This is one of the most incredible victories I've ever seen. Congratulations!
An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
21–30 of 316 posts
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#22I 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 known) that that log jam was tsunami wave heading to LA?
I'm not sure if stacking 5-6 high is a long term solution. It works now, because it's only at 2 high and the buffer is available. But if they were at 5-6 high under normal circumstances when this tsunami wave hit we'd be talking about letting them go 8-9 high? Maybe limit them to 2 high but allow them to file a temporary permit to go to X high with justification... something along those lines, so it is a rather accessible flex up and down and it doesn't require extreme levels of non-local politics to accomplish.
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#23From what I heard, the real issue is the ships are not bringing these containers back, because: 1. there's not so much good for US to export (volume-wise); 2. shipping price is so high that to save time, ships do not wait to load empty containers. As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.
I was also thinking about this after reading the original thread.
If the port is full and the trucks are full, clearly we have more overall containers than before. Where did they come from? And is the place they come from now short on containers?
Those are of course separate problems. If we are accumulating empty containers, you could just dump them somewhere for the time being. Yes, the trucks would have to drive somewhere else than the port to dump them, but that's clearly better than economic standstill. And if it turns out that China is short on empty containers, then we might need to work on the incentives for ships to bring back the empties.
But unless this whole clogging was caused by a very temporary spike in container throughput, increasing buffer capacity will only alleviate the problem for so long.
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to think that if we declared a state of emergency, suspended all regulations and deployed a couple battalions of Seabees we could still build a port in a matter of months, rather than years. I'd like to think we still have those kinds of capabilities if they were needed, but I'm increasingly not sure that we actually do.
If you can develop the political will to treat the citizens of LA like we did the Iraqis in the second Gulf adventure, sure. Just suspend the rule of law and send in Bechtel behind a bunch of guns.
I'm not saying we should do that, but it might be preferable to allowing the citizens of LA to hold the entire global economy hostage because they love their regulations.
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#25In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don't increase then it's not going to matter how large you make the buffer. Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are…
The trucks were acting as a buffer, if you believe the CEO of Flexport. So if you increase the buffer size, then the trucks can be trucks again and it's guaranteed to increase truck loadings per hour.
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Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#26Wow. There's just no straight talk anymore... Why does everyone have to dance around the issue. Just say the facts and this article could have been quite a bit shorter.
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#27In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don't increase then it's not going to matter how large you make the buffer. Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are…
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 would cease to exist - trucks could just haul away containers at max throughput. I gather that it's become harder to ship back empty containers though, and presumably just scrapping them is not a sound solution in the long run either.
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can develop the political will to treat the citizens of LA like we did the Iraqis in the second Gulf adventure, sure. Just suspend the rule of law and send in Bechtel behind a bunch of guns.
I'm not saying we should do that, but it might be preferable to allowing the citizens of LA to hold the entire global economy hostage because they love their regulations.
We didn’t do it when it was just a union why should we do it for the citizens of LA?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/how-onl...
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#29In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don't increase then it's not going to matter how large you make the buffer. Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are…
There were supposedly trucks that couldn’t be loaded because they had no place to get rid of the empty container they currently had. So truck loading rate was low, not because of the speed of the workers and cranes, but because of the availability of the trucks. So this is supposed to allow the truck loading rate to go up by making it easier for trucks to become available. I don’t know if that will happen, but this i…
Increasing a buffer size can also make it look like the problem is solved temporarily when you really have a rate issue. It seems that filled containers are coming in at a faster rate than empty containers are going out. We've increased the buffer for empty containers at the dock but did we address the outgoing rate problem?
Why wouldn't the buffer just fill again? I wonder if we've reached a point where manufacturing a new container is more economical than hauling an empty back across the ocean especially if you include opportunity cost to ship actual goods.
Re: An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles
#30Two points:
First, negative feedback is good. The problem here was a case of positive feedback, which are always bad. This Ryan person might be helping in the one crisis, but he has just installed a thousand new timebombs.
Second, the reason NYT has nothing about this is that NYT editors tell its reporters to find stories that seem to illustrate what the editors want said. NYT is not really interested in what is actually happening; NYT has always been that way.