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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

#281

Post by djrogers »

monocasa wrote: post #277
clairity wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$180K puts you well within the top 20% in income. pay is not the problem. in fact, trying to solve politician quality by increasing pay would likely worsen the problem by misaligning incentives even more. also the assumption that the best and the brightest are managers at tech companies is amusingly naive.

That's for a literal federal Senator. Even mayors don't make near that in the general case.

The mayor of Long Beach makes >180k in pay and benefits: https://patch.com/california/longbeach-ca/long-beach-mayor-r...

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

#282

Post by djrogers »

beerandt wrote: post #173
mzs wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the CEO knew beforehand and crafted a narrative.

I'm with you. He impressed me until the list. Stacking containers and finding more storage space is smart, but I think he also went pretty far outside his knowledge domain when he started talking about messing with train logistics and mobilizing the military (other than maybe using federal land/ depots for storage). I don't know his background, but I do know trains are all about throughput, which isn't significantly…

> I don't know his background

He’s the CEO of Flexport - if he’s not one of the foremost experts on logistics in the country, it’s only because they all work for him.

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

#283

Post by djrogers »

SilasX wrote: post #264
mzs wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the CEO knew beforehand and crafted a narrative.

Why is everyone "suspecting" this? The blog post starts by laying out that that was exactly what he did (knew beforehand and put it into a plausible but made-up narrative). See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29032229

The blogger doesn’t know any better than the rest of us if that’s what happened.

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

#284

Post by djrogers »

more_corn wrote: post #100
revel wrote: post #71

This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!" Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility! It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to hi…

It is quite reasonable to make fun of people who required a 2 container limit for aesthetic reasons which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain. It was also inarguably effective to publicly shame them into reversing their decision.

> which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain

Nope - you don’t get to blame a new problem on a 20+ yr old regulation. Changing this will likely help in the short term, but it’s not the cause of the problem.

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

#285

Post by djrogers »

justinator wrote: post #69
dqpb wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by self-written?

They're breaking a story that didn't actually happen - the article itself says that the boatride isn't the reason for the policy change, it just sounds nice and marketable. They also admitted that they got influential people ready to retweet the story - also a marketing move.

The writer of the article is speculating when he says the boat ride was immaterial. He’s not the original author.

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

#286

Post by djrogers »

ciphol wrote: post #139
conductr wrote: post #22

I 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 k…

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?

> The land belongs to the port owners,

A) the article is wrong, the limit was at truck yards, not the port B) Zoning is a thing, and as long as it is, residents (read voters) will want it used to keep their homes pretty and valuable whenever possible.

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

#287

Post by valleyer »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #191
btown wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yep -- Darwin has had an implementation of memory compression since OS X Mavericks.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/os-x-10-9/17/

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

#288

Post by monocasa »

djrogers wrote: post #281
monocasa wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's for a literal federal Senator. Even mayors don't make near that in the general case.

The mayor of Long Beach makes >180k in pay and benefits: https://patch.com/california/longbeach-ca/long-beach-mayor-r...

He makes $143k + medical and pension.

Those numbers are nutty, I know 22yos that make more than that.

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

#289

Post by labster »

gkop wrote: post #225
labster wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let the global supply chain burn? By Jove, let’s have a great depression!

Let the containers on the streets piss people off to build pressure to align incentives, rather than prolonging the problem with a temporary stacking improvement. This is just a tool in our toolbox that we should not ignore, I'm not saying it's the right tool. But there is a cost of papering over the root cause, that's not free. BTW I don't live in LA/Long Beach. I recognize that LA doesn't deserve the quality of lif…

But the temporary rule change is a quality of life improvement. Less trucks idling on the streets, less ships idling offshore means better air quality. Less ships anchored means less chance of another oil pipeline spill. More cargo hauled means more prosperity. A few months of eyesore are an acceptable cost.

The thing is, there is no fix to the root cause. You can either have cheaper products with just-in-time supply chains, or you can pay more for storage. The trade-off will always be efficiency or redundancy, and most industries have already chosen the level of risk they can accept. Real world systems have tipping points and bottlenecks, and it’s okay to use government to push them back into steady state.

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

#290

Post by ncmncm »

mek6800d2 wrote: post #278
elzbardico wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, a fair point. But in the end is the same thing: stupid public worker bureaucrats exerting their petty, ignorant power like the Gods they think they are.

Unrelated to the trailer issue, but everyday we should thank our lucky stars that there's no such thing as "stupid private sector bureaucrats exerting their petty, ignorant power like the Gods they think they are."

You appear to be unfamiliar with the phenomenon of oil companies. Or power utilities.

PGE is considered directly responsible for >$40B in fire damage in California.

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