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Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

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Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#201

Post by mola »

drcode wrote: post #63
graton wrote: post #60

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?

Because that SV guy has a whole PR aparatus at his disposal aimed at creating public pressure for action. In our attention economy this gives you superpowers.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#202

Post by HaGoijer »

edmundsauto wrote: post #188
remarkEon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that point in the thread was really about the lack of chassis on which to move the containers. That part I'm inclined to agree with to a certain extent, but then you're back to asking why there aren't enough chassis, and I'm back to asking why there are still full containers on the docks that can accept stacking empties higher than 2x.

Does "chassis" ~= "truck"? It seems like maybe a technical, specific term that I don't understand.

A chassis is the trailer to carry the container. The truck pulls the trailer/chassis.

Often chassis dont have cranes to (un)load containers themselves and therefore require cranes (capex heavy assets). Such cranes aren't everywhere/in surplus.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#203

Post by Ensorceled »

ta988 wrote: post #170
neilparikh wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in many countries (like the Canada example mentioned above), "UBI" was conditional on being unemployed.

So it is not Universal, just using the name.

Correct. People calling this a “UBI experiment” are just co-opting the term.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#204

Post by fny »

CalChris wrote: post #123
fny wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you've never been paid some low multiple of minimum wage. You have no incentive to make anything efficient.

Longshoreman make an average of $147,000/yr + benefits in the Bay Area. https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/dock-workers-u...

Didn't realize this. In a lot of other places the hourly figure is closer to $30-50 an hour.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#205

Post by laurent92 »

new_realist wrote: post #58

The last year and a half of pandemic aid has been a large scale experiment in universal basic income. The results seem to be somewhat expected: a labor shortage and high inflation.

France has UBI since 1981 and it’s called RMI. We still have it. Let’s stop with this “large scale experiment”, we already have the results.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#206

Post by patentatt »

ta988 wrote: post #163
OldHand2018 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How would you load them on rail car? If there was a working railroad system connected to the docks maybe. A working railroad system would solve a lot of issues in the US. But it is impossible to get a discussion on infrastructure as it gets abused by both sides only for political reasons.

Wait, are there not rail heads at shipping ports? As a complete layperson, I would have assumed that’s like the one thing a shipping port needs, right?

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#207

Post by patentatt »

koolba wrote: post #64
riskneutral wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Erm, then pay some truckers to haul empty containers to some space in the middle of Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Idaho, Iowa, etc.? The empty containers don't need to be trucked to Arizona, they need to be shipped back to China so that they can be filled with more goods and shipped back to LA. There are fewer goods flowing from the US to China though, so they are piling up in LA. Either the price of shipping from US to…

Too bad they didn’t switch to collapsible containers: https://www.shiplilly.com/blog/collapsible-shipping-containe... That would handle the trade imbalance by allowing more empties to fit on the way back. Or the USA could actually make something worth shipping. But that’s probably a lot harder than replacing a worldwide fleet of existing non-collapsible containers.

Love the ingenuity, but isn’t needing to develop new technologies to overcome a severe trade imbalance just ignoring the larger problem of why there is such lopsided trade? It can’t be healthy or long-term sustainable for the US to basically stop manufacturing, can it?

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#208

Post by wenc »

davidjfelix wrote: post #89
aptxkid wrote: post #51

It sounds more like deadlock than a positive feedback loop (also it’s weird that he calls it negative feedback loop).

I wouldn't say it's weird -- it seems like you understood what he was saying and he misspoke. Clearly he was trying to indicate that he believed that something negative was increasing. While I agree this isn't what a negative feedback loop is, I can see how saying this is a positive feedback loop of slowdowns (an undesirable negative effect) might feel like the wrong thing to say.

A positive feedback loop in this instance means more and more of something happening, and is being reinforced in every iteration.

In control theory, the language of positive/negative in feedback loops usually means growth/diminution rather than good/bad.

It’s seemingly counter to common intuition but as a former control theorist I immediately recognized this language in the context of feedback loops.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#209

Post by qeternity »

fieldcny wrote: post #128
qeternity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying it’s the problem now. I’m saying it’s been a problem in the last. But the current problem is absolutely not due to truckers being non union.

Seems like your comment was just an attempt to dunk on a group of people you seem to believe are over paid. You have no real facts or information about how much port workers make and you present no evidence that rules that you may deem to be “inefficient” aren’t in place for safety reasons. You also seem to ignore the fact that most manual labor jobs have to provide enough income for a worker while they are able to p…

> Seems like your comment was just an attempt to dunk on a group of people you seem to believe are over paid.

I was responding to a comment that argued they weren’t paid enough, and I was just making the counterpoint.

So no, if anyone has an axe to grind, it would be you.

Re: Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis

#210

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

remarkEon wrote: post #2

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…

>we either don't have enough physical trucks (I doubt this)

There was a reddit thread in the truckers group around a year back which literally said this: there are not enough physical trucks since trucks have to been maintained and the spare parts for it are not making their way across border fast enough. This meant that owners have to buy new trucks to compensate for their broken down trucks and leading to escalation of costs which means they expect the same person to work 2x to make up for it.

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