281–290 of 514 posts
I love how these commenters think they know something about shipping that the CEO of Flexport doesn’t (I’m referring to the person you replied to, BTW).
The best HN commenters seem to speak only when it concerns their expertise, or do so after fully understanding the issues at play.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is bufferbloat related to the situation at hand?
The metaphor is that a container is data. “Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data. It is a huge drag on Internet performance created, ironically, by previous attempts to make it work better. The one-sentence summary is ‘Bloated buffers lead to network-crippling latency spikes.’”. Increasing buffer sizes (increasing the number of containers st…
The downside at this point is that all the retail items for this holiday season won't be on shelves for christmas, so the damage done to brick and mortar sales industry has already been done
Truckers are leaving containers all over Los Angeles.[1] Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2] A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing truc…
> Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. These are empty containers that are getting unloaded and stacked in order to free up the truck and its chassis for another load. The equipment for doing that stacking/unstacking is called an Empty Container Stacker [1]. These are different from a Reach Stacker [2] which will have much less vertical reach and are also differ…
Truckers are leaving containers all over Los Angeles.[1] Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. A place that just stacks empty containers 2 high probably only has large forklifts. The special equipment for high stacking is far more expensive, and only bought if you need it.[2] A more useful proposal is a "peel pile".[3] This is a system which assigns outgoing truc…
> This is a system which assigns outgoing trucks an easily accessible container to deliver, rather than a specific container that has to be retrieved. This is such an obvious thing. Do they really have people so incompetent they didn't think of that? Wow
Odds are you could offer truckers a special premium flat rate to clear the blockage - but it wouldn’t be sustainable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Allowing stacking over 2 high is only useful if you have the equipment to stack over 2 high. These are empty containers that are getting unloaded and stacked in order to free up the truck and its chassis for another load. The equipment for doing that stacking/unstacking is called an Empty Container Stacker [1]. These are different from a Reach Stacker [2] which will have much less vertical reach and are also differ…
Okay, how many empty container stackers are there in LA county?
Everyone's focused on Ryan's comments about stacking, and the subsequent win there. Amazing job, Ryan, and thank you Robert Garcia for being a man to take one on the chin (for this solution not coming from your team) and for then doing the right thing. I am seriously impressed by not seeing any NIH (not invented here) behavior here. But why stop there? Ryan suggested 5 courses of actions, and made it clear that we ne…
> I can't stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don't work. Not for the world economy, but for Chinese economy, as it's what US companies make the most of their money. What the current crisis shows the most is that just how close the US economy coming to a sever crisis, from well.... just missing the shipment of holiday toys from China. If China can inadvertently move US markets through just…
So this is not just a matter of Chinese factories not being able to sell their goods (in which case their government will take care of them as they have done in the past). This is about US e-commerce businesses who can only fall back on their banks (and which are far more unpredictable in their generosity).
Ryan's idea to mobilize the military resources would have been a no-brainer and would have already happened in at least two countries I have lived in before.
One final detail - this may seem like a recent issue, and most of us only heard about the problem sometime in early October. In reality, the industry press has been covering this since at least March [1], when the backlog of cargo ships at LAX started exceeding 20 (it's supposed to be well below that). Now it's at over 70. So it's been 7 months with practically no action until a week ago. I am a Democrat, but this is not going to bode well for Biden.
[1] https://edisonreport.com/latest-update-on-the-global-shippin...
Everyone's focused on Ryan's comments about stacking, and the subsequent win there. Amazing job, Ryan, and thank you Robert Garcia for being a man to take one on the chin (for this solution not coming from your team) and for then doing the right thing. I am seriously impressed by not seeing any NIH (not invented here) behavior here. But why stop there? Ryan suggested 5 courses of actions, and made it clear that we ne…
Does he mean negative feedback loops or positive feedback loops? Getting worse every day sounds like positive feedback, whereas negative feedback would keep things steady.
Uncontrollable positive feedback explodes. Uncontrollable negative feedback freezes.
A little off topic, but these ports don’t usually store so many empty crates, so why do we have them now? Are we not exporting at the same rate? Is that even what empty crates are used for? I’m assuming they aren’t sent back to (mostly?) China empty. I read something about the prices to ship out of the US being very high, but isn’t the price coming in also similarly proportionally high, yet we still have a backlog of…
This is very bad for the rest of the world, and also for the US, since all the empty containers are stacking up there, then there aren't any empty containers available in China or anywhere else for exporters, so even getting your hands on an empty container can be very difficult or almost impossible, or they cost 2-3x more than usually.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The guy in charge took a paternity leave for 2 months and no one in the media even noticed.
>The guy in charge took a paternity leave for 2 months and no one in the media even noticed. Don't worry, once people did notice, it did take long before they started ridiculing him for spending time with his family.
Our willingness to shame this guy (and other guys, by extension) for spending time with his family reflects our willingness to shame women for taking the same time off.
Our acceptance that he should put work over his family forces SOMEONE to put his family over THEIR work. In a male-female marriage (yes, I know he is gay), this means that men should work and women should stay at home. This attitude contributes to the gender pay divide and stereotypes that men shouldn't be great fathers.
It hurts our wives and our strength as husbands and fathers.