ports right now. So much profit that they don’t want their ships to wait in US ports for empty containers to reload. This asymmetry makes it even…
Not at all Tragedy of the Commons. In 40 days (one round trip from US to China), the system clogs and the boats can't go running off because they can't unload at all (happening now). At this point the system stabilizes. Sure, it's not a stable point that the shipping companies want, but it is stable. Capitalism has a way to deal with this. It's called "rising prices". However, business managers have gotten far too us…
Do you think people will just tolerate hyperinflation that would cause and sit quietly in line while waiting for overpriced food staples? Riots. Public disorder. Maybe even rebellion against the government.
Governments get involved because the individuals in that government fear what happens when we reach the tipping point where basic society breaks down.
I think we forget that 95% of all goods (or their inputs) are shipped and over 20% of GDP directly relies on shipping. That’s a massive gamble that the same people involved in the supply chain that is suffering from massive entropy can magically reduce that entropy after it snowballs.
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> Why don't you have enough trucks? This is addressed later in the thread. Normally, many trucks haul containers to their destination, unload the container, then return it empty to the port, pull it off the trailer, and haul away another loaded container. But the port is too full to accept empty containers, and zoning laws mean truck companies have already maxed out their own container holding areas. This leaves enor…
Why does the empty container have to be taken back to long Beach? Couldn't it be taken literally anywhere else?