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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

#61

Post by otterley »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #32
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #8

Some talk about 'building a new port' as part of the solution. I'm thinking that's a decade project and $100B or some such? PoLA tried to expand for a decade and the impact statements got bogged down and nothing happened if I remember right (my sister-in-law was doing the math on the statements)

Port of Oakland says hi. Is there a reason it does not get the traffic of L.A.? Or is a 3rd large port needed?

The primary reason is that it doesn't have the capacity of Los Angeles and Long Beach. It has fewer cranes, less lot space, and importantly, less rail capacity serving it.

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

#62

Post by irrational »

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen at companies. There is a serious problem that all the lower level people know about, but nobody says anything to the higher ups because nobody wants to be seen as a troublemaker and potentially lose their job. Everyone assumes that eventually it will become so bad that the higher ups will notice. That rarely happens in my experience. Instead things become bad and the solution is layoffs, reorgs, etc. In the midst of the chaos we can often make the change that precipitated the whole crisis without anyone becoming wiser. Rinse and repeat.

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

#63

Post by ksdale »

ncmncm wrote: post #30

Two 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 ac…

What new timebombs do you think he has installed, for example?

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

#64

Post by zelienople »

Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil.

Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old.

Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways.

But no, let's keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!

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

#65

Post by ChuckMcM »

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the 'stacking rule' meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their property were "storing" empties on trailer chassis that carry one container.

As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When that happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on.

So the "win" here was that more trailers would be available to take full containers from ships and that would move things along.

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

#66

Post by bombcar »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #36
MauranKilom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

> 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. This is not obvious to me. The same ships are going back to fetch more goods, so why would they want to go empty? Surely the cost of manufacturing a new container is (or should be) less than the cost of putting it on an empty boat.

It’s time to load. An empty ship may be halfway back to China to get a new (overpriced) load before a similar ship is loaded with empties.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #36
MauranKilom wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wou…

> 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. This is not obvious to me. The same ships are going back to fetch more goods, so why would they want to go empty? Surely the cost of manufacturing a new container is (or should be) less than the cost of putting it on an empty boat.

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by gouggoug »

> 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. From what I understand, this was a rule put in place a long time ago, in a different context. The ramifications of such rule under unprecedented stress weren't understood or foreseen. Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to be honest.

Great they removed the rule, but don't forget about Chesterton's fence.

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

#69

Post by justinator »

dqpb wrote: post #49
justinator wrote: post #39

OK so this is essentially a self-written news story that was manipulated to make it feel-good. That's bad . Also, now that I know I'm manipulated, I'm skeptical that the changes will have the outcome that they want. It could but it's not good that you've told me you've manipulated me. That's also bad .

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.

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

#70

Post by bombcar »

irrational wrote: post #62

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen at companies. There is a serious problem that all the lower level people know about, but nobody says anything to the higher ups because nobody wants to be seen as a troublemaker and potentially lose their job. Everyone assumes that eventually it will become so bad that the higher ups will notice. That rarely happens in my experience. Instead things become bad and the solution is la…

This is where big money consultants make their money. They come in and tell everyone what they already knew in a way that lets everyone pretend is was magically discovered.
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