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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

#191

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

btown wrote: post #146
dcow wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Both the rx and tx buffers were full and the port was dropping packets. (There were both container ships waiting to offload and trucks waiting to offload full and empty containers, respectively.) Now that buffer size has been increased, there is more bandwidth to available to actually move containers. Since the spike is temporary, the problem has gone away. If we were permanently faced with more containers then,…

By this analogy, the politician literally "downloaded more RAM!"

While it's a long-running gag, I would like to remind everyone that swapping to zram is a thing on Linux (I don't know whether there's an equivalent on Darwin, and I think NT ships it by default), and the tech goes all the way back to RAM Doubler for MacOS (or at least, that's the earliest implementation that I know about). So for quite a long time you kind of have been able to do exactly that...

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

#192

Post by ciphol »

conductr wrote: post #170
ciphol wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

1. LB residents don't want that, and limit of 2 has worked until now. Height restrictions are nearly universal in the US and this is not a California/Long Beach specific problem. Sure you can argue there the balance is too lopsided and limit of 2 is too restrictive for industry. I tend to believe a port town is an industrial town. If you live there, you should expect to see the industrial side. I grew up in Houston a…

Again, why should one LB resident get to decide what another LB business does? Just because this sort of restriction is common doesn't mean it's right.

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

#193

Post by CalChris »

revel wrote: post #181
ncmncm wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to assume that the problem described is the problem faced. I bet we don't get a nice neat story about how changing stacking rules didn't actually solve the problem, and after a short time made it worse.

I would love to hear why you think this won't help

Because that two high rule doesn't apply to the port. Take a look at this photo.

https://polb.com/

The port is already stacking five high. The two high rule is for outlying yards. Basically, it will help if it helps. We just don't know yet, but it seems like a really good+cheap idea.

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

#194

Post by justinator »

otterley wrote: post #164
justinator wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we can talk about dropping atomic bombs on Japan during WWII if you want. The discussion isn't going to be a very simple one.

Wait, what? You want to compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians during wartime to a story about temporarily allowing containers to be stacked a little higher?

It's a classic example of, "do the means justify the ends?" - that's what you were asking. It's a slippery slope from "make a cute story on changing container storage policy" to something more nefarious. So think: how many times have you've been manipulated like this? Are you OK with it? Where do you draw the line?

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

#195

Post by pessimizer »

munificent wrote: post #99
mbauman wrote: post #48

All the dismissals here are fascinating to me — and sure seem to be exactly the overarching story of TFA. Yes, this certainly isn't the only problem here, but it's certainly the easiest to fix. And yes, the narrative of the story is definitely important, because it avoided all the rabble you see here that was getting in the way of a simple first step.

We are so used to doom and negativity in the news that we discard any positive news outright... which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that everything is terrible all the time.

Declaring great success at the moment a course of action of decided on is going to be more productive for generalized cynicism than stories of bad things that have actually happened.

Pretend this were reported as "Long Beach allows containers to be stacked higher in order to deal with a glut of empty containers" rather than Randian Superhero Casually Solves Port Problem, and Miraculously the Parasitic Bureaucrats Are Forced to Listen to Him by the People of Twitter, and By the Way, Why Can't We Demolish Neighborhoods and Replace Them With SROs?

Wouldn't more cynicism be engendered by the second story than the first if the change turns out to be ineffective or even destructive?

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

#196

Post by otterley »

justinator wrote: post #194
otterley wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? You want to compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians during wartime to a story about temporarily allowing containers to be stacked a little higher?

It's a classic example of, "do the means justify the ends?" - that's what you were asking. It's a slippery slope from "make a cute story on changing container storage policy" to something more nefarious. So think: how many times have you've been manipulated like this? Are you OK with it? Where do you draw the line?

I think we all have much bigger problems to spend our time obsessing over.

Besides, slippery-slope arguments are weak because predictions based on precipitating events rarely pan out to see our worst fears realized. As an extreme example, one could get wrapped around the axle fearing that a child squashing an ant in the garden could end up being the next Hitler.

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

#197

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#198

Post by neltnerb »

jlkuester7 wrote: post #134
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…

It sounded like the capacity to physically move things around is being blocked because trucks are being used for storage.

In that particular situation a temporary buffer that allows the flow to become unblocked is necessary.

The computer won't operate if you are unable to move data off the internal registers because there's nowhere to go. Including operations to delete the data in long term storage that is preventing the internal registers from being cleared.

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

#200

Post by zz865 »

Factorium wrote: post #127
zz865 wrote: post #119

It seems weird that there is no incentive to put empty containers on an empty boat to China, esp when there is a shortage of containers in China. Maybe the port should charge higher rent for storing empty containers? There is something missing in the story.

Its currently taking too long to load those containers back. Its cheaper to just dock, unload, sail off. Short-term optimisation.

Its cheaper only because container storage isn't priced correctly. If the containers were charged at $HIGH_RENT/day storage fee the owners would pay someone to get rid of them.
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